The Age of Elegance (24 page)

green, but usually white—worn over leggings, breeches and doublet. Beautifully hemmed and embroidered, such smocks were perfectly adapted for out-of-door work; Jane Austen's mother used to wear a green one for gardening. Most Englishmen at their callings dressed in clothes of the stoutest quality; yeomen in fustian^:oats, corduroy breeches and ribbed worsted stockings, brewers in quilted coats of immense thickness; fishermen in striped jerseys, grey aprons, leather leggings, top-boots and fur-lined caps; firemen in horse-hide lined with leather, quilted with wool and strengthened with metal. A Lancashire handloom weaver's working garb was a green woollen waistcoat with a silk neckerchief, his wife's a white linen mob cap, a cotton bed-gown and petticoat, a striped calico apron and black hose and shoes. A young girl went to the Wakes in a "gown made wi' tucks and fleaunces, new shoon wi' ston op heels, new stokins wi' clocks, a tippet wi' frills o reawnd, manny a streng of necklaces, an a bonnit made by th' new mantymaker, the prattyist at ever wur seen, wi' a skyoy blue underside and pink ribbins." Even servant maids sometimes wore silk on Sundays, when the lanes were full of girls showing off their new pumps, caps and ribbons. And the vagrant gipsies with their scarlet cloaks and bright tents and caravans were as colourful as the cottage gardens. Mr. Petulengro sported a smartly cut coat with half-crowns for buttons, a scarlet and black waistcoat sewn with guineas, stuff velveteen breeches and fur boots, a silver-knobbed riding whip and a high Spanish hat.
¹

English houses impressed foreigners like their food and clothes. Every traveller noted the contrast between the beggars and rural hovels of the Continent and the neat Kentish and Sussex villages— "our own land of fair and handsome faces, well-fed inhabitants, richly cultivated and enclosed fields," as Harry Smith, returning from the wars, called it. Village greens with shouting children and fat geese, white-washed cottages exquisitely grouped round church and manor-house, roses, honeysuckle and jessamine festooned over porch and casement, gardens full of flowers and embowered in trees, gave travellers the impression they were in a land where even the

¹
Ashton, II, 220-1; Bamford, I, 30, 71, 94,107,132, 211-12, 214;
ii,
56-7,259, 333; Clapham,
i,
315-17; Cobbett, I, 17, 43, 53, 81; De Selincourt,
Middle Years,
II, 883; Eden, 108-9; Hill,
Austen,
177; Howitt, 108, 117, 184;
Lavengro,
36,
319-20; Meidinger; Newton, 166; Pyne,
Costume of Great Britain
(1808);
Romany Rye,
44*. Lady Shelley, I, 287; Simond, I, 3, 14, 181-2,184, 226, 256; II, 224, 256, 297.

poor throve. So did the clean-scrubbed floors of the cottage interiors, the gleaming oak and copper, the inns with their neat, sanded parlours and plentiful fare. "This," reported a French American, "is the land of conveniences." After more t
han a year travelling the countr
y he found, at Barnsley, its first bad inn, and even this, he thought, would have been deemed excellent in France.
¹

In the south the countryman's cottage was generally of stone or brick, half-cast and timber, with a thatched roof and from three to four rooms. It was built of local materials blending with the landscape. The casements, Simond noted, instead of being left open to the weather or stuck up with rags, as on the Continent and in America, were leaded and glazed. In the far north and west, where much lower standards prevailed, single-room turf-cabins of the Continental type were common. Yet even these were usually whitewashed and had casements with gardens and flowers, indicating, a traveller thought, a remarkable degree of ease and comfort among the labouring classes. Over most of the country the standard of visible building was so good that it was hard for foreigners who did not penetrate under the surface to conceive where the poor lived.
²
The interiors of the wayside cottages were furnished with elm and oak settles, tables and chairs, iron-hooped harvest bottles, pewter and stoneware utensils, shelves for cheeses, herbs and bunches of yarn, and on the walls brass bosses, horses' face-pieces and coloured plumes and streamers. The homes of the better-to-do weavers on either side of the southern Pennines—daub and timber cottages with low wooden latches overhanging crystal streams or stone houses in rows on the hillsides, with open doors "inviting the stranger to glance at their neatness, cleanliness and felicity"—usually had a room in front, a loom-shop behind and two or three sleeping chambers above, or else a large loft where the family worked. At Leek the silk workers occupied airy, well-furnished apartments approached by stairs, with

¹
Ashton, II, 220-1; Bamford, I, 43. 94. 99. 209-11, 214, 219; II, 68-9, 260, 331, 333; Bury, I, 242, 245, 263; II, 15; Clapham,
1,
220; Cobbett,
1,
43,
81; Colchester, II, 502; Lord Coleridge, 223-4-Cooper, 16. 10-20; De Selincourt, II,
283, 883; Dino, 165; Eland, 12
, 19; Farington, VII, 125; VIII, 197; Lady Holland, I, 105, 320; Howitt, 131, 202-3,
et passim;
W. Irving,
Sketch Book;
Jekyll and Jones, 51, 80,98;
Lav
engro,
2, 330; Leigh Hunt,
Autobiography,
II, 153-4; Letts, 65, 211-212; Meidinger, I,
315-17;
Mercer, I, 37; Mitford,
Our Village,
7-9, 14. 16-18, 32, 43, 65, 70-1, 74-5;
Old Oak,
57-68;
Romany Rye,
65, 162-3, 175-8; Lady Shelley, I, 287; Simond, I, 2, 3, 10, 12-15,16,17.217, 221-2, 225-6, 256, 297. 338, 354; II, 56,62,78, 86,115,146,182,201,224, 228, 234-5, 245-6, 251-2, 283, 297; Smith, I, 108, 334-5.

²
Simond, II, 224. "There are a few cottages to be seen, but the pots of geraniums inside the windows and roses outside seem to place them outside the reach of common labourers; those of America with double pay and provisions at half-price have no such habitations, at least as to neatness and good repair." Simond, II, 283. See
idem,
I, 12, 184, 221, 256; II, 228; Bamford, II, 33;
Romany Rye,
162; Woodward, 9.

carpets and oil-cloths; Cobbett passing through Durham and Yorkshire noted the excellence of the miners' and cutlers' homes. "There were a dozen good rush-bottomed chairs, the backs and rails bright with wax and rubbing," wrote a weaver's apprentice of his master's house, "a handsome clock in a mahogany case, a good chest of drawers, a mahogany corner-cupboard all well polished, besides tables, weather-glass, cornice and ornaments and pictures illustrative of Joseph and his brethren." At the time of the peace, Howitt recalled, the Derbyshire and Staffordshire workers had so much furniture in their houses that they could scarcely turn round.
¹

If English peasants and artisans could take pride in their dwellings, those socially above them had every cause to do so. "A nice farmhouse in a dell sheltered from every wind," was Cobbett's definition of human felicity. In Miss Mitford's village the vine-covered cottage of her neighbour, the retired lieutenant, looked "the image of comfort and content"; so did the white dwelling of the mason opposite and the old farm at the end of the hamlet with its pointed roofs and clustered chimneys. Her own cottage was full of "little odds and ends of places, pantries and what not, all angles and of a charming in-and-outness; a little bricked court before one half and a little flower-yard before the other; the walls, old and weather-stained, covered with hollyhocks, roses, honeysuckles and a great apricot tree, the closets full of contrivances," and the little garden full of flowers. It seemed built, she said, to show in what small compass comfort could be packed.

Where the labourers' homes were neat and those of farmers snug, the houses of the gentry were princely. Almost every parish possessed at least one fine seat on which successive generations of skilled builders, craftsmen and garde
ners had been employed by a con
noisseurship which scarcely ever lacked taste and a sense of proportion. In most, the impress was classical; the lore of the ancient world and Renaissance Italy had been ransacked by the land-owning classes and applied with innumerable insular and local variations, Pal-ladian, Baroque, Rococo and, more lately, Pompeian and Grecian principles, being blended with the national genius for diversity and die pastoral background of hill, grove and stream. Others, like the

¹
Bamford, II, 260. See
idem,
I, 43, 68, 94, 169, 193-4; H. 68-9, 259;
Ann, Reg.
1816. Chron., in; Clapham, 28-9, 32-3, 36-7; Daniel, I, 28-9, 31; Darvall, 31-2; Eland, 12, 19, 21-2; Howitt
r
107, 132-3, 202-3; Jekyll and Jones, 51, 98, 100; Leslie,
Constable,
84;
Old Oak,
48; Simond,
I,
256; II, 10, 95, 213, 256; Walker,
Costume of Yorkshire
(1814); Woodward, 32-3.

cottages and farms at their gates, were relics of a less sophisticated and purely native culture. Such was the many-gabled black and white mansion of Lady Shelley's childhood with the family arms carved in stone over the door, or the old hall at Middleton built of plaster and framework, with its massive beams and black oak carvings and walls hung with matchlocks, swords and trophies of the chase. Many of these older houses had fallen into decay or become farms like moated Parham in Suffolk and Boston Hall in the fens, their rafters exposed, the gilding peeling off the galleries, the vast doors and chests turned to humble rustic purposes, cooking utensils hanging on nails which had held the swords of crusaders, and pigs and chickens ranging the uneven floors. Owing to a new craze for romantic antiquities those that were still lived in by their owners were surprisingly becoming objects of new interest; the house-party in
Mansfield Park
made an expedition to view the beauties of Sotherton,. though its improving owner intended to uproot the avenue and modernise the gardens
a la Repton.

The most impressive thing about England's country houses was their number. They ranged from palaces like Blenheim, Petworth and Castle Howard to unassuming residences of pilastered stone, brick or white stucco little bigger than the houses of the professional classes in the county towns, but set amid the common denominators of park, lawn and drive. They were, above everything else, the distinguishing ornament of the landscape.
¹
A gentleman stranded on the road could be sure of shelter under the roof of one of his own kind, where he would find, though with infinite variations, the same classical or Gothic architecture, the same fine furniture of mahogany, walnut and rosewood, the same oriental carpets and china and their English counterparts, the same ancestral worthies in gilded frames flanked by masterpieces or pseudo-masterpieces from Italy and Holland, the same libraries of leather-bound books containing the solid culture of three centuries. And outside would be the cedars, the close-mown lawns, the flower-beds, conservatories and ice-houses, the vistas cunningly blending the artificial with the natural, l#wns, park, water merging into the landscape which they commanded and to which they belonged.

Such houses were maintained in flawless order. The Earl of

¹
Simond, I, 201, 220-1; II, 86, 100, 254; Washington Irving,
Sketch Book.
Wansey, travelling in France in 1814, counted only twenty country houses in a day's journey; in the same distance in England, he reckoned, he would have seen three hundred.

Bridge water at Ashridge employed five hundred men in his gardens, conservatories and workshops. Nothing was allowed to be slovenly; everything was planned to give the highest possible return in elegance and comfort. The gardens of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey had countless walls, villages of hothouses and potting-sheds, and a whole parish at work on them. Nor was the author drawing on her imagination; when she and her mother visited cousins at Stoneleigh Abbey the house was so large that they were unable to find their way about. It had forty-five windows in front, several drawing-rooms, dining-rooms, parlours, galleries and staircases, all hung with velvets, brocades and family portraits, twenty-six bed-chambers in the new part of the building and more in the old. "Every part of the house and
offices
' wrote Mrs. Austen, "is kept so clean that were you to cut your finger I do not think you could find a cobweb to wrap it up in. In the kitchen garden the quantity of small fruit exceeds anything you can form an idea of. This large family, with the assistance of a great many blackbirds and thrushes, cannot prevent it from rotting on the trees. The ponds supply excellent fish, the park excellent venison; there is a great quantity of rabbits, pigeons and all sorts of poultry. There is a delightful dairy where is made butter, good Warwickshire cheese and cream. One manservant is called the baker and does nothing but brew and bake. The number of casks in the strong-beer cellar is beyond imagination.
^,1

Within these stately houses went on a life designed for enjoyment and content. It seemed a paradox that their inmates, as mirrored in their letters and contemporary novels, should have suffered the usual human lot of anxiety, envy, longing and even, sometimes, of despair. Amid furniture "in all the profusion and elegance of modern taste" and the masterpieces of an unbroken civilisation, on lawns shaded by cedars of Lebanon and rolled and scythed till they resembled green lakes,
²
surrounded by avenues, temples and parks cropped by deer, with terraces for sun and groves and fountains for shade, with walled gardens and hothouses that poured out a never-ending flow of peaches, nectarines, grapes, melons and pineapples, with coverts full of game, cellars of choice vintages, side-tables of gleaming mahogany

¹
Hill,
Austen,
163-5.

²
"The mowing, or rather shaving of this smooth surface, is done once a week and even twice in warm rainy weather. . . . The grass must be wet with dew or rain and the scythe very sharp; the blade is wide and set so obliquely on the handle as to lie very flat on the sod. The rollers are generally of cast iron, 18 or 20 inches in diameter and 2^ or 3 feet long, hollow and weigh about 500 lbs.; . . . those drawn by a horse are three or four times heavier. Simond, I, 154-5.

groaning with game, hams and cheeses, these elegant, favoured creatures, with the stimulus and wherewithal for the cultivation of every social, aesthetic and learned taste, still contrived on occasion to be bored and out of humour.

Yet, on the whole, as Squire Lambton reckoned a man could do on ^40,000 a year, they managed to 'jog along." Sitting at the pianoforte in some great sunlit room filled with buhl and ormolu, pier glasses and statues, elegantly
derange
sofa-tables from Gillow's fashionable warehouse, Sevres china, breloques and singing clocks, little Tom Moore would sigh out his enchanting melodies, now gay, now melancholy, to companies of dandy men and exquisitely dressed women. The gentlemen hunted, raced, shot, fished, read, played at billiards, cards and
ecarte,
looked after their estates, sat on the Bench, and rode, danced and joined in charades with the ladies; the latter gossiped, sketched, made scrapbooks, embroidered stools, looked at engravings, walked in the gardens and inspected the greenhouses, played with their children in the nursery wings, devoured the novels of Walter Scott or Lady Morgan, constantly dressed and redressed and displayed their elegant accomplishments to the gentlemen. "Lady Asgill established herself in an attitude with Sir Thomas Graham at her feet," wrote Lady Shelley; "in the next room Lady Jane and Miss Russell at a harp and a pianoforte (both out of tune) played the Creation." At Knowsley, where from June to November there were never less than forty guests, the princely host restricted the gentlemen to five brace of partridges apiece to ensure their return to drive with the ladies in the afternoon, a concourse of carriages and horses parading after luncheon for the purpose. At Woburn breakfast was served from ten o'clock onwards, every guest being furnished, under the supervision of the groom of the chambers, with a separate teapot at any hour he chose, before parading for the great liveried battues. Here after dinner the "lively, easy young Duchess would collect her romping force of girls and young men" and, advancing through an enfilade of half a dozen rooms hung with Canalettos, pelt the gentlemen at their whist with cushions and oranges. And though during the London season the enchanted groves and flowers in the shires wasted their sweetness on the uninhabited air, their owners always returned to them in the end with delight. "Tixhall is in radiant beauty," wrote Harriet Leveson Gower, "all over roses, rain, sunshine and a new fir
eplace in the hall. I really do
love it beyond expression." "After having been at a ball until three o'clock," Lady Shelley concluded her journal of a metropolitan July, "Shelley, Mr. Jenkinson and I drove down to Sutton in the barouche and at nine o'clock we mounted our horses and galloped over that delightful turf.
...
As I breathed this pure air my jaded spirits were restored. I was exalted by a sense of happiness which only those who love and understand the beauties of nature can fully enjoy..
..
From Sutton we rode across country to Maresfield which 'in all its blueth and greeneth' reproached us for our absence. Thank God! I can leave the vanities of London without a sigh and return to my dear home with every good feeling unimpaired!" An English squire wintering in Rome in the first year of peace told a friend that he had seen nothing among its southern profusion equal to Cowes-field House. "Never mind the climate—stay where you are; all their tinsel and show can never be put in comparison with the solids and substantials of England."
¹

1
Paget Brothers,
271-2. See Mrs. Arbuthnot,
Journal
(23rd Jan., 1822,
et passim);
Austen, II, 369-70; Bamford, II, 215; Broughton,
1,
174; Byron, Corr., I, 298; Lord Coleridge, 241;
Creevey Papers,
I, 296; Farington, VIII, 17, 141.
I43»
301; Gronow, II, 91; Gore, 57; Hill,
Austen,
163-7; Harriet Granville, I, 35, 128-30,151-2,197-9, 202-3, 219-20; Howitt, 1-28;
Lieven Letters,
18-19; Lockhart, V, 337-9; Mitford,
Literary Life,
26; Newton, 24, 159-60. 199.204;
Sea-Bathing Places,
46, S01-2; Simond, I, 9, 73-4, 154-5,198-9. 223; II, 74, 78, 85, 9y, 119, 219, 254; Lady Shelley, II, 12-13.