The Age of Elegance (49 page)

force and temptation of the nation: the stimulus and peril. It was increasingly attended by vanity, greed and covetousness, and by the uncharitableness to which these gave rise. It reduced even good men from Christians to cads. It ceased to occur to gentlemen that there was anything ignoble in speaking of those socially beneath them with contempt. "I never saw more ridiculous figures," wrote Fox's great-nephew after a levee, "tailors and haberdashers were among them." "King" Allen, the dandy, used to call his bankers his tradesmen, and the Benchers of Lincoln's Inn resolved that writers in the Press were unfit to be called to the Bar. "Mr. Powlett," a country clergyman noted in his journal, "would not go to any place to dine where Mr. Claridge was invited because he was a steward; how soon Mr. Powlett seems to have forgotten that he is the son of a country attorney!" Lady Shelley's father was so disgusted at seeing a rich cotton spinner secure the best turbot at the local fishmonger's that he left his town house at Preston in a passion and never returned. She herself was unable to enjoy a fete at Geneva because some vulgar English were looking on, and felt a strong prejudice against Peel on account of his birth. Even so choice a spirit as Mary Mitford could not escape the infection and wrote contemptuously of sitting next to the grocer's wife, jammed in between brewers and bakers and tailors and corn dealers. When the Prince Regent joined his servants at a Pavilion supper party, the Opposition Press made high jest at royalty condescending to "cooks, scullions, dish-washers, lick-trenchers, shoe-blacks, cinder-sifters, candle-snuffers, etc." A great poet like Wordsworth, a man whose life was dedicated to the contemplation of the eternal, could write of the disgrace—he was of yeoman stock—his brother had incurred by marrying his young housekeeper: "a connection with a servant, and that one his own."
¹

Across the elegant surface of the national wealth ran a yellow streak. The cad—showy, heartless, deceptive and bouncing—was a special product of the Regency; the Regent himself was one. So, for all his genius, was the most famous poet of the age, Lord Byron, who corresponded facetiously with the mother of the man he had cuckolded about her daughter-in-law's indiscretions. The dandies

¹
De Selincourt,
Middle Years,
II,
612.
See Holland,
Journal,
1,
141;
Mitford, 1,
110-11;
Newton,
89;
Shelley, I,
3, 8, 236;
II,
17;
Woodward,
28, 541.

insulted their social equals and were offensively rude to their inferiors; a set of men, a contemporary recalled, who arrogated to themselves the right of criticising the entire universe, who never condescended to laugh, always looked hazy after dinner and sneered at everyone and everything. The air—the manner—the
je ne sais quoi
—of a Corinthian's quiz, "the curled Up of contempt and the eye, measuring, from top to toe, his companions" became the glass of fashion at which young England dressed itself in the self-indulgent years after Waterloo. His imitators were "the smokers, jokers, hoaxers, glass-cockers, blacklegs and fancy fellows of the town," the Corinthian Toms, Jerry Hawthorns and Hon. Tom Dashalls who figure with such gusto in the blackguard pages of the journalist, Pierce Egan, and who became a vogue towards the end of the first quarter of the century. Their motto was to be ripe for any spree, by which they generally meant any frolic that involved others in trouble. It was the result partly of too much food and drink, and, with the growing upper-class substitution of snobbery for religion, of too little sense of responsibility. Lord Barry more, driving home from a midnight revel in his highflyer phaeton, cracked half the windows—"fanning the daylights," he called it—on either side of Colnbrook high street with his whip.

The older ideal of a gentleman was being obscured by one that, though based on elegance, high vitality and courage, was both competitive and calculating:
"an out and outer,
one up to everything, down as a nail, a trump, a Trojan . . . one that can patter flash, floor a charley, mill a coal-heaver, come coachey in prime style, up to every rig and row in town and down to every move upon the board from a nibble at the club to a dead hit at a hell; can swear, smoke, take snuff, lush, play at all games and throw over both sexes in different ways—he is the finished man!"
¹
Bamford, tramping through Oxford, was told in an alehouse that the undergraduates were courageous fighters, generous remunerators and profuse spenders, all of which the company allowed to be gentlemanly qualities, but that, in intercourse with those beneath them, they were arrogant, wilful and capricious and prone to lay on too hard when they got the upper hand. A heartless disregard for the feelings of others was the hallmark of the "blood." It was considered a joke to crowd timorous passers-by off the pavement, to throw a drunk in a

¹
English Spy,
II,
217.
See also
idem,
219-21;
Life in London,
35,128.

dunghill, drop a live coal on a sleeper
's head, rob a blind man of his
dog and swear in the presence of l
adies and clergymen. "What d'ye
think of that for a lark, eh?" cried one
of the type relating his even
ing at his parson brother's. " 'Kee
p it up—keep it up, d me,' says
I, so I sets down to the table, drank
as much as I could—then I mix'd
the heel-taps all in one bottle and brok
e all the empty ones and rolled
home in
prime and plummy
order, d me!"
¹

This notion of gentility had dangerous consequences when applied by the flashy sons of the rough, upstart employers and moneymakers of the cotton and mercantile towns. Some Lancashire weavers' wives after Peterloo, who, wear
ied out on a tramp over the Pen
nines, boarded the York stage-coach, were greeted with coarse abuse by the young Manchester sparks aboard, and, when they sought protection from the coachman and guard, were ridiculed by these obsequious snobs. Below such "gemmen" were the stable-boys, cadgers, pugilists, horse-croppers and raffish hangers-on of the sporting world, with their cheap cigars, hats askew and hands in pockets, swearing obscenely at street corners or hanging about dog-pits or public houses making up their betting-books.
²

Gambling—reckless and showy—was the crowning vice of the rich idler. Clubs like Crockford's and the Roxborough, with their exquisite furnishings and princely food and service, drained away more than one great estate and drove gentlemen to courses which damaged both their honour and their country. Lord Sefton—an upright and kindly man—after losing a small fortune at Brooks's, recouped himself, like others, by an enclosure-bill at the expense of his poorer neighbours. Sometimes the play at these establishments would continue for two or three days before the infatuated gamblers broke up. At Crockford's, during the parliamentary session, supper, cooked by the great
chef,
Ude, was served from midnight till five, every delicacy and drink that could gratify the most fastidious taste being provided without charge.
³
It was the green hazard table and the croupiers in their white neckcloths that maintained the club and made the fortune—more than a million pounds—of the old

¹
Real Life in London,
I,
90-1.
See
English Spy,
II,
234.

²
Bamford, II,
210-11, 220-1;
Byron,
Corr.,
I,
132-3;
English Spy,
I,
143-5. 247;
IL
217-21, 234;
Gronow, I,
227;
Leigh Hunt,
Autobiography,
II,
173;
Life in London,
35, 128;
McCausland,
59-60;
Real Life in London,
I,
3, 26, 90-1
n.; Sydney, I,
131.

³
Those who chose, however, would throw a ten-pound note on the play-table at the end of the session and leave it there. Lamington,
11-12.
See Lord Coleridge,
185-6;
Ashton, I,
35<5-7;
Creevey Papers,
36;
D'Arblay, IV,
44-5;
English Spy,
I,
332-6;
II,
13;
Greville, I (Suppl.),
48-9;
Gronow, II,
10, 81-6, 92-4, 282;
Moorsom,
27;
Paget Brothers,
177;
Real Life in London,
I,
196.

fishmonger who owned it. Humble men copied the vices of their betters; during the peace celebrations in Hyde Park the dicing tables in the gambling booths were continually surrounded by multitudes. In Dartmoor the poor perverts, shunned by their fellow prisoners and living apart under a monstrous king of their own choosing, gambled away their very clothes and food until they were left starving and naked.

CHAPTER
TEN

The Underworld

"The carriage that glitters like a meteor along the streets of the metropolis often deprives the wretched inmate of the distant cottage of the chair he sits on, the table he eats on, the bed he lies on."

Hazlitt

"If an empire were made of sand, it would be pounded to dust by the economists."

Napoleon

I

N
Spitalfields, once a village of pleasant gardened houses built by Huguenot silk-weavers, one saw the reverse of the London of elegance and splendour that the free institutions and the vigorous habits of the English had created. Here 50,000 workers, cut off from all direct access to the soil and the raw materials of their labour, and dependent solely on wages and the fluctuations of distant markets, were crowded in conditions of squalor which worsened as ever more newcomers poured into the place, its stately homes become overcrowded tenements, its mulberry trees cut down and gardens obliterated by mean dwellings, its rustic lanes transformed into un-paved and sewerless streets.
¹
In these nightmare extensions of London to the east and beyond the river, and in the rookeries and foetid courtyards that huddled behind the haunts of fashion and commerce, pallid, diminutive-looking men, women and children dragged out their crowded existence amid heaps of garbage. The only cheerful places in such abodes of misery were the gin or "blue ruin" shops. Here were the characters of low life that Corinthian Tom and Jerry Hawthorn, in their resolve to drain the last dregs of metropolitan pleasure, found revelling by night: Tinker Tom, dirty Suke, boggle-eyed Jem and Billingsgate Moll, full of fire and fury defending herself with her fish basket, African Sail, flashy Nance and Bet, the ballad singer, "rolling her peepers for a new fancy man"; the cadgers and flat-catchers of the Holy Land enjoying their "peck and booze" after

¹
F. Warner,
The Silk Industry, passim.

their eleemosynary labours; the lascars, jack-tars, coal-heavers, dustmen, women of colour and remnants of once fine girls, who jigged together at All Max—that "bit of life" at the east end of the Town— where the reckless could drown their miseries in "Daffy," "Ould Tom" and "Stark Naked."

Half the customers of such places lived outside the law. The thieves' kitchen was the natural flower of the London slum. The world of Fagin and the Artful Dodger did not spring from Dickens's imagination. Neither did the "stout, broad-shouldered, sturdy chested man"—with the broad-skirted green coat with large metal buttons and the pale, scared woman and emaciated children waiting for him outside the tap-room—who, as Bill Sikes, matriculated from burglary to murder. "We never calls them thieves here but prigs and fakers," the old apple-woman on London Bridge told the author
of
Lavengro.
"If you have any dies to sell at any time I'll buy them of you; all safe with me; I never peach and scorns a trap!" There were parts of the town like Tothill Fields and Seven Dials where by tacit agreement neither watch nor Bow Street runner ordinarily entered. In these "flash cribs," or "infernals," thousands of thieves and their female "pals" lived in ancient tumble-down houses and narrow courts reeking with ordure. Across their horizons lay the shadow not of Paul's cross but of the Newgate gallows and the gibbet. The most popular of London spectacle
s was a hanging; then the under
world, drunk on gin and horrors, shouted itself senseless as Jack Ketch, the hangman, cut down the lifeless bodies.
¹

In the manufacturing districts vice and destitution lived, not in juxtaposition with respectability and splendour, but far removed from them. Most of the steam-factory towns were situated on wild heaths and moors in scantily populated neighbourhoods little influenced by gentry or clergy. In these settlements, doubling in size every five or six years, with their filth, noise and perpetual inflow of new inhabitants, the old framework of society, built round church, manor-court and the village democracy of constable, way-warden and overseer, broke down completely. Here only the law of the jungle held. Just outside Birmingham, capital of the Midland hardware trade, was a squalid manufacturing village known as "Mud

¹
Ashton,
Old Times,
246-7:
Bamford, I,
67;
II,
130-2;
Cooper,
9-10;
Dixon,
50;
English
Spy,
I»
338;
Fraser's Magazine,
XXXI
(1843), 335-6";
Lavengro,
194-5, 289-91;
Lucas, I,
45;
Newton,
94;
Life in London,
181, 207-31, 225-8, 271-3;
Real Life in London,
I,
295;
II,
i28-3o
;*Sydney, II,

City" whose inhabitants were the terror of the neighbourhood; a generation later Disraeli drew their savage offspring in his "Wodgate." The wife of one of Nelson's captains, passing through Nottingham a few years after Trafalgar, described with horror the drunken, riotous rabble that careered all night outside her inn.

For success in discovering new forms of livelihood was uprooting growing numbers from the country's traditional life. Though many thrived in that freer society, many more, the old props gone, went to the wall. Those swept into the slums of the capital or the squatters' towns around the steam factories could transmit to their children only a memory of the Christian traditions and influences among which they grew up. A generation after Waterloo a third of Manchester's children attended neither church, chapel nor school. The stony places in which the dispossessed took root tended inevitably to make hard, cruel, reckless men and sluttish, depraved women.

Competition was the condition of English economic life. The end of competition was increased wealth and liberty for the individual. The virtues which made for success in it were largely those which had given England victory in battle and which were engendered by the free and Christian society in which the more fortunate of the English grew up. But the end of life was imperceptibly ceasing to be the pursuit of those virtues and was becoming instead the property and prestige which those virtues had created.

Nor were the qualities which made for such success—energy, faith, resource, happy co-ordination of body and mind—equally engendered in all. The distinction between the love of liberty and private selfishness was finer than Britons realised or cared to admit. English liberty, with its educative virtues, depended for its operation on the institution of property. Without it the boasted freedom of the individual had Uttle real existence. A man without property, a man of straw, could preserve neither his own freedom nor that of others. The richer the subject, the more complete his liberty. A poor man could be incarcerated for debt, pressed, in time of national emergency, into the Navy, or, lacking the wherewithal to hire a substitute, called up for wartime service in the Militia. If the local Justices feared he might become a charge on the poor rates, he could be forcibly removed to the parish of his birth or "settlement." Even
habeas corpus
could not avail without the wherewithal to fee a lawyer: "an Englishman unless he can lay his hands on
£25
"
wrote Stendhal, "is an outlaw." In a country where tyranny was held in universal detestation and the right to liberty regarded as every man's birthright, the poor were almost inevitably at the mercy of the petty bully—the greedy employer, the embezzling tradesman or jerry-builder, the pawnbroker and usurer, the corrupt beadle or constable. There was no national organisation to enforce order and justice; only twenty clerks at the Home Office. That and hanging! The substitute for a police force was the hundred-to-one chance that even the least offending malefactor might finish on the gallows. There were over two hundred capital offences; a man might hang for chipping the balustrade of Westminster Bridge or impersonating a Chelsea pensioner. It was because the sanctity of property seemed so important to the English—the sheet-anchor of all independence and virtue—that in 1810 the House of Lords, on principle, rejected Romilly's bill for exempting petty larceny from the death penalty. A man who stole five shillings' worth of goods from a shop counter, it was held, was undermining the whole structure of a free society and was not fit to live. As, however, the English were a humane and Christian people in their private relationships and instinctively reacted, when personally confronted with it, from the harsh reality to which their principles gave rise, the chief result of the bloodthirsty rigour of the laws with which they defended property was to ensure the acquittal of the majority of petty malefactors, judges and juries refusing to inflict death for such trifling offences.

It was the essence of all economic activity in England that it was uncontrolled. Everything was left to individual enterprise. The very-gardens in the new seaside resorts were laid out by speculating gardeners who recouped themselves by charging for admission and selling fruit and flowers. A service that was worth no one's while to provide—that did not offer profit to someone—was regarded as an activity not worth providing. Even the cleansing of the streets was left to the self-interest of men like Dickens's golden dustman who filled the suburbs with vast piles of stinking, fly-haunted rubble and manure which, regardless of their neighbours' amenities, they kept for sale to farmers and road contractors. Fire-fighting was left to insurance companies; London had to wait a generation after Waterloo before even its parishes
were allowed to maintain a fire
engine. All monopolies, it was felt, especially State monopolies, were bound to be inefficient and corrupt. "An individual," wrote Walter Scott, "always manages his own concerns better than those of the country can be managed."

Apart from the means of defence the State owned nothing; the very Ministers of the Crown regarded the official papers that passed through their hands as private property. Foreigners commented with surprise on the inadequacy of the public buildings; the benches and chairs in the London parks were invariably disfigured or destroyed. Even the royal arbours in Kensington Gardens were scribbled over with dirty rhymes. The cascade in Hyde Park below the Serpentine was blocked with duckweed and decaying branches; a large part of the metropolitan water supply—though the cost of a single week of the war could have supplied an aqueduct from the Surrey hills—was drawn from canals in which the poor washed or the Thames into which the sewers flowed.
¹

If London was badly off in public services, other places were far worse off. There were towns of ten thousand inhabitants which did not possess a post office or a postman. Their sanitary condition, a doctor reported, was like that of an encamped horde.
²
Birmingham —a city of 100,000 people and the fourth largest in the kingdom— was without even a charter and was administratively a mere agglomeration of squatters' dwellings, growing ever more congested and anarchical. Local government was a harlequinade; there were more than 250 municipal corporations in England and Wales and 15,000 parishes, and almost all corrupt. No one, except the very poor, showed the slightest respect for their authority or the antiquated regulations they feebly tried to enforce. Simond's first impression of England was the sight of the Falmouth beadles on a Sunday, in old-fashioned silver lace and cocked-hats, trying to compel a Quaker to shut his shop, which reopened the moment they had gone.

In such a society scarcely anything was planned. Man was left free to act as and when it seemed fit to him to do so. In the hurly-burly of this untrammelled individual activity it was difficult even to unveil a statue or open a bridge without someone being crushed or killed. When Kean, the great actor, visited Liverpool a woman was

¹
Bury, 1,
252;
English Spy,
I,
191;
Lockhart, IV,
74;
Partington, I,
27-8;
Raumer,
I,
142;
Sea-Bathing Places,
429, 437;
Woodward,
4. 41, 448.

²
Hutchins,
Public Health Agitation,
64,
cit.
Hammond,
Town Labourer,
44.
See Clapham, I,
36-7;
Fremantle, 1,
46;
Sea-Bathing Places,
349-51;
Hammond,
Rise of Modern Industry,
153;
Letts,
123-5;
Smart,
245-9;
Woodward,
46, 432, 441.

trampled to death in the gallery; the King's brother, the Duke of Cambridge, taking his bride for a walk in Kensington Gardens, had to set her with her back to a tree to prevent her being smothered by the crowd. In the manufacturing districts, where the controlling forces of custom, Church and ancient neighbourhood were lacking, English anarchy reached Homeric heights. When Messrs. Hole, Wilkinson and Garthside's new sheets were set out on the Manchester warehouse floor, the country drapers fought for the pieces with their fists.
¹