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Title: Social life in England, 1750-1850
Author: Frederick John Foakes-Jackson
Release date: December 8, 2024 [eBook #74856]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Macmillan and Co
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND, 1750-1850 ***
SOCIAL
LIFE IN ENGLAND
1750-1850
BY
F. J. FOAKES-JACKSON
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1916
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1916,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1916.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
ACADEMIAE HARVARDIANAE
ET PRAESERTIM
A. LAURENTIO LOWELL
PRAESIDI
PROFESSORSIBUSQUE EIS
QUI FRATERNO AMORE
HOSPITEM ACCEPERUNT
CANTABRIGIENSIS CANTABRIGIENSIBUS
HOC OPUSCULUM
D.D.
PREFACE
This volume contains a course of Lowell Lectures delivered in Boston in
March, 1916; and I take this opportunity of tending my thanks to the
Lowell Institute for affording me the privilege of delivering them.
I must also thank a most indulgent audience for their sympathetic
attention.
I desire particularly to thank several friends in England for
assistance in the preparation of these lectures. In my investigations
into the story of Margaret Catchpole, Mr. John Cobbold of Holywells,
Ipswich, Mr. Edward Brooke of Ufford Hall, Suffolk, Mrs. Sylvester of
Tonbridge, and the Curator of the Ipswich Museum, allowed me to see
original documents of great interest; Mr. Barker of the _East Anglian
Daily Times_ and Mr. Goodwin of Ipswich helped by searching the files
of old newspapers for information. The Downing Professor of the Laws
of England at Cambridge assisted with his advice on the subject of
Dickens’ legal knowledge; and Mr. Stoakley of the Cambridge chemical
laboratory contributed to the success of the lectures by his admirable
reproductions of illustrative maps and pictures.
Above all, I must express my gratitude to two ladies in America, who
not only contributed to the pleasure of my visit by their unstinted
hospitality, but did all in their power to save me from those pitfalls
which beset every one who lectures in a strange country. Mrs. Barrett
Wendell of Boston found time in the midst of her many useful avocations
to hear several lectures before they were delivered, and to advise how
they could be made more intelligible and acceptable to an American
audience; and Mrs. Kirsopp Lake proved herself indefatigable not only
in revising the lectures before they were delivered, but also in
reading the proofs of this book.
UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY,
NEW YORK,
August, 1916.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LECTURE PAGE
I. LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ILLUSTRATED BY THE CAREER
OF JOHN WESLEY 1
II. GEORGE CRABBE 42
III. MARGARET CATCHPOLE 81
IV. GUNNING’S “REMINISCENCES OF CAMBRIDGE” 126
V. CREEVEY PAPERS--THE REGENCY 168
VI. SOCIAL ABUSES AS EXPOSED BY CHARLES DICKENS 213
VII. MID-VICTORIANISM. W. M. THACKERAY 261
VIII. SPORT, AND RURAL ENGLAND 302
SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND
LECTURE I
LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ILLUSTRATED BY THE CAREER OF JOHN WESLEY
In order to depict social life in England in the eighteenth century I
am going to take the career of one of its most remarkable men, though
you may be surprised at the choice I have made. For the eighteenth
century was an eminently social age and the stage is crowded with
figures of men and women of the world. Their letters, their talk, their
scandals, their amusements have come down to us in profusion; and it is
not difficult for us to imagine ourselves in their midst. You may well
ask me why I did not select a really brilliant character to expound the
life of this time. I might for example have taken Lord Chesterfield or
Horace Walpole, or Boswell, that most observant of men, or the great
character whom he immortalised. Or I might have selected others less
known, but equally interesting, and rather than a revivalist preacher
like John Wesley. I had written thus far when I came across the
following words by the British man of letters, Mr. Birrell:
“How much easier to weave into your page the gossip of Horace Walpole,
to enliven it with a heartless jest of George Selwyn, to make it blush
with the sad stories of the extravagance of Fox, to embroider it with
the rhetoric of Burke, to humanise it with the talk of Johnson, to
discuss the rise and fall of administrations, the growth and decay
of the constitution, than to follow John Wesley into the streets of
Bristol, or to the bleak moors near Burslem, when he met face to face
in all their violence, all their ignorance, and all their generosity
the living men, women, and children, who made up the nation.”
But I think I could give another reason why John Wesley is a fit person
to represent the social life of his century, namely, that though he
may undoubtedly be classed among the saints, though he was one of the
most unworldly of men, though he took what must seem to most of us an
unnecessarily serious view of life, he fell short of hardly any of
the great men enumerated in shrewd observation and even in what in
the language of his time would have been termed “wit.” Nay, Wesley
possessed a caustic humour which many a worldly wit might have envied.
“Certainly,” he writes in Scotland, “this is a nation quick to hear
and slow to speak, though certainly not ‘slow to wrath.’” “You cannot
be too superficial in addressing a ‘polite’ audience” is an aphorism
of his which I remember. “I know mankind too well, I know they that
love you for political service, love you less than their dinner;
and they that hate you, hate you worse than the devil.” Here is a
criticism of a tapestry in Dublin. “In Jacob’s vision you see, on the
one side a little paltry ladder, and an angel climbing up it in the
attitude of a chimney sweeper; and on the other side--Jacob staring at
him under a silver laced hat.” The criticisms of books,--for he was
an omnivorous reader, especially on a journey,--“History, poetry and
philosophy I commonly read on horseback, having other employment at
other times,”--are not always fair but nearly always shrewd and often
as bitter as anything Johnson himself could have uttered. “I read
with much expectation a celebrated book, Rousseau on Education. But
how was I disappointed! Sure a more consummate coxcomb never saw the
sun.... I object to his temper even more than to his judgment: he is a
mere misanthrope; a cynic all over. So indeed is his brother infidel
Voltaire; and well nigh as great a coxcomb. But he hides his doggedness
and vanity a little better; whereas here it stares us in the face
continually.” Here is his opinion of a very famous book. “Tuesday,
February 11, 1772, I casually took a volume of what is called, A
sentimental Journey through France and Italy. Sentimental! What is
that? It is not English: he might as well say Continental. It is not
sense. It conveys no determinate idea: yet one fool makes many. And
this nonsensical word (who would believe it?) is become a fashionable
one! However the book agrees full well with the title; for one is as
queer as the other. For oddity, uncouthness, and unlikeness to all the
world beside, I suppose the writer is without a rival.” “A book wrote
with as much learning and as little judgment, as any I remember to have
read in my whole life,” he says of Cave’s “Primitive Christianity.”
Despite the fact, therefore, that John Wesley was devoted to the
work of missionary preaching, that he was an ecstatic visionary and
in many respects the most credulous as well as the most zealous of
evangelists, his knowledge of men and critical power was not a little
remarkable.
I am not at all sure that sinners are not the right people to write
about saints. Saints may be; because sanctity implies something
attractive which is almost unthinkable without the sympathy which
nearly always reveals itself in a certain playfulness. But good,
deserving people are assuredly not qualified to be the biographers of
saints; for, in their desire to exalt their hero, they generally strip
him of all the qualities for which men loved him (and no one was ever
loved for his perfections alone) and present him as their own ideal of
what a saint should be. John Wesley is an example of this and he would
appear in a far more amiable light in pages written by a kindly man of
the world than in a book by a devoted admirer and would-be imitator
of his virtues. It was, after all, Boswell’s many failings which
contributed to give us so delightful a portrait as that of his great
and good friend, Samuel Johnson.
Now John Wesley was an undoubted saint, and the good he did in England,
and his society in America for that matter, is incalculable: but I ask
his admirers and any who profess to follow him to forgive me for using
him as a peg on which to hang a few remarks on social England. Before,
however, I do so may I introduce him and some of his family to you?
It is rare indeed to find in any family so much genius transmitted from
father to son for more than two centuries as there was in that of the
Wesleys. Here are six generations:
1. Bartholomew studied physic at the University and, when ejected for
Puritanism in 1662 from the living of Allington in Dorsetshire, he
practised as a doctor.
2. His son John was an ardent Puritan, imprisoned on no less than four
occasions. He died at an early age and was distinguished when at New
Inn Hall at Oxford for his proficiency in Oriental studies.
3. Samuel, Rector of Epworth, a scholar of some repute and father of
the famous Wesleys.
4. Charles, the poet of Methodism.
5. Samuel, the musician, one of the pioneers of modern organ playing.
6. Samuel Sebastian, the celebrated composer, organist in Gloucester
Cathedral, who died in 1875.
Talent, not without eccentricity, seemed the natural gift of this
remarkable family, to which was added beauty in the females and
distinction of appearance in the male members. Samuel, the third on
our list, was, naturally, a puritan by upbringing; but he became a
Churchman by conviction. He obtained the Rectory of Epworth in the Isle
of Axholm in Lincolnshire, and the chaplaincy of a regiment. This,
however, he lost; and his dissenting enemies stopped his getting any
further preferment save the living of Wroote, near to Epworth. He
married the daughter of an ejected minister, Susannah Annesley, who
was herself connected with the noble family of that name. She had no
less than nineteen children, but few of these survived, among them the
three famous brothers Samuel, John, and Charles. The girls, had they
had their brother’s advantages and education, might have been almost
equally distinguished. As it was, however, Samuel had enough to do to
give his sons an education worthy of their abilities. The eldest son
Samuel was a scholar of Westminster and a student of Christ Church, a
friend of Bishop Atterbury, and a sound scholar. Owing to his Toryism
he was never more than an usher (under-master) at Westminster and
Master of Tiverton School: and he continued to hold the principles of
a High Churchman to the last. He was an excellent and affectionate
brother, ready to help John and Charles in their education; but from
the first he recognised the tendencies of Methodism to be schismatical;
and in a letter to his mother just before his death he pointed out
the danger of his brothers’ teaching. Because he was not in sympathy
with the movement he has been condemned as “worldly,” as dull, as
without genius; but a sentence in this letter reveals something of the
incisiveness of John. “As I told Jack,” he writes, “I am not afraid
that the church should excommunicate him, discipline is at too low
an ebb; but that he should excommunicate the church.” John went to
school at the Charterhouse, thence to Christ Church, Oxford, and to a
fellowship at Lincoln College. Charles followed in the footsteps of
Samuel and became a student of Christ Church. Academic distinction was
the lot of all the sons of the Rector of Epworth.
The home of the family was amid the fens of Lincolnshire; and the
fenland had still many of its peculiar characteristics during the
childhood and youth of the Wesleys. The Isle of Axholm had been but
recently literally an island, rising out of the swamps and often
approached only by boat. These islands were inhabited by a wild uncouth
race who lived partly as farmers, and partly by capturing the fish and
birds which swarmed in the surrounding fens. Here lived John Wesley and
his family. By birth they were emphatically gentlefolk, by education
highly cultivated; they were miserably poor, severed from the society
of their equals among a people with whom they could have but little
sympathy. All of a deeply religious spirit; the father a pious and
conscientious but disappointed scholar, the mother sternly determined
to do her duty, the sons endowed with singular gifts of leadership,
the daughters sensitive and refined, condemned to live as peasant
girls. A family so able, so thrown on its own resources, so out of
contact with the world, of so imperious a spirit, was almost bound to
develop on exceptional lines. Their virtues and their strength were as
abnormal as their weakness, their singularly active minds were equally
capable of the greatest deeds and the most surprising mistakes. All
the girls were unfortunate in the choice of their partners and had sad
lives. John, the most gifted of all this gifted household, was able
to transform England by his preaching; yet made the most astonishing
blunders in the conduct of his private life, though shewing a talent
for administration worthy of his celebrated namesake, Arthur Wesley,
or Wellesley, Duke of Wellington. In studying the movement we must
always keep Epworth in the background.[1] But there was another side
of the life of the sons of the Rector. Samuel’s friend Atterbury,
the Tory Bishop of Rochester, is one of the most remarkable figures
of his age. John and Charles at Oxford were poor enough but found a
welcome in society congenial to them. Their birth and manners gave them
access to a coterie of religious yet cultured circles, especially at
Stanton in Gloucestershire; and they always comported themselves with
a consciousness of a perfectly secure position in society. Neither of
them was in the slightest degree dazzled by rank, wealth, or worldly
position. When Count Zinzendorf, the great German noble, and the patron
of the Moravians, spoke with the authority of a pious prince to John,
he was answered in a spirit as uncompromising as his own. Selina,
the famous and pious Countess of Huntingdon, “the elect lady” of
evangelical preachers, might patronise Whitefield; but could not take
a high tone with the Wesleys. Indeed, the aristocracy who preferred
the treasure of the Gospel to be contained in clergy, who might be
described as “earthen vessels,” disliked the Wesleys, whose greatest
successes were obtained among the middle class. None the less their
influence was in a measure due to the social advantages which they had
enjoyed when Oxford students. We, however, have to do with John Wesley
as illustrating the England of his day, and we may well begin to use
him for our purposes as a traveller. He had been one the greater part
of his life; but a good starting point for us will be after his visit
to Germany in 1738, immediately after the time from which he dates
his conversion. From that day almost till his death in 1791, John
Wesley was almost continually on the road, preaching from town to town
wherever he could get a hearing.
For years he seems to have travelled constantly on horseback, but later
in life he made use of a postchaise. The distances he covered are
almost incredible. Here is an extract from his Journal, dated August
7, 1759, when he was in his fifty fourth year. “After preaching at
four (because of the harvest) I took horse and rode easily to London.
_Indeed I wanted a little rest_; having rode in seven months about
four and twenty hundred miles.” As we have seen, Wesley often read as
he rode, and this practice taught him the value of a slack rein. “I
asked myself How is it no horse stumbles when I am reading? No account
can possibly be given but this: because I throw the reins on his back.
I then set myself to observe; and I aver that in riding about an
hundred thousand miles I scarce remember any horse (except two that
would fall head over heels anyway) to fall or to make a considerable
stumble while I rode with a slack rein. To fancy, therefore, that a
tight rein prevents stumbling is a capital blunder. I have repeated
the trial more than most men in the kingdom can do. A slack rein
will prevent stumbling if anything will. But in some horses nothing
can.” But all his rides were not so leisurely, and I will read you an
account of a ride in Wales. He started from Shrewsbury at 4 A.M., and
at two in the afternoon was forty two or three miles off, preaching
in the marketplace at Llanidloes. He and his companions then rode to
Fountainhead where he hoped to lodge; but “Mr. B. being unwilling” they
remounted at 7 P.M. and rode on to Ross-fair. They missed the track
and found themselves at the edge of a bog and had to be put on the
right road; again they missed their way, “it being half-past nine.”
They did not find Ross-fair till between 11 and 12. When they were
in bed the ostler and a miner had a ride on their beasts, and in the
morning Wesley found his mare “bleeding like a pig” in the stable, with
a wound behind. This was on July 24; on the 27th he was at Pembroke;
“I rested that night, having not quite recovered my journey from
Shrewsbury to Ross-fair.” He was in his 62d year! The dangers of travel
were considerable, and one of the most remarkable facts in regard to
Wesley was that he was never molested by highwaymen, who literally
swarmed in England throughout the eighteenth century. They were often
in league with the post boys, many of whom were highwaymen themselves.
When Wesley was 76 years of age he writes: “Just at this time there was
a combination among many of the postchaise drivers on the Bath road,
especially those that drove by night, to deliver their passengers into
each other’s hands. One driver stopped at the spot they had appointed,
where another waited to attack the chaise. In consequence of this
many were robbed; but I had a good Protector still. I have travelled
all roads by day or by night for these forty years, and never was
interrupted yet.” Four years later, in 1782, he writes: “About one on
Wednesday morning we were informed that three highwaymen were on the
road and had robbed all the coaches that had passed, some within an
hour or two. I felt no uneasiness on this account, knowing that God
would take care of us: and He did so; for before we came to the spot
all the highwaymen were taken.” I cannot but think it remarkable that
Wesley was never molested, because, especially in his early days of
itinerancy, everything was done to hinder his work and his enemies were
quite unscrupulous enough to set the highwaymen on him. Perhaps the
highwaymen had their scruples! In the early days of Wesley’s mission
the invasion of England by the forces of the young Pretender took
place. This was the period at which he and his followers suffered most
from mob violence and also from charges of Popery and disaffection.
I will take the latter first, as there is hardly any feature in the
18th century so marked in England as the dread and horror with which
the Roman Catholic religion was regarded. I remember a few years ago
examining a number of cartoons and caricatures during the rebellion
of 1745 and almost every one of them had to do with Popery. To the
English the invasion of the country by Charles Edward was like the
Spanish Armada, an attempt to impose the papal yoke on the land. In the
trinity of the nation’s enemies the Pope stood first: “From the Pope,
the Devil and the Pretender, Good Lord, deliver us.” It was hatred
of Rome that completely blinded people’s eyes to the romance of the
young prince’s enterprise, and to his undoubted claim to the throne.
Neither the government nor the sovereign were popular; but it was no
question of popularity where Popery was concerned. The House of Hanover
stood for Protestantism and the nation rallied to its support. Even
that rapacious and cynical infidel, Frederick the Great of Prussia,
was the darling of England as the “Protestant Hero”; and the Duke of
Cumberland’s cruelties were forgotten because he saved England from the
Pope. Like Marlborough and Wellington he was known as “the Great Duke.”
No charge could be more effective against an opponent than that of
Romanism and many good men had to endure it. The great Bishop Butler
was exposed to it for complaining in his visitation charge to the
clergy of Durham of the disgraceful neglect into which they had
allowed their fabrics to fall. The most deadly shaft levelled against
John Wesley was Bishop Lavington of Exeter’s book, “The enthusiasm of
the Methodists and Papists compared.” The visions, the trances, the
ecstasies of the Methodists, reminded good Protestants of such Catholic
mystics as St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross. The reasonableness
of Protestantism, whether Anglican or nonconformist, was contrasted
with the excited and hysterical manifestation of religious fervour in
Popish countries, and the fervour of the Wesleys and their followers
was especially unpopular on this account. The furious hatred of
anything approaching Romanism is the key to much of the thought and
feeling of the age. But though undoubtedly an enthusiast, Wesley was
far in advance of his age as regards toleration. He had, moreover, a
curious and chivalrous regard for the memory of Mary Queen of Scots;
and he considered Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen and Protestant champion,
as little better than a royal criminal. He at least would never have
said as Puff says in _The Critic_, “Hush! no scandal against Queen
Elizabeth.” On the contrary, he says in his Journal, “But what then was
Queen Elizabeth? As just and merciful as Nero, and as good a Christian
as Mahomet.” Thus he wrote in 1768, and if he held such a view twenty
three years earlier, no wonder he was suspected of Jacobitism and
Popery.
Far more to his credit is the fact that he resolutely refused to
indulge in violent abuse of the ancient Church. On the contrary, he
found so little true religion anywhere that wherever it was manifested
he welcomed it. Charles Wesley’s son went over to the Church of Rome,
to the great grief of his parents and, possibly, to the scandal of
Methodism. This is how John writes and his words are so remarkable that
I quote them at some length.
“He has not changed his religion; he has changed his _opinions_ and
_mode of worship_, but that is not _religion_.... He has suffered
unspeakable loss because his new opinions are unfavourable to
religion.... What then is religion. It is happiness in God or in the
knowledge and love of God. It is faith working by love producing
righteousness and peace and Joy in the Holy Ghost. In other words, it
is a heart and life devoted to God.... Now either he has this religion
or he has not: if he has, he will not finally perish, notwithstanding
the absurd unscriptural opinions he has embraced ... let him only have
his right faith ... and he is quite safe. He may indeed roll a few
years in purging fire but he will surely go to heaven at last.”
No wonder, therefore, considering the bigotry of his age, that Wesley
was exposed to persecution by the mobs: but his leniency towards
Romanism was not the only cause of this. To-day, however, I wish to
utilize the story of the attacks made on the Methodists to shew the
state of the country. Mob law was powerful wherever population was
dense. Towns were gradually growing up and the English system of legal
machinery was devised rather for a rural population. There was no
police properly so called. Shakespeare’s Dogberry and Verges would
not have been caricatures in the 18th century. Wesley himself speaks
of the watchmen as “those poor fools.” The violence of the mob was
a feature of the 18th century in England. Perhaps you may recollect
Hogarth’s picture of the chairing of a member of Parliament after an
election,--the man laying about him with a flail, the prize-fights,
etc. Riots play an important part in the history of the time and
the no-popery riot in 1780 when Lord George Gordon stirred up the
fanaticism of the London mob is only one of many similar occurrences.
Never did the brothers Wesley, John and Charles, shew the courage of
good breeding more conspicuously than when they faced an infuriated
rabble and saved themselves and their followers by the dignity of their
demeanour and the fearless mildness of their conduct amid scenes of
tumult. Witness the affair at Wednesbury and Walsall. The mob dragged
John Wesley from one magistrate to another. Some tried to protect him
but were overpowered. To quote the Journal: “To attempt speaking was
vain; for the noise on every side was like the roaring of the sea. So
they dragged me along till they came to the town where seeing the door
of a large house open, I attempted to go in; but a man catching me by
the hair pulled me back into the middle of the mob.... I continued
speaking all the time to those within hearing, feeling neither pain
nor weariness.... I stood at the door (of a shop) and asked ‘Are you
willing to hear me speak?’ Many cried out ‘No, no, knock his brains
out, kill him at once, etc.’.... In the mean time my strength and voice
returned and I broke out aloud in prayer. And now the man who just
before headed the mob, turned, and said, Sir I will spend my life for
you: follow me and not one soul here shall touch a hair of your head.”
Throughout the riot Wesley notices: “From first to last I heard none
give me a reviling word, or call me by any opprobrious name; but the
cry of one and all was “The Preacher! the Parson! the Minister!” A man
rushed at him to strike him but paused and merely stroked his head,
saying, “Why, what soft hair he has!” In Cornwall attempts were made to
stop Methodism by calling in the aid of the Press-Gang. Thomas Maxfield
was caught and offered to the captain of a ship in Mount’s Bay, who
refused to take him. An attempt was actually made to press John Wesley.
A clergyman, Dr. Borlase, acted in his magisterial capacity to further
this infamous project. But a Mr. Eustick who was charged with executing
the warrant had the sense to see the indecency of arresting such a
man to serve in the navy as a common seaman. He conducted Mr. Wesley
to Dr. Borlase’s door and told him he had done his duty and that his
prisoner was free to depart. Wesley’s description of the event is
characteristic. Mr. Eustick was visited by him in order to be taken to
Dr. Borlase’s to be pressed into the army.
“I went thither, and asked, ‘Is Mr. Eustick here?’ After some pause
one said ‘Yes’; and he showed me into the parlour. When he came down
he said ‘O Sir will you be so good as to go with me to the doctor’s?’
I answered ‘Sir I came for that purpose.’ ‘Are you ready Sir,’ I
answered, ‘Yes.’ ‘Sir I am not quite ready, in a little time, in a
quarter of an hour I will call upon you.’ In about three-quarters of an
hour he came and finding that there was no remedy, he called for his
horse and put forward to Dr. Borlase’s house; but he was in no haste
so we were an hour and a quarter riding three or four measured miles.
As soon as he came into the yard he asked a servant, ‘Is the Doctor at
home’ upon whose answering ‘No Sir he is gone to Church;’ he presently
said ‘Well Sir I have executed my commission. I have done Sir; I have
no more to say.’”
Not that Wesley was not in serious danger at times, especially in
Cornwall. Once at Falmouth the house was filled with privateersmen.
Only a wainscot partition separated him from the mob. “Indeed to all
appearances our lives were not worth an hour’s purchase.” When the
door was broken down he came forth bareheaded (“For I purposely left
off my hat that they all might see my face”). His calmness saved him;
for though countless hands were lifted up to strike or throw at him
yet they were “one and all stopped in the midway so that I had not
even a speck of dirt on my clothes!” Ferocious as were the British
mobs of this period they were capable of generous sentiments and
chivalrous admiration for courage. The people were often set on Wesley
by the gentry and, to their shame be it said, by some of the clergy.
The excuse, both in Cornwall in 1745 and in Newcastle, was that the
Methodist societies were with the Pretenders. “All the gentlemen in
these parts say,” Wesley was told, “that you have been a long time in
France and Spain, and are now set hither by the Pretender; and that
these societies are to join him.”
It is scarcely necessary to do more than allude to the extreme
brutality of the amusements of people in England in the eighteenth
century. Dog fighting, bear baiting, bull baiting, cock fighting,
were universal and, as we may see from Hogarth’s pictures, cruelty to
animals was universal. On one occasion a baited bull was turned loose
to interrupt a congregation assembled to hear Wesley preach. One of the
ringleaders of the mob at Walsall who ended by taking the part of the
Methodists was a noted prize-fighter in a bear garden.
John and Charles Wesley began their religious labours at Oxford in the
city prison, Bocardo, ministering to the prisoners, and the Journal
throws a lurid light on the condition of felons, criminals, and debtors
in England. The system was atrocious, there was no real control; and
the jailers farmed the place and made what they could out of it. The
result was that if a man paid he could do what he liked in jail; and,
if he could not, he was treated just as his keepers pleased. Side
by side, therefore, with the utmost squalor and misery was almost
indescribable profligacy. “I visited the Marshalsea prison,” writes
Wesley, “on February 3, 1753, a nursery of all manner of wickedness. O
shame to man that there should be such a place, such a picture of hell
upon earth! And shame to those who bear the name of Christ that there
should need any prison at all in Christendom.” Let me quote an extract
from a letter to the London Chronicle, Friday, Jan. 2, 1761, “Sir,
of all the seats of woe on this side hell, few, I suppose, exceed or
equal Newgate. If any region of horror could exceed it, a few years ago
Newgate in Bristol did; so great was the filth, the stench, the misery
and wickedness which shocked all who had a spark of humanity left.”
The prison at Bristol had been reformed by a good keeper, who, says
Wesley, “deserves to be remembered full as well as the man of Ross.”
It was clean, there was no drunkenness nor brawling, no immorality, no
idleness, and a decent service in the chapel. These reforms themselves
shew what most prisons of the time must have been like.
Another evil was smuggling: wherever a boat could land there was a
conspiracy to defraud the revenue. The business, for it was nothing
else, was run on the most extensive scale and the whole countryside was
engaged in it. The smugglers were armed and disciplined and prepared to
offer furious resistance to the officers of the Revenue. Wesley set his
face sternly against the practice.
“The stewards met at St. Ives, from the western part of Cornwall. The
next day I began examining the society; but I was soon obliged to stop
short. I found an accursed thing among them; well nigh one and all
bought and sold ‘uncustomed’ goods. I therefore delayed speaking to any
more till I had met them all together. This I did in the evening and
told them plain, either they must put this abomination away or they
would see my face no more.”
This was in November, 1753. In June, 1757, Wesley was in the north at
Sunderland.
“I met the Society and told them plain, none could stay with us, unless
he would part with all sin; particularly robbing the King, selling or
buying run goods; which I would no more suffer than robbing on the
highway.”
In 1762 he is able to record of Cornwall:
“The detestable practice of cheating the King (smuggling) is no more
found in our societies, and since the accursed thing has been put away,
the work of God has everywhere increased.”
The Cornish practice of “wrecking” still continued and in 1776 Wesley
writes, “I was afterwards inquiring if that scandal in Cornwall of
plundering wrecked vessels still continued.” He was told that it was
as great as ever and only the Methodists would not share in it. Wesley
remarks, with his usual good sense when dealing with a practical
matter, “The Gentry of Cornwall may totally prevent it whenever they
please. Only let the law take its course and the plundering will
stop. Even if every labourer or tinner (_i.e._ tin miner) guilty
of it were to be discharged and his name advertised to prevent his
getting respectable employment, there would be no more of it.” In
his peregrination Wesley did not disdain to visit and to note in his
Journal objects of curiosity and interest. His active mind could not
help occupying itself with anything exceptional, and many a traveller
with nothing to do but investigate the locality has seen much less than
he. Here is his description of how apprentices were made free of the
corporation of Alnwick:
“Sixteen or seventeen, we were informed, were to receive their freedom
this day, and in order thereto (such is the unparalleled wisdom of the
present corporation, as well as of their forefathers), to walk through
a great bog (purposely preserved for the occasion; otherwise it might
have been drained long ago), which takes some of them to the neck, and
many of them to the breast.”
A few months later he is in the south near Carisbrooke Castle, whither
he walked in the afternoon.
“It stands upon a solid rock upon the top of a hill and commands a
beautiful prospect. There is a well in it, cut quite through the
rock, said to be seventy two yards deep, and another in the citadel,
near a hundred. They drew up the water by an ass, which they assured
us was sixty years old. But all the stately apartments lie in ruins.
Only just enough of them is left to shew the chamber where poor King
Charles was confined, and the windows through which he attempted to
escape.”
From the steeple of Glasgow Cathedral Wesley surveys the country.
“A more fruitful and better cultivated plain is scarce to be seen in
England. Indeed nothing is wanted but more trade (which would naturally
bring more people) to make a great part of Scotland in no way inferior
to the best counties in England.”
When he came to Edinburgh he was not so pleased with the High Street.
“The situation of the city, on a hill shelving down on both sides, as
well as to the east is inexpressibly fine. And the main street so broad
and finely paved, with lofty houses on either side (many of them seven
or eight stories high), is far beyond any in Great Britain. But how can
it be suffered that all manner of filth should be thrown even into this
street continually? Where are the magistracy, the gentry, the nobility
of the land? Have they no concern for the honour of their nation? How
long shall the capital city of Scotland, yea, and the chief street of
it stink worse than a common sewer? Will no lover of this country, or
of decency and common-sense find a remedy for it?”
On one occasion he went to the Tower of London, where lions used to
be kept, with a man who played the German flute to see whether music
had any influence on animals. The lions rose up and came to the front
of the den and seemed all attention. A tiger started up and began
continually leaping over and crawling under a lion. Wesley asks “Can
we account for this by any principle of mechanism? can we account for
it at all?” At Carn Brae in Cornwall he admires the Druidical remains.
At Windsor he views the improvements of that “active and useful man
the Duke of Cumberland,” especially the triangular tower built at the
edge of Windsor Park. Here also he visited the house of a lover of
the antique, “The oddest I ever saw with my eyes. Everything breathes
antiquity; scarce a bedstead is to be seen that is not an hundred and
fifty years old; and everything is out of the common way: for six
hours I suppose these oddities would much delight a curious man; but
after six months they would probably give him no more pleasure than
a collection of feathers.” When he was eighty we find him in Holland
delighted with the country and its people and his reception by Madam
de Wassenaar. “She received us with that easy openness and affability
which is almost peculiar to persons of quality.” The great hall in the
Staat haus at Amsterdam reminds him of his old College hall at Christ
Church, it is “near as large.”
It is a temptation to me to multiply examples of how the great
preacher illustrates the country, every way of which was familiar
to him. After his long journeyings no man of his time could have
known England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland better. Few, with all
our facilities of travel, know it half as well. Much of it was wild
and almost uninhabited. Some of the roads were enough to daunt the
hardiest of travellers. On one occasion the road to Ely for a mile and
a half was under water. The chaise found the roads impassable near St.
Ives, so Wesley borrowed a horse and rode forward till the ground was
completely under water. Then he borrowed a boat “full twice as large as
a kneading-trough.” He was seventy two years old at this time! So wild
were parts of the island that John Haine, a disciple of Wesley, relates
that he once saw what he supposed to be a supernatural appearance in
the clear sky, “a creature like a swan, but much larger, part black and
part brown, which flew at him, went just over his head, and lighting
on the ground stood staring upon him.” This was undoubtedly a great
bustard, and Southey in his “Life of Wesley” quotes the _Gentleman’s
Magazine_ to shew that one was seen as late as 1801. As we have seen,
the very people of this time seem almost as unfamiliar to us as the
scenery would have been. But is it not strange that with a guide whose
thoughts were almost entirely in the world to come we should have seen
so much and could see so much more, if only we could study him more
closely? He lays bare to us England during the very long and active
life of a man born just after the death of William III, who saw George
III thirty years and more upon the throne. Wesley might have heard
of the peace of Utrecht in 1713 as a boy, of the South Sea Bubble in
1720 as a youth, and he lived to hear of the French Revolution in 1789
and the fall of the Bastille. And throughout this long period of time
the remarkable thing is his amazing vitality. He says he never felt
low spirited: a sleepless night is so unusual that it is specially
commented on. Till his 85th year he never acknowledged that he felt
old: his youthfulness surprised him when recording his eighty eighth
and following birthdays. No man had therefore a greater opportunity
for seeing what England was like; and Wesley used it to the full. Yet
it is a strange and perhaps an original guide whom we have used and
it may be that the impression he leaves upon your minds is not quite
what I had designed. Suppose my lecture should have been to some of
you like the sermon of which George Herbert writes, “Where all lack
sense, God takes the text and preaches patience;” and, my listeners,
you have surrendered yourselves to your own thoughts and dreams. You
may have pictured in the England of the eighteenth century a moorland
on a windy winter evening, and on the near horizon the glare of an
ill-lit manufacturing town, and a single figure small and slight, his
long gray hair falling over his shoulders, sitting on a tired horse
plodding forward with loosened rein. It is a subject the genius of a
Millet might have made as memorable as his famous “Angelus,”--the two
peasants praying as they hear the bell across the damp fields at even.
And your dream, vision, picture, call it what you will, would be no
less an adequate clue to the meaning of that famous age, than would
some of the most stirring scenes in the history of Great Britain in
those thrilling times. For in a sense John Wesley expressed the spirit
of many thousands of its people.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] To shew how inaccessible Epworth must have been, I may mention
that when I went there in an automobile, the sides of the roads were
pointed out to me as paved so as to make a mule track about three feet
in width.
LECTURE II
GEORGE CRABBE
I have chosen the subject of George Crabbe, the Suffolk poet, partly
out of attachment to the county of my birth, but also because I have
certain faint though undoubted family links in connection with him.[2]
In addition to this, his character, as a man as well as a poet, has a
certain attraction for me; and even though there has been a revival of
interest in him, comparatively few have studied him, or are acquainted
with the facts of his life. Crabbe, however, was singularly fortunate
in having a son, possessed of many valuable qualities as a biographer,
for not only was he affectionate, and extraordinarily proud of his
father, but at the same time he was not blind to his defects as a man
or as a writer. And it must be remembered that Crabbe at his death
occupied a place in public estimation, together with Scott and Byron;
that the latter had described him as “Nature’s sternest painter and the
best,” and had written of him, “Crabbe, the first of living poets.”
A son, therefore, who under such circumstances could refrain from
indiscriminating eulogy of a beloved father just after his death must
be a man to be trusted.
George Crabbe was born in 1754 at Aldeburgh, a somewhat squalid little
fishing town on the coast of Suffolk, rejoicing, however, in the
dignity of a corporation, and returning two members to Parliament.
His father was saltmaster and general _factotum_ of the borough; a
man, to all appearances, of rough manners, not improved by unfortunate
circumstances; but sufficiently intelligent to recognise that in
George he had a son who would repay a good education.[3] Not that with
his narrow means he could do much; but he certainly did his best,
and more than could be expected. George was intended for the medical
profession; and it may be of interest to hear how a boy was educated
to be a doctor in the eighteenth century. Young Crabbe was sent to
school at Bungay, where he remained till his eleventh or twelfth
year. He was next sent to a Mr. Richard Haddon at Stowmarket, where
he showed considerable aptitude for mathematics, in which his father
was also proficient. His master, to quote the biography, “though
neither a Porson nor a Parr, laid the foundations of a fair classical
education also.” But he soon had to return home and had to work in the
warehouse of Slaughden Quay, piling up butter and cheese, duties which
the poor boy--he was but thirteen, and was of a dreamy, meditative
temperament--bitterly resented. But his father had not forgotten that
George was to be a doctor, and seeing an advertisement, “Apprentice
Wanted,” he sent him to Wickhambook, near Bury St. Edmunds. There he
was treated as a mere drudge, slept with the ploughboy, worked on the
farm, and learned his profession apparently by delivering medicine
bottles to the neighbouring villages. In 1771, he removed to Woodbridge
as apprentice to a Mr. Page, where he pursued his studies under more
favourable circumstances. Here it was he met his future bride, Miss
Elmy, at the neighbouring village of Parham, won a prize poem in the
_Lady’s Magazine_ owned by a Mr. Wheble, on the subject of “Hope”;
and later he published at Ipswich a poem entitled “Inebriety,” in the
preface of which he apologises “for those parts wherein I have taken
such great liberties with Mr. Pope.” And it was certainly to Pope that
Crabbe owed his inspiration. Now to imitate Pope’s versification is
easy, and to copy his mannerisms not impossible; but to gain a double
portion of his spirit, to emulate his epigrammatic terseness, above all
to acquire anything like his knowledge of life and human nature can
only be done by a man who is even in a measure akin to him in genius.
Whether Crabbe was, it must be our endeavour to decide.
“Inebriety” did not catch on in Suffolk, a land which bears the epithet
“silly” in two senses. I prefer the one which alludes to its numerous
churches, “selig,” or pious. At any rate, no young author could expect
an appreciative audience of clerics when he wrote thus:
“Lo proud Flaminius at the splendid board,
The easy chaplain of an atheist lord,
Quaffs the bright juice with all the gust of sense,
And clouds his brain in torpid elegance.”
Crabbe completed his apprenticeship in 1775 and once more returned to
Aldeburgh. His family circumstances were extremely distressed, his
father had changed for the worse, and his mother’s health had broken
down. Again he was compelled to act as a warehouseman at Slaughden
Quay. He managed to get to London for a short time, nominally to walk
the hospitals; but having no funds he had, as he expresses it, to “pick
up a little surgical knowledge as cheap as he could.” After ten months’
privation, Crabbe returned to Aldeburgh to become the assistant of a
surgeon-apothecary, named Maskill,[4] who had opened a shop in the
borough, and on his retirement Crabbe, though “imperfectly grounded
in the commonest details of his profession,” set up for himself.
His medical career was a complete failure. He had not the requisite
knowledge and lacked means to acquire it, nor was he able to adapt
himself to the rough surroundings amid which he lived. Aldeburgh was
peopled, to quote his own words, by--
“A wild amphibious race
With sullen woe expressed on every face,
Who far from civil acts and social fly,
And scowl at strangers with suspicious eye.”
Sneered at as a poor and useless scholar by the relatives of Miss
Elmy, to whom he was now engaged, regarded as a failure by his rough
but not ungenerous father, Crabbe’s life was far from happy; the
only relaxation he found was in the study of botany, and the only
encouragement in the society of the officers of the Warwickshire
militia, who were for a time quartered in the town. Their colonel,
General Conway, showed the young surgeon attention, and gave him some
valuable Latin books on botany. At last, wearied and disgusted with his
life, Crabbe gave up attempting to be a doctor; and, aided by a loan
of five pounds from Mr. Dudley North, brother to the candidate for the
borough, he made his way to London in 1780 as a literary adventurer.[5]
The early struggles of a man who has won literary fame are only of
importance in so far as they affect his subsequent work. Crabbe’s
intellect was essentially scientific rather than imaginative. His
poetry is, like Dutch art, remarkable for the finish of details and
for exactness of observation. It is the same when he depicts what he
saw as when he describes emotions and feelings. He had to understand
before he could write. His hobby, as we have seen, was botany: he first
showed talent as a mathematician; nor, because he failed in his medical
work, need we suppose that his want of success was due in any way to
intellectual deficiencies. Place Crabbe in a different situation.
Suppose him to have walked the hospitals of London or Edinburgh, and to
have made his way as a physician. He might well have taken an honoured
place among the scientific men of his age. But look at the facts. His
training was hardly better than that of an assistant in a chemist’s
store in the most remote village nowadays. This, for example, was the
hospital which Crabbe had “walked”:
“Such is that room which one rude beam divides,
And naked rafters form the sloping sides;
* * * * *
Here on a matted flock, with dust o’erspread,
The drooping wretch reclines his languid head.
* * * * *
But soon a loud and hasty summons calls,
Shakes the thin roof, and echoes round the walls,
* * * * *
Anon a figure enters, quaintly neat,
All pride and business, bustle and conceit.
* * * * *
A potent quack, long versed in human ills,
Who first insults the victim whom he kills;
Whose murderous hand a drowsy Bench protect,
And whose most tender mercy is neglect.”[6]
We see the influence of Pope in the versification; but of personal
experience in the subject.
True, Crabbe detested his profession, and thus apostrophises medical
books as--
“Ye frigid tribe, on whom I wasted long
The tedious hours, and ne’er indulged in song;
Ye first seducers of my easy heart,
Who promised knowledge ye could not impart.”
But for all this, when in later life as a clergyman he used to
prescribe for his poorer parishioners, he seems to have shown a
power of diagnosis which made it evident that, though he failed as a
surgeon apothecary, he might, had he had the requisite education, have
succeeded as a consulting physician.[7]
Because he took Holy Orders and won his fame as a poet while a
clergyman, Crabbe’s experiences, on which he founded his rhymed
tales--for such his poems really are--are considered to have been
mainly clerical. But, to understand him aright, we must remember that
he was more or less engaged in the practice of medicine from the age of
fourteen to that of twenty-five. It would be easy to quote many lines
wherein the doctor and not the parson is revealed, and he never lost
the professional dislike of quacks or contempt of valetudinarians.
Let us now consider how Crabbe’s experiences of Aldeburgh appear in
his poems. I will take most of my extracts from his early poem, “The
Village,” but a few will be from “The Borough,” which did not appear
till more than twenty years later.
In “The Village” Crabbe boldly asks:
“From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray,
Where Virgil, not where Fancy, leads the way?”
and declines to follow the fashion of speaking of rural life as the
height of felicity. He says:
“I grant indeed that fields and flocks have charms
For him that grazes or for him that farms;”
But when amid such pleasing scenes I trace
The poor laborious natives of the place.
* * * * *
Then shall I dare these real ills to hide
In tinsel trappings of poetic pride?”
In this spirit he describes the barren coast of East Suffolk, not then
the haunt of the holiday-maker and the golfer, but the battleground of
the smuggler and the preventive men, the home of--
“A bold and artful, surly, savage race,
Who only skilled to take the finny tribe,
The yearly dinner, or septennial bribe;
Wait on the shore, and, as the waves run high,
On the tossed vessel bend their eager eye,
Which to the coast directs its venturous way,
Theirs, or the ocean’s miserable prey.”
This description of the barren land about the coast well illustrates
Crabbe’s power of observation:
“Lo, where the heath with withering brake grown o’er,
Lends the light turf that warms the neighbouring poor;
From thence a length of burning sand appears,
Where the thin harvest waves its wither’d ears;
Rank weeds, that every art and care defy,
Reign o’er the land, and rob the blighted rye;
There thistles stretch their prickly arms afar,
And to the ragged infant threaten war;
There poppies nodding, mock the hope of toil;
Here the blue bugloss paints the sterile soil;
Hardy and high above the slender sheaf,
The slimy mallow waves her silky leaf;
O’er the young shoot the charlock throws a shade,
And clasping tares cling round the sickly blade;
With mingled tints the rocky coasts abound,
And a sad splendour vainly shines around.”
We have already heard of the workhouse hospital and the “potent quack”
who attended to the sick. Let us now listen to Crabbe’s description of
the young clergyman who ministered to the afflicted of his village:
“A jovial youth, who thinks his Sunday task
As much as God or man can fairly ask;
The rest he gives to loves and labours light,
To fields the morning, and to feasts the night.
* * * * *
A sportsman keen, he shouts through half the day,
And, skilled at whist, devotes the night to play.”
But I must reluctantly forbear to quote more from “The Village,” and
ask you to turn your attention to two passages in “The Borough,” which
show what sort of men lived in Crabbe’s native town, and also indicate
the power our author has in depicting two very different characters.
I will take Peter Grimes, the fisherman, first. Grimes was one of
those human monsters who delight in cruelty; and the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth century, to its shame, furnished victims for its
exercise in workhouse apprentices. The guardians of the overflowing
workhouses of London were accustomed to get rid of their superfluous
numbers by binding children as apprentices to masters, who practically
became the owners of the little victims they were paid to teach.
“Peter had heard there were in London then--
Still have their being!--workhouse-clearing men,
Who, undisturbed by feelings just or kind,
Would parish-boys to needy tradesmen bind;
They in their want a trifling sum would take,
And toiling slaves of piteous orphans make.”[8]
Grimes did several of these wretched boys to death by his cruelty,
which was notorious in the borough, but the shocking thing was that
nobody troubled to interfere.
“None put the question: ‘Peter, dost thou give
The boy his food? What, man! the lad must live;
Consider, Peter, let the child have bread,
He’ll serve thee better if he’s stroked and fed.’
None reasoned thus; and some, on hearing cries,
Said calmly, ‘Grimes is at his exercise.’”
At last Grimes, who seems to have been never quite sane in his
brutality, went mad, and died raving at visions of his aged father and
the boys he had done to death.
More inviting is a picture of another fisherman, the mayor of the
borough:
“He was a fisher from his earliest day,
And placed his nets within the borough bay,
Where, by his skates, his herrings, and his soles,
He lived, nor dreamed of corporation doles.”
At last he saved £240 ($1200), and asked a friend what to do with it.
The friend suggests “put it out on interest.”
“‘Oh, but,’ said Daniel, ‘that’s a dangerous plan,
He may be robbed like any other man.’”
The friend tells Daniel that he will be paid five per cent. every year.
“‘What good is that?’ quoth Daniel, ‘for ’tis plain
If part I take, there can but part remain.’”
With great difficulty the principle of a mortgage is explained, and at
last,
“Much amazed was that good man. ‘Indeed,’
Said he, with gladdening eye, will money breed?
How have I lived? I grieve with all my heart
For my late knowledge of this precious art;
Five pounds for every hundred will he give?
And then the hundred--I begin to live.”
Such was the simplicity of the good folk of Aldeburgh, and so little
news of the great world reached the place that, when Crabbe, at the age
of twenty-five or six, went to London in 1780, he had never heard of
the genius and tragic fate of Chatterton.
I shall pass over the terrible year our aspirant for fame spent in
the Metropolis. It is a matter of personal pride to me to quote the
following passage from the “Life”:
“The only acquaintance he had on entering London was a Mrs. Burcham,
who had been in early youth a friend of Miss Elmy’s, and who was now
the wife of a linen-draper in Cornhill. This worthy woman and her
husband received him with cordial kindness; then invited him to make
their house his home whenever he chose; and as often as he availed
himself of this invitation he was treated with that frank familiarity
which cancels the appearance of obligation.” (“Life,” by the Rev. G.
Crabbe.)
I am glad to think my great-grand-parents understood the duty of
hospitality.
At last, after a terrible struggle with poverty and the unsuccessful
publication of a poem called “The Candidate,” Crabbe, who had hitherto
sought for a patron in vain, found one in Edmund Burke. It is said that
the following lines, expressive of the writer’s feelings on quitting
Aldeburgh, satisfied Burke that his petitioner was a poet:
“As on their neighbouring beach the swallows stand,
And wait for favouring winds to leave the land,
While still for flight the ready wing is spread,
So waited I the favouring hour, and fled;
Fled from those shores where guilt and famine reign,
And cried, ‘Ah! hapless they who still remain,
Who still remain to hear the ocean roar,
Whose greedy waves devour the lessening shore;
Till some fierce tide, with more imperious sway,
Sweeps the low hut and all it holds away;
When the sad tenant weeps from door to door,
And begs a poor protection from the poor.’”
Burke selected two poems, “The Village” and “The Library,” for
publication. He introduced Crabbe to Fox, and also to Reynolds: the
latter brought him to Dr. Johnson; and when Burke heard that Crabbe
desired to be ordained, he induced Dr. Yonge, Bishop of Norwich, to
overlook his unacademic education, and to admit him to the ministry.
Lord Thurlow, himself an East Anglian, had at first refused to receive
Crabbe, but now treated him with much kindness, and gave him £100
($500); so Crabbe returned to Aldeburgh a clergyman--a very different
position from that which he had occupied on leaving--and was shortly
summoned thence to be domestic chaplain to the Duke of Rutland, on the
recommendation of his firm friend, Mr. Burke. From the Duke’s seat
at Belvoir “The Village” was published, after it had been submitted
to Burke and Johnson. Naturally Crabbe’s sentiments about rustic
happiness and virtue accorded with the views of the worthy doctor, but
it is pleasing to remark the kindness which made him at the height
of his fame labour to improve the work of the younger poet. Very
characteristic are Johnson’s corrections of Crabbe’s manuscript. Here
is how Crabbe writes at the commencement of “The Village”:
“In fairer scenes, where peaceful pleasures spring,
Tityrus the pride of Mantuan swains might sing:
But charmed by him, or smitten with his views,
Shall modern poets court the Mantuan muse?
From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray,
Where fancy leads, or Virgil led the way?”
From Johnson’s hands little remains unchanged:
“On Mincio’s banks in Cæsar’s bounteous reign,
If Tityrus found the golden age again,
Must sleepy bards the flattering dreams prolong
Mechanick echoes of the Mantuan song?
From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray,
Where Virgil, not where Fancy, leads the way?”
I cannot feel very certain myself that the poet or his corrector got
the concluding line right.
I must now pass somewhat hurriedly over a long period. In 1785 Crabbe
published “The Newspaper,” and for twenty-two years he settled down
to his clerical duties and did not reappear as an author. He lived at
Stathern and Muston in Leicestershire the happy, domestic life of a
country clergyman, returning to Suffolk when his wife inherited a share
in the estate of her uncle, Mr. Tovell, at Parham.
In 1807 Crabbe appeared once more as a poet with “The Parish Register,”
and from this time his fame was unquestioned. “The Borough” followed
and then “The Tales.” But I need not weary you with dates and details.
A new generation arose to encourage Crabbe. His first poems had been
hailed by Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Johnson, and Fox; his later
by Scott, Byron, Lord Holland, and Rogers. His last days were spent
in comfort and comparative affluence at Trowbridge, to which he had
been appointed by a later Duke of Rutland. In 1817 he was lionised in
London, and in 1822 he paid his famous visit to Edinburgh and found Sir
Walter Scott in the midst of that preposterous pageant in which the
King and Sir William Curtis, Alderman of the City of London, delighted
the Scottish nation by appearing at Holyrood, tremendous in Stewart
tartan, with claymore, philabeg, and other accessories of the garb of
old Gaul. Scott, unwearied by his efforts to organise the King’s visit,
had time to welcome a brother poet, and it will be remembered that so
delighted was he to greet one whose writings had so often occupied
his attention that he sat down on the sacred glass out of which George
IV had deigned to drink, with the natural result.[9] Crabbe lived on
till February, 1832, passing away, full of years and honours, in the
seventy-eighth year of his age.
Crabbe’s works are sufficient to fill seven volumes, and it is not
possible to do more than endeavour to form an estimate of him by
limiting oneself to a few topics. I must content myself with three, and
I fear that even then I cannot do justice to these. Those I propose are:
I. Crabbe as reflecting the manners of his age.
II. As a delineator of character.
III. His place as a poet.
I. I have spoken of Crabbe’s scientific education--such as it was--and
of his power of observation, and I find, even in later life, more of
the doctor than the parson. It is for this reason that his work is of
more value than that of greater poets in reflecting his age. For Crabbe
was not one of those who let “fancy lead the way,” but dealt with
sober realities of experience, and even refrained from generalising
or theorising. For the religious life of the period Crabbe’s poems
are an invaluable document of which historians have, I suggest, made
too little use. There is no reason to suppose that our author took
Orders simply to secure literary leisure. His early diaries prove him
a most devout man, and the fact that he occupied himself twenty-two
years in parish work, without publishing, shows his devotion to his
profession. Yet he apparently saw no harm in accepting two livings
in Dorsetshire from the Lord Chancellor, which he scarcely ever went
near, but took other work in the Vale of Belvoir. Nor did he feel any
compunctions later in leaving his parishes in the Midlands to the care
of a non-resident clergyman in order to live on his wife’s property
in Suffolk; and he evidently considered the then Duke of Rutland
unduly slow in providing for him. He was not always popular with his
parishioners. This was not unnatural at Aldeburgh, where he had been
known under less prosperous circumstances, but he met with a good deal
of opposition when, after his long residence in Suffolk, he returned
to Muston; and at Trowbridge he was at first considered too worldly
for his flock, and only slowly won their sincere respect. A strict
moralist, he had no dislike of social pleasure, and as a staunch Whig
he shrank from enthusiasm of every kind. The serious and the profane
alike distrusted him. The worldly remonstrated at his description
of the workhouse chaplain, to which allusion has been made, and in
deference to the complaints of the religious world the vigorous lines
in “The Library”:
“Calvin grows gentle in this silent coast,
Nor finds a single heretic to roast,”
make way for a weaker couplet with a half line plagiarised from Dryden:
“Socinians here and Calvinists abide
And thin partitions angry chiefs divide.”
Let us consider the clergy and religious teachers generally as he
describes them.
I can only allude to the five rectors, whom old Dibble, the village
clerk in the “Parish Register,” remembered. First comes “Good Master
Addle,” who
“Filled the seven-fold surplice fairly out,”
and “dozing died”; Next was Parson Peele, whose favourite text was “I
will not spare you,” and with “piercing jokes, and he’d a plenteous
store,” raised the tithes all round. Dr. “Grandspear” followed Peele, a
man who never stinted his “nappy beer,” and whom even cool Dissenters
wished and hoped that a man so kind, “A way to heaven, though not
their own, might find.” After him came the “Author Rector”--
“Careless was he of surplice, hood and band,
And kindly took them as they came to hand.”
He was succeeded by the young man from Cambridge, assailed in his youth
by a “clamorous sect,” who preached “conviction” so violently that “Our
best sleepers started as they slept.”
But says old Dibble:
“Down he sank upon his wretched bed
And gloomy crotchets filled his wandering head.”
And it is on this point that Crabbe is so illuminating as to the
spirit of his age. His difficulties as a clergyman were due rather to
the fanaticism than to the indifference of his flock. In “Sir Eustace
Grey,” a very powerful description of a madman who finds religious
peace at last, the poet concludes,--
“But, Ah! though time could yield relief
And soften woes it cannot cure;
Would we not suffer pain and grief
To have our reason sound and sure?
Then let us keep our bosoms pure
Our fancies’ favourite flights suppress;
Prepare the body to endure,
And bend the mind to meet distress,
And then His Guardian care implore,
Whom demons dread and men adore.”
As the doctor recommends a moderate and temperate life as the best
preventive of disease, and distrusts strong remedies and universal
panaceas, so Crabbe (true to the best medical tradition) regards the
pastoral work of healing the soul. Tolerant in most respects, he is
severe on what the eighteenth century styled “enthusiasm,” and on
sentimentalism in religion generally.
Thus, in “The Borough” we have in the letter on religious sects a
description of the contempt the Calvinistic Methodists had for Church
teaching:
“Hark to the Churchman; day by day he cries:
Children of men, be virtuous, be wise,
Seek patience, justice, temp’rance, meekness, truth,
In age be courteous, be sedate in youth,--So
they advise, and when such things be read,
How can we wonder that their flocks are dead?”
This “cauld morality,” as Scott makes Mr. Trumbull call it in
“Redgauntlet,” is contrasted with a really rousing sermon:
“Further and further spread the conquering word
As loud he cried--‘the Battle of the Lord.’
Ev’n those apart who were the sound denied,
Fell down instinctive, and in spirit died.
Nor stayed he yet--his eye, his frown, his speech,
His very gesture, had a power to teach;
With outstretch’d arms, strong voice, and piercing call
He won the field and made the Dagons fall;
And thus in triumph took his glorious way,
Through scenes of horror, terror, and dismay.”
Crabbe often found his work hindered by a sort of fatalistic quietism
which gave no hope to the “unconverted,” even when they sought the aid
of the minister of religion. In “Abel Keene” we have the story of a
merchant’s clerk who abandoned his faith, and then in days of poverty
came for help:
“Said the good man, ‘and then rejoice therefore:
’Tis good to tremble: prospects then are fair,
When the lost soul is plunged in just despair.
Once thou wert simply honest, just and pure,
Whole as thou thought’st, and never wish’d a cure:
* * * * *
‘What must I do,’ I said, ‘my soul to free?’
‘Do nothing, man--it will be done for thee.’--
‘But must I not, my reverend guide, believe?’
‘If thou art call’d thou wilt the faith receive:’--
‘But I repent not.’--Angry he replied,
‘If thou art call’d thou need’st naught beside:
Attend on us, and if ’tis Heaven’s decree
The call will come--if not, ah, woe! for thee.’”
Crabbe had very little toleration for spiritual valetudinarians. He
liked a good practical Christianity and was a little inclined to class
the overscrupulous with the _malades imaginaires_. In “The Gentleman
Farmer” we have a cleverly told story of a man of property, a professed
atheist and an avowed enemy of priests and doctors. At last he fell
ill; and his artful housekeeper, the meek Rebecca, produces a Scotch
cousin, Dr. Mollet. He is so successful that Rebecca decides to allow
the Rev. Mr. Whisp, a converted ostler, to advise her master. Mollet
and Whisp between them point out that it is his duty to marry Rebecca.
Then the three batten happily on their victim:
“Mollet his body orders, Whisp his soul,
And o’er his purse the lady takes control.”
Though Crabbe lived in the days of the French Revolution and Tom Paine,
infidelity seems to have given him far less trouble than the enthusiasm
of his parishioners. In “The Learned Boy” we have the tale of a
precocious lad such as our poet detested, a mean little creature, neat
and docile at school, to whom much could be taught because he could
imitate without reflecting:
“He thought not much indeed--but what depends
On pains and care, was at his fingers’ ends.”
As it was impossible to make such a lad into a farmer like his honest
father, he was sent to an office in town and picked up some up-to-date
views of the Bible from a brother-clerk. On his return he thus
explained his views to his grandmother, much to the dear old lady’s
distress:
“I myself began
To feel disturbed and to my Bible ran;
I now am wiser--yet agree in this,
The book has things that are not much amiss;
It is a fine old work, and I protest
I hate to hear it treated as a jest;
The book has wisdom in it, if you look
Wisely upon it as another book.”
The father, overhearing his hopeful son, treats him to a long
discourse, driven home with a cartwhip, and concluding:
“Teachers men honour, learners they allure;
But learners teaching of contempt are sure;
Scorn is their certain meed, and smart their only cure.”
I have dealt hitherto with the subject of religion as showing how
Crabbe can be used to illustrate his age. For politics I may refer to
the witty tale of “The Dumb Orators”; for social life to “Amusements in
the Borough,” and to “Clelia” and “Blaney” in the same collection.
II. In the biography the son writes with much discrimination of his
father’s genius:
“Whatever truth there may be in these lines (from “The Learned Boy,”
disparaging order), it is certain that this insensibility to the
beauty of order was a defect in his own mind; arising from what I
must call his want of taste.... This view of his mind is, I must add,
confirmed by his remarkable indifference to almost all the proper
objects of taste. He had no real love for painting, for music, for
architecture, or for what a painter’s eye considers as the beauties
of a landscape. But he had a passion for science--the science of the
human mind first--,” etc.
I believe that in delineation of character Crabbe is an artist indeed,
worthy to rank with Jane Austen and the Brontës, and perhaps even more
subtle than these ladies. He was not without a certain cynicism, and
his powers of critical observation were great. He draws the drunken
old reprobate in “The Borough,” the magnificent “Sir Denys Brand,” the
gentle, suffering “Ellen Orford,” the University don in “Schools,” with
masterly skill. I can only indicate his power in this respect by a few
inadequate quotations.
The sketches of the characters in the almshouses in “The Borough”
I commend to you as masterpieces. Clelia and Blaney had come down
in life, and were without much excuse. They had been jobbed into
the institution by Sir Denys Brand, and his words at the meeting of
trustees throw a world of light on the baronet’s character. Of Blaney
he says:
“‘’Tis true,’ said he, ‘the fellow’s quite a brute--
A very beast; but yet, with all his sin,
He has a manner--let the devil in.’”
Of Clelia:
“‘With all her faults,’ he said, ‘the woman knew
How to distinguish--had a manner, too,
And, as they say, she is allied to some
In decent station--let the creature come.’”
But though these two are powerfully drawn, Crabbe expends more care and
skill in depicting Benbow, who had been
“a jovial trader; men enjoyed
The night with him: the day was unemployed.”
Benbow, whenever he could find an audience, used to dilate on “The
men of might to mingle strong drink,” whom he had known. There was
Squire Asgill, whose manor house was a disgrace and scandal to the
countryside. It is needless to particularise. I can explain best by
saying that his life was that of Sir Pitt Crawley in his later days,
only he was more hospitable and generous. Let us see the worthy squire
at his best, in church:
“His worship ever was a churchman true,
He held in scorn the methodistic crew;
May God defend the Church and save the King,
He’d pray devoutly and divinely sing.
Admit that he the holy day would spend
As priests approved not, still he was a friend;
Much then I blame the preacher as too nice
To call such trifles by the name of vice;
Hinting, though gently and with cautious speech,
Of good example--’tis their trade to preach.
* * * * *
A weaker man, had he been so reviled,
Had left the place--he only swore and smiled.”
A still greater hero of Benbow’s was Captain Dowling, who was ready to
drink against any rival:
“Man after man they from the trial shrank,
And Dowling ever was the last that drank.”
But we must leave the old reprobate, and go on to a far subtler
delineation of character. Sir Denys Brand, to use Crabbe’s own words,
was “maybe too highly placed for an author, who seldom ventures above
middle life to delineate.” It is admitted that Sir Denys was a real
person, and the biographer withholds his name out of consideration for
his family.[10] It must be remembered that Crabbe’s nature was both
proud and sensitive, and the scathing satire he expends on Sir Denys
was probably provoked by some real or fancied slight.
He is one of the trustees of the almshouses. He took the office--
“True ’twas beneath him; but to do men good
Was motive never by his heart withstood.”
Sir Denys is an aristocratic prig of the first water, and Crabbe hated
prigs. He is one of those men who can be, with a certain amount of
truth, described as possessing all the virtues:
“In him all merits were decreed to meet,
Sincere though cautious, frank and yet discreet,
Just all his dealings, faithful every word,
His passions’ master and his temper’s lord.”
His benevolence was splendid, and known to all men:
“He left to meaner minds the simple deed,
By which the houseless rest, the hungry feed;
His was a public bounty, vast and grand,
’Twas not in him to work with viewless hand.
* * * * *
He the first lifeboat plann’d; to him the place
Is deep in debt--’twas he revived the race.”
Yet nobody liked him--
“’Twould give me joy [says Crabbe] some gracious deed to meet
That has not called for glory in the street;
Who felt for many, could not always shun,
In some soft moment to be kind to one;
And yet they tell us, when Sir Denys died,
That not a widow in the borough cried.”
III. Perhaps it may be said that the subject of my lecture was after
all rather a commonplace old gentleman, and if what I have said
leaves this view, it is because I have failed to convey the effect
which the study of his works has left upon me. He certainly made a
great impression in his time, and was hailed as a true poet in an age
of poets. Nor is an age always wrong when it acclaims a man in whom
posterity sees little merit. To compare Crabbe with Byron as a poet
would be as absurd as to place his little stories on a level with the
romances of Scott, whether in prose or verse. But in his own time
men rated him very highly, and this is the more remarkable because
he was essentially a man of the eighteenth century, who achieved his
reputation in the nineteenth. He saturated himself in Pope and Dryden,
and the wits of a bygone age, and never conformed to the taste of
his own. The romantic movement, much as he admired Scott’s writings,
never influenced Crabbe nor does he seem to have been affected by
the Lake Poets. He was simply himself: simple-minded if sensitive,
full of courage, and with a quiet dignity of his own. Unworldly, yet
remarkably shrewd, curiously blind to the beauties of Nature and of
art, yet wonderfully alive to the marvels of the world and the pathos
of life. Stern and uncompromising as a realist, he lacked neither
sympathy nor imagination, and possessed a saving sense of descriptive
humour. Lord Thurlow said of him, “He’s as like Parson Adams as twelve
to a dozen, by G--d,” and he has much of the winning simplicity of
Fielding’s charming clerical creation. And yet he had the elevation
of character and the genius with fearless hand to tear the veil which
hid the lives of the poor from their richer neighbours, to expose the
cruelty, injustice, and rapacity of an age which for all its greatness
was singularly callous and unsympathetic of weakness and suffering;
and Crabbe may take his place not only with the poets of his time, but
with the Clarksons, the Howards, the Frys, and the good men and women
who succeeded in inaugurating an era of practical humanity. We need
not grudge him the generous commendation of the greatest among his
contemporary poets--
“Nature’s sternest painter and her best.”
FOOTNOTES:
[2] My father’s first cousin, the Ven. Robert Groome, Archdeacon of
Suffolk, the intimate friend of Edward Fitzgerald, was the grandson
of a native of Aldeburgh who owned the _Unity_ smack in which Crabbe
sailed to London in 1780. My maternal great-grandparents, as will
appear, also knew the poet.
[3] One cannot fail to recall Horace’s generous acknowledgement of the
liberality of his father, “macro pauper agello,” in sending him to Rome
to be educated. _Sat._ I. vi. 71.
[4] In the “Life” by his son it is implied that Crabbe was Maskill’s
assistant; but this is denied in Huchon’s “George Crabbe and his
Times,” p. 63.
[5] So the “Life.” Huchon points out that his name at this time was
Long, and that he subsequently assumed the name of North. Crabbe went
to London on the _Unity_ smack, the property of Robinson Groome,
grandfather of Archdeacon Groome, the intimate friend of E. Fitzgerald.
Huchon, _op. cit._, p. 81.
[6] “The Village.”
[7] In the “Life” Crabbe is said to have prescribed for his
parishioners at Muston with great success.
[8] For this abominable system see Walpole, “History of England from
1815,” vol. i, p. 163, and his quotations from Romilly and Yonge.
Dickens, of course, alludes to the apprenticing of parish-boys in
“Oliver Twist.”
[9] Lockhart’s “Life of Scott.” Huchon points out several obvious
discrepancies. “George Crabbe,” etc., p. 435.
[10] He is said to have been “Challoner Arcedekne, who built Glevering
Hall,” near Parham. Huchon, “George Crabbe,” etc., p. 309. The
bitterness of the satire lies in the little known fact that at the time
the family of Arcedekne was not in the eighteenth century reckoned
among the old county families: their fortune having been recently
acquired in the East Indies.
LECTURE III
MARGARET CATCHPOLE
May I invite you to-day to a remote corner of England and ask you to
associate with rather humble folk? Our heroine is a servant maid;
her romance is her love for a smuggler and the faithful affection of
a young farmer. The greatest personages to whom I shall introduce
you are a Suffolk brewer and his worthy lady and uncommonly numerous
family, one of whom was my grandfather. Yet it is almost impossible to
imagine that men alive within our memory should have shared even as
young children in the scenes I have to describe--the lawlessness of the
country, the wild acts recorded, the stilted language employed by the
chief actors. The strange callousness of the criminal code, the very
piety displayed by some of the principal characters, are completely out
of date and almost incomprehensible. The author himself of this true
romance, though he only died in 1877, evidently wrote and thought in
ways quite alien to those now in vogue.
I shall continue what I have said about Crabbe by attempting briefly to
describe the county of Suffolk (the South-folk), which must occupy our
attention during this lecture. I do so with no apology, for I believe
that many a New England family tree springs from roots deeply embedded
in its soil.
One thing realised by every child born in East Anglia is that he is not
one of those inferior people who are born in the “Shires.” His native
land is not called after any town, Northampton, Bedford, Leicester,
or Cambridge: he belongs to a race, not to a territorial division,
invented less than a thousand years ago. He and his kinsmen, the
North folk, are East Anglians; and the rest of the world are to him
“furriners,” or people who came from the “Sheeres.” Not that he is an
unmixed race--far from it. The peasantry were in the land long before
the Angles arrived. They are a small dark people, who have survived
countless invasions and will probably outlive modern civilisation.
When you see them beating a field or covert for game and kill hares
and rabbits by throwing their sticks with unerring aim, you feel that
they do much as their ancestors did before the dawn of history. The
Anglian is a big blond man slow of speech and apparently somewhat
dull, but in a bargain he is seldom the loser. The little town of
Hadleigh was once the capital of Alfred’s rival, Guthrum, the Dane;
and the Norse origin of many families reveals itself in Grimwood,
Grimwade, Grimsey, and Grimes. Flemings and Dutch, French Huguenots,
have all contributed to the population of East Anglia; but despite
the blending of nationalities there is a strong feeling of a common
tie binding all these heterogeneous elements together. Yet there are
curious local divisions existing to this day. The eastern and western
parts of the county are at constant feud. When the county councils were
established in the ‘eighties,’ Suffolk had to be divided into East
and West, because the two would not work together. When last year the
county was made a single diocese, Ipswich would not allow the ancient
western monastic town of Bury St. Edmunds to give the bishop his
title; and Bury St. Edmunds scorned to submit to the richer but less
aristocratic Ipswich. So in desperation the diocese had to be called
‘St. Edmundsbury and Ipswich.’
To look at an Ordnance map one would say that Suffolk was very flat
and eminently agricultural. The highest hill I could find was 402
feet above the sea; seldom does the land rise over 200 feet. Yet a
motor drive in Suffolk gives one the sensation of having been on a
switchback railway. One is never on the level, and some of the little
ascents and descents are very sharp. The beautiful church towers
are usually on hills and the churches are often placed outside the
villages. The road or ‘street’ (Roman _stratum_) on each side of which
the hamlet stands frequently runs up a hill. The lanes are narrow and
muddy; and at the bottom of a hill often waterlogged. Communication
must have been exceedingly difficult--a fact which explains many
peculiarities of the people.
Nowhere is there a sharper line drawn by nature in the county than
between the agricultural land in the centre and the coast. Rarely do
the corn lands reach the sea. A belt of breezy commons, bright with
gorse, extends almost from Lowestoft to Ipswich, and a glance at the
map shews how thin the population is. Only by branch lines of recent
construction does the railway reach the Suffolk coast. Cut off by a
wild tract of commons and marshes, the inhabitants of the little ports
formed strangely isolated communities, and regarded with no friendly
eye the villagers of the interior, marrying only among themselves and
keeping carefully apart. A brief survey of the coast throws a light
on the character of the people. All along the shore the five fathom
line, sometimes half a mile, sometimes as much as three miles from the
shore, marks the continual encroachment of the North Sea. Towns like
Aldeburgh and Dunwich, once standing a mile or more from the shore,
are now, as in the case of the first, threatened by the waves; or,
like Dunwich, once a famous seaport, almost entirely washed away and
submerged. Occasionally, as from Aldeburgh to Orford, the sea makes its
own breakwater by casting up long banks of shingle, and even now, for
nearly ten miles, save for coastguard stations and lighthouses, the
Suffolk foreshore is absolutely uninhabited.
One of the most striking features of the coast is the inland tidal
rivers. In the south are the Stour and the Orwell, which converge
at the important harbour of Harwich; and at the head of the tidal
waters of the Orwell is Ipswich. The river itself when the tide is
high is a most beautiful estuary with parks and woods sloping down
to the water--Stoke Park, Wherstead Park, Woolverstone on the south,
Alnesbourn Priory and Orwell Park on the north. A few miles north
of the estuary of the Orwell and Stour is the river Deben, which
culminates inland at Woodbridge and was the scene of many a solitary
boating expedition by the famous translator of Omar Khayyam, Edward
Fitzgerald. Then comes the shingle bank I have spoken of, parting the
river Ore from the sea, as far as Slaughden, when it turns inland and
becomes the Alde, giving its name to Aldeburgh. Great salt marshes in
many places fringe these rivers and impart an air of desolation to the
surrounding scenery.
Rightly to appreciate this curious country we must divest ourselves
of modern ideas, forget that we can be in London in two hours, ignore
the fact that the commons have been turned into golf courses, that the
people are occupied by letting lodgings, that their harvest is the
holiday season, and that we can motor on most of the roads in comfort.
One must go back, and not so very far after all, to a time when it
would have needed a guide to enable you to find Aldeburgh and the
coast, and when you would have received the reverse of a hearty welcome
from its inhabitants, “a surly race” who viewed strangers with “a
suspicious eye,” and no wonder, since they had the best of reasons for
concealing “the way they got their wealth.” You must transport yourself
into this past, if you would wish to understand what the poet Crabbe
has to tell you about his native place.
I think I caught something of his spirit when I went to Aldeburgh to
prepare myself for writing this lecture. It was on a chill December
day, damp and cold with a northeast wind. I had had a cold for a week
and it lay very heavily on my chest, so my spirits were the reverse
of buoyant. Rain was falling as I made my way along the deserted High
street and walked to Slaughden Quay, where Crabbe was born, and as a
young man worked at rolling casks from the hookers to the stores. A
“dirty sea” at low tide was breaking against the shingle bank, and on
the other side was the valley of the Alde and dreary marshes stretching
to the low uplands on the horizon. On the rising ground above the town
rose the church tower of Aldeburgh; and one could well imagine what a
dreary home the desolate quay and the squalid little town must have
been, when the only approach was by the harbourless sea, or by sandy
tracks over a bleak moor, or by the sluggish river winding through the
marsh.
The peculiarities of East Anglia, both inland and on the coast, are
reflected in its inhabitants. It is a country which by its isolation
has fostered strong originality in all classes, manifesting itself
frequently in a species of coarseness of fibre and sensibility. The
people have not a character for high intelligence, at any rate in
Suffolk, where “silly” is the epithet applied to the county. Despite
this fact perhaps no part of Great Britain has produced so many
“worthies” of the highest order. In almost every one of these the
“animal” is very strong and the intelligence is dominated by practical
considerations. Suffolk and Norfolk respectively have bred perhaps
the two greatest of English statesmen--Cardinal Wolsey and Sir Robert
Walpole. Wolsey impressed his contemporaries by his native force and
arrogance; and Bishop Creighton explains in his biography of him how
sane a view he took of his country’s position in regard to the politics
of Europe. Walpole, with the tastes of a boorish squire, little
delicacy of mind, and a cynical contempt for mankind, was an unrivalled
financier and minister in days of material prosperity. In the forefront
among the pioneers of English science stands the famous Suffolk name of
Bacon. In his great achievements and his equally serious faults Francis
Bacon, Viscount Verulam, is an East Anglian. His luminous mind is seen
in the singularly lucid English in which his thoughts are expressed,
his rough common-sense reveals itself in the way in which he brushes
aside the speculative theories of the philosophers, and goes directly
for results based on practical experiment. And on the darker side, the
unscrupulous way in which he crushed friend and foe alike in order
to attain the position, which his genius entitled him to take in the
country, discloses the same lack of sensibility which we frequently see
in the East Anglian character.
Among the great judges few take a higher place than Lord Thurlow.
Scarcely anyone could inspire such fear by the mere force of his
personality than he. Whether in the House of Lords, when he crushed
the Duke of Grafton, who twitted him with being a _novus homo_; or in
the law courts; or at his own table in private life, where, in his old
age, he could make the greatest wits of the day retire in discomfiture,
he shewed himself an antagonist to be dreaded. Yet, as Crabbe attests,
under that rough exterior beat a kind heart.
Not only the genius of Nelson, the son of a Norfolk Rector, as well as
the moral failure which cast a stain on the unparalleled lustre of his
name, may be traceable to his native soil. Even to-day there is one to
whom England looks with confidence, though his stern practical ability
inspires but little affection, among whose proud and well-deserved
titles is the name of his mother’s home, an out-of-the-way Suffolk
village; for on entering the peerage Earl Kitchener assumed the style
of Baron Kitchener of Khartoum and Aspal.[11]
The force of character which produces great men is certain almost to
manifest itself for evil also, and we recognise the truth of much of
Crabbe’s stern realism in the characters to which he introduces us.
As Dr. Jessop, a singularly acute observer of the Norfolk villager,
points out, the criminal annals of East Anglia disclose outbursts
of remarkable ferocity on the part of its inhabitants. Side by side
with this vindictive spirit is a proneness to superstition, generally
of a gloomy character. Aldeburgh has records of many portents and
apparitions in its annals; nowhere was the witch finder more active
than in Suffolk; and, even in the later half of the nineteenth
century, a woman suspected of being a witch was done to death in the
neighbouring county of Essex. We have seen in Crabbe how what was then
called “enthusiasm” in religion drove more than one of his characters
into a despair of gloom. Not that there was not a great deal of genuine
piety: the churches of East Anglia are the glory of the countryside,
and many of the most magnificent are due to the liberality of its
traders and manufacturers in the days when it was one of the industrial
centres of English life. Indeed, it may not be merely local vanity
which explains the contemptuous epithet “silly” as carrying with it
not a slight but a compliment--the word being used in its older sense
as the equivalent of the German _selig_, “pious.” Nowhere did the
Reformation obtain a stronger hold than in the diocese of Norwich; and
its roll of Protestant martyrs in the reign of Mary was exceptionally
large. Forcefulness for good or evil, superstition, and genuine piety
all play their part in the story I am now about to ask you to consider.
The popularity in Suffolk of the life of Margaret Catchpole--though the
literary merit of the book is not great--is a testimony that her tale
strikes a sympathetic chord to this day.
I must preface what I have to say by a few remarks about the author
of the book. The Rev. Richard Cobbold was the son of John Cobbold,
a wealthy brewer of the Cliff House, Ipswich, by his second wife,
who plays so important a part in the story I am about to put before
you. Mrs. Cobbold was a very remarkable woman, a friend of Sir Joshua
Reynolds, an author of some repute; and, what was most unusual at the
time, an eloquent public speaker. She married Mr. Cobbold when he
was a widower with fourteen children and had by him a large family
herself--six sons and a daughter. Richard was the youngest son, being
born in 1797 and dying in his eightieth year in 1877. He was Rector of
Wortham, a parish in the north of Suffolk, an author of repute in his
day, highly respected as a devoted clergyman, a strong churchman, and a
keen and active sportsman. In 1845 he brought out “Margaret Catchpole.”
In his preface he says: “The public may depend upon the truth of the
main features of this narrative; indeed, most of the facts recorded
were matters of public notoriety at the time of their occurrence. The
author who details them is a son with whom this extraordinary female
lived and from whose hands he received the letters and facts here
given.” The story of Margaret Catchpole told in the novel is briefly as
follows:
She was born at Nacton, a village not far from Ipswich, on what was
then a somewhat desolate heath on the north bank of the Orwell. Her
father was head ploughman to a farmer named Denton, a well-known
breeder of Suffolk cart horses. From childhood she was known as a good
rider, and she obtained her first place as a servant by catching a very
spirited pony of Mr. Denton’s, whose wife was taken suddenly ill, and
riding at a gallop to the town and through the streets crowded on a
market day to fetch the doctor. As she had not had time to saddle or
bridle her steed, she rode him bareback with a halter to guide him--a
really remarkable feat for a child of fourteen. As she grew up, she
found a suitor in a clever sailor named William Laud, originally a
boat builder, who had been a pupil in navigation, says the author,
under a Mr. Crabbe, a brother of the poet’s.[12] Laud’s education and
abilities seem to have been above his station in life, and had he been
able to keep straight he would have risen to the command of a merchant
ship, and possibly even to officer’s rank in the Royal Navy. As it was,
he attached himself to a man named Bargood, an unscrupulous employer of
smugglers, and became one of the leaders of that highly organized body
which in the war with France was bent on defrauding the revenue. Laud’s
influence was singularly bad for the Catchpole family. Two brothers
came to a bad end, another enlisted and disappeared for years, and
the whole household fell under suspicion of being in league with the
smugglers.
Now comes the undoubted fiction in the story. Margaret Catchpole
particularly requested that her husband’s name should be concealed, if
her adventures were ever published, in order that her children might
not know she had been a convict. Consequently we must assume that
the honest lover called John Barry of Levington, the parish next to
Nacton, is fictitious, and probably that he and his brother Edward are
introduced to heighten the romance.[13] Anyhow, in the story Laud was
severely wounded by John’s brother Edward, who commanded the preventive
men on Felixstow Beach, and was supposed to have been killed. Margaret
nursed Laud in his concealment into convalescence; and later on when
she was in service at a Mrs. Wake’s he attempted to carry her off by
violence. She was, however, protected by the faithful John Barry and
a strange old fisherman nicknamed Robinson Crusoe. John Barry was
seriously wounded. On his recovery he proposed to Margaret, who refused
him; and, in desperation, the rejected lover emigrated to the Colony
of New South Wales, Australia.
In May, 1793, Margaret entered into service with Mrs. Cobbold of the
Cliff, Ipswich. The house still stands adjoining the well-known brewery
on the shore of the river Orwell. Even to this day it lies at the
fringe of the business part of Ipswich, at the end of the docks and
quays; beyond it is country and the well-wooded banks of the beautiful
river. The girl was under-nursemaid, and also helped the cook in the
evening. She soon manifested exceptional abilities; for not only did
she learn all the lessons which the children had to prepare, but on
three occasions she saved the life of members of Mrs. Cobbold’s large
family. She rescued two little boys, George and Frederick (the latter
my grandfather), from the fall of a wall, which would inevitably have
crushed them; she saved another, Henry, in Ipswich, when he had fallen
into deep water; and when an older boy, named William, had gone alone
down the Orwell to shoot ducks and his boat had been overturned, it
was by her courage and resource that the lad was recovered in a state
of insensibility. On the latter occasion Laud reappears suddenly. He
had been pressed into the Navy and was now necessarily leading a more
reputable life, and Margaret could avow her partiality for her lover
without shame. In 1794 Laud fought in Lord Howe’s victory of the 1st of
June and apparently distinguished himself highly in the action, being
one of the crew entrusted with bringing home a valuable prize. In the
story Laud is represented as a man naturally with good impulses, but
weak and unstable; and the villain of the piece is the sailor who was
Laud’s mate in his smuggling days--one Luff.
Luff was determined to get Laud back to the smuggling business; Laud,
on the contrary, desired to lead a virtuous life with Margaret.
Accordingly, when he was free of the navy, he brought his prize money
and left it at Mr. Cobbold’s house, but Margaret, who had now become
cook and had got into trouble by entertaining too many sailors, refused
to see her lover--of course not knowing it was he. Luff then turned up,
and, as she refused to give him information about Laud, threw her into
a well from which she was rescued with difficulty. Luff was killed soon
after in a desperate encounter with the preventive men, and from what
Margaret’s brother Edward could gather Luff had murdered Laud. Margaret
did not believe it; but her conduct became so unsatisfactory from grief
and disappointment that Mrs. Cobbold, despite all she had done for the
family, was compelled to dismiss her from her service. Laud in the
meantime had reformed and settled down as a boat builder, and on his
uncle’s death he came into the business. But the habit of smuggling
was too strong, and he returned to his old courses. This brings us to
the tragedy. Margaret has heard that Laud is alive from an old servant
of the Cobbolds. She longs for an explanation and is determined to see
him. Instead of consulting any of her reputable friends she goes to
Ipswich and is persuaded that Laud is in London waiting for her there.
Even a letter from him is produced expressing his readiness to marry
her if she would join him. This clumsy fraud was devised by a man named
Cook in order to induce Margaret, whose fame as a rider was known to
him, to steal a horse from Mr. Cobbold, and to ride him up to London.
Regardless of the consequences, Margaret took her old master’s best
horse, named Rochford, and rode him to London, seventy miles, in eight
hours. Of course the loss of the horse was known at once, and handbills
were issued offering a reward. Margaret, dressed as a groom, was
arrested soon after her arrival in London, and sent back to Ipswich to
be tried at the Assizes. On August 9, 1797, she pleaded guilty at Bury
St. Edmunds and was condemned to death. Her crime was then considered
a most serious one, but she made a very favourable impression, and
the witnesses for character gave such good testimony that the judge
commuted the death sentence to one of transportation for seven years.
For three years Margaret remained in Ipswich gaol; and it is probable
that her sentence would have been remitted altogether but for what
ensued.
Laud was now smuggling on a large scale. He was deeply concerned with
an affair in which two preventive men were beaten and thrown into the
sea at Southwold for reporting that they had seen forty carts and
horses ready to take a cargo which was to be “run” near Dunwich. A
reward of £100 for his apprehension was offered in the newspapers
on March 2d, 1799. Shortly after this 880 gallons of gin were seized
and the guilt of smuggling it brought home to Laud. All his property
was confiscated and he was given a year’s imprisonment and sentenced
to pay £100. He was committed to Ipswich gaol, and would have to
stay there after his sentence had expired till the fine was paid. Of
course Margaret, whose good conduct had made her practically free of
the prison, discovered that her lover was an inmate; and, as she had
kept intact the prize money he had given her, she was able to give
him the means of obtaining his liberation at the end of his year’s
imprisonment. Laud persuaded her to try to escape and join him, and
the way she did this is one of the most extraordinary in her romantic
career. The wall of the prison was twenty-five feet high and protected
at the top with iron spikes. Margaret succeeded in getting a flower
stand, which placed endways raised her to within thirteen feet of the
top. She had made herself a garment like a shepherd’s smock and a pair
of trousers so as to be unincumbered in her movements. By casting a
clothes-line over the _chevaux-de-frise_ on the top of the wall she
managed to climb up to the iron spikes. Then, lowering the line on
the other side, she turned over between the revolving spikes and let
herself down on the opposite side. She and Laud made for a place called
Sudbourn; but were overtaken on the beach where, after a desperate
fight, Laud was killed by Edward Barry, and Margaret arrested and taken
back to the gaol.
It was one of the strange anomalies of the cruel law of that age that
whereas ruffians like Cook, and desperados like Laud escaped the
capital sentence, comparatively innocent persons were hanged without
mercy. For a reprieved person to escape from prison was death, and,
though Margaret was ignorant of the terrible penalty which she
had incurred, there seemed no hope of her meeting with any further
leniency. She was again brought before the same judge, Lord Chief Baron
Sir Archibald Macdonald, who had condemned her in August, 1797, on the
third day of the same month in 1800. Again she pleaded guilty, and when
the judge condemned her in very stern language she made a short speech
accepting his sentence, which impressed everyone present in the court
house. Her eloquence and her whole demeanour profoundly impressed the
judge, and again he obtained power to respite her, sentencing her this
time to lifelong transportation.
Throughout her trials Margaret found in Mrs. Cobbold a constant friend,
one who never allowed her for a moment to feel forsaken. The letters
which passed between her and her former mistress are preserved, and
on reading them one cannot but fail to note how in style and diction
the maid had been influenced by Mrs. Cobbold. Margaret continued to
write from Australia, and her letters are marvellous when one considers
her antecedents and lack of early education. She collected specimens
to send to her mistress, some of which were presented to the Ipswich
Museum. Once more she was able to save life by an act of desperate
daring, from which the men shrank, at the time of a flood. At last,
according to the story, “John Barry,” who had prospered in the colony,
found that she was there, sought her out, and married her. The last
letter published in the book is dated June 25th, 1812, and announces
her marriage to John Barry. It contains these words: “Should you
ever think fit, as you once hinted in your letter to me, to write
my history, or to leave it to others to publish, you have my free
permission at my decease, whenever that shall take place, to do so. But
let my husband’s name be concealed, change it, change it to any other
... for mine and my children’s sake.” She died September 10th, 1841, in
the sixty-eighth year of her age.
The book raises problems of exceptional literary interest. In the
first place, it was written by a man of unimpeachable character, who
wrote with a distinctly religious aim, in view mainly to shew that
the heroine after having violated “the laws of God and man” became by
“the inculcation of Christian faith and virtue conspicuous for the
sincerity of her reformation.” He avers that his narrative is strictly
true and based on facts “well known to many persons of the highest
respectability still living” and that he himself received the letters
he quotes. He has no motive for deviating from his intention to tell
the truth except that, as we have seen, Margaret Catchpole desired
her married name to be concealed. That the author studiously carried
out this natural wish is proved by the fact that a wealthy lady in
New South Wales, named Mrs. Reiby, who had left Bury in Lancashire as
a girl, was declared to be the true Margaret Catchpole, to her great
annoyance, as she naturally had no desire to figure as a “convict
heroine.” In 1910 the story of Margaret was dramatised in London and
acted by the late Mr. Laurence Irving and his wife. A correspondence
thereupon appeared in the _East Anglian Daily Times_ in which it was
hinted that Mrs. Reiby, a Staffordshire girl, was transported in 1791
for the same offence of horse stealing.[14]
No one can read the book without perceiving that all the conversations
are fictitious. Mr. Cobbold was no Shakespeare, and he makes all his
characters talk in the same style as (if report be true) he conversed
himself. The whole of the Barry incidents may be fictitious; for if
the details given were true, everybody in Suffolk must have known who
Margaret’s husband was. The father of Edmund and John “Barry” was the
discoverer of crag shells as manure and was a farmer and miller at
Levington Hill, the next parish to Nacton. But even then the author may
have used pardonable license. Still the last letter of Margaret’s which
the author declares he received from his mother cannot be genuine. It
is signed Margaret “Barry,” and it says expressly that she was married
to the man who had loved her fruitlessly when the family lived at
Nacton. In point of fact Margaret never married.
Had the book been a document written many centuries ago, there would be
suggested grave doubts whether such a woman ever existed; as it is, the
Cobbold family have lived in Ipswich in unbroken succession during the
past century; and documents, like the original gaol-delivery in 1797
and the exemption of Mr. Cobbold from any parish offices for arresting
the culprit, prove beyond doubt the existence of Margaret Catchpole.
As, however, the subject of these lectures is ‘English social life,’ I
shall now give some extracts from the book before me, and from Crabbe’s
biography to shew how the peasantry lived in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth century.[15]
Even to this day if you enter a harvest field in Suffolk at reaping
time you will hear the old Norman French demand for “_Largess_”
and you will be expected to give it. Mr. Cobbold gives in his book
a description of a harvest home, many features of which are still
remembered. The farmer lodged all the single men in his house, but
the married men (known as hinds) lived in the neighbouring cottages.
When the last sheaf of corn was conveyed to the stack-yard, the barn
was covered with green leaves and the sheaf brought in with shouting
and blowing of the harvest horn. The farmer then gave an ample supper
to the labourers, and he, his wife, and daughters waited on their
guests. The head man of the harvest field acted as “lord of the feast.”
The chief song was called “Hallo Largess,” and was in honour of the
division of the Largess obtained in harvest time among the reapers.
Here is a verse of the song quoted by our author:
“Now the ripening corn
In the sheaves is borne,
And the loaded wain
Bring home the grain.
The merry, merry reapers sing
And jocund shouts the happy harvest hind
Hallo Large, Hallo Large, Hallo Largess.”
“At evening when the work of the day is over,” to quote from “Margaret
Catchpole,” “all the men collect in a circle, and Hallo, that is cry,
“Largess.” Three times they say in a low tone, “Hallo Large! Hallo
Large! Hallo Large!” and all, hand in hand, bow their heads almost
to the ground; but after the third monotonous yet sonorous junction,
they lift up their heads, and, with one burst of their voices, cry out
“Gess.” I cannot help wondering whether this semi-barbarous custom
which prevailed in Suffolk survive in those marvellous yells in which
the exuberant spirits of youth in the highly civilized universities of
America now find a vent.
Allusion has been made to the superstition of the East Anglian
peasantry, and a most interesting example is given in Thomas Colson,
better known in Ipswich as Robinson Crusoe, the fisherman on the
Orwell. He had built a boat for himself of the strangest materials
and was constantly at work on the river. His skill was wonderful, and
he is described as a perfect fisherman, quiet, steady, active, and
thoughtful. In character he was singularly benevolent, never refusing
to help anyone in distress. To quote Mr. Cobbold: “The writer of these
pages knew Colson well. He has often as a boy been in a boat with him,
and always found him kind and gentle.”
The old man’s mania was probably only an exaggeration of the belief of
his time or at any rate of his youth. He was a firm believer in wizards
and witchcraft. He fancied himself surrounded by evil spirits. He
knew their names, their propensities, how they afflicted men, and his
great study was to prevent their malign influence. His trust in charms
was absolute, and his whole body was hung with amulets, rings, bones
of horses, verses, etc., each of which he declared to be efficacious
against a certain spirit. If he lost one of his many charms, he
believed himself specially liable to attack by the demon, against
whom it was a prophylactic. That he had learned much from folklore is
evident from the fact that though often questioned about the different
demons who tormented him, he never deviated from his ordinary account
of them; and no one ever found him tripping as to their names or
attributes. Though subject to hallucinations, he must have learned his
demonology somewhere; and there seems to me little doubt that among the
less educated folk in East Anglia there was, down to the end of the
eighteenth century, a belief and a knowledge of the different powers
of evil little different from that of the Middle Ages or the days when
witchcraft was dreaded by all the inhabitants of England of every
class.[16]
The primitive character of rural life at a comparatively late period
is seen in the admirable description of Mr. Tovell’s house in the
Life of the Poet Crabbe, written by his son, which fully attests the
accuracy of his younger contemporary--Mr. Cobbold. Mr. Tovell, whose
property Mrs. Crabbe inherited, was a yeoman farmer possessed of a very
considerable freehold property whose income, £800 ($4000), for those
days was considerable. A landowner of such comparative wealth in the
eighteenth century might well aspire to a place among the gentry of the
county, but Mr. Tovell possessed a sturdy independence which forbade
him taking any position in which he might feel himself ill at ease.
A yeoman he was by education and such he was determined to remain:
“Jack,” he said, “will never make a gentleman.” Nevertheless, says Mr.
Crabbe, he possessed a native dignity of his own. The following is a
description of his and his worthy wife’s menage at Parham. I quote
somewhat at length.
“His house was large and the surrounding moat, the rookery, the ancient
dovecot, and the well-stored fishponds were such as might have suited
a gentleman’s seat of some consequence; but one side of the house
immediately overlooked the farm-yard, full of all sorts of domestic
animals and the scene of constant bustle and noise. On entering the
house, there was nothing at first sight to remind one of the farm: a
spacious hall paved with black and white marble, etc., etc. But the
drawing room, a corresponding dining parlour, and a handsome sleeping
apartment upstairs, were all _tabooed_ ground and made use of on great
and solemn occasions only--such as rent days and an occasional visit
with which Mr. Tovell was honoured by a neighbouring peer. At all other
times the family and their visitors lived entirely in the old-fashioned
kitchen along with the servants. My great-uncle occupied an arm
chair.... Mrs. Tovell sat at a small table on which, in the evening
stood one small candle in an iron candlestick...; in winter a noble
block of wood, sometimes the whole circumference of a pollard, threw
its comfortable warmth and cheerful blaze over the whole apartment.
“At a very early hour in the morning, the alarm called the maids and
their mistress also:... After the important business of the dairy and a
hasty breakfast, their respective employments were again resumed: that
which the mistress took for her especial privilege being the scrubbing
of the floors of the state-apartments.”
Once a new servant was found doing this, and thus spoke the good lady:
“_You_ wash such floors as these? Give me the brush this instant and
troop to the scullery and wash that, madam.... As true as G--d’s in
heaven, here comes Lord Rochford to call on Mr. Tovell. Here, take my
mantle (a blue woollen apron), and I’ll go to the door.”
The family dined together--the heads sat at the old kitchen table--the
maids at a side table, called a bouter, the farm men stood in the
scullery. With the principals at the table any stranger who happened
to come in dined, even if he was a travelling ratcatcher, tinker, or
farrier. “My father,” Mr. Crabbe goes on to say, “well describes in the
‘Widow’s Tale,’ my mother’s situation when living in her younger days
at Parham:
“But when the men beside their stations took,
The maidens with them, and with these the cook;
When one huge wooden bowl before them stood,
Filled with huge balls of farinaceous food;
With bacon, mass saline! where never lean
Beneath the brown and bristly rind was seen:
When from a single horn the party drew
Their copious draughts of heavy ale and new;
When the coarse cloth, she said, with many a stain,
Soil’d by rude hands who cut and came again;
She could not breathe, but, with a heavy sigh,
Reined the fair neck, and shut the offended eye;
She minced the sanguine flesh in pastimes fine
And wondered much to see the _creatures_ dine.”
Then Mr. Crabbe goes on to describe Mr. Tovell’s cronies, who came
after dinner, and enjoyed their punch, prosperous farmers or wealthy
yeomen like himself. Their talk was at times too much for Mrs. Tovell,
who withdrew; but “the servants, being considered much in the same
point of view as the animals dozing on the hearth, remained.”
The life of Crabbe the poet as told by his son is an admirable piece of
biography, and the Rev. George Crabbe, junr., was to my mind at least
as good a realist in prose as his father in poetry. I wonder if I am
right in conjecturing that you in New England had at the same time old
farmers not very unlike Mr. Tovell who lived in prosperous simplicity
like the old Suffolk Yeoman, rough in manner, coarse in expression,
and blunt in sensibility, yet with an honest independence of character
which redeemed much which to our eyes may seem repulsive.[17]
But the object of my remarks in this lecture has been to endeavour to
give you an idea of what England, or part of it, was like about 1800;
because I have another side of the picture to shew in my next lecture.
The primitive simplicity of the peasant and the farmer was doomed to
disappear, and the process had already begun. Still, side by side
with a luxurious civilisation there were many traces of a roughness
belonging to an early period in human development. To bring these facts
into light, I do not think that the choice of my native county of
Suffolk is a bad one.
When we turn from the peasant and trader, who in those days had little
influence in controlling the country, to the classes which exercised
power in the land, we come, as it were, to the surface of things; but,
to use an agricultural metaphor, we cannot explain the crop without
some knowledge of the soil. The explanation of many things, strange
now to us in the most highly polished social circles, can be found in
the character of the middle and lower classes of the time. When we
come in my next lecture to deal with academic life we shall find men of
the highest intellect marked by much of the uncouthness of the people
described by Crabbe or Cobbold, for many scholars had passed their
early days in the same surroundings; and when we go a step higher and
associate with the wits, dandies, and politicians of the Regency, I
think we shall acknowledge that only a very thin crust of superficial
polish lay between them and the people whom they affected to despise.
But this similarity does not merely extend to the faults of society; it
is to be found in its virtues also. There is no lack of virile strength
in the characters to which I have drawn your attention to-day; their
good qualities are as marked as their defects, and we recognise in
nearly every one of them qualities which brought England safe through a
great crisis in its history.
APPENDIX TO “MARGARET CATCHPOLE”
The literary history of “Margaret Catchpole” is somewhat remarkable.
The book was published as a true romance in 1845. It immediately
attained widespread popularity and passed through several editions.
It was dramatised in 1846 in London; and a play bill in the Harvard
library shews that it was acted in the National Theatre, Boston,
Mass., April 11 and 12, 1859. Mr. Richard Cobbold, the author,
was involved in a dispute with Mr. Gedge, the editor of the _Bury
Post_, on the historical accuracy of the story; both sides admitting
that Margaret had married well in Australia, and that her son had
visited Suffolk as a wealthy man desirous of purchasing an estate.
The author nearly became involved in legal proceedings because a
lady in Australia had been frequently mistaken for his heroine, and
subjected to some annoyance on this account. In 1910 the story was
again dramatised by the late Laurence Irving, and it was proved
that Margaret Catchpole had died a spinster: the certificate of
burial, dated 1819, being produced. This and the documents in the
Ipswich Museum--viz. a letter written by her to Mrs. Cobbold when
in prison, and a handbill offering a reward for her apprehension
after her escape--give an unfavourable opinion of the accuracy of
the author. The account of her arrest in the _Ipswich Journal_ of
April, 1800, makes no mention of the death of her smuggler lover. I
have, however, through the kindness of Suffolk friends and my own
relations discovered the documents used by Mr. Richard Cobbold, which
had been carefully filed by his mother; and I have seen the sketches
he made (he was no mean artist) to illustrate the novel, with notes
made by himself in his 77th year. He died in 1877. Upon the whole, I
am convinced that, though he made some serious mistakes, especially
about Margaret’s age and marriage, he believed that he was writing
a perfectly true account of her. The subject seemed to me of such
interest to students of literary problems that I had the hardihood to
submit it as a prelection to that respectable body the Council of the
Senate of the University of Cambridge (England) under the title of
“St. Luke as a Modern Author” (Cambridge: Heffer and Sons). If some of
that august body considered the introduction of this romance in humble
life as an illustration of a serious subject an impertinence, I can
only tender my apologies. In America it has been suggested by many
theological professors that “Margaret Catchpole” has a real bearing
on the question of the composition of the Acts of the Apostles, and
may prove a clue to that thorny problem, as well as to others which
can be illustrated by the use of illiterate materials for literary
purposes. Margaret’s letters from Australia, despite the fact that she
had been totally uneducated as a girl, are wonderfully interesting,
and the naturalness of her style renders them far more readable than
the polished periods which her biographer has put into her published
letters.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] The lecture was delivered March, 1916.
[12] This seems impossible from what is known of the Crabbe family.
(See Huchon’s “George Crabbe.”) The poet had no brother who could have
taught Laud.
[13] An example of Mr. Cobbold’s local knowledge and the skill with
which he weaves it into his story is seen in the fact that he makes the
Barrys the sons of a farmer who first used crag shells for manure. In a
Suffolk gazetteer, about 1855, I discovered that this had really been
done at Levington, but in 1712, a generation or so before the Barrys
could have appeared.
[14] The case of horse stealing tried in Lancashire in 1791 was a
peculiarly hard one. A young lady of good family was condemned to
transportation for mounting a stranger’s horse, having been dared to do
so by a friend. She was only fourteen years of age! She was apparently
sent to Australia rather as a passenger than a convict; and married the
captain of the ship.
[15] See Appendix on the literary problem of Mr. Cobbold’s novel.
[16] Mr. Cobbold in a private document says that Colson derived
his knowledge of the names of demons from Glanvil’s _Sadducismus
Triumphatus_. I looked over the book and found no names of demons.
[17] I have been privileged to see kitchens in old houses in New
England, which must have been used in very much the same way as Mr.
Tovell’s. The house now preserved by the Colonial Dames at Quincy is a
good example.
LECTURE IV
GUNNING’S “REMINISCENCES OF CAMBRIDGE”
An English University so closely connected with New England must have
special interest to you. Yet those who have been to our Cambridge would
find it indeed hard to recognise it in the place I am now about to put
before you. It changed beyond recognition within the long lifetime of
the author, whose reminiscences, put down during his long last illness,
will be the text of my lecture. He had remarkable opportunities of
observing University life, and many faculties of making the best of
them. His hard shrewd face looks down upon us when we take our wine
after dinner as guests in the combination room of Christ’s College,
and is an indication of his character. He was no Boswell; for he
lacked appreciation of the men he described and though capable of
devoted friendship, had little affection for many of them. But he is an
admirable raconteur with a shrewd eye for the absurdity of a situation,
and will, I think, prove excellent company for us during the time at my
disposal.
Many of my audience have doubtless visited our English Cambridge before
this war broke out, and will be able to check the remarks I am about to
make. An easy run from London brings the traveller to a railway station
so inconvenient that it could only have been imagined in a bad dream;
and he finds himself in the outskirts of a fair sized and rapidly
increasing town.
A dull drive through a street of shops brings you to the colleges;
and, if you happened to arrive at midday, you would find a stream of
undergraduates in cap and gown with women students from Girton and
Newnham issuing from or flowing into the lecture rooms. Supposing your
host to be in his college, you would find the courts populous with
undergraduates, some in cap and gown, some in flannel blazers, and
some, _proh pudor!_ in evening pumps or even in carpet slippers. If
you asked a question of one of them, you would be answered obligingly,
if not with elaborate courtesy. Your host (a fellow of the college)
would probably be working with a few pupils; and when they withdrew
you would either be given lunch in his rooms or taken to his house. A
few friends would be asked to meet you. The meal would be, I hope, a
good one, and several would not even take the wine which was provided.
Why I say this will appear later. If it were summer, you would have
been taken for a walk in the “Backs,” and have found the narrow river
crowded with boats full of gaily flannelled men and a good many ladies;
and, I think, you would have admired the brightness of the scene.
You might witness a cricket match, and, later in the evening, have
watched the eights practising, with their coaches running, cycling, or
riding beside them. If you dined in the college hall, you would find
a good if not elaborate dinner neatly served; and the company, if not
brilliant, would be at least variegated. In the combination room, over
a modest glass of port and perhaps a cigar, the conversation would turn
on many topics. The presiding fellow, who has been everywhere, would
be laying down the law to a somewhat inattentive audience about hotels
in Buda-Pesth and the old college friends he had met on the Yukon
River. A famous man of letters would be giving his views on finance
and town planning. A chemist and a mathematician would be absorbed in
discussing bird life. A great authority on art might be explaining
his views on the religion of the future to a D.D., who ought to know,
being by repute a heretic, but is somewhat inattentive as he is trying
to listen, and at the same time endeavouring to explain to another
man what are the prospects of the college boat. An anthropologist of
European fame is being instructed by the junior fellow how the last
fashionable dance ought to be performed; and the tutor, a silent man,
suddenly breaks in with a question as to the progress of one of his
pupils. Naturally the guest is not neglected; he would perhaps rather
listen, especially as everyone is talking about something he does not
make his specialty, as all sensible people do after dinner. It may be
our supposed guest is taken to the Master’s Lodge and finds several
undergraduates on terms of easy familiarity with the “dons” and even
with the, in old days unapproachable and awful, Head of the college. I
am of course speaking of happier days before the War had depleted our
numbers and when we all felt friendly and sociable.
In every scene in this imaginary sketch the contrast with Cambridge
in the eighteenth century would be apparent. Except for parts of the
buildings all is changed. In one respect the traveller who visited
Cambridge a century ago would have had the advantage. Had he approached
by either of the hills, by Madingley or the Gog Magogs, the town would
have appeared more beautiful than now. Here is a description of his
first view of the place by John Henry Newman in 1832, who was too great
an admirer of the beauties of Oxford to fail to see how lovely was her
rival:
“CAMBRIDGE, July 16th, 1832.
“Having come to this place with no anticipations, I am quite taken by
surprise and overcome with delight. This, doubtless, you will think
premature in me, inasmuch as I have seen yet scarcely anything, and
have been writing letters of business to Mr. Rose and Rivingtons. But
really, when I saw at the distance of four miles, on an extended
plain, wider than Oxford, amid thicker and greener groves, the Alma
Mater Cantabrigiensis lying before me, I thought I should not be able
to contain myself, and in spite of my regret at her present defects
and past history, and all that is wrong about her,[18] I seemed about
to cry _Floreat in eternum_. Surely there is a _genius loci_ here, as
in my own dear home; and the nearer I came to it, the more I felt its
power. I do really think the place finer than Oxford, though I suppose
it isn’t, for everyone says so. I like the narrow streets; they have
a character, and they make the University buildings look larger by
contrast. I cannot believe that King’s College is not far grander than
anything with us; the stone, too, is richer, and the foliage more thick
and encompassing. I found my way from the town to Trinity College
like old Œdipus, without guide, by instinct; how, I know not. I never
studied the plan of Cambridge.”
Ill paved, ill drained as was the town, narrow as were the streets,
it must have been picturesque to the eye, and the colleges, unspoiled
by modern additions, are very attractive, to judge by the old prints.
On the whole, however, I think our verdict would have been that old
Cambridge was a pleasanter place for us to explore than for its
inhabitants to live in.
Let us now exercise our imagination a little more and try to fancy what
a day spent in Cambridge would have been like to a stranger towards the
close of the eighteenth century. One thing, I think, may be assumed
to be unaltered. Had he come to visit a friend, he would have been
hospitably received. Let us suppose that he also arrived at midday in
summer when it was full term and that, to quote Wordsworth, he--
“At the Hoop alighted ... famous inn.”
He certainly would not have met a troop of young men, let alone
maidens, going in and out of lecture. The lectures were over: and the
lecture rooms were never crowded. Perhaps some noisy fellow-commoners
might have stared and jeered at him and quite possibly have insulted
him. Most colleges were very empty of students, many rather
dilapidated. He would have dined in the middle of the day, and the
hall would have been hot, noisy, and probably ill ordered. Joints were
passed from one diner to another and carved according to taste. At the
high table, where he would dine, would be the resident fellows, a stray
nobleman or so, and a few rich young men, called fellow-commoners. A
good deal of beer would be drunk, and most of the company would be
rather cross and sleepy after the meal. The fellows, who were nearly
all clergymen, would show themselves obsequious to the noblemen,
uneasily familiar with the fellow-commoners, and completely oblivious
of the scholars and pensioners, who dined at the lower table, and of
the sizars, or poor scholars, who, in some cases (certainly at an
earlier date), waited on them, and after dinner ate what had been left
on the high table. There were no games to watch: and in the afternoon
probably our guest would be mounted and taken for a ride. In the
evening supper would be served and perhaps a considerable amount of
wine drunk in the combination room. As political feeling ran high at
the time, the company would probably have quarrelled. Very few fellows
had ever left their native country. A few had hardly known any places
save their homes and their University.
Some must have been strangely uncouth in manner and appearance. Most
of them were, as I have said, clergymen, and, of course, bachelors;
but their practice of celibacy was not always such as to fulfil the
ideals of the advocates of that holy state in the days of the saints.
But we have not yet finished our day. Supper would have been followed
by an adjournment to a small, dirty, ill-lighted public house, and the
walk home to bed might not be inaptly compared to the convolutions of a
corkscrew.
That such was the University in the days of our author I fancy some
extracts from the book before me will convince you. He admits that in
his youthful days Cambridge had sunk lower than it ever had before, and
he trusted that such days as his might never recur.
We have kept him waiting too long. Let me present to you Henry Gunning,
Esquire Bedel of the University of Cambridge. He tells us he was a
son of a clergyman in the neighbourhood and the descendant of “that
admirable prelate,” Dr. Peter Gunning, Bishop of Ely in the reign of
Charles II. He entered Christ’s College in 1784, and died in 1855,
well over eighty years of age, after a life spent in the University.
During his long last illness he dictated his reminiscences.[19] He had,
at an earlier period written some memoirs; but, on reflection, after a
serious illness he had decided to burn all the papers. In his own words:
“I kept an account of the decision of the Heads on any disputed
point.... My notes became much swelled by rumours of _jobbing_ among
the higher powers, which, though sometimes defeated, were generally
so skilfully conducted that they more frequently succeeded. I had
collected sufficient materials for publishing a pretty large volume,
but was about that time attacked by a sudden and dangerous illness,
which afforded more opportunity for serious reflection than I had
before accustomed myself to.... I was apprehensive that I might have
inserted some things (which I believed to be facts) upon questionable
authority.... I feared that the papers might fall into the hands of
some bookseller whose only object would be gain, to obtain which he
would not scruple to whitewash men whose characters ought to have been
drawn in the darkest colours, or to speak in extremely harsh terms of
others on whose eccentricities I only wished to pass a slight censure.
Too ill to admit of delay, I decided on committing all my papers to
the flames, nor did I for fifty years regret the step.” Gunning died
before his task was completed: his memoirs terminated abruptly; but the
most interesting part of his work has happily survived, and the earlier
reminiscences, as is customary with the aged, are more full and vivid
than the later.
I shall not attempt to moralise or discant much upon his story; but I
intend to give it in his own words with a few remarks in passing.
Henry Gunning entered Christ’s College as a sizar, a poor scholar
who was at one time supposed to be fed by what was left of the meals
provided for the fellows (a Christ’s College sizar being the equivalent
of a “servitor” at Oxford), though Gunning says nothing of this.[20]
As we shall see, he led anything but the life of a humble dependant
whilst at the University. His college had been and now is among the
most distinguished at Cambridge. It had produced John Milton and Ralph
Cudworth, and had been a famous centre of the intellectual life of the
seventeenth century. It was the college of William Paley, who was
Senior Wrangler in 1763, and it was destined to be the school of many a
famous man, among them Charles Darwin. But only three men entered with
our hero in 1785.
The two tutors, Mr. Parkinson and Mr. Seale, were in a sense men of
mark. The former had been disappointed in failing to be elected Master;
and was engaged to a very beautiful young lady, whose numerous admirers
made him at times uncomfortable. As Mr. Parkinson had an eighteen-mile
ride to get to his lady-love, he lectured in cap and gown, but also
booted and spurred, and snubbed young Gunning when he asked for
explanations of difficult points in the lecture.
Accordingly his pupil gave up lectures and decided not to read at
all; but at the end of the term the tutor spoke most kindly and
encouragingly, as an old friend of his pupil’s father. The result was
that Gunning became, for a time at least, a reading man, and was
much encouraged by his friend Hartley, a Yorkshireman who shewed him
the solution of the difficulties which Parkinson was too impatient to
explain. When Parkinson examined Gunning he found that his progress
was most satisfactory, encouraged him most kindly to persist; and when
Gunning told him of a man who was reputed to read twelve hours a day
in hopes of surpassing the expected Senior Wrangler, he remarked, “If
he mean to beat him he had better devote six hours to reading and six
hours to reflecting on what he has read.”
Seale, the other tutor, was a good teacher and a really humorous
lecturer. “Nothing could be pleasanter than the hour passed at his
lecture, such was his kindness to all.... When any ludicrous blunder
occurred ... he joined in the laugh as heartily as any of us.” Seale
seems to have been a very able scholar, but somewhat quarrelsome: he
became chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury; but had to resign
because he quarrelled with the butler about the wine supplied at the
chaplains’ table. However, Gunning had nothing to complain of in regard
to the education he got from his college.
He was not always a close student; and both his diversions and his
friends are more interesting in illustrating his times, than are his
tutors or his reading. May I for a moment digress and explain the
constitution of the University? Except for a very few professors and
the officials--Vice-Chancellor, Proctors, Taxors, and Moderators,
etc.--the University was practically non-existent. The colleges did
virtually all the teaching and were self-contained bodies.[21]
A man got little or no instruction outside his own college; the
University examined him and gave him his degree--that was all.
The real rulers of the University were the Masters of the colleges.
Most of them were highly placed ecclesiastics, and, consequently,
had frequently to be absent from Cambridge; but as the “Heads” might
marry, and fellows had to resign their position on taking a wife, they
constituted a permanent element, and became all-powerful. I myself have
often heard stories of the time when the Master of a college, and his
family, belonged to an aristocracy to which no ordinary Master of Arts
could hope to be admitted; and, you may be sure, the ladies who reigned
in the lodges were very careful to keep the wives and daughters of
such married graduates as happened to live in the town at their proper
distance. Gunning will have plenty to say about them. The fellows of
the colleges were for the most part non-resident; only the tutors and
a few old men resided with any permanence in the colleges. With a
few exceptions the fellows who stayed in Cambridge were either very
young men or very strange old bachelors who seldom left the town. What
instruction was given was given by the college tutors, and most of
the fellows who lived in Cambridge served as curates to the different
village churches. Some were almost entirely idle men, and one, who
shall be nameless, found them no little mischief to do.
The fellows dined at the high table, to which the nobility were also
admitted. Noblemen, _i.e._ peers, the eldest sons of peers, and men
who could prove royal descent, had till comparatively recently had the
right of proceeding to the degree of M.A. after two years of residence
without taking any examination or the degree of B.A. In Gunning’s early
days peers wore on state occasions a magnificent academical dress
varying in colour according to taste. Then came the fellow-commoners,
men of wealth, who paid far higher fees than the ordinary students
and dined with the fellows. These were also distinguished by the
magnificence of their academic attire. It is difficult to imagine a
much worse system of education. The nobility and fellow-commoners
were kept apart from the ordinary men, often grossly flattered by
the fellows and even by the Masters of the colleges. Work was not
expected of them, and their example was often pernicious alike to the
students and to the younger fellows. The majority of the young men
were classed as scholars, who with the fellows formed what is called
the “society” of the colleges, pensioners, and sizars or servitors.
Almost all were intending to take Holy Orders: a few, however, became
barristers or medical practitioners. The University was very small. In
1748 there were only 1500 on the books of the colleges; this includes
non-residents, who were almost certainly in the majority. In 1801
the total of residents in the University, including, I suppose, the
servants who slept in college, was 803.
Gunning certainly kept good company, and this is how he enjoyed
himself. He was a keen sportsman, and Cambridge afforded excellent
opportunity for him to indulge his taste. The fenlands were not
preserved and abounded with waterfowl. Young lads and boys were always
ready to carry the game and to provide poles to leap the fen ditches.
The fishing was excellent, and so both summer and winter could be fully
occupied by the sportsman. We hear nothing of any games or athletics
from Gunning. Everybody rode, but there was apparently no hunting. Here
is a riding story told by Mr. Gunning. Dr. Watson, Bishop of Llandaff,
was remarkable for holding many posts simultaneously and of impartially
neglecting the duties of all. Yet he possessed undoubted gifts, and
his was the only criticism of Gibbon’s famous chapters about the rise
of Christianity which the historian deemed worthy of his attention.
He took a high degree in 1759 and five years later became Professor of
Chemistry. For two years he held the chairs of Chemistry and Divinity
together; and for thirty-two years he was Bishop of Llandaff, and
Regius Professor of Divinity in Cambridge, discharging the duties
of both offices from his house in the Lake district in the North of
England. Apropos of this house in Westmorland, Gunning tells a good
story. The proprietor of the Cock Inn out of compliment to Dr. Watson
changed the name of his hostelry to the “Bishop’s Head” and painted his
Lordship on the signboard. The ostler, who had saved money, built a
rival hotel which he called “The Cock.” Thereupon the landlord of the
“Bishop’s Head,” finding custom leaving him, put an inscription under
the portrait, “This is the Old Cock.”
Dr. Watson’s deputy professor was Dr. Kipling, who was very unpopular
from the way in which he held aloof from the undergraduates, so the
young men resolved to have their revenge. Dr. Kipling’s principal
recreation, to quote our author, “was a daily ride to the hills,
which at that time was the most frequented road among members of the
University. Returning one day, he picked up an ostrich feather which he
saw drop from the hat of a lady, who was proceeding very slowly about
fifty yards in advance.
“On overtaking her he presented the feather, accompanied by an
expression relative to the good fortune in being able to restore it.
The lady thanked him for his kindness, and, expressing her annoyance
that her servant was not in attendance, said she had just left General
Adeane’s.... The Doctor begged her not to be uneasy, as he should have
much pleasure in attending her until her servant appeared. They had
not proceeded far before they began to meet parties of young men who
were going out for their morning’s ride. From the significant glances
that were exchanged between the parties Dr. Kipling could not fail to
discover he had got into bad company. That he might rid himself of his
new acquaintance, ... he clapped spurs to his horse, which had been
selected with his well-known Yorkshire discernment. The lady was well
mounted, and applying her whip briskly kept up with the Doctor.” Thus
they rode together through the town, and the story was long related
in the University. The lady’s name was Jemima Watson. No relation to
the Bishop and Professor of that name! You will, I think, see that
Mr. Gunning had a keen eye for character and no little malice; and I
propose to deal with some of the strange personalities of the time
depicted by him.
On taking a very good degree, our author might reasonably have looked
for a fellowship, but this was not possible because “his county” was
already in possession of one. I may explain that it was the law that at
a small college like Christ’s the fellows should be so selected that
no two persons born in the same county should be on the list together.
This was intended to protect a college from being monopolised by a
single county, by the fellows choosing their friends. But at this time
the office of Esquire Bedel was vacant, and Gunning was elected to
it. The Vice-Chancellor at this time was attended on all ceremonial
occasions by three Esquire Bedels and also by Yeoman Bedels. The
former officers still exist, but their number has been reduced to
two. Gunning’s colleagues were Mr. William Mathew, Senior Fellow and
Bursar of Jesus College, and the famous Mr. Beverley, of Gunning’s
own college. Mathew, an excellent man, gave his friend the following
description of the duties of his office. They were first _carving_ at
the Vice-Chancellor’s table, and in this Beverley was unrivalled and
always kept the best slices for himself.
Second only to the art of carving was the practice of _punctuality_,
which was thus defined: “The statutes of the University enjoin the
Respondent to dispute from the _first_ to the _third_ hour. The
authorities consider the statutes to be complied with provided the
Disputant is in the box _before_ the clock strikes _two_ and does not
leave it until after it has struck three.... There are other points
of practice which are soon learned.” As says Gunning, “most of them
were founded on _a violation of the statutes_. I inserted them in a
memorandum book.”
The senior Esquire Bedel was Mr. Beverley, a most remarkable man.
Gunning hated him with all his heart and introduces him in these words:
“If his own account of himself is to be believed (and perhaps _in this
instance_ his word may be taken), he was the most profligate man in
the University. He obtained his office by the influence of the famous
Lord Sandwich, the friend and betrayer of Wilkes, immortalised as
Jenny Twitcher. Beverley had a large family, borrowed from everybody,
and cheated all he could. Lord Sandwich entertained magnificently at
Hinchinbrooke Castle, about fourteen miles from Cambridge, and Beverley
was not above procuring invitations for members of the University who
paid him.”
He must have had many attractive qualities and was a good musician.
People were always trying to get him out of debt, especially Mr. Basil
Montagu, a son of Lord Sandwich.
Montagu collected money to free him from his pressing liabilities
and then invited Beverley to tea and read him a long lecture on his
extravagance. Poor Beverley departed in tears, not having been told
what his benefactor intended to do. Montagu felt he had been too
severe and feared that Beverley might give way to despair and even kill
himself. But, instead of finding the prodigal a corpse, he heard sounds
of music if not of dancing, and found his volatile friend seated at his
table with a bowl of punch and several boon companions. “After this
exhibition Montagu troubled himself no further about Beverley’s debts.”
A notable character of the time was a certain Jimmy Gordon, who had
fallen from a position of affluence to one of extreme degradation.[22]
Seeing the Master of Trinity, who was also Bishop of Bristol, Gordon
begged of him. His Lordship replied, “If you can find a greater
scoundrel than yourself, I will give you a half a crown.” Off went
Gordon and told Beverley that the Master wished to speak to him. The
Master, when Beverley came, remarked, “You have been misinformed, Mr.
Beverley.” Up came Jimmy at this moment and said, “I think, my lord, I
am entitled to my half crown.”
I feel I must relate one more example of Beverley’s behaviour. On
Midlent Sunday it was customary for the Vice-Chancellor to drive in
state and preach in the church at Burwell and be accompanied by one
or more of the Esquire Bedels. After the sermon they all dined at a
farmer’s house and so enjoyed the ale and port wine that they did not
go and hear the vicar at afternoon service. “What sort of preacher is
Mr. Turner?” asked the Vice-Chancellor. “For my own part,” replied the
tenant, “I would not go over the threshold to hear him preach.” “If
that be your opinion, who have had frequent opportunities of hearing
him, I am of that opinion too; and we will remain and have a few more
glasses of your fine old port.” Needless to remark, the clergyman was
furious at the having been thus neglected. On the way back to Cambridge
a Mr. Hole, who was acting as a deputy Bedel, attacked Mr. Beverley,
who had a good deal of wit, and gave him more than he got. Then the
Vice-Chancellor tried to defend Mr. Hole, and he too got more than he
bargained for. So he stopped the carriage and told Beverley to go and
sit on the box. The Bedel refused, and told the other two that they had
better get out and walk home. “They declined to follow this advice,”
and “it was not long before perfect quiet reigned among them, and the
university Marshal who acted as Vice-Chancellor’s servant imagined (and
it was not a _very improbable_ conclusion) that they had been overtaken
by the drowsy god.”
A more reputable but still very striking character was Dr. Milner, the
President of Queen’s College. His portrait is one I often study when
I dine there. A portly man in his red gown and doctor’s wig, he sits
grasping the arms of his chair, looking very strong and masterful.
In politics a strong Tory, attached by religious sympathy to the
evangelical party, editor of the “Church History” of his brother, from
his force of character and his mathematical ability Milner was long
the ruler of the University. Caring nothing for public opinion, he
would have his own way; and he is reported to have once exclaimed, when
settling a man’s place in an examination and the man’s tutor exclaimed,
“Surely you do not say that A is better than B?” “I never said he was
the better man; I said he should stand above him.” It was the custom
for the moderators who conducted the Tripos and made out the lists
to submit any doubtful cases to some great mathematician, who held a
_viva voce_ examination; and, as Milner’s undoubted ability made his
judgment of great value, he was often called to do this. Except where
men of his own college or Magdalene, a great centre of evangelicalism,
were concerned, his judgment was excellent; but Gunning considers that
he was quite unscrupulous when his partiality or interest led him to
decide a point. Milner, though an ardent pietist and a valetudinarian,
was somewhat notorious for the joviality of his supper parties, at
which the bowl circulated freely and the fun was fast and furious. His
powerful personality dominated the University, as may be seen from the
fact that he did his best to stop the reform of Trinity College. In his
account of this Mr. Gunning draws a striking picture of the Seniority
of the college in the closing years of the eighteenth century. By its
statutes Trinity was practically governed by the Master and the ten
Senior Fellows, the latter men who had lived for years in the college
without generally doing any work, being content with holding their
fellowship and living in celibate idleness. Their power was great;
and, as it may well be supposed, they were not as a rule qualified to
exercise it, especially when they claimed a right to select the fellows
themselves without regard to the reports of the examiners. The tutors
fought a hard battle to remove this abuse and were taunted by Milner
and the Tory party with being Jacobites and supporters of the French
Revolution. The matter was decided in the courts, and the tutors won,
with the result that a fellowship at Trinity became, in Macaulay’s
words, a veritable “patent of nobility.”
I abbreviate Gunning’s description of the Seniority partly from a sense
of propriety.
The Rev. Stephen Whiston, B.D., was, says our author, “I believe a very
respectable man.”
The Rev. Samuel Backhouse, B.D., kept a girls’ school at a village
called Balsham.
“Was it profit that he sought?
No; he paid them to be taught.
Had he honour for his aim?
No; he _blushed to find it fame_.”
The Rev. Samuel Peck, B.D., must have been rather a nice old man. He
was a great authority on village law and helped the country people
gratis, saying, “Sam Peck never takes a fee, but he loves gratitude,”
and the farmers paid him in presents of the produce of their land. He
played a very clever trick upon Gunning’s old tutor Seale by persuading
him to share the expenses of treating two ladies on a journey from
London to Cambridge, who turned out to be his own cook and waitress![23]
The Rev. Thomas Wilson, B.D., had to have his garden key taken away
because he was rude to the Master’s wife one dark evening when she was
returning from a party.
The Rev. John Higgs, B.D., and the Rev. Thomas Spencer, B.D., were
unknown to Gunning. Mr. Spencer was mad, and only came to Cambridge
when his vote was wanted. The Rev. William Collier, B.D., was a
well-known gourmand. He is recorded to have eaten three-quarters of a
sucking pig and to have left the rest because he was engaged to dine
immediately after. He was a Hebrew scholar, a good classic, and a
modern linguist. The Rev. James Lambert was an excellent sportsman and
was supposed to be unorthodox. “Lambert was never addicted to those
vices for which at that time the Seniors of Trinity were so notorious,
but when in college attended closely to literary pursuits.” He was
Professor of Greek.
Observe, except Lambert all were B.D.’s. Here is an epitaph:
“Here lies a Fellow of Trinity.
He was a Doctor of Divinity.
He knew as much about Divinity
As other Fellows do of Trinity.”
My last character shall be Dr. Farmer, Master of Emmanuel, a most
amiable and delightful man. We make his acquaintance as curate of the
parish of Swavesey, a village with a most beautiful church, then a
place much larger and more prosperous than it is at present. Almost all
the parishes around Cambridge were served by fellows of the colleges,
who went over on Sunday to take the prayers, and they were rarely
visited on any other day by a clergyman. Sunday was a great day in
the colleges, as these clergymen met after its labours, and ate most
jovial suppers. Farmer was regarded as a model of punctiliousness in
the performance of his duties, as he made a point of never missing a
Sunday at Swavesey and of dining after service at the inn, to which
meal he usually invited one or more of the farmers. He then rode
back to Cambridge, slept an hour or so, and appeared in the Emmanuel
“parlour,” where he was the delight of the whole party. People used
to come for the week end from London for the pleasure of hearing
Farmer’s conversation; and Mr. Pitt was much attached to him. He was
fond of rushing up to London to dine; and one Ash Wednesday morning
he announced to his Vice-Chancellor that he had to make haste to get
to the University church in time, for at “three o’clock this morning
I was blowing my pipe with the worshipful company of pewterers.” Dr.
Farmer became Master of Emmanuel; and Gunning suggests that he might
have become Head of Trinity for the asking; but when Mr. Pitt sought
his advice as to whom he should choose, he simply replied, “If you want
to oblige the society, appoint Postelthwaite.” He was a great admirer
of Shakespeare, and never missed a performance when a play of his was
acted.
But we must leave these quaint personages for a more general view of
the life of the University. It had its splendid as well as its sordid
side. Dress, as I have already hinted, played a great part in the
pageant of the old place. Here is Gunning’s description of the fêtes
at Commencement at the end of the summer term:
“On Commencement Sunday, the college walks were crowded. Every doctor
of the University wore his scarlet robes during the whole day. Every
nobleman wore his splendid robes, not only in St. Mary’s and in the
college halls, but also in the public walks. Their robes (which are now
uniformly purple) were at that time of various colours according to the
taste of the wearers; purple, white, green, and rose colour were to be
seen at the same time.”
There was also a good deal of ceremonial at other times; and the
barbaric was occasionally mingled with the magnificent, as, for
example, at the opening of Stourbridge Fair. This Fair, now a poor
and insignificant gathering, was once the most famous in England and
had ranked among the great fairs of Europe. In Gunning’s early days
much of its splendour remained. At its opening the Vice-Chancellor
with his Bedels and Commissary, the Registrary, the Proctors, and
the Taxors, met in the Senate House at eleven, where everybody drank
sherry and ate cakes. After this all drove to the Common, and the
Vice-Chancellor proclaimed the Fair to be open, the Yeomen Bedels on
horseback repeating his words at different parts of the assembly. Then
followed a devouring of oysters in what was known as the Tiled Booth,
after which the University magnates strolled about the Fair till dinner
was ready. It was no easy task to get into the dining-room, because
the people outside would not budge to allow the procession to pass,
the University being very unpopular because they supplied the mugs in
which the beer was sold and these held notoriously short measure. This
was the only effort in the direction of temperance we meet with at this
period, and that was dishonest. The dinner consisted of boiled pork,
herrings, goose, apple-pie, and beef. The wine was bad, but everyone
enjoyed himself, despite the heat and discomfort of the Tiled Booth. At
half-past six they all went to the theatre. How they got home is not
recorded!
Of intellectual pursuits Gunning has little to record. The disputations
for degrees continued from the Middle Ages, in which he took part
frequently as disputant and, knowing the rules of logic, he was often
able to overthrow men of admittedly more learning than himself. There
were good scholars and learned men at Cambridge; but we hear more
of their schemes, their quarrels, and their amours than of their
achievements in the schools.
Porson, the most famous Grecian since Bentley, is hardly if ever
mentioned!
It is a strange record of the days of old, and the Cambridge therein
described seems to have been in another world than this. Yet some of
us were alive when Henry Gunning died, and I can myself remember
characters almost as strange as he depicts. But in all the book there
is no one so strange as the writer himself. In it we have the record,
not of a diarist, but of an old, old man in his last illness, a man by
his own account not devoid of piety or good feeling, yet recollecting
every slight, every injury, he had sustained nearly sixty years before,
the dislikes of his youth for men long gone to their account being as
green and vigorous as they were when he first formed them. One cannot
even like him, but nevertheless it is impossible to deny that he can
not only amuse but instruct, and that much would have been forgotten
but for his dictated notes about the Cambridge of his youth.
It was a nobler University before that age, and it has risen perhaps
even to greater heights since. Gunning saw the University of Beverley
and the Seniors of Trinity shine once more as the University of Whewell
and Macaulay, of Darwin, Tennyson, and scores of great and good
men.[24]
That the improvement in days to come may equal if not surpass that
which Gunning witnessed is the prayer of him who has made the
“Reminiscences” the subject of this lecture.
FOOTNOTES:
[18] He means that Cambridge was, and always had been, Liberal and
Protestant.
[19] A series of letters by Gunning’s devoted nurse, Miss Mary Beart,
was published in the _Cambridge Review_ by Mr. A. T. Bartholomew, of
the University Library, and has been reprinted. His “Reminiscences”
were not received with favor by the authorities: only one Head of
a house, Dr. Benedict Chapman, Master of Caius, appears among the
subscribers.
[20] The practice of sizars waiting in Hall on the fellows seems to
have been discontinued at an early date. Dr. Bass Mullinger alludes to
complaints made in the seventeenth century that servants were taking
the place of poor scholars. To Dr. T. G. Bonney of St. John’s I owe
many valuable hints on this and other subjects of a kindred nature.
His “A Septuagenarian’s Recollections of St. John’s,” printed in the
_Eagle_, the College Magazine, June, 1909, was most useful to me.
[21] The colleges were everything, the University a mere degree-giving
Corporation, says the late Mr. J. W. Clark in his “Memories and
Customs” (1820-1860), reprinted from the _Cambridge Review_, 1909.
[22] Gordon is introduced by Lord Lytton in one of his novels--I think
“Pelham.”
[23] A caricature of Mr. Peck is preserved in the combination room,
Trinity College. He is riding a pony laden with farm produce.
[24] In justice to Gunning it ought to be said that men like Adam
Sedgewick, the great geologist, regarded him with affection, and during
his long illness the lady who attended him as nurse was devoted to
him; and her record of the patience with which the old man bore his
sufferings referred to above, deserves to be read by those who would
form a fair estimate of his character. But whilst not denying my author
all good qualities, I maintain that he not only depicts but represents
an age singular for its coarseness of feeling and absence of ideals;
though, to do him justice, he shewed himself a consistent opponent of
the evils of his time in Cambridge.
LECTURE V
CREEVEY PAPERS--THE REGENCY
It is time we entered better society than we have been in for the
last few lectures. Of course much depends on the meaning of the word
“better.” I do not think we need attach any moral significance to it.
Let me at once admit that by better, I mean more select, or, perhaps,
“exclusive” is the right term. For most people in the time of which
I am about to treat it was necessary to be born to good society in
order to obtain an entrance to it. Yet there were exceptions. Whilst
there were men like Brougham whose genius compelled recognition,
though they were made to feel that they neither were nor could be
members of the inner circle; there were others, without even his social
qualifications, who took their place therein and made themselves felt
and even feared by the highest in the land. Such a man was the author
of the papers from which I shall borrow so much to-day; nor can we
forget that the rival in _ton_ to the Prince Regent himself, the first
gentleman in Europe, was Brummell, the tradesman’s son.
The subject of my remarks to-day will be at first mainly political, not
that I have any desire to raise controversial questions; but one is
bound to do so, when speaking of English life during the great war with
Napoleon, which bears so striking an analogy to the present. There is a
marked tendency to-day to say that the conduct of our statesmen and of
society in general contrasts unfavourably with that of men of a century
ago; and I think I shall be able to prove conclusively that, under very
different conditions the passions of men are much the same as formerly,
and that, if the advantage is on either side, it is with the present
rather than with the past.
I feel I have set myself a very difficult task in attempting to define
a Whig in the later years of George III.
The strength of the party was the new aristocracy created by Henry VIII
with the spoils of the monasteries, of which the Cavendishs, Russells,
and other houses were the leaders.[25] They were naturally strongly
Protestant: and their immense power dates from the Revolution in
1688. Their rivals, the Tories, were in opposition till the accession
of George III; and, as their sympathies were all on the side of the
exiled Roman Catholic Stuarts, they had little or no influence. When,
however, George III, a prince born in England, ascended the throne,
the Tories, who bore him no grudge for his treatment of the exiled
royal family, rallied to the young monarch, who was resolved not
to submit, as his grandfather had done, to the tyranny of the Whig
oligarchy. Henceforward the Tories were on the side of the Crown,
whilst their opponents resisted its encroachments. The revolt of the
American colonies, provoked by Mr. Grenville’s Stamp Act, made the
Whigs oppose the King, who was determined to coerce his disaffected
subjects. When the French Revolution broke out, this party sympathised
with the republicans; and were opposed to the war which began in 1792.
Their following consisted of the dissenters and intellectuals: the
former drawing their strength from the commercial classes, and the
latter consisting of young men, enamoured with the cult of reason and
extremely susceptible to new ideas. The bulk of the nation, however,
the Church, the country gentry, the farmers, profiting by war prices,
and even the lower orders, was Tory. The non-aristocratic members of
the Whig party were often great sufferers. They were exposed to mob
violence, as in the case of Dr. Priestley, to social ostracism, and
to vindictive prosecutions by the government. But the great houses
maintained their position and were too strongly entrenched in it to be
seriously disturbed.
Thus we have the spectacle of liberal ideas being championed by a
coterie of great families, haughty, withdrawn from common folk, and
so exclusive that it was almost impossible to gain admission to their
circle. Hereditary exercise of power extending over fully a century
made them skilled politicians; and when they recruited talent from
the middle classes, the Whigs made their allies feel their dependence
upon the ruling caste. Neither the philosophy of Edmund Burke in one
generation, nor the versatility of Henry Brougham in another, prevented
either from the sense of being in a state of dependence on their
patrons.
One man, however, without the advantages of birth or wealth, enjoyed
the privilege of moving freely in this charmed circle, in the person
of Mr. Creevey, whose memoirs only appeared in 1903. His editor, Sir
Herbert Maxwell, describes his abilities as hardly of the second
order, but I must confess that, considering the position he occupied
in the party, I cannot share his opinion. Married to a Mrs. Orde and
apparently living on his wife’s moderate fortune, sitting for Thetford,
a close borough of the Duke of Norfolk’s, and after his wife’s death
subsisting on an income of £200 ($1000) a year, he never stooped to
flatter, gave his advice without fear or favour, and, when the Duke
put him out of his seat in the House of Commons, wrote the head of the
English peerage a letter which shewed that he looked on his patron as
an equal who had treated him very shabbily. From the Duke’s reply to
“My dear Creevey” it is easy to see that his Grace recognised that he
had offended, not a humble dependant, but a man of great political and
social influence.
I am now going to select a few passages dating from the rupture of
the Peace of Amiens in 1803 and onwards, shewing how England was rent
by faction, even in the most perilous days of the war with Napoleon.
Remember that often the country was fighting alone against perhaps the
greatest genius the world has ever seen, and that her position at times
appeared to be almost hopeless.
In 1804, when Buonaparte’s camp was established at Boulogne ready for
the invasion of England, party feeling ran extraordinarily high. Pitt
was becoming impatient of the incompetence of his friend Addington;
and, as a party manœuvre, he moved for an inquiry into the conduct
of Admiral Lord St. Vincent and was supported by Fox. Creevey writes
that he is convinced that the accused is innocent; but still he felt
bound to vote with Fox. “I am,” he says, “more passionately attached
every day to party. I am certain that without it nothing can be done.”
A month later the King’s madness was coming on, and Creevey hopes
that this attack will make an end of him as a ruler. “I hope that
the Monarch is done and can no longer make ministers.” Later on, the
prospect of disaffection in Ireland fills Creevey with hopes that
Pitt’s position may become impossible; he says, “The country engaged
in a new war unnecessarily undertaken and ungraciously entered upon,
the Catholics discontented, and the Opposition unbroken. If such a
combination of circumstances does not shake the Treasury bench, what
can?” The next year, 1805 (Trafalgar), brings to Mr. Creevey and his
friends the hope that Mr. Pitt may be exposed for lending Government
money to a firm which had recently gone bankrupt. In 1808, when Sir
Arthur Wellesley began his work in the Peninsula, the convention
of Cintra made him most unpopular; and the nation was, says Sir
Herbert Maxwell, “almost unanimous in demanding his degradation if
not his death.” Mr. Whitbred writes to Mr. Creevey, “I grieve for the
opportunity which has been lost of acquiring national glory, but I
am not sorry to see the Wellesley pride a little lowered.” The next
year witnessed the lamentable failure of the Walcheren Expedition,
and Wellesley’s victory of Talavera. Captain Graham Moore, brother
to Sir John Moore, writes to Creevey: “The Cannings are in a damned
dilemma with this expedition and the victory of Talavera. They mean,
I understand, to saddle poor Lord Chatham with the first, but who can
they saddle the victory with? They cannot attack the Wellesleys as they
did my poor brother. What a cursed set you (politicians) are.” The
passage of the Douro by Wellesley led to Mr. Whitbred addressing the
General in most complimentary terms; but the war occupied people’s
thoughts but little, the main interest being centred in the exposure
of the scandalous sale of commissions in the army by Mrs. Clarke, a
friend of the Duke of York’s. Two years later, in 1811, Creevey takes
encouragement from the number of sick in the army of Portugal and hopes
it may bring about peace, and when the war in Spain was nearing its
victorious conclusion a friend writes to him, abusing Wellington.
These remarks are indeed the mild utterances of leaders of a party
more interested in disparaging their political opponents than in the
progress of the war. When we turn to the extreme wing of the party we
find Napoleon a hero and his defeat a calamity:
“But even with such mighty odds against him the towering and gigantic
genius of Napoleon would have defied them all, if English money
had not bribed some of his generals. It was this, and this only,
that completed his downfall. To talk of the Duke of Wellington as
the conqueror of Napoleon is an insult to the understanding of any
intelligent man; and for Lord Castlereagh to have boasted of having
subdued him as his lordship was wont to do, was pitiful, was wondrous
pitiful.” So wrote Lady Ann Hamilton; in the same strain also at an
earlier period spoke Mr. Fox of the virtues of his country’s greatest
and most determined enemy. It is thus that history repeats itself in
the wars my country has waged in her long history.
I now pass to a character very different from Creevey’s, to the man who
ruled the fashionable world with an authority even more undisputed than
that of the Prince of Wales, Beau Brummell, the prince of the dandies.
The Beau had no advantages of birth and only a moderate fortune. It
is often the custom to regard him as a mere coxcomb, the outcome of a
frivolous society fitted only to point a moral and adorn a tale. I
venture to take a more charitable view of him and to give my opinion
that he owed his ascendancy to something more than extravagance of
dress and unbounded impudence.
To take but a single example: Everybody knows the story of Brummell
walking with Lord Alvanley in the Park being cut by the Prince Regent
and enquiring in an audible voice, “Who is your fat friend?” There
is very little point in the remark except its offensiveness. But the
biographer of Brummell, Captain Jesse, got the true version from a
friend who witnessed the incident. It was not in the Park, but at a
ball given by Brummell, Lord Alvanley, and two others. The Prince was
not invited, because of his quarrel with Brummell; but, as everybody
was going, he signified his pleasure to be present. When he arrived
he greeted Lord Alvanley and his other two hosts, cutting Brummell
pointedly, thereby insulting one of his entertainers. The Prince had by
a gross breach of good taste placed himself in an impossible position.
If he did not know his host, his host had a right to regard him as an
uninvited intruder; therefore the question was a snub, unanswerable
even by the Regent. The life of Brummell is the record of much folly
and frivolity, ending with a long exile in Calais, which terminated in
imbecility and death in an almshouse. Nevertheless this famous dandy,
fop though he was, is one of those butterflies whose useless lives
at least add to the beauty of the scene. Nor is it for the recorder
of his time to point the finger of scorn at him. Absurd as his ideal
was, it was not wholly contemptible. His vanity was not malicious,
he was at least no sycophant, he held his own among aristocrats, who
were as vulgar as they were arrogant. He shamed his associates into
decent manners, at a period when social polish was hardly skin deep.
He insisted on personal cleanliness in days when it was disregarded by
the highest in the land. He had the art of making friends who stood by
him in his hours of poverty and distress. The Duke of York, with all
his faults the best liked son of George III, the Duchess, one of the
most amiable ladies of the day, the Duke of Beaufort, and many others
remained staunch to him as long as he lived. He was a sharer in the
follies of his day, but so far as I know he was not so heartless in his
vices as many a greater man; nor did he pander to the vices of others.
We can laugh at his absurdities, without having that feeling of disgust
with which we regard many of the faults of his august rival, the Prince
Regent. How delightful, for example, is his criticism of the Duke of
Bedford’s coat! On one occasion his Grace asked the Beau his opinion of
his new clothes. “Turn round,” said Brummell, “now stand still.” Then
taking the garment by the lapel, he exclaimed, “Oh, Bedford, do you
call this a coat?”
The thing which strikes us most in connection with the halcyon period
of the dandies, with its follies and lavish expenditure, is that it
coincided with some of the most anxious days through which England ever
passed, and with the age when distress and poverty were most keenly
felt. Fashionable life was indeed fast and furious and characterised
by its reckless extravagance. Everybody gambled: every possible event
was made the subject of a bet. The turf was, as it is to-day, crowded
with blacklegs; and the issue of a great fight in the prize ring was
watched with more trembling anxiety than that of a battle in Spain or
Flanders. The prevalence of drunkenness was universal; every memoir
of the time records drinking-bouts innumerable. The fine gentleman
garnished every sentence with an oath and even used bad language in
his letters to his friends. Duelling was universal. Pitt, the Duke
of Wellington, Castlereagh, nearly all the leading statesmen, had to
fight. Even the Duke of York, though very near the throne, ‘met’ the
Duke of Richmond. But with all its failings the men of fashion had one
merit: though they were almost incredibly coarse, brutal, and selfish,
no one could reproach them with softness. They may have been bad, but
they were men. If they went to see prize-fighters beat each other into
a jelly, they were ready enough to use their fists themselves. If they
gambled the cards and the dice, they did so at the risk of ending
their days in a debtor’s prison. Many of them died ruined in purse and
bankrupt even of honour. If they pursued their amours unscrupulously,
there was always the risk of facing an outraged relative’s pistol. The
spice of danger was never absent from their lives. One alone could
share in all their pursuits, and be exempt from peril. He could drink
himself drunk without danger of his words being called in question; he
could ruin wives and daughters and no one would raise a hand against
him; he could engage in shady transactions on the turf, and men made it
a point of honour to shield his fair fame. If others were extravagant,
they dissipated their own patrimony; and when that was gone, there was
nothing for it but to starve. But he had only to fall back on national
resources, and the taxpayer extricated him from his difficulties. It is
because of its immunity, that the profligacy of George, as Prince, as
Regent, and as King is so detestable.
It has been customary, I think, to underrate his abilities. Thackeray
has a most misleading passage about his relation with the Whigs. “At
first he made a pretence of having Burke and Fox and Sheridan for
his friends. But how could such men be serious before such an empty
scapegrace as this lad...; what had these men of genius in common
with their tawdry young host of Carlton House? That fribble the
leader of such men as Fox and Burke! That man’s opinions about the
constitution--about any question graver than the button of a waistcoat
or the sauce of a partridge worth anything! The friendship between the
Prince and the Whig Chiefs was impossible. They were hypocrites in
pretending to respect him, and if he broke the hollow compact between
them, who shall blame him?” But if we turn to Creevey, we shall see
that George played the game with the Whigs with consummate skill. Not
that he cared a straw for the constitution or political matters. He
wanted leisure, comfort, influence,--above all, money. He used the
Whigs for his purposes in the question of the Regency, and in order to
extort money from the nation. They were ready enough to serve him in
defeating Pitt and their other opponents; but he, once he was Regent
in 1812, with his father, the old King, hopelessly insane, flung them
aside as no longer useful and made the Tory government uphold the two
things now to his interest to conserve,--the _status quo_ and the power
of the Crown.
No one has ever doubted the power of fascination exercised by George,
which was due not less to his clever adaptability, than to his high
position. What reader of Lockhart’s “Life of Scott” can forget the
dinner party when the King and Sir Walter exchanged mutual badinage in
the freest manner? We find the same in Creevey regarding the extreme
affability with which he treated him and the Whig leaders at Brighton,
when Prince Regent. George’s charm of manner and the ease with which
he could adapt himself to his company and forget to all appearance
his royal dignity in social intercourse was one of his most powerful
political assets which he used to the fullest advantage.
The influence exercised by him was almost wholly evil. Head of the
state in the days of its greatest military glory, when the moral and
political influence of England was paramount in Europe; living in the
days of great industrial and mechanical triumph, in which his country
had the fullest share; confronted as King with some of the gravest
social problems, which its poets and philosophers were taxing their
utmost to expose and remove,--the marvel is that any man could have
occupied such a position, and yet interested himself almost exclusively
in frivolous pleasures and sensual amours.
I do not think that it is too harsh a verdict to say that George IV’s
example acted like a poison to the social life of several generations.
Vice was rampant enough in English society before he came to manhood;
but his father had done much to set an example to his nobility of a
pure domestic life, and to encourage simple tastes and pleasures.
Gambling and profligacy went on despite the King; but his son led
the orgies of extravagance. His taste was atrocious. What can be more
monstrous than the Pavilion at Brighton? Read Thackeray’s description
of his coming of age fête at Carlton House, quoted from the _European
Magazine_, 1784: “The saloon may be styled the _chef-d’œuvre_, and
in every ornament discovers great invention. It is hung with a
figured plush.... The window curtains, sofas, and chairs are of the
same colour. The ceiling is ornamented with emblematical paintings,
representing the Graces and Muses, together with Jupiter, Mercury,
and Apollo and Paris. Two ormolu chandeliers are placed here, etc.,
etc.”[26] The coronation was a monstrous exhibition of extravagance.
For the feast in Westminster Hall, where the Champion of England,
“mounted on a horse, borrowed from Astley’s theatre, rode into the
Hall,” more than eight hundred dozen of wine and one hundred gallons
of punch were provided. Vulgarity distinguished the period of the
‘First Gentleman in Europe.’ Countless families were brought to ruin by
association with him, and at no time that I can call did more eminent
people die by their own hands. As Thackeray says: “There is no greater
satire on that proud society ... than that it admired George!”
One episode which perhaps throws as much light as anything upon the
manners and morals of the time is the trial of Caroline of Brunswick,
the unhappy, if indiscreet, consort of George IV. Before making the
attempt I am afraid I must go back to 1795, when the Prince of Wales,
on the report of his not too refined sailor brother, decided to offer
his hand to that princess. He got very well paid by the country for the
sacrifice. His income was raised from £60,000 ($300,000) to £125,000
($625,000); for the preparations for the wedding he got £27,000
($135,000); a further grant of jewels and plate, or cash to buy them,
£28,000 ($140,000). Then came £15,000 ($130,000) to complete Carlton
House; and the Princess, his wife, was in addition offered an allowance
of £50,000 ($250,000) a year. For some reason--I should say she was the
only princess who ever did so--Caroline accepted less than was offered
as income; namely, £35,000 ($175,000).
It is true George also wanted his debts, amounting to a trifle
of £600,000 ($3,000,000) odd, paid, and failed to get it; still,
considering the value of money in those days, and that times in England
were worse than had been known,--wars, taxes, bad seasons, the poor in
abject distress, Pitt distracted how to raise money, sedition rampant,
and no very glorious period for the British arms,--he certainly did not
sell himself cheap. Of the miserable marriage which ensued little need
be said. From the time the Prince raised his bride, when she tried to
kneel, and said to Lord Malmesbury, “Harris, I am not well; get me a
glass of brandy,” to her death twenty-six years later, it is one long
discreditable story. But I allude to it for a personal reason. I have
myself seen two of the counsels of the Queen in the celebrated trial.
Dr. Lushington was a friend of my family’s, and I was at a school in
Brighton which Lord Brougham used to visit; and--I believe I am correct
in saying this--I actually received one of the prizes when he gave
them away. I certainly have a book on my shelves which, I fancy, I got
on that occasion. It assuredly does not make a man feel young when he
realises that he has seen and can remember men who not only witnessed
but took a very prominent part in a trial which was held ninety-six
years ago.
Let me, however, recapitulate the events which led up to the great
scene in the House of Lords. George as Prince of Wales hated his wife
from the first, and after the birth of the Princess Charlotte refused
to have anything to do with her. On April 30, 1796, the Prince wrote
a letter to the Princess in which he said: “Our inclinations are not
in our power, nor should either of us be held answerable to the other,
because nature has not made us suitable to each other.... I shall now
finally close this disagreeable correspondence, trusting that, as we
have completely explained ourselves to each other, the rest of our
lives will be passed in uninterrupted tranquillity.”
To do George justice, his wife does not seem to have been attractive.
He had excellent taste in dress and deportment; and Caroline was far
from being a model of refinement in appearance or manners, whilst her
choice of company was never discreet. The old King always treated
her with kindness and even affection, but he found it necessary to
warn her to be more careful in the selection of her society. In 1804
the Prince of Wales instituted a “Delicate Enquiry,” which four
Lords were appointed to conduct, with the result that the behaviour
of the Princess was pronounced not _un_satisfactory. In the years
which followed there were constant quarrels and recriminations about
the education of their daughter, the Princess Charlotte of Wales,
a high-spirited girl who stood up boldly to the ill treatment she
received at her father’s hands, and defended her mother. In 1814 the
Princess of Wales left England for her famous travels. Two years later
the Princess Charlotte married Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, and settled down
at Claremont, a beautiful place purchased for her by the nation. The
young couple were thoroughly happy, the people looked forward to being
one day ruled over by a beloved and virtuous queen. The incredible
scandals of the family of George III were being forgotten, when the
news came that the Princess was dead.
I shall _never_ get to the trial! I must digress once more. What ensued
was almost farcical. Despite the fact that George III had an immense
family, he had no grandchildren. All his elderly sons hastened to get
married. The Prince Regent was very little married to his wife, and
very much so to various other ladies; the Duke of York had married
happily, and was, if not always faithful, a kindly husband; but he had
no family. The Duke of Cumberland had married a princess of whom the
royal family disapproved, and perhaps he was more hated by the nation
than any member of the house of Hanover. Among other things, many
firmly believed that he was really guilty of the murder of his servant,
Sellis. The idea of his coming to the throne was dreaded on all sides.
But there was no lack of _nominally_ unmarried Royal Dukes,--Clarence,
Sussex, Kent, and Cambridge. The nearest persons to the succession,
who had families, were the King of Würtemburg, his brother, and their
sister the Princess Frederica Buonaparte. It became necessary for the
Royal Dukes to take wives in accordance with the Royal Marriage Act of
1772;[27] and, though they had not only themselves but other ladies and
their children to consider, these noble princes presented themselves
at the altar of Hymen. Not, however, without some forethought, as the
following remarks of the Duke of Kent to his friend Mr. Creevey testify:
The Duke thought that his brother Clarence would marry, but that
his price would be too high for the ministers to accept, viz., “a
settlement such as is proper for a prince who marries expressly for
a succession to the Throne,” and in addition the payment of all his
debts, and a handsome provision for each of his ten natural children.
Kent, being next in the succession, was ready to do it cheaper. “It
is now twenty-seven years that Madame St. Laurent and I have lived
together, ... and you may well imagine, Mr. Creevey, the pang it will
occasion me to part with her.” She need not have very much; but a
certain number of servants and a carriage are essentials. Being a “man
of no ambition,” the Duke of Kent wanted only £25,000 ($100,000) a year
in addition to his present income if he took a wife--the same sum as
York had when he married in 1792,--and Kent was generously prepared to
make no further demands because of the decreased value of money since
his brother’s allowance was made. “As to the payment of my debts,” he
concluded, “I don’t call them great. The nation, on the contrary, is
greatly my debtor.” So it is; for he married, and became the father of
Queen Victoria.
The Princess Caroline had left England in 1814 and had been touring in
the Mediterranean ever since. At first she was attended by some English
in her suite; but these gradually dropped off, leaving Her Royal
Highness without any of her husband’s subjects about her. We need not
follow her in her travels or adventures. It is enough to say that she
visited very out-of-the-way places and mixed with the sort of people no
ordinary lady, not to say a royal Princess, could be expected to meet.
She loaded her courier, Bergami, with honours and favours, she founded
an order of knighthood when she visited Jerusalem and made him Grand
Master. She had procured for him the title of Baron. Her conduct and
the familiarities she permitted were, to say the least, indiscreet.
Undoubtedly she had laid herself open to a serious charge of misconduct.
The Prince Regent resolved to do his best to get rid of his hated wife
by trying to obtain a divorce. But not only law but also public opinion
was against this. He had driven his wife away with every possible
insult, he had kept her apart from her daughter, the Queen, his mother,
had refused to receive her as Princess of Wales at court. And if, in
desperation, Caroline had failed in her duty, Europe rang with stories
of the immorality of the Regent, and the common people were heart and
soul on the side of his wife. As a divorce seemed hopeless, attempts
were made to bribe Caroline to renounce her titles and live on a large
income out of England. Matters came to a climax when George III died.
If George IV was King, his wife was Queen of England; and she was
resolved to return to the country and maintain her rights.
This miserable matrimonial squabble with all its sordid details rapidly
assumed the dimensions of a political struggle which rent the country
in twain. The Whigs had never forgiven George for using them as long
as he was Prince of Wales and throwing them over when he became Regent
in 1812. They therefore espoused the cause of the Queen; and as far
as possible--for they had little admiration of her conduct--defended
her. The Whig lawyers rallied to her cause, notably Henry Brougham,
who, despite his great talents, had suffered from the exclusiveness
of the great Whig families. As a parvenu, high political office was
closed to Brougham, but the case of the Queen gave him an unrivalled
chance as a lawyer. More honest and unselfish and almost as useful to
Queen Caroline was Alderman Wood, a prominent citizen of London, who
more than once filled the office of Lord Mayor. Despised by the polite
society of the time, called by the King, with his usual delicacy, “that
beast Wood,” the alderman understood better than anyone the effect of
the Queen’s return to the country. He knew that, however great her
indiscretions, her wrongs would win her popular sympathy, and that
her courage in facing her accusers would be sure to range the nation
on her side. That he was no vulgar demagogue is attested by the facts
that the royal family often sought his counsel; that it is due to his
advice that Queen Victoria was born in England; and that he was the
first baronet she created shortly after her accession to the throne.
But of all the Queen’s friends there is no one who was more honest
and faithful than that gaunt Scotch spinster, the Lady Ann Hamilton,
whose memoirs were published when she was very old, without her consent
and greatly to her distress. The daughter of the Duke of Hamilton
and sister to the radical Lord Archibald Hamilton, she was six foot
high, awkward and ungainly, and an object of ridicule to Caroline
and her friends. They called her Joan of Arc, and shewed her no
consideration and little courtesy. Yet in her hours of trial Caroline
had no truer or stauncher friend. Her “Secret History of the Court of
England,” published under the circumstances to which I have alluded,
is extraordinarily scurrilous, but it reflects the fierceness of party
spirit which animated the Whig faction; and I may have to recur to it.
George III died on January 29, 1820. The first act of his successor was
to refuse to allow the new Queen’s name to appear in the prayer for the
Royal family. But on the 7th of June Her Majesty entered London. The
road from Westminster Bridge to Greenwich was thronged with spectators.
“She travelled,” says Grenville, “in an open landau, Alderman Wood by
her side and Lady Ann Hamilton and another woman opposite. Everybody
was disgusted at the vulgarity of Wood sitting in the place of honour,
whilst the Duke of Hamilton’s sister was sitting backwards in the
carriage.” ... “It is impossible,” he adds, “to conceive the sensation
created by this event. Nobody either blames or approves of this sudden
return, but all ask, What will be done next? How is it to end?”
Events moved rapidly. The Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, produced the
famous green bag, full of incriminating documents, in the House of
Lords, but the Queen did not flinch. It was even proposed to bring her
to trial under the fourteenth century act of treasons, 23 Edw. III.
Finally, however, the King’s advisers determined, not to try the
Queen, but to introduce a bill into the House of Lords depriving her
of all royal titles and dignities and divorcing her from her husband.
But in order to carry the bill an investigation into her conduct was
necessary, so that she was practically, if not actually, tried.
I propose to ask you to follow the Queen’s case in Creevey’s notes,
and I think we shall gather from them something of the interest with
which people watched it.
The trial began on Aug. 17; and Creevey thus describes the entry of
the Queen. “To describe to you her appearance and manner is far beyond
my powers. I had been taught to believe she was as much improved in
looks as in dignity of manners; it is therefore with much pain I am
obliged to observe that the nearest resemblance I can recollect to this
much injured lady is a toy which you used to call Fanny Royde. There
is another toy of a rabbit or a cat, whose tail you squeeze under its
body, and then out it jumps in half a minute off the ground into the
air. The first of these toys you must suppose to represent the person
of the Queen; the latter the manner by which she popped all at once
into the House, made a _duck_ at the throne, another to the Peers, and
a concluding jump into the chair which was placed for her. Lady Ann
Hamilton was behind the Queen, leaning on her brother Archy’s arm....
She is full six feet high and bears a striking resemblance to one of
Lord Derby’s great deer.”
Brougham and Denman both spoke for the Queen, and she was better
received on the next day, the 18th. Creevey went off to his club and
wrote: “Nothing can be more triumphant for the Queen than this day
altogether.... The Law Officers of the Crown are damnably overweighted
by Brougham and Denman.” The next day the facts adduced by the Attorney
General made things look bad. A less numerous and reputable crowd
appeared to cheer the Queen on the 22d. “Now,” writes Creevey, “her
danger begins.” But then things began to mend; the witness in whom
the prosecution had most confidence was a certain Teodoro Majocchi.
Brougham forced him to contradict himself, and seeing how he was
being driven into admissions, the witness continually replied, _Non
mi ricordo_, “I don’t remember,” a phrase which became for a time
proverbial. There were very few English witnesses, but when Creevey, on
Aug. 25, mentioned this to the Duke of Wellington, his Grace replied,
“Ho! but we have a great many English witnesses--officers.” “And this
was the thing,” writes Creevey, “which frightened me most.” On the
26th the evidence of a chambermaid gave trouble, and Creevey is angry
with the Queen. “This,” to quote him, “gives considerable--indeed very
great advantage--to the case of that eternal fool, to call her (the
Queen) no worse name.” A few days later, Sept. 8, he calls her “the
idiot.”--The next day the House adjourned till the 3d October, and
the divorce clause was dropped. Creevey remarks that now the Bill of
Pains and Penalties was really directed against the King: its object
being “to declare the Queen an abandoned woman, and the King a fit
associate for her!” When the House sat on Oct. 3, Mr. Brougham made
his great speech for the defence. On the 6th it came out that the
husband of the Queen’s friend, Lady Charlotte Lindsay, had sold his
wife’s letters to the Treasury. On the 9th Creevey reports “the town
literally drunk with joy at the unparalleled triumph of the Queen.” But
at 4 P.M. the weather changed. Two Naval officers, Flynn and Hownam,
were called for the defence, and broke down under cross examination, so
that the Queen’s guilt became almost certain. Then the government lost
its advantage by committing the mistake of letting a witness, who was
to have been indicted for perjury, leave the country. On the 13th the
Duke of Norfolk wrote to Creevey, saying that “if this horrible bill”
passed, he would feel no regret that as a Roman Catholic he could not
take his seat as a Peer. At last, on Oct. 24, the trial was nearing its
end and Denman began to sum up. The attack he made on the King and the
Duke of Clarence, who had been especially bitter against the Queen, is
a striking example of the freedom allowed to a British advocate. He
compared the case to the dismissal of the virtuous Octavia by Nero and
the examination of her servants by his infamous minister, Tigellinus.
He looked at the Duke of Clarence and declared that he ought to come
forward as a witness and not whisper slanders against Caroline. The
Queen, he said, might well exclaim, “Come forth, thou slanderer, and
let me see thy face! If thou would’st equal the respectability of an
Italian witness, come forth and depose in open court. As thou art, thou
art worse than an Italian assassin! Because, while I am boldly and
manfully meeting my accusers, thou art plunging a dagger unseen into my
bosom.”
In his peroration Denman made a most unlucky slip, but he faithfully
reproduced the irrational attitude of public opinion.[28] The people
believed the Queen guilty and yet desired her acquittal. She had
suffered so cruelly, she had been so shamefully treated, her ruin had
been sought by employing spies against her, her accusers were worse
than she. So Denman quoted the divine words to less guilty accusers of
a sinful woman--“Go and sin no more,”--whereupon a wag wrote:
“Most gracious Queen, we thee implore
To go away and sin no more;
But if that effort be too great,
To go away, at any rate.”
Then followed the debate, and on the 6th of November, even with the
aid of eleven of the bishops, there was a majority of only 28 in
favour of the Bill of Pains and Penalties. The feeling of the peers
was in accordance with Denman’s peroration. Caroline was guilty but
ought not to be punished. Said Lord Ellenborough: “No man who had
heard the evidence would say that the Queen of England was not the
last woman in the country which a man of honour would wish his wife to
resemble, or the father of a family would recommend as an example to
his daughters.” (_Loud cheers._) But he voted against the bill. On Nov.
8 it was proposed that the divorce clause should be tacked on to the
bill. Creevey writes (Nov. 10): “_Three times three!_ if you please,
before you read a word further.--The Bill has gone, thank God! to the
devil. Their majority was brought down to 9 ... and then the dolorous
Liverpool came forward and _struck_. He moved that his own bill be read
this day six months.” “I was a bad boy,” he writes next morning, “and
drank an extra bottle of claret with Foley, Dundas, etc.” I need not
tell the rest of poor Caroline’s story, how public feeling calmed down,
especially when Parliament voted her £50,000 ($250,000) a year. How
she tried to attend the Coronation, how she died, and the King ordered
the body not to be taken through London, and how the people rose and
forced the funeral procession to pass through the city, how at last
she found rest among her ancestors in her native Brunswick. Time will
not permit me to do more than allude to George’s visit to Ireland at
the very time his injured wife was dying, and his speech: “This is one
of the happiest days of my life. I have long wished to visit you. My
heart has always been Irish. Go and do by me as I shall do by you. Go
and drink my health in a bumper. I shall drink all yours in a bumper of
Irish whiskey.”
Well might Byron celebrate the occasion of the Irish visit and the
King’s tumultuous welcome:
“Is it madness or meanness which clings to thee now?
Were he God--as he is but the commonest clay,
With scarce fewer wrinkles than sins on his brow--Such
servile devotion might shame him away.
Ay, roar in his train! Let their orators lash
Their fanciful spirit to pamper his pride.”
I am afraid I have occupied much time with this famous trial. Had I
told you the evidence in the least detail I should only have inspired
disgust. Nor should I have selected the subject except for a special
reason.
Though no results immediately followed, even though George IV recovered
his popularity in a measure,--for he was a very clever and could be a
very charming man,--yet the very fact that the bill was introduced into
the House of Lords ranged public opinion against that branch of the
Legislature as nothing previously seemed to have done. It brought about
the time when the days of the aristocracy as the sole influence in
government were to be numbered. Peers were no longer to be allowed the
enormous privileges they had enjoyed. They had ranged themselves on
the side of the throne in an unjust cause,--not because they cared for
the King,--but because they considered their interests and his to be
identical. The Reform Bill of 1832 was the answer of the English middle
class to the Bill of Pains and Penalties of 1820.
FOOTNOTES:
[25] Disraeli’s “Sybil” gives a scathing portraiture of the great Whig
families in his sketch of the career of the Earls of Marney.
[26] Quoted from Thackeray’s “Four Georges.”
[27] Which made illegal any marriage contracted by a prince of the
blood without the consent of King and Parliament.
[28] I am informed by a friend, Mr. Denman, a grandson of Caroline’s
Counsel, that the words were not used in the speech, which was reported
wrongly in the _Annual Register_.
LECTURE VI
SOCIAL ABUSES AS EXPOSED BY CHARLES DICKENS
Let us revel in the company of a writer who has been perhaps even more
appreciated in America than in his own country: and will you allow
me to express my opinion that the greatest proof of the magnanimity
of your fathers was shown in the fact that they forgave “Martin
Chuzzlewit,” and took its author to their heart? No little man, and
for that matter little nation, can bear to be caricatured. Many even
who possess true greatness cannot endure ridicule. It must remain to
the eternal credit of your country that Charles Dickens was beloved by
it. Nowhere did the creator of “our Elijah Pogram,” Hannibal Chollop,
Mrs. Hominy, and Mr. Scadder find a warmer welcome than in the country
where he discovered their prototypes; and his popularity in America is
a testimony to the good humour and generosity of its people.
My object in this lecture is to endeavour to explain the England which
Dickens described; and I will with your permission preface my remarks
by pointing out some of the disadvantages of an old society, bearing in
mind its advantages also. The England in which Dickens worked was in
many respects simpler in life, yet more fertile in types of character,
than it is at present. I cannot but think that people got more pleasure
out of living than they do in our days. Yet if I may venture upon a
paradox, the world of “Pickwick” was older, and not younger, than the
one in which we are living.
Strictly speaking, modern England is not an “_old_” country, but a new
one. Steam and electricity, the progress of science and the advance of
democratic ideas have inaugurated a new age; and we, as well as you in
America, live in days of experiment rather than of tradition. But the
England of the thirties was an old country. It was changing rapidly,
it is true; yet it is scarce an exaggeration to say that it bore a
greater resemblance to the England of Queen Elizabeth than to that of
the present day; but the institutions of the past, which had changed
very little in character, had become more intolerable as civilisation
advanced; and, consecrated by time, they pressed very heavily on the
many to the great benefit of the few interested in their maintenance.
The main thesis I shall put before you to-day is that it is time that
an edition of Dickens appeared with a good popular commentary; for much
of it is not intelligible even to an English reader at the present day:
and one thing which the volumes should have is a map of the London
which he is so fond of describing. Most of the sites have become so
changed as to be hardly recognisable; and the appearance of the streets
is so altered that one can hardly reconstruct them even in imagination.
It would be no difficult task to find plans and pictures to assist one
in this direction, and the result would, I think, be most illuminating
to the reader. The prisons, for example, of which we read so much, the
Fleet, the Marshalsea, Newgate itself, have all disappeared, and few
now know even where the two former actually stood. As to the notes and
comments which might be written, I hope this lecture may indicate what
I mean.
The first novel I shall take is “Oliver Twist” because it--despite the
charm of the story--is almost unintelligible to the ordinary reader,
where it deals with the conditions of the lives of the very poor and
of the criminal classes. I need hardly remind you of the details.
There is the poor little boy born and bred in the workhouse under Mr.
Bumble the beadle, his being apprenticed, his escape to London, and
his introduction to the thieves’ school kept by the Jew Fagin, the
devilish plot to make him a criminal, his escape, and his restoration
to his family. A character like Fagin’s would be impossible in London
at the present day. There may be equally dangerous criminals; but he
was protected by a system which is now happily entirely obsolete. His
infamous trade was to train up criminals whom he finally handed over to
the arm of the law.
“I say,” said the other (the landlord of the Cripple), “what a time
this would be for a sell. I’ve got Phil Barker here: so drunk that a
boy might take him.” “Aha! but it’s not Phil Barker’s time,” said the
Jew, looking up. “Phil has something more to do, before we can afford
to part with him, so go back to the company, my dear, and tell them
to lead merry lives--_while they last_, ha! ha! ha!”
And again:
“Change it,” exclaimed the Jew (to Nancy).... “I will change it!
Listen to me, you drab. Listen to me, who with six words can strangle
Sykes, as surely as if I had his bull’s throat between my fingers now.
If he comes back and leaves that boy behind him,--if he gets off free,
and dead or alive fails to restore him to me--murder him yourself if
you would have him escape Jack Ketch: and do it the moment he sets
foot in this room, or mind me, it will be too late!”
These were no empty boasts. Fagin had literally the lives of all who
thieved for him in his pocket, and this is the motive of the plot of
the story. The object of Fagin is to get Oliver Twist to commit some
crime and thus be able to hand him over to the police as soon as it
was convenient to do so. Let us see how this could be managed. There
were practically no police. London was protected by a horse patrol in
the suburbs and a small foot patrol in the streets. Each parish had its
own watchman, who might not under any circumstances leave his beat,
not even to prevent a felony. The parish constable or headborough was
paid a ridiculous wage: in the great parish of Shoreditch he received
£4.10.0 ($22.50) a year. Yet it was, what with blackmail and fees, a
lucrative office. If the headborough prosecuted, he could get expenses
at the rate of $6 a day and more, and he could bring in any other
friend who held the same office as a witness--expenses paid.
Crime was prevented by encouraging informers. A man could get £40
($200) for information which led to a capital conviction, and he could
sell the exemption which he also gained from serving in a public office
in the parish for a similar sum. It became actually in the interest
of the thief takers to allow young persons and even children to commit
minor crimes in the hope that sooner or later they would be guilty of
worse offences. It was naturally the prime object of the informer to
obtain a conviction. Fagin combined the work of a receiver of stolen
goods with that of a thief taker.
The administration of the workhouse system was equally bad. The humour
with which Dickens describes Mr. Bumble the beadle, his pomposity, his
courtship of the matron, and his fall, is delightful; but Mr. Bumble,
the visiting magistrates, and the overseers of the poor represented a
state of things almost unthinkable in its brutality. Oliver himself was
nearly being apprenticed to a sweep who would certainly have treated
him much as Crabbe’s “Peter Grimes” treated his apprentice, and this
dialogue between Mr. Bumble and Mrs. Mann, the nurse of the pauper
children, reveals the spirit with which the indigent poor were treated.
“Mrs. Mann, I am going to London.”
“Lawk, Mr. Bumble,” said Mrs. Mann, starting back.
“To London, ma’am,” resumed the inflexible beadle, “by coach. I
and two paupers, Mrs. Mann! A legal action is a-coming on, and the
board has appointed me--me, Mrs. Mann--to depose to the matter at
Clerkenwell....”
“You are going by coach, Sir? I thought it was always usual to send
them paupers in carts.”
“That’s when they’re ill, Mrs. Mann,” said the beadle. “We put sick
paupers in carts in rainy weather, to prevent their taking cold.”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Mann.
“The opposition coach contracts for these two; and takes them cheap,”
said Mr. Bumble. “They are both in a very low state, and we find it
would come two pounds cheaper to move ’em than to bury them--that is,
if we can throw ’em upon another parish, which I think we shall be
able to do, if they don’t die upon the road to spite us. Ha! Ha! Ha!”
When Mr. Bumble had laughed a little his eyes again encountered the
cocked hat; and he became grave.[29]
Here is fiction: let us turn to facts as we find them in a history of
the England of the period:
The parish had the right to apprentice the children of poor parents
to any trade.... Children under this law might be sent to any part of
the Kingdom. “It is a very common practice,” wrote Romilly in 1811,
“with the great populous parishes in London to bind children in large
numbers to the proprietors of cotton mills ... at a distance of 200
miles.... The children, who are sent off by waggon loads at a time,
are as much lost for ever to their parents as if they were shipped off
for the West Indies. The parishes that bind them get rid of them for
ever, and the poor children have not a human being in the world to whom
they can look up for redress ... from these wholesale dealers whose
object it is to get everything that they can wring from their excessive
labours and fatigue.... Instances (and not very few) have occurred
in our criminal tribunals of wretches who have murdered their parish
apprentices that they might get fresh premiums with new apprentices.”
Some manufacturers, it is shocking to state, agreed to take one idiot
for every nineteen sane children.
Even naturally humane men were found to defend these dreadful abuses
in the House of Commons. Here is an extract from a speech: “Although
in the higher ranks of society it was true that to cultivate the
affections of children for their family was the source of every
virtue, yet it was not so among the lower orders.... It would be
highly injurious to the public to put a stop to the binding of so many
apprentices to the cotton manufacturers, as it must necessarily raise
the price of labour and enhance the price of cotton manufactured goods!”
We turn next to the debtor’s prison which is so prominent in the
“Pickwick Papers.” So resolute was Mr. Pickwick not to submit to the
judgment against him in the famous trial that he allowed himself to
be imprisoned in the Fleet. He was first put into the Warden’s room
with several other prisoners. When he entered the room, the others
were absent. “So he sat down on the foot of his little iron bedstead,
and began to wonder how much a year the warden made out of the dirty
room. Having satisfied himself, by mathematical calculation, that the
apartment was about equal in annual value to a freehold in a small
street in the suburbs of London,” etc., etc.
Here we have one of the great abuses of the horrible “debtor’s prisons”
in London. They were jobbed by the officials, and the bare decencies
of life could only be obtained by a heavy payment. The warders charged
£1.1.0. on entrance for “garnish,” which was supposed to provide coals,
candles, brooms, etc., and exorbitant fees were demanded for rooms. The
state of those who could not pay was deplorable. In the prison of the
Court of Requests at Birmingham, according to the Parliamentary papers
of 1844, eight years after “Pickwick” was written, the male prisoners
slept in an attic eleven feet long by sixteen broad on platforms
littered with loose straw. For exercise, at Kidderminster they walked
in a yard thirteen yards square; and their room was without even a
fireplace. For food they were allowed one quarter of a loaf of bread
and were allowed two jugfuls of water for drinking and washing.
In 1827 nearly 6000 persons in London were imprisoned for debt. We read
constantly in Dickens of Chancery prisoners, especially in “Little
Dorrit”; men who had been thrown into gaol to rot there for years
because they could not pay for suits in which they had been quite
unwillingly involved. The absurdity of the system was enhanced by the
fact that they were deprived of any chance of working to pay their
debts. Many were forgotten and left literally to rot. They were not
even allowed to escape by bankruptcy; for unless a man failed in trade
he could not claim that relief, nor could his property be divided among
his creditors. The law thus gave no means of escape to the debtor nor
of payment to the creditor.
Imprisonment for debt was not abolished in England till 1869; and it is
now only allowed by order of the court in the case of small debts which
people can but will not pay.
The horrors of the prisons which Howard and Elizabeth Fry, for all
their gallant efforts, were powerless to remove, gave rise to a wave
of public sentiment which carried their administration to an opposite
extreme. Dickens saw this and exposed the folly of the movement in
“David Copperfield.” You will doubtless remember that David’s old
schoolmaster, Mr. Creakle, of Salem House, suddenly developed from a
brutal pedagogue into an ardent philanthropist, after having become
a Middlesex magistrate, and devoted himself to the well-being of
criminals. Copperfield, as the rising author of the day (Dickens
himself), is invited to see a new model prison and takes his old friend
Traddles with him.
“It was an immense and solid building, erected at a vast expense. I
could not help thinking, as we approached the gate, what an uproar
would have been made in the country, if any deluded man had proposed to
spend one half the money on the erection of an industrial school for
the young or a house of refuge for the deserving old. In the kitchen
repasts were being prepared for the prisoners, so delicate that none of
our soldiers, sailors, labourers, or workmen could hope ever to dine
half so well.”
There, in a most comfortable cell, our friends find Uriah Heep reading
a hymn book, canting and complaining of the toughness of the beef; and
Mr. Littimer, Steerforth’s infamous valet, gently hinting that the milk
supplied might have been adulterated. To illustrate this I turned to
the old numbers of _Punch_ of the day, a study of which, comic paper
though it be, is one of the best illustrations of the current life and
thought of every period since it appeared in 1839. There one finds
innumerable jokes and pictures of convicts enjoying every sort of
luxury, obsequiously waited on by the warders. Prison reform had to be
irrational before it could become sane; for, as David Copperfield says,
“Perhaps it is a good thing to have an unsound hobby ridden hard; for
it’s the sooner ridden to death.”
Next we come to an abuse, on which I must speak with much diffidence,
for no one but a trained lawyer could properly discuss it--the Court
of Chancery. It is the theme of much of Dickens’ best work and is the
whole motive of “Bleak House” and the famous Jarndyce and Jarndyce
lawsuit. The mixture of humour and pathos in the treatment of this
subject tempts me to digress a little before explaining as best I may
the actual state of the law at the time. We are introduced to those
who were interested in the vast machinery of the Court of Chancery,
as the great Jarndyce case drags its slow length along from the Lord
Chancellor down to the starving law writer. We see suitors of every
description like the “man from Shropshire” and “Miss Flyte.” We seem to
smell the musty law papers as we read the book. I confess to feeling
almost maddened by the callous slowness with which Mr. Vholes the
solicitor, who “maintained an aged father in the Vale of Taunton,”
played with the hopes and fears of the anxious suitors. The eminent
respectability of such a practitioner, adds Dickens, was always quoted
whenever a commission sat to see whether the business of the Court
could be expedited. We laugh, but the tears are not far off, at the
humour of such people as Miss Flyte, Mr. Gruppy, Conversation Kenge;
yet we feel the pathos of all the woe and disappointment caused by the
delays of the monstrous machine of the Law.
To Dickens the Court of Chancery represented two things: first it
stood for oppression. It appeared to him a vast system backed by vested
interests, which sucked unhappy suitors into litigation against their
will, fettered and crippled them for the rest of their lives, and, in
many cases, ultimately consigned them to the despairing misery of a
debtor’s prison.
It drove men and women to madness, like poor Miss Flyte, or made them
misanthropes, like Mr. Grindley, “the man from Shropshire.” It made
wretched, half-ruined people hang about the courts day after day
expecting a judgment, it caused houses to fall into ruin, and whole
streets to become deserted because Chancery could not decide to whom
they belonged. Listen to “the man from Shropshire’s” description of his
own case:
“Mr. Jarndyce, consider my case. As there is a heaven above us, this
is my case. I am one of two brothers. My father (a farmer) made a
will and left his farm and stock to my mother for her life. After my
mother’s death, all was to come to me, except a legacy of £300 that I
was to pay to my brother.”
The brother claimed the legacy, Grindley said he had had some of it,
and the brother filed a bill in Chancery.
“Seventeen persons were made defendants in this simple suit.” Two years
elapsed and the Master in Chancery then found there ought to be another
defendant, and all the proceedings were quashed. “The costs at that
time--before the suit had begun, were three times the legacy.”
The brother tried to back out, but the court would not let him. The
whole property was sucked away in a suit which common-sense could have
decided in a day.
The demoralising effect of a court so dilatory and so capricious also
revealed itself in its influence on character. Men and women spent
their lives in waiting for a decision and found it impossible to settle
to any regular calling.
The court was, in fact, like a gigantic lottery. A favourable decision
might make a man wealthy in a day, and with such a prospect it was
impossible for him to settle down to the drudgery of a profession.
In addition to this, so conflicting were the interests involved that
families were divided hopelessly.
How pathetically does Dickens sketch the character of Richard Carstone!
He tries physic, the army, the law, and cannot stick to any as his
vocation. He feels that at any time the Jarndyce case may make him
a rich man. His only hope is to drive it to a conclusion. Under the
influence of Mr. Vholes he learns to distrust his old friend Mr. John
Jarndyce, and even, in part, his betrothed, the sweet Ada, because they
too have interests in the suit. When the case comes to an end by all
the money being absorbed in costs, he dies, despairing yet penitent.
Let us now see how the bare facts, stripped of romance, appear.
The Court of Chancery represents Equity, which is, ideally, law in its
highest aspect, regarded not as interpreted by statute or custom but
from the standpoint of justice tempered by mercy. As such Equity came
to be regarded as more important than Common law; and the Chancery
overshadowed the other courts. The Chancellor rose constantly in
importance, and as the chief of the King’s chaplains and his adviser
in the exercise of the prerogative of mercy he became “the keeper of
the King’s conscience.” As time went on, Equity like Common law was
based on precedent, and its original purpose fell into the background.
The business of the Chancery was continually on the increase, and it
finally became utterly unmanageable. Protracted law suits are certainly
no new thing and in the 15th century there are, I believe, examples of
interminable litigation. At an early date, the “law’s delay” had passed
into a proverb; and nothing was done to remedy the growing evil. The
Lord Chancellor and the Master of the Rolls were the only available
judges; and as population increased and conditions of life became more
complicated, the grievances of the wretched suitors in Chancery became
intolerable. As you know, in the prize ring, when a boxer had got his
adversary into a hopeless position and could treat him as he liked, the
beaten man was said to be “in chancery.”
It is generally supposed that the Chancellor in “Bleak House” is the
famous Lord Eldon, whose tenure of that exalted office is almost
the longest on record. He was a man of many virtues and singularly
kind-hearted,--the description of his reception of the wards in
Chancery in the book before us does ample justice to this trait--and
as a lawyer he ranks among the very foremost exponents of the law of
England. But he knew and valued the merits of the legal system; and
despite the fact of many cases of individual hardship, these were many,
and he was so anxious to give judgments in exact accordance with the
law that he had great difficulty in making up his mind. As a matter of
fact a judgment by Lord Eldon is even now accepted in your country as
well as mine: but his conscientious thoroughness was a great drawback
in delaying the congested business of the court. I will now give some
formal examples of the condition of the Chancery, taken from Spencer
Walpole’s “History of England from A.D. 1816.”
But first let me quote Dean Swift’s description of the law’s delay a
century earlier. It is of course a caricature: but his satire is so
pungent and his wit so satirical that I cannot resist the temptation of
using his famous book.
Swift makes Gulliver explain the law of England to the Houyhnhnms, the
horses who rule over the human Yahoos.
“It is a maxim among these lawyers that whatever hath been done may
be legally done again; and therefore they take special care to record
all the decisions made against common justice and the general reason
of mankind. These, under the name of precedents, they produce as
authorities, to justify the most iniquitous opinions, and the judges
never fail of directing accordingly.
“In pleading they studiously avoid entering into the merits of a case;
but are loud, violent, and tedious, in dwelling on all circumstances
which are not to the purpose. For instance, in the case already
mentioned (a claim to a cow) they never desire to know what claim or
title my adversary hath to my cow; but whether the said cow were red
or black; her horns long or short; whether the field I graze her in
be round or square; whether she was milked at home or abroad; what
diseases she is subject to and the like; after which they consult
precedents, adjourn the cause from time to time, and in ten, twenty, or
thirty years come to an issue.”
* * * * *
Here is a typical undefended Chancery suit. A will which came into
force in 1819 contained bequests to charities. These legacies were
contrary to the Mortmain laws, and were consequently void. The
heir-at-law filed a bill in Chancery to make them so. During 1820 the
trustees of the charities put in their answers. In 1821 the case was
referred to the Master in Chancery to find out who was the heir at law.
By 1823 he was ready with an answer, and the court directed him to give
an account of the property. He did so in 1824. In 1825 the case was set
down for further directions; in 1826 the Master was told to ascertain
the children of the testator’s half-nephews. This took till 1828, when
the case was reported to the House of Commons. The Master was then
still pursuing his enquiries. A defended case was naturally slower. The
case was referred to the Master in Chancery; he reported: exceptions
were then taken to his report, and so on. In about ten years something
probably occurred to make it necessary to begin again. The Masters were
paid by fees and were interested in making a case last. Their incomes
often amounted to as much as from £3000 ($15,000) to £4000 ($20,000)
a year. The amount of law copying was prodigious. In one case it came
to 10,497 folios, for which a charge of six shillings and eight pence
($1.60) for each folio was made. You recollect the poor captain who
sunk to the position of a law-copying clerk. Be sure he was not paid at
this rate.
Such then were a few of the abuses of one branch of the legal system
which Dickens exposed. They have in the main been disposed of since
1873. We cannot, however, leave the subject without a few words on his
inexhaustible fertility in drawing the characters of lawyers.
The profession is represented throughout. We see Mr. Justice Stareleigh
trying Mr. Pickwick and waking up at intervals. Who can forget the
cross-examination of Sam Weller.
“‘Is it a good place?’” Sam is asked. Yes, Sir. “‘Little to do and
plenty to get,’ said Sergeant Buzfuz jocularly. ‘Plenty to get, as the
soldier said when they gave him six dozen,’ replied Sam. ‘You mustn’t
tell us what the soldier or anybody else said,’ remarked the judge,
waking up suddenly. ‘It is not evidence.’” Immortal too are the counsel
in that famous case, the eloquent Buzfuz and the abstracted Stubbin;
nor can we forget the unlucky novice, Mr. Phunky, who ruined the case
for Mr. Pickwick by the way he cross-examined Mr. Winkle.
No profession has risen more in dignity and respectability in England
in recent years than that of the solicitor or attorney. In Scott and
in almost all earlier novelists, the man who prepared the work for
counsel and was engaged in the humbler practice of the courts is nearly
always represented as a rogue. How often do we find him described as a
“miserable pettifogger” and charged with “sharp practice.” It is the
same with Dickens. Even Mr. Perker in “Pickwick,” who is thoroughly
honest, cannot withhold his admiration of Dodson and Fogg’s acuteness.
“‘Dodson and Fogg have taken Mrs. Bardell in execution for her costs,
Sir,’ said Job.
‘No,’ exclaimed Perker, putting his hands in his pockets, and
reclining against the sideboard.
‘Yes,’ said Job. ‘It seems they got a cognovit out of her, for the
amount of ’em, directly after the trial.’
‘By Jove!’ said Perker, taking both hands out of his pockets, and
striking the knuckles of his right against the palm of his left,
emphatically, ‘those are the cleverest scamps I ever had anything to
do with.’
‘The sharpest practitioners _I_ ever knew, Sir,’ observed Lowten.
‘Sharp,’ echoed Perker. ‘There’s no knowing where to have them.’
‘Very true, sir, there is not,’ replied Lowten: and then both master
and man pondered for a few seconds, with animated countenances, as
if they were reflecting upon one of the most beautiful and ingenious
discoveries the intellect of man had ever made, etc.”
In treating of the dishonest little legal practitioners Dickens
indulges his taste for burlesque humour. Witness the scene in which
Dodson and Fogg are visited by Mr. Pickwick, and the two lawyers try to
provoke him to commit an assault or to use slanderous language, and Sam
Weller without ceremony drags his master out of the office. Mr. Sampson
Brass is also a subject of rollicking humour, as is his sister, the
fair Sally. Witness the scene where Brass visits Quilp at his wharf on
the Thames and is compelled to drink spirits neat and almost boiling,
and is made sick by the pipe the little monster makes him smoke; or
when Brass, aided by Quilp’s wife and mother-in-law, is writing a
description of the supposed corpse of his missing client, and recalls
Quilp’s characteristics, “his wit and humour, his pathos and his
umberella.” I confess I do not quite understand how Brass was able to
get Kit imprisoned; our author’s law appears a little stagey. I should
say that type of lawyer had disappeared; but I once did come across a
Dodson and Fogg, though a pianoforte, not a widow, was the cause of my
costly experience.
Let us now turn from the somewhat painful abuses which Dickens
denounces to a more cheerful subject, that of Parliamentary elections.
Here I can speak frivolously, for I am one of those who have grave
doubts whether a good or a bad system of election, in my country at any
rate, matters much, for choose them how you will, the representatives
of the people never seem to represent anything but their own private
interests. Let us take Mr. Pickwick’s experiences at Eatandswill, which
is, I believe, the now disfranchised borough of Sudbury in Suffolk,
about fourteen miles from Bury St. Edmunds, whither Mr. Pickwick
started on his expedition to thwart the plans of Mr. Jingle, and had
his famous experience at the young ladies’ school. His friend, Mr.
Perker, was, you will recollect, the agent of the Hon. Samuel Slumkey.
“‘Spirited contest, my dear Sir,’ said Mr. Perker to Pickwick.
‘I am delighted to hear it,’ said Mr. Pickwick, rubbing his hands.
‘I like to see sturdy patriotism, on whatever side it is called
forth;--and so it’s a spirited contest?’
‘O yes,’ said the little man, ‘very much so indeed. We have opened all
the public houses in the place, and left our adversary nothing but the
beer shops--masterly stroke of policy that, my dear Sir, eh?’”
The prospects however were doubtful, for Mr. Fizkin had thirty-three
electors locked up in the coach house of the White Hart. All the hotels
were full of voters and Mrs. Perker had brought green parasols for
the wives of doubtful supporters of Mr. Slumkey. Then came the day of
nomination and “During the whole time of the polling, the town was in
a perpetual fever of excitement. Everything was conducted on the most
liberal and delightful scale. Exciseable articles were remarkably
cheap at all the public houses.... A small body of electors remained
unpolled until the very last day. They were calculating and reflecting
persons, who had not yet been convinced by the arguments of either
party, although they had had frequent conferences with each. One hour
before the close of the poll Mr. Perker solicited the honour of a
private interview with these intelligent, these noble, these patriotic
men. It was granted. His arguments were brief, but satisfactory. They
went in a body to the poll; and when they returned, the honourable
Samuel Slumkey, of Slumkey Hall, was returned also.”
To persons accustomed to modern Parliamentary elections in England
this passage would need a commentary to be understood. The nomination
and the show of hands amid riotous disorder is a thing of the past.
The protracted poll, lasting in some cases for several days, the
non-resident electors billeted in the inns at the candidates’ expense,
and the whole scene Dickens depicted belongs to another age which is
almost incomprehensible to the England of to-day.
Sam Weller’s story of his father and the voters had more point in those
days than now. Mr. Weller was offered a twenty-pound note ($100) and
it was suggested that if the coach were overturned by the bank of a
canal it might be a good thing. Strangely enough an accident happened.
To quote Sam’s words: “You wouldn’t believe it, sir,” continued Sam,
with a look of inexpressible impudence at his master, “that on the
wery day he came down with those voters, his coach _was_ upset on that
’ere wery spot, and every man of them was turned into the canal.” In
the unreformed Parliament, before 1832, the boroughs had each its own
peculiar electorate; and I am glad to use for my information a book
written by two learned scholars now in America, Mr. and Mrs. Porritt.
In not a few places the election of members was vested in the Mayor
and burgesses, in others the different guilds and corporations were
the electors. In one case the franchise was more democratic even than
now, the very tramps who slept in the town of Preston became voters.
Not infrequently the members were nominated by a local magnate. In many
cases the town sold its nomination to the highest bidder; and this
was occasionally the case at Eatandswill, if so be that it represents
Sudbury. But frequently the electors were the so-called “freemen” of
the borough. The name takes us back to mediæval times, when slavery was
in existence, or to the days when the guilds were close corporations,
and no one not free of them could practise any trade. But in later
times the freedom was a matter of inheritance and could even be
taken up, in some cases, by marriage with a “freeman’s” daughter.
The franchise in many towns was enjoyed only by these freemen, and
in Ipswich, to take an example familiar to me, most of them were
non-resident.
In an election in the “twenties,” which is reputed to have cost the
candidates £30,000 ($150,000), I have been told that they chartered
ships to bring electors from Holland. This is, doubtless, why all
the hotels in Eatandswill were crowded, and explains the elder Mr.
Weller’s adventure by the canal. Bribery was illegal; and in a famous
case in 1819 Sir Manasseh Massey Lopez was fined £10,000 ($50,000) and
imprisoned for two years for practising it at Grampound. But it was an
exceptional case; and the Lords threw out the bill for disfranchising
the borough.
Now we are on the subject of political life I cannot resist reminding
you of a perfectly delightful sketch of a political fraud in the
person of Mr. Gregsbury in “Nicholas Nickleby.” He comes into the story
for no particular reason except to give Dickens the joy of describing
the sort of man he had doubtless observed when he was a pressman in the
House of Commons.
Nicholas is present when the deputation arrives to request Mr.
Gregsbury to resign his seat, and Mr. Pugstyles is its spokesman.
“‘My conduct, Pugstyles,’ said Mr. Gregsbury, looking round upon
the deputation with gracious magnanimity, ‘my conduct has been, and
ever will be, regulated by a sincere regard for this great and happy
country. Whether I look at home, or abroad; whether I behold the
peaceful industrious communities of our island home: her rivers covered
with steamboats, her road with locomotives, her streets with cabs, her
skies with balloons of a power and magnitude hitherto unknown in the
history of aëronautics--I say whether I look at home, etc., etc., I
clasp my hands, and, turning my eyes to the broad expanse above my
head, exclaim, Thank God I am a Briton.’” When even this outburst does
not meet with approval and the deputation presses Mr. Gregsbury to
resign, the member reads a letter he has addressed to Mr. Pugstyles
in which he says, “Actuated by no personal motives, but moved only by
high and great constitutional considerations ... I would rather keep my
seat, and intend doing so.” No, in all the changes time has brought,
one thing does not change--our politicians are still the same.
In “Our Mutual Friend” our author touches once more on the state of the
poor and their terror of “the parish.” No one who has read this novel,
with its wealth of characters amazing even for Dickens--for even in his
other works you fail to find so many types as Bella Wilfer, Mr. and
Mrs. Boffin, Fascination Fledgby, the dolls’ dressmaker, Mr. Silas
Wegg, Mr. Venus, Rogue Riderhood, the Veneerings, to mention only a
few--no one, I say, can ever forget the old washerwoman Betty Higden
and her horror of the workhouse, how it haunted her whole life and gave
an additional terror to death, that thereby she would fall into the
hands of the parish and be buried by it. And in this novel Dickens is
as severe on the injudicious charity of philanthropists and faddists as
he is upon the callousness of the guardians of the poor. There is no
more terrible satire on the mistakes of the education of that age than
his delineation of Bradley Headstone. I have never to my recollection
read any discussion of this character but I have often thought that in
Headstone and Charley Hexam, his pupil, he is giving a warning of the
dangers of modern education.
Universal education was not yet adopted in England, which was the
most backward of countries in this respect. But it was in the air,
and Dickens foresaw that some of the principles adopted would prove
serious to the community. He dwells on the mechanical efficiency of
the teaching; the learning to write essays on any subject exactly one
slate long, for example; on the miscellaneous and useless information
imparted; on a Bible teaching which has nothing to do with vital
religion. Dickens recognised that the education of all classes was
killing individuality, and not fostering moral or spiritual qualities.
He recognised that in the type of Charley Hexam it was encouraging a
desire for “respectability,” consisting, not in taking one’s coat off
to work, but in working in a black coat, which was killing the finer
feelings in which the poor often shew to the advantage of the rich. And
in Bradley Headstone Dickens points out, that all this smug education
was powerless to restrain the elemental ferocity of human nature in
the schoolmaster, who looked natural in Rogue Riderhood’s clothes,
and not himself in his decent black coat. There was latent in him all
the ferocity of a hardened criminal; and recent events are shewing how
powerless education is really to civilise the heart of man.
I have spoken of the need of a map of London to understand Dickens,
and I shall now take an extract from “Oliver Twist” to illustrate this
remark. Oliver has just met with John Dawkins, otherwise the Artful
Dodger, who offered to take him to a lodging. “It was nearly eleven
o’clock when they reached the turnpike at Islington. They crossed from
the Angel into St. John’s Road; struck down the small street which
terminates at Sadlers Wells Theatre; through Exmouth Street and Coppice
Row; down the little court by the side of the workhouse; across the
classic ground which once bore the name of Hockley in the Hole, thence
to little Saffron Hill the Great and so on to when they reached the
bottom of the hill, his (Oliver’s) conductor, catching him by the arm,
pushed open the door of a house near Field Lane.”
Now I almost defy anyone to find all these localities in a modern map.
You would have, in the first place, to start in the middle of London at
the Angel at Islington. Sadlers Wells is now in the midst of a network
of streets. It was only when I turned to Northcock’s history of London,
which has a good map dated 1772, that all was plain. Islington was a
village outside London; Sadlers Wells a suburban resort; Exmouth street
was not yet built;[30] but Coppice row, Hockley in the Hole, and of
course Saffron Hill and Field Lane, were all easily found.
In speaking of this great delineator of human character as now needing
explanation and comment, I have no doubt that he belongs to that small
group of writers whose works belong to all ages. We hear complaints in
England that young people do not read him; and the same were made when
we were young.
But with us, and I believe with you, his popularity from time to time
revives, and no educated man or woman can ignore him. The fact that
he has appealed so strongly to the imagination of America is alone a
proof of the universality of his genius; for, like Shakespeare and
the classics of all countries, his works are the property, not of one
people, but of the world. He is not perfect; we should not love him
so much if he were. He has faults of style, of arrangement, even of
taste. It is easy to criticise; but because of his very excellences,
his humour, his pathos, his wide sympathy, his hatred of injustice
and oppression, it seems almost presumption to endeavour to sing his
praises.
May I conclude with those prophetic words he puts into the mouth of
Martin Chuzzlewit on leaving your country, which he made his own by
denouncing its failings as unsparingly as he did those of his own
mother land, in the hope that both you and we, America and England,
would conquer them and become the common benefactors of humanity.
“‘I am thinking,’ said Mark, ‘that if I was a painter and was called
upon to paint the American Eagle, how should I do it?’
‘Paint it as like an Eagle as you could, I suppose.’
‘No,’ said Mark, ‘that wouldn’t do for me, sir. I should want to
draw it like a Bat for its shortsightedness, like a Bantam for its
bragging, like a Magpie for its honesty, like a Peacock for its
vanity, like an Ostrich for putting its head in the mud and thinking
nobody sees it.’
‘And like a Phœnix for its power of springing from the ashes of its
faults and vices and soaring up into the sky.’
‘Well, Mark, let us hope so.’”
APPENDIX TO LECTURE VI
To shew Dickens’ care in collecting his facts the following report of
a case relating to Yorkshire Schools is of interest. It was supplied
to the author by C. S. Kenny, Esq., Downing Professor of the Laws of
England, Cambridge.
CHAPTER II. THE RELEVANCY OF EVIDENCE
[_Evidence must be confined to the points in issue._]
BOLDRON _v._ WIDDOWS
WESTMINSTER N. P. SITTINGS. 1824.
1 CARRINGTON AND PAYNE 65.
This was an action for defamation. The declaration stated that the
plaintiff kept a school, and had divers scholars; and that the
defendant spoke of him in his business of a schoolmaster certain words
there set out. The words were variously laid in different counts;
but they were, in substance, that the scholars were ill fed, and
badly lodged, had had the itch, and were full of vermin. Some of the
counts laid the loss of certain scholars as special damage. Pleas--the
general issue; and justifications, that the whole of the words were
true.
For the plaintiff, several witnesses proved the speaking of the
words, and that the boys were boarded, educated, and clothed, by the
plaintiff, at £20 a year each, near Richmond in Yorkshire: and the
usher of the school was called to prove that the boys were well fed
and well lodged, and had no itch. In his cross-examination it appeared
that there were between eighty and ninety boys; that about seventy of
them had had a cutaneous disease; and that they all slept in three
rooms close to the roof, with no ceiling; and that there was a general
combing of the heads of the whole school every morning over a pewter
dish, and that the vermin combed out were thrown into the yard; no
boy was free from them. A piece of bread of a perfectly black hue was
shewn him: he did not think the bread in the school so black as that.
The witness having stated that he had himself been at the Appleby
grammar-school, the plaintiff’s counsel wished to ask him what was the
quality of the provisions used by the plaintiff’s school, compared
with those consumed by the Appleby grammar-school.
The defendant’s counsel objected to this.
ABBOTT, C.J. That cannot be asked; what is done at any particular
school is not evidence. You may shew the general treatment of boys at
schools, and shew that the plaintiff treated the boys here as well as
they could be treated for £20 a year each, for board, education, and
clothes.
One of the plaintiff’s scholars was then called to prove the
plaintiff’s good treatment of them.
In cross-examination, the defendant’s counsel wished to ask him
whether the plaintiff did not set the boys to plant potatoes in school
hours?
ABBOTT, C.J. I do not think you can ask this; the issue here being
whether the plaintiff’s scholars were ill fed, badly lodged, had the
itch, and had vermin. Nothing has been said as to their being badly
educated. Their education is not in question here.
_Gurney_, for the defendant, addressed the jury, and called witnesses
to prove the truth of the words.
Verdict for the plaintiff, damages £120.
FOOTNOTES:
[29] The question of the domicile or “settlement” of paupers was the
cause of endless litigation. See Mr. Blake Odgers’ lecture V in “A
Century of Law Reform.” He quotes a judgment in 1724 which has been
preserved in rhyme.
“A woman, having a ‘settlement,’ married a man with none.
The question was, he being dead, if what she had is gone.
Quoth Sir John Pratt, the ‘settlement’ suspended did remain,
Living the husband; but, him dead, it doth revive again.”
[30] It must have been named after Admiral Pellew (Lord Exmouth), who
captured Algiers in 1816.
LECTURE VII
MID-VICTORIANISM. W. M. THACKERAY
The word respectable has a strange history. In the days of the later
Roman Empire its equivalent “spectabilis” was applied to the highest
dignitaries. In France it is a title of honour--“votre respectable
mère” means something very different from “your respectable mother.” In
England respectability is associated with primness, faded clothes, and
possibly necessary penuriousness. One would not seek a way to a lady’s
good graces by describing her as a respectable woman. When we say a
man’s abilities are “respectable,” it is in order to get someone else
to give him employment. It is a word which conveys ridicule ever since
the famous dialogue in Thurtell’s trial for murder:
_Witness._ The prisoner was a respectable man.
_Counsel._ What do you mean by respectable?
_Witness._ Well--er--he kept a gig.
The characteristic of Mid-Victorian society was respectability, and
I shall try to show that its chief exponent W. M. Thackeray was its
prophet.
The English race has always had a bias in favour of what is known as
Puritanism, not only in religion but in life. I think it may be said
of us that we dislike intensely to have a thing forbidden by law, but
love to have many forbidden by custom. We abhor a number of notices
put up to say we must do this or that, that most things are forbidden,
we detest a police who interfere with the ordinary affairs of life and
force us under penalty to submit to trivial regulations. But we have no
objections to the erection of a number of conventions far more irksome
than any legal code of morals and we submit to a police system created
by ourselves, more vigilant, more inquisitive, more given to informing
than any secret service in the world. For what laws were ever devised
more drastic in their operation than those of public opinion, and has
any _vehmgericht_ or inquisition ever judged unseen and condemned
unheard on the report of the police, in a more secret and summary
fashion than that of the tea table of Mrs. Grundy? Never was society
more under the thrall of these dominating influences than in the Early
and Mid-Victorian age.
The reason for this seems plain enough. The eighteenth century had been
distinguished for the coarseness of its language, manners, and morals.
The upper classes combined a good deal of old world politeness with
a surprisingly frank disregard of moral considerations. There were
conspicuous exceptions, but the singular impunity enjoyed by men of
high rank and position made them often callous as to the opinion of
their inferiors. The lower classes were accustomed to brutal sports
and cruel amusements and unrestrained by any effective police, besides
being entirely uneducated. The middle class, which was daily becoming
more and more important to the life of the nation owing to the rapid
development of trade and manufacture, was gradually monopolising
the political control of the nation. It was in this class that the
evangelical and Methodist movements had achieved their chief successes;
and those who composed it were fundamentally serious minded. Under the
Regency and during the reign of George IV and William IV the court was
essentially aristocratic, and neither monarch gave it any prestige on
the side of morality. Queen Victoria took a middle-class view of life;
domesticity was the key-note of her reign. The Prince Consort was the
model husband and father, so correct, so admirable, so exemplary, that
even now we are apt to forget how able and wise a man he was and how
heavy a debt his adopted country owes him.
One of the effects of the Victorian age was that England awoke to
a most amazing sense of its own virtue. People were continually
contrasting the present with the past, to the disadvantage of the
latter. In the ‘forties,’ and even ‘fifties,’ many people could
remember the time when it was unsafe to approach London after dusk on
account of the highwaymen, when men, women, and children were hung
by the score for the merest trifles, when duels were of almost daily
occurrence, when the grossest abuses existed in church and state, when
immorality in the highest quarters flaunted itself unashamed before
the world. Old men could recall a time when to get drunk and use the
foulest possible language was almost necessary, if a man were not to be
written down as a milksop. And the contrast was almost too delightful
to the newly emancipated middle class in their neat villas with trim
gardens, whence they went to church decorously, sat in their select
pew, their large families around them, and thanked God that they were
not as other people’s wicked ancestors had been.
In one of Lever’s novels--I believe--an Irish solicitor was asked by
an Englishman the reason for the success of a famous Counsellor with
juries and replied, “He first butthers them up; and then slithers them
down.” I am going to take the same liberty with that great novelist
W. M. Thackeray, only I protest that my butter is genuine and were I
an Irishman myself I should say it came from the heart. I cheerfully
bow before the genius of England’s master of fiction. His characters
are my friends, his kindly wisdom my delight, his pathos can move me
almost to tears, his cynicism is a constant stimulant. His style is
to me incomparable and fills me with envy and despair. His books are
my best companions in sickness and in health, in depression and in my
most cheerful moments. If I am his critic, it is because he is so old
a friend that I love him alike for his weaknesses and peculiarities
and for his great merits. With the utmost humility I commend his
scholarship and appreciation of the literature of the eighteenth
century. His “Four Georges” and “English Humorists” are to me models of
what literary lectures should be. I could praise him till I wearied my
audience, and all my praise would be absolutely genuine.
No student of Thackeray can fail to admire the way in which he prepared
himself by study for his historical novels. In “Esmond” and the
“Virginians” he saturated himself in the literature of his period. He
could catch the style of the pamphleteer, the newspaper writer; he
reproduces the conversation of the wits so as occasionally to deceive
the very elect. The descriptions of life at Castlewood, of the service
in Winchester Cathedral, the letters of the old Marchioness of Esmond,
Henry Esmond’s contribution to the _Spectator_, the account of the
battle of Wynandael, etc., are all masterpieces. So are some of the
minor characters in these novels--Will Esmond in the “Virginians,” for
example, Father Holt, Esmond’s Jesuit tutor and, above all, Parson
Sampson in the “Virginians.” But his principal actors are not, I think,
of the eighteenth century at all. They are the people Thackeray himself
knew, in the garb of their supposed period, but really men and women
of the middle of the nineteenth century. Esmond and George Warrington,
Rachel, Lady Castlewood, and her incomparable daughter Beatrix are,
with all their perfect accessories, modern men and women playing a
part, admirably it is true, but still a part, in the comedy of a bygone
age. In the days of Anne and the Georges I am confident no one felt or
acted or thought as they are represented by our author. It is only when
Thackeray is out of sympathy with his heroes that he makes them true to
their age. In “Barry Lyndon” we have the genuine article, so we do in
his uncle, the Chevalier de Balibari, so again in every character in
“Catherine,” which was intended as a burlesque. But in the more serious
novels I feel somehow that Thackeray did not really transport his
characters into a bygone age.
Of this he seems to have been conscious himself. When he drew pictures
to illustrate “Vanity Fair,” he did not depict Rawdon Crawley as a
Waterloo guardsman, nor Becky as a lady of fashion in 1816, nor Pitt as
an aristocratic member of the Clapham set. He drew them as the people
he knew himself and dressed them in the costume of his own time, thus
acknowledging how he really regarded his own creations.
The ruling aristocracy came to an end when the Reform Bill was passed
in 1832, but their prestige remained. The middle class entered
the Promised Land and took their share in its government: but not
triumphantly. I may almost say they were abashed by their success. The
peers could no more return a great proportion of the House of Commons,
they could no more promote or cast down common men much as they
pleased. They dare no longer defy public opinion as their predecessors
had done. Yet to the middle class they still appeared august enough.
Their manners, their breeding, the state in which many lived, inspired
no little awe among those immediately below them. Society was divided
into castes almost as rigidly, though less formally, than in India
to-day. The old Whig nobility still considered themselves divinely
called to rule the country and to dictate to the sovereign. The
county families held aloof from the inhabitants of the town; and
barely tolerated the professional classes. The beneficed clergy,
barristers, medical men, lesser army officers, etc., scorned the
traders. The wholesale trader held the retail storekeeper in scorn and
so on _ad infinitum_. But in England the barriers of rank were never
insurmountable, and in a free country anyone was at liberty to try to
climb them. Hence everybody endeavored with varying success to ascend
the social ladder, and did not scruple to use other people as stepping
stones. Thus arose the fierce fight to get into what is still called
“Society” and the rampant snobbery which Thackeray was never tired of
denouncing. With this we may begin the investigation of his attitude
towards the society of his age.
The great example of this pushfulness is Thackeray’s most delightful
creation in “Vanity Fair,” Becky Sharp, though she assuredly was no
snob. With all her doubtful antecedents, however, Becky, at least,
married into the ranks of the aristocracy; and in her husband our
author has created so real a person that one is actually disposed to
question whether he was rightly judged by the author of his being. We
are told that Rawdon Crawley was stupid, badly educated, unaccustomed
to good society, at least when ladies were present. But if he were
such an oaf why did his rich aunt Miss Crawley, who had known Sheridan
and the wits, make such a fuss about him and make him sit at table
with herself and Becky because “we are the only Christians in the
county.” Why was he allowed to act in the Charades at Gaunt House
on that memorable night of his wife’s triumph? The fact is that
Thackeray was obsessed with the idea that all young men of fashion were
necessarily stupid. It is a thoroughly middle-class tradition and we
find it constantly in his pages. Because of certain mannerisms and
affectations, because they cared little for literature, because they
fought duels and gambled, all young men about town were not necessarily
fools; and it was a mistake to depict Rawdon Crawley as on the one hand
uncommonly sharp and also a fool. But it is because Thackeray’s genius
has created such a living being that we are indignant at his failure to
make him conform to our ideas of what we think he really was. We regard
him as a living man whom his creator has misjudged, and not as the
figment of the brain of the author.
“Vanity Fair,” however, holds up the mirror to social England in
the unrivalled description of Becky’s climb up the rungs of the
ladder till she arrived at the very apex of fashionable success.
Her husband’s position gave her every opportunity with the men, and
with them it was easy enough. Where her genius was seen was in her
dealings with her own sex. Apart from the skill displayed in the
description of her career, she is interesting to us as an example of
the gradual invasion of society by those who were born outside its
pale. Men, as we have seen, like Creevey, occasionally managed to
make themselves indispensable, but for a woman to do so was a most
difficult task. At first Becky was a complete failure so far as her own
sex was concerned. Miss Crawley was never taken in for a moment. She
recognised her attractions and allowed her to amuse her, but had no
idea of regarding Becky as anything more than a sort of upper servant.
“She’s just a companion as you are, Briggs, only infinitely more
amusing.” When she married Rawdon, she did for herself so far as the
old lady’s good graces were concerned. In her early married life she
was equally unsuccessful. At Paris, where her husband was in the army
of occupation, her success with the men and her popularity with the
great ladies of French society, owing to her mastery of the language,
only increased the bitterness of her countrywomen against her. When she
came back to London, men crowded her little house in Curzon Street, but
the ladies held sternly aloof. Social distinctions were very marked in
the early “twenties” in London, and the great ladies of the day had
no idea of allowing people of doubtful birth to push themselves into
their company. You doubtless recollect how Jane Austen describes the
dinner party at Lady Caroline de Burgh’s in “Pride and Prejudice” to
which Elizabeth and Mr. and Mrs. Collins were invited, and the studied
rudeness with which her ladyship treated her guests in order to keep
them conscious of their inferiority. We find the same sort of thing in
Lord Lytton’s early novel “Pelham,” where the man of fashion treats the
people he meets in the country as beings of a different species. Every
description of fashionable life tells the same story and we have to
realise this to understand “Vanity Fair.”
I must ask you to pardon me if I linger over this theme and try to
elaborate it. Becky had had a good deal of experience before her chance
came, and she was fit to take it. Her brother-in-law, Pitt Crawley,
was always a little smitten by her charm and determined to do the
right thing by Rawdon by inviting him and Becky to Queen’s Crawley.
Becky strikes the right note at once--they go by coach, “it looks more
humble.” Once there, she captivates Lady Jane by affecting interest in
her nursery. But these are only the outworks, Lady Jane is kind and
soft, Pitt is pompous and easily flattered. But the citadel remained
unvanquished in the person of Lady Southdown, Pitt’s mother-in-law.
Here we have Thackeray’s counterpart of Lady Caroline de Burgh, a
countess of austere evangelical piety, combined with a firm but by no
means constant belief in patent medicines and more or less irregular
clergy and medical practitioners, who forces her doctrines and her
doctorings without mercy upon her dependants and inferiors. “She would
order Gaffer Hodge to be converted, as she would order Goody Hicks to
take a James’ powder, without appeal, resistance or benefit of clergy.”
Our author describes her as “this awful missionary of the Truth,”
driving about her estate administering tracts and medicaments.
A lady so domineering, so aristocratic, so virtuous could not be
expected to receive poor Becky with her doubtful antecedents and still
more questionable conduct. She vows she will leave Queen’s Crawley
if ever Mrs. Rawdon sets foot in the home. But Pitt Crawley knows
womankind: “She has spent her last dividends, and has nowhere to go. A
countess living in an inn is a ruined woman.” This shrewd diagnosis is
correct: her ladyship remains and manifests her disapproval of Becky
by a stony silence. That astute little woman, however, is not daunted.
She reads the countess’s tracts; she is troubled about her soul. Her
ladyship cannot resist the temptation of snatching such a brand from
the burning. She hopes to convert Becky, who is prepared for a greater
sacrifice. She offers her body as well as her soul, and consults Lady
Southdown about her health. The victory is won. That night the fearsome
form of the great lady appears in night attire at Becky’s bedside and
forces her to drink the decoction she has prepared. Her victim swallows
it and makes so good a story of the incident that her male friends are
convulsed, and thus, “for the first time in her life, Lady Southdown
was made amusing.” It is when Mrs. Rawdon Crawley forces her way
into the company of the real leaders of London society that we get a
true glimpse of the social life of the period, and I shall ask your
permission to read the well-known but I think rarely quoted account
of her début at the dinner party at Gaunt House. To me, I confess, it
seems inimitable. I must, however, remind you of the scenes which lead
up to it. First, there is Lord Steyne’s request or rather order to the
ladies of his household to call on Becky, which they do, and when his
lordship pays her a visit he is amused to find her gloating over the
cards they have left. “All women,” he says, “are alike. Everybody is
striving for what is not worth having.... You will go to Gaunt House.
It’s not half so nice as here. My wife is as gay as Lady Macbeth and my
daughters as cheerful as Regan and Goneril.... And _gare aux femmes_;
look out and hold your own! How the women will bully you!” Then there
is the interview of Lord Steyne with his wife and daughters. Lady
Steyne is told to write and ask Becky to dinner. Lady Gaunt, the eldest
son’s wife, says she will not be present. Lady George, the second
son’s wife, reminds him of the money she brought into the family--all
in vain. Steyne treats them to a vigorous allocution. “You will be
pleased to receive her with the utmost cordiality, as you will receive
all persons whom I present to this house.... Who is master of it, and
what is it? This temple of virtue belongs to me. And if I invite all
Newgate and all Bedlam here, by--they shall be welcomed.” The ladies of
course yield but they make it hot for their presumptuous little guest.
“It was when the ladies were alone that Becky knew that the tug of war
would come. And then indeed the little woman found herself in such a
situation as made her acknowledge the correctness of Lord Steyne’s
caution to her to beware of the society of ladies above her own
sphere. As they say that persons who hate Irishmen most are Irishmen:
so, assuredly the greatest tyrants over women are women. When poor
little Becky, alone with the ladies, went up to the fireplace whither
the great ladies had repaired, the great ladies marched away and took
possession of a table of drawings. When Becky followed them to the
table of drawings, they dropped off one by one to the fire again. She
tried to speak to the children (of whom she was commonly fond in public
places), but master George Gaunt was called away by his mamma; and the
stranger was treated with such cruelty finally, that even Lady Steyne
pitied her, and went up to speak to the friendless little woman.”
Later on she had her triumph, for when the gentlemen came in they
crowded round the piano. “And Mr. Paul Jefferson Jones (an American
guest) thought he had made a conquest of Lady Gaunt by going up to her
ladyship, and praising her delightful friend’s first-rate singing.”
Once Becky had been recognised at Gaunt House, other ladies began to
acknowledge her, none the less eagerly because she was known not to
be too favourably regarded by the Steyne females. The great Lady Fitz
Willis paid her marked attention. When anyone was taken up by this
lady, her position was safe. Not that she was amusing or clever or
beautiful, “being a faded person of fifty seven”: but nevertheless she
was a recognised leader whose social verdict was undisputed. Under her
ægis Becky was safe; and it was thrown over our little adventuress
because of an early rivalry between Lady Fitz Willis and Lady Steyne.
Now the success of Becky with all her disadvantages was not undeserved.
She had wit, tact, courage. She could flatter where necessary: but she
could defy an enemy when she thought fit. Very great ladies feared her
biting sarcasm if they provoked it; and she won her place because of
her weapons of defiance as well as her powers of attraction. She fell
from her high position because she was found out; but, even after her
exposure and Rawdon’s eye-opening to her unfaithfulness to his cause,
she fought on in the social battle; and the last glimpse of her is at a
charity bazaar!
But the society which Becky Sharp conquered by her brains was soon to
be stormed by wealth. And Thackeray describes the process in the novels
of a later period. The strife was only beginning in “Vanity Fair.”
Lord Steyne’s younger son, we are told, married the daughter of the
great banker Lord Helvellyn; but this was exceptional. The city was
just beginning to intermarry with the lesser nobility. Miss Schwartz,
the rich West Indian, who was destined for young George Osborne, was
married into the noble family of McMull. The younger Miss Osborne
married, after much haggling over settlements, Frederick Bullock of
Hulker Bullock and Co., whose family was allied with the impecunious
nobility; but she was completely out of society. She would have gone on
her knees to Gaunt House to be asked to dinner there. Her father, whose
means would have procured him an entrance into any society a few years
later, then lived in an unfashionable part of London, and his dinner
parties were dull, pompous gatherings, the most honoured guest being
Sir Thomas Coffin, “the hanging judge” for whose benefit the famous
tawny port was always produced.
It was about a decade after the Reform Bill of 1832 that the walls of
the Jericho of Good Society began to shake at the trumpet sound of
wealth. Before we enter upon the subject let me remind you of two marks
of the great novelist’s skill, (1) the names he gives his characters
and (2) his careful tracing of their pedigrees. The Earl of Dorking
lives at Chanteclere, his eldest son is Viscount Rooster, his daughters
are the Ladies Adelaide and Hennie Pulleine. Who cannot with a very
little knowledge of London conjure up Gaunt House and Great Gaunt
Square? The character of the Marquis of Steyne is shown in his numerous
titles. He is Viscount Hellborough and Baron Pitchley and Grillsbury,
etc., etc. The Crawley family name their sons after the most popular
man of the day. So Sir Walpole Crawley was evidently born about 1730,
Sir Pitt between 1757 and 1761, the Reverend Bute about 1761, Sir Pitt,
the second, after the time younger Pitt rose to power--that is, later
than 1784, and Rawdon when Lord Rawdon was the favourite of the Prince
of Wales.
The pedigrees, especially of the rising families, are traced very
carefully. Do you remember Mr. Foker, the charming young man of
fashion in “Pendennis”? His unfailing good humour, his shrewdness,
his gaudy garments, his advice to Pendennis, when he was infatuated
with Miss Fotheringay, and when he was going the pace at Oxbridge; his
love for Miss Amory and his recovery when he found out how heartless
she was? Though he plays a minor part, his character is as subtle a
delineation as any by this master hand. Now notice how we get this
blend of aristocracy and commercialism; for Foker is a true gentleman,
honourable, chivalrous, with healthy instincts, yet with a good deal of
the man of business in him, for all his idleness and eccentricity a man
not easily duped. In the “Virginians” George Warrington, when lately
married and very poor, gets to know a Mr. Voelker, a rich, vulgar
but kindly brewer, our hero’s grandfather. His father has Anglicised
himself and become Mr. Foker whose porter is of world-wide celebrity.
He marries an Earl’s daughter and yet insists on the family beverage
being served at every meal, and Major Pendennis feels bound to taste it
when he dines though the old gentleman found it disagreed with him. In
Harry Foker, the young man of pleasure, we have the half-and-half beer
and the peerage, and no bad blend either. In Barnes Newcome we have a
less attractive type of the same class. The Newcomes are as humble in
origin but more pretentious than the Fokers. They do not parade the
family business, being bankers; but have discovered a noble ancestry.
Their family can be traced back to the “Barber Surgeon of Edward the
Confessor.” Thomas Newcome, the second founder, had however to begin
as a very intelligent factory hand who left his native Newcome, made
a moderate fortune, gallantly returned and married a girl of his own
class, and became the father of that prince of gentlemen, Colonel
Newcome, whose son Clive, Thackeray wishes us to admire, though I
confess I find him insufferable. Then his first wife dies and Thomas
flies at higher game. He woos and wins the great heiress, pietist, and
philanthropist, Sophia Alethea Hobson, to the amazement of the serious
Clapham circle in which she moves. Their twin sons are Sir Brian, who
marries Lady Ann Barnes, daughter of the Earl of Kew, whose eldest son
is Lord Walham--all neighbouring suburbs of London give the name to
this aristocratic family,--and Hobson, a thorough man of business, who
marries a lawyer’s daughter, and affects the farmer, whilst his wife
professes to admire talent. Hobson is shrewd, Brian pompous, and as
the former says of himself, you must get up very early in the morning
to take him in. If in Foker we have the attractive side, in Sir Brian
Newcome’s eldest son Barnes we have the other aspect of the blending of
birth and business. Had Harry Foker sprung from two noble grandfathers,
he might have been just as simple-hearted and good-natured as he now
appears, like Lord Southdown in “Vanity Fair,” or Ethel Newcome’s
lover, Lord Kew; but he would not have been quite so shrewd--for it
is no impeachment of a man’s natural good sense that he should have
been taken in by the purely imaginary virtues of a Blanche Amory. But
in Barnes Newcome we see the mixture of the hardness of a well-bred
man of the world and the business ability inherited from a commercial
ancestry. I cannot resist quoting at some length the introduction of
Barnes to his uncle Col. Newcome at Mrs. Hobson Newcome’s evening
party. The description of it is sketched for the Colonel’s benefit, by
Frank Honeyman, the popular preacher.
“The Jew with a beard, as you call him, is Herr Von Lungen the eminent
haut-boy player.... At the piano, accompanied by Mademoiselle Lebrun,
is Signor Mezzocaldo the great barytone from Rome. Professor Quartz
and Baron Hammerstein, celebrated geologists from Germany, are talking
with their illustrious _confrère_ Sir Robert Craxton, in the door. Do
you see that stout gentleman with snuff on his shirt? The eloquent
Dr. McGuffog of Edinburgh talking to Dr. Ettore, who lately escaped
the Inquisition at Rome in the disguise of a washerwoman, after
undergoing the question several times, the rack and the thumbscrew....
That splendid man in the red fez is Kurbash Pasha--another renegade, I
deeply lament to say,--a hair-dresser from Marseilles, by name Monsieur
Ferchaud--”
But I need not trouble you by reading more. Mrs. Hobson Newcome could
not get the aristocracy, so she collected notabilities and felt herself
intellectual. As you will remember, the guest of the evening was
“Rummum Loll, otherwise his Excellency, otherwise his Highness, ...
the chief proprietor of the diamond mines of Golconda, with a claim of
three millions and a half upon the East India Company.” The Rummum was
the lion of the year and went everywhere, and the whole company was
amazed when with the air of the deepest humility he saluted Colonel
Newcome, who in his old-fashioned coat and diamond pin was being
mistaken for a Moldavian boyar. At this juncture Barnes comes in and
makes himself known to his uncle. The art with which the scene is drawn
is consummate. Barnes behaves as a thoroughly well-bred man, greets the
Colonel with unaffectedly good manners, snubs his aunt by a few quiet
words, and finally turns to his uncle to discuss the Rummum. “I know he
ain’t a prince any more than I am.” Then Barnes warms to the subject
and frankly asks the Colonel to tell him if the bank can trust the
Indian magnate. “The young man of business had dropped his drawl or his
languor, and was speaking quite goodnaturedly and selfishly. Had you
talked for a week, you could not have made him understand the scorn and
loathing with which the Colonel regarded him.”
Barnes is of course the villain of the piece: but the interest in his
character to us lies in the fact that he reveals in its worst aspect
the blending of two types, the aristocratic, with its pride and narrow
exclusiveness, and the commercial, with its rapacious selfishness.
In many respects the “Newcomes” is a tragedy, as is seen in Colonel
Newcome’s quarrel with Barnes and the tale of his ruin in the affair
of Rummum Loll’s Bundlecund Bank, and the _motive_ is the struggle for
wealth by one of a class whose first object ought to have been honour
and to whom money should have been always a secondary consideration.
Let us however turn now to lighter themes. One of Thackeray’s most
delightful characters is the old Countess of Kew, the sister of the
late Marquis of Steyne and the grandmother of Lord Kew and Ethel
Newcome. The old lady frankly, and with a cynicism worthy of her
brother, accepts the new order. She marries her daughter, Lady Ann,
to Sir Brian Newcome, with complete disregard of the young lady’s
preference for her cousin, Tom Poyntz. “Sir Brian Newcome,” she would
say, “is one of the most stupid and respectable of men; Ann is clever
but has not a grain of common sense. They make a very well-assorted
couple. Her flightiness would have driven any man crazy who had an
opinion of his own. She would have ruined any poor man of her own rank.
As it is I have given her a husband exactly suited to her. He pays the
bills, does not see how absurd she is, keeps order in the establishment
and checks her follies. She wanted to marry her Cousin, Tom Poyntz,
when they were both very young, and proposed to die of a broken heart
... a broken fiddlestick! She would have ruined Tom Poyntz in a year,
and has no more idea of the cost of a leg of mutton than I have of
Algebra.” Her ladyship was under no delusions as to the antiquity of
her husband’s family, the founder of which was a fashionable doctor
who had attended George III. She recognised that the great houses to
which she belonged had had their day and was resolved to make the best
she could out of the world she lived in. She had the brains and the
character to make that world thoroughly uncomfortable if it did not
bow to her will, and with her the old order began to come to an end.
“_Was_ my grandfather a weaver?” asks Ethel Newcome. Her answer is:
“How should I know? And what on earth does it matter, my child? Except
the Gaunts, the Howards, and one or two more, there is no good blood
in England. You are lucky in sharing some of mine. My poor Lord Kew’s
grandfather was an apothecary at Hampton Court, and founded the family
by giving a dose of rhubarb to Queen Charlotte. As a rule nobody is of
good family.”
Leaving the novels, we come to the Book of Snobs, where the storming of
society is seen at a later stage. In Chapter VII on “some respectable
snobs” we have the rise of the noble family of de Mogyns. The first of
this ancient race who appeared above the horizon in these degenerate
days was a Mr. Muggins, banker, army contractor, smuggler, and general
jobber, lent money to a R-y-l P-rs-n-ge, and by way of payment was
made a baronet. His son paid undue attention to Miss Flack at a county
ball. Captain Flack, her father, offered the alternative of a duel or
marriage, in accordance with the custom of the Irish nation to which he
belonged and of the age; young Alured Smith Muggins preferred to marry
the lady and on the death of his father became a baronet. The editor
of Fluke’s Peerage found him a pedigree. The family was really founded
by the patriarch Shem, whose grandson began to draw up its pedigree
on a papyrus scroll now in the possession of the family. In the days
of Boadicea, Hogyn Mogyn of the hundred beeves aspired to marry that
warlike princess. Whether he wooed and also won is not stated, but he
married someone and became the ancestor of Mogyn of the golden harp,
the black fiend son of Mogyn, ancestor of the princes of Pontydwdlm.
These succumbed to the English Kings; but their representative David
Gam de Mogins fought bravely at Agincourt and from him Sir Thomas
Muggins was descended.
This sounds a mere satire. I turn to Burke’s Peerage 1895. I find that
the son of a famous contractor, whose father was celebrated for having
begun as a navvy and ended as a millionaire many times over, sprang
from a very ancient Norman family which became obscure in 1603 and rose
again to fame two centuries later. I notice that a brewer now a baron,
whose beer had a world-wide fame, was the scion of a noble house, the
first of whom was Gamellus who flourished when Henry Beauclerc ruled
the land from 1100 to 1134.
One of the ladies of this famous family was christened by the
delightful but unusual name of Temperance, but this was in the reign of
Charles I before the brewery was established. Are not such pedigrees
as ridiculous as any fiction of the brain? But how much is it to be
regretted that the writers of our peerages do not study the Book of
Snobs. They would at least avoid parodying it at the order of their
ennobled patrons. Disraeli, like Thackeray, exposed this business in
his novel “Sybil, or the Two Nations.”
I need not say, however, that it was not because of their descent from
the great Hogyn Mogyn that the de Mogyns got into society. They pushed,
they schemed, they suffered rebuffs undaunted, and at last they won the
coveted reward. Lady de Mogyns cut her friends as she ascended, and at
last became a recognised power in the great world.
The day had scarcely dawned when Thackeray died, when instead of
wealth’s striving to win a place in society, society sought to obtain
the recognition of the very rich. His satire had not to expend itself
on aristocrats who hastened to abase themselves before the millionaire,
and snobbery changed from a worship of rank to a worship of wealth.
Our author has often been criticised for his abuse of the nobility.
It has been said that it was prompted by envy. I venture to doubt
this. To be as great a satirist as he, a man must feel deeply and
have a _saeva indignatio_ against a great evil. This, like all his
predecessors, Thackeray had. He saw the hardness that the spirit of his
age engendered.
In all Thackeray’s novels and writings we see how ashamed the new
aristocracy was of the trades and businesses by which they made their
money and how contemptuous the real aristocracy was of ennobled trade.
Lord Steyne sneers at the idea of his son’s wife being a banker’s
daughter. The Newcomes conveniently forget the weaver from which they
sprang. We are sneeringly reminded that Mr. Wenham’s father was a coal
merchant; Major Pendennis conveniently forgets that his brother was a
mere apothecary. But this was not part of the old tradition of England.
A very little time before people of high birth felt no shame in being
in trade. The Nelsons are as good a family as any, yet Nelson himself
served as a common sailor before the mast, and his near relatives
kept shops in small towns. Let me read you a passage from a recently
published book on Wordsworth:
“Dorothy Wordsworth ... lived first with her maternal grand-parents,
and was not happy with them. She loved an open-air life, and was held
closely indoors--serving in fact in a mercer’s shop which they kept....
In 1788 a change came, for she went to live with her uncle at Forncett
Rectory near Norwich. The Rector was also a Canon of Windsor, and in
the Summer of 1792 ... Dorothy was meeting King George III and his
family--the princesses at least ... and going to races and balls.”
Trade was no bar to good society till it was able to buy it and there
was a great mingling of classes now rigidly separated. This feeling
of shame for having practised some perfectly reputable calling has
had I believe very serious results. It has made for the separation of
employers and employed. It has caused people to take less pride in
integrity and thoroughness and made them desirous of amassing wealth
in order to enjoy ease. It has tended to make those of the second
generation more desirous to pose as nobles than to follow the calling
of their fathers. It has destroyed a commercial aristocracy and has
put a plutocracy in its place. It tended for a time to substitute
prudery and respectability for real Christianity; and, before the war
at least, even these poor substitutes were growing so out of fashion
as to be regretted. It has also deepened the rift between classes.
Between the old nobility and the poor there was a certain sympathy. The
humbler class appreciated the fact that their rulers were gentlemen,
they liked their courage, their courtesy, they did not even object to
being ordered by them, their very vices were comprehensible. But they
have never had any fellow feeling with a plutocracy; with their present
pay-masters they have been more impatient than with their former
rulers; and the difficulties of the present age are in no small degree
due to the snobbery which Thackeray denounced.
LECTURE VIII
SPORT, AND RURAL ENGLAND
I hope you will pardon the flippancy of the subject I am about to
introduce; but I may say that it is not possible to understand English
life without studying it. Though we are getting close to our own
times, yet it is evident that society has undergone an almost complete
change since the scenes were depicted in the works I am using to-day.
Surtees caught the exact moment when the change was coming; and the old
order was awaiting the signal to quit the world. In the rural England
of the ‘forties’ and ‘fifties,’ when the railway was just beginning
to invade the countryside, the hunting field was still a national
playground where neighbours met, the county family still the pivot
round which rural life moved. But everywhere are signs of the coming
change. The _nouveau riche_ was buying the old estates, and the Jewish
magnate beginning to make his appearance; but the fabric of county
society remained as yet unshaken. I can myself remember the gulf that
parted socially the county from the town, the landed gentry from the
professional classes, when the ownership of land was far more important
than the possession of wealth.
I propose to treat my subject from two aspects. First I shall take the
so-called sporting novels, which are in themselves a literature, though
I mean to confine myself practically to a single author; and, after
having touched on this subject, I shall ask you to notice how Anthony
Trollope, a writer sometimes tedious, but always observant and often
witty, deals with the hierarchy, clerical and lay, of county society.
When St. Thomas a Becket was escaping from his enemies in England,
he travelled through Flanders in humble disguise. Once, however, he
nearly betrayed himself by stopping and admiring a beautiful falcon.
Such discrimination raised the suspicion that the traveller was not a
mere peasant or itinerant merchant, but an English gentleman of rank.
However, the archbishop managed to escape detection and passed on. This
little incident, however, shows that, even in the twelfth century, an
expert knowledge of sport was deemed to be characteristic of gentility,
and Becket, who had spent his early days in the king’s court,
instinctively looked with interest on a good bird. Four centuries
later a very different archbishop of Canterbury, though he too died a
martyr’s death, was known as an excellent rider. Thomas Cranmer, the
son of a country squire, was, we are specially told, remarkable for the
firm and easy way he sat his horse. Unlike Becket, Cranmer was bred a
scholar; but, in later days, he too would have been called a sportsman.
About a century later another English primate distinguished himself
less creditably in the field. George Abbott, the Puritan predecessor
of Laud, was shooting deer; and by pure accident killed a keeper; for
which an attempt was made to declare the see of Canterbury canonically
vacant. It is much the same with less exalted ecclesiastics. In the
middle ages the clergy of England were honourably distinguished for
their morality as compared with their continental brethren. Their
besetting sin was that nothing could restrain them from hunting. The
“hunting” abbot of the middle ages was succeeded by the “hunting
parson” of later days. Thackeray’s description of the Rev. Bute Crawley
would, _mutatis mutandis_, apply to many an English clergyman, from the
earliest times down to our own days.
“A tall, stately, jolly, shovel-hatted man.... You might see his bay
mare a score of miles away from the Rectory house whenever there was a
dinner party.... He rode to hounds in a pepper-and-salt frock, and was
one of the best fishermen in the county.”
It is hardly necessary to dilate upon the sporting vocabulary
of Shakespeare; or to point out that the correct use of hunting
and shooting and hawking terms was considered as test of a man’s
gentility--nor need I appeal to the severity of the old Forest Laws and
the more modern Game Laws, both of which were powerless to restrain the
English peasants’ inveterate propensity to sport.
Little wonder is it, therefore, that there arose a veritable literature
which revolved round the pivot of sport and especially that of hunting.
I need hardly say that the conditions of the pursuit of game changed
with the state of the country. In the middle ages the greater part
of England was wooded. The greenwood was the home of the outlaw; and
it was said that a squirrel could cross England without touching
the ground. The chase was therefore pursued in glades and thickets;
and could never have been a very rapid affair. What riding was done
in the open country was connected with hawking--a very favourite
pastime. Gradually, as the country became more open and the forests
disappeared, the fox, which our ancestors regarded as vermin, began to
be looked upon as a sacred animal, because of the excellent runs he
gave. For a long time the hunting was slow and its arrangements very
primitive; those who joined in it being the squire, his friends, and
his dependants; but gradually the crack riders began to gather from
all parts to where the best hunting was to be had; and Leicestershire
became the chief centre. Fashionable hunting, as opposed to the
rural and purely local sport, seems to have begun at the time of the
Regency in the days of the “dandies”; and I have a recollection of
an oft-quoted description by “Nimrod” of the way in which a stranger
was gradually recognised and welcomed when he came among the hunting
fraternity at Melton Mowbray. But it is my intention to speak of a
later period when hunting had become a sport in which men, who had no
connection with the locality, came down from London to take part. In
olden days the town sportsman was a theme of constant derision. John
Gilpin’s ride, and Mr. Winkle’s difficulties with his horse, were
typical stories. The caricaturists were never tired of depicting the
quaint and somewhat dangerous antics of the Londoner with a shotgun,
and jokes at his ignorance of all sports were the stock in trade of the
humourist. Gradually however these began to fall flat. As the country
became accessible, first by good roads, and then by railways, men from
London joined in its pastimes, and proved themselves anything but
ridiculous where horse and gun were concerned.
“Mr. Sponge’s Sporting Tour” is valuable for our purpose because it
illustrates so many sides of English country life. The hero is a
somewhat shady adventurer who spends half the year in hunting and the
rest in talking about it, and is famed for being a guest whom, once you
get into your house, it is impossible to eject. He hires his hunters,
and sells them if he can at a profit; and, as he can ride almost
anything, he is able to show a vicious brute to the greatest advantage,
sell him for a good sum, and then make a great favour of taking him
back. He generally succeeds in getting invitations, partly because
he is supposed to be a rich man, and also on account of a rumour, of
which, to do him justice, he is unaware, that he is able to give
people, anxious for notoriety, a good notice in the newspapers.
One can almost smell the English country in winter time as one reads
the book and in imagination plough one’s way, as the dusk draws on,
through the muddy lanes on a tired horse after a long run, which has
left one several miles from home with the short winter day closing
rapidly. Or, one can feel the exhilaration which the sight of a fox
gives when he goes away with the hounds at his heels, apparently their
certain prey, and then vanishes as he slips through the next fence, not
to be caught, if caught at all, for many a long mile.
The author’s description of the different houses visited by Mr. Sponge
in his tour gives no bad idea of rural life and sport in the “fifties.”
The first house which Mr. Sponge honours is Jawleyford Court, inhabited
by Mr. Jawleyford, a gentleman of good lineage, but only moderate
means, on which he manages to make an appearance of living in great
state. Jawleyford, as his name implies, is a pretentious fellow,
apparently hearty and hospitable, but very deceptive to those who come
in close contact with him. He poses as a man of culture and refinement,
and also as an ardent devotee of the chase. Sponge cares for only one
thing on earth, and that is hunting; and he is emphatically a man of
one book, namely, a work on London cab fares by a certain Mogg--whether
the title is an invention or not, I do not know. When Mr. Sponge has
nothing better to do, he takes this work and studies imaginary drives
about London, amusing himself by calculating the price of each. One can
imagine how this ill-assorted couple--Sponge, who cared for nothing
but hunting, and Jawleyford, who liked to pose as a man of culture and
refinement--got on together. But Mrs. Jawleyford was impressed with the
idea that Sponge was a man of wealth and was a most eligible suitor
for one of her pretty daughters. Consequently she received her guest
with much hospitality, and gave him a hearty welcome. The first day
was unsuitable for hunting; and Sponge had to amuse himself in the
house with his host, who conducted him over his picture gallery, and
was intensely disgusted when Sponge failed to recognise the bust of
Jawleyford, which was considered a speaking likeness.
The next day, however, Sponge, totally disregarding the enchanting
Miss Jawleyfords, started, before breakfast, to a meet of the hounds.
We are now introduced to a great county magnate, who is believed to be
a caricature of a noble sportsman, well known in his day--the Earl of
Scamperdale. He had been kept very short by his father, the previous
earl; and, as Viscount Hardup, had acquired very penurious habits,
which clave to him after his accession to fortune. Hunting was his
only expensive taste: and on this he spared no necessary outlay. He
was always well mounted and his hounds admirably chosen; but he would
do almost anything sooner than take his horses through a turnpike
gate. He lived in a sort of back room in his splendid house; and his
food was of the coarsest description. His only companion was a Mr.
Jack Spraggon, who was exactly like him in appearance, rode well, and
was quite content to fare like his lordship, if he could get nothing
better. This well-assorted couple between them possessed a fine flow
of language, though Lord Scamperdale always said that people presumed
on him because he was “a lord and could not swear nor use coarse
language”; and they contrived to keep the field fairly select, by
driving intruders away by their powers of satire and abuse. Now Sponge
was a first-rate horseman, but could only afford mounts which were
unsound or vicious. His horse, “Multum in Parvo,” was the latter. In
appearance he was a low long-backed beast, splendidly made, and as a
rule was a docile and tractable creature; but if he took it into his
head to bolt, he did so with great determination and no power on earth
could stop him. Directly the horse saw Lord Scamperdale’s hounds, this
propensity asserted itself; and he carried his rider into the midst
of the pack, scattering them like sheep and maiming several. Then
the floodgates of the Earl’s copious vocabulary were opened and poor
Sponge was assailed, first by him and, when he sank back exhausted
into his saddle, by Jack Spraggon. If I recollect aright, the latter
on this or some other occasion called Sponge a “sanctified, putrefied,
methodistical, puseyite pig-jobber,” for Surtees is very careful to put
no real bad language into the mouth of his characters. From this time
forward Lord Scamperdale takes a violent dislike to Sponge and plots
with all his might to get rid of him. His determination is increased
when on another occasion Sponge’s horse bolts, not this time into the
hounds, but into the Earl himself and knocks him off sprawling on the
ground. The story, however, is useful to our purpose because it reveals
the different types of country life, and the graduated hierarchy of its
society. The Earl of Scamperdale is, of course, a caricature; but with
all his boorishness and eccentricity, he is quite conscious that, as a
nobleman, he is a great personage. His hounds are not a subscription
pack, but are supported entirely at his own expense; and his bad
language to strangers has at least the advantage of keeping his field
small and select for the benefit of the residents in his neighbourhood,
who put up with his eccentricities partly because they really regard
his rank and position; and also because his lordship shows them the
best of sport. Jawleyford, whose daughter Scamperdale ultimately
married, represents the country squire, not well off but pretentious,
keeping up a sort of pinchbeck dignity, yet a member of the hierarchy
of which the peer was also a member, though more highly placed.
Less reputable, but of the same order, is Sir Harry Scattercash, of
Non-Such Hall, on whom Sponge inflicts himself after he has been
driven out of the Flat Hat hunt, as Lord Scamperdale’s pack was named.
Sir Harry is a young man, who has come unexpectedly into his title
and estate after marrying an actress; and he is engaged in drinking
himself to death and dissipating his money. His house is full of his
wife’s theatrical friends, who make themselves thoroughly at home,
and Sir Harry has apparently inherited a pack of hounds, managed on
a very different system to that adopted by Scamperdale, whose motto
is efficiency with economy. Sponge, who, with all his vulgarity, is
a first-rate sportsman, takes this motley pack in hand and makes
even Sir Harry’s hounds kill their fox in fine style. In fact, on one
occasion, when he has outdistanced the mixed field which attended the
baronet’s meets, he actually changes foxes with Lord Scamperdale,
and a fine scene ensues in which Mr. Spraggon surpasses himself in
the variety of his language. Not that two such adventurers as Sponge
and Spraggon are real enemies; and they meet on neutral ground in
the house of a third type of Squire. Mr. Puffington, the son of a
wealthy manufacturer, has bought an estate and set up a pack of
hounds. The delineation of this character is extremely clever; and
shows how the author realises the change which is coming over country
life. Scamperdale, Jawleyford, and Sir Harry all belong to the old
landed aristocracy. Puffington is a new man. His money is in the
land like theirs; but he is independent of his estate. In his desire
to be popular he allows his tenants to rob him and his labourers
to poach his game. He maintains a pack of foxhounds, and entertains
magnificently. But he is not really liked, and is regarded as an
interloper. Thinking Sponge is a literary man and that he will trumpet
the fame of his pack in the newspapers, Puffington invites him to stay
in his house and entertains him royally.
Jack Spraggon is also one of the invited guests; and Sponge lends him
one of his horses. They have a famous run with the hounds; and when
they get home, in the interval before dinner, Spraggon tells Sponge
that Puffington, their host, expects to have a flaming account of his
hunt in the newspapers; and that their reception is due to the fact
that Sponge is believed to be a great writer on sporting subjects. As,
however, he does not know how to do it, Spraggon offers to dictate
an account of the run; and Sponge settles down at the table, having
used his friend’s razor to cut the pen. The run is described in true
journalistic style; and, when Sponge, who is an indifferent penman,
exclaims “Hard work authorship,” Jack Spraggon says that he could go
on for ever. Sponge retorts, “It’s all very well for you to do the
talking, but it’s the ‘writing’ and the craning and the spelling.”
However, the manuscript is sent off to the local paper, and falls into
the hands of a daughter of the proprietor. As she cannot make head or
tail to Sponge’s writing, she edits it as best she can, calling “a
ravishing scent” an exquisite perfume; and making the run not less than
ten miles “as the cow goes” instead of as the “crow flies.”
That evening there is a grander banquet than ever; and Spraggon and
Sponge get hold of a rich young fellow, a Mr. Pacey. Spraggon persuades
Pacey, who fancies himself a very sharp blade indeed, that Sponge is
a greenhorn, with the result that at the end of the dinner he buys
Sponge’s horse, Multum in Parvo, at a very low figure. As, however,
that famous quadruped manages to throw Mr. Pacey, and also his
guardian Major Screw, Sponge gets the horse back with a sum of money
as a compensation for the inconvenience to which he has been put, and
generously gives Mr. Pacey a bit of valuable advice: never to try to
trade in horses after dinner! Naturally Mr. Puffington is not pleased
by all this, and when he reads the account of the run with his hounds
he nearly has a fit; and he resolves to take to his bed till Sponge is
well out of his house.
Here we take farewell of our hero; and I will say a few words on the
way in which Surtees, in his sketches of country life, indicates his
appreciation that a change is coming over the land. The Scamperdales,
Jawleyfords, and the older families are disappearing and the new
commercial and moneyed class is taking its place. Puffington and
men of his type are beginning to come to the front. It is getting
more difficult to live on the land, as the older gentry had done;
and estates are becoming rather a tax on a commercial fortune than
the support of an aristocratic family. Surtees represents the old
landowners as somewhat out at elbows, trying in vain to compete with
the new men who are buying up their estates. In one of his novels we
have a great Jewish magnate, Sir Moses Mainchance, who would have
been practically impossible twenty years earlier. Sport changes with
society. The railway has made country and town one, as a few hours
bring all England within reach of London. Hunting is ceasing to be the
old friendly and almost family institution, where the neighbourhood
gathered at the meet, and everybody was known and welcomed. It was
already becoming an affair for the rich from all parts of the world;
and the Scamperdales in vain tried to scare away the wealthy sportsman
of the town by abusive language. The time was close at hand when his
presence would be welcomed eagerly; and rural sport would be at an end.
* * * * *
We will now turn to another side of country life--namely, the social
as portrayed by Anthony Trollope, who might also have been quoted
as a writer on sport. Trollope, to my mind, has a real genius for
interesting his readers in uninteresting people; because he describes
so faithfully the characters one meets every day, gives their
conversation exactly as they talked to one another, and exhibits them
in the same commonplace attitude, in which we all are for the greater
part of our lives. He wrote not by inspiration, when he felt in the
mood, but regularly and systematically, turning out his novels, when
he had leisure from his duties as a government official, at so many
pages an hour. He says that he had little or no intimate knowledge
of cathedral society; yet, to one who has opportunity of observing it
somewhat closely, his descriptions appear to have the accuracy of a
photograph.
In Trollope’s novels we have English life, especially well drawn; and
though many scenes are laid in London, his characters always gravitate
back to the country whence they derive their influence and prestige.
It is not my intention to elaborate more than one side of this very
versatile and copious writer. His political novels, for example, are
well worth studying, especially “Phineas Finn.” In “The Bertrams”
we have an excellent picture of Oxford life in the opening chapter.
Personal experience gave Trollope unusual insight into the characters
of the government officials of his time. He was wonderfully quick at
seizing on types hitherto unknown in English society who were gradually
becoming forces in the world. Even as a writer on sport he deserves
a place. For what can be better than his description of the young,
popular, able clergyman in “Framley Parsonage,” whose very success
leads him into some very difficult situations? I need not remind you,
for I find he is widely read in this country, of his treatment of
social gatherings in great houses like that of the Duke of Omnium.
All I intend to do is to ask you to examine his clerical types and,
perhaps, to offer some explanations which may be useful.
The state of things we read of in such books as “The Warden” and
“Barchester Towers” has almost, but not quite, disappeared, and I
confess that, although I think I understand it, I find a difficulty in
making it clear to you. The initial problem is to explain why life in
a cathedral city is often rural rather than town life. In the first
place the word “city” in England used to be applied only to places
where there was a cathedral. Ely, though still a town of some 8000
people, is always spoken of as a “city” and so are Llandaff and St.
David’s, which are little more than villages; and, till very recently,
Liverpool and Birmingham were styled “towns.” Leicester, with some
300,000 inhabitants, is still, I believe, technically a “town.” The
older cathedrals are in fact generally in small places which were once
very important “cities,” but have been outstripped by what then were
little better than hamlets, but have long since become great centres
of population. Such are Canterbury, Chichester, Salisbury, Wells, Ely,
and Lichfield. Barchester was emphatically a country town, dominated by
the landowners in the vicinity; and the clergy around it were a rural
priesthood. The society which was centred in any cathedral was and
still is unlike anything else in the world. In the middle ages a great
cathedral, like Salisbury or Lincoln, was designed for a semi-monastic
rather than congregational worship. It was served by a community of
priests, called “canons” because they observed a “canon,” or rule
of life. Joined with these was a veritable army of inferior priests,
singers and ministers, all under the control of the dean, who presided
over the cathedral, as the bishop over the diocese. This vast and
splendid establishment was, at the Reformation under Queen Elizabeth,
reduced to a limited number of canons, or prebendaries, minor canons,
singing men and boys, vergers and bedesmen. As, however, under the new
régime the services were little more than daily morning and evening
prayer, the reduced staff had little or nothing to do. Accordingly the
canons took turns to reside in the cathedral close and usually held
benefices in other places. They married like other clergy; but were
still, nominally, monastic persons attached to the cathedral. As time
went on the estates of the chapters or colleges of the deans and canons
became very valuable; and their positions were much coveted as the
prizes of the church. A cathedral chapter therefore was, as a rule, an
aristocratic body, consisting of the dean nominated by the crown, and
the canons, as a rule, by the bishop. Of course the bishops, in days
when public opinion was not powerful, put their relatives into the
canonries; and there were many ties between the various members of the
cathedral bodies, who kept the rest of the world, and especially the
inferior clergy, at a respectful distance.
With this attempt to explain the situation let me try to set forth some
of the principal characters in “The Warden” and “Barchester Towers”;
remembering that men are living under an order of things which was
beginning to pass away.
First we have two charming characters in the Bishop and the Warden.
Bishop Grantley is an aged man, a gentleman in the truest sense of
the word; but a prelate who had never perhaps in his life been
particularly energetic, and was passing his later days in dignified
ease. He is a little lonely, as very old men often are; and he does
not comprehend the new age in which men have to fight to maintain
their position and privileges; so he fails to understand his energetic
son, who has married the Warden’s daughter. His one friend is the
Warden, a man, younger than himself, though elderly. The Warden holds
one of those anomalous positions not uncommon in the church at that
time. He is head of a hospital for old men, in receipt of a very
comfortable income of £800 ($4000); and he is also the precentor, that
is, leader of the music in the cathedral. He is a modest retiring man,
an exquisite musician, and a kindly friend to the old men under his
charge. Very different is the Bishop’s son, Archdeacon Grantley. The
Archdeacon is a strong man, determined to stand up for his rights, and
what he believes to be the rights of his church. He is thoroughly
efficient, a vigorous administrator, a capable ruler of the rich
parish over which he presides. He cannot understand his father’s
allowing things to drift, nor the placid piety of his father-in-law,
the Warden. The two old men are terribly worried, and when they dine
together they plot feebly how to resist the Archdeacon, but give way
whenever he appears on the scene. But at last the crisis comes. The
newspapers discover that the Warden is overpaid for his nominal work
at the hospital, the old men, who are well lodged, fed, and cared
for, are told that they ought to share in his stipend. A busy lawyer
in the cathedral city takes up the case and the great London paper,
the _Thunderer_, has leading articles denouncing the abuses of the
church in general and the Warden’s position in particular. Finally a
novel appears with a thinly veiled attack on the administration of the
Barchester Hospital for old men. Then the Warden shows himself to
have all the firmness of a man, gentle by nature, but of the highest
principles. He retires to a life of poverty rather than bear the
reproach of being in a false position. The Archdeacon storms, accuses
his father-in-law of culpable weakness in deserting his post, and the
Bishop for allowing him to do so. And then the old Bishop rallies to
his friend’s support. Terribly afraid of his masterful son, he will
not allow the Warden to be bullied out of doing what he thinks right.
So the Warden leaves his comfortable house and takes apartments in the
city, the Bishop gives him a tiny parish; and Mr. Harding, for that is
the Warden’s name, lives in honourable poverty, directing the cathedral
music as precentor and ministering in his little church in the old
city; and he and his old friend, the Bishop, have peace in their latter
days. Thus we pass from “The Warden” to “Barchester Towers,” and find
old Dr. Grantley dying peacefully and his son, the Archdeacon, hoping
to succeed his father. Another man is, however, given the bishopric,
and Trollope introduces his greatest characters, Bishop and Mrs.
Proudie. The new Bishop is a fairly easy-going man, but his wife is
determined to bring things in Barchester into order. Her régime has for
its watchword efficiency. In it there is no room for kindly bishops
and retiring scholars, like Mr. Harding. What is required is awakening
preachers, zealous reformers, capable administrators. The old sleepy
cathedral must become a centre of vigorous life and action, in which
even clergy like Archdeacon Grantley, with their aristocratic notions,
could have no place. Mrs. Proudie is herself a lady of high birth; but
vulgar people have a good deal of influence over her, because they
flatter her vanity. Accordingly she takes up with a clergyman named
Slope, who lets her in for a good deal of trouble by his officiousness
and want of judgment and good feeling. But who am I, that in a brief
lecture I should attempt to describe Mrs. Proudie? Let us turn to a
very typical character in old cathedral life. Dr. Stanhope, one of the
canons of Barchester, would be impossible now, but is easily conceived
in the “fifties.” I should say that he was the sort of man who had
become a clergyman because his family was able to advance him; and had
never had any real vocation for his calling. His wife and children
were a great expense to him; and he had lived long abroad in order
to retrench, getting his work done for him in England. His son was a
thorough Bohemian, and his daughter had married an Italian nobleman,
who had left her. Bishop Proudie had compelled Dr. Stanhope to return
to his duties at Barchester; and the family were thoroughly out of
place in a cathedral city with their foreign ideals and lax views of
propriety. You have to picture the decorous formality of Barchester
society to realise the humour of Trollope’s description of Bertie
Stanhope and his sister the Signora. Throughout Trollope’s novels there
is the background of rural life; and especially that of the clergy.
At times it is amusing, but often it is tragic; and, believe me, in
those parsonage houses in the picturesque villages of England some
veritable tragedies have been enacted. How many a clergyman and his
wife have succumbed before the work of bringing up an enormous family
on insufficient means! How many a man of high culture has found in the
parish he entered with such high hopes the end of his career! How many
have dreariness and isolation led to find relief in habits which have
proved their ruin! The story of the rural clergy of England is the
theme of many a novelist, from Fielding onwards; and there is generally
a tone of sadness about it. And may I commend especially the writings
of Charlotte Young for perhaps the best description of the subject?
Side by side with the comfortable dignitaries, who lived around the
cathedrals,--the Grantleys, the Proudies, the Stanhopes,--were the
Quiverfuls, with the crushing load of children innumerable, and Mr.
Crawley, a famous scholar in his day, who had sunk amid the poverty of
a wretched parish and the weight of utterly uncongenial surroundings.
One of the greatest changes in England that people of my age have
seen is the complete shifting of influence from the country to the
town. And this is peculiarly true of the clergy, who often belonged to
the country families and shared in the ideas, tasks, and pursuits of
their brothers. Now that our young clergy are recruited from a totally
different class, they are perhaps more devoted to their profession but
are unfortunately bred in towns rather than the country and often fail
to understand the people in the way their predecessors had done.
Even in my younger days the possession of land meant power and social
prestige; and people really lived on it. But the change was coming
rapidly; and the writers I have quoted show us the scene just before
it was about to shift. Among all classes there has been a rush from
the country to the towns; and there has been a growing tendency to
regard rural England rather as a playground than as the source of the
nation’s best inhabitants. This tendency has unfortunately, in my
judgment at least, been fostered by a legislation which has refused
to give agriculture the encouragement it requires, with the result
that our villages in England almost all tell the same tale of falling
population. Perhaps one of the most urgent problems before our English
statesmen is how to attract people back to the beautiful country, which
under modern economic conditions has been so much deserted.
I have now brought my lectures to an end. I have tried to place before
you as vivid a picture as I could of English life in a bygone age;
and if I have not made it adequate to the expectation of my auditors,
I have at least a hope that I have aroused sufficient interest to
make some here desire to know more of the subject. For the study of
social life is, in truth, a most important branch of history. It is
almost impossible to form a just conception of the men of any age from
documents unless one can gain an idea what manner of men they really
are. Unless we have this knowledge, no amount of research, no ingenuity
or discrimination will assist us to arrive at an apprehension of the
truth. For it is not possible to understand men’s actions unless
we have that sympathy which makes us realise that under different
conditions they were human beings not, after all, unlike what we
ourselves should have been in their circumstances. And it is in the
novel, the private letter, the caricature, the half-forgotten jest or
good story, that we are helped to depict the men and women of the past.
A pleasing task awaits me; namely, to thank you for the welcome you
have given me as a stranger, when I first appeared before you, for
the patience you have shown in listening to what I had to say, for
the evident sympathy and good feeling you have shown throughout these
lectures. Let me say that I felt deeply the honour conferred on me by
the offer of a Lowell lectureship, that I enjoyed, in these days of
great sorrow and anxiety shared by all my countrymen, the distraction
which I found in preparing for my responsible task; and that though,
I confess, I first entered this room with no little trepidation and
wondered how I could possibly interest complete strangers, I now
feel that I am speaking to friends, who have, by their kindness to
an Englishman with whose very name they must have been unfamiliar,
demonstrated the reality of the ties which bind the two Englands, the
old and the new, each to the other.
Printed in the United States of America.
The following pages contain advertisements of a few of the Macmillan
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The Salon and English Letters
BY CHAUNCEY BREWSTER TINKER
Professor of English Literature in Yale University
_Illustrated, 8vo, 290 pages, $2.25_
The interrelation of literature and society in the age of Johnson is
presented in this scholarly and interesting book by Professor Tinker.
The author writes with a rare enthusiasm that wins the reader’s
interest from the beginning. It is with the borderland where literature
and society meet that the author deals. “I shall trace as well as I
can,” he says in his introduction, “the attempt made in England between
1760 and 1790 to emulate the literary world of Paris by bringing men of
letters and men of the world into closer relations and by making the
things of the mind an avocation of the drawing-room, and thereafter I
shall endeavor to show the results of this movement as they appear in
the improved artistry of three or four types of writing.”
“Professor Tinker’s volume is as interesting as it is timely....
A chronicle of a picturesque phase of English letters.”--_Boston
Transcript._
“I could wish that more of our university scholars--those, that is, who
have the learning, critical insight, and happy style that this book
shows--would devote themselves to this kind of scholarship.”
--_Prof. H. M. Belden,
University of Missouri, Columbia, Mo._
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York
World Literature
BY R. G. MOULTON, M.A., PH.D.
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Chicago, Author of “Shakespeare as a Dramatic Thinker,”
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_Cloth, 12mo, $1.75_
In these days of “five-foot shelves” and “best selected books,” the
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from the English point of view. He has supplemented the theoretic
treatment by valuable expositions of masterpieces. To the general
reader the work will suggest a rational scheme or philosophy which
should be at the back of any attempt to make a selection of the “best
books.” To the student it will illustrate a treatment of the subject
unhampered by the divisions between particular literatures expressed
in different languages which is too often a great weakness in literary
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every stage of general culture from the most elementary to the most
advanced.
“Full of the vital quality of its subject.”
--_New York Sun._
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York
Representative English Comedies, Vol. I
_FROM THE BEGINNINGS TO SHAKESPEARE_
With introductory essays and notes. An historical view of our earlier
comedy and other monographs by various writers under the general
editorship of
CHARLES MILLS GAYLEY, LITT.D., LL.D.,
Professor of the English Language and Literature in the University of
California
_Cloth, 8vo, 686 pages, $2.00_
The aim of this volume and those which will follow is to indicate the
development of a literary type by a selection of its representative
specimens, arranged in the order of their production and accompanied
by critical and historical studies. So little has been scientifically
determined concerning evolution or permutation in literature that
the more specific the field of inquiry, the more trustworthy are the
results attained,--hence the limitation of this research not merely
to a genus like the drama, but to one of its species. What is here
presented to the public differs from histories of the drama in that it
is more restricted in scope and that it substantiates the narrative of
a literary growth by reproducing the data necessary to an induction;
it differs from editions of individual plays and dramatists, on the
other hand, because it attempts to concatenate its text by a running
commentary upon the characteristics of the species under consideration
as they successively appear. It is an illustrated, if not certified,
history of English comedy.
CONTENTS
I. AN HISTORICAL VIEW OF THE BEGINNINGS OF THE ENGLISH COMEDY. By
Charles Mills Gayley.
II. JOHN HEYWOOD: CRITICAL ESSAY. By Alfred W. Pollard.
Edition of the _Play of the Wether_. The same.
Edition of a _Mery Play between Johan Johan, Tyb._ The same.
III. NICHOLAS UDALL: CRITICAL ESSAY. By Ewald Flügel.
Edition of _Roister Doister_. The same.
Appendix on Various Matters. The same.
IV. WILLIAM STEVENSON: CRITICAL ESSAY. By Henry Bradley.
Edition of _Gammer Gurton’s Needle_. The same.
Appendix. The same.
V. JOHN LYLY: CRITICAL ESSAY. By George P. Baker.
Edition of _Alexander and Campaspe_. The same.
VI. GEORGE PEELE: CRITICAL ESSAY. By F. B. Gummere.
Edition of _The Old Wives’ Tale_. The same.
Appendix. The same.
VII. GREENE’S PLACE IN COMEDY: A MONOGRAPH. By G. E. Woodberry.
VIII. ROBERT GREENE: HIS LIFE, AND THE ORDER OF HIS PLAYS. By Charles
Mills Gayley.
Edition of the _Honourable Historie of Frier Bacon_. The same.
Appendix on Greene’s Versification. The same.
IX. HENRY PORTER: CRITICAL ESSAY. By Charles Mills Gayley.
Edition of The _Two Angry Women of Abington_. The same.
X. _Shakespeare as a Comic Dramatist._ By Edward Dowden.
INDEX.
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York
Representative English Comedies, Vol. II
_THE LATER CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE_
BEN JONSON AND OTHERS
With introductory essays and notes and a comparative view of the
fellows and followers of Shakespeare under the general editorship of
CHARLES MILLS GAYLEY, LITT.D., LL.D.,
Professor of the English Language and Literature in the University of
California
_Cloth, 8vo, 586 pages, $2.00_
In this volume are included a number of the plays of Ben Jonson and
the best play of several of his contemporaries. Each of these has been
edited by a scholar of unquestioned standing, and is accompanied by
an introductory critical and historical essay. Furthermore, Professor
Gayley, the general editor, has included a most scholarly introduction
in the form of an essay entitled “A Comparative View of the Fellows and
Followers of Shakespeare in Comedy.”
CONTENTS
I. A COMPARATIVE VIEW OF THE FELLOWS AND FOLLOWERS OF SHAKESPEARE.
(Part One.) By Charles Mills Gayley.
II. BEN JONSON: CRITICAL ESSAY. By Charles H. Herford.
Edition of _Every Man in His Humour_. The same.
III. BEN JONSON: CRITICAL ESSAY. By Charles Mills Gayley.
Edition of _Epicœne, or the Silent Woman_. The same.
IV. BEN JONSON. THE ALCHEMIST: CRITICAL ESSAY. By George A. Smithson.
Edition of _The Alchemist_. The same.
V. CHAPMAN, JONSON, AND MARSTON. EASTWARD HOE: CRITICAL ESSAY. By
John W. Cuncliffe.
Edition of _Eastward Hoe_. The same.
VI. THE MERRY DEVILL OF EDMONTON: CRITICAL ESSAY. By John Matthews
Manly.
Edition of _The Merry Devill of Edmonton_. The same.
INDEX.
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York
Representative English Comedies, Vol. III
_THE LATER CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE_
FLETCHER AND OTHERS
With introductory essays and notes and a comparative view of the
fellows and followers of Shakespeare under the general editorship of
CHARLES MILLS GAYLEY, LITT.D., LL.D.,
Professor of the English Language and Literature in the University of
California
_Cloth, 8vo, 663 pages, $2.00_
This volume, like the second one of this series, contains plays of
the later contemporaries of Shakespeare. The editors of the different
plays are scholars of wide reputation who have made a special study of
the period and the various dramatists here represented. In this volume
Professor Gayley’s masterly essay on “The Fellows and Followers of
Shakespeare” is brought to a close.
CONTENTS
I. A COMPARATIVE VIEW OF THE FELLOWS AND FOLLOWERS OF SHAKESPEARE IN
COMEDY. (Part Two.) By Charles Mills Gayley.
II. THOMAS DEKKER: CRITICAL ESSAY. By Alexis F. Lange.
Edition of _The Shomakers Holiday_. The same.
III. MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY. THE SPANISH GIPSIE: CRITICAL ESSAY. The
late H. Butler Clarke.
Edition of _The Spanish Gipsie_. The same.
IV. JOHN FLETCHER. RULE A WIFE AND HAVE A WIFE: CRITICAL ESSAY. George
Saintsbury.
Edition of _Rule a Wife and Have a Wife_. The same.
V. PHILIP MASSINGER: CRITICAL ESSAY. Brander Matthews.
Edition of _A New Way to Pay Old Debts_. The same.
VI. RICHARD BROME: CRITICAL ESSAY. G. P. Baker.
Edition of _The Antipodes_. The same.
VII. JAMES SHIRLEY: CRITICAL ESSAY. Sir A. W. Ward.
Edition of _The Royall Master_. The same.
INDEX.
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York
* * * * *
Transcriber’s note
Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized. Other spelling
has also been retained as originally published except for the
corrections below.
Page 24: “fearlesss mildness of” “fearless mildness of”
Page 34: “of an hill and commands” “of a hill and commands”
Page 34: “near an hundred” “near a hundred”
Page 34: “stately appartments lie” “stately apartments lie”
Page 118: “and solemn occasion” “and solemn occasions”
Page 118: “At all other time” “At all other times”
Page 324: “Duke of Omniun.” “Duke of Omnium.”
Page 343: “Gammer Gurton’s Nedle” “Gammer Gurton’s Needle”
Page 345: “followers of Skakespeare” “followers of Shakespeare”
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