England and the English in the Eighteenth Century. Chapters in the social history of the times

Front matter

ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY VOL. I. PRINTED BY SPOTT1SWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE LONDON ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Chapters m tlje %uciai gistorj) of tin (Limes KV WILLIAM CONNOR SYDNEY ' The Lift of Man in England : what men did, thought, suffered, enjoyed ; the form, especially the spirit of their terrestrial existence ; its outward environment ; its inward principle ; how and what it was whence it was ; whence it proceeded ; whither it was tending ' Carlyle IN TWO VOLUMES — VOL. I. £0110011 WARD & DOWNEY 12 YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN 1891 \A_il rights reserved^

Preface

. The scope and intent of these volumes are sufficiently indicated upon their title-page. They consist of a series of short chapters embodying the results of a study of the manners, the customs the daily life, the occupations, and the general social condition of the English people in the eighteenth century, an age which, in spite of its close proximity to that in which we live, and in spite of the many books which have been written to illustrate its history, is still, perhaps, more imperfectly known and understood than any of those to which it immediately succeeded. That the specification of every source of information which has been consulted would hardly have been possible, will be obvious, nevertheless the work contains few, if indeed any, state ments of importance which are unaccompanied by the means whereby their accuracy can be tested by such as may be desirous of so doing.

If such a pendant to historical literature shall be found instrumental in casting even a very slight semblance of the vi ENGLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. glow and colour of reality over a century which now exists only in print, and in conveying easily to the minds of its readers that knowledge of commonplace detail and everyday life which, however apt to be neglected by professed students of the past, is yet the very kind of knowledge that is calculated to invest history with reality and vividness, the object in presenting it as a candidate for the favour of the public will have been fully attained. London : May 1891. CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME PAGE

Chapter II. The London Of Our Great-grandfathers

Changes if the aspect of the metropolis since the accession of George III. — Condition of its thoroughfares in the last century — ' The art of walking the streets' — Taking the wall— Inconveniences endured by foot-passengers — Signboards — A city shower — Sedan chairmen — Pall Mall — Night side of old London — Linkboys and watchmen — The state of Westminster — Of Fleet Ditch — Decayed houses — Condition of various localities described — Bird's-eye view of the metropolis in the Georgian era ........ 7

Chapter III. Some Phases Of Town Life

The population of London during the eighteenth century — Isolation of the various districts — Its causes and effects — The daily life of a Beau — 'Bloods,' 'Frolics,' and 'Macaronies' — Eighteenth-century hours — The belle of fashion and her mode of life — Conversation — Swearing — Excessive drinking — Eminent hard drinkers — The classes and the masses — Life of the commonalty — Places of amusement and entertainment — Fashionable residential localities — The Mall in St. vol. I. a PAGE James's Park — ' Shoemaker's holiday' — Wedding and funeral customs — Marrowbones and cleavers — Lying in state — Insecurity of life and property— The life of the streets— Thieves and their practices — Vails-giving — Footmen ....... 43

Chapter IV. Dress And Costume

Transitional character of English dress in the eighteenth century — Female attire — Commodes — Preposterous size of head-dresses — The hoop — The train — Minor decorations — Snuff, paint, patches, and fans— Lace — Scattered contemporary notices relative to female costume — The dress of beaux — Wigs and their varieties — Hats — ' The cock ' — Powder — Ruffles — Watches — Clouded canes — The muff — The umbrella — Buckles — Dress of the learned professions — Military and naval costume — Juvenile attire — Notices of male costume selected from contemporary writers . . . . .89

Chapter V. Amusements And Pastimes, Public And Private

Vauxhall and Ranelagh — Marylebone and Cuper's Gardens — Drums, Festinos, and Ridottos — Masquerades — Mrs. Cornelys's Entertainments in Soho Square — The Pantheon — The Opera — The Stage — Its glaring anachronisms — The London fairs : Bartholomew, Southwark, and May fairs — Giants and dwarfs — Miscellaneous exhibitions — Cock-fighting— Prize-fighting — Bear-baiting — Cricket and football — Bowls — Boxing — Archery, rowing, and ballooning . -131

Chapter VI. London Coffee-houses, Taverns, And Clubs

Important position held by coffee-houses, taverns, and clubs — Uses of the coffee-houses — Taverns and their votaries — Taverns frequented by Dr. Johnson — Clubs — The spirit of conviviality — The clubs of Queen Anne's time — The October, Scriblerus, and Mug House Clubs — Clubs founded by Dr. Johnson — Cowper and his contribution to the Nonsense Club — Eccentric clubs — The Humbugs' Club— Club-night— Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu and the blue-stockings— Blasphemous clubs — Medmenham Abbey and its monks — The Society of Mohawks CONTENTS. IX PAGE 219

Chapter VII. Gambling And Duelling

National mania for gambling in the last century — Whist— The South Sea Bubble — State lotteries — Gambling clubs — Notorious gamesters — The Selwyn correspondence — Charles James Fox — Wagers — Female gamesters — Frequency of duelling — Its causes — Notable English duels of the eighteenth century — Lord Byron and Mr. Chaworth — Sheridan and Captain Mathews — Pitt and Tierney

Chapter VIII. Popular Credulities, Superstitious Beliefs And Practices

The hold which credulity retained on the national character — Astrology, its professors and dupes — Isaac Bickerstaff and John Partridge — Astrological almanacs and their contents — Duncan Campbell — The Earthquakes of 1750 and 1756 — Touching for the king's evil — Charms and medicinal recipes — Witchcraft : its believers and its victims — Belief in ghosts — Notable impostors of the century — Psalmanazar, the historian of Formosa — The Epworth mystery — Mary Tofts and her warren of rabbits — The case of Elizabeth Canning — The Cock Lane mystery — The Stockwell Ghost — Arch-quack Cagliostro .......... 263

Chapter IX. Concerning Quacks And Quackery

England overrun with quacks in the last century — The evil traced to its source — The methods which quack doctors employed — Specimens of quack advertising — Queen Anne and Sir William Read — Sir John Hill — Doctor Rock — Quack medicines — Dr. James's fever powder — The Bishop of Cloyne and the tar-water controversy — Female quacks — Mrs. Mapp, the Epsom bone-setter— Mrs. Joanna Stephens and senatorial stupidity — Foreign quacks — Dominicetti and his scented baths — The wonders of Herr Katterfelto — Itinerant empirics — Dr. Graham and his Temple of Health — His celestial bed — Animal magnetism — Dr. de Mainauduc and Philip Loutherbourg ............ X PAGE 326

Chapter X. Wars And Rumours Of Wars

Pugnacity of the English nation in the last century — Victories by land and sea — Rumours of invasion — Ludicrous invasion panics — The unsatisfactory state of the navy — Naval mutinies — Impressment and its abuses — Privateers and privateering — Condition of the army — Its defects and severity of discipline — The slave-trade and its abominations — Testimony of various writers to its inhumanity — Prevalence of smuggling — ' Kentish Knockers ' — Connivance at ' free-trading '.......... ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

Chapter I. Introductory

The England to which it is proposed to introduce the reader in the following pages is the England of the eighteenth century. He will be transported, in imagination at least, into that strange, quaint old world in which Pope, Addison, Gay, Goldsmith, Fielding, Lord Chesterfield, Dr. Johnson, Horace Walpole, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mrs. Delany, and Mrs. Eliza beth Robinson, not to mention a host of other major and minor celebrities, lived, moved, and had their being.

He will be carried back to the days when beaux strutted about Pall Mall and St. James's Street attired in richly-embroidered velvet coats, sporting cocked hats and lace cravats, and priding them selves on ' the nice conduct ' of ten-guinea clouded canes ; to days when belles deemed it no disfigurement to stick patches on their faces, to wear pyramidical head-dresses, or to shop on Ludgate Hill and in St. Paul's Churchyard, or to take the air in St. James's Park, attired in hooped petticoats, carrying huge decorated fans, accompanied by black boys and curly lap-dogs ; to days when ' the quality,' as people of rank and position were ordinarily styled, repaired to the haunts of gaiety and pleasure in sedan chairs and gilded chariots ; when travellers VOL. I. B possessed of the stoutest hearts quailed at the prospect of continuing their journey after the shades of night had fallen ; when every highway of importance was studded with gibbets and constituted a happy hunting-ground for armed and mounted desperadoes ; when stage coaches, pack-horses, and waggons afforded the only means of communication between places situated far apart ; when it would sometimes be found necessary to harness a team of strong oxen to the cumbersome family coach in order to drag it through the sloughs and narrow miry lanes ; when the rich veins of coal and iron had scarcely been opened ; when the great manufactures had barely emerged into existence ; and when as yet neither steam, electricity, gas, the post, the newspaper press, nor a hundred other kindred agencies favourable to the comfort and happiness of the people, had begun to make their enormous power known and felt throughout the length and breadth of the land.

The reader will be invited to undertake a short mental pilgrimage over the kingdom, pausing as he does so to make note of the condition of the roads along which he passes, to take cognisance of the homes and haunts of the peasantry, to mark the peculiarities of dialect, and to observe the various trades and handicrafts, the manners, customs, recreations, and tastes of the people. He will be led to the court and the manor-house, and thence to the mansion and the cottage. He will be conducted through the streets of the capital — to its theatres, its ridottos, its masquerades, its auctions, its toyshops, and its bear-gardens. For his inspection, the churches, the gaols, the dens of the astrologers and fortune-tellers will all be unroofed, after the manner of Asmodeus in the ' Diable Boiteux ' of Le Sage.

He will be invited to walk over the houses, to ex amine the furniture, to rummage the wardrobes contained in them, and to summon into existence specimens of the different classes of English society from the king on his throne to the humblest subject in the realm. And if this has the result of opening his eyes a little, well will it be. We are so accustomed to the in numerable conveniences peculiar to a highly civilised state of society, of which the wealthy and the ind;gent participate in a greater or lesser degree, as of the air which they breathe, that INTRODUCTORY. 3 we are apt not only to undervalue them but even to overlook them altogether. It is well, therefore, that the present genera tion should be occasionally made to realise the value of that which it thus thanklessly enjoys. Far below their true worth are good and safe roads, well lighted streets, cheap and speedy methods for the conveyance of life and property, great dis coveries and striking improvements, estimated in this our day.

Few of those to whom it was permitted to cross the deep gulf which separates this century from the one which preceded it now linger among us. Fewer still are able to say anything from personal knowledge about the social life of England before the year 1800, in an age which is in character although not in time, so very far removed from our own. The extraordinary strides which scientific progress has made, and the revolutions which have been effected in the means of locomotion have not merely completely altered many customs, but have eradicated very much that was peculiar in our modes of living. It can hardly be expected that so complete a transition from the old order to the new will readily occur again. Men having ceased to wonder at their own experience will probably soon cease to believe that things in the world around them were not always what they seem to them at present.

There is a certain class of people, who were perhaps never more numerous than they are now, who delight to pose in the character of laudatores temporis acti. It is from such that society hears periodically the most pathetic lamentations over the degeneracy of these latter days, and sighs the most plaintive for the return of bygone ages. With something akin to regret they dwell on the ' Merrie England ' of their forefathers ; their waking hours are haunted by beatific visions of those far away times when ' the extremes of exuberant wealth and luxury, of pale faced poverty and squalid want,' to adopt their own language, were almost, if not entirely unknown. One of our greatest bards has told us that it is distance which lends enchantment to the view. And the remark is true, for, to minds at all capable of reflection lamentations and regrets alike of this kind appear to be founded upon conceptions altogether erroneous ; since the more closely the candle is held up to what by a strange figure B of speech it is the fashion to call ' the good old times,' the less reason will be found for either envy or admiration of them — indeed the inevitable conviction that will force itself upon the inquirer will be this, that ' the good old times ' were in point of actual fact very bad times, and that those in which our lot happens to be cast are not such evil ones as they are com monly represented.

What one of the most illustrious of English historians observed nearly half a century ago remains true even to this day — namely, that ' the more carefully we examine the history of the past, the more reason shall we find to dissent from those who imagine that our age has been fruitful of new social evils. The truth is that the evils are, with scarcely an exception, old. That which is new is the intelligence which discerns and the humanity which remedies them.' The pleasure derived from the present possession of advantages is considerably heightened when they are compared with the disadvantages which were endured in the last age. There is nothing which tends to dull delight and to obliterate gratitude so much as custom. As Sydney Smith once said, ' It is of some importance at what period a man is born.' People who live in these luxurious times are far too apt to undervalue many benefits which they possess, and are far too prone to ignore the startling contrast which exists between the light of the present age and the darkness of the past.

Who that is now whirled in less than three hours from London to Bristol, or to Manchester in five, would care to entrust his limbs to a stage coach accomplishing the distance in as many days ? Or who would care to consume seven hours out of the twenty-four in making a voyage in a packet from Dover to Calais, or from Brighton to Dieppe ? Who that in the capital nowadays walks through streets lighted by gas and electricity would feel any in tense desire to return to the miserably lamp-lighted streets of eighteenth-century London ? The habit of walking on well paved thoroughfares begets forgetfulness of the pebbly narrow streets of the age anterior to the present. So, too, the possession of an efficient police force renders men utterly insensible to the woes of foot-passengers to whom no better protection — if such it deserves to be called — was vouchsafed than lazy beadles and tipsy INTRODUCTORY. 5 watchmen.

The working classes (albeit they perpetually grumble and strike) would be in a far more contented frame of mind than they are could they but realise one half of the discomforts and privations that their predecessors endured without repining, the poor fare on which they subsisted, the restrictions by which they were hampered, and the scanty wages that they earned. Let him turn in which direction he may, where will the mechanic to-day find things in anything like the same state in which they were in the last century ? Can he lay his finger upon a com modity consumed by all classes of the people that is not either of better quality or of improved manufacture ? Can he point to any article of male or female wearing apparel, worn even by the poorest of the population, that is not at the present day of a quality far superior to that which was then in general use among the wealthy ?

And may not the same be truly said with respect to food ? Will it be denied that inferior substitutes for bread made of wheaten flour have long since passed out of use ? Will it be denied that the masses live upon nothing, or at any rate expend their earnings upon nothing as the main stay of their subsistence, except the best and the costliest of all the commonly cultivated productions of the soil ? Will it be contended that the numerous other articles of daily con sumption, such as tea, coffee, and sugar, for example, have not from being the luxuries of the few become the necessaries of the many ; or that houses, cottages, and mansions, tenanted by people of all degrees, both externally and internally have been equally changed and improved ; or that every article of furni ture, every article intended either for use or for ornament, cor tained in them, has been changed, and that decidedly for the better ; or that the intellectual needs of the masses have never been ministered to more assiduously by those agencies which civilise the conduct of men and prevent them from sinking to the level of the brute creation — the lecture halls, free public libraries, mechanics' institutes, and recreative evening classes?

Surely not. It would be no easy task to enumerate the many things which in the last century were seldom seen, and are now possessed in greater or smaller measure by nearly everybody ; the many things not then in vogue, but which have since passed into daily use, to our " exceeding refreshment," as Robinson Crusoe would say ; the many more things which were not even in existence, and which, if not enjoyed by the entire community, are at all events enjoyed by no inconsiderable portion of it. Once more. If the visits of the heavenly bodies were like those of angels, few and far between, no small amount of wonder and interest would be excited in mortal minds in their exits and their entrances ; but, because they set their watch in the sky on almost every clear night, few condescend to elevate their eyes in order to gaze at them.

Much the same is the attitude which present-day folk adopt in regard to the past. If it be impossible to gauge all the benefits at present enjoyed, it is not impossible to recognise this, that times associated as they are with so many flagrant evils and so many discomforts have no claim whatever, in the name of common sense, to the title of ' the good old times.' To all the previous ages the present stands indebted for the advantages it now possesses, and failure to appreciate them can result only from despising the day of small things.

Chapter II. The London Of Our Great-grandfathers

Changes in the aspect of the metropolis since the accession of George III. — Condition of its thoroughfares in the last century — ' The art of walking the streets' — Taking the wall— Inconveniences endured by foot-passengers — Signboards — A city shower — Sedan chairmen — Pall Mall — Night side of Old London — Linkboys and watchmen — The state of Westminster — Of Fleet Ditch — Decayed houses — Condition of various localities described — Bird's-eye view of the metropolis in the Georgian era. It is the special object of the present chapter to sketch in brief outline as accurately and comprehensively, in so far as the materials available for the purpose will permit, the condition and topographical aspect which the vast and ever-increasing capital of the British Empire presented about the time of the accession of George III., the era from which the prosperity of the kingdom began to increase in a marvellous ratio.

The changes which had taken place over the metropolis in the sixty years before that date were neither very extensive nor were they very important ; but such was not the case in the forty years that followed. Yet although an Act for the paving of Westminster was passed in 1762, and another for the improvement of the Strand and St. James's Street three years later, fully half a century elapsed before anything approaching a complete reformation made itself perceptible. A rough sketch of London, therefore, at the epoch when the sceptre passed from the hands of George II. into those of his successor, may serve a useful purpose in two ways — in the first place as forming a fitting prelude to the subject by showing very decidedly the vast strides which the metropolis has made on the road of improvement, and, secondly, from the possibility of its being the means of enabling the reader to understand some facts contained in subsequent chapters, which would per haps otherwise fail to lend themselves readily to his compre hension, or perhaps even to his belief.

It sounds like the reiteration of an already well-worn truism, to say that there is probably no other city in Europe, certainly none in the United Kingdom, which has undergone during the last three-quarters of a century of its existence more extraordi nary metamorphoses and improvements than London. Yet so it is. The capital, undoubtedly, still stands where it. did then ; but in almost every other respect it is as much transformed as an ancient residence that had been almost entirely reconstructed from kitchen to garret. The historian of the ' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ' remarks that the description composed in the Theodosian age of the many stately mansions in which Rome abounded might almost excuse the exaggeration of the poet that the Eternal City contained a multitude of palaces, and that each palace was equal to a city.

Signs are not wanting that some such destiny as this is reserved for the metropolis of England in the immediate future. In these days a new generation has arisen, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who were in the prime of life when George III. ascended the throne. They know and see London as it now is ; but few people living have before their mind's eye the appearance which it wore in the days of their eighteenth-century ancestors. What sweeping changes old Father Time, that most irresistible of all reformers, has silently laboured to accomplish in this particular direction will be readily apparent to anyone who will take the trouble to collate with care the contemporary maps and engravings purporting to represent the London of the Georgian era with those which represent the London of the present day.

By a series of gradual and successive revolutions, entire streets and immense blocks of dilapidated houses have been demolished, in order to make room for the new spacious and imposing thoroughfares which have been formed on their sites ; in addition to numerous railway-stations, banks, offices, squares, crescents, and churches. Before the progress of alteration and amelioration, the labyrinthine mazes of foetid alleys, the dingy courts, the squalid dens of crime and misery, and innumerable other abominations, reeking of poverty, hunger, and destitution, which then flourished almost beneath the very shadow of kingly palaces, have in great part vanished, never, it is devoutly to be hoped, to reappear ; while on the other hand desolate commons and fields which were then appropriated to pasturage have been converted, as by the wand of some Arabian magician, into long rows of lofty buildings, magnificent in their outward aspect.

William Maitland, were he to renew once more life's fitful fever, would hardly recog nise the city which he so diligently and carefully catalogued some one hundred and fifty or more years ago ; and if he would not, it is a moral certainty that his contemporaries, among whom Dr. Johnson, Goldsmith, Boswell, and William Hogarth may be specially mentioned, would experience the same difficulty. Looking backwards from the vantage-ground of time upon the age which closed with the year 1799, it requires no small men tal effort to realise that London, at the coronation of George III., was, and for many a year afterwards continued to be, marred by numerous disfigurements which it had inherited from preceding eras. By far the greater part of its streets andcourts, to start with, were built in a very irregular fashion; numbers of ancient gabled houses which, by an accident of their position, had escaped the great conflagration of 1666, were still standing in them ; and tradespeople encroached to a most unwarrantable extent upon the footway with their bulks, their bow windows, and their great glass doors.

Not a few of the principal thoroughfares still remained unpaved ; and, as a consequence of this, every shopkeeper and householder paved the space in front of his door entirely in accordance with his own peculiar ideas. Such pavements as were in existence consisted of round stones taken fresh from the quarry, and thrown down at random ; so that it was almost next to impossible for wayfarers to find repose for the soles of their feet.1 Some of the streets of the capital, it is true, were paved with freestone ; but to have done so on any extended scale would have entailed considerable expense, as the stone had to be brought from a very long distance, and 1 J. r. Grosley, Tour to London (1765), i. 33-36. that was not then deemed worthy of serious consideration. The middle of a thoroughfare was either generally full of cavities which harboured water and filth— removed only at the convenience of the scavengers — or else was occupied by a succession of dirty puddles, five or six inches deep, which, when stirred up by the cart-wheels and horses' hoofs, smothered the pedestrian from head to foot, filled the passing coaches and carriages when their windows were not closed, and daubed all the lower parts of shop and house-fronts.

On either side of every thoroughfare ran a miry ditch, in the truest sense of the word, commonly called 'the kennel,' that, during the prevalence of tempestuous weather, was often swollen well-nigh to overflowing, and in hot weather positively pesti lential, by reason of the various fumes emitted by the heaps of garbage and rubbish, 'of all hues and odours,' of which it was made the receptacle. Through these veritable morasses, when they had attained 'full tide,', it afforded infinite gratifica tion to coachmen and carters to urge their horses, and to splash purposely every decently-dressed person they met on the way. Well might the poet Gay counsel the London pedestrians ever to be watchful to maintain the wall — by which he meant that they should keep as closely as they possibly could to the shop and house-fronts.1 This was one of the golden rules of ' the art of walking the streets ' which no person outside the precincts of Bedlam at that time would so much as have dreamed of despising.

Dr. Johnson relates that, when his mother lived in London, there were two sets of people, those who gave the wall and those who took it — the peaceable and the quarrel some ; and that when he returned to Lichfield in 1737, after sojourning in London, she asked him whether he was one of those who gave the wall or of those who took it. ' Now,' said he, ' it is fixed that every man keeps to the right ; or, if one is taking the wall, another yields it, and it is never a dispute.' 1 Gay, Trivia, ii. The poet also furnishes elaborate hints as to whom to ' give ' and whom to ' refuse ' the wall to (b. i. ). Gay's curious little poem was originally published in 1716, but much of what he says in it respecting the state of the London streets and outdoor life in general was applicable not only at the particular date of which this chapter treats, but also until the commencement of the present century.

In order to render transit across the streets within the bounds of possibility, small causeways, raised a little above the level, and composed of large broad stones picked out for the purpose, were constructed. ' Kerbstones were as yet unthought of, and rows of posts formed the only lines of demarcation between the foot and carriage ways.2 Although these foot paths barely afforded space for more than one person to pass at a time, the passenger's only chance, or rather certainty of safety, lay in keeping steadily within them, notwithstanding the danger he momentarily ran of being sent floundering head first into 'the kennel,' or thrust heavily against 'the wall' by some ruffianly sedan chairman, thus proving the value of the caution which Gay administered to foot passengers : — Though expedition bids, yet never stray Where no ranged posts defend the rugged way ; Here laden carts with thundering waggons meet, Wheels clash with wheels and bar the narrow street.3 If it happened that a pedestrian, compelled by the urgency of his business to exchange the footpath for the carriage way, turned out into the latter from the space between two posts, ten chances to one if some advancing vehicles would not necessitate his speedy return to the place he came from ; and in that case he had no course open to him but to leap over or stoop be neath the chain or rail which was commonly continued from the top of one post to that of another.