The English scene in the eighteenth century

Prefatory Note

In one of his later essays Sir Leslie Stephen complained that too much value is placed on the publication of minute new facts relating to the history of the eighteenth century. The aim of students of the society of that age should be, he went on to say, to systemize the materials which are already in existence ; in other words, to form a clear and general view of the age. His last work, " English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century," is an admirable example of the practical performance of a theoretical precept. The object of this book is to follow — however imperfectly — the same ideal, and to present to the reader some of the more important and characteristic aspects of England in the eighteenth century. These aspects, whether of places or of people, we must realize if we would form an accurate mental picture of the scene, and obtain its proper value from the mass of data which have from time to time been made available to those interested in this epoch.

Anatole France somewhere says that poets tell us what we vaguely think. Possibly in the chapters which follow some may find mental pictures and

vii viii PREFATORY NOTE

conclusions of which they have thought, but which have not hitherto grown into definite forms, or found articulate expression.

To attain the object in view it was necessary that the treatment of the subject should be at once broad and simple ; to enter minutely into details, to offer illustrations of every statement of fact or of opinion, would lessen clearness of outline. It would have been equally inappropriate to load the following pages with references, since a view presented in a few lines is frequently the result of the consideration of many facts, and of numerous authorities. Some references have, however, been inserted, chiefly to enable a reader who desires to follow a particular subject at length, to have at hand some guide when he begins his quest.

My debt of gratitude to Mr. Thomas Seccombe is acknowledged on another page ; to Miss Helen Clergue also I am very grateful for valuable aid.

PART I Introductory Outlook CHAPTER

I. The Capital

II. The People of the Capital

III. Some Resorts and Ceremonies of the Capital .....

IV. The Women of the Capital

V. The City of Pleasure

VI . The Literary Circle of the City of Pleasure ....

VII. The Seaport . • . .

PAGE I

3 H

89 107

PARI II

Conspicuous Groups . , .125

VIII. The Nobility . . . , .127

IX. The Middle Class • • . '147

IX

X CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

X. The Intellectual and Moral Development OF THE Middle Class . 164

XL The Men of the Industrial Revolution . . . . . .182

XII. General Influence of the Men of

XIII, The New Provincial Citizen . . 212

XIV. The Woman of Letters . . . 224 XV. The Naval Officer .... 243

XVL The Country Clergy . . . 259

XVII. The Peasant 270

LIST OF , ILLUSTRATIONS

Buckingham Palace in 1790 . . . Frontispiece

FACING PAGB

Vauxhall Gardens . . . . . .12

The Card Party, about 1780 . . . . 18

The Cock Pit ....... 26

A Tea Garden (Bagnigge Wells) . . . .34-

Richard Nash, Esq. . . . . . ,76

Henry Fielding , . 90

Alexander Pope . . . . . , .92

Mrs. Thrale (Piozzi) . . . . . . 100

"The Flowing Bowl" or "Sailor's Returned" 118' Thomas Pelham, First Duke of Newcastle . .128 William Henry Cavendish, Third Duke of Portland . . . . . . . . 134

Augustus Henry, Third Duke of Grafton . . 136 WoBURN Abbey . . . . . . . 146

John Wesley 178

xi xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PACK

JosiAH Wedgwood ...... 190

Anna Seward 228

Fanny Burney (Madame D'Arblay) . . . 234

The Press Gang ....... 252''

The Sleeping Congregation ..... 268

The Village Ale-House ..... 276

THE

ENGLISH SCENE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

PART I

INTRODUCTORY OUTLOOK

As we survey the face of England in the eighteenth century our attention is instantly arrested by three cities, widely separated, and conspicuous above all other urban communities of the land, each having definite and different characteristics which are intimately involved with the peculiar life of the epoch. Of these cities the first is the Capital, with its long-existing historic traditions, its close association with every change in the political growth of the nation, the centre of the intellectual life of the people. It is visible, set in this particular period, as a capital. It comes into view from afar and it passes into the future, as a capital, in each phase of its history evidencing the influences of the age.

In the South- West of England, appropriately placed in a pleasant land and in a soft atmosphere, are the dignified and handsome buildings amidst which we I

2 INTRODUCTORY OUTLOOK

discern a varied throng enjoying the City of Pleasure, a special product of the time ; one which disappears with the century.

Separated alike from London and from Bath by some hundreds of miles, wherein are county and cathedral towns — not differing markedly from the same towns to-day — and stretches of farm-land and villages, we note, on a northern estuary within sight of the western seas, isolated and self-contained, the abode of shipowners and of seamen — the Seaport.

We have passed two towns not appreciably smaller than Liverpool, though in fact less in population, Birmingham and Manchester,^ the one the centre of the Midland hardware, the other of the Lancashire weaving trade. But though each had a technical and commercial individuality, neither had the distinct and epoch-marking character of the three cities which may be distinguished by illustrative appellations. Collectively, Birmingham, Manchester, and other urban communities, especially of the Midlands and of the North, were much alike ; they furnish examples of classes of men of supreme importance in the history of the age, though these are not connected with any one particular town. They must be described when we come to view some sections of the people in relation to the century, without reference to special localities.

It is with the Capital that we are in the first place concerned.

1 In 178 1 Liverpool was estimated to have 39,000 inhabitants, Manchester (without Salford) in 1773, 22,000, and Birmingham in 1770, 30,000.

CHAPTER I The Capital

London to-day is a huge aggregation of considerable towns ; in the eighteenth century it was one great and homogeneous city, the largest in Europe, with a population estimated at 725,903 souls.-^ Small though it was compared with the enormous London of our own age, striking differences are to be noted between its people and those of the provincial towns, as of the rural districts, and its society was marked by some special features. In fact, an appreciation of London as a whole ; not only objectively — of its streets, its houses, its business, and its amusements — but of the moral and mental characteristics of the men and women who formed its society, in a word, of the Londoner, implies an understanding of the most conspicuous part of England in the eighteenth century. To know London is to know the Capital of the Empire, with all that is implied by the expression — the innumerable, varied, and vital, interests. Outside of the metropolis, and distinct from it, was the rest of the kingdom with its own life and characteristics. Volumes have been written on that part of London, commonly

1 Maitland, "History of London" (1772), vol. ii. p. 744.

4 LONDON EARLY IN THE CENTURY

called the West End, which has been pictured for us in multitudinous memoirs so that we cannot dissociate the England of the Georges from St. James's Street. Yet this locality was only the centre of a portion, though, relatively to its numbers, a most influential one, of the society of the kingdom.

In the first half of the eighteenth century the country lay quiescent after prolonged political and religious conflicts ; years of internal turmoil were followed by years of peace. England was politically fatigued. Still conscious of the shocks which she had endured at the Revolution and the Rebellion, and of the constant anxiety of the age of Anne, she was grateful for rest at home, and thankful for the Hanoverian dynasty, which had become a symbol of popular freedom. This dominant note was most marked in London, which, as the heart of the kingdom, was most sensitive to the feeling of relief and, as a capital, was most capable of appreciating material prosperity. But the national energy, the dynamic force of the nation, had not lessened, the temperament and the fibre of the people had not changed, and beneath the quietude of the eighteenth century were the old and often tried inherent vigour and common sense. We must seek for evidences, however, of these qualities not so much in London as in provincial centres, in Lancashire, in Yorkshire, in Derbyshire, where the genius of the inventor and the enterprise of the manufacturer were changing the face of the country and the habits of its people, were founding a new

THE CAPITAL S

class, and causing social, and eventually political, changes throughout England.

The striking difference between the size of the Metropolis in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries increases the difficulty of realizing to-day the life of the Londoner in the former age. We are so accustomed to London as we see it, throbbing with palpable energy, and, as we daily move about in it, scarcely aware of its vitality and its immensity, only conscious in a vague way of its vast size and of the infinite occupations of its people, that it is not easy to comprehend it as it appeared to our forefathers. London at the period of our survey was in a state of change ; it was, as it is to-day, growing ; it was in course of transformation from a collection of separate but neighbouring communities into a single city. But it was a change rather in the nature of consolidation than of expansion. In the twentieth century London, a vast metropolis, irresistibly expands, overspreading rural districts, and absorbing large villages. In the eighteenth century this distinction between the capital and the communities around it was less conspicuous, and places around London and Westminster — Stepney and Kensington for instance — gradually joined with, rather than were absorbed by, the main town. The cities of London and Westminster were, however, united, and some of the villages which had existed around them were just becoming parts of the town.

If a stranger had hired a phaeton and started from

6 TYBURN

Tyburn turnpike to take a survey of the scene, and had happened to choose a Monday morning before 1783 — after that date executions took place in front of Newgate — he would probably have found himself entangled in a disreputable crowd, the nearest approach to which nowadays would be the throng at the entrance to a racecourse. Opposite the spot on which the Marble Arch now stands he would have noticed one or more gallows, and carts containing the condemned persons with arms pinioned and a rope round their necks and coffins by them, men and women, murderers or simple thieves, received by jeers and cheers, by murmurs and shouts, from the excited and expectant populace. As each vehicle placed beneath the gallows moved away, a dangling body would have been seen against the sky. This would be seized by those who had been the friends of the executed man, who holding it, by their weight sought to end his sufferings. If the stranger had waited longer he would have noticed women in black, the womenfolk of the dead, claiming the corpses of their relatives, or a surgeon eager for experiments carrying off the body of a friendless felon. Anxious to escape from this frequent, and to us shocking, spectacle, the result at once of a cruel criminal law and a brutal population, our friend would have driven along Tyburn Road and Oxford Street. On his left were a few streets, of which, on first starting, Berkeley Street was the northern boundary; beyond Marylebone Street and Queen Anne Square w^rq the Marylebone

THE CAPITAL 7

Gardens, and then a long succession of open fields extended to the north. He would presently pass along Great Russell Street noting Montague House, and there, after 1753,^ he could have, if so inclined, tarried for a time and inspected the Harleian manuscripts. A few yards farther was Bedford or Southampton House, a white building, long and low, with a courtyard, behind it were delightful and shady gardens from which were charming views of the green heights of Highgate across Lamb's Conduit Fields. These noble mansions, and others not inferior to them in various parts of eighteenth-century London, were not merely architectural features of the capital, however noticeable. They emphasised the supreme political and social position of the aristocracy, not, as to-day, lost among the miscellaneous crowds of men and dwellings in the West End, but dominant over, and apart from, the general population of the town.

Continuing along Great Ormond Street the wayfarer would soon approach the Foundling Hospital which kindly Captain Thomas Coram had established in 1 741, and which had not a house near it. Thence, keeping to the outskirts of the town, he would reach the southern end of Finsbury Fields, near the junction of the City Road and Old Street. He would, if it were summer, pass numbers of wayfarers driving or walking to Bagnigge or Sadler's Wells, some hoping by drinking the waters

^ Montague House was purchased as a British Museum in 1753, primarily to hold the Qottonjan and Harleian M3Sj

8 EASTERN DISTRICTS OF THE CAPITAL

to improve their health, others going thither only for enjoyment. As he turned southward, on his left hand the houses of Hoxton village might be seen among the trees, w^hile beyond the open space of Upper Moorfields, which was laid out with walks, a collection of unimportant streets and houses extended eastwards to a line of which the centre was High Street, Whitechapel. Beyond was a succession of green fields with a few houses grouped round Bethnal Green.

The explorer would then come down Finsbury, past Bethlehem Hospital to the Royal Exchange. If minded to drive to the eastern termination of London, he had little more than a mile to traverse ; for when he reached the end of Whitechapel Street by the London Hospital, before him would have stretched the high road running through the villages of Mile End, New Town, and Old Town. To the southward lay the quiet village of Stepney, whither the East End Londoner resorted on Sundays and holidays to eat Stepney buns and drink ale and cider. Here also the seaman ashore regaled himself and his mistresses with like refreshments. By the London Hospital he would, turning to the right, drive along the New Road through open country. About Ratcliff Highway he would meet with a few houses among orchards and market gardens, till he reached Wapping, with its two or three streets running parallel with the river, crowded with sailors, fishwives, and disreputable women. This maritime piece of London extended from Sha dwell Causeway to a littk east pf the Tow^rj showing fron^

THE CAPITAL a distance all the picturesque features which belong to a busy waterside district. In midstream were many ships — colliers, Dutch galliots, hay boats, and West Indiamen, discharging their varied cargoes into barges, an animated and suggestive sight. But on shore the foul streets were thronged with drunken seamen and scarcely less drunken women, their unkempt hair hanging over their faces, their bosoms bare, or half hidden by a handkerchief, and on their feet long quartered shoes with great buckles, their heedless and immoral lives eventually to end in the great churchyard of St. George, Ratcliff. Each tavern was filled with swearing sailors, some just paid off, a crimp or two and their half-stupid prey, and the streets were muddy and filthy.

Tired, however, of sitting in his carriage, our friend would take boat from Wapping Old Stairs (Thames Tunnel) to Tooley Stairs at the south end of London Bridge. He would pass Horsely Down with its houses, its stairs, and its dock, meeting, it might be, the Lord Mayor in his state barge, doffing his hat to an acquaintance who is on his way down stream, perhaps to Dr. Johnson and Boswell bound on a pleasure trip from Temple Stairs to Greenwich, arguing, as they glide along, on the argonauts and on preaching.^ He would watch for a moment to see if fishermen from Lambeth had had any luck and had caught a salmon.

The immensity of the modern metropolis has caused its people to forget that in the eighteenth ^ Bogwell's " Life of Johnson," chap. vii. (July 30, 1763).

10 THE THAMES

century London was essentially a riverside town, with all the changing picturesqueness of a tidal shore. To-day the inhabited area has grown to a size out of all proportion to the Thames, but throughout the eighteenth century the river was a conspicuous feature of the town, an important element in the life of the Londoner alike for business and pleasure, constantly in his view, at once an anchorage, a highway, and a pleasure resort. The comparatively small tonnage of ships in those days enabled them to be moored quite up to London Bridge with perfect ease, and from Shadwell upwards the surface of the river was thronged with small boats calling at one or other of the numerous " stairs " on either shore, and passing from bank to bank.

" On either hand, Like a long wintry forest, groves of masts Shot up their spires ; the bellying sheet between Possessed the breezy void ; the sooty hulk Steer'd sluggish on ; the splendid barge along Row'd, regular, to harmony; around, The boat, light skimming, stretch'd its oary wings." ^

Though regattas were unknown, pleasure boats glided about the river by Vauxhall, Twickenham, and Richmond, and well-to-do people liked on summer afternoons to visit their friends by water, passing from villa to villa, or were rowed about in gay parties, thus obtaining opportunities for the enjoyment of the

1 Thompson, " The §easons^" Autumn (1730).

THE CAPITAL ii

tranquil open-air pleasures which our ancestors valued in their quiet, sensible fashion.

But we must return to our wayfarer. Arrived at his destination on the southern shore, he would drive through the Borough to the beginning of Blackman Street, where he would find himself in the country, here low-lying and unhealthy. He would return through a suburban district to Blackfriars Bridge, and thence proceed over familiar ground, Fleet Street and the Strand, where quaint signs hung from the shops and taverns — to Charing Cross. To the east of St. James's Park with its canal, he would see Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament as they existed till destroyed by fire in 1834. He has come to the group of buildings which connect London with England politically, legally, and ecclesiastically, which more especially emphasize its character as the national capital, and which are the most remarkable links between the century on which our gaze is fixed and a distant past, and an unseen future. The road from the Horse Ferry was the boundary of Westminster, and beyond it were the orchards and market gardens which in those days supplied London with vegetables and fruit. Then driving up Pall Mall and St. James's Street, the end, too, of that part of London on the W^st — for there were only a few houses, as now, between it and the Green Park — he would have continued along Tyburn Lane (Park Lane), noting, as he passed, the house of the Earls of Dorset — which has been replaced by a magnificent modern ijiansipn — till h^

12 VAUXHALL GARDENS

found himself, after having covered a space of some thirteen miles, again at Tyburn turnpike, now quite deserted by the crowds of the morning.

If the visitor — whose imaginary expedition through London we have followed — had chanced to conclude his journey towards evening, he would hardly have failed to hire a boat at Westminster and to visit Vauxhall Gardens or, as they were called up to 1786, the New Spring Garden at Vauxhall,^ the most famous of the out-of-door pleasure resorts of the eighteenth century. Opened soon after the Restoration — probably in 1 66 1 — they remained a popular rendezvous until 1859. In the eighteenth century they were in their zenith, though long before this time they were most attractive to the pleasure-seeker : " Lord I " exclaimed Pepys, when, busy with his official work, he met two handsome women calling on his wife, " to see how my nature could not refrain from the temptation, but I must invite them to go to Foxhall to Spring Gardens ! " This was in 1666, and thenceforward all through the succeeding century visitors, from the Prince of Wales to the City apprentice — the entrance fee was only a shilling — from May to September crowded the boxes, the leafy alleys, and the tree-shaded walks. Vauxhall was a mixture of a West End Exhibition of to-day and the Kurhaus Gardens of a German spa. We can scarcely doubt that although an inherent love in English

1 Warwick Wroth, " The London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century," p. 286,

THE CAPITAL 13

people of fresh air and trees and flowers was one cause of the attraction of Vauxhall as of other out-of-door resorts, that another was the influence throughout the years following the Restoration, the Revolution, and the accession of the Elector, of foreign habits and customs among the more fashionable sections of society. The exiled Cavaliers had learnt in France to appreciate a flein air life, the ideal of which we see depicted by Pater and Lancret, while the Dutch soldiers and courtiers set a fashion in England which they had brought with them from Holland.

Chapter II

The Londoner of the eighteenth century was a stay-at-home person. The difficulty and the expense of travelling made it usually impossible for him to pass beyond the villages by which the capital was surrounded — Knightsbridge, Hampstead, Kensington, and Hoxton. A long journey was not often undertaken unless it were absolutely necessary. " A rich citizen of London has perhaps some very valuable relatives or friends in the West ; he thinks no more of visiting them than of travelling the deserts of Nubia, which might as well be in the moon, or in Limbo Patrum, considering them as a sort of separate being." ^ Only a few vigorous and specially energetic people made tours for pleasure in England till quite the end of the century. Riding-horses, stage coaches, wagons, and post-chaises, it is true, thronged the roads on every side of London. From the George and Blue Boar in Holborn, eighty-four coaches departed every day. Coaches left for Oxford four days in the week, and for Bristol twice a week. A journey to York occupied thirty hours, and cost

^ Gentleman's Magazine, vol. xxii. p. 553. 14

£3 6s. 3^. These are but a few examples of the traffic by road from London which enlivened the main EngHsh highways, and the courtyards of the old inns of London and of country towns and villages.

We often think of this form of travelling as pleasant and picturesque, and as an agreeable characteristic of eighteenth-century life, but if w^ regard it a little more closely we shall realize that it had also an effect on the life and character of the Londoner. It was neither an easy nor a rapid method of travel and, through the difficulty of communication as well as the position of the metropolis in a corner of England, the majority of Londoners were isolated from the rest of England, and were divided somewhat from their countrymen. London in the eighteenth century was in many respects the opposite of what it is to-day. Now it needs more corporate life, less cosmopolitanism, greater municipal individuality ; then it was homogeneous, well defined, and proud of its importance as the chief city of Great Britain, yet unembarrassed by a size to which no city had hitherto reached. The Londoner of the eighteenth century, while he cannot be called provincial — for the infiuence of a widely extended trade, and the effect of the connexion of Great Britain with European politics of which he was constantly hearing, tended to enlarge his mental view — ^was yet essentially a townsman, and often ignorant of the life of his fellow-countrymen at a distance, whether they lived in town or country.

i6 SOCIETY OF THE WEST END

The most conspicuous and interesting of the dwellers in the metropolis were a number — and a comparatively small number — -of men and women who were clustered together in the West End, and who formed the governing class. Politics, and pleasure in various, but rather limited, forms — cards, routs, dinners, and balls — were the occupation of this striking division of English society, the chronicles of which are inscribed in the immortal letters of Horace Walpole and in the gossiping correspondence of George Selwyn and his friends. The nobility, as will be more fully described in a later chapter, were so essential to the government of the country, that from this cause, and from their high and influential social position, they formed the core of this fashionable section, and gave it an aristocratic colour, and something of the tone of an exclusive club. The relations of all those who belonged to it were personal, often intimate. Lively Lady Sarah Lennox, for instance, writes about her political friends as naturally as of the women of her family. The same feature is constantly apparent in Walpole's correspondence. In a letter to Mason, in 1778, he first tells a story of his new housemaid and of her late mistress, the wife of the Bishop of Worcester, then he passes to a lawsuit as to Lord Foley's will, concluding by an historical dissertation on the war with the American Colonies and a half-humorous and half-despairing summary of the political situation — " unless sudden inspiration should seize the whole island, and make it with one voice invite Dr. Franklin to come over and new model the Government, it will crumble away in the hands that still hold it. They feel, they own, their insufficiency. Everybody is sensible of it, and everybody seems to think, like Lady Melbourne, that if we are blown up, it will be very comical." ^

The people who comprised this important division were distinct from the rest of the inhabitants of the capital, who, whether merchants in the City, or lawyers and doctors outside of it, were regarded with something like contempt by this particular society, a contempt which was exaggerated by their women folk, who threw up their heads and made rude remarks about ladies who were not of the ton. Selfish but good-natured, sensible and worldly, this section did not trouble itself about the past, or disturb itself about the future ; marriages :^nd deaths, the last debate, the next appointment, or a recent scandal alike interested it, it lived in and for the present. Politics and pleasure were daily and closely intermingled — " the blue and buff junto meet in St. James's Street to fix upon their plan of operations for to-morrow," ^ wrote Storer, a man about town, to Lord Carlisle, a month after the news of the disaster of York Town reached London in the autumn of 1781. This is a simple sentence, it is, however, singularly suggestive. We see the Whig leaders meeting in

1 " Letters of Walpole " (edited by Toynbee), vol. x. p. 239.

2 " George Selwyn, His Letters and His Life," p, 165.

i8 POLITICS AND SOCIETY

Charles Fox's rooms in St. James's Street, where some of the company have been engrossed in faro or hazard, whilst others have come from a chat at Brooks's or White's. In fact, gambling and politics were largely conducted in one street in the West End of the town, and political campaigns were planned where men lost their thousands on the green table. In many respects, too, this section of society was more closely in touch with the country than with the City at the very time when it formed a striking element in London life. This difference between the City and the West End makes more apparent the diminishing political power of the former, the influence of which was now becoming more purely commercial. The conjunction in the West End of statesmen, noblemen, men of letters, and men of pleasure, great ladies, and giddy women of fashion, commenced in the reign of Anne ; its end began when Lord Grey passed the Reform Bill of 1832, when the exclusiveness of the governing and fashionable section was broken by the invasion of the middle-class politician, and of the City magnate, whose advent on the political scene had been emphasized by the coming of the wealthy Nabob in the middle of the eighteenth century.

Another section, different from the great body of average Londoners, comprised a number of middle-class men and women, some well-to-do and even rich, generally unostentatious, appreciative of comfort, but more appreciative still of brightness of mind

The Card Party,

About jySo and clever conversation, resulting in agreeable and delightful intercourse. This group has been portrayed for us by Fanny Burney in her Diary, and she has handed down a memorable gallery, Johnson, Burke, Mrs. Thrale, and Mrs. Montague, Mr. Crisp, and Mr. Thrale, the Lockes of Norbury Park, and her own family in which the active, intelligent, and cosmopolitan Dr. Burney is a striking and an attractive figure.