England in the nineteenth century

Front matter

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QUEEN VICTORIA.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Year 1822. — The Family of George III. 9 II. George IV. — Mrs. Fitzherbert. — Princess

Charlotte 45

Chapter I. The Year 1 82 2. — The Family Of George Ih

'T^HE Marquis of Londonderry, better known to the -'- world by his title of Lord Castlereagh, had been prominent in English politics for twenty-five years. He had persistently opposed all liberal advancement, all progressive opinions. He was succeeded in his office of Foreign Secretary by Mr. Canning, under whose guiding influence the cabinet of Lord Liverpool seemed to adopt, in foreign affairs at least, an entirely different policy.

I was born in the summer of 1822, exactly as it were on the summit of the Great Political Divide, the old policy of repression going out, and the new policy of progress coming in, which has prevailed in England from 1822 up to this time.

I came into a world governed on High Tory principles, but with all kinds of radicalism, and sympathy for the late French Revolution, seething beneath the surface of society.

Poor George TH. had died in 1820, after nine years of hopeless insanity, during which the Prince of Wales had been Prince Regent of his kingdoms. Mr. Pitt, who had been Prime Minister at the beginning of the century, resigned office in 1801, but returned to it in 1804, when, but for the opposition of the King, his old rival, Mr. Fox, would have formed part of his ministry. Pitt died in January, 1806, and was succeeded by the ministry of All the Talents, in which Mr. Fox was Foreign Secretary. Mr. Fox on coming into office was forced to adopt his predecessor's policy, and to continue the war with Napoleon Bonaparte. He died, however, in 1806. A few months later, Mr. Canning became Foreign Secretary. In 1809, having unhappily quarrelled with Lord Castlereagh, then Minister of War in the same cabinet, whom he accused of tardiness in supporting English generals in the Peninsular War, a celebrated duel took place, after which both combatants resigned their cabinet positions. Lord Castlereagh resumed office shortly after, but Canning, refusing to sei-ve in the same ministry, would only accept, six years later, the office of President of the Board of Control. This he resigned in 1820, at the time of the Queen's trial ; but on Lord Castlereagh's death, in August, 1822, he was again made Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and at once committed England to a liberal and enlightened foreign policy. " No," he said, when invited by the Holy Alhance to crush the movement for constitutional government in Spain, " England can't help at that game. We '11 maintain the parcelling out of Europe by the Treaty of Vienna, though we don't half like it ; but we hold every nation to be free to do as it likes within its own boundaries, and when we please we will resist any attack on this freedom."

In France, in 1822, the close of Louis XVIII. 's life was made uneasy by the persistent efforts of the emigre nobility to restore the old regi7ne in France. Prussia, but for the assistance she had afforded the Allied Powers in their struggle with Napoleon, would have been but of small account in the family of nations. Italy, which had favored Napoleon, was punished by being placed, directly or indirectly, under the dominion of the Austrians. Russia was under the Emperor Alexander, who was restrained by a conscientious adherence to what he considered the principles of the Holy Alliance from taking advantage of an opportunity offered him of acquiring supreme influence, if not absolute dominion, in Constantinople as the champion and protector of the revolted Greeks. Spain, under a weak and hated sovereign, King Ferdinand, was incurring the enmity of the Powers who composed the Holy Alliance, by making frantic efforts to secure a constitution, and, a year later (1823), was to be invaded by French troops, in order to check her tendencies towards liberalism.

England when I was born had made very little material progress since the age of Queen Elizabeth. It prided itself, indeed, on its macadamized roads, its canal-boats, and its fast stage-coaches, and steamboats were beginning to be used on Scotch and English rivers ; but in 1822 the steamboats in Great Britain numbered only a hundred and twenty-three, and these dared not venture on the rough waters of the ocean.

Large cities were beginning to be lighted with gas. The discovery of its illuminating powers was very recent, and the smell was too offensive to allow of its introduction into private houses. Boston, one of the earliest American cities to introduce it into its streets, did not adopt it till 1828.

In 1822 Ohio represented our Far West. A quarter of a century earlier, Indians had tortured white men to death on the banks of the Miami River.

Gutta-percha was a substance not yet applied to common uses. India-rubber overshoes were made for sale by Indians, who ran the sap into rough clay moulds. Stationers kept rubber shoes in those days to cut up for school children who wanted to buy little bits of India-rubber to obliterate pencil- marks. Elastic was not; china buttons were not. Shirt-buttons looked like Queen Mab's chariot-wheels, tiny constructions made of thread and wire. Our nurse lighted our nursery fire with tinder-box, flint, and steel. Innoculation had but recently given place to vaccination ; and many faces pitted all over from small-pox might be met in any city in half-an-hour's walk through the streets. In common surgical practice there were no alleviations to pain.

In the summer of 1815 my father crossed the ocean on a ship that had on board the New York dentist, Dr. Parmlee, who had been to Paris to learn how to make artificial teeth. Before that time, if any man (Uke General Washington) wanted a new set of teeth, he had to reconcile himself to adopting those of a dead man.

On the other hand, there were giants (Sti ' the earth in those days in statesmanship and literature. Sir Walter Scott was bravely producing Waverley novels as fast as pen could write them, in his grand struggle against debt, prompted by his keen dread of mercantile dishonor. Byron in 1822 was in Venice, and had just published " Cain," as a defiance to steady-going humanity; Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Lamb, Campbell, De Quincy, and Professor Wilson were in their noontide glory.

On the Continent, great authors had not yet shown themselves. The turbid waters of revolution had hardly subsided enough to let them rise. Goethe, indeed, was living, though, as a writer, he belongs rather to the last years of the eighteenth century. Although America had Washington Irving, her literature was as yet only an annex to that of the mothercountry. She raised Httle cotton ; she hardly manufactured any cotton cloth; she printed none. Power-looms had, even in England, not entirely superseded the ancient hand-looms, on which weavers in their own cottages wove their webs. Workmen were bitterly opposed to the introduction of machinery, not foreseeing that the increase of production would give employment to hundreds where one would have got a living under the old system. How far large factories, with their armies of working-men and workingwomen, would be conducive to morality, breaking as they do into the home life of the working-classes, was a matter that in those days did not trouble the public conscience at all.

Postage was a very heavy tax on those who could least afford to pay for letters ; for the better class of society people in England avoided postage, through their acquaintance with peers or members of Parliament ; and the franking privilege afforded those gentlemen a cheap and easy way of gratifying constituents, and bestowing favors upon friends.

In 1822, High Churchism, as we know it now, or as it was in the days of Laud, was out of date in England. Wesley and his followers, half a century earlier, had run a furrow, as it were, over English soil, whence had started new hfe into the English Church, called Evangelicalism. The clergy were divided into high and dry divines of the old solid school, and the zealous, enthusiastic, rash, and somewhat contracted Evangelicals, who claimed a monoply of " Gospel teaching." Among the lay leaders of the Evangelical party were Zachary Macaulay (father of the statesman, poet, and historian). Lord Ashley, of whom I shall have more to say hereafter, and Mr. Wilberforce.

Bishops in England always wore wigs, as well as knee-breeches, black silk stockings, shovel hats, and the episcopal apron ; and when a young bishop with a fine head of hair was persuaded by his wife to request the Prince Regent's permission to appear at court without his wig, many persons — especially the Duke of Cumberland — predicted from such an innovation the downfall of the Church, — much as the Court Chamberlain of Louis XVL predicted the overthrow of monarchy when he saw shoe-strings instead of buckles in M. Roland's shoes.

There wis no system of government education at that time in England. The education of the poor was the work of private charity. There was a Poor Law, which obliged ratepayers to support paupers ; and sometimes the poor-rate became so grievous that it swallowed up the profits of the farmer and made him poor. He had to pay, besides tithes and church-rates (the latter for keeping church property in order), window tax for every window, taxes on his horses if above the size of ponies, taxes on his cart-wheels, taxes on malt, taxes on silver plate, if he had any, taxes on hair-powder, if he wore it, taxes on property, if he inherited it, and taxes on every bill he paid, for no receipt for any sum above ;Q\o was legally valid, unless it were written upon stamped paper.

Sydney Smith's celebrated denunciation of taxation at that period (which my father made me learn by heart when I was seven years old) was no exaggeration.

"We have," he says, "taxes upon every article thai enters into the mouth, or covers the back, or is placed under the foot ; taxes upon everything which it is pleasant to feel, smell, or taste ; taxes on everything in the earth, or in the waters under the earth ; on everything that comes from abroad or that is grown at home ; taxes on the raw material ; taxes on every value that is added to it by the industry of man ; taxes on the sauce which pampers man's appetite, and on the drug which restores him to health ; on the ermine which covers the judge, and the rope that hangs the criminal ; on the poor man's salt, and the rich man's spice ; on the brass nails of the coffin, and the ribbons of the bride; — on bed and board — couchant or levant — we must pay. The schoolboy whips his taxed top; the beardless youth manages a taxed horse, with a taxed bridle, on a taxed road; and the dying Englishman, pouring his medicine, which has paid seven per cent, into a spoon which has paid fifteen per. cent, flings himself back upon his chintz bed, which has paid twenty-two per cent, and expires in the arms of an apothecary who has paid a license of one hundred pounds for the privilege of presiding at his death-bed. His whole property is then taxed from two to twenty per cent. Besides the probate, large fees are demanded for burying him in the chancel ; his virtues are handed down to posterity on taxed marble, and he is gathered to his fathers to be taxed no more."

This excessive taxation was mainly the result of the vast efforts made by England in her wars with Napoleon. Many persons beheved (like Lord Holland) that Napoleon might probably have been quiet, had he been let alone, and considered the wars against him as undertaken solely in the interest of kings and of the aristocracy. As time develops more and more the inner history of Napoleon's career, it may be doubted whether he ever could or would have adopted the motto of his nephew, "The Empire is peace," for more than a few years at a time. There was deep discontent in England from 1818 to 1822, which Lord

Castlereagh put down with a firm hand. His domestic government was stern, rigid, and persecuting. His foreign policy appeared to countenance every encroachment on the rights of nations attempted by the sovereigns of Europe. He shot himself in August, 1822, and popular hatred disturbed his funeral ceremonies as he was laid to his last rest in Westminster Abbey.

In our own day we sometimes talk of being tired of Dickens's maudlin sympathies and sentimentalities ; but to estimate what the world was before the days of Dickens we must look back to the state of public sentiment upon the subjects on which he wrote, in my earlier days.

Towards the close of the last century a son of Lord Montagu had been stolen, sold to a sweep-master, and used as a chimney-sweep. Being sent to sweep the chimneys in his father's house, he entered his mother's chamber, and recognized his surroundings. This led to his being restored to his family ; and in grateful remembrance of his deliverance from suffering he gave, as long as he lived, an annual feast to all the London chimney-sweeps upon the ist of May. On his death, Mr. James White (Charles Lamb's friend) undertook to continue the festival ; but it was the sole gala day in the year for these unhappy boys. Such horrors as they sulTered do not exist now, either in chimneys, or in factories, or workhouses, or Yorkshire schools ; and this is largely because Dickens has turned the full light of public sympathy upon the world's dark places of cruelty.

Sydney Smith says, —

"An excellent and well-managed dinner is a most pleasing occurrence, and a geat triumph of civilized life. It is not only the descending morsel and the enveloping sauce, but the rank, wealth, beauty, and wit which savors the meats, the learned management of light and heat, the silent and rapid services of the attendants, the smiling, sedulous host proffering gusts and relishes, the exotic bottles, the embossed plate, the pleasant remarks, the handsome dresses, the cunning artifices in fruit and farina; — the hour of dinner, in short, includes everything of sensual and intellectual gratification which a great nation glories in producing. In the midst of all this, who knows that the kitchen chimney caught fire half-an-hour before dinner, and that a poor little wretch of six or seven years old was sent up in the midst of the flames to put it out ! There is a positive prohibition of sending boys up a chimney in a blaze; but what matter Acts of Parliament where the pleasures of genteel people are concerned ? — or what is a toasted child, compared to the agonies of the mistress of the house with a deranged dinner?"

He adds further : —

" When these boys outgrow the power of going up a chimney, they are fit for nothing else. The miseries that they have sufi'ered lead to nothing ; they are not only enormous, but unprofitable. Having suffered in infancy every misery that can be suffered, they are then cast out to rob and thieve, and are given up to the law."

I have spoken only of the chimney-sweeps, but the miseries suffered by young children in mines and factories were as great, if not so brutal ; and in this connection I may say a few words about a great and good man who came into Parliament at this period. He was born Lord Ashley, he became the Earl of Shaftesbury. He by no means belonged to a pious or exemplary family. His reHgious impressions were taken from a good old nurse who died when he was seven years old. " The recollection of what she said and did and taught," he has remarked, " even to a prayer that I now constantly use, is as vivid as in the old days when I heard her. I must trace, under God, very much, perhaps all, of the duties of my later life to her precepts and her prayers."

The "duties" he thus speaks of were undertaken to promote love to God and goodwill towards men, especially towards little children. I have heard him speak upon such subjects at public meetings in Exeter Hall. He was a tall, fair-haired, slender, eager-looking man, careless in dress, but fervent in spirit. The House of Commons from 1822 to 1826 was full of great orators, — Canning, who died in 1827; Brougham, versatile, brilliant, and omniscient; Peel, the great debater ; Huskisson, the master of facts ; Wilberforce, with all the eloquence of conviction and persuasion.

THE FAMILY OF GEORGE III. ly

What Wilberforce had done towards emancipating blacks, Lord Ashley set himself to do for factory children.

Factories in 1822 were a new invention. Up to the last quarter of the eighteenth century, linen, stockings, and woollen cloth had been, as I have said, woven in hand-looms by weavers who, like Silas Marner, dwelt in their own cottages. Their webs of linen were laid to bleach upon the grass, or spread upon the hedges. The punishment was death for the Autolycus who filched them in the gloaming.

Edward Cartwright about 1785 invented the power-loom. This led almost immediately to great industry in the manufacture of cotton cloth. Factories were established, modern competition began ; and when hard times arrived, manufacturers, anxious to produce cheap goods, threw men out of employment, and took on women, and children of tender age, to tend their looms. Then, too, in the year 1825 there came in England a " commercial crisis." Banks suspended payment in all directions, and as the notes of country banks circulated almost exclusively in the communities around them, ruin was wide- spread in many country towns.

The great reform with which Lord Ashley's name is associated was his protest against employing child-labor in the mills. So great was the new demand for this cheap labor that London guardians of the poor were willing to supply small pauper boys and girls out of their workhouses to millowners, and despatched them by the bargeful to manufacturing towns. These friendless creatures, overworked and ill-treated, died rapidly, or became lifelong cripples.

" The factories were filled with women and children working long weary hours in a polluted atmosphere, standing all day on their feet at their monotonous labor. Under this cheap labor system a curious inversion of the rules of life took place. Women and children superseded men in the factories, and the domestic concerns of the family were attended to by shiftless men, or, mother, and father too, lived on the killing labor of their little children, to the utter destruction of parental affection^, and of the last remnants of self-respect."

Heartbreaking stories were publislied, in what are called Blue Books, — /. e., reports of Parliamentary Commissions, — about children so weary from their work that the most inhuman devices were resorted to by their mothers to rouse them in the mornings.

Southey, under date of 1833, wrote of Lord Ashley and the child-labor system : —

" The slave trade is nothing to it. . . . Once more I say, ' Cry aloud, and spare not.' These are not times to be silent. Lord Ashley has taken up the Factory Question with all his heart, and with a deep religious sense of duty. If we are to be saved, it will be — I do not say by such men, but for the sake of such men as he is."

I will not dwell on Lord Ashley's further efforts on behalf of children made to work in coal-mines. In South Staffordshire, according to his speech in Parhament, it was common for children to begin work at seven years old. " In the West Riding of Yorkshire," he said, "it is not unusual for infants even of five years old to be sent to the pits. Near Oldham, children are worked as low as four years old, and in the small collieries towards the hills, some are so young that they are brought to work in their bed-gowns." This "work" was dragging sledge-tubs, on all fours, through tunnels too low and narrow to admit grown persons. The child had a girdle fixed about its waist, to which the sledgetub was made fast by a chain.

It took nearly twenty years from the first agitation of this subject before these abuses were effectually remedied by Act of Parliament. The greatest struggle was to obtain a law permitting only ten hours' work for women and children. Miss Barrett's noble poem, " The Cry of the Children," is said to have had a powerful influence on the result.

At this time there was another noble work, taken up quietly and carried on successfully, by a woman whose name will be handed down to posterity as that of a " mother in Israel."

Elizabeth Fry was a Miss Gurney, one of the rich and influential Quakers of that name, — a family whose happiness it still is to do good.

Her mother died when she was twelve years old, and her father, self-absorbed, paid little heed to the seven lovely daughters who, on his country place near Norwich, were growing up around him.

Elizabeth was the gayest of the band. She had those bounding high spirits which, overpowering in youth, are sometimes the salt that keeps men and women fresh into old age. A very un- Quaker-like young lady she must have been, doting on dancing, charmed with her own powers of enchanting gentlemen, quick, imaginative, eager for excitement, and admired and beloved wherever she appeared.

" How amazing it must have seemed in after-life," writes one of her biographers, " to the calm, serene, holy-minded woman, invincible to the flatteries of courtiers, the friendship of kings and emperors, the tears of empresses, the shouts and blessings of excited crowds, unmoved, save to deepest humility, by all the homage, the adulation, the almost adoration she met with when her name was ringing throughout Europe, to recall how in her butterfly youth the fripperies of a ball-room could have been ' too much ' for her, and singing at a village concert might, she feared, ' be a snare.' "

When about eighteen she was suddenly startled out of her gay carelessness by a sermon heard at a Quaker meeting ; and by degrees she came to the fixed resolve of becoming what her sect called " a plain " Quaker. Not long after her adoption of the Quaker speech and dress, she married Joseph Fry, a young man of a family far stricter than the Gurneys, and went to lead the life of a London merchant's wife in the heart of the City.

It is a mystery to many not connected with the Society of Friends how ladies of that Society contrive to do the work they do in furtherance of schemes of benevolence outside of their own homes, and yet maintain their domestic establishments in perfect order and dignity. We account for it on the supposition that Quaker domestic establishments have their wheels so well greased by wealth, discipline, and kindliness that all things run on smoothly, even in the absence of the guiding hand.

At first Elizabeth wrote of herself, " My time appears to be spent to little more purpose than eating, drinking, sleeping, and clothing myself." But she had at all times a house full of company, and her large family of children came in rapid succession. Moreover, she suffered greatly from neuralgia, or, as she, in her ignorance of our modern long word, calls it, " from toothache." But by chance one day she paid a visit with a friend to the great prison at Newgate.

In four rooms, not over large, they found crowded three hundred women, many of them having with them their children, some tried, and others untried, with only one man and one woman to take charge of them by night and day. Though military sentinels were posted on the roof, such was the prevailing lawlessness among these women that the Governor of the Prison entered that department with reluctance, and advised the ladies to lay aside their watches before going in.

Mrs. Fry's heart was touched. She sent the miserable creatures clothes ; but four years passed before she entered on the work with which her name is associated. It was in the midst of the bitter winter of 1816, when the Thames was frozen over, and a fire kindled on the ice roasted an ox whole, that Mrs. Fry, left alone at her own desire with these women, knelt among them and prayed for their little children, — those half- naked and half-starved little children who stood around her. Then, having won the women's sympathy, she proposed to open a school for these little ones. One of the women was chosen superintendent ; and thus began that movement which has led to the astonishing amelioration of prison life all over the world.

Here is a description of the Women's Department in Newgate as Mrs. Fry found it, written by one of her friends : —

" The railing was crowded with half-naked women struggling together for the front situation with the most boisterous violence, and begging with the utmost vociferation. I felt as if I were going into a den of wild beasts, and shuddered when the door closed upon me."

In a fortnight a great change, at least in outward appearance, had come over the wards. The most depraved had recovered some self-respect.

In those days the offences for which people were hanged were very numerous. Forgery, passing counterfeit money, and even some kinds of petty theft, were capital crimes. One terrible duty was undertaken by Mrs. Fry, — that of seeing, advising, and comforting condemned prisoners ; and her stories of these poor creatures, some of whom went out of their minds as they contemplated the horrors of their execution, are harrowing.

One woman, for having passed counterfeit notes received from her lover (not knowing that they were counterfeited), was, in 1818, condemned to the gallows. Mrs. Fry exerted herself to obtain a pardon for her. In vain the Duke of Gloucester, stupid but kindly, used his influence with the Prime Minister ; the poor woman was executed. Her fate led to Mrs. Fry's introduction to the old Queen Charlotte, who was paying a state visit to the Lord Mayor. Hearing that Mrs. Fry was in the Mansion House (whither she had come to make interest on behalf of this poor woriian), the Queen desired to see her. "A murmur of applause," says a spectator, " ran through all the assemblage as the Queen took Mrs. Fry by the hand. The murmur was followed by a clapping and a shout, which was taken up by the multitude without, till it died away in the distance."

This visit to the Lord Mayor was Queen Charlotte's last appearance in public. She caught cold on this occasion, and died not very long after.

Soon Mrs. Fry began to be consulted even by foreign nations as to the management of prisons. In spite of her numerous children, she undertook many journeys of benevolence, always accompanied by her brother, Joseph John Gurney, who in such matters went with her heart and hand.

During a great part of her life she was very rich ; but in her later days sorrows, domestic and pecuniary, came upon her. Her husband's business house was involved by the failure of other houses, and she had to move into a cottage, giving up her beautiful home. It also grieved her that her children all married out of the Quaker connection. Her eldest grandchild was born on the same day as her own youngest child.

In her earlier days she was frequently sent for by the Duchess of Kent to visit the little Princess Victoria, whom she describes as " a sweet, lovely, hopeful child ; " and, later, she records long conversations on . prison disciphne with Prince Albert.

The King of Prussia, when he visited England in 1842 for the christening of the Prince of Wales, insisted upon . taking an informal luncheon at her cottage. On this occasion she presented to him eight daughters and daughters-in-law, seven sons and sons-in law, and twenty-five grandchildren. " Her life," says Mrs. Oliphant, " stands nearly alone in the boundless and almost uninterrupted success which attended every effort."

Her end was gradual and peaceful. The naturally frail tenement failed, worn out by ceaseless exertions, at the age of sixty- five. She died at Ramsgate, October, 1845. I'^ the garden of a cottage where she passed the last years of her life, a Memorial Church has been erected, the cornerstone of which was laid by Princess Louise.

"The key to her whole character," says Mrs. Oliphant, " may be found in these words, written for her sister by her own pen : ' My dear Rachel, I can say one thing, since my heart was touched at seventeen, I believe I have never awakened from sleep, in sickness or in health, by night or by day, without my first thought being how I may best serve my Maker.' " Hers was the charity of the Christian, rather than the narrower zeal so frequent with philanthropists.

Such was in part the state of things when I came into the world. With Lord Castlereagh's death, and the resumption of power by a ministry that included Mr. Canning, a change came over England.

In a world such as I have endeavored to describe, the personal history, predilections, and domestic conduct of the royal family were of very much more publis importance than are the character and conduct of Queen Victoria's sons. The influence of the court filtered down, as it were, through all classes of the people.