Dickens's England (9 page)

Henry Mayhew,
London Labour and the London Poor
(2 vols, 1851–2;

4 vols, 1861–2)

SUCCESS AND MONEY

A man becomes enormously rich, or he jobs successfully in the aid of a minister, or he wins a great battle, or executes a treaty, or is a clever lawyer who makes a multitude of fees and ascends the bench; and the country rewards him for ever with a gold coronet (with more or less balls or leaves) and a title, and a rank as legislator. ‘Your merits are so great,' says the nation, ‘that your children shall be allowed to reign over us, in a manner. It does not in the least matter that your eldest son be a fool: we think your services so remarkable that he shall have the reversion of your honours when death vacates your noble shoes. It is our wish that there should be a race set apart in this happy country who shall hold the first rank, have the first prizes and chances in all government jobs and patronages . . .

It used to be the custom of some very old-fashioned clubs in the City, when a gentleman asked for change for a guinea, always to bring it to him in
washed silver:
that which had passed immediately out of the hands of the vulgar being considered as ‘too coarse to soil a gentleman's fingers'. So, when the City Snob's money had been washed during a generation or so; has been washed into estates, and woods, and castles, and town mansions, it is allowed to pass current as real aristocratic coin. Old Pump sweeps a shop, runs of messages, becomes a confidential clerk and partner. Pump the Second becomes chief of the house, spins more and more money, marries his son to an Earl's daughter. Pump Tertius goes on with the bank; but his chief business in life is to become the father of Pump Quartus, who comes out a full-blown aristocrat, and takes his seat as Baron Pumpington, and his race rules hereditarily over this nation of Snobs.

William Makepeace Thackeray,
The Book of Snobs
(1848)

LE MOT JUSTE

Miss Petowker:
‘What do you call it when Lords break off door knockers and beat policemen, and play at coaches with other people's money, and all that sort of thing? . . . Ah! aristocratic.'

Charles Dickens,
Nicholas Nickleby
(1839)

A YOUNG TOFFS' CLUB

In those days the club most affected by subalterns was the ‘Ralegh', a charming night-house, approached by a tunnel, whose portals opened at dusk and closed reputedly at four a.m., or whenever its members vacated it – and the comfort of that long, delightful single room! Ranged round its entirety were fauteils suitable alike for forty winks, or brandy and soda, and the only eatables procurable – bacon on toast sandwiches, with a dash of biting sauce. Here might be seen the best men in London percolating through at every moment, and exchanging badinage as brilliant as probably it was naughty – poor old George Lawrence of ‘Sword and Gown' fame, and Piggy Lawrence, killed not long after in a regimental steeplechase; Fred Granville, who assisted at a once-celebrated elopement by waiting at one door of an Oxford Street shop for the beautiful fiancée of a wealthy landowner, whose brougham had deposited her at another; Freddy Cooper, the best four-in-hand whip of the day; the wicked marquis, who ran through a fortune almost before he was of age; and young Wyndham, another Croesus of the duck-and-drake type; Sir Henry de Hoghton, of the red tie and velvet suit, who thought he could play ecarté; and King-Harman, then a sinner, but eventually a saint, who died in the sanctity of respectability. These, and a hundred others, all, alas! gone; gone to the inevitable dustbin . . .

One of the Old Brigade (D. Shaw),
London in the Sixties
(1908)

ETIQUETTE

Etiquette means a code of social laws regulating the external conduct of the members of that order of society which is emphatically styled ‘good' – that is, well-bred. . . . But in the present day, when the distinctions of rank are becoming constantly less marked, and the circles of good society are so constantly receiving into themselves the man who has risen from the cottage or the workshop, a knowledge of these social laws becomes important for his wife and daughters; and can be best acquired, we believe – or at least acquired with less pain to the adult learner – from a book than from a living teacher. . . .

[Morning Calls]

A morning call should not be paid before three p.m., nor after five. No one has a right to intrude (unless by permission) on the quiet morning occupations of a family; nor to detain them in the drawing-room after the dressing-bell has rung . . .

A morning call should never exceed half an hour in length. If other visitors come in during your visit, do not ‘sit them out', as it is phrased; remain for a few minutes after their entrance chatting to them if they are acquaintances of your own, or, if they are strangers to you, bearing a part in the general conversation. Then rise and take your leave, bowing slightly to the strangers as you quit the room.

If the lady on whom you call is not at home, you must leave your card. If she has a grown-up daughter or a sister living with her,
two cards;
or you may slightly turn down the corner of your card, which signifies that the visit is paid to all. . . .

A card left at a farewell visit has P.P.C.
(pour prendre congé,
i.e. to take leave) written in the corner.

After an illness of any kind, or after the death of any member of the family, a card ‘returning thanks' is sent to all whose cards or inquiries have been received at the house during the period of affliction. . . .

Ceremonial visits are made the day after a ball, when it is sufficient to leave a card. It is usual to call about a week after a small party.

When a stranger calls for the first time, you ought to return the call in about a week's time; a long delay in returning a first visit is considered equivalent to an unwillingness to accept the new acquaintance, unless there has been some unavoidable hindrance, which the lady should explain, and for which she must apologise.

If you cannot receive a visitor, tell your servant to say that you are ‘engaged' or ‘not at home'. These words are not, as they are sometimes thought, a falsehood, for everyone knows they merely mean that you are engaged and cannot see visitors. . . .

Should you have a letter of introduction given to you, be sure
to send it
(enclosing your card). Do not on any account call with it yourself. If the receiver of the letter is really well-bred, she will call upon you or leave her card the next day, and you may then return her visit.

‘Frederick Warne',
Modern Etiquette
(1871)

ABOVE HER

Soon after Miss Mary Hoggins [sister of the Cranford doctor] married Mr Fitz-Adam, she disappeared from the neighbourhood for many years. She did not move in a sphere in Cranford [Knutsford, Cheshire] society sufficiently high to make any of us care to know what Mr Fitz-Adam was. He died and was gathered to his fathers without our ever having thought about him at all. And then Mrs Fitz-Adam reappeared in Cranford (‘as bold as a lion,' Miss Pole said), a well-to-do widow, dressed in rustling black silk, so soon after her husband's death that poor Miss Jenkyns was justified in the remark she made, that ‘bombazine would have shown a deeper sense of her loss'.

I remember the conversation of ladies who assembled to decide whether or not Mrs Fitz-Adam should be called upon by the old blue-blooded inhabitants of Cranford. . . .

Mrs Fitz-Adam did not stand a chance of meeting with a Mr Fitz-anything in Cranford, so that could not have been her motive for settling there. Miss Matty thought it might have been the hope of being admitted into the society of the place, which would certainly be a very agreeable rise for
ci-devant
Miss Hoggins; and if this had been her hope it would be cruel to disappoint her.

So everybody called upon Mrs Fitz-Adam – everybody but Mrs Jamieson, who used to show how Honourable she was by never seeing Mrs Fitz-Adam when they met at the Cranford parties. There would be only eight or ten ladies in the room, and Mrs Fitz-Adam was the largest of all, and she invariably used to stand up when Mrs Jamieson came in, and curtsey very low to her whenever she turned in her direction – so low, in fact, that I think Mrs Jamieson must have looked at the wall above her, for she never moved a muscle of her face, no more than if she had not seen her. Still Mrs Fitz-Adam persevered.

Elizabeth Gaskell,
Cranford
(1853)

PROVINCIAL SPINSTER

I think I see my father's sister stand

Upon the hall-step of her country house

To give me welcome. She stood straight and calm,

Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tight

As if for taming accidental thoughts

From possible pulses; brown hair pricked with grey

By frigid use of life (she was not old,

Although my father's elder by a year),

A nose drawn sharply, yet in delicate lines;

A close mild mouth . . .

She had lived, we'll say,

A harmless life, she called a virtuous life,

A quiet life, which was not life at all

(But that, she had not lived enough to know),

Between the vicar and the county squires,

The lord-lieutenant looking down sometimes

From the empyrean to assure their souls

Against chance vulgarisms, and, in the abyss,

The apothecary, looked on once a year

To prove their soundness of humility.

The poor-club exercised her-Christian gifts

Of knitting stockings, stitching petticoats,

Because we are of one flesh, after all,

And need one flannel (with a proper sense

Of difference in the quality) – and still

The book-club, guarded from your modern trick

Of shaking dangerous questions from the crease,

Preserved her intellectual. She had lived

A sort of cage-bird life, born in a cage,

Accounting that to leap from perch to perch

Was act and joy enough for any bird.

Dear heaven, how silly are the things that live

In thickets, and eat berries!

I, alas,

A wild bird scarcely caged, was brought to her cage,

And she was there to meet me. Very kind.

Bring the clean water, give out the fresh seed.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
Aurora Leigh
(1857)

A FRENCH VIEW OF LONDON FASHIONS

[In Hyde Park] from five to seven o'clock is the review of ladies' dresses. Beauty and ornamentation abound, but taste is wanting. The colours are outrageously crude and the forms ungraceful; crinolines too distended and badly distended, in geometrical cones or bunched, green flounces, embroideries, flowered dresses, quantities of floating gauze, packets of falling or frizzed hair; crowning this display tiny embroidered and imperceptible bonnets. The bonnets are too much adorned; the hair, too shiny, presses closely on the temples, the small mantle or casaque falls formless to the lower part of the back, the petticoat expands prodigiously, and all the scaffolding badly joined, badly arranged, variegated and laboured, cries and protests with all its gaudy and overdone colours. In the sunshine, especially at Hampton Court the day before yesterday, amongst the shopkeepers' wives, the absurdity was at its height; there were many violet dresses, one being of a wild violet clasped round the waist with a golden band, which would have made a painter cry out. I said to a lady, ‘The toilette is more showy among you than in France.' ‘But my dresses come from Paris!' I carefully refrained from replying, ‘But you selected them.'

Hippolyte Taine (trans. W.F. Rae),
Notes on England
(1872)

LIFE UPSTAIRS, AS SEEN FROM DOWNSTAIRS

14th May 1837

I said some time agoe I would give an account of the way people live in the parlour. Now I think I will begin just to give you some idea of it, but as the old Lady and her daughter are quite allone at present, there is not so much cooking for the parlour as there is in general. For the parlour breakfast, they have hot rolls, dry toast, a loaf of fancy bread and a loaf of common and a slice of butter. They have the hot water come up in a hurn that has a place in the middle for a red hot iron which keeps the water boiling as long as the iron keeps hot. With this, they make their tea themselves. They have chocolate which is something like coffee but of a greasey and much richer nature. This is all they have for breakfast and it's the same every morning. They have it as soon as they are up, which is nine o'clock. It take them about three-quarters of an houre to breakfast.

Lunch at one, the same time we dine in the kitchen. They generally have some cut from ours or have cold meat and some vegetables. Dinner at six which is considered very early. This day they had two soles fryed with saws [sauce], a leg of mutton, a dish of ox, pullets, potatos, brocols, rice and a rhubarb tart, a tabiaca pudding, cheese and butter. Has tea at eight o'clock with bread and butter and dry toast; never any supper – it's not fashionable.

18th May 1837

This is a very buisy day as we are going to have a party this evening something larger than usual. We had four to dinner and about fifty or sixty in the evening. The plan of manageing these parties are thus: there were two men besides myself, one opened the door and let the Company in, I shewed them into a parlour where there was three maidservants to make tea and give it to them and take off their cloaks and bonnets, and the other man shewed them up into the drawing room and gave in their names as lowd as he can bawl in the drawing room. There is very good singing and music in their way. After they have been here some time, we carrey them up some refreshments on trays and hand about amongst them. This is all kinds of sweet cakes and biscuits, lemonade, ashet [a large dish], negos, orangade and many other pleasant drinks but the best is the different kinds of ices. This is stuf made of ice pounded, mixed with cream, and juice of strawberrey, some of apricot and oranges – in short, there are many different kinds. It's quite as cold as eating ice alone. It's eat out of glass sawsers with a spoon. It's from ten to sixteen shillings a quart, it depends on what fruit it's made of. The company comes jeneraly about ten or eleven o'clock and stays until one or two in the morning. Sweet hearting matches are very often made up at these parties. It's quite disgusting to a modist eye to see the way the young ladies dress to atract the notice of the gentlemen. They are nearly naked to the waist, only just a little bit of dress hanging on the shoulder, the breasts are quite exposed except a little bit comeing up to hide the nipples. Plenty of false haire and teeth and paint. If a person wish to see the ways of the world, they must be a gentleman's servant, then they mite see it to perfection. They had two gentlemen to dinner. Had fish, soop, saddle of mutton, piece of veal stewed, spinnach, two sorts of potatos and a bowl of sallad. For second course, a roast duck, stewed coliflour, goosberry tart, orang jelly, custard pudding, cheese, butter, redishes, sponge cakes, of cracknells, one of prueins, one of raisins and almonds, wine, &c. . . . I have eat of the good things until I am sick and now I am off to bed.