For many people the Georgian era
appears as the most graceful, leisured
and cultivated that England has
known; to others the tragic con-
sequences of the Enclosure Acts, the
degrading conditions of factory life,
the harshly repressive criminal laws,
the incidence of drunkenness, disease
and urban squalor suggest a different
picture. How far both these are only
partial viewpoints of the eighteenth-
century social scene is evident from
E. N. \Villiams' balanced survey.
"While indicating how much that was
new and peculiar to Georgian England
"was shared by all its citizens,
irrespective of their position in society ,
Mr Williams shows how differently
the members of the upper, middle and
lower classes lived. These differences
extended to every aspect of daily life
to dress, food and houses, work and
amusements, education, religious
beliefs and cultural pursuits.
Just as the author's judicious use of
individual instances and contemporary
quotation makes vivid this account of
Georgian social life,- so do the numer-
ous, and often unfamiliar, illustra-
tions reproduced from paintings,
drawings and engravings of the day
add to its immediacy. Together, text
and pictures provide a perceptive and
revealing record of life in Georgian
England.
E. N. Williams is a graduate of
Cambridge University and an auth-
ority on eighteenth-century England.
He is the author of The Eighteenth-
Century Constitution, and is at present
senior history master in a leading
public school.
B. T\ BAXSFORD LXD
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
The illustration on the jacket of this book is re-
prodtced t by permission of the National Gallery.,
from a detail of the painting of Mr and Mrs
Andrews by Thomas Gainsborough.
Master and pupils
Life in
GEORGIAN
ENGLAND
E. N. WILLIAMS
English Life Series
Edited by PETER QUENNELL
LONDON: B. T. BATSFORD LTD
NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
First published 1962
} E. N. Williams, 1962
Made and printed in Great Britain
by William Clowes and Sons, Limited, London and Beccles
for the publishers
B. T. BATSFORD LTD
4 Fitzhardinge Street, Portman Square, London, W, 1
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
2OO Madison Avenue, New York 16, N.Y.
To
My Mother
and Father
By the same author
THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CONSTITUTION
Preface
My debt to the chief historians of eighteenth-century England
will be evident on every page, Since it has not been thought
suitable to quote sources in a work of this nature, my first duty
is to thank (and apologise to) those authorities whose works I
have ransacked. To one of these I am especially grateful, and that
is Dr J. H. Plumb, whose criticisms have been invaluable, and
whose kindness inexhaustible. Messrs Michael Langley-Webb
and Harry Pitt have also read the manuscript and made valuable
suggestions. I am particularly grateful to them for their frank
comments. I am also indebted to Mr Donald Bradfield and Mr
Bert Howard for their warm encouragement; and to Mr Basil
Cridland, who saved me from a number of errors in one section.
Above all, I must thank my pupils, who teach me my history.
Dul-wich E. N. W.
Spring 1962
VII
Contents
PREFACE Vll
ACKNOWLEDGMENT X
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ......... xi
I The English People 1
II Upper-Class Life 21
III Middle-Class Life 55
IV Lower-Class Life 89
V Cultural Life I
VI The End of Georgian England . . . . .146"
INDEX 169
IX
Acknowledgment
The illustration on page 147 is reproduced by gracious permis-
sion of Her Majesty the Queen.
The author and publishers wish to thank the following for the
illustrations appearing in this book: The Ashmolean Museum,
Oxford for page 32; the Trustees of the British Museum for
page 43 ; the Dulwich Gallery for page 28 ; Lord Durham for
page 64; the Trustees of the Goodwood Collection for pages 7,
8 (top) and 100; Lady Hudson for page 23 ; Lord Mountbatten
for page 94 (bottom) ; the Trustees of the National Gallery for
page 45 ; the National Galleries of Scotland for page 40 ; the
National Portrait Gallery for pages 6, 67, 68, 123, 131, 138,
141, 151, 161, and 166; Lord Northbrook for page 74; Lord
O'Hagen for page 159; the Parker Gallery for page 38; Radio
Times Hulton Picture Library for page 81; the Rothampstead
Experimental Station, Harpenden for page 17; the Royal
Academy of Arts for page 94 (bottom) ; Sport and General for
page 70; the Trustees of the Tate Gallery for pages 34 and
136; the Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum (Crown
Copyright Reserved) for pages 48 and 144; the Walker Art
Gallery, Liverpool for page 110; the Marquess of Zetland for
page 33.
List of Illustrations
Master and pupils From a contemporary engraving , . . Frontispiece
Adelphi wharfs and warehouses in 1771 From Robert and James
Adam, 'Works in Architecture*, 1778 3
A wagon 4
Thames ferries Both from engravings by J. Kip after L. Knyff,
c. 1720 5
Duke of Newcastle From a painting by W. Hoare 6
Couple by the Thames 7
Family group Both from 'The Thames from Richmond House' by
Canaletto 8
Oyster-seller 8
Knife-grinder Both from Tempest, 'Cryes of the City of London',
1711 9
Sunderland iron bridge From a woodcut by Thomas Bewick . . 10
Chairing the member From an engraving by William Hogarth . 13
Canvassing From an engraving of 1784, published by Carington
Bowles . 15
Thomas Coke, later Earl of Leicester, at Holkham From a contem-
porary painting ... 17
James Watt's 'Old Bess* From Samuel Smiles, "Lives of Baulton
and Watt\ 1865 19
Squire and family From a contemporary painting 3
Hanover Square in 1725 From Daniel Defoe, "A Tour thro' London ',
7755 24
The Duke of Bridgwater and his canal From an engraving by
J. Cooper after T. D. Scott, c. 1860 26
Blenheim Palace (1715), Oxfordshire: the south front From an
engraving by T. Heath after Metz, 1806 27
Lady and gentleman From a painting by Sir Thomas Gainsborough 28
Houghton Hall (1722), Norfolk: the entrance front From an
engraving by W. Watts, 1782 SO
Heveningham Hall, Suffolk: the gallery From a watmokur by
Thomas Malton, c. 1790 32
xi
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Sir Lawrence Dundas and his grandson From a painting by John
Zoffany 53
Children playing From a painting by William Hogarth ... 34
A schoolboys' party 37
Fellows of Brasenose College, Oxford 38
Both from prints by Thomas Rowlandson
The * Backs' at Cambridge From an engraving by J. Walker, 1793 39
Grand Tourists in Florence From a painting by Thomas Patch . 40
Bloomsbury Square in 1787, with Bedford House From a water-
colour by E. Day es, 1787 43
Brooks's From a print by Thomas Rowlandson 44
The Rotunda at Ranelagh From a painting by Canaletto ... 45
Fox-hunting From a woodcut by Thomas Bewick 47
Parish vestry From a water colour by Thomas Rowlandson, 1784 . 48
Hunters From a painting by J. Seymour 49
Lady gardening From a woodcut by John Bewick 50
Lady dressing From an engraving by C. Grignion after S. Wale . 51
Ladies playing cards After a contemporary drawing .... 52
Lady in coach From a contemporary engraving 52
Cricket From a contemporary engraving after Francis Hayman . 53
Boatman on the Thames From W. Harrison, '''Description of London
and Westminster*, 1775 55
South Sea House 'Engraved by Thomas Bowles, 1 764 .... 56
Goree Buildings, Liverpool From an engraving by H. Wallis after
S.Austin 57
Shopkeeper From a woodcut by John Bewick 58
Draper's shop From a woodcut by Thomas Bewick 59
Lawyers in Westminster Hall From an engraving by C. Mosley
after Gra-velot 60
Family doctor From an engraving, published by Laurie and Whittle,
1801 62
Apothecary From R. Phillips, 'The Book of English Trades', 2818 62
Village parson From a contemporary print 63
Farmer's family From a painting by John Zoffany 64
Making cheese From a contemporary engraving 65
Sir Richard Arkwright From a painting by Joseph Wright of Derby 67
Josiah Wedgwood From a Wedgwood-ware medallion by William
Hackwood, 1779 68
Hackney School From a contemporary print 70
Schoolroom From a woodcut by Thomas Bewick .... 71
'Tightlacing* From a drawing by John Collet, published by Bowles
and Carver 72
xii
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
A conversation From an engraving of c. 1740 73
A life of increasing refinement From a painting by William Hogarth 74
'The Social Evening' 75
Brighton Assembly Room 76
Both from watercolours by Thomas Rowlandson
Ninepins From an engraving of 1 784, published by Car ing ton Bowles 77
Race-meeting From a woodcut by Thomas Bewick 78
Dancing at the Assembly From an engraving by William Hogarth 79
Manchester factory From an engraving by McGahey after Harwood 81
Beating hemp in prison From an engraving by William Hogarth 83
Nursery tales From an engraving by A. Benoist after James
Highmore 84
Nonconformist preacher From a woodcut by Thomas Bewick . . 87
Threshing in a small farm From an engraving by W. S. Reynolds
after R. Westall, 1800 " 90
Reaping on a large estate From Richard Bradley, ' The Country
Gentleman and Farmer's Monthly Director', 1727 . . . . 91
Milkmaid From W. H. Pyne, 'Microcosm of Great Britain', 1808 92
Cottage Industry From an engraving of c. 1820 93
Wheelwright FromR. Phillips, ' The Book of English Trades', 1818 94
Iron-workers From a painting by Joseph PFright of Derby 9 1 780 . 94
Weaving From R. Phillips, "The Book of English Trades', 1818 . 95
Spitalfields silk-weavers From an engraving by William Hogarth , 96
Cutlers From R. Phillips, * The Book of English Trades', 1818 . 96
Silversmiths From an engraving by B. Cole after S. Marini , . 97
Watchmaker From R. Phillips, ' The Book of English Trades', 1818 97
Cannon-makers From Diderot, * Encydopedie ' 98
Shipbuilding From an engraving by J. Kip after </. Badslade . 99
Domestic servants From * Whitehall from Richmond House * by
Canaletto 100
Sawyers From R. Phillips, "The Book of English Trades', 1818 , 10
Billingsgate Market in 176 From an engraving by Alexander van
Haecken 104-5
Mariner 107
Tailor and apprentices .108
Both from R. Phillips, "The Book of English Trades', 1818
Coalmining From a painting of c. 1795 . 110
Early morning at Covent Garden From an engraving by William
Hogarth 112
Communal grave From an early eighteenth-century engraving . . 113
Brewing From R. Phillips, ' The Book of English Trades 9 , 1818 . 114
xlii
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Beer-drinking From an engraving by William Hogarth . . . 115
Cock-fighting From a woodcut by Thomas Bewick
Jonathan Wild being carted through the streets, 1725 From a
contemporary engraving
The Gordon Riots : burning of Aldgate Prison From a print by
Q'Neil, 1781
Learning to read From a painting by J. Van Aken 120
Sir Isaac Newton From a painting by John Fanderbank . . . 123
Astronomical demonstration with an orrery From an engraving
by B. Cole after S, Wale 124
Chemist From R. Phillips, ' The Book of English Trades 9 , 1818 . 126
Ward in Guy's Hospital Drawn and engraved by Thomas Bowles,
c. 1725
George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne From a painting by John
Smibent, 1728 131
Baptism From a woodcut by Thomas Bewick 132
Church service From an engraving by William Hogarth . . . 133
The mobbing of John Wesley at Wednesbury From a contemporary
painting 135
Samuel Johnson From the portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds . . . 136
Bookseller's shop From R. Phillips, ' The Book of English Trades',
1818 137
Oliver Goldsmith From the portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds . . 138
Drury Lane Theatre, designed by Robert Adam in 1773 From
Robert and James Adam, * Works in Architecture*, 1776 . . . 139
Harpsichordist From a contemporary engraving 140
George Frederick Handel From a painting by Thomas Hudson, 1 756 141
William Hogarth From an engraved self-portrait 142
William Hogarth and David Garrick From a contemporary silhouette 143
North Parade, Bath, in 1777 From a water colour by Thomas Malton 144
George III From a painting by Peter Edward Stroehling . . . 147
John Wilkes From an engraving by William Hogarth .... 148
House of Commons From an engraving by B. Cole, c. 1760 . . 149
Tom Paine From a painting by A. Milliere after an engraving by
W. Sharp 151
Marriage ceremony From a woodcut by John Bewick . . . . 153
Carpenter From R. Phillips, ' The Book of English Trades', 1818. 155
Children in a rope factory From a contemporary engraving . , 156
Coach leaving the Turf Hotel, Newcastle From a woodcut by
Thomas Bewick 158
Charles Towneley in his library From a painting by John Zqffany. 159
William Blake From a painting by Thomas Phillips, 1807 . . . 161
xiv
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshire From an engraving by J. Barnett after
J. C. Buckler, 1822 162
Strawberry Hill (1753-78) From a woodcut by Thomas Bewick . 163
Recreation inside the Fleet Prison From an engraving after Thomas
Rowlandson 165
Hannah More From a painting by Henry William Pickers-Gill, 1822 166
Improving the poor From an engraving by J. Allen . . . . 167
vv
The English People
Perhaps the most important single development in eighteenth-
century England was the growth of population, but the most
astonishing feature to us looking back is the way the numbers
then are dwarfed by the figures now. It is like looking at England
through the wrong end of a telescope. When William III and
Marlborough defeated Louis XIV, the population of England
and Wales was about five and three-quarter million: not much
more than the present population of Middlesex, Kent and
Surrey combined. About twice the numbers at present governed
by the London County Council sufficed under Chatham to defeat
France and conquer Canada and half India: six and a half
million. And at the end of the century just over nine million
brought Napoleon down and made England the most powerful
state in the world. This is a good deal less than the joint
population of present-day Lancashire and Yorkshire. Nor is
that the whole story, for the population of our chkf enemy was
not similarly reduced. On each of those occasions, the people of
France were a Goliath, three times the English size.
Of course, there is a good deal of guess-work about these
numbers. Until the census of 1801 they are only estimates.
Although the eighteenth century is the first to make statistically-
minded historians happy with a rich range of hard figures from
which to draw graphs of industrial production, shipping turnover
or food prices, their picture of the population-increase necessarily
contains much guess-work some of it very ingenious. The
most valuable estimator of all was Gregory King whose total
of five and a half million for the year 1696 is still regarded as
1
THE ENGLISH PEOPLE
being about right by later calculators. King's work, which was
not printed till 1801, contains the most fascinating detail. His
break-down of the various occupations and classes, for example,
shows that England contained, in part, 16O temporal lords, 26
spiritual lords, 12,OOO gentlemen, 15,OOO 'persons in liberal
arts and sciences', 5O,OOO shopkeepers and tradesmen, 364,000
'labouring people and outservants' and 849,OOO 'vagrants: as
gipsies, thieves, beggars, etc/. The total acreage of each of the
various types of landscape is given, such as arable land, pasture,
woods, rivers, lakes, meres and ponds; and he calculated that
these supported, among other things, twelve million sheep and
lambs and two million rabbits and conies. No method has so far
been devised of confirming or denying his rabbit figures. He
expected the (human) population to rise, and his guess for the
year 19OO was 7,35O,OOO; which was a better shot than most
diviners of the eighteenth century would have made, for the
general feeling, oddly enough, was that the population was
going down. A chance of finding out was lost in 1753 when
Parliament rejected a proposal to take a census. Opponents of
the scheme said that it would reveal England's weakness to the
enemy, or that it would bring down divine displeasure, or (a
conclusive argument in the Georgian period) that it was sub-
versive of individual liberty. Consequently, we have no hard
figures till the first census of 1801, and even that has to have an
estimate of the soldiers, sailors and marines built into it before
it is sound for they were away at the war.
This puny but pugnacious people was spread over the face
of the country in a much more even way than it has ever been
since: in fact, the distribution at that time is much more like
that shown in the Domesday Book than that given in the 1961
census. The people were thickest on the ground where the
soil was most fertile (like the corn lands of the south and east),
or where rural industries had developed (as in the textile
villages of the Cotswolds, Wiltshire, East Anglia, and the West
Riding), or where a seaport flourished (like London or Bristol) .
In fact, the greatest density was to be found on a belt on either
side of a line joining these two ports. A traveller moving out of
this area northwards, southwards or westwards would have
THE ENGLISH PEOPLE
found the countryside scantily populated, as he would have
done in the Middle Ages; and he would have also encountered
another medieval characteristic; that the typical Englishman
was still the yeoman in his fields and not the man in the street.
Even in 1801, when London, the 'Great Wen', and lesser
carbuncles like Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham were
drawing in hordes of workers from the surrounding countryside,
78 per cent of the people of England and Wales still lived In the
country. (The fifty-fifty position, even, was not reached till
1851.) In the early part of the century, a foreign traveller
remarked in Daniel Defoe's hearing that * England was not like
other countries, but it was all a planted garden'; and though
he would undoubtedly have modified his phraseology had he
gone round with Cobbett at the end of the century, nevertheless,
even then, England was far from being the workshop of the
world. The Industrial Revolution had its birth under the
Georges, but did not reach Its maturity till Victoria's time.
Even so, its effect on the distribution of population Is already
visible on maps based on the 1801 figures. In 170O the people
were still living in the places they had always lived in ; in 1 80O
they were assembling in the areas they now occupy. The 180O
population map is essentially the same as the twentieth-century
one, though the shading Is not so dark.
Adelphi wharfs and warehouses, London
THE ENGLISH PEOPLE
This re-deployment was effected by people moving from the
south and east to the north-west, and from the country into the
new industrial towns. At the start of the Georgian period the
towns, with one exception, were small. London, the exception,
was already a monster containing over half a million; in other
words, about a tenth of the total. It was probably the largest
concentration of human beings in Europe, and was fifteen times
as big as Bristol and Norwich, its nearest rivals in England.
It is no wonder that Defoe called it a 'prodigy of buildings, that
nothing in the world does, or ever did, equal except old Rome'.
Bristol was probably at the 40,000 mark at the beginning of the
century; Manchester about 7,000, and Liverpool about 4,000.
Any town over 5,000 was regarded as a 'large town' in those
days, and most of them were overgrown villages of a few thou-
sand souls, performing their ancient function as markets for the
surrounding countryside. With certain exceptions, towns were
not yet centres of industry, and if a town grew it was mainly by
trade, and thus the largest towns tended to be the ports. But
the growth of these was slowed down, till the turnpikes and
canals were constructed in the second half of the century, by the
difficulties of supplying them with food and water. Even at the
end of the period water was still being sold from carts on the
streets of Liverpool at a halfpenny a bucket.
The bad state of the roads isolated the towns one from
another. Goods were mostly transported across country (where
they could not go by water) by strings of packhorses, 30 or 40
strong, along so-called roads consisting of a narrow paved
track in the middle with a soft shoulder on either side. It took
a week to travel from London to York. And as coaches and
A wagon
Thames ferries
wagons Increased In numbers, so the
roads went from bad to worse. In bad
weather they were impassable, and
goods which a town had to Import shot
up in price. The heavy rains in the
spring of 1751 doubled the price of coal
in Derby, and raised it in Rugby from
3d. to Is. %d. acwt and in Northampton
from lod. to is. 6d. The local communi-
ties were therefore as self-sufficient as
they could be ; and not only economic-
ally, but socially, politically and cultur-
ally as well for ideas and knowledge
and fashions need transport, as well as
food and drink and fuel. Thus the life of
the average Englishman was circum-
scribed by the boundaries of his
'country': his little group of villages
depending on the local market town.
This area provided him with his bread,
cheese, meat and ale. It produced the cloth for his back, and the
boots for his feet and the roof over his head. Within it he
picked up his education and selected his bride, The government
for him was not Whitehall but his local Justice of the Peace;
and at election time he was more interested in who was going
to put up the money for the new corn-exchange than he was in
whether England should go to war on, or make an alliance with,
Frederick the Great.
The boundaries of these local communities were gradually
crumbling under the impact of improved transport and the
freer flow of men, and goods and ideas ; but while they remained
standing they had important consequences. They go some way
to explain, for example, the leisurely way in which the new
techniques in agriculture and industry were taken up; in fact,
for the general conservatism in all walks of life in the first half
of the century. They help to explain the nature of the literature
in the age of Pope, produced as it was, not for a mass reader-
ship, but for a minority of sophisticated aristocrats and their
5
THE ENGLISH PEOPLE
hangers-on in 'the Town'. They help to make more comprehen-
sible the nature of Georgian politics : the lack of national political
parties for much of the period, the importance of 'men, not
measures* and the prevalence of < influence'. And they are the
reason why in the normal way you had to go to Burton-on-Trent
If you wanted a tankard of Bass or Worthington, and had to limit
yourself in London to brews like Truman's or Whitbread's.
THE SOCIAL CLASSES
England was thus a confederation of local communities. But
horizontal divisions existed as well as vertical ones in the form
of a very complex class structure. At the top were the few really
great aristocratic families: what Burke called 'the great oaks
that shade a country*. Magnates like the Devonshires, the
Newcastles, the Bedfords or the Rockinghams were as wealthy
as some Continental sovereigns, and they looked down on the
king of England who had been one of these. But they were not
cut off socially from the rest of the peerage, and neither were
they essentially distinct from the body of the landed gentry.
The English aristocracy did not possess exclusive privileges
like the French noblesse, for example,
which set them as a race apart^JEnglish
society was class-conscious, but not
caste-ridden ;/and so, for nearly every
purpose, the peerage and the gentry
can be regarded as one class. Within it
there was more freedom of movement
than anywhere else in Europe: and that
is true also of the movement between
it and the other classes. The spectacle
of aristocrats like the Bedfords going in
for speculative building in London, or
like the Devonshires coal-mining on
their estates, or like the Howards mixing
with the middle-class on the boards of
trading companies was familiar long
before the eighteenth century. The re-
verse process was even more common:
6
Duke of Newcastle
Couple by the Thames
the tendency of businessmen
with a fortune to buy a country
estate, and turn themselves, or
at least their children, into
gentry, and perhaps their grand-
children into peers. Defoe's
couplet puts the position neatly:
Fate has but little Distinction set
Betwixt the Counter and the
Coronet.
But the key test of social
mobility, of course, is whether
the sons and daughters could
join hands in marriage across
boundaries of class. This was not
at all uncommon, for business deals (like international treaties
in those days) were often sealed in this way. There was no
reason why a gentleman's son should not marry a City man's
daughter, and not necessarily with the tragic consequences of
Hogarth's Marriage-a-4a-Mode\ but to keep his daughter in her
own class the same gentleman would half ruin himself to provide
a suitable portion for her, for it was the male of the species that
conferred rank.
This freedom of movement between the classes extended
practically right through the social scale. The exceptional
diversification of English social classes helped to make this
possible. The middle class is a case in point, for nothing is
more difficult than to decide which types are covered by the
term. The merchants obviously belong. But how do we place
that minority of business-men in the City of London, with in-
comes as princely as those of the aristocracy and a style of life
to match? And into which category comes a gentleman's younger
son, who has gone into trade? We ought, clearly, to include
the professional men, the doctors and lawyers and churchmen,
who were increasing in numbers and rising in status in this
period; but they were a miscellaneous group, too, as they were
recruited from all directions, from the gentry, the business classes
7
Family group
and from the lower classes, for
this was a good route up the
social scale for a poor boy with
talents and industry. The lower
gentry also present difficulties,
for their birth and manner of life
link them with the main body of
the gentry, but their incomes
place them on an economic level
with the smaller business-men.
And the rural class next lower
down, the small farmers, the
yeomen of England: they are
not to be classed with manual
labourers, but then neither are they gentlemen. The working
class is equally rich in minutely differentiated grades, from the
skilled craftsman in Sheffield, through the Cornish copper-miner,
the Manchester weaver, the cowman, the ploughman down to
the casual labourer trudging the streets in any city and the
squatter on the common in any village.
It is impossible to give a brief account of the complexity of
English society which is at all
adequate ; but its highly variega-
ted nature must be stressed, for
it was of profound importance.
The road from the bottom of the
stairs to the top was long, but
there were many steps to
scramble up, and each one was
shallow. No one was far above
or far below the next man ; and
this was quite different from
earlier times, and from neigh-
bouring states where there were
few people between the landlords
at the top and the anonymous
and featureless peasantry below.
To change the image, English
Oyster-seller
Knife-grinder
society was effervescent: count-
less bubbles were rising and
falling as the ferment of activity
on all sides of life was transform-
ing the country into the first
industrial state and the greatest
power in the world. Society was
seething, but the structure re-
mained steady: it passed the
stage of rapid industrialisation,
the most profound convulsion
that economic man has yet
[earned to impose on himself,
with its political structure un-
damaged and its institutions
intact. By contrast, revolution
was overturning the remaining
governments of the Ancien
Regime and has continued to do so ever since.
If the minute gradations in society made for the stability of
the whole, the steepness of the climb provided the stimulus
for the parts ; for it was a great distance from the bottom to the
top and the rewards were enormous. In the early part of the
sentury, the great magnates were receiving =g20,OOO* a year
and more from their estates, while a labourer was lucky if he
was making %Q. Sir Robert Walpole spent more a year on
wigs than he paid to one of his footmen. This gap widened as
the economy boomed during the course of the century, and the
bitter tale of abject poverty in which thousands dragged out
their days will be told in a later chapter. But there is a brighter
side to the story. It was a free society, and the sky was the limit;
and the enticing prospects open to the enterprising acted like a
magnet, electrifying the energies, the inventive talents and the
business acumen of men at all levels, without which this minia-
ture nation would never have made its mark in the world.
Many of the great leaders of the Industrial Revolution rose
* Multiply by 10 for an approximate modern sterling equivalent, or
by 30 to get dollars.
9
iron bridge
from humble stations. Robert
Peel the elder was a yeoman who
printed cotton cloth in his own
house, Richard Arkwright was
a barber, Peter Stubbs an inn-
keeper.
Besides acting as an incentive,
this top-heavy distribution of
wealth produced a further divi-
dend : the capital for the manifold
activities of the period. Had
been equal there would never have been the saving
indispensable for enclosing and improving the fields, sinking the
mines, constructing the roads, bridges and canals, settling the
colonies, building the factories, raising the fine houses, or form-
ing those great collections of fine art purchased in all quarters
of Europe* From the economic point of view, the Bridgwater
Canal, the Soho Ironworks and Castle Howard represent an
( involuntary) abstention from consumption by the lower classes.
Though it was not, and could not have been, any consolation to
them, their privations were the means to a more abundant life
for their descendants; for England now feeds, clothes, houses,
educates and entertains 45 million people in a style quite beyond
the dreams of the seven or eight million of Georgian times,
GOVERNMENT
The paramount position enjoyed by the aristocracy and gentry
in the social and economic life was reflected in the dominating
role in politics, which they had fought for and won in the previ-
ous century. This is not simply to say that they controlled the
government in Whitehall. Their grip was far more all-
embracing: they controlled the armed forces, the Church, the
service and local government, from top to bottom.
However, a proper appreciation of the political activity of the
classes depends on an understanding of the govern-
system of the era, which has many apparent similarities
to today's, kit which In fact was quite different from it. In the
place, tlie king was the head of the state, and he ruled as
10
THE ENGLISH PEOPLE
well as reigned. He chose his ministers, and decided on his
policies; but by the eighteenth century he could do neither of
these things exactly as he liked, for he had to take into account
the wishes of Parliament. The crux of the matter is that govern-
ment is powerless without money and armed forces; and since
the revolution of 1688 only Parliament could provide these.
Thus the king had to appoint ministers who possessed, or who
could acquire, a majority in the House of Commons. A king
could turn a blind eye to this requirement and insist on his own
favourites, as George II did with Carteret, or George III with
Bute; but such a deviation could not last more than a year or so.
Equally temporary were ministers that Parliament tried to
force down the throat of an unwilling monarch, like the Rocking-
ham administrations or the Fox-North coalition under George
HI. Stable government could only come from a recognition
that there were two centres of political power: the King's Closet
and the House of Commons ; and the enduring ministries of the
eighteenth century all drew their strength from both these
sources. The governments of Walpole, Henry Pelham, Lord
North and the younger Pitt are good illustrations of this.
Now how did these ministers Prime Ministers they could
be called, though this was a term of abuse at least in the first
half of the period how did they ensure that they had parlia-
mentary support? A modern Prime Minister knows that his
measures will go through, for he is at the head of a great
party whose discipline ensures that the members troop obedi-
ently into the appropriate lobby. But, though the terms 'Whig'
and 'Tory' were bandied about all through the century,
parties on modern lines did not exist. For one thing, about half
the Members of Parliament were independent country gentle-
men. They owed their seats to no one but themselves, certainly
to no party machine. They had no political ambitions, and could
vote on measures as their consciences guided them. For reasons
of principle, or of temperament, or of tradition, about half of
them tended to support the king's ministers whoever they were,
and the remainder voted with the opposition. But no minister
could complacently rely on them, for they were not robots.
If they turned nasty, they could shake an administration to its
11
THE ENGLISH PEOPLE
foundations; if they all voted with the opposition, a government
doomed, as Walpole was in 174 and North 4O years later.
Their presence in the Commons made parliamentary government
anything we know today. It kept the ministers on their
toes; and debates were genuine battles over real issues and not
foregone conclusions. These parliamentary watchdogs thus
a valuable function more like that of today's press and
opinion.
But it is a good thing that every Georgian M.P. did not join
their ranks, otherwise stable government would have been
impossible. A legislature entirely composed of individuals or
groups renders the executive impotent. Ministers either
evade controversial (i.e. important) issues, or they are brought
down; and public confidence in both government and Parlia-
ment is soon replaced by contempt, as the experience of the
French Fourth Republic showed. The English Civil War and the
Glorious Revolution gave Parliament ultimate control over the
crown. Historians have rightly stressed this but to the neglect
of the equally important necessity of government control over
the legislature, which today is provided by party discipline.
How did Georgian parliamentary government avoid the French
fate if party machines did not then exist? The answer is by the
of * influence', or ' patronage * or 'corruption' for which the
period has been so roundly condemned. And to see how this
operated we must take a look at the other half of the House of
Commons.
This consisted of the active politicians, the career men, the
men who formed governments and led oppositions. They were
organised into little groups, five, 10 or strong, each round
some great leader (usually one of the aristocrats) whose
orders they took because they owed their seats to him, or
because he had given them a job, or because they were related
to or had been at school with him, or simply because they
eye to eye with him on politics in general. These groups
the * parties' of the time, the bricks with which govern-
and oppositions were constructed; the Pelhams, Cobham's
'Cubs', the Prince of Wales* faction, the Bedford Gang, the
the Foxltes. There was one larger group which
12
Chairing the member
we have not yet men-
tioned. This was the
' placemen * : a body some
100 or 200 strong who
voted for the king's
government at all times
and formed the perma-
nent core of any minis-
terial majority. These
above all have been exe-
crated by later writers,
and they were bitterly
attacked all through the
century by the scribes
of the opposition. They
were attached to the
crown rather than to any
politician, and were a miscellaneous body of junior ministers,
civil servants, army and navy officers, members of the House-
hold, government contractors, sinecure and pension holders, and
members of those boroughs, like Harwich and Orford, which
the government always had in its pocket. * Lackeys' they may
have been, or 'King's Friends' or 'janissaries'; but they were
essential to the stability of parliamentary government.
Thus a Prime Minister formed his majority out of the
'placemen', and the followers of whichever aristocratic leaders
had helped him to set up a government. There is no doubt that
'influence' played the major role here; but the system is ab-
solved from the charges of utter baseness which have been hurled
at it, by the necessity of placating those guardians of public
honour, the independent gentry. Patronage was essential, but
by itself was not enough.
We have been talking about 'government boroughs' and
seats 'owned' by aristocrats. How was it possible for safe seats
to exist before the days of nationally organised parties? To
explain this we must briefly examine what went on in the con-
stituencies. First of all, there were about 2OO boroughs electing
two members each, but the franchise varied from place to place.
13
THE ENGLISH PEOPLE
In boroughs only members of the corporation voted;
in others all the freemen. The widest franchise tended to be in
*scot and lot' boroughs, where the rate-payers voted; and in
'potwalloper* boroughs, where the voters were all those not on
poor relief those who kept their own pot boiling on their own
hearth. The narrowest roll was in those boroughs where the
vote was attached, not to human beings, but to pieces of property
by a medieval form of land-holding called 'burgage-
tenure*. Since votes were cast openly at the hustings, there was
room for every kind of pressure by powerful men. Moreover,
there was little connection between general elections and the
formation of governments. Where there was a connection, it
was the opposite way round from today ; that is, a new govern-
ment might hold an election to get the sort of parliament it
wanted. Today, the people vote to get the sort of government it
wants; in Georgian times the electors were simply choosing
M.P.s. That meant that contests were fought on local and
personal matters, rather than on great issues of policy put to
the electorate by nation-wide party machines.
Electioneering for Georgian candidates, then, demanded its
own special techniques. In each borough there were 'interests'
to woo or to whip. It might be the corporation, or the weavers,
or the freemen, or the Dissenters or the shipbuilders. The
Earl of Bristol kept the corporation of Bury St Edmunds up to
the mark for many years by regular douceurs', a dinner of 29
dishes with toasts to their wives, or lOO to distribute to the
poor during a smallpox outbreak, with six dozen of wine for
themselves. A candidate at Carlisle became a Brother in the
Shoemakers' Company* He gave them two silver candlesticks
and a salver, and lOs. a head for drinks, promising that, later on,
his regiment would require 7OO pairs of shoes and that Carlisle
would get the business. Individuals as well as 'interests' had
to be carefully nursed, according to their rank. It might be the
post erf" Comptroller of the Customs at Gloucester for the agent
of the Gloucestershire Clothiers; or a night at the alehouse for a
pfwaBoper in Taunton. Sometimes the stick was more appro-
priate than the carrot: employees could be dismissed, tenants
shopkeepers boycotted.
14
Canvassing
In burgage boroughs, where
control depended on land rather
than people, elections were less
complicated, once a patron had
bought a majority of the tene-
ments. 'I was unanimously
elected by one Elector, to repre-
sent this Ancient Borough in
Parliament, * wrote Philip
Francis from Appleby in West-
morland, adding: 'There was no
other Candidate, no Opposition,
no Poll demanded, Scrutiny, or
petition/ But in any of the other
constituencies, if the electorate
was large (say, two or three
thousand) then corruption would
not work by itself; and speech-
making, manifesto-writing and
other modern devices had to be employed. Contests in West-
minster and London became famous for this.
Each county also elected two Members, but here the fran-
chise was the same everywhere. The vote went to all owners of
freehold property (land usually, but it could be life-office in
church or state) worth 40^. a year. This descended low enough
down the social scale to make the electorate too numerous for
urban methods. Usually, no contest took place, and the leading
' interests * in a county fixed it between themselves to have one
member each. These deals might occur between two great
aristocrats, or between an aristocrat and the body of the gentry,
or between Whigs and Tories. And normally there was no great
difficulty about whipping in the mass of the electorate: tenants,
poor relations, employees, clergy, or tradesmen. Occasionally,
an election turned sour as it did in the famous Oxfordshire
battle of 1754, when the Tory gentry opposed the Whig
aristocrats. Such a slip-up would be expensive, to the tune of
perhaps ^30,000 or jg40,OOO a side.
15
THE ENGLISH PEOPLE
BUSINESS
With all Its faults, the political structure produced sound
government; and turned out to be made-to-measure for rapid
economic expansion. Big money, whether landed or mercantile,
enough say in policy-making to ensure that England became
a business concern with its eye on profit, instead of a dictator's
plaything reaching out for glory. At home, the state held the
ring while the business-men got on with the job: abroad, it
captured markets for them by armed aggression. It even en-
sured the necessary austerity in the mass of the people, for
paternal government was not to be expected of a gelded
monarchy and an unwilling parliament.
The mainspring of the whole economy was agriculture.
Cattle and sheep, for example, besides producing meat,
supplied the raw materials for a number of industries : wool for
the weaver, skins for the tanner, fat for the candle-maker and
soap-boiler, horns for the cutler and bones for the glue-
manufacturer. But the influence of agriculture went deeper. A
bad harvest could depress the whole economy by leaving
consumers with nothing to spend on manufactured goods. A
good one could have a tonic effect all round.
Georgian agriculture was certainly not stagnant, though
many of the improvements associated with the so-called
'Agrarian Revolution* were well advanced before this period
opened. It was mainly a question of low prices forcing farmers
to cut costs by more intensive production. The use of turnips
as a field crop was established in High Suffolk in the 1650s.
This revolutionary fodder, along with others such as clover,
sainfoin and lucerne, was spreading in the early Georgian period
in the light soils of the south and east. And so were marling and
manuring to give these soils body. The four-course rotation
was thus well past the experimental stage by the time Lord
Townshend retired from politics or Coke took over at Holkham.
These new techniques, besides improving animal husbandry by
prwicfeg winter food, did away with fallow and made for
greater yields. By using them, the farmers in these old-enclosed
were able to show a profit in low-price periods when
16
THE ENGLISH PEOPLE
the traditional grain producers on the open clay of the Midlands
were going to the wall. The latter, in their turn, began to switch
from arable to pasture, and to enclose.
The new methods, invented under harsh market conditions,
spread in the piping times after 1750 ? when various factors
pushed up the price of farm produce. The remainder of the
land was enclosed by Act of Parliament. The Midlands and the
west went in for intensive animal breeding, developing a
'machine' as Bakewell put it, 'the best contrived for converting
herbage into money*. In the lighter soils of the north-east they
followed the earlier lead of East Anglia. And everywhere the
output was mounting. Between the 1730s and the 1790s, the
number of cattle and sheep sold at Smithfield went up by about
40 per cent (though their size did not double or treble, as used
to be thought). During the second half of the century, the yield
per acre of wheat increased by about 30 per cent. The farmers
saved the country's life, for without these increases England
would have starved during the Napoleonic Wars.
Sound government and thriving agriculture provided the
framework within which commerce broke records and industry
performed miracles. The ingredients of the Industrial Revolu-
tion can be listed; but it is impossible at this stage of our know-
ledge to say exactly what weight to give each factor, or to
explain precisely why England shot ahead of Europe at the end
Thomas Coke, later Earl of Leicester, at Holkham
THE ENGLISH PEOPLE
of the century. Foreign conquest, commercial drive, and a
growing population (in England and in Europe) gave the
stimulus of an expanding market. Capital was there in plenty.
The fall of the rate of interest from the seven per cent or eight
per cent that governments were paying in 1 TOO to the three per
Consols of mid-century is a gauge of this ; and an index of
its availability. For the growth of such institutions as the Bank
of England, the National Debt, and joint-stock companies and
country banks indicated the steady spread of the investing
habit.
Another essential feature of industrial expansion was an
adequate labour force, which was recruited during the Georgian
period from the expanding population, and supplemented by
the steady severance from the land of the cottagers and squatters.
And to amplify human energy, ancient sources of power were at
hand. The water-wheel was turning silk machinery in Derby-
shire early in the century; while large London breweries were
using about 20 horses each to work their equipment. But fast-
flowing streams were not dependable, and a horse cost ^4O a
year in upkeep the stipend of a country curate. And so, in the
"eighties, the most cataclysmic of the Georgian inventions, the
steam engine, added vast reinforcement to the power of men's
muscles.
Again, the basic raw materials coal and iron were abundant
and fortunately close together. In means of transport, too,
England was well endowed by geography. Her island position
provided the main highway, the encircling sea ; while inland the
rivers were navigable and already being deepened and widened
in late Stuart times. And the terrain provided no insoluble
problems for later improvers on nature : the canal pioneers like
Thomas Steers, Henry Berry and James Brindley; and the road
engineers like Metcalf, Telford and Macadam.
Ingenious men were plentiful, the most important being the
entrepreneurs the visionaries who co-ordinated all the fore-
factors and put them to work. These were usually thrust-
ing adventurers from the lower rungs of the social ladder,
risk-takers with energy and organising ability, who turned
gold what were sometimes the inventions of others. But
IS
James Watt's *OId Bess"
the captains of industry
like Arkwright and Whit-
bread, Wilkinson and
Strutt were just as crea-
tive in business-methods
as Crompton or Watt in
technology; and in those
days there was not much
distinction between the
laboratory, the workshop
and the counting-house.
The key inventions were
not isolated lightning
flashes that struck Darby
or Kay or Cort out of the
blue: they were the logical conclusions to the tinkering and
pondering of many other men. Since the scientific revolution of
the previous century, the empirical habit of mind was wide-
spread, especially among the products of the Dissenting Acade-
mies. Technical advance was in the air, but it required all the
other circumstances to precipitate it.
The application of science to industry was thus not a simple
process. Neither was it a smooth one. From a distance the
Georgian period looks like a century of vast economic advance;
but closer inspection reveals that the Industrial Revolution was
an affair of fits and starts. Already the ferment was working
in late Stuart and early Georgian times; but the 'twenties,
'thirties and 'forties brought a mysterious slo wing-down.
Capital was twice-shy after the South-Sea Bubble, and labour
was short. However, after mid-century, the population began
to rise again and production started to mount. In the early
'eighties, all the graphs turned sharply upwards and the
Industrial Revolution was off the ground. But these smooth
ups and downs should be looked at even more closely. Under the
magnifying glass the graphs covering the whole century have a
very jagged appearance, telling of bankruptcy and unemploy-
ment as well as fortunes and high wages. Wars, harvests and
diseases, financial panic and human error were all the time
19
THE ENGLISH PEOPLE
sending spasms through the economy. There were no crusades,
pogroms, religious wars or bloody revolutions in Georgian
England, but there was enough adventure in the struggle for
existence to keep a violent and aggressive people from growing
placid*
Further Reading
T. S. Asbton, The Industrial Revolution, 1948.
_ ^n Economic History of England: the Eighteenth Century, 1955.
J. D. Chambers, The Fob of Trent, 1670-1800, 1957.
E. Hughes, North Country Life in the Eighteenth Century, 1952.
A. R. Humphreys, The Augustan World, 1954.
F. Mantoux, The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century, 1928.
Dorothy Marshall, English People in the Eighteenth Century, 1956.
Sir Lewis Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III
ed.), 1957.
J. H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century (Pelican), 1950.
A. S. Turbervffle (eel.), Johnson's England, 1933.
20
II
Upper-Class Life
WEALTH
The Georgian period saw the steady accumulation of large
estates. Every year the great landed families were adding acre
upon acre to their patrimony. Sarah, widow of the great Duke
of Marlborough, bought on the average an estate a year after
her husband's death. In one year she bought six, in six different
counties. It was a new process, beginning in the late seventeenth
century and continuing right through our period. Of course,
there had been much buying and selling of land for a century or
so before ; but that had been, in the main, a question of new
men, merchants, lawyers and politicians, buying out decaying
gentry. In the Georgian period it was different. Though some
of the land was bought out of the proceeds of business and
government (like that of the Marl boroughs, for example), in
the main it went to those who already had plenty. In the previ-
ous period, land was the safest form of investment, and a mer-
chant would turn his stocks and shares into ridge and furrow
for security's sake: in order, for instance, to leave a sound
legacy to his widow and children. The political and economic
conditions of the eighteenth century made it perfectly safe for a
rich man to leave his money in commerce or buy government
stock. Those who bought land had different motives: they were
investing in political power and social prestige. In the seven-
teenth century the land transfers had caused grave social and
political dislocation; in the eighteenth they made for stability,
since the estates went, not to upstarts, but to the most substan-
tial and conservative section of the population. Thus on the one
UPPER-CLASS LIFE
we have civil war, and on the other the 'peace of the
Augustans'.
Not that everyone was content, for those who were selling
were going through bad times. These, on the whole, were the
smaller gentry. Oxfordshire, which had been a county of small
squires, was practically monopolised by the Marlboroughs by
mid-century. The smaller fry were selling out for a variety of
reasons, partly bad luck, and partly bad management. A run of
ineligible daughters could put a severe strain on the estate
which had to find portions for them. Another disaster could be a
dowager with a large jointure surviving her husband for a
large number of years. This could happen in the best of families,
was a terrible burden on the son's estate which provided the
money. The wife of the third Duke of Leeds survived her hus-
band for 63 years and drew 190,000 from the estate. Straight-
forward extravagance was a common cause of debt, especially
among those gentry w r ho succumbed to the prevailing fashion of
rebuilding their houses in the latest style, planting gardens
and buying statuary and pictures. A typical debtor was the
third Lord Weymouth, who was ruined by drink and cards
at the age of 3 1 . But the greatest cause was the land-tax of 4^.
In the pound introduced to pay for the wars against Louis XIV.
Small gentry, with nothing coming in but their rents, could not
survive for long paying a fifth of their income to the govern-
ment, A second or third income was essential: yqu had to go
into politics (Lord Weymouth recovered that way) or some
form of business.
All through the eighteenth century the tide was flowing hard
against those who were not in the economic or political swim.
There were many like Sir William Chaytor, who in 17OO was
seized for debt by the sheriff's bailiffs in his manor house near
Darlington in Durham and taken with his servant George to the
Fleet prison in London. "I wish thou hadst seen what a day
George and I had yesterday, * he wrote to his wife from prison,
*he mending my old drawers and I mending my old breetches
setting buttons on my ruff coat which was almost worn to
in riding up/ Lady Chaytor took lodging in Westminster
and in 17O4 having pawned all her belongings. Sir William
UPPER-CLASS LIFE
died in prison in 1721 and the baronetcy became extinct. It is
no wonder that such men formed the core of the Country interest,
whether they called themselves Whig or Tory, and nursed
bitter hatred for the two great centres of power, the Court and
the City. We find them opposing Marlborough's war, reading
the Craftsman, rallying round Pitt and the Patriots, and crying
out against standing armies, Continental warfare, septennial
parliaments, party politics and placemen. In George Ill's time
they demanded 'Economical Reform', and even toyed with
Squire and Family
Wilkes and Parliamentary Reform, till the general rise in land
values at the end of the century pushed them above the bank-
ruptcy line, and the spectre of red revolution rallied them to the
establishment.
Many ancient families sounded the sour notes of Squire
Western in Tom Jones: 'the lords ... I heate the very name of
themmun ' ; but it was different with the squires and nobles whose
land-agents and lawyers were waiting to pounce on their
property. They have never had such a bountiful century, before
or since, particularly the greatest of them. Many of them were
families of recent origin, who had done well out of politics and
3
UPPER-CLASS LIFE
business under the Tudors and Stuarts. The dukes of Bedford,
for example, were descended from John Russell whom Henry
VIII created Baron Russell and Edward VI Earl of Bedford.
Out of the spoils of the monasteries he received the Cistercian
Abbeys of Woburn in Bedfordshire and Tavistock in Devon, the
Benedictine Abbey of Thorney in the Isle of Ely, and the
gardens of a dissolved convent in London, now called Covent
Garden. Speculative building on the London property paid
handsome dividends; just as it did in the next century on the
manors of Bloomsbury and St Giles, which were brought into
the family by the wife of the first duke. In 1700, when the second
duke succeeded, Luttrell noted in his diary that he was 'the
richest peer in England, worth upwards of 30,000 p. a. and
In a few years will have ^45,000 p.a/ In the eighteenth century
the Bedfords began to buy seriously for the first time since their
Tudor heyday, and soon no one could compete with them in
Bedfordshire. At the end of the century, the sixth duke was still
issuing marriage licences from Woburn in lieu of the abbot
who had performed this function till the abbey came under
Thomas Cromwell's hammer.
Political power was distributed along with the estates.
Newcastle shared Nottinghamshire with Lord Middleton, and
had influence in the election of one member in Nottingham,
Newark and East Retford. He nominated all four members for
what he called *my own two boroughs' of Aldborough and
Boroughbridge in Yorkshire. The Marlboroughs had decisive
influence over one seat in Oxfordshire, nominated the two
Hanover Square in 1725
UPPER-CLASS LIFE
members for Woodstock (where Blenheim stands) and after
helping to pay the Oxford Corporation's debt of 5,670 in
1 768 they shared the borough for the next thirty years with the
Bertie family. But the completeness of the aristocratic political
command must not be exaggerated. It was strong in the north,
the north Midlands and parts of the east, but in the western
and south-western counties the gentry were in control. And the
Duke of Newcastle, the most assiduous parliamentary manager
of them all, never had more than 1 seats at his disposal, and
he was only really sure of four of those.
The steady accumulation of wealth continued right through
the Georgian period and an estimate of 1783 credits 28 peers
with land over the 100,OOO acre mark. Of course, the income
from these vast areas depended on where they were situated.
Owners of London property did very well as the industrial and
commercial areas w r ere developed further and further east, and
the fashionable dwelling houses were built further and further
west. A glance at the London street directory is enough to
indicate the trend: Berkeley Square, Harley Street, Cavendish
Square, Oxford Street, Bedford Square, and so on. The Bedfords'
income from their London property rose from 3,700 a year
in 173 to ,8,000 a year in 1771. And there w r ere many other
ways of increasing the yield of land. The Georgian upper class
is celebrated for the lead it gave in scientific farming, and one of
the most successful, though no pioneer, was Thomas Coke of
Holkham in Norfolk, who doubled the annual rental of his
original estate between 1776, when he took over, and 1816.
Other proprietors exploited the minerals on their estates,
sometimes leasing mines to industrialists, sometimes, like the
Dudleys, working their own. The enterprise of the third Duke of
Bridgwater in digging one of the first canals of the Industrial
Revolution from his collieries at Worsley to his customers in
Manchester is well known.
Yet their enterprise extended far beyond the confines of their
own estates. They had capital in every kind of commercial and
industrial undertaking, and were as much at home in City offices
as they were in West End drawing-rooms. When the fourth
Duke of Bedford imported wall-paper and porcelain from China
5
The Duke of Bridgwater and his canal
to beautify
Woburn, he
was able to
have it carried
in his own
ships, for the
Tavistock and
the Streatham
were regulars
on the East
India run.
England may
have been a
nation of shop-
keepers, but
JLV^V-J-'V-.lQjWU.C
the gentry were not a class apart and had no objection to putting
their younger sons behind the counter. &
Thus the landed classes were not simply passive receivers of
rent, and those that were went to the wall. The astonishing
buoyancy of the successful ones was dependent on hard-headed
exploitation of what they had, combined with further sources of
income from outside.
But we have not yet mentioned the most important outside
source perhaps the most decisive element in the accumulation
of fortunes in pre-industrial times and that was public office
The whole range of jobs in the government, the civil service,
the armed forces and the Church was a bottomless treasure-
chest from which the upper class subsidised themselves and
supported their dependants. At the start of the period, the
fcXT* of Marlborou g h a s Captain-General and Master of
tfte Ordnance (among other things) received ^60,000 a year
apart from his percentage of the bread contracts for the army
abroad and of the pay of foreign mercenaries, and other per-
qwsites emoluments and gifts. Sarah, his wife, as Groom of the
Stole, Mtstress of the Robes and Comptroller of the Privy
Pue, was receiving 5,6OO; while their two married daugh-
ters , Heanetta and Anne, were making rfi.ooo a year each as
Ladies of the Bedchamber. Sir Robert Walpole inherited a
26
UPPER-CLASS LIFE
modest estate of about ,=2,000 a year from his father, but a
few years in the government enabled him to tear down his
father's house, build a palace in its place and live there like a
prince. Just how much he made in his 21 years as First Lord of
the Treasury it is impossible to calculate: suffice it to say that,
in the time of his bankrupt descendants, his pictures were
knocked down to Catherine of Russia for ,40,000.
Politics at that time was the high road to success in all walks
of life, and a wise father got his son into the House of Commons
as soon as he became of age, if not before. The House in 1761
contained five Townshends, three Cornwallises, five members
of the Manners family (one illegitimate), four Cavendishes,
three Walpoles and four Yorkes. Nearly all the leading naval
commanders of the Seven Years' War and the War of American
Independence were M.P.s: for example, Anson, Byng, Bosca-
wen, Haw r ke, Hardy, Rodney, Howe, Keppel, Cornwallis, Hood
and so on. But the navy was a career open to the talents com-
pared with the army, where the higher ranks were almost
monopolised by the younger sons of the great landed magnates.
In the American War, Howe, Gage, Clinton and Burgoyne
were all younger sons, or sons of younger sons, of aristocrats.
The more land you held, the bigger public offices you acquired,
and the greater your service to the government, the greater
your ability to buy more land.
The stability or enlargement of landed estates, and their
longevity, were greatly assisted by the dynastic attitude adopted
by their owners, for whom the land and the family were more
Blenheim Palace (1715), Oxfordshire: the south front
UPPER-CLASS LIFE
than the individual holder, just as a kingdom is more
important than the individual monarch. Gardens were laid out
and trees planted for the enjoyment of grandchildren not yet
conceived. The Duke of Marlborough never saw Blenheim as he
had planned it, and never, of course, expected to see the estates
Lady and gentleman
which were to be bought for future holders out of the jg4OO,000
he left for the purpose in his will.
But the most impressive manifestations of this attitude are
the arrangements made at the marriage of the eldest son of a
family. This was the system of strict settlement which became
the regular method in the eighteenth century. Lawyers drew
up a scheme whereby the heir became in effect only a life-
of the estate when he succeeded, and the whole was
28
UPPER-CLASS LIFE
entailed intact on his eldest son. The heir could not sell or
mortgage the property except by the verv expensive process
of a private Act of Parliament. Included in the settlement,
usually, were provisions for a jointure for the heir's wife (an
annual income) and for portions (lump sums) for the daughters
and younger sons when they came of age. These were usually
raised by a mortgage on the estate. The system was a very
powerful force in holding estates together generation after genera-
tion. In fact, it did more: it made for increase, for the wife of the
heir brought her portion from her father, and this was usually
used to buy an estate to add to the main bod\^. Marriages thus
became an important method of gaining property. As Sir William
Temple put it, 'our marriages are made, just like other common
bargains and sales, by the mere consideration of interest or gain,
without any of love or esteem, of birth or of beauty itself.
Marriage to an heiress was a regular way of advancing the
family fortunes. The father of Lord North, the prime minister
of George III, married three in turn, and the eldest sons of the
previous four generations married one each. Many of the heiresses
were daughters of middle-class business-men, and it was fortu-
nate that the English landed classes were much less exclusive
than their opposite numbers on the Continent. The second
Viscount Palmerston, the father of the Victorian Foreign
Secretary, married the daughter of a City merchant. The first
Viscount married two bourgeois ladies, first, the daughter of
the governor of the Bank of England, and, second, the widow
of a Lord Mayor of London. The hope was, of course, to many
money and social position, and one can appreciate the horror
caused by a daughter marrying below her income-bracket as
well as her dignity. When the daughter of the Duke of Rich-
mond eloped with Henry Fox, who was a younger son, society
was so aghast that Carteret said: 'I thought our fleet or our
army were beat, or Mons betrayed into the hands of the French/
The father of the bride need not have been so upset, for his
own marriage had been arranged by his father and the Earl of
Cadogan to settle a gambling debt, while he was at the univer-
sity, and his bride still in the nursery. As it happened, they
fell in love and lived very happily together.
29
UPPER-CLASS LIFE
THE ESTATES
The lucrative marriage, the political eminence, the company
dividends and broad acres were symbolised by the country seat.
\11 the leaders of fashion in the Georgian period were building,
or knocking down and rebuilding. Their diaries and letters,
account-books and talk were all full of it. They went up to
London for the Season, for Parliament and business, but as
soon as June came round they were off to their estates where their
real pleasure lay. Those, like Lord Hervey, who preferred the
Town were exceptional. 'I cannot persuade myself to leave
this town', he wrote to Henry Fox at the end of May, 1727,
'whilst any body will stay in it with me; which I fear will not
be longer than this week.' The following year in the middle of
June he wrote to Henry's brother, Stephen, who was down in
Somerset: 'You are by this time at Redlynch, and finding your
park wall advanced, the foundation of your new building laid,
your slopes improving, your puddles filling, and your plant*-
Houghton Hall (1722), Norfolk: the entrance front
UPPER-CLASS LIFE
tions thriving/ The magnates aimed at size and grandeur.
Blenheim, for example, was designed to rival Versailles itself,
and no expense was spared. Vanbrugh and Hawksmopr were the
architects, Grinling Gibbons carved much of the stone, Laguerre
did the frescoes, Thornhill painted the ceilings and Rysbrack
did some of the statuary. By 1 7 10, jgls*,OOO had been spent
and it was not half finished. Marlborough, however, was
falling from power and work had stopped. Shortly after the
Tories had taken over, Harley, the head of the new government,
allowed 7,QQQ from the Treasury to put some sort of roof
over what had been built to preserve it from ruin. It w r as not
till the political climate had changed again in 1714 that the vast
works could recommence. Shortly after this Colen Campbell
began work on Houghton for Sir Robert Walpole, creating a
fitting symbol of the prime minister's wealth and power.
* There is a garden of 3 acres to one side of the house/ wrote
Lord Hervey, * and to the other three, the park comes close up
without any interruption. The house itself is 164 foot in front.
There are two ranges of offices of 1OO foot square, joined to the
house by two colonnades of 68 foot each, which makes the front
of the whole from out to out just 5OO feet/ Describing the
'base or rustic story', he said, 'The whole is dedicated to fox-
hunters, hospitality, noise, dirt and business. The next is the
floor of taste, expense, state and parade/ The garden was
created by Bridgman. To do the thing properly, the village had
to be demolished and shifted further away. After ten years of
work had gone into it, Hervey was able to tell the Prince of
Wales in 173 1, 'He has already, by the force of manuring and
planting, so changed the face of the country, that his park is a
pleasant fertile island of his own creation in the middle of a
naked sea of land/
In the middle years of the century, the Oxfords rebuilt Wei-
beck, and the Bedfords Wobum. In the latter, the Georgian
palace was built round the Stuart core. An outside water-closet
was installed for the fourth Duke's own use; and inside w r ere
two fixed baths, one hot and one cold, the latter like a small
swimming-pool. Cipriani painted the library ceiling, while
Rysbrack made the chimney-piece in the drawing-room. The
31
UPPER-CLASS LIFE
cost of reconstructing Woburn between 1747 and 1763
was j8*,9~Q 6s. 8d. The second Viscount Palmerston (whose
was only <7,OQO a year till his mother died) could not
such lavish splendour or such basic reconstruction. He
'Georgianised' his Elizabethan mansion at Broadlands by
a facade and portico. Nevertheless, he spent ^33,000
with * Capability* Brown and Henry Holland on this and his
Town house in Hanover Square.
And the fabric and the landscape were only the beginning.
Hrocningham Hall, Suffolk: the gallery
bought SOD old masters in his lifetime at a cost of
Chandos at Canons specialised in exotic fruits
animals and birds from all over the world. Marlborourfi was
picking up pictures, statues and fabrics all over Europe in the
SSI ^?T5 %hting the French and holdin s his allia *
together. He had tapestries woven in Brussels to depict his
w*ne*. After capturing Tournai he took down the marble
wTi IV fr r over the gatew *y d p ]aced Jt ^
Blenheim, where it still remains. His successor, the
UPPER-CLASS LIFE
fifth Duke, ruined himself with the collector's mania perhaps
as common a cause of bankruptcy as gambling itself at that
time.
Entertaining was equally prodigal. Chandos kept an orchestra
of 27 players, which cost him l,OOG a year in wages, apart
from board and lodging. According to Sir Thomas Robinson, It
cost l5 a night in candles to illuminate Houghton. Here, as
in most palaces, the feasting had a political purpose behind it.
'Our company at Houghton', wrote Hervey to the Prince of
Wales in 1731, 'swelled at last into so numerous a body that
we used to sit down to dinner a little snug party of about thirty
odd, up to the chin in beef, venison, geese, turkeys, etc.; and
generally over the chin in claret, strong beer and punch. We
had Lords spiritual and temporal, besides commoners, parsons
and freeholders innumerable. In public we drank loyal healths,
talked of the times and cultivated popularity; in private we
drew plans and cultivated the country/ In 1789, when Lord
Fitzwilliam received the Prince Regent, he threw open the gates
of Wentworth and entertained 20,000 of the local population.
The hordes of guests are
one reason for the size of
these palaces. The long
retinues of servants are
another. But the chief reason
was the same as Louis XIV's
motive in creating Ver-
sailles : ostentation. The
object was to demonstrate
to tenants, neighbours,
friends and rivals one's
wealth, social eminence and
political power.
These country seats and
town houses, with their
furniture and hangings, their
pictures, statues and books,
their trees and flowers, are
vivid evidence of the
Sir Lawrence Dundas and Ms grandson
knowledge and taste of
the Georgian landed
classes. Good taste was
widespread. Elegance
had become second
nature, whether it was
in the decoration of a
ducal coach or the design
of a shop-window in a
country town. The early
factories, even, were not
Children playing 'dark, Satanic mills'.
EDUCATION
All this is surprising in view of the haphazard and disorganised
nature of upper-class education. Many continued to be brought
up at home under the direction of tutors, for most of the schools
were inadequate. Others, however, were sending their sons to
one of the handful of schools that were emerging into promi-
nence at that time, and this was normal practice at the end of the
period- For this was the time that the English public schools
took shape. As a rule they had been founded, along with the
rest of the grammar schools, to prepare the local poor men's
sons for the university; but some of the headmasters discovered
that their foundation charters allowed them ( or did not forbid
them) to take in fee-paying pupils to supplement their meagre
salaries. Harrow's rise in this period is typical of those schools
which made a success of this business venture. Already by 1718
it had 104 fee-payers to 40 free scholars. This was due to
skilful lobbying by its Old Etonian headmaster, Thomas Brian,
one of whose feats was to pull in the Duke of Chandos on to the
governing body. A school is at the mercy of its head, of course,
and Harrow's numbers fell very low under the next head who
drank and eventually absconded. The next one, Thomas
Thaekery, another Old Etonian, temporarily built up the
again. He attracted the nobility by giving them special
privileges; but he grew lax, and when he resigned in 1760 the
were down to 80, and the sixth form was notorious
34?
UPPER-CLASS LIFE
for its drinking and gambling. The next head, Sunnier (yet
another Old Etonian ), brought the numbers up to 230 by
eleven years of thorough-going reform. His most important
measure and this typifies a key development in the period-
was to bring the boarders into houses under the control of the
school, instead of letting them run wild in the lodgings they had
previously taken in the locality. The school thereafter prospered,
though not without a serious three-day riot in 1 77 1, when the
boys objected to having yet another Old Etonian in command.
However, in 1803 there were 350 pupils, including five future
prime ministers.
Thus the public schools flowered and withered, battled into
fashion or spent the century sound asleep just like all the other
institutions of that heyday of private enterprise, unpredictable,
uncontrolled, uninspected and dependent entirely on the
hazards of individual initiative. Most of the grammar schools,
as Lord Chief Justice Kenyon described them in 1795, were
'empty walls without scholars, and everything neglected but the
receipt of salaries*. Those schools that thrived (and Eton,
Westminster, Winchester, Harrow and Rugby were notable)
did so by developing certain devices that we have noticed at
Harrow. First, the fee-paying element was expanded like the
Oppidans at Eton. Secondly, the nobility were attracted. In the
early part of the century, Westminster prospered under Whig
patronage ; later this custom was transferred to Harrow. It was
not a question of noble boys being battered into shape to fit
the needs of the school, but of education adjusting itself to
suit the young gentlemen arriving with their money, their
tutors, their servants and aristocratic ways. When the fifth
Duke of Hamilton went to Winchester at the age of IS, he was
placed at the head of the school on account of his rank. Eton
only placed peers at the top of their forms. The poor scholars
took second place, and in some schools that element was
squeezed out altogether.
A third measure was to improve discipline by the introduction
of boarding-houses, praepostors, fagging and so on; but very
few dents were made in the wild animal spirits and thick-
skinned self-confidence of boys who treated their headmaster
35
UPPER-CLASS LIFE
rather as their fathers treated the king. The masters were too
few to have much effect on pupils who were doing the school a
favour simply by being there- The boys were left to organise
themselves, and the result was often the kind of mob-rule that
emerges in the early days of a successful revolution. When
George III met an Eton boy,, he used to ask, 'Have you had a
rebellion lately, eh, eh?' Periods of anarchy alternated with
of terrorism. At one stage, boys might, like the future
prime minister Melbourne at Eton, go off for a week's racing
at Ascot ; at another they might be mercilessly whipped on their
bare buttocks, Dr Parr of Harrow boasted that he never
flogged a boy twice in the same lesson. But sensitive boys
probably suffered less physical and mental torture from their
masters than from their bullying fellow-pupils. The third
Lord Holland, when he was a fag, had to make toast by holding
the bread in his fingers, and according to Samuel Rogers his
hands retained a withered appearance for the rest of his life.
The fourth aspect in which some schools improved was the
curriculum. Most schools provided little more than a continuous
diet of Latin. Other subjects were regarded as 'extras', which
the boys paid for and studied in their spare time. Dr Thomas
James, the Old Etonian who put Rugby on the map, wrote:
* Saturday is a half-holiday, and of course (like other half-
holidays) is for writing, dancing, French, drawing, or even
fencing as it is now taught at Rugby/ Cowper, at Westminster
between 1741 and 1749, read some of Milton and the whole of
Homer in Greek on his own initiative. Charles James Fox was
another voracious reader who filled the gaps in the school
time-table for his own pleasure. He, like many of the boys,
had his own tutor with him. This was the Rev. Dr Francis
(the father of Junius} who, according to Gibbon, an ex-pupil,
'preferred the pleasures of London to the instruction of his
pupils'. Fox, however, seems to have suffered no academic
harm, at least, and remained a cultivated and scholarly person
to the end of his days.
Net that this was any tribute to the Georgian system of
instruction, which, though it enabled politicians to quote the
authors across the floor of the House of Commons,
36
A schoolboys' parly
certainly did little to fit
them for an era of im-
perial expansion and
rapid industrialisation.
The Dissenting Acade-
mies, where the middle
class learned modem
subjects like science,
mathematics and geo-
graphy, were much more
in tune with the times;
and some of the public
schools, like Oundle and
Rugby towards the end of the century, began to attract people
by copying their methods. But the remainder plodded on in the
old rut.
One department of education which arouses so much public-
school enthusiasm today was entirely absent from the Georgian
time-table, and that was organised games. The boys were left
to their own devices. The younger ones spent their spare time
fighting, eating jam-tarts or roaming the countryside. Palmer-
ston at the age of 1 3 wrote to his mother that he had just acquired
a half share in a ferret, and that they were off chasing rabbits.
The senior scholars got in some early practice for their adult
social life by drinking, gambling and wenching. Cricket was
played; and so was the ancient game of football, of course,
though Butler, the head of Shrewsbury, thought it only fit
for butchers' boys. Private enterprise also organised the first
inter-school match between Eton and Westminster in 1796.
Eton was defeated, and to add to their chagrin the team was
flogged by the head the next day for being absent from school.
When the young gentlemen moved up to Oxford or Cam-
bridge, as many of them did, they had every opportunity to
forget what little they had learned at school. The dons seem to
have put one half of their effort into writing begging letters to
politicians like Newcastle, and the other into extracting the
maximum nourishment from the college endowments. Few of
them gave any lectures, and few of the undergraduates attended
37
Fdlows of Brasenose College, Oxford
if they did. Richard Watson, who became Professor of Chemistry
at Cambridge in 1764, 'had never read a syllable on the subject
nor seen a single experiment'. Perhaps some of the scholars,
sons of artisans and farmers, got down to their books, for they
had their careers to make mainly in the Church. But the upper
class lived a life apart. At Cambridge they ranked as Noblemen,
Fellow Commoners or Pensioners; at Oxford as Noblemen,
Gentleman Commoners or Commoners. They were marked off
by such privileges as their admission to the dons' High Table,
Common Room and cellar, and by their highly coloured acade-
mic dress. 'Our life was an imitation of high life in London*,
wrote the first Lord Malmesbury, looking back on his Oxford
days. * Luckily drinking was not the fashion; but what we did
drink was claret, and we had our regular round of evening
card-parties, to the great annoyance of our finances/
Certainly, little pressure to work was brought to bear on
them, either by the college heads or by the tutors their fathers
sent up with them. In the middle of his residence at Hertford
College, Oxford, Charles James Fox was taken to Paris bjr his
father to round off certain aspects of his education not provided
for by English university regulations. While he was away, the
of Ms college, Dr Newcome, wrote telling him not to
worry about hurrying back. 'As to trigonometry, it is a
of entire indifference to the other geometricians of the
college . * . whether they proceed to the other branches of
SB
UPPER-CLASS LIFE
mathematics immediately, or wait a term or two longer. You
need not . . . interrupt your amusements ... we shall stop until
we have the pleasure of your company/
The year or so between the university and the House of
Commons was usually filled with the Grand Tour, which
became the standard finishing school for the eighteenth-
century persons of quality. Not all parents were happy about
it. The second Lord Onslow said to Queen Caroline (using the
vocabulary to which she was accustomed): 'So, Madam, after
I had seen enough of the French to know them and to despise
them, I brought my son back again ; and thought I would sooner
cut my son's throat than leave him to be educated among such a
pack of w and rogues and fools/ Others felt that the
family reputation was safer if their progeny were allowed to
let off steam in the masquerades of Paris and the courts of
Italy rather than in Covent Garden and St James's Park. But
most regarded it as a valuable education. Their children broad-
ened their outlook, practised their French, polished their manners
and mixed with the highest society in Europe. Palmerston
bagged the two leading Parisian hostesses on the same day, for
his diary of IS September 1773 shows him dining with Madame
The ' Bach" at Cambridge
UPPER-CLASS LIFE
Geoffrin and supping with Madame du Deffand. On the 28th
lie was presented to Louis XV at Versailles.
But the chief object was Italy, to see the great collections of
Renaissance paintings and antique statues. Many of them went
the rounds like coach-parties 'doing" the Louvre today. That
was Sir Joshua Reynolds' impression. 'Some Englishmen,
while, I was in the Vatican % he wrote, 'came there and spent
above six hours in writing down whatever the antiquary
dictated to them. They scarcely ever looked at the paintings
the whole time.' Such young men gained nothing but 'the
manners of footmen and grooms' (to quote Chesterfield's view)
and some packing-cases of copies of old masters, fragments of
classical sculpture (probably forged) and a portrait or two of
themselves. The Duchess of Marlborough, while her grandson
was on the Tour, wrote: 'As to medals and antiquities, painting
and sculpture, I don't look upon that to be the most useful
knowledge to anybody, and much less to younger brothers who
will have no money to lay out in such things/ The Duke of
Grand Tourists in Florence
UPPER-CLASS LIFE
Brldgwater, obsessed by his canals, would have agreed with
her, for when he died his curios were found still in their packing-
cases just as they had been brought from Rome. On the other
hand, some tourists were profoundly affected for the rest of
their lives. Palmerston was one. *l never saw a statue worth
looking at till I crossed the Alps ', he wrote, * or which gave me
the least idea of the powers of the art/ Lord Burlington was
another who was deeply stirred : he helped to transform English
architecture. In fact, the Grand Tour played a major role in the
development of English artistic taste, and the collections still
on view in English country houses today are vivid evidence of
the effect it wrought.
THE TOWN
When Charles, later third Duke of Marlborough, was on the
Tour, his grandmother wrote: "Tell Charles that I shall choose
him of the House of Commons for the next Parliament, but
that won't oblige him to come into England sooner than is
reasonable, but only secure it for him when he has done his
travels. 7 That was the next stage in a gentleman's life, whether
he was going to be a career-politician or not. As Horace Walpole
somewhat extravagantly put It, 'merit is useless: it is interest
alone that can push a man forward. By dint of interest one of
my coach-horses might become poet-laureate, and the other,
physician to the household/ The headquarters of interest was
London, and when the parliamentary session began in the autumn
society flocked to the metropolis. There was much more to the
London season, in contrast to Continental states, than simply
hanging about the Court. In fact, the Hanoverian Court was
regarded as a boring duty. Lord Hervey, whose long career
in Court office makes him an expert, wrote to Stephen Fox in
1727 saying that he had been *at Court last night. There was
dice, dancing, sweating and stinking in abundance as usual/
The following year he told the same correspondent, * I am just
come from Court, where I saw nothing but blue noses, pale
faces, gauze heads and toupets among the younger gentry:
lying smiles, forced compliments, careful brows, and made
laughs amongst the elders/ The first three Georges were fish
UPPER-CLASS LIFE
out of water, awkward as leaders of English society, apart
from being impossible to work with. They even hated one
another: Queen Caroline said that her 'dear first-born is the
greatest ass, and the greatest liar, and the greatest canaille,
the greatest beast, in the whole world, and ... I most
heartily wish he was out of it/ That was Frederick, Prince of
Wales, whose "ludicrous . . . pretended taste for poetry and the
arts' Horace Walpole sneered at. 'I recollect none of his
ancestors eminent in arms ; and that any of the family should
have a real taste for letters, or the arts, would be little short of a
miracle/ Their ignorance, or obstinacy, or blustering bad-
temper was always offending someone. George II forbade the
Duchess of Queensberry the Court in 1729. She had been touting
for subscriptions for Gay's Polly even in the Drawing Room,
and the opera (the successor to the Beggar's Opera} was
anathema to the government. She wrote to the king in a huff:
'The Duchess of Queensberry is surprised and well pleased that
the King hath given her so agreeable a command as to stay from
Court, where she never came for diversion, but to bestow a
great civility on the King and Queen/ The Earl of Egmont
summed up the position on the occasion of another bout of
rudeness by the same monarch : 'the nobility of England are proud
and presently take fire at any slight the Crown casts upon
them 7 . Most people, though, were less independent-minded than
Egmont, and found it necessary to continue bowing and scraping.
They also had to kow-tow to the ministers, for, though the
king was the fountain of honour and the source of sinecures,
it was the cabinet who usually bullied him into distributing them
in accordance with their political programme. Thus society had
to dance attendance on heads of departments, wait in their ante-
rooms, fawn on their wives or mistresses and drink themselves
under the table at their routs. Hervey thus describes what he
calls 'the farce of a full Levee' at Sir Robert Walpole's:
* kissing, whispering, bowing, squeezing hands were all acted
there as usual by the political pantomimes who officiate at
those weekly performances, where several boons are asked
which are not so much as promised, and several promised
will never be granted *,
4
UPPER-CLASS LIFE
Though politics was the prime lever of their actions, and
their favourite topic of conversation, they had much other
business to despatch in their brief, bustling residence in the
capital. There were lawyers to see and cases to hear in West-
minster Hall ; bankers to consult in the City ; physicians to call
in; architects, hairdressers, wig-makers, tailors and dress-
makers to set to work. And every day was a continuous round
of social engagements which began before breakfast and ended
after supper. Some magnates had great town houses to establish
their headquarters in. The Bedfords, for example, decamped from
Woburn to Bedford House which occupied the north side of
Bloomsbury Square. But few went to these lengths. (This was
a London idiosyncrasy which surprised foreigners.) Instead,
they bought, or took for the Season, a more modest mansion
among the terraces and squares that were being laid out further
and further west as the century progressed. At the start of the
period Bloomsbury and Soho were fashionable; at the end it was
Mayfair, 'Had they not been stopped by the walls of Hyde
Park', wrote Fielding, 'it is more than probable they would
by this time have arrived at Kensington/
From these dwellings they sallied forth to pick up the latest
news and gossip in the coffee-house or chocolate-house. This
Bloomsbury Square in 1 787, with Bedford House
Brooks's
was the communications
industry in almost its
primitive simplicity, at
one remove from the
market-place. The des-
perate shortage of hard
information at that time
inflated its value to
famine heights. Rumour
and gossip were appreci-
ated almost as much.
Everybody, to use
Hervey's phrase, went
* hawking about for news '. They spent hour upon hour in coffee-
houses, taverns and clubs giving it and getting it; and when they
got home at night they filled their diaries and letters with it. The
chief resorts of the quality were the coffee- and chocolate-houses
in St James's Street and Pall Mall; and in the second half of
the period these evolved into clubs. White's, Boodle's, the
Cocoa Tree and Almack's (later known as Brooks's) were all a
step from one another in St James's Street. The basic occupation
here was gambling, for stakes which rose higher as the years
passed. It was the national weakness, from the Court down to the
humblest ale-house. Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams described
Lord Hervey's early education as follows : * The beginning of his
life was spent in attending his father at Newmarket and his
mother at the gaming-table/ At the age of 16, Charles James
Fox and his elder brother lost ^32,000 in three days' and three
nights' play. Brooks's had a rule which read: 'Every person
playing at the new Quinze table to keep fifty guineas before
him/ And the Betting Book at that club reveals that the wagers
extended far beyond cards and dice, to any aspect of life in
which chance played a part, such as the fecundity of a duchess,
or the longevity of a bishop. According to a story in circulation
In the Town in the 1760s, Lord Edgecumbe, acting as a Teller
in a House of Commons division, from force of habit began
'calling out the numbers one, two, three, four, five, six, seven,
eight, nine, ten, knave, queen, king/
44
UPPER-CLASS LIFE
Lord Carlisle described George Selwyn's life in Town as
follows : * You get up at nine ; sit till twelve in your night-gown ;
creep down to White's, and spend five hours at table; sleep till
you can escape your supper reckoning; and then make two
wretches carry you in a chair, with three pints of claret in you,
three miles for a shilling/ But there was more to London life
than that for most people. There was the theatre, the opera,
gallantry at Vauxhall or Ranelagh, and more doubtful goings-
on at masquerades and bagnios. The second Lord Palmerston's
precise diary enables us to see how a typical Georgian aristocrat
spent every day over a period of 37 years. In February and
March, 1765, he dined with the Duchess of Ancaster, the
Duchess of Marlborough, the Duchess of Bedford, the Spencers,
the Speaker, Lord Portland and David Garrick. His annual
summary for the year 1770, after enumerating the houses he
went to most, goes on: 'When unengaged I dined much at
Almack's Club in Pall Mall, where there was a constant and
The Rotunda at Ranelagh
UPPER-CLASS LIFE
excellent society. On a Saturday I dined at a club at the St
Alban's Tavern, called the Opera Club/
All this involved a prodigious intake of food and drink.
Breakfast was late and light: usually tea and bread and butter.
Dinner was at two or three at the start of the century, and at
five or later towards the end. Supper was any time between
nine and two in the morning. The Duke of Marlborough
celebrated the birth of his fourth son with a supper which in-
cluded roast beef, mutton, pork; loin and fillet of veal; pork and
mutton pies; chicken, ducks, geese roasted; boiled tongues,
hog's head and two dishes of souse; two plum puddings, and
one apple pie. Dinner, the most important meal, was less
restrained. When it was over, the ladies would retire and a
long bout of toasts would begin, the gentlemen occasionally
relieving themselves in a chamber-pot in the sideboard drawer.
Drink was another national passion.
'Drunk as a lord' is an eighteenth-century phrase with a
sound empirical basis. The leaders of the nation provided the
model for the rest: Walpole, Bolingbroke and Carteret, to
take one political generation, were Gargantuan topers. The
Duke of Newcastle, according to Hervey in 1731, 'was t'other
night most excessively drunk, and the next morning fearing he
might have said or done something improper to the Princess
Royal with whom he had a great deal of conversation, he came to
her making a thousand excuses for his conduct, to which she
very graciously answered: " Mon Dieu, vous etie% charmant;
vans ne m'avezjamazs si bien diverti de votre vie. Je voudrais vous
rofr ttwjours zvre".* When Northington was appointed Lord
Chancellor, he persuaded George III to close down the evening
sessions of Chancery on Wednesdays and Fridays, so that he
could finish his bottle of port after dinner. Gout got him even-
tually, and in his later years he went by the sobriquet of
4 Surly Bob*.
THE COUNTRY
In view of this suicidal diet, it was fortunate that the Season
was as good as over by early June, and that everyone (apart
from the Herveys and Selwyns) got away to some fresh air and
UPPER-CLASS LIFE
exercise on their estates. Arthur Young noticed the English
peculiarity here. 'Banishment alone", he wrote, 'will force the
French to execute what the English do from pleasure reside
upon and adorn their estates/ Scarcely a minister would be
found in his office at that time of year, and the great issues of
policy were decided in bucolic surroundings at Claremont or
Stowe or Houghton. At the last, says Hervey, the usual plan
was 'to hunt, be noisy, jolly, drunk, comical, and pure merry
during the recess'. Slightly lower down the social scale, things
were not so very different according to the Rev. Robert Knipe,
who told Francis Place that in Cheshire 'in his youth he was
intimately acquainted with the principal gentry of the
country. . . . Fox-hunting, drinking, bawling out obscene songs
and whoring was the common delight of these people/ This
account, written in the puritanical nineteenth century, is of
course biased. It leaves out, for one thing, all the hard work the
landed classes imposed on themselves; for they were never
happier than when they were developing their private resources
or performing their public services,
Rebuilding their houses and transforming the landscape took
up much of their time. Then there was the supervision of the
home farm, which provided the household with its com, eggs,
milk, butter and cheese, poultry and game, mutton and beef,
pork and bacon, ale or cider. They also spent much of their
time riding round to see their tenants, or having them up to the
house, to discuss every aspect of farming, for they were know-
ledgeable agriculturists. As we shall see later, they were the
Fox-hunting
UPPER-CLASS LIFE
force and inspiration behind the astounding improvements in
farming techniques and estate management in which England
led the world. In fact, they were at the back of practically any
improvement for the upper classes ran the local government.
Since !688 S it counted as a positive virtue on the part of the
British government that the state did absolutely nothing for the
localities. The nobility and gentry in their various roles as
Lords-Lieutenant, Deputy Lieutenants, Sheriffs, and, most
important of all, as Justices of the Peace, bore the whole burden
of civil and military administration. In the absence of central
supervision, there was plenty of room for neglect and abuse.
'I have sometimes thought', wrote Horace Walpole, 'that a
'squire and a vestry were a king and republic in miniature.
The vestry is as tyrannic, in its way, as the 'squire in his.
Any power necessarily leads to abuses of that power/ But not
all Justices were tyrants: some acted as a miniature welfare
state. Most were somewhere in between the two extremes, and
served the country well.
While they supervised the work of the Constables, the
Churchwardens, the Overseers of the Poor and the Surveyors
of the Highways in the village vestries, or collaborated with
their colleagues at Quarter Sessions, or cracked a bottle or two
with them at race-meet-
The Parish Festry
ings, the landed classes
were also preoccupied
with the problem of the
next election. In a thou-
sand different ways, by
bullying or cajoling,
bribing or threatening,
they had to keep the
voters sweet, whether it
was their own tenants,
to whom a nod was as
good as a wink, or some
stiffnecked borough-
council, for whom a sub-
stantial gift like paving
Hunters
the town streets might
have to be provided. In
between elections, cam-
paigning was a tolerably
calm affair securing
promotion for a voter's
military cousin here, or
a benefice for his clerical
brother there but in
election year it was all
hands to the pump. This
happened every six years or so, and involved either much time
or much money. When Palmerston paid ,=4,200 in 1790 to
get in at Newport, Isle of Wight, he absolved himself from a
severe personal effort. The electorate consisted of the Mayor,
11 Aldermen and 12 Burgesses. Writing to his wife, he says:
' I arrived at Newport with my companions on Friday at Mr
Holmes's house, from whence we were carried to ask the votes
of about a dozen shopkeepers who looked as if they thought we
might as well have saved ourselves the trouble. The evening
concluded with a rubber of whist and a supper of which Mrs
Holmes and two other Isle of Wight ladies, tolerably vulgar,
did the honours. About eleven on Saturday we were conveyed
to the place of the election where the ceremony, which was
extremely private, took up about an hour, after which we were
advised to take a ride to Carisbrook which we did with great
pleasure, [and]] returned to a dinner of about 80 people/
MORALS AND MANNERS
The stiff upper lip had not yet been built into the character of
an English gentleman. Men and women were natural, spontane-
ous and straightforward. They were uninhibited either by inner
doubt or outer social pressures. There was something Latin
about them, and it is not surprising that they gravitated so
readily to the shores of the Mediterranean and filled their
houses with the products of its civilisations. When Fox and
Burke finally broke their political union and private friendship
they wept on the floor of the House of Commons. Men acted on
49
UPPER-CLASS LIFE
impulse. A slight produced a blaze of anger, a sound thrashing,
a duel or a blistering lampoon in language which would have
shocked the Billingsgate of the nineteenth century. Frankness
was all; there was no mincing of words, no stabbing in the
back. The great Duke of Marlborough's widow, Sarah, grew
into a sour old termagant, variously known in the Town as
'Her Graceless', or 'old Mount Aetna' or the 'Beldam of
Bedlam*. When she learned that her grandson (later the third
Duke) intended to marry Elizabeth Trevor, she was beside
herself with rage, for Lord Trevor, the girl's grandfather was
her mortal enemy. He had been one of the 12 peers created to
pass the Treaty of Utrecht which betrayed all that her husband
had fought for. According to Hervey, 'she proceeded to call the
young lady's father a madman, her mother a fool, her grand-
father a rogue, and her grandmother a w '. The Earl of
Pembroke, says Horace Walpole, was *so blasphemous at
tennis, that the primate of Ireland was forced to leave offplaying
with him'.
And their lack of self-consciousness was not confined to
speech. Joseph Farington, looking back, wrote: 'With the appa-
rent show and polish of the former age much brutality was
mingled, and great and general licentiousness prevailed in all
ranks/ Spontaneity is morally neutral. It can lead to blood-
thirsty diversions like prize-fighting, bull-baiting, cock-fighting
and Tyburn executions. It produced a harsh system of poor-
relief, prisons that were death-traps, a system of criminal
law which led Europe in brutality. But it also inspired bouts of
private generosity, and bursts of
heroism like Wolfe's at Quebec.
Perhaps the Georgian gentry
differ most from their descend-
ants in their attitude to what
they called 'gallantry'. It was
de riguewr to keep a mistress.
The Duke of Devonshire had
three children by the Duchess,
and two by Lady Elizabeth
Foster, and the Duchess had
"Lady gardening
/,**
Lady dressing
one by Lord Grey.JThey were
mostly brought up together in
Devonshire House. Little dis-
advantage attached to illegi-
timacy. Horace Walpole's
brother, Sir Edward, had four
bastards by Mrs Clements and
they all married well. The Earl
of Bellomont seduced the
daughter of a tradesman by pre-
tending to marry her, his
servant acting the part of
parson. Some of them indulged
in wenching on what appear to
have been medical grounds.
Lord Carlisle wrote, 'I was afraid I was going to have the
gout the other day. I believe I live too chaste: it is not a com-
mon fault with me/
The gentleman regarded the women of the lower classes as
his legitimate prey, and the country was alive with illegitimate
children. To women of his own class, though, the beau behaved
differently. There was a rough equality, a fraternal cameraderie
between the sexes, for women had not yet been reduced, or
exalted, to their Victorian position. Georgian ladies had their
feet on the ground. Their education was almost the only respect
in which they differed from their brothers, consisting as it did of
English, a little French, book-keeping, drawing, needle-work,
dancing, with perhaps a little music, or Italian. They were
mainly taught by their governesses at home, though boarding
schools were becoming popular in the second half of the century.
Otherwise, they read the same books as the men, talked politics
with them on an equal footing, and dressed with a similar finery.
Even the ladies* magazines, which were then coming in, had
nothing specially feminine about them. The Ladies' Magazine,
or Universal Entertainer, which began to appear in 1 749, included
no recipes, no fashion notes, and no household hints. It did
contain ribaldry, however, as did masculine magazines. Women
held powerful positions in politics, like Queen Caroline or the
5!
Indies playing cards
Countess of Yarmouth.
They owned boroughs,
like the Duchess of
Marlborough ; they
electioneered, like
Georgiana, Duchess of
Devonshire, in the
famous Westminster
election of 1784. They
pulled their weight in literature, had their views on theology,
made their contribution to medicine. They hunted and shot,
plaved cricket and rowed. 'They do whatsoever they please*,
a foreign visitor, Gemelli, observed, 'and do so generally wear
the breeches . . . that it is now become a proverb that England is
the hell of horses and the paradise of women; and if there were a
bridge from the island to the continent, all the women in Europe
would run thither/ They lived their lives in a degree of freedom
which has only just once again been accorded to them. Thus
Fanny Russell writes to her brother in 1743 about an outing she
had with Princess Amelia: 'My mistress and her youngest
sister, Princess Louisa, went last night to Bartholomew's Fair:
did not come home till one this morning and then went and
supped at Lady Anne's and stayed there till two. Lady Harriet
and Lady Ann went with them, and the Duke of Grafton, Lord
Lydford, Gen. Churchill and Mr Will Finch/ In such conditions
the frequency of elopements is not surprising, though it is
doubtful if they deserved the term. Lord Palmerston did not
think so. When Lady
Susan Fox-Strangways,
daughter of the Earl of
Ilchester, ran off with
William O'Brien, a
handsome Irish actor, he
thought the affair was
* contrived by what can
scarce be called a strata-
gem, if we consider the
very great liberty which
Lady in coach
UPPER-CLASS LIFE
young ladies unmarried enjoy in England*. Her parents were
socially discomfited rather than morally outraged. 4 To remove
the disgrace from the eyes of the public', says Horace Walpole,
they got the actor a post under the Ordnance in America.
That is not the only example of love overcoming the social
barriers. Lady Mary Duncan married a doctor, Lady Caroline
Keppel a surgeon, Lady Henrietta Wentworth a footman, and
Lady Elizabeth Bertie a dancing-master. In 1756 Shebbeare
wrote: 'Men of the highest rank marry women of infamy
even, not to say of extreme low birth/ The fifth Earl of Berkeley
married the daughter of a butcher and publican. The owner of
Berkeley Square and other fat chunks of Mayfair could afford
to flout the conventions. We find such easy-going relations
with the lower classes in all pursuits. The classes mingled at
public school and university. They talked farming and business
and ran elections together. They met at fairs, at cock-fights, at
Newmarket and Epsom, at Bath and Scarborough and Brighton.
When Kent beat All England by 1 1 1 runs to 1 10 in 1746 in the
presence of the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Cumberland,
Lord John Sackville (later Duke of Dorset) played in the winning
eleven under the captaincy of Rumney, the head gardener at
Knole.
Such ease of manner was distinctive of the English upper
class in Europe at that time, and helps to explain why the crisis
of 1780 did not degenerate into a French Revolution. As it was,
Cricket
UPPER-CLASS LIFE
the nobility and gentry were able to go on enjoying their
de vivre for a few years longer. Their privileges and
pleasures were not snatched from them, but were whittled
away by a process much more subtle and far more gradual;
and it is time now to consider it.
Further Reading
Brian Connell, Portrait of a Whig Peer, 1957.
H. J. Habakkuk, * England % in A. Goodwin (ed.), The European Nobility
in the Eighteenth Century, 1953.
R. W, Ketton-Cremer, Horace Walpole (2nd ed.), 1946.
A. L. Rowse, The Early Churchills, 1956.
The Later Churchills, 1958.
Romney Sedgwick (ed.), Lord Hervey's Memoirs, 195.
Gladys Scott Thomson, Family Background, 1949.
54
Ill
Middle-Class Life
BUSINESS MEN
When the Georgian period opened, the merchants were the
driving force of the English economy. As Defoe said (biased
though he was, of course): "The Commerce of England is an
immense and almost incredible Thing/ And the world-wide
success of English merchants gives the lie to the fatuous
remark of Dr Johnson's to Mrs Thrale. 'Do not be frighted*,
he said when she was having trouble running her late husband's
brewery. 'Trade could not be managed by those who manage
it, if it had much difficulty/ Nothing could be further from the
truth. The Georgian merchants were not buoyed up on some
impersonal tide of economic change: they fought every inch
of the way up the graphs which record their achievements.
Some of them fought so successfully that they thrust them-
selves outside the classes considered here, by becoming gentle-
men. The greatest of them be-
longed to the companies of the
City of London. Their agents
were importing iron from
Sweden, tea from China, and
sugar from the West Indies.
They bought tobacco in Virginia
and sold it in Moscow; and they
sold English cloth in the four
corners of the earth. They had
their irons in every fire: they
Boatman on the Thames
MIDDLE-CLASS LIFE
controlled the Bank of England, they victualled the army and
navy, they lent money to the government and paid Charles
James Fox's gambling debts. Some of them warranted the
dithyrambs of Defoe who wrote: 'Our Merchants are Princes,
greater and richer, and more powerful than some sovereign
Princes/ Samson Gideon, the Jewish financier, is a good
example of the thrust and skill that could pay such dividends
in that buoyant society. At the age of twenty he began to
speculate In Change Alley and at Garraway's and Jonathan's
coffee houses in lottery tickets, government securities and the
South Sea House
stocks of the Bank, the East India Company and the South Sea
Company* In the 1730s he was jobbing and broking in English,
Dutch and French funds and marine insurance. During the War
of Austrian Succession he cracked the hard core of anti- Jewish
sentiment in Treasury circles, raised money among his co-
religionists to help finance the fighting, and became a most
valued adviser to the Pelhams and the Bank of England on all
matters of high finance. Each year for 4O years he calculated his
capital. It rose from &1,6QO in 1719, to ,44,650 in 1740, to
in 1750 and ^350,OOO in 1759. He married an
56
MIDDLE-CLASS LIFE
English Protestant wife, obtained a coat of arms, bought
Belvedere House in Kent from Lord Baltimore, and decorated it
with some of Sir Robert Walpole's pictures that he bought from
Horace. He added various other estates in Buckinghamshire and
Lincolnshire, including the Manor of Spalding. In spite of the
fact that, as he put it in an application to the government, he
had his children 'baptised by the Sub-dean of St. Paul's [Yj
few days after their birth', the ministers repeatedly refused
him a peerage, eventually conferring a baronetcy on his son,
a thirteen-year-old pupil at Eton.
But London had no monopoly of tycoons: each of the great
provincial ports like Bristol and Liverpool, Newcastle and Hull,
had its own coterie of hustling entrepreneurs. At Gateshead on
the Tyne, William Cotesworth pulled the strings of a vast
medley of trading operations. He began the son of a yeoman and
apprentice to a tallow r -chandler; he ended as an 'Esquire', of
Park Place, Gateshead, having been Mayor, Justice of the Peace
and Sheriff of Northumberland. He collected tallow r from all
over the north of England and sold it throughout the world,
He imported indigo, cochineal, logwood, woad and other dyes
from the Indies and the Middle East; flax, tow, madder and
whale-fins from Rotterdam; alum from Hamburg; wine,
cherry-brandy and prunes from Bordeaux; wheat, rye, barley,
beans and hops from London. He dealt in tea, sugar, chocolate
Goree Buildings, Liverpool
MIDDLE-CLASS LIFE
and tobacco; and he sold grindstones in Sweden and New
England. He ran the English Sword Blade Company with
German labour till the gentry took to walking-sticks. He was
the biggest coal-mining proprietor in the area, and probably
the greatest salt producer in the country. As the government's
principal agent in the easily disturbed north, he was in contact
with the leading ministers of the day. He reconstructed his
home at Park Place in the latest style; and after his death his
daughter called in James Gibbs to embellish it further. But
whether he belonged to the middle class or the gentry is a
question. In 1723 he gave instructions to move the dog-wheel
which turned the spit in the kitchen 'on purpose to keep the
dog from the fire, the wheel out of the way and the dog pre-
vented from shitting upon anything it could. The dog must
shit in the pot/
Immediately below this level was a stratum of business-men
of every kind in every town in the land: country bankers,
wholesale dealers, shipowners, shopkeepers and all those other
members of the distributing trade supplying the demands of a
population growing in size and wealth. It was a layer which
thickened as the pace of economic life accelerated, as the towns
grew, as tastes became more sophisticated and pockets fuller.
Sir Dudley Ryder, the Attorney General who was created Baron
Ryder of Harrowby on the day of his death, came from such a
family. His father, the son of a Dissenting parson, was a linen-
draper, whose shop, at the sign of the Plough and Harrow, was
in Cheapslde, at the comer of Ironmonger Lane. There Ryder
(then a law-student at the Middle
Shopkeeper Temple) used to repair to buy a suit-
length, look over the attractive customers
or touch his father for some cash. In June
1715 he got l% out of him; in the
following October another 7. In the
following July his father decided to give
him an allowance. *He asked me', says
Ryder's Diary, 'what he should allow
me, whether 5Q a year would not be
enough, and after some time said he
58
would allow me 80 per annum,
which I thought little enough to
provide clothes and everything/
They were a reasonably pros-
perous family, and possessed a
country house at Hackney where
they usually spent the week-end,
like many another business
family. 'The greatest ambition
of the London shop-keeper*. Draper's $h&f>
said The Idler, 'is to retire to
Stratford or to Hackney/ The Ryders* neighbours out there
were people like Samuel Powell the grocer, Allard Denn the
brewer, Edward Anthony the lawyer and Mr Marsh the solicitor.
PROFESSIONAL MEN
The last two, and Dudley Ryder himself, are representative
of another segment of the Georgian middle classes : the pro-
fessional men. The burgeoning wealth of all classes and the
increasing complexity of social and economic relations swelled
the ranks of the lawyers, doctors, civil servants, clergy, soldiers,
sailors, architects, teachers, writers and actors. At the same time
It raised their status. Many of these occupations began the cer>~
tury as trades, and ended It as professions. Architecture became
a respectable career whose practitioners were no longer aristo-
cratic hirelings or speculative builders. Again, David Garrick's
place In society indicates the long way the actors had come
since the days when 'licentious and dissolute manners', as
Boswell put It, were typical of that walk of life. ' In our own time ',
he added, 'such a change has taken place, that there Is no longer
room for such an unfavourable distinction/
In the legal profession, the Bar had long been a route to
wealth and nobility; but the lower ranks, the attorneys, were
regarded at first with disdain, as batteners on the misfortunes
of others. Swift called them ' a society of men bred up from their
youth In the art of proving, by words multiplied for the purpose,
that white is black, and black Is white, according as they are
paid '. They may have done a lot of dirty work, but the gathering
59
MIDDLE-CLASS LIFE
demand for their services by the upper classes was bound to
raise them from the mud, particularly when they formed a
professional association. It is difficult to think of any pie in
which they did not have a finger. The Marquess of Rocking-
ham's vast estates were managed by the Yorkshire attorney,
Richard Fenton, who supervised all the conveyancy work, the
Lawyers in Westminster Hall
marriage settlements, the private bills in Parliament, the elec-
tions to the House of Commons. Samuel Dawson of Sheffield,
like many of his colleagues, dealt in wills, leases, business-
partnerships. He handled work for the Cutlers' Company,
turnpike trusts and canal proprietors, while manorial business
kept him busy with court-rolls, presentments, rents, maps
and plans. The county families who ran local government as
Lords Lieutenant and Justices of the Peace needed the attorneys
60
MIDDLE-CLASS LIFE
as Clerks of the Peace and Town Clerks to guide them through
the labyrinths of the law. Some attorneys climbed to the top
like Lord Hardwicke and Lord Kenyon. John Robinson ran the
general election of 1784 for George III and Pitt, But in general
they formed part of the elite in each county town, men of
substance and w r orth. Their social climb was aided by the forma-
tion in 1739 of the Society of Gentlemen Practisers in the Courts
of Law and Equity, the direct ancestor of the Law Society. This
w r as confined to London attorneys, but similar societies were
formed in the provinces: in Bristol, for example, in 1770 and in
Yorkshire in 1786, Perhaps the wining-and-dining side of these
societies occupied a typically Georgian amount of their time,
yet by regulating entry into the profession, supervising training,
laying down fees, striking crooked lawyers off the roll and
preventing amateurs like schoolmasters from doing legal work
in their spare time, they made the lower reaches of the law a
career fit for gentlemen. By the end of the century they were
usually called 'solicitors' the word 'attorney' with its un-
savoury associations dropping out of use.
Medicine had a similar evolution from trade to profession.
In 1745 the surgeons broke away from the barbers to form the
Company of Surgeons. After this their training and knowledge
vastly improved, thanks mainly to pioneering work in the
hospitals, and private schools like the one William and John
Hunter founded to study anatomy in Windmill Street. In 1800
they received a charter from the crown as the Royal College of
Surgeons. As far as physicians are concerned, there are three
groups to consider. Firstly, the Fellows of the Royal College of
Physicians, who, like the barristers, had already achieved power
and influence when the century began. They had the monopoly of
the wealthiest invalids in the metropolis and were earning
incomes of several thousand a year. Their numbers were
carefully limited (in 1745 there were 52, for example) and entry
was confined to graduates of Oxford, Cambridge and Trinity
College, Dublin. Next in rank came the second group, the
Licentiates. These numbered a score or so. Trained as a rule
at Leyden in Holland, or at Edinburgh, they knew more about
medicine than the Fellows, and fought a running battle with
61
Family doctor
them to gain full admission to the
College. However, they had comfortable
practices, and when, for example, they
called for subscriptions to bring the
College before the courts in 1767, some
of them contributed ,100, and none
gave less than 50.
The high and mighty Fellows and
Licentiates were too few and too dear
for most of the middle classes, who were
doctored by a third group the apothe-
caries. Originally members of the
Grocers* Company, these were essentially tradesmen who
prepared and administered the potions prescribed by the physi-
cians ; but in the second half of the seventeenth century they began
to attend patients and prescribe drugs themselves. The physi-
cians objected, of course, but the apothecaries got a firm grip
on the market during the Great Plague, when the physicians
fled to the country, leaving them in possession of the field.
When the House of Lords* judgement in Rose's Case in 1703
allowed them to treat patients, but not to charge fees, they
circumvented the obstacle by raising the price of their medicines.
By mid-Georgian times, the apothecary
was functioning like a modern general
practitioner, treating the ordinary, and
even serious, cases, and calling in the
physician as we should a specialist.
Medical knowledge made no spectacular
advances, but doctors were already
making use of one anodyne which has
been fully exploited ever since. 'My
Complaints', wrote Colonel Ellison in
1744, 'are what the Modern Physicians
term n^rYQijs, a cant word the Gentle-
men of the Faculty are pleased to make
use of when a distemper proves obstinate
and does not yield to their medicines/
Even so, the profession of apothecary
Apothecary
Village parson
was becoming a respectable call-
ing for the sons of prosperous
fanners and tradesmen, and even
gentlemen's sons are found on
the apprenticeship books. By the
end of the period they were well
established, especially when an
Act of 1815 allowed them to
charge fees. Already, in their
turn, they were doing what the
physicians had done a century
before: they were taking corpo-
rate action to keep the chemists
and druggists out of the gold-
mine.
The remainder of the professions can be sketched in only
briefly. The armed forces were expanding during the period
and attracting the sons of the middle classes, though wealth
was required for the purchase of commissions, and political
pull was essential for the fatter postings like the governerships
of the garrison towns. Plymouth was worth l,QQO a year,
Berwick and Hull 600. The Church and the other denomina-
tions (which will be treated in a later chapter) could provide a
career open to the talents. And so could the Civil Service;
though in all these institutions the middle classes were usually
confined to the subordinate posts. At the end of the century
the Revenue Departments employed a staff of about 20,000
people. These were scattered all over the country, of course;
while the central establishments in London, which had not yet
acquired that rabbit-like tendency to multiply, were surprisingly
small. In 1745, the Secretary of State's office, which covered
both home and foreign affairs, employed a staffof 26, not counting
a decipherer and an embellisher. During the War of Austrian
Succession, the War Office had 13 clerks and the Admiralty
eight. Shortly after, an empire was won and then lost, with a
similar team at headquarters.
Whether or not the American colonies were lost on the desks
of Whitehall, the civil servants, along with all the other
63
MIODLE-CLASS LIFE
professional men, formed a sector of the middle classes whose
importance Is only beginning to be recognised. They occupied
the middle ground between the traders and the gentry. They
worked with and for both ; they recruited from each ; they bridged
the gap between the two, passing on to each some of the virtues
of the other. They kept the gentry's feet on the ground, and
taught the shopkeepers what books to read. By a fusion of
Farmer's family
aristocratic honour and middle-class earnestness, they helped to
raise the standards of public service to what they became in
Victorian times*
FARMERS
Since we are not limiting the term 'middle classes ' to those who
were bourgeois, we must include the farmers among them;
not the peasants scraping a precarious existence out of a few
MIDDLE-CLASS LIFE
acres, loaded with debt and making ends meet with industrial
work, but the substantial yeomen of a 100 or 500 acres, whether
freeholders or leaseholders. In general, the Georgian period
was good to them, though they had their ups and downs. Much
depended on the harvest. The more abundant it was, the more
ruinous it could be. A small fluctuation in the size of the crop
built up into a wild swing in its price. Gregory King wrote that
' one tenth the defect in harvest may raise the price three tenths '.
Three or four years of plenty in succession left the average
farmer in debt, and wiped out the small man. The 'thirties and
'forties were such a time. 'Corn was so amazingly cheap in
England', wrote Arthur Young, 'that the nation ought never
to wish to see such another period.' In Nottinghamshire, the
Duke of Kingston's tenants were behind with their rents, and
many of his farms were vacant. At Burton, in 1 74 1, arrears of
103 were written off. 'These arrears', says the Duke's
account-book, ' are desperate and irrecoverable, the said several
persons whole effects being seized on and sold for the Duke's
Benefit. . . . Nott. Smith and Carr are run away and Connywell
very poor/ The blow was somewhat softened for the farmers
by the elasticity of the London gin-market, for the surplus
corn was siphoned off into a record spirit output of eight
million gallons in 1742. On the other hand, when the harvest
was a wash-out, the flush returned to
John Bull's cheeks. He prospered in the Making cheese
'twenties, and all through the second
half of the century. The extreme dearth
of 1 796 tossed ,=20 million into his lap.
From the 'fifties onwards, the farmers
enjoyed a crescendo of prosperity. The
steady rise in meat and grain prices is
reflected in enclosures, new farm-
houses and the spread of scientific
methods of agriculture. Arthur Young
describes the farmer's 'large, roomy,
clean kitchen with a rousing wood fire
on the hearth, and the ceiling well hung
with smoaked bacon and hams'. Some
65
MIDDLE-CLASS LIFE
acres, loaded with debt and making ends meet with Industrial
work, but the substantial yeomen of a 100 or 500 acres, whether
freeholders or leaseholders. In general, the Georgian period
was good to them, though they had their ups and downs. Much
depended on the harvest. The more abundant It was, the more
ruinous it could be. A small fluctuation in the size of the crop
built up into a wild swing in its price. Gregory King wrote that
' one tenth the defect in harvest may raise the price three tenths '.
Three or four years of plenty in succession left the average
farmer in debt, and wiped out the small man. The 'thirties and
'forties were such a time. 'Corn was so amazingly cheap in
England', wrote Arthur Young, 'that the nation ought never
to wish to see such another period/ In Nottinghamshire, the
Duke of Kingston's tenants were behind with their rents, and
many of his farms were vacant. At Burton, in 1741, arrears of
^103 were written off. 'These arrears', says the Duke's
account-book, 'are desperate and irrecoverable, the said several
persons whole effects being seized on and sold for the Duke's
Benefit. . . . Nott. Smith and Carr are run away and Connywell
very poor/ The blow was somewhat softened for the farmers
by the elasticity of the London gin-market, for the surplus
corn was siphoned off Into a record spirit output of eight
million gallons in 174. On the other hand, when the harvest
was a wash-out, the flush returned to
John Bull's cheeks. He prospered In the Making cheese
'twenties, and all through the second
half of the century. The extreme dearth
of 1796 tossed %Q million into his lap.
From the 'fifties onwards, the farmers
enjoyed a crescendo of prosperity. The
steady rise In meat and grain prices Is
reflected in enclosures, new farm-
houses and the spread of scientific
methods of agriculture. Arthur Young
describes the farmer's 'large, roomy,
clean kitchen with a rousing wood fire
on the hearth, and the ceiling well hung
with snioaked bacon and hams'. Some
65
MIDDLE-CLASS LIFE
farmers put on greater airs, to Young's puritanical horror; but
if they had a piano in the parlour, if their wives and daughters
left the cheese-making and bacon-smoking to the servants while
they chose fine clothes in the local capital all this filled the
pockets of the shopkeepers, and stirred into action the last
section of the middle classes we shall consider: the manufacturers.
MANUFACTURERS
The industrialists, whose impact was destined to destroy the
Georgian way of life, began the period as a cloud no bigger than
a man's hand. Gregory King does not mention them; yet
Colquhoun in his calculation of 1803 mentions 5,OOO 'manu-
facturers employing labour in all branches '. His figure of 15,OOO
for merchants shows where the growing point of the middle
classes now was. Before the Industrial Revolution, goods were
produced by craftsmen like the spinners and weavers of York-
shire, the nail-makers and button-casters of Warwickshire, the
cutlers of Sheffield, the stocking-knitters of Nottingham, and
the cabinet-makers of London. These were in too small a way
to warrant inclusion in this chapter. Their work was organised,
their finance supplied and their goods marketed by merchants.
Big business then was commerce. Yet it was not the big men
who ventured out into the unknown seas of factory-production.
The Georgian captains of industry usually rose from the ranks,
or enlisted from outside. But not from the lowest ranks : for hard
work and ingenuity were of no avail without capital, whether
saved, inherited or borrowed from relations and friends.
Samuel Whitbread the elder was the son of a freeholder who
paid SQO to apprentice him to a brewer. Six years later, when
he set up on his own, he was able to rely on =?,6OO he inherited
and other sums borrowed from family and friends in Bedford-
shire. Jedediah Strutt, the hosiery manufacturer, was the son of
a small fanner and maltster in Derbyshire. He was apprenticed
to a wheel-wrlght for a w premium, and worked as one in
I^Ieester til an uncle left him the stock of his farm. He thus
had something behind him when he started to develop his
iiwmtioB for making ribbed stockings. The rest of his fixed
capital was provided, typically, by his brother-in-law, and two
66
Sir Richard Arkwright
other local hosiers all Dissenters like
himself. Strutt, in his turn, along with
Samuel Need, another Dissenting hosier,
backed Richard Arkwright when he
began his machine-spinning venture at
Cromford in Derbyshire. Arkwright
himself came from a poor family, and
had previously been a barber and publi-
can in Bolton in Lancashire. Thomas
Ridgway who knew him in those days
says: 'He was always thought clever
in his peruke making business and very
capital In Bleeding & toothdrawing and
allowed by all his acquaintance to be a
very ingenious man/
The importance of family and relig-
ious connections is well brought out by
the history of the Anchor Brewery in its Georgian period.
When the third owner, James Child, died in 1696, leaving no
son, the manager, Edmund Halsey, took over. He had married
one of Child's daughters and she had brought him a partnership
as a dowry. He himself died without a son in 1729, and his
nephew, Ralph Thrale, became the fifth owner. He was a
yeoman's son, and he had to pay off the $Q S QOQ capital
cost out of the profits over the first eleven years. He was
succeeded by his son Henry, Dr Johnson's friend. When this
one died without an heir in 1781, John Perkins took control.
He had been manager for years, and only he knew all the
secrets of porter-brewing. His capital, 135,000 by now, was
provided by three inter-related Quaker bankers; his wife's
family, the Bevans, their relatives, the Gurneys, and their
relatives, the Barclays. Thus Barclay, Perkins and Co. was born.
The first generation of the industrial middle class were thus
a motley crew. The Rev. Edmund Cartwright of power-weaving
fame was a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and a village
parson. Benjamin Huntsman, the steel pioneer, was a clock-
maker. The first spinning-mill using water-power was opened
in Northampton in 174 by Edward Cave, the founder of The
67
Joslah ffiedgwaod
Gentleman's Magazine, The first silk-
throwing factory was started at Derby
in 1702 by Thomas Cotchett, a barrister.
This failed, and the Lombes who bought
it and made a success of it were London
silk-merchants, sons of a Norwich
worsted-weaver. James Brindley, the
organising genius of the canal age, was
practically illiterate. He never did learn
how to spell 'navigation'. Instead of
using drawings, he used to stay in bed
for a few days visualizing his engineer-
ing feats down to the last detail in his
head.
Heterogeneous they may have been,
but they all possessed certain important
characteristics in common. They were
hardworking, adventurous, abstemious,
ingenious and tough. They were frontiersmen breaking new
ground, whether it was in adapting machinery, organising labour
or exploiting new markets with new products. Often from
Puritan backgrounds, they were hard on their workers, though
not so harsh as they have been made out. Josiah Wedgwood
wanted 'to make such machines of the men as cannot err'. But,
like Brindley who killed himself with over-work, they were
equally exacting with themselves. And they had boundless
ambition. Richard Arkwright expected to make so much money
'that Ae would pay the national debt'. Wedgwood wrote to his
partner in 1775: *I hope to ... ASTONISH THE WORLD ALL AT
ONCE, for I hate piddleing you know.' Starting from nothing,
he died worth ,500,000, having achieved his ambition to be
'Vase Maker General to the Universe'. Thomas Lombe was
able to provide a portion of jg4O,000 when one of his daughters
married Sir Robert Clifton, and one of ,=60,000 when the other
married the Earl of Lauderdale. His initial investment had thus
paid good dividends. It consisted in sending his brother to
Leghorn for a couple of years in 1715 to steal from the Italians
the secrets of their silk-throwing by machine.
68
MIDDLE-CLASS LIFE
The capital value of WhitbreacTs Brewery rose from
,l 1 6,OOO in 1762 to .271,000 j n 1790, And by the end of the
century he had r J 35O ? OOO Invested in landed property. When
Arkwright died in 1792, The Gentleman's he
left 'manufactories the income of which is greater than that of
most German principalities. . . . His real personal property
is estimated at little short of half a million/ The fact that he was
then accommodating Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, with
a loan of ^?5,,OOO to pay gambling debts which she did not wish
the Duke to discover symbolises the arrival on the social scene
of a new actor or rather a whole new cast presenting an
entirely new repertoire. But the manifold implications of that
w r e shall have to pursue later.
EDUCATION
Samuel Whitbread the elder put his son and heir through
Christ Church, Oxford, St John's College, Cambridge, and the
Grand Tour. He came back to brewing with the sister of Earl
Grey for a wife, and gambling, hunting, politics, rout-giving
and picture-buying for hobbles. The subsequent decline of the
firm in his time suggests the incompatibility of public-school
values and business success. Ralph Thrale sent Henry to Eton
and Oxford with <g!,OOO a year in his pocket, Henry's reckless
expansion of the brew r ery to make it the greatest in London led
to crisis after crisis. Mrs Thrale had one miscarriage rushing
to Brighton to raise money from friends, and another one
settling a dispute with the workmen. The universities were
clearly not strong on book-keeping. When Henry Ellison of
Gateshead wished to put his boy into banking he was advised
by a director of the Royal Exchange Assurance Company that
Eton was not a good jumping-off ground. 'He cannot come
from thence Into a Merchants" Compting house', said the
director, * without being some months at school in London to
learn to write and also Accounts/
Nor were the grammar schools, to which many middle-class
parents sent their children, much better, confining themselves
as most of them did to Latin and Greek. William Byrd, the
landowner from Virginia who was educated in England,
69
MIDDLE-CLASS LIFE
received a good grounding in these subjects and Hebrew at
Felsted in Essex, but he rounded it off with a short apprentice-
ship in Holland, and a period at Perry and Lane's in the City
to learn business methods. William Cotes worth, the wealthy
jack-of-all-trades from the north-east, sent his two boys to
Newcastle Royal Grammar School and then to Sedbergh. After
this, Robert, the younger, went first to Mr Wright's, a writing
master 'at the Hand and Pen in St Mary Axe, near Leadenhall
Street', and then to Jacob Lernwoods and Son, a business
house in Amsterdam. The elder boy went to Trinity College,
Cambridge, and the Middle Temple. Not all grammar schools
were out-of-date, and some provided a good beginning for a
professional man. One headmaster of Lichfield (Johnson's
school) boasted of having flogged seven judges.
Much more suited to the trading classes were the Dissenting
Academies, the educational basis of the Industrial Revolution.
So successful were they with their new subjects and new methods
that they attracted Anglicans as well as Dissenters, and gentle-
men as well as merchants. When the famous Warrington Acad-
emy (where Dr Priestley taught) was mooted, it was said:
'It is now become a general and just complaint that some public
provision is wanted for the education of young gentlemen
designed either for the learned professions or for business/
Hackney School
Schoolroom
Philip Doddridge
the hymn-writer
ran one at Market
Harborough, and
later at North-
ampton. Here
were taught
shorthand, Greek,
Latin, Hebrew,
logic, rhetoric,
geography, meta-
physics, geome-
try, algebra, trigonometry, conic-sections, celestial-mechanics,
mechanics, statics, hydrostatics, optics, pneumatics, astronomy,
history and anatomy. French was an extra. Dudley Ryder's
accomplishments, reading habits and intellectual interests as
revealed in his Diary testify to the soundness of his training in
the Academy at Hackney. John Wilkinson, the inspired iron-
master, was schooled at Dr Caleb Rotherharn's Academy at
Kendai
Schools and academies are only half the story, and we must
not neglect the traditional system of apprenticeship which pro-
vided many a middle-class boy with his technical know-how
and moral outlook. For it was not confined to the working
classes, and premiums of ^2O, 50 and ,100 were paid by
middling people to merchants, bankers, apothecaries, attorneys
or brewers to give their sons a start in life. These figures
steadily rose, and in the 'fifties some London attorneys were
demanding ^400. In 1755 Robert Ellison was settled with
Hagens, the Fenchurch Street bankers, for ^g^OO plus stamp-
duty. By the end of the period London merchants were asking
^1,OOO: a fair indication of the economic buoyancy of the times,
and the pressure of traders and gentlemen alike to gain the
perquisites of a middle-class education.
MORALS AND MANNERS
The Georgian era was 'pudding-time' for the middle classes,
but essentially they did not come into their own in this century.
71
t Tight lacing*
Until the last decades they were
content to remain political and
economic appendages of the
nobility and gentry, and their
social habits and attitudes were
coloured by this basic fact.
Grocers sent their daughters to
boarding-school, farmers' wives
strove to keep abreast of the
fashions of the Town, attorneys
kept as near as their stomachs
would allow to the steadily re-
tarded hour of dining. 'The
merchant', says Soame Jenyns
in 1767, '. . . vies all the while
with the first of our nobility, in
his houses, table, furniture, and
equipage: the shop-keeper, who used to be well contented with
one dish of meat, one fire, and one maid, has now two or three
times as many of each; his wife has her tea, her card-parties,
and her dressing-room, and his 'prentice has climbed from the
kitchen-fire to the front-boxes at the playhouse/ 'As much
ceremony is found in the assembly of a country grocer's wife',
says another writer in 1772, 'as in that of a countess.'
Even the manufacturers were not immune. When Richard
Arkwright rode into Derby in the role of High Sheriff of Derby-
shire In March, 1787, there was plenty of pomp-and-circum-
stance. He was presenting a Loyal Address on the occasion of
George Ill's escape from assassination, and, according to the
Manchester Mercury, he was 'accompanied by a number of
gentlemen, etc., on horseback, his javelin men thirty in number,
exclusive of bailiffs, dressed in the richest liveries ever seen
there on such an occasion. They all rode on black horses. The
trumpeters were mounted on grey horses, and elegantly
dressed in scarlet and gold/ It is no wonder he received a
knighthood on the occasion. Another industrial magnate, John
Wilkinson, was as steeped in upper-class manners as any blade.
He kept mistresses while his second wife was still living, and
MIDDLE-CLASS LIFE
had illegitimate children in his seventies. Even the more
humble Jedediah Strutt dearly loved a lord. When he was on a
business-trip once in London he sent home to his son Billy a
copy of Lord Chesterfield's Letters, marking a number of
passages for his special attention. * It is almost as necessary to
learn a genteel behaviour, & polite manner', he wrote, 'as it is
to learn to speak, or read, or write/
Dr Johnson ruled that the Letters * inculcated the morals of
a strumpet and the manners of a dancing-master', but Strutt,
who founded a business which still flourishes today, had a
keen nose for a business proposition. His reasons for giving his
son a course of Chesterfield are significant. * You are not to be
a Nobleman nor prime minister', he told his son, 'but you may
possibly be a Tradesman of some emminence & as such you
will necessarily have connections with Mankind & the World,
and that will make it absolutely necessary to know them both ;
& you may be assured if you add to the little learning &
improvement you have hitherto had, the Manners, the Air, the
genteel address, & polite behaviour of a gentleman, you will
abundantly find your acct in it in all & every transaction of your
future life when you come to do business in the World/
For upper-class custom was vital to the manufacturers, not only
for itself, but also for the prestige it brought. Georgian entre-
preneurs bought country seats
and toadied to countesses for the
same reasons that modern firms
build impressive office blocks or
put Shakespeare on television.
The first target at which
Wedgwood aimed his stream-
lined sales organisation was the
Royal Family and the aristo-
cracy ; and having scored a direct
hit he wrote : ' The Great People
have had these Vases in their
Palaces long enough for them to
be seen and admired by the
Middling Class of People^ which
A conversation
MIDDLE-CLASS LIFE
class we know are vastly, I had almost said, infinitely superior
in number to the Great/
Similarly, every avenue of political advancement was paved
by upper-class patronage, and no middle-class aspirant could
expect promotion in the Civil Service, the Church, the armed
forces or the law, if he was a social outsider. It is thus not
surprising that social life among the 'middling class' should be
A life of increasing refinement
an imitation, if not a caricature, of the ways of the haute-monde.
Arid the fact that Georgian society was open at the top was
another reason. The middle classes did not fence themselves
in with a bourgeois ideology while patrician pastures were within
reach of an appreciable number.
It was fortunate for Georgian architecture that this was so,
for we know only too well what happened when the middle
classes formed their own aesthetic taste. In the eighteenth
74
MIDDLE-CLASS LIFE
century this class was putting up farm-houses, laying out streets
and squares in the West End, embellishing the market-towns,
and even building factories, in a style which they picked up from
such publications as Kyp and KnyfiPs Noblemen's Seats and James
Paine's Plans, Elevations, and Sections of Gentlemen's Houses.
Good design in furniture and furnishings, china and silver
percolated down in the same way. In these surroundings, the
middle classes lived a life of increasing refinement. The French
traveller, Grosley, noticed this in the habits of London business
and professional people in the 'sixties. 'They rise . , . and pass
an hour at home, drinking tea with their families; about 10
they go to the coffee-house, where they spend another hour:
then they go home, or meet people about business: at two
o'clock they go to "Change": in their return they lounge a
little longer at the coffee-house, and then dine about four. . . .
In summer the remainder of the day is passed either at some of
the public walks, or in a country excursion, if they happen to
have a villa near London. About ten . . . they go home to bed,
after taking a slight repast. In all seasons, the London merchants
generally retire to the country on Saturday, and do not return
till Monday at "Change-time"/
The provincial towns were not far behind London, particularly
in the boom conditions after 175O, when improved transport
* The Social Evening*
MIDDLE-CLASS LIFE
hastened the spread of civilised living. One by one the provincial
towns were taking powers by Act of Parliament to light, pave,
drain, clean and police their streets; and there is plenty of
evidence still standing of the elegance of commercial centres
like Bristol, or Newcastle, or Nottingham, before they were
swamped by Industrial squalor. The amenities of life gradually
filtered through from London. Newcastle had its Assembly
Rooms in 1738; Liverpool had a subscription library of 100
Brighton Assembly Room
members and 45O volumes by 1758. Manchester built a public
baths in 1751, an infirmary in 175 and a lunatic asylum in
1765, Durham had its first theatre in 1771. The Newcastle
Philosophical Society was founded in 1775. And Nottingham's
Musical Festival rendered the Messiah and Judas Maccabaeus in
1772.
And there was plenty of diversion available, especially in
London. Dudley Ryder, when a law-student, played the viol
flute, argued the basic problems of mankind at Sue's or
76
: .
m :
Ninepins
John's Coffee-houses, took the fresh air In St James's Park.
He danced at Hampstead Wells, played bowls at Epsom, or
mixed with a rougher crowd at Lambeth Wells or Southwark
Fair. One summer's day in 1715 he took a trip on the Thames
like many another Londoner. * About 1 o'clock we set out from
the Tower, mother, Aunt Lomax, brother and sister, and brother
William and Cousin Dudley and myself, in a pair of oars, but it
was fitted up in the manner of a pleasure boat with awnings. . . .
We got to Woolwich a quarter to 3. Took a little refreshment
there and w r ent to the ship which is called The Royal George.
It has been building two years and half and was designed to be
called The Royal Anne.' William Byrd, the American, loved
Will's Coffee-house in Bow Street near Covent Garden. He
usually went there in the early evening to read the news, and
then again at about 1 1 to ring the changes on coffee, milk,
jelly, cake and cherry-brandy. One day he went to the prison
for vagrants and prostitutes, which was open to the public.
* I went with him to Bridewell % says his Diary, * to see the people
make pins, which was very pretty. Then we saw the ladies beat
hemp. Then we went to see the men at fetters/
Few provincials rose to a sojourn in London. Instead, they
made their own pleasure in their own local capital, where cock-
fights and Quarter Sessions, race-meetings and general elections
MIDDLE-CLASS LIFE
passed the time agreeably. In smaller places the more
merchants and professional men might mix with the
gentry, but Nottingham had two assembly rooms, one called
the 'Ladies Assembly', and the other the 'Tradesmen's
Assembly'. Similarly at Derby, the Dissenting Strutt and his
manufacturing friends of the Unitarian Meeting at Friargate
Chapel were cut off from the county families who had houses in
the town. As wealth accumulated, traders ventured further
afield. A trip to Scarborough might be their Grand Tour; and
there they would drink the sea-water as well as immerse them-
selves in it. One writer of the 'thirties said that 'the tide affects
Race-meeting
the water very much so as to give it a brackish taste'. Another
said: *I think I never saw a more Regular place we have no
Gallantry and I think less Drinking so that Bacchus and Venus
meet with few customers/ 'Margate*, reported Dr Pococke in
1754, 'is a fishing town, and is of late much resorted to by
company to drink the sea-water, as well as to bathe; for the
latter they have the conveniency of cover'd carriages, at the
end of which there is a covering that lets down with hoops,
BO that people can go down a ladder into the water and are not
seen, and those who please may jump in and swim/
POLITICS
Many of the middle classes enjoyed themselves reluctantly, or
at least took their pleasures seriously. A dip in the sea was
78
therapeutic, a ball at the
Assembly might produce a con-
tract. Jedediah Strutt wrote to
his wife in 1765: *I was this day
thro* Cheapside, the Change &cc
and cou'd not help imediately
reflecting, that the sole cause
of that vast concourse of people,
of the Hurry & bustle they were
in, & the eagerness that appeard Darning at the Assembly
in their countenances, was gett-
ing of Money, & whatever some Divines woud teach to the
contrary, this is true in fact that it is the main business of the
life of Man/
Prosperous as they were, the Strutts used to let rooms during
Derby race-meetings. And it was from a business point of view
that the middling people took an interest in politics. We have
already noticed that central and local government was the bread
and butter of many a barrister and attorney. Merchants and
manufacturers were equally involved. Everywhere we find them
as Mayors and Aldermen performing the multifarious duties of
the Justice of the Peace. As business-men and residents they
had a common interest in street-paving and hospital-building,
turnpike trusts and Sunday trading, keeping the poor above riot
rations and putting down crime. Some had more particular
axes to grind. Brewers, for example, could not afford to be
indifferent to the local oligarchies when public-houses were
licensed annually by the Justices at Brewster Sessions. Some had
even bigger fish to fry. Humphrey Parsons, Alderman,
Sheriff and Lord Mayor of London, and M.P. for 20 years,
obtained a duty-free monopoly of beer-imports into France, it is
said, by presenting his horse to Louis XV at a hunting party.
Thrale's Brewery supplied the drink at the King's Bench
Prison: a valuable appointment in the gift of the Crown.
But the King's government affected every business-man, its
foreign and fiscal policies especially. The trading interest, said
Sir Robert Walpole, 'resembled a hog whom if you attempt to
touch, though you was only to pluck a bristle, he would certainly
79
MIDDLE-CLASS LIFE
cry out loud enough to alarm all the neighbours'. He knew what
he was talking about, for the merchants got their war with
Spain and he was soon winkled out of office. But all the Georgian
wars are well known as 'commercial wars'; and the treaties
which concluded them contained commercial clauses. The latter
usually satisfied some of the merchants and made others
squeal. It was impossible to please all the trading interest all
the time: witness the row r over the Asiento clause in the Treaty
of Utrecht, or the controversy caused by the "West-Indian sugar-
lobby when they talked the government into taking Canada in
the Treaty of Paris instead of the French West Indies, which
would have been dangerous rivals to English sugar barons,
But this is not to say that the middle classes aimed at running
the government, for the citadels of power were still fully
manned by the upper classes. The business-men contented them-
selves with giving the ministers a hefty nudge now and then, or
sometimes a sharp tap on the nose, whenever a measure especial-
ly affected their interests. As large-scale industry grew, the
manufacturers, too, began to watch legislation with great
interest. The brewers, for example, kept a sharp look-out, for
government duties accounted for 2O per cent of the wholesale
price of London porter in peace-time, and during the war against
Napoleon it reached nearly 50 per cent. It is no wonder that the
Borough of Southwark, the headquarters of the industry, was
represented in Parliament by a brewer for practically the whole
of the eighteenth century.
The other manufacturers formed their own local, regional and
even national associations to influence the government, as well
as to protect themselves from other menaces like machine-
breaking or workmen's combinations. The silk-throwsters of
Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire joined together in 1778 to
prosecute embezzlers of silk. In 1788 Strutt's accounts show
that he paid three guineas to 'the Chamber of Commerce at
Nottingham for procuring an Act of Parliament to prevent
the destruction of frames'. In 1785, on Wedgwood's suggestion,
the General Chamber of Manufacturers was formed of all the
important iron, textile, pottery and other interests. It succeeded,
among; other things, in modifying Pitt's tax-reforms in the
80
MIDDLE-CLASS LIFE
1780s. The manufacturing class was here flexing its muscles,
and dropping a strong hint of what it could do if it really began
to throw its weight about.
Though the middling people were politically minded, no
labels like Whig or Tory, Jacobite or Radical, can be attached
to them. They were too varied and unwieldy a group to be filed
away so neatly. The voting record of the brewer-M.P.s, for
example, reveals that they toed no consistent line, either indi-
vidually or as a group. They have to be classed as Independents,
except for the younger Samuel Whitbread, and he was hardly
a member of the middle classes. The merchants* interests
differed from the farmers* or manufacturers'; and each group
was fissured with its own internal conflicts. The only clear
line one can see is the one that separated the pure politicians
as well: that between the Ins and the Outs, Court and Country.
The general tendency was for big business to be on the Court
side. The merchant-princes of the City companies and their
brothers in the provinces, who subscribed to government loans,
handled government contracts and, having the ear of ministers,
Manchester factory
MIDDLE-CLASS LIFE
quietly influenced policy these were usually to be found in the
ministerial lobby. In the opposition sat the smaller business-men
of the City and provinces, angry at being thrust outside the
magic circle of economic privilege and political influence. They
often teamed-up with the country gentry (equally out in the
cold) to rant with Bolingbroke, or sign remonstrances dictated
by Fox.
REFORMERS
Perhaps these smaller business-men might be termed the 'true'
middle class of the eighteenth century, for among them one can
trace a certain consistency of attitude. Along with their hatred of
the economic and political monopoly in which their social betters
luxuriated, they enjoyed a profound disapproval of their manners
and morals. We can see their hand in all the voluntary move-
ments of the period which were attempting to instil a sense of
shame in dissolute parsons and peers, and a sense of duty in
good-for-nothing spinners and weavers. One such organisation,
The London Society for the Reformation of Manners, was very
lively in the first quarter of the century. Its members acted as a
vigilance committee, nagging constables into performing their
duties, employing paid Informers to report breaches of the law,
and bringing delinquents to justice. Each year it published a
black-list giving the names of those whose conviction it had
secured, along with their crimes. The issue of 1700 mentions
'many notorious cursers, swearers, Sabbath-breakers, and
drunkards', besides "843 lewd and scandalous persons ... as
keepers of houses of baudry and disorder, or as whores, night-
walkers, etc/. Between 1692 and 1725, the Society secured
01,899 arrests, and many provincial towns followed its ex-
ample ; but In the 'thirties its energies flagged and the movement
drops from view after 1758. It had been impelled by a mixture
of motives. Some members were religious enthusiasts, others
were snooping busy-bodies. And at the back of many minds
were economic considerations. Workers who got drunk not only
on Saturday and Sunday but on Monday as well were bad for
business. As contemporaries like Swift and Defoe pointed out,
these societies tended to concentrate on the poor. 'We do not
82
MIDDLE-CLASS LIFE
find the Rich Drunkard Mj Lord Mayor",
wrote the latter, 'nor a Swearing Lewd Merchant/
A similar outlet for the reforming of
and their wives was provided by the for Promoting
Christian Knowledge. It likewise at the inci-
dence of idle apprentices, though by different Formed
in 1698, the S.P.C.K. was sponsored by the Church of England
and enjoyed the support of Queen Anne. Its of improving
the manners and morals of the poor was to to read,
so that they could absorb the Scriptures and Improving tracts.
It issued Bibles and Prayer Books, like *A
Caution against Drunkenness*, *A Persuasion to Serious
Observation of the Lord's Day ', and * A Kind Caution to Profane
Swearers*. But its main effort was put into the charity schools,
which we shall treat in the next chapter.
Reforming zeal withers in the torpid 'thirties, 'forties and
'fifties, though it does not die. There are continuous signs of it
all the way from the Puritanism of the previous age to the
Victorianism of the next. It was active in the founding of
hospitals and workhouses, and dominant in the Methodist and
Evangelical movements. In the
last quarter of the century it
received a shot in the arm from
the manufacturing leaders, and
showed its stamina in the Sunday
Observance Society of 1775, the
Proclamation Society of 1789
and the Society for the Suppres-
sion of Vice of 1802. It also lent
its strength to Jonas Hanway in
his crusade on behalf of pauper
apprentices ; to John Howard in
the prison reform movement; to
Robert Raikes in the Sunday
School experiments; and to
William Wilberforce in the anti-
slavery campaign.
Exactly what success was
in prison
MIDDLE-CLASS LIFE
by this constant hammering away at abuses cannot be
calculated, for human happiness is not susceptible of statistical
proof. When we consider the gigantic tasks left for the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries to perform in the way of civilising
political power and humanising social relations, we cannot credit
the Georgian philanthropists with miracles. But they made the
start for the late eighteenth century is the 'take-off' period in
social reform, after countless centuries of indifference to suffer-
ing. Out of the complex chemistry of Georgian times, the spirit
of humanitarianism is the most precious deposit, and it was pre-
cipitated by the middle classes.
The relentless energy behind this lower middle-class drive
to impose its attitudes on upper and lower classes alike a
campaign which has succeeded, perhaps, only too well was
partly generated by the strict code of behaviour they imposed
on themselves and their children. We have seen that middle-
class education, particularly in the Dissenting Academies, had
an intellectual content favourable to business success. Its moral
injunctions were likewise appropriate. In sharp contrast to the
warm tolerance enjoyed by the scions of the gentry, many
middle-class children were faced from a tender age by durance
vile. Parents and teachers believed in the inherent wickedness
of human nature, and set out to break the child's spirit by rigorous
authoritarianism. Flogging on
the bare behind was a common
punishment for a mild misde-
meanour sometimes ceremoni-
ously preceded by father praying
for God's blessing on the thrash-
ing. No time was lost in mould-
ing the mites into shape. 'Oh,
how precious a thing it is to
hear a little child pray, as soon
as, nay sooner than, it can speak
plain! * said an educational writer
in 1702. Mrs Wesley gave each
of her children a day to learn the
alphabet at the age of four.
Nursery tales
MIDDLE-CLASS LIFE
Henry Longden's father explained to his five-year-olds the
omnipresence, omniscience of God ; when
they were seven he taught them to to their
superiors and abhor falsehood. 'After this, he would the
nature of our moral depravity; our in-
sufficiency to save ourselves; the everlasting punishment
which Is prepared for the wicked. He would then unfold the
plan for our recovery and salvation by Jesus Christ/ A proper
apprehension of death and hell-fire was Instilled In children by
taking them to executions, and showing corpses.
The children thus learnt early in life to imprint on themselves
the familiar pattern of Puritan manners. Human impulse was
suspect, the pleasures of the body were crushed, dancing, the
theatre, laughter, light conversation and leisure were avoided
like the plague. Strict with themselves, they turned into harsh
fathers and dictatorial husbands for the equality of the sexes
was no part of middle-class philosophy. Similarly, they became
demanding employers and censorious neighbours. 'The Lord
show mercy to him% said Arthur Young about the loose-
living Lord Cairington, *and by interrupting his prosperity or
lowering his health, bring him to repentance/ Any kind of waste
made their flesh creep, including waste of time ; and one of their
most difficult tasks was to induce a proper appreciation of the
clock into their workmen. Spending money had its moral
dangers; making money was a virtue though it would be a
curious economic system which had the one without the other.
If God *is pleased to make prosper whatever you do*, wrote
Henry Venn, a founding father of the Evangelical movement,
'your wealth is plainly His Gift, as much as if it came to you by
legacy, or inheritance/
This type of personality, hard-working, thrifty, self-disci-
plined and gifted at organising others, could hardly fail to do
well in a favourable economic climate. And these traits were
peculiarly those of the smaller and provincial business-men
we have been considering and thus of many of the manu-
facturers. The association of this set of beliefs with business
success is too well established by the evidence for it to be passed
over as a coincidence ; but to find a fully satisfactory explanation
85
MIDDLE-CLASS LIFE
of it is another question. The exact relationship between Georgian
Dissent and industrial advance (part of the wider conundrum of
modern history, the connection between Protestantism and
capitalism) has long taxed the ingenuity of social theorists.
Did business-men become Dissenters because the doctrines of
those churches favoured commerce? Or did Dissenters make
fortunes because of their peculiar virtues ? Or is the explanation
at a deeper psychological level: that certain temperamental
types lean equally towards business and Dissent?
Some historians have stressed the fact that Dissenters in
Georgian England were second-class citizens, cut off by law
and custom from the chief prizes in the state, and thus forced
to channel their energies into economic enterprise. One authority
has stressed the superiority of Dissenting technical education.
Another has noted that the probity of Dissenters earned them a
good reputation and thus others bought their products confident
of the quality, or lent them money in the assurance of their
honesty. Furthermore, the Dissenters, a series of minority
groups in a hostile world, stuck together, employed fellow-
members, married one another and did business together:
witness the interlocking Quaker banking families, the Bevans,
the Barclays and the Gurneys. And Dissent and business were
conjoined in the middle class for another reason. A working
man who learned the sober and industrious habits of Non-
conformity (say from the Methodist preachers) made money
and left the working class. Equally, a middle-class millionaire
who gravitated towards high society took on the Latitudinarian
colouring of his new associates.
As the Georgian period neared its end, the first of these social
jumps became more frequent, while the second became in-
creasingly difficult; and a formidable commando of men accumu-
lated whose religious and moral outlook was totally opposed to the
tenets of the rest of society. As these shock-troops of the middle
classes grew in numbers, wealth and confidence, they formed
their own taste in the arts, produced their own kind of literature
and formulated their own political programmes. How the business
community ceased to be cultural and political 'yes-men* is not
easy to explain*
86
Nonconformist preacher
Earlier in the century,, an as-
piring merchant or professional
man was seduced from his
middle-class ways by compara-
tively easy social ascent. Dudley
Ryder's grandfather had been
one of the Puritans ejected from
his living in I66 under the Act
of Uniformity ; but Ryderhimself
was typical of the later genera-
tions of the Old Dissent who
were hardly distinguishable from
Anglicans in their lack of 'en-
thusiasm'. True, he was not
without misgivings about some
of his loose London ways, as the
totting of vices and virtues in
his diary shows ; but he went the
way of many of his like. He paved the road for a successful
career at the Bar and in politics by joining the Church of England.
This social transformation usually took two generations, as in
the case of the Whitbreads. The contrast between father and
son is vividly brought out in their portraits. However, certain
developments were reducing the proportion (if not the total
number) of middle-class families who could achieve this
metamorphosis.
In the prosperous years after 1750, the upper classes had
less and less need to sell their properties to Tyneside tallow-
chandlers, or concede their daughters to quick-witted attorneys
with Sheffield accents. They were in a position to close the ranks,
and their grip on power and patronage became more exclusive.
This process was helped by the growth in population. The total
numbers vastly increased, but the room at the top remained
steady. Society in early Georgian times was like a bottle with
a wide enough mouth to let an appreciable number through to
the upper air. As the years passed die mouth stayed put, but the
body bellied into a flask; and the bottleneck thus produced
kept a multitude permanently in their own class. Many, of
87
MIDDLE-CLASS LIFE
course, by now (like the converts of the Methodists and Evan-
gelicals) did not wish to adopt upper-class manners. Neither did
more moderate men like the Unitarian Jedediah Strutt, who
described himself in 1786 as 'having but little pride & no
ostentation of my own, not being fond of finery & dress, not
thrusting myself into what is calld Genteel Company'. But in
any case they had no choice. It was not the rise of the middle
class that caused the tensions of the next century: it was their
failure to rise. The pressure in the flask was intensified by the
expansion of the manufacturing and professional groups : and as
all these elements grew rich, confident and class-conscious,
social crisis began to threaten. It became a problem of widening
the neck or bursting the flask. But this question will have to
wait for a later chapter.
Further Reading
T. S. Ashton, Iron and Steel in the Industrial Revolution (2nd ecL), 1951.
R. S. Fitton and A. P. Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 1958.
John Carswell, The South Sea Bubble, I960.
Peter Mathias, The Brewing Industry in England, 1700-1830, 1959.
A. Raistrick, Dynasty of Iron Founders: the Darbys and Coalbrookdale, 1953.
R. Robson, The Attorney in Eighteenth-Century England, 1959.
88
IV
Lower-class Life
YEOMEN
The majority of the working people were rural (whether they
were In agriculture or industry), and the typical villager was
the yeoman. This term applies strictly to small freeholders, but
we shall use it loosely, as they often did, to include leaseholders
and copyholders as well; in other words, peasants farming hold-
ings of roughly five to 50 acres. Their fortunes varied from
year to year. They were at the mercy of the price-level, which
fluctuated according to a number of variables: the harvest,
tariff policies, local catastrophes and foreign wars. The same
season could be good for a dairyman and bad for a grain farmer.
A fall in the price of butcher's meat might ruin a grazier;
although if tallow shot up at the same time he would be saved.
Moreover, the type of holding created further differences* The
freeholder growing for subsistence was insulated from the
market compared with the tenant paying an annual rent. For
the latter, wrote an expert in 1750, 'to lose a Wheat-Crop is
the ready Way to his Ruin, especially if he be a poor Tenant;
for on the Golden Grain Crop chiefly depends the Payment of
his Rent*. He was in a precarious situation, for a good harvest
gave him a low price for his surplus, and a bad harvest left him
without one.
What the small farmers needed was a steady plateau of
prices, but neither the economic system nor government skill
could provide this for them. And if annual fluctuations tossed
them helplessly about, the general drift of the tide was also
against them all through the century. At the start, Daniel
Defoe placed them fifth in the list of seven classes into which he
89
Threshing in a small farm
divided the population:
'the country people,
farmers, &c., who fare
indifferently'. They came
below 'the working
trades, who labour hard
but feel no want'. Later,
in 1767, Arthur Young
thought that the small
farmer had the same
standard of living as the
labourer, except that the
farmer worked much
harder. *I regard these small occupiers as a set of very miserable
men*, he wrote. "They fare extremely hard, work without
intermission like a horse and practise every lesson of diligence
and frugality without being able to soften their present lot/ They
were ill-equipped for the rough waters of the eighteenth century.
For one thing, they worked on too small a scale when the trend
was moving away from their kind of husbandry, as a means of
feeding a family, to a new kind of agriculture as means of supply-
ing the market. And on the small farm the overheads in labour
and equipment were high. Moreover, if the peasants had in-
sufficient capital in reserve to tide them over a bad patch, they
also had nothing to spare for the new methods like marling and
draining which their heavy-weight competitors were adopting.
And, further, land-owners were everywhere reorganising their
estates. They were aiming at a small number of large tenants on
leases of seven, 14 or 21 years, instead of the medieval hotch-
potch of freeholders, copyholders and tenants for a number of
lives. Coke and his predecessors and neighbours at Holkham
found that this made for more efficient management, easier rent-
collecting and higher production. And, finally, this reorganisa-
tion was more often than not rounded off with enclosure, by
private pressure in the first half of the century, and by Act of
Parliament in the second.
This relentless corrosion of the English peasant had pro-
found effects on society, but its operation was too slow and too
90
LOWER-CLASS LIFE
piecemeal to warrant the term 'agrarian revolution". It was
not, as Is sometimes implied, a wholesale by
capitalists using the organs of the state. Even enclosure tended
to be the recognition of a fait rather a sudden
catastrophe. At Wigston in Leicestershire, for example, by
1765 there were only 70 small farmers left. The majority of the
land, 70 per cent, was run by 13 bigger men in units of 1OO
acres and more. And this was just before the village was en-
closed by Act of Parliament. And what is more, the
farmers at Wigston survived till the end of the Georgian period.
In some parts of the country they actually increased in number
after enclosure.
Nevertheless, though the yeomen were not suddenly wiped
out, they only managed to hobble along to the end of the century.
They received out of the enclosure award a compact holding of
perhaps SO acres; but they began their new mode of life heavily
mortgaged. There would be the legal fees of probably ^35 to
pay, and a further ,75 for hedging and ditching. Worse than
Reaping on a large estate
LOWER-CLASS LIFE
this, they no longer had the right to graze on the common,
and they were thus forced to buy fodder and rent grazing land,
With their common-rights went their last mooring to the ancient
way of life, and they were adrift in a money economy. It
buoyed them up to the end of the century, and then dashed
them on the rocks after 1815,
COTTAGERS
Thus enclosure exposed the peasant to the weather, but it was
the weather that drowned him. On the other hand, the class next
below, the cottagers and squatters, sank immediately. The open-
field system had kept them afloat from the earliest times, and
in our period there was an appreciable number in every village.
At the head were men who owned a freehold cottage and garden,
a strip or so in each of the open fields and grazing rights on the
waste. In Wigston, for example, a cottager with half an acre in
each field could tether one horse or one cow on the common,
and graze one sheep in addition. Below this were cottagers with
no land, yet even these in Wigston in 1765 possessed about
36 cows and sheep between them. Below these again was a
miscellaneous layer of squatters: families crammed into little
shacks on the waste, occupying a few square yards of land to
which they had no legal title. None of these, cottager or squatter,
with land or without land, could earn a living out of their cow
or their pig, their cabbage-patch or brace
of geese. Many of them appeared on the
books of the Overseer of the Poor, and
all of them had to find some kind of job.
They became the cowmen, the hay-
makers, the threshers and hedgers of the
bigger farmers. But that by itself would
not keep a cottager with a family. ' If he
has a wife and three or four children to
feed', wrote Defoe in 1728, he 'must
fare hard and live poorly'. 'But', he
added, 'if this man's wife and children
can at the same time get employment, if
at next door, or at the next village, there
92
Milkmaid
Cottage industry
lives a clothier or bay maker or
a stufFor drugget weaver . . , the
family at home gets as much as
the father abroad/ Though this
exaggerates, there was spinning
and weaving available nearly
everywhere, and a variety of
other industrial occupations,
according to the local specialities.
In Leicestershire and Notting-
hamshire stocking-knitting was
the great stand-by. Round
Bedford it was lace. In the village
of Wigs ton, out oC a total of 16!
families, there were six tailors
and six shoemakers.
These families were the chief
sufferers in the changing pattern
of village economy. They had always lived on the brink of des-
titution, but the agrarian changes pushed them over the edge.
With enclosure, the cottager received, perhaps, a one-acre field.
Without the old common rights, this was not a viable concern,
and sooner or later he sold out. The squatter, having no rights,
got nothing. And this was the gradual transformation every-
where: the accumulation year by year of a mass of landless
labourers. Even before enclosure, 70 per cent of Wigston's
population were in this state. In fact, though the numbers had
more than doubled, there were fewer occupiers of land than at the
time of Domesday.
Nevertheless, it is important to note that these labourers were
still living in Wigston. It can hardly be called a 'deserted
village'. In fact, the old picture of the landless proletariat being
sucked into the maws of the factories, leaving their villages in
the sole possession of a few magnates, needs retouching. It is
true that the modem industrial system required the creation of
a class of wage-earners, but in the Georgian period most of these
stayed in the villages, which grew only less slowly than the
towns. After all, the enclosed fields did not marl and manure
93
Wheelwright
themselves. The new type of agricul-
ture needed more, not fewer, workers,
for the labour-saving devices did not
reach the countryside till the next cen-
tury. Neither did the opening of the
factories involve the immediate shut-
down of domestic work. On the
contrary, the Industrial Revolution in
our period caused an expansion of
cottage production. More and more
Wigston workers were hiring stock-
ing-frames, and the villagers of
Warwickshire were making more and
more nails. What can be said of the
country people is that, being severed
from the land, they were at the mercy
of massive industrial advance when it did come. In the meantime,
though, theirs was a miserable lot, as we shall see. They were
bruised by the joltings of a runaway economy, degraded by an
unwise Poor Law policy, starved by bad harvests and fleeced
by war-time inflation.
INDUSTRIAL WORKERS
Leaving on one side the thatchers and masons, wheelwrights and
blacksmiths, maltsters and innkeepers, milkmaids and midwives
and a host of other rural
Irm worker* workers, we must now
turn to those who worked
in industry. Here again
we find a staggering
diversity: from the
medieval skilled crafts-
man employing a few
apprentices and journey-
men down to the modern
wage-earning factory
operative, owning noth-
ing but his labour, with
Weaving
all the varieties of the 'domestic
system* in between. The last was the
most common, especially in the multi-
farious textile trades. * In many parts
of Yorkshire ', wrote Josiah Tucker in
1757, 'the woollen manufacture is
carried on by small farmers and free-
holders. These people buy some wool,
and grow some; their wives and
daughters and servants spin it in the
long winter nights and at such times
when not imployed in their farms and
dairies. The master of the family either
sells this produce in the yam market
or hath it wove up himself. It is then
milled, cleansed, and brought to market,
generally to the town of Leeds/ But most textiles were produced
under less idyllic and less intimate conditions, by large firms
employing workers in their hundreds and thousands. 'In
Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, and Somersetshire*, writes Tucker,
* ... one person with a great stock and large credit, buys the
wool, pays for the spinning, weaving, milling, dyeing, shearing,
dressing, etc. That is, he is the master of the whole manufacture
from first to last and perhaps fenploys a thousand persons under
him. This is the clothier whom all the rest are to look upon as
their paymaster/
However, he paid his workers by the length of cloth, and
they did not regard themselves as wage-slaves, but as small
master-men. After all, they were skilled craftsmen, they worked
in their own homes, according to their own time-table, finding
their own looms, size and candles, and employing their own
wives and children as assistants. They looked down on their
neighbours, the farm-labourers, but they could scarcely afford
to, for the clothier had them in an iron grip. They were usually
in his debt, and he could get away with exactions which make a
modern factory-owner look like a fairy-godmother. He could
slash their rates of pay, make them take truck and force them
to buy goods in shops with false weights and measures. Fear
95
iisitfif f ^yfffisiis^f-i'
Sfitalfiflds silk-wearers
of unemployment made
the weavers submit, con-
tenting themselves with
embezzling what cloth
they could, and occasion-
ally bursting out in
bloody riots.
The Spitalfields silk-
weavers in the East End
of London were in the
same boat, and so were
the hosiery-knitters of
the Midlands. At Strutt's warehouses in Derby, for example,
between 200 and 400 workers from the surrounding villages
would collect their yarn on a Monday morning and bring it
back on the following Saturday afternoon in the form of stock-
ings. A silk-stocking maker could produce four pairs a week,
at 2s. 6d. a pair. He made them on his own premises, on a
frame which he rented for 15. a week. Similarly, nail-makers
collected their iron in Birmingham and tramped back a week
later, perhaps eight or ten miles, with the finished article.
Sometimes, as in the Warring-
ton area, the workman bought
his iron and sold his nails, for
all the world like a master
craftsman. But his type was
rare, and any resemblance
between the Georgian 'domes-
tic system ' and Merrie England
is fleeting. It was much more
like the factory system, with
workers and machinery scat-
tered over a wide area: though
there were important psycho-
logical differences, as we shall
see.
Of course, there were master
craftsmen of the kind imagined
Cullers
Silversmiths
by those who paint a rosy
picture of pre-industrial
England. There still are.
You would find them in
all big towns, in trades
demanding a high level of
skill, accuracy and care:
the luxury trades. Some
of the Yorkshire weavers
come into this category.
So do the Sheffield cutlers
and Birmingham tool-
makers. But most of them
were in London, the most
intensely industrialised part of the kingdom. Here you would
find coachbuilders and sign-painters, tailors and milliners,
jewellers and silversmiths, and the makers of sextants, tele-
scopes and surgical instruments. Not all Spitalfields weavers
were cogs in a mass-production machine, for the finest work,
the velvets, required the attentions of highly trained master-men.
The shoemaking business was similar. At the top of the scale
was the made-to-measure shop, where the complete shoe was
made on the premises. Lower down was
the less skilled cobbler, working alone
in a garret or cellar, assembling leather
cut for him by a leather-cutter. Below
him again was the 'translator*, refur-
bishing second-hand shoes for the poor.
Watch-making, for which London was
famous, was even more diversified. The
master-craftsmen were men of accom-
plished skill and Ingenuity, some of
them, like Tompion and Harrison, having
a world-wide reputation. But by our
period, the manufacture was minutely
subdivided, and much of It was put
out to men performing repetitive
tasks in Clerkenwell garrets. 'The
97
Watchmaker
LOWER-CLASS LIFE
movement-maker', says a writer in 1747, 'forges his wheels and
turns them to the just dimensions, sends them to the cutter and
has them cut at a trifling expence. He has nothing to do when
he takes them from the cutter but to finish them and turn the
comers of the teeth. The pinions made of steel are drawn at
the mill so that the watchmaker has only to file down the points
and fix them to the proper wheels. The springs are made by a
tradesman who does nothing else, and the chains by another
After the watchmaker has got home all the ... parts of which
it consists, he gives the whole to the finisher, having first had
the brass wheels gilded by the gilder, and adjusts it to the proper
time. The watchmaker puts his name on the plate and is
esteemed the maker, though he has not made in his shop the
smallest wheel belonging to it/ Already ' engines ' were speeding
up some stages of the work, and it is not surprising to find that
watchmaking artisans were prominent in textile machinery later
in the century.
We have limited ourselves so far to the craftsmen and
domestic workers, the traditional types in English industry; but
already there were numerous examples of the sort of workers
we are familiar with today: wage-earners working en masse on
their employer's premises. Coal-mining clearly could not be a
domestic craft; and the men who hewed the stone at Portland,
mined the copper in Cornwall and the lead in Derbyshire,
extracted the salt in Cheshire or quarried the slate in Cumber-
land all had to go out to work every morning. Nature dictated
their place of business. In other cases it was the type of product
which brought many workers together in one spot: sail-makers,
ship-builders and cannon-foun-
ders, for example. Processes
CMnn.on-nM.KTS . . * i i *n r i
requiring special skill, caretul
supervision or homogeneous
treatment also tended to be
carried out under one roof, like
dyeing and finishing in the tex-
tile industry, or the making of
army uniforms. Government
establishments were the largest
LOWER-CLASS LIFE
of all. The royal arsenal at Defoe In the
^twenties. *The building-yards, timber-yard, deal-yard,
mast-yard, gun-yard, rope-walks; all the yards
places, set apart for the works to navy*, lie wrote^
'are like a well-ordered city/ It power
brought about the concentration of the
Industrial Revolution. By 17SJ, for example, Thomas Lombe's
silk factory was employing several hundred hands, with a
3-foot water-wheel driving 6 ? QOO wheels.
This was a true factory, but whether all the operatives were
true workers In the modem sense may be doubted. Even in these
large establishments old customs were mingled with the new.
In the coal-mines, for example, a skilled hewer (regarded then
as the 61ite of the working class) hired his own assistants,
The ancient practice of families working together, instead of
father going out to work, lingered everywhere, and survived
into the next century. In the iron industry, furnace operators
99
LOWER-CLASS LIFE
had their wives and children on the job, preparing the ore and
picking out bits of iron and charcoal from the cinders. At the
forge, the hammerman was under contractfor aterm of years, and
employed his own labourers. In establishments of an earlier
origin, like tallow-chandlers' and tanners' works, the men were
theoretically journeymen under a master. In newer industries
brewing and sugar-refining, the men were labourers under
a foreman. In practice, It was hard to tell the difference.
DOMESTIC SERVANTS
The Georgian workers were clearly far from being a homo-
geneous social group, and the typical working man that we are
familiar with was only just emerging. On the other hand, a
species now fast becoming extinct flourished in vast numbers in
the eighteenth century the domestic servants. Anyone not
convinced of the diversity of the social structure should examine
the ranks and degrees In this set of men. Beginning with the
upper servants, and leaving out the land-steward and maitre
d'h&tel as qualifying for middle-class status, we have, in
descending order, the clerk of the stables and the clerk of the
kitchen, the cook, the confectioner, the baker, the bailiff, the
valet, the butler, the gardener and the groom of the chambers.
Below these came the lower servants,
senmts who wore livery: the coachman, the
footman, the running footman and the
groom, the under-butler and the under-
coachman, the park-keeper and the
gamekeeper and the porter, the postilion,
the yard-boy, the provision-boy, the
foot-boy, and, finally, the page. The
female hierarchy had a similar pecking-
order. The lady's maid (or waiting-
woman or tirewoman), the housekeeper
and the cook were in the higher echelons.
Below them (though not in livery) were
lined up the chambermaid, the house-
maid, the maid of all work, the laundry
100
LOWER-CLASS LIFE
maid and the dairy maid. These last four were about level, and
right at the end came the scullery maid. Of course, this is the
establishment of a wealthy household. A
would begin lower down ; but the order of precedence would
be strictly maintained, even If the staff (as in a modest parson's
house) consisted only of a personal man, a maid of all work
a scullery maid.
Traditionally, retainers belonged to their employers body
and soul, and Implicit obedience was expected. In Georgian
times It was rarely given, for servants were then notoriously
Insubordinate. Masters had the right to give them a clout now
and then, as Swift did when his man was not there to let him
Into the house one night. When Patrick finally appeared, after
ten, 'I went up% Swift tells Stella, *shut the chamber door, and
gave him two or three swinging cuffs on the ear, and I have
strained the thumb of my left hand with pulling him, which I did
not feel till he was gone/
Many servants would have looked for another job at that
point, and there w r ere various ways of doing this. In the pro-
vinces, like some of the mining and agricultural workers, servants
were hired annually at the fairs. The American visitor William
Byrd noticed this when he was staying In the country In 1718.
* We went to the fair', says his diary, * where we saw the maids
stand In a row to be hired/ But hordes of them preferred
London register offices. * Young men and women in the country \
wrote Arthur Young, 'fix their eye on London as the last stage
of their hope; they enter into service in the country for little
else but to raise money enough to go to London/ Jonas Hanway
calculated that they swarmed into the metropolis at the rate of
5,OOO a year. Instead of going to register offices, they were often
met by an agent or a bawd as they descended from the wagon on
their first arrival, like Moll Hackabout in the Harlot's Progress.
Native Londoners had an unsavoury reputation, and masters
preferred country wenches and lads. In fact, an unemployed
Londoner would often take the wagon out of town and then
come in again in order to get a post. The consequence was a
surfeit of flunkeys there. In the 'sixties every thirteenth person
you met was one; and a calculation of 1796 puts the ratio at
1OI
Sawyers
one in four and a half. In 1760 there
were 2,000 out of work according to
Hanway; in 1796 Colquhoun thought
the figure was nearer 10,000. This is
surprising in view of the steady howl
that came from employers all through
the century about the shortage of
scullions and maids of all work. The
explanation must be that the idle were
resting between posts, trying to
improve themselves. In any case, in all
kinds of work, complaints about lack of
jobs, on the one hand, and shortage
of hands, on the other, formed a dis-
cordant duet all through the middle
decades of the century.
LABOURERS
This sketch of yeomen and cottagers, artisans, factory hands
and retainers hardly takes us below the surface of lower-class
life, but we must limit ourselves to dredging up only a few
more samples. There were the chimney-sweeps, the climbing-
boys with their black faces and white teeth, scrambling up the
flue with brush and scraper, shouting * All up! ' at the top and
then twisting down again. There were the sawyers who worked
in pairs. They had their distinctions, too, for the under-sawyer
got all the dust in his face. There were the builders, the drovers,
the scavengers and the odd-job men. And there were plenty of
shop-assistants. Some were respectable like Robert Owen in
the 'eighties, who opened up Flint and Palmer's in the Borough
at eight in the morning, saw the last customer out at 10-30,
and got to bed at two in the morning after putting the shop
straight. At the lower end of the scale was the chandler's shop,
which dealt *in all things necessary for the kitchen in small
quantities', says a writer in 1747. 'He is partly cheese-monger,
oilman, grocer, distiller, etc/ The poor got their ha'porths of
bread, cheese, beer, coal, soap and candles there; the hawker
called in for his breakfast and a tot of gin.
LOWER-CLASS LIFE
And we must not forget the women, the fish-hawkers and
ballad-sellers, the cinder-sifters and rag-pickers. Nor their
husbands the sailors, the porters, the coal-heavers and chairmen
Londoners who would come out on the streets at the drop of a
tract, as they did in John Wilkes* great days. Then we come to
the dregs: the cut-throats and burglars, Fleet-parsons and
fences, the gentlemen of the road and the ladies of the street
the under-world of the Beggar's Opera. Life was bitter at this
level. Like the washer-woman Arm Nichols, who used to arrive
at her Hackney employer's at midnight and then scrub through
to the end of the next day for a few pence, all these people were
only too familiar with over-work, disease, sudden death or a
destitute old age; and an existence on and off the Poor Rates,
In a period when the experts advised that low wages were
good for trade and that state action was bad for liberty, the
lower classes were helpless victims. Dr Deering in the 'thirties
described how Nottingham was visited by a 'Dlstemperature in
the Air once in five years which either brings along with It some
Epidemic Fever (tho' seldom very mortal) or renders smallpox
more dangerous than at other times . . . but in the year 175 . . .
this Distemperature swept away a great number (but mostly
Children)*. At the same time, Dr Hillary of Ripon noted the
evidence of 'nervous', 'hysteric' and 'putrid' fevers in York-
shire. * Many of the little country towns and villages were almost
stripped of their poor people % he wrote ; and added, * I observed
that very few of the richer people, who used a more generous
way of living and were not exposed to the Inclemencies of
the weather, were seized with any of these diseases at this time/
THE POOR LAW
Life was short in all the towns, but London was positively
murderous. In Bethnal Green, John Wesley found this family
In 1777: 'one poor man was just creeping out of his sick bed,
to his ragged wife and three little children, who were more
than half naked, and the very picture of famine; when one
bringing in a loaf of bread, they all ran, seized upon it, and
tore It in pieces in an Instant'. In Holbora in 1763, a man went
over an empty house in Stonecutter Street with a view to buying
I OS
LOWER-CLASS LIFE
it. In two of the rooms he found three dead women, emaciated
and almost naked. In the garret were living two women and a
girl, two of them on the verge of starvation. Dr Johnson was
told by Saunders Welch the magistrate that malnutrition
killed off more than a week. Primitive medicine, insanitary
housing, excessive drink, inadequate food and lack of birth
control produced a throng of senile invalids, abandoned wives
and illegitimate children which overstrained the sketchy welfare
services. Add to this the growing population and periodic
slumps, and it is not surprising that the Poor Law system was
overwhelmed before the end of the century.
The 'Poor Law* is a euphemism for a legal maze whose
complexities often foxed the House of Lords and always
caused magistrates to reach for their Burn's Justice of the Peace
and Parish Officer. In this do-it-yourself manual of local
government a quarter of the space was devoted to pauperism ;
but we cannot afford such lengthy treatment here. Briefly, the
law provided officials with an excuse not to relieve a pauper
till he was in his own parish. You could gain a 'settlement*
in a parish in several ways: by being born there (if illegitimate) ;
by having a father settled there (if legitimate and under seven) ;
by marrying a husband there; by working there for one year
(if single); by apprenticeship there; by renting a tenement of
lO annual value; by holding a public office; by paying the
rates; or by 4O days' residence there, after giving notice in
writing. If you were in a place without one of the above quali-
fications and appeared * likely to become chargeable' the magi-
strates would promptly 'remove* you. But let us see, first of
all, how a parish treated its own admitted poor.
We will begin with the children an enormous problem in
all large towns, where babies were left exposed on the streets,
or their bodies dumped on dung-heaps to save funeral expenses.
The retired sea-captain Thomas Coram was so sickened by the
sight of these that he worked for 17 years to start the Foundling
Hospital; and one of the Governors of this was Jonas Hanway,
who began collecting statistics in the 'sixties. Choosing a sample
of eleven London parishes (including the best and the worst)
he forad that, in the year 1763, 91 children had entered the
LOWER-CLASS LIFE
workhouses, not counting those who had been discharged with
their mothers during the year. By the end of 1765, BBS of these
were dead. But not all parishes put babies in the workhouse.
Many of them put them out to nurses at a shilling or two a
week. In 1715, a Parliamentary Committee reported 'that a
great many poor infants . . . are inhumanly suffered to die by the
barbarity of nurses, who are a sort of people void of commisera-
tion or religion, hired by the Church Wardens to take off a
burthen from the parish at the easiest rates they can, and these
know the manner of doing it effectually'.
The tough ones who survived this treatment were appren-
ticed at the age of seven till they were 4,* in the case of boys,
and 21, in the case of girls. The theory was that the children
should learn a trade and become useful citizens; but too often
the parish was solely concerned with getting the child off its
hands. This it could do by apprenticing it in another parish,
thus gaining it a settlement there. The Vestry Minutes of St
Pancras in 1722 illustrate the process: 'Ordered, that Mr Batt,
Upper Churchwarden, should bind out William Lucas apprentice
to what person or business he shall think most proper, and to
make as cheap a bargain for putting him out as he can/ The
parish funds had to pay a fee to the master (usually about jg5),
but it was money well spent. As a writer put it in 1738:* if the
child serves the first forty days we are rid of him for ever'.
The master was on a good thing, too,
for he had a useful drudge; and, even if
the child ran away, he still had his 5.
In fact, many masters ill-treated their
charges so that they would run away,
for they were only in the game for the
money.
At its best, the system provided
employers with cheap labour; at its
worst, it was the equivalent to being
sold into slavery. The child belonged to
the master till his time was out. If an
apprentice got pressed into the navy,
21 after 1768.
107
Mariner
Tailor apprentices
for example, the master was entitled to
all his pay and prize-money. Jonathan
Saville, a Methodist preacher of some
note in the Halifax area, was apprenticed
at the age of seven to a miner. To
escape the latter's brutality, he then
became bound to a spinner; but his
master's daughter was a virago'who one
day felled him to the ground with a
blow, breaking his thigh. He grew up a
stunted cripple. To be bound out as a
domestic help to learn the 'art of
housewifery' or as a street milk-seller,
or as a pot-boy, or as a baker's beast of
burden was bad enough ; but acquiring the skills of chimney-
sweeping was worse. Here the fees were low. ' Orphans who
are in a vagabond state, or the illegitimate children of the
poorest kind of people', wrote Hanway in 1785, 'are said to be
sold, that is, their service for seven years is disposed of for
twenty or thirty shillings/ Masters would sometimes take on
as many as 24, send them out to beg in the summer, and hire
them out at 6d. a day in the winter. It is no wonder that we
hear so much of runaway apprentices at that time. Sometimes
they were caught, like Mary Wotton, who absconded at the
age of nine, unwisely taking with her 7 guineas belonging to
her mistress. She was sentenced to death.
The children were the first group the parish was responsible
for. The second was the aged and sick. Here again, it is im-
possible to generalise. Some parishes provided their rent and
an allowance for food. Others billeted them on more affluent
parishioners. Others ran a workhouse perhaps nothing more
than a mud hut on the waste. Some parishes paid a doctor to
'physic the poor'; most paid their funeral expenses.
In the towns, as the problem became overwhelming, some
parishes provided special institutions and ran them wisely,
like Liverpool with its Workhouse, Infirmary, Dispensary and
Fever Hospital. But many populous places went no further than
a workhouse under a contractor, who was out to make what he
108
LOWER-CLASS LIFE
could out of It. Overcrowding usually resulted. * Few persons
accustomed to cleanly life*, said Hanway, 'can bear the stench
of them or stand the survey of such misery/ St Leonard's*
Shoreditch, complained to the House of Commons In 1774 that
its building was too small. The parish officers, goes the report,
'are obliged to put thirty-nine children . . . Into three beds,
by which means they contract disorders from each other*.
These children were the victims of the seizing up of local
government machinery which was occurring everywhere. Tudor
Institutions set up to run villages could not cope with the
massing of population that came In Georgian times.
Apart from the children and the 'Impotent poor*, the parish
authorities had a third task: that of providing work for the
* able-bodied poor*. Their activity In this field was so slipshod
that we need say no more about It. We can pass on instead to
see what happened to those who became destitute In a place
where they had no settlement. Till 1795, the Justices had the
power, If anyone looked 'likely to become chargeable to the
parish [to quote the Ac] to remove and convey such person to
such parish where he was last legally settled'. The removing
parish had to foot the bill here ; but If the other parish was a
long way off they could save expenses by dealing with the
pauper under a different set of laws altogether the Vagrancy
Laws. Here, the pauper, after whipping and/or imprisonment,
was not 'removed* but 'passed*: that is, trundled in a cart
from one parish boundary to the next till he was home. The
costs were borne by each parish through which he was 'passed*.
Professional beggars, like some of the Irish returning home
after the London hay-making season, found it a convenient
mode of transport. A single man, if he was fit, was usually left
undisturbed by the authorities, and in a big city parish they
would not even know he was there. But let a family arrive In
a country parish, or a widow with children, and they were
immediately bundled out by the constable. And the Overseers
were as nervous as kittens if a single woman appeared on the
scene, for fear she should become pregnant. And this was
understandable, for a bastard became settled In the parish where
(to use their phrase) he was 'dropped*, and not like a normal
109
LOWER-CLASS LIFE
child In the parish of his father. In a case like this, the alternatives
were either the pass-cart or the shot-gun wedding. Parson
Woodforde received 10s. 6d. for performing one of these in
1769. *I married Tom Bunge of Amsford to Charity Andrews
of Castle Gary by License this morning', he writes. 'The Parish
of Gary made him marry her, and he came handcuffed to Church
for fear of running away'. Since Tom lived in another parish,
the Overseers had successfully passed the baby.
WORKING AND LIVING CONDITIONS
The lucky ones with jobs worked long hours. In large firms like
Ambrose Crowley's, the men put in a 1- or 13-hour day.
Domestic workers, able to please themselves, tended to alter-
nate between bouts of 16 or 17 hours a day and spells of idle
dissipation. In the long summer days, nail-makers or weavers
could slave from six in the morning till 1 1 at night. After a
day or two of this they would be attacked by what Francis
Place remembered as that 'sickening aversion which at times
steals over the working-man and utterly disables him. ... I have
felt it, resisted it to the utmost of my power, but have been
obliged to submit and run away from my work. This is the case
with every workman I have ever known'. Long hours were
considered vital by the mercantilists in order to secure a favour-
Coalming, c. 1 795
LOWER-CLASS LIFE
able balance of trade. For the same reason, the pundits favoured
low wages and high food prices. 'Everyone but an Idiot knows*,
wrote Arthur Young, 'that the lower classes must be kept
poor or they will never be industrious/
It is not easy to make out what Georgian wages were. They
varied from place to place. They were higher in the town than
in the country ; higher in the south than in the north, and highest
in London* They also fluctuated from time to time. An agri-
cultural labourer might make 5s. a week in winter, 8s. in summer,
and perhaps IBs. during the harvest. Since piece-rates were so
common, much depended on the yards of cloth woven or pairs
of stockings knitted. Skilled men received about half as much
again as labourers* Miners on the Newcastle coalfield and engine-
men in Shropshire ironworks would get 1 55. a week, while their
labourers would make 8s, or 9s. On the other hand, the labourer's
wife and children might bring his total income to nearly twice
that amount. In any case, everyone had perquisites, which make
the raw wage-figures only a rough guide to total earnings. The
farm-labourer often received his board and lodging, the miner
his load of coal and the iron-worker his ale. Servants probably
doubled their wages with tips, quite apart from their right to
their master's cast-off clothes, and the Christmas gifts they
drew from all his tradesmen: so much in the pound on aE he had
spent. The groom of the chambers at Canons, the home of the
Duke of Chandos, used to make ^38 a year solely out of
showing visitors round. Thus no one can pronounce with any
confidence on Georgian wages. And the same applies to real
wages, for similar uncertainties bedevil the task of constructing
a cost-of-living index. The most one can say is that, when the
humanitarians began to grieve over the workers* conditions at
the end of the century, they were better than they had been at
the start.
Whether housing improved is more doubtful, for there was
an increasing pressure of population on space and building
materials. The rural labourer lived in a two-roomed cottage,
with a chamber above in the roof. In Wigston in Leicestershire,
the houses were built on footings of small round stones, with
mud walls and thatched roofs, using the minimum of wood.
ill
LOWER-CLASS LIFE
Everything depended on what materials were locally available,
and perhaps on a landlord's soft heart. After viewing the hovels
at Warminster, near Stratford-upon-Avon ('mud without and
wretchedness within*), the Hon. John Byng swore this to his
diary: *Upon my estate, there shall be no mud cottages/
Where stone or bricks were available dwellings were decent,
as at Gilbert White's Selborne; but some wretches lived in
holes in the ground, and William Savery, the visitor from
Early morning at Covent Garden
Philadelphia, saw the poor at Bridgnorth in Shropshire living
in caves cut from the soft rock in the side of a hill.
In the towns conditions were no better. The respectable
artisan and his family occupied one room usually; while less
wealthy workers lived and worked in cellars andgarrets. Various
factors conspired to convert labourers* suburbs into rabbit
warrens. Nottingham had to expand in upon itself because the
town fields were unenclosed till 1845. The workers there were
crammed into a rookery called the Back Side, where only one
passage, Sheep Lane, was wide enough for a farm-cart. In
LOWER-CLASS LIFE
London, where the jam was worst, it was partly due to govern-
ment bans on building, dating from Tudor and Stuart times. In
these circumstances, illegal tenements were run up out of sight,
in courts and alleys behind existing structures. Only jerry-
building with flimsy materials was worth while to speculative
builders under the constant threat of demolition by the authori-
ties for breach of some by-law, or for a faulty title to the land,
if not actual trespass. This explains why Johnson called London
a place where 'falling houses thunder on your head * ; and accounts
for the mysterious ease with which political mobs pulled houses
down at the slightest provocation.
Where there was no room to expand, houses were divided
and subdivided. Everyone let rooms. A respectable single man
like Benjamin Franklin could get one for Is. 6d. a week. A
normal family would only achieve a garret for that. And those
who had rooms took in lodgers: 15 or to a room in St Giles
and Bloomsbury at %d. a night. Some lodgers sub-let a portion
of their bed on a weekly lease. The lowest of the low occupied
the cellars, the cobbler sleeping by his last, and the green-meat
woman's family bedding down among her vegetable-matter.
Cellars were damp, if not wet, for London's sewers were not all
they should have been. The inhabitants of one house in Spital
Square used to punt themselves across from the cellar-steps in
a wash-tub to draw their daily beer.
The stench from these bilges rose from the cellar-flaps to
mingle with the thousand and one other odours that polluted
the metropolitan air. Windows were taxed, and so the reek of
bodies, unwashed blankets and rotting curtains did not escape
till a sash was thrown
up to allow a chamber- Communal gram
pot to be emptied, or till
a milk-seller emerged to
dump her night-soil on
the heap of carrion on the
corner. The Fleet Ditch,
before it was covered
over in the 'thirties, was
the receptacle of dead
LOWER-CLASS LIFE
dogs and whatever offal the tripe-dressers, sausage-makers and
catgut-spinners could not employ in their trades. All the creeks
into which the Thames tide washed contributed their sickening
smells, 'These filthy places', said a writer in 1722, who was
interested in anti-plague precautions, 'receive all the sinks,
necessary houses and drains from dye houses, wash houses, fell
mongers, slaughter houses and all kinds of offensive trades;
they are continually full of carrion and the most odious of all
offensive stench proceeds from them/ It proceeded also from
those churchyards where paupers were buried in large communal
graves, which were left open as long as there was room for
one more. 'How noisome the stench is that arises from these
holes so stow'd with dead bodies', said a health expert in 1721,
* especially in sultry seasons and after rain, one may appeal to
all who approach them/ Above, the air was dark with the
fumes from the industries of this coal-burning city, surrounded
as it was with a smoke-screen of brick-kilns in full blast,
In spite of the efforts of some city-fathers and benevolent
landlords, living conditions improved little for the urban worker.
On the other hand, the evidence suggests that his diet gained in
variety, though regional variations be-
fore the canals and turnpikes were
constructed must limit generalisation.
Bread, cheese and beer seem to have
been the basis. Generally, bread was
baked from wheat and barley, or wheat
and rye ; though in the north-east they
ate a rye or barley loaf, and in the north-
west they were limited to oatmeal.
Gradually during the century, more and
more workers advanced to pure wheaten
bread, so that at the end, innocent of
dieticians' charts, they looked down on
anything else. 'Rye and barley bread',
said Arthur Young in 1767, 'are looked
on with horror even by poor cottagers/
Meat was taken perhaps once a week;
but over much of the country the food
114
Brewing
was cold, and so not much In the
way of vegetables was con-
sumed, except In areas well
supplied with timber or coal.
Tea began the period as an
upper-class luxury and ended it
as a working man's necessity,
much to the horror of the re-
forming societies. Already in
the 'thirties, Dr Deering was
complaining that at Nottingham
'almost every Seamer, Sizer
and Winder will have her Tea
in a morning . . . and even a
common Washerwoman thinks
she has not had a proper
Breakfast without Tea and hot
buttered White Bread'. The
annual consumption of sugar
also rose, from four pounds a head at the start of the century,
to eight pounds in the middle and IS pounds at the end.
And the production of beer steadily outpaced the increase
in population, and state control maintained a stable price.
In London, porter was 3d. a quart till 1761 and 3%d. thereafter
till 1799, when it moved up to 4rf. Except for the gin-orgy
of the 'twenties, 'thirties and 'forties, beer was the standard
daily drink; and a wise one in view of the doubtful sources of
drinking water. The citizens of Nottingham used a fluid which
was pumped up by a joint-stock company from the River Leen,
the main sewer of the town. It was providential that they pos-
sessed one alehouse to every 80 or so inhabitants. And they
needed them, for the lower classes, like their tetters, performed
many of their daily tasks under alcoholic auspices. Benjamin
Franklin recorded how his printing shop near Lincoln's Inn
Fields always had a pot-boy in attendance. * My companion at
press*, he says, 'drank every day a pint before breakfast, a
pint at breakfast ... a pint between breakfast and dinner, a
pint in the afternoon about 6 o'clock, and another pint when he
115
Cock-fighting
had done his day's
work. ' The field-reeves
of Wigston chalked
themselves up a drink
every time they hired
a crow-scarer or took
out the town plough;
and the mug-rings are
still visible on their
account-books to con-
firm it. On a Saturday
night, a working man
received his wages in a public house ; if he went on a journey he
caught the wagon there; if he was out of work it was his em-
ployment-exchange. Even if he was sent to gaol, he could buy
as much beer as he could afford on the premises. Smaller
prisons were in public houses, like the old White Lyon in
Southwark.
Ail diversions were likewise drink-centred. 'All the amuse-
ments of the working people of the metropolis were immediately
connected with drinking*, said Francis Place, ' chair-clubs,
chanting-clubs, lottery-clubs, and every variety of club, in-
tended for amusement were always held at public-houses/ In
Chichester, according to a resident, farmers coming in to market
used 'to get drank and stay two or three days till their wives
came to fetch them Home'. In rural Northumberland there was
a pre-Christian atmosphere about the way Whit Monday's
racing was rounded off. 'They ended their recreation with
Carrouzing at the Ale-houses', says a diarist, 'and ye men
Kissing and toying away most of the night with their Mistresses.
Some with their real Sweethearts and others with their Ladys of
Pleasure/ Many ale-houses kept a pond for duck-hunting,
and customers in the Tottenham Court Road area used to
divert themselves by throwing a cat in and setting their dogs
on it.
Any fight to the death between members of the brute creation
drew a large crowd, and cock-fighting and bull-baiting were in
great demand. In the churchyards of Chichester on Shrove
116
LOWER-CLASS LIFE
Tuesday throwing stones at a cock tied to a stake at three
shots for Qd. was a great draw; and the rector of Bethnal Green
In the East End of London used to complain his parish-
ioners* devotion to * bullock-hanking* during divine service.
* I have seen them*, he said, * drive the animal through the
populous parts of the parish, force sticks with iron up
the body, put peas into the ears, and infuriate the beast, so as
to endanger the lives of all persons passing along the streets/
But human suffering was even more popular. Parson Woodforde
gave his servants time off to see a hanging in Norwich; London
journeymen took a day off every six weeks to enjoy the Tyburn
executions.
CRIME
Punishment may have suited the mood of brutalised cockneys,
but it scarcely fitted the crime. There were few murders, but
many executions; for most offences were against property.
Burglary, arson and highway robbery hit Georgian society
where it hurt most, and it let fly in a blind panic. New capital
offences were created in a wild stampede: 33 under George II
and 63 in the first 50 years of George III. With little or no
debate, Parliament raised the number of capital crimes from
about 50 at the start of the period to about 200 at the end.
You could be hanged for picking a pocket to the value of 12
pence, or for being found in the company of gipsies. Setting
fire to a town or to a heap of hay brought the same Nemesis.
This was one half of the
upper-class response to Jonathan Wild carted the streets, 1 721
the swelling army of
criminals; the other was
the self-help of the prop-
erty-owner. * One is
forced to travel, even at
noon*, Horace Walpole
told Horace Mann, 'as
if one was going to
battle/ The real solu-
tion an efficient
LOWER-CLASS LIFE
police-force was not available to Lockeians with their healthy
fear of adding to the powers of the state.
The severity of the criminal law impressed visitors from
Continental tyrannies, but public executions horrified them.
Even before the saturnalia at Tyburn, Londoners used to slip
the keepers at Newgate a few coins just to stare at the condemned
man. About 3,OOO saw M'Lean the highwayman and not only
the plebs. 'I am almost single in not having been to see him',
said Horace Walpole. "Lord Mountford, at the head of half
White's, w r ent the first day/ Then came the two-hour journey
by cart to the gallows, the manacled prisoner dressed in his
best and sitting on his own coffin. In view of all the toasts he
drank with the yelling crowds lining the route, he was mercifully
pretty drunk for the horrible proceedings at Tyburn, where
thousands more had bought seats in a grandstand erected by
Widow Proctor, the cow-keeper who owned the site. And he
would know nothing about the sale of his hangman's rope at
6d. an inch ; nor would he feel the eyes of the oglers who thronged
to see him dissected at Surgeons* Hall.
This exploitation of the baser instincts of the London
populace was viewed quite calmly by the authorities. Indeed,
the publicity was the whole point. 'Sir*, said Dr Johnson, a
humane man, 'executions are intended to draw spectators.
If they do not draw spectators they don't answer their purpose/
The pillory, the whipping at the cart's tail, the suspending of the
criminal's body in chains from a gibbet all were supposed to
be deterrent. The idea that he would be 'anatomised' was
believed to be especially frightening to a would-be thief.
However, the mounting total of hangings, reaching a record of
97 in 1785 in London and Middlesex alone, indicates flaws in
this diagnosis.
The real cause of the increase of robberies, apart from the
lack of police, was thought by foreigners to be the co-existence
of wealth and poverty on one another's door-steps. 'It appears
to me wonderful', wrote the German visitor Johann Archen-
holtz, 'that the crowds of poor wretches who continually fill
the streets of the metropolis, excited by the luxurious and effemi-
nate life of the great, have not some time or another entered
118
LOWER-CLASS LIFE
Into a general conspiracy to plunder them/ But his fears were
not realised In Georgian times, for the lower classes^ for the
most part, still made their protest in the form of rugged indivi-
dualism. They did engage In politics at times, of course^ but their
aggressive emotions were usually exploited by members of the
ruling circles for their own ends, like Bolingbroke Wilkes.
That is, until the violence culminating in the Gordon Riots of
1780 made the upper classes realise what fire they had been
playing with. After that, the lower classes set up in politics on
their own account; but even then most rioters aimed, not at the
general overthrow of the established order, but at the righting
of some particular wrong.
* Suppose the rich grind the face of the poor', asked John
Wesley, * what remedy against such oppression can he find in a
Christian country?' The remedy was usually the sudden out-
burst of sticks and stones, and broken heads, and houses in
flames. In 1749 the mob uprooted turnpikes In Bristol; In 1758
they tore down enclosures in Wiltshire. In Norwich in 1740
there was a five-day riot over the price of mackerel; at Leicester
in 1766 the crowd stopped every wagon entering the town and
The Gordon Riots: burning of Aldgnte Prism
sold the goods at their own
prices. At Kettering in 1740 a
500-a-side football match evol-
ved into an attack on a near-by
mill. Matthew Boulton was
attacked by 400 starving Cornish
copper-miners in 1787. He only
saved his life by giving them 20
guineas for drink. His partner
James Watt thought this soft
and said he should have called
out the troops. Methodist-bait-
ing often made the rabble go
berserk: John Wesley records
at least 60 riots in his Journals.
EDUCATION
Learning to read
Insolent and aggressive though
they could be, the lower classes
accepted the existing structure of society and government till
the last decades of the century. One reason why they did not
play at politics was their lack of education. Much was done by
private charity to remedy this, but only a small impression was
made on the prevailing ignorance. The upper and middle classes
were faced with the perennial problem: how to teach the masses
to be useful workers and upright citizens, without enabling them
to compete with their own children, and without poisoning
them with political aspirations. The Charity School movement
(an outlet for middle-class zeal mentioned in the last chapter)
was always on the horns of this dilemma. Under the auspices
of the S.P.C.K., groups of subscribers founded a large number of
these schools, especially in the first half of the period. The object
was to spread virtue among the poor by teaching them to read.
It was hoped that they would then soak themselves in the Bible,
the Catechism and the Whole Duty of Man. That the urchins
should grow up to read the Rights of Man was not part of the
programme. On the contrary, they were to be taught, to quote
Isaac Watts, 'to know what their station in life is, how mean
LOWER-CLASS LIFE
their circumstances, how necessary 'tis for them to be diligent,
laborious, honest and faithful, humble what
duties they owe to the rest of mankind particularly to their
superiors '. Also on the curriculum was a little writing arith-
metic and a good deal of spinning, knitting other lowly
tasks. An enthusiastic London vicar the Charity
School alumni were 'as much distinguished from what they were
before as is a tamed from a wild beast'; but cynical
Mandeville doubted whether learning led to virtue. *Vice in
general', he wrote, *is no where more predominant than where
arts and science flourish/ If we may believe the accounts of the
Methodists and Evangelicals, paganism was gaining on the
Charity Schools by mid-century.
But literacy was growing, Although only a small fraction of
the poor perhaps 4O ? GOO a year' went through their hands,
the Charity Schools were an important supplement to the exist-
ing educational resources: the older endowed schools* the
moribund apprenticeship system, the dame schools and the
village curates. A snowball of literacy was started which was to
roll on to menacing size. As we shall see y the religious re-
formers and the Sunday schools added their layers. And the
Industrial Revolution sharpened the wits and transformed the
habits of a skilled elite who knew what 1789 was ail about when
it came. By that time the lower classes were on the move.
They were no longer content to leave their political and social
welfare in the hands of their betters.
Further Reading
G. D. H. Cole and Raymond Postgate, The Peopk, 1746-1948,
University Paperbacks, 1961.
M. D. George, England in Transition, Pelican, IS5S.
London life in the Eighteenth Century, 1925* or London School of
Economics reprints, 1951.
J. J. Hecht, The Domestic Servant Chss in Eighteenth-Century England,
1956.
W. G. Hoskins, The Midland Peasant, 1957,
R. F. Wearmouth, Methodism and the Common of the
Century, 1945.
121
V
Cultural Life
SCIENCE
* There Is no occupation more worthy and delightful*, wrote
John Ray the biologist, 'than to contemplate the beauteous
works of nature and honour the infinite wisdom and goodness
of God/ And this accurately conveys the atmosphere of Georgian
intellectual life* During the generation before George I arrived
in England, a profound mental convulsion occurred, the results
of which are still unfolding. The scientific revolution wrenched
the Western mind out of its old rut, placed it on new rails and
sent it careering into the modern world. The genius of Newton
absorbed post-Renaissance experimental data, mathematical
skill and abstract speculation, and reduced it to a few laws of
beautiful simplicity and immense range. They seemed to
provide an exact explanation of the behaviour of every speck
of matter in the universe: the stars in the sky and the particles
on the earth.
Nature and Nature's Laws lay hid in Night:
God $aid> Let Newton be! and all was Light.
And Pope's life spans the vital years when the new outlook
spread to the educated classes. It is a watershed in intellectual
history; and Georgian culture is a joy-ride over the new
territory. Poets and painters, parsons and political thinkers,
doctors and mechanics, all went confidently forward in Newton's
light, and in the glow provided by the bonfire of medieval
superstition and dogma,
In physics, the picture sketched by Newton suffered little
change during our period, and
scientific advance was a matter
of filling in details provided by
more accurate observations and
more sophisticated mathematical
skills, though the latter were
mainly a Continental develop-
ment. The growing-point of
physics w r as electricity. In 1 709,
Francis Hauksbee developed the
first efficient friction-machine Sjr Im&c
for producing static electricity.
This was the start of a century of European-wide experiments and
parlour-tricks with electric sparks. Stephen Gray established
the difference between conductors and insulators, and in 1730
electrified a boy suspended from the ceiling by threads made of
hair. In 1752, Benjamin Franklin proved by his famous kite
experiment that lightning was a gigantic electric spark beating
the Russians by a year. His theoretical work produced a satis-
factory explanation of the distinction between positive and
negative electricity; and his practical flair the lightning-con-
ductor.
Another basic advance was Priestley's inspiration that
electricity works according to the same law as gravitation:
that is, that the attraction or repulsion between two electric
charges is inversely proportional to the square of the distance
between them. While, in the meantime, the aristocratic recluse,
Henry Cavendish, was pioneering ways of measuring electric
currents and formulating concepts like what is now called
'potential*. But he did not publish all his results, and many
had to be rediscovered in the next century by men like Faraday.
Towards the end of our period, attention was switched from
static to current electricity a move made possible by the
Italian Volta's invention of a simple electric ceil. In England,
Sir Humphry Davy made important discoveries in the border
territory between electricity and chemistry. By means of
electrolysis, he decomposed caustic potash and caustic soda
and found two new metals, potassium and sodium.
123
Agronomical demonstration with an orrery
This was typical of
the history of chemistry
in the Georgian period,
when many new sub-
stances were isolated for
the first time. This was
the century when chemi-
stry was revolutionised,
as physics had been
under the Stuarts; and
progress was due partly
to improved experimental techniques (especially the use of
quantitative methods) and partly to some inspired theorising
in France by Lavoisier, the Newton of this story. The British
contribution was mainly practical, and valuable information
was collected by a variety of experimenters who regarded their
work as a gentlemanly hobby. Stephen Hales, the perpetual
curate of Teddington, among other things invented an apparatus
for collecting gases over water. The Scots professor, Joseph
Black, followed up this crucial advance by the rigorous use of
the balance at every stage of his experiments. This enabled
him to discover a new gas, now called carbon dioxide. He
discovered that a given weight of chalk released the same
quantity of this gas, whether by heating or by the addition of a
dilute acid. He also discovered that there was a small quantity
of it in the atmosphere. This represented an entirely new
appreciation of the role of gases in the composition of matter,
and triggered off a long period of investigation into the
nature of * air', which could no longer be regarded as a simple
substance.
Advance in this field was first of all assisted, and then blocked,
by a concept which eventually had to be jettisoned. This was
phlogiston, an inflammable principle, which the German
professor Stahl postulated was released into the air whenever
anything burned. The ash was the original substance minus its
phlogiston. When quantitative methods showed the residue to
be heavier than the original substance (owing, as we should
say, to the absorption of oxygen on burning) Georgian chemists
124
CULTURAL LIFE
saved the theory by giving phlogiston a negative weight.
Much fruitful experimentation was stimulated by the mental
gymnastics Involved In accommodating this mythical substance,
with the results coming out mirror-fashion compared with the
modern view. Where we say 'oxygen*, they said 'minus
phlogiston*, and so on. Priestley actually collected some
oxygen, and realised that It supported life and combustion
better than air. But he could not take the plunge and called It
' dephlogistlcated air*. When Lord Shelbume (his patron at
that time) took him to Paris In 1774, he mentioned his find to
Lavoisier at dinner one day. The latter's mind was less muscle-
bound, and after a bout of Intense experimentation he succeeded
In making the theoretical somersault. Phlogiston was thrown
overboard. The one-fifth of the atmosphere which burning
things absorbed he called 'oxygen'; and the remaining four-
fifths he named 'azote' in English, 'nitrogen*.
In biology, no fundamental reappraisal occurred till the
nineteenth century, for the Georgian period was only the great
fact-collecting stage. Darwin's Insights would have been Im-
possible without the material accumulated by observers like his
grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, or Gilbert White of Selbome,
or Joseph Banks, who went with Cook to Australia and gave
Botany Bay its name. In the early years of the period, the Rev.
Stephen Hales published his findings In plant-physiology In his
Vegetable Staticks. Towards the end, John Hunter, the famous
surgeon, placed comparative anatomy on firm foundations with
his dissections of hundreds of different species of animals and
plants. But England's contribution was modest compared with,
say, Buffon's Histoire Natwellei and undoubtedly the greatest
single step forward was made by the Swedish botanist, Carl
Linnaeus. He classified plants according to their stamens and
pistils, and divided them Into genera and species, the basis of his
double-naming system which he got universally accepted. He
believed that each species was descended from an original
created by God (as men were descended from Adam); and,
though he had second thoughts In later life, he under-pinned
the belief in the Immutability of the species the chief mental
barrier to the acceptance of Darwin's thesis. Nevertheless, his
125
Chemist
system of identification made for rapid
progress over the whole field of bio-
logical studies.
In no branch of science was the
amateur more confidently expert than in
medicine; and we find that every diary-
and letter-writer had his own witches'
broth and patent cure-alls. William Byrd
from Virginia recommended rattlesnake
root for 'the pleurisy, the rheumatism,
and easing of pain in any part that pro-
ceeds from inflammation'. ' I drank snail
tea for breakfast', wrote the Hon. John
Byng, 'for my chest is very sore/ Henry
Fox believed in taking medicines 'in
postures that should make them long in
travelling through one's body, instead of hurrying them through,
post'. Lord Buckinghamshire dipped his gouty foot in cold water
and killed himself. Georgian medicine lacked its Linnaeus, and
the confused nomenclature tended to make treatment a hit-and-
miss affair. There was a rich variety of fevers : spotted, putrid,
brain, low, relapsing, intermittent and continued to mention
only a few. A small boy with a rash wrote home from his school
near High Wycombe to say that the school doctor 'calls it the
blisters, not the chicken pox and says that the chicken pox, the
watry jags, the Blisters and swine Pox are all the same Disorder
under different names '.
At the professional level there was much progress to record.
The plague had disappeared for good; inoculation checked
smallpox and vaccination conquered it. The link between dirt
and disease was grasped, and better hygiene reduced gaol-fever
and made child-birth less of a gamble with death. Midwifery
progressed as the lying-in hospitals were founded ; and a large
number of general hospitals were started by philanthropists
all over the country. In these, fundamental knowledge was
discovered and passed on to successive generations of better
educated practitioners, though the best medical schools were
still outside England. Hospitals were free, though, in the
19,6
CULTURAL LIFE
Georgian way, you usually had to know someone who knew a
governor before you could get in. At St Bartholomew's, you
also had to put down 195, 6d. for burial fees. This was return-
able, of course, if you recovered. Surgical skill also became
more widespread, particularly when William Hunter began to
add demonstrations and dissections to his lectures. Operations
were conducted without drugs, except brandy; but they were
not so hideously painful as they might seem. William Cheselden
at St Thomas's often extracted a stone from the bladder in less
than half a minute.
Newton survived into Georgian England, but the period
produced no other scientific genius. In fact, the country owes
its triumphs not to the concentration of talent in one or two
great men, but to the wide dispersal of the scientific habit of
mind among the people. When the truth is known, perhaps this
characteristic more than any other will account for the precocity
of England's economic growth. For the Industrial Revolution
was a whole collection of scientific experiments. The brewers
and distillers, bleachers and dyers, pot-throwers and iron-
smelters must be accorded a place in Georgian science ; and so
must the men who built the roads and machines, or boosted the
yield of meat and grain. Nor were these technological advances
the product of unlettered trial and error, as is sometimes
imagined. There were ample arrangements for business-men,
scientists and technicians to pick one another's brains; and the
cross-fertilization of ideas between John Roebuck, Joseph
Black and James Watt on the steam-engine was not exceptional.
Wedgwood supplied utensils for Priestley's chemical experi-
ments, while Priestley Investigated minerals of possible use at
Etruria.
Manufacturers who joined the Manchester Literary and
Ward in Guy's Hospital
CULTURAL LIFE
Philosophical Society could tap the knowledge of six Fellows
of the Royal Society among their colleagues. One member,
John Dalton, taught at the Manchester Academy using Lavoi-
sier's Elements of Chemistry as a text-book. The importance
of the academies has already been stressed ; but the adult thirst
for self-improvement was just as significant. Practically every
town had its regular visits from itinerant lecturers, like Dr
Thomas Garnett, whose lectures on chemistry, according to the
Manchester Mercury, were on its 'Application to the common
purposes of life, as well as to the useful Arts of Bleaching,
Dyeing, Agriculture, etc/.
PHILOSOPHY
The scientific outlook was not limited to merchandise, but
penetrated every nook and cranny of Georgian intellectual
life. * It would be very singular*, wrote Voltaire, who spread its
influence on the Continent, 'that all nature, all the planets,
should obey eternal laws, and that there should be a little
animal, five feet high, who, in contempt of these laws, could act
as he pleased, solely according to his caprice/ The philosophers
were all confident that what Newton had done for physics,
they could do for psychology, morals, sociology, politics,
aesthetics and religion. Collect enough facts, they thought,
discover the laws that God has built into the human condition,
and the perfectibility of man would be in sight. This was the
essence of the Age of Reason, and it was characterised in England
by empiricism rather than rationalism. A Georgian philosopher
did not balance a metaphysical mountain on an axiom or two;
but, following Locke, derived a few probable truths from a vast
array of facts*
Locke's unemotional approach, tolerant attitude, common-
sense language and factual bias set the tone for the whole
century. His rejection of 'innate ideas'; his sensationalist
psychology ; his reduction of human motives to the pursuit of
pleasure and the avoidance of pain; his hope of placing ' morality
among the sciences capable of demonstration* ; his social-contract
theory of politics; his belief in the 'reasonableness of Christi-
anity*; his support of Toleration: all formed the points from
18
CULTURAL LIFE
which later thinkers started. But they produced such an abun-
dance of bold formulations and seminal insights that a mere
sketch will have to suffice here.
Now that the old Christian certainties had been undermined,
the Georgians were intensely interested in finding a new basis
for morals ; and life for most of them was not a matter of re-
sisting the Devil, or suffering the burden of Original Sin, or
fleeing from the wrath to come, but finding happiness. *To
say truth % wrote Soame Jenyns, 'Happiness is the only thing of
real value in existence: neither riches, nor power, nor wisdom,
nor learning, nor strength, nor beauty, nor virtue, nor religion,
nor even life itself, being of any importance but as they contribute
to its production/ Of course, the pursuit of happiness was not the
same as chasing every passing pleasure; for the good man could
distinguish between his short-term and his long-term felicity.
But how did they deal with the evident possibility of a clash
between one man's happiness and another's, or that of society
as a whole? Some postulated a kind of Newtonian law which
harmonised the true long-term happiness of each with that of all.
The chief source of this optimistic view of the universe was
Lord Shaftesbury's influential Characteristicks of Men, Manners,
Opinions, Times, the chief ingredients of which formed die basis
of Pope's Essay on Man:
Thus God and "Nature link'd the geriral frame,
And bade Self-lorn and Social be the same.
Evil, according to this view, is an illusion caused by our Inability
to see the whole picture:
All Discord, Harmony not understood:
All partial Evil, universal Good;
And y spite of Pride, in erring Reason's spite*
One truth is char, Whatever is, is right.
Thus human poverty and pain are massaged away by Soame
Jenyns (whose book was thrashed by Johnson in a review)
with the theory * that the sufferings of individuals are absolutely
necessary to universal happiness'. The fact that in everyday
life virtue and happiness often fail to coincide was a great
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CULTURAL LIFE
Inconvenience to these thinkers. It was offset by theologians
like Paley with rewards and punishments after death. Another
way round the difficulty was to postulate, with Hutcheson, a
benevolence In man which can recognise and seek * the greatest
happiness of the greatest number*.
This characteristic devotion to things as they stood also
rings through all the hymns to the British constitution, founded
on the Revolution Settlement and the Protestant Succession.
With the old prop of Divine Right knocked away, Georgian
political theorists concentrated at first on finding an alternative
justification for political authority, based on reason instead of
faith. Locke's solution, again, was found generally acceptable,
with its contract theory, its defence of property, its belief in
government by consent, in toleration, in the minimal state, the
separation of powers and the ultimate right of resistance to
tyranny. With the foundations agreed on, theorists then began
to consider the other end of the problem: what governments
ought to do.
The answers were such as one would expect in the intellectual
climate of the time. The Scot, Adam Smith, in his Wealth of
Nations, founded the science of political economy on a philosophy
which harmonised well with the Essay on Man. If each man pur-
sued his own self-interest, he believed, there was a principle
inherent in economic life (the 'invisible hand') which ensured
that this produced the greatest good for all. It followed, then,
that for governments it was * the highest impertinence to pretend
to watch over the economy of private people'. Similarly, Jeremy
Bentham judged political action by its results, and his criterion
is the hedonistic principle we have already noticed. 'It is the
greatest happiness of the greatest number*, he said, 'that is the
measure of right and wrong/ All institutions which failed to
achieve this were to be thrown out and new ones created that
did. Not much in the way of government action to implement
this view can be credited to the Hanoverian period, but the
influence of these Georgian theorists on Victorian practice was
immense.
It was a blessing for eighteenth-century self-confidence, that
two of the subtlest thinkers of the time, Berkeley and Hume,
130
of CI&)
were not widely read, for they posed
problems which have had philosophers
running round in circles ever since.
Berkeley, a delightful Irish bishop and
elegant stylist with a leaning towards
mysticism, pursued the empiricist tracks
into very difficult terrain beyond the
point where Locke had stopped short.
If all that Locke knew were sense-data,
how could he know of the independence
of objects which produced them ? Berkeley
argued that ideas were the only things
we could be sure of, and that the ex-
ternal world depended for its existence
on being perceived. But tables and chairs
did not go in and out of existence
according to whether we perceived them
or not: their continuance was guaranteed by the fact that they
were constantly perceived by the mind of God.
One has doubts about including Hume here, for he was a
Scot, who wrote his masterpiece. The Treatise of Human
Nature, in Paris, and was celebrated in the Georgian period
primarily as a historian. He drove right through rationalism
and came out the other side a complete sceptic. He dug below
the foundations of that reason which the eighteenth century
thought would solve all problems, and found that they rested on
sand. He not only demolished miracles, but even made untenable
the argument from design, on which, as we shall see, the Deists
depended for the belief in the existence of a deity. Not content
with denying the possibility of reason discovering a deductive
morality, he dethroned reason altogether from its governing
role in moral action. 'Reason is, and ought only to be', he said,
* the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other
office than to serve and obey them/ And before he had finished
he had laid waste every inch of empiricist territory by with-
holding the certificate of certainty from every particle of our
Inductive knowledge. The assumption of causation, upon which
the whole of science depended, was grounded, according to
IS!
CULTURAL LIFE
him, on nothing firmer than coincidence. 'All our reasonings
concerning causes and effects are deriv'd from nothing but
custom*, he said.
How did a philosophic mind survive such nuclear destruction?
Hume fell back on common-sense. *I dine, I play a game of
backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends ; and
when, after three or four hours* amusement, I wou'd return to
these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain'd, and ridicu-
lous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any
farther/
RELIGION
The intellectual atmosphere of the century following Newton
and Locke did not encourage an intense religious life. Nor, on
the other hand, did it lead to atheism. The argument from
design convinced most, whether Deist, Latitudinarian or Dis-
senter. "The works of Nature', said Locke, * every where suffici-
ently evidence a Deity/ Deists like Tindal, Bolingbroke or Tom
Paine believed in 'natural religion', deduced by reason from the
facts of nature. Revelation was unnecessary; mysterious matters
like the miracles or the prophecies were against common-sense.
A benevolent deity had set the universe going and then left
It to its own devices, they said. But deism was never very strong
in England, partly because Christians like Butler and sceptics
like Hume had demolished its arguments; and partly because
(unlike in France) the Estab-
lished Church was only a
logical step or two away from
it.
The Latitudinarians believed
that 'natural religion' was
incomplete without Revelation,
which was also reasonable. The
title of Locke's treatise, The
Reasonableness of Christianity,
sums up their position. And
the sermons of Archbishop
Tillotson (the favourite read-
Bapthm
CULTURAL LIFE
Ing of the Augustan Church) epitomise their cool, tolerant and
prosaic attitude to religious life. His sermons on His command-
ments are not grievous and The advantage of religion to are
two examples of the tendency to reduce Christianity to good
behaviour In everyday life. The preoccupation of the Georgians
with social morality is here again apparent. Horace Walpole
went to church only to set an example to the servants. * A good
moral sermon may Instruct and benefit them*, he said.
Church service
'Enthusiasm* was disdained: it was Irrational, It was vulgar
and it smacked of the religious turmoil of the previous age,
now happily over for a church secure in the Protestant
Succession.
After the rebellion of 1715, Dudley Ryder heard the Bishop
of Salisbury preach * a very good honest sermon full of abhor-
rence of the rebellion and all popish principles*. Aspiring clergy
had to toe the right political line, for the grandees, like New-
castle, who controlled the state machine, made promotion
153
CULTURAL LIFE
depend on It. William Warburton provided theoretical founda-
tions In his Alliance between Church and State. ' The Church shall
apply all its Influence in the service of the State', he wrote,
* . . the State shall support and protect the Church/ The
consequence was pluralism and absenteeism, and fashionable
parsons like Johnson's school-friend, Dr Taylor. * His size, and
figure, and countenance, and manner', says Boswell, 'were
that of a hearty English 'Squire, with the parson super-induced.'
Such clerics spent their stipends on society and politics, and
hired a curate at ^O a year to do their ecclesiastical chores for
them. And the situation steadily deteriorated with rapid
industrialisation. With the growth and movement of the masses,
the distribution of churches came to have about as much relation
to population-density as the Parliamentary constituencies. It
was thus not surprising that 'knees and hassocks are well-nigh
divorc'd % as Cowper put it.
The Nonconformist congregations, still suffering from civil
disabilities, but secure in their toleration, were not immune
from the prevailing tepid atmosphere. One member, Dudley
Ryder, thought the differences between Dissent and the Estab-
lishment were 'very small and trifling'. 'For my own part', he
said, 'I could communicate with either of them.' But in all
churches there were bishops, parsons and pastors who performed
their duties with zeal, and who carried the seventeenth-century
religious warmth through into the Georgian period. And the
highly intellectualised approach to religion could not satisfy
human nature for ever, any more than it could in literature or
philosophy. In any case, there was growing at the bottom of the
social scale a mass of workers whose life was a savage struggle.
They did not know anything about the intricacies of pre-
destination, or the Trinity, or the argument from design; and
did not want to know, either. They were thirsting for a warmer
draught: for faith, which, as Wesley said in 1738, is 'not barely
a speculative, rational thing, a cold lifeless assent, a train of
ideas in the head, but also a disposition of the heart'.
The Evangelical Revival, which was visible from the 'forties
onwards, affected Dissent and Church of England alike. The
greatest inspiration for it was William Law's A Serious Call
134
CULTURAL LIFE
to a Devout and Holy Life. This was no essay in rational calcula-
tion, but a moving appeal to the heart. Here and there, mini-
sters like Newton at Olney, Grimshaw at Haworth, Fletcher at
Madeley and Simeon at Cambridge responded, devoted
their lives to the conversion of their flocks back to vital religion.
The most effective, of course, was John Wesley, who
the vital Innovation of becoming an Itinerant preacher. Alto-
gether, he travelled a quarter of a million miles,
sometimes two or three sermons a day, to a handful In a village,
or a crowd of 20,000 In an Industrial town. Where the
parson was hostile, as he often was, he spoke outside In the
fields. And his theme was not Augustan prudential morality,
but 'plain, old Bible Christianity'; and he preached it with a
dramatic force that swept thousands into a new mode of life.
Sometimes his converts wept, and screamed and fell down In
convulsions. But wherever he passed, he organised a small
group of the faithful to carry on the work. For he was a powerful
and Inventive administrator, and gradually constructed a vast
pyramid of control, based on the little "bands* at the bottom.
Then came the 'circuits' and * districts *, with the
Conference at the top all under his command.
This was all too much for the Church of England to stomach,
particularly when he allowed laymen to administer the sacra-
ments, and ordained ministers to serve In the newly independent
The mobbing of John ffiesky at
United States. Wesley himself wished his
community to remain fully a part of the
Church, but after his death the inevitable
secession occurred. And the Methodist
Church, together with the other Evangeli-
cal congregations, swelled into the most
powerful of all the forces which were
about to transform Georgian cultural life
altogether.
LITERATURE
Georgian creative writers are now better
appreciated than they were in Victorian
times, when they were esteemed princi-
Samud Johnson pally as models of what to avoid. They
derived their characteristics partly from
the intellectual atmosphere just described. The all-purpose
philosophy of reason rolls smoothly through Pope's Essay on
Man, so lubricated and sprung that no jolts are felt from stones
left unturned and no sound is heard but the beat of the metre.
And many lesser examples of this cerebral, ruminative, witty
and tightly constructed verse provided aspiring gentry and
merchants with predigested morsels of the prevailing ideology,
untouched by Humean hands. But the nature of this literature
was also partly due to the social context, and the place of the
writer in it.
The social, political and religious violence of Stuart times
was now over, and the great families controlled a society that
seemed as stable as the Newtonian universe itself. They patro-
nised writers who aimed to keep it that way. The literary
world had expanded from the Court to the Town, but it was
still intimate enough for poets to speak directly to a homo-
geneous audience, whose education had sensitised them to the
classical echoes in the satires and pastorals, and whose know-
ledge of the world enabled them to catch the wicked references
to contemporary scandal. Moreover, writers lived close to the
hub of social and political life. They fraternised with the magnates
in coffee-houses and routs, and depended partly on their patro-
136
CULTURAL LIFE
nage, as Swift did on Hariey. Some magnates, like Chesterfield,
Bolingbroke or Horace Walpole, were authors on their own
account. Subject-matter in these circumstances to be
public rather than private, social rather individual,
rather than rural. The poet was a a Job of work in
the world rather than a visionary exploring his soul. His
business, said Johnson, was *to examine, not the individual, but
the species ; to remark general properties '.
Poetry did not yet provide a substitute for religion, but
up into pleasing form ' what oft was thought but ne'er so well
expressed*, as Pope put it. Johnson praised Gray*s Elegy
it abounded 'with images which find a mirror In every mind,
and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo*.
Politics, business, agriculture and all the daily of
man in society were proper subjects for verse, rather the
solitary imaginings of the sufferer grappling with his
The head, not the heart, held the easy flow of the language and
the precise unfolding of the thought within the confines of the
heroic couplet. Poetic diction like Cowper's * feathered tribes
domestic' and 'public hives of puerile resort" helped to pre-
serve propriety. And the use of irony,
puns, epigrams, parallelisms and anti-
theses indicate fancy rather than imagi-
nation. This was the Age of Reason; but
Swift's savage indignation at the failure
of the human race to rise to its
possibilities, Pope's filthy smearing of
his enemies, Johnson's fear of death and
Cowper's conviction that he was marked
for eternal damnation all indicate what
emotions were damped down beneath
the exquisite surface.
And in the second half of the century,
this surface began to crumble with the ex-
pansion of the business and professional
classes. As the marketing of literature
evolved from private patronage, through
subscription publishing, to publishing
1 37
Oliver Goldsmith
by booksellers, the writer became less
of a hired entertainer of the haut monde
and more of an independent professional
man. He was now alone, addressing an
audience whose numbers were swelling,
and whose wants were unpredictable. In
these conditions, the conventions of
Augustan literature could not go on for
ever.
The new state of affairs is seen early
in prose, and the sharp eye of Defoe was
quick to notice. 'Writing', he said in
1725, '. . .is become a very consider-
able Branch of the English Commerce/
In this medium, the eighteenth century
invented two new literary forms: the
periodical-essay and the novel. Steele and Addison in their Tatler
and Spectator started a fashion in Queen Anne's reign which
Johnson and Goldsmith sustained under the Georges. Addison's
aim was to bring 'philosophy out of closets and libraries,
schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-
tables and in coffee-houses'. And these essays steadily civilised
the climbing gentlemen and merchants, improving their manners
and morals, as well as clarifying their punctuation and pinning
down their spelling. This stream of didacticism is one of the
headwaters of middle-class morality, and Victorian tender-
mindedness is clearly apparent in Addison.
It was a working journalist, outside the inner ring of patro-
nised authors, who wrote the first full-scale narrative about real
people against a real background. Robinson Crusoe, which came
out in 1719, with three editions in four months, made over
,l,QOO for its publisher; and is now better known in every
country in the world than Defoe is in his. In the 'forties,
Richardson and Fielding raised fiction to a higher level with their
fuller orchestration of character and plot, their comprehensive
survey of the social scene and detailed analysis of the human
psyche. Together with the picaresque Smollett full of vigorous
incident, the off-centre Sterne with his cerebral sophistication,
138
CULTURAL LIFE
and many other followers, they the
most potent literary force of the world,
Little need be said of Georgian the middle-
class invasion of the playhouse is the for the
sentimentality of the tragedy the of
the comedy. Perhaps good work not be the
stage was partly occupied by the quality in
Drury Lane Theatre, designed by Robert Ail am in 1773
when people dropped in for a scene or two mainly to gaze at
the audience. William Byrd, the American, sometimes called
in at a show or two on his way to the coffee-house. He found
difficulty in keeping awake, unless there was an attractive girl
in the audience. Perhaps dramatic illusion was hard to achieve
when Covent Garden and Drury Lane had a row of spikes
across the front of the stage ; when Caesar was played in a full-
bottom wig ; when the spectators were free with their cat-calls
and guffaws if they were not chatting with one another; and when
139
CULTURAL LIFE
a shower of rotten fruit might be the prologue to an attempt to
break the place up, benches, boxes, scenery and all. Perhaps it
was the star-system, which Garrick exploited so well. Perhaps
the blame can be laid on the pitiful remuneration which drama-
tists received: it left the field too free for wealthy amateurs
like Gentlemen Johnny Burgoyne to get their works staged.
Whatever the reason, apart from those of Colman, Goldsmith
or Sheridan, Georgian plays are not often revived.
MUSIC
Upper-class audiences behaved little better at the opera. Here
the composers, performers and conductors were mostly foreign.
According to Hervey, musicians could make far more money in
England than anywhere else in Europe. 'My countrymen', he
said, 'give them 3,000 a year to come there to have the
pleasure of hissing them off when they are there/ Music-
lovers seemed less interested in the rule-ridden Italian operas
than in forming cliques to support rival stars, like the two
fighting prima donnas, Cuzzoni and Faustina. Open warfare
finally broke out between the partisans of these two when hisses
and cat-calls closed down Buononincini's Astyanax in June 1727.
A later battle washed the steps of the throne or rather the royal
family were knee-deep in it. George II supported Handel at
Covent Garden, while Frederick Prince of Wales and the
opposition leaders formed a rival establishment at Lincoln's Inn
Fields. When Handel, an
Harpsichordist inept political tactician,
wrote an anthem for
Frederick's marriage,
the king dropped him
like a hot brick, with
the result that he and
Covent Garden went
bankrupt.
This was not Handel's
only financial collapse,
for he was used to a
fickle public as well as a
Gwrge Frtderuk
peevish monarch. His first
oratorios, Esther, Deborah
Athaliah, were hits; but then
Saul and Israel fell flat; and
London's reception of the
Messiah was really hostile. The
clergy, even, pronounced it
irreligious. This was the pot
calling the kettle black; but
George II differed. He rose to
his feet at the Hallelujah Chorus,
inaugurating an English custom
which still survives. Shortly
after this, in the "forties, Handel
really moved back into favour,
with his Te Deum to celebrate
Dettingen, his Judas Maccabaeus
to honour the defeat of the Forty-five, and his Music for the
Royal Fireworks to salute the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle.
In the second half of the period, the public to support
native talent. The early success of the Beggar's (which
was based on folk-tunes) had not been followed up; but in the
'sixties Thomas Arne, the only Georgian composer of any
merit, started the long vogue of the ballad opera with his Low
272 a Village. He directed the orchestra at Vauxhall Gardens;
and the popularity of the concerts there and at Ranelagh (where
Burney played the organ) and at Carlisle House in Soho (where
J. C. Bach was in charge ) supports the other evidence that all ranks
found a deep pleasure in music, even if their taste was unsophisti-
cated. Dr Johnson, who confessed that 'he was very insensible
to the power of rausick', was not typical. What does, perhaps,
typify the modest Georgian talent in this field is the wealth of
popular songs like * Where the bee sucks ' and * Lass of Richmond
Hill ' which date from this period. The hymns tell the story.
PAINTING
In the visual arts, Georgian deference to foreign standards was
equally slavish. The Grand Tour was habit-forming, and the
141
CULTURAL LIFE
London Magazine in 1733 complained that the dealers were
'continually importing shiploads of dead Christs, Holy Families,
Madonnas, and other dismal dark subjects*. These found a wel-
come home in Palladian mansions. On the other hand, the
England of the Protestant Succession and constitutional
monarchy was temperamentally unfitted to reproduce the
rhetoric of baroque Europe. The Georgian gentry were not
prepared for 'poetical painting', according to Henry Fuseli,
whose bent lay in that direction. ' Portrait with them is every-
thing. Their taste and feelings all go to realities/ This quality
is visible in the success of Kneller's standardised likenesses,
Stubbs' exact delineation of horses and dogs, Joseph Wright of
Derby's reproductions of scientific and industrial episodes, and
the portraits and conversation-pieces of Hogarth, Reynolds,
Gainsborough, Romney and the rest.
Reynolds lectured in support of the gusto grander and
painters (like writers) aimed at the 'general idea'. This
justified them in 'elevating' their subjects, in modifying details
of dress and appearance in order to bring out the 'nobler parts' :
say, the statesmanlike qualities of a cabinet-minister, or the sea-
worthiness of an admiral. Sometimes, this simply meant leaving
out the warts. Queen Caroline told Zincke, the German enamel-
ler, not to make the king look
more than 25. George told him
not to make the queen look
above 28 though she was
about two years his junior. But
Reynolds aimed at the ideal. In
fact, 'face-painting' for him was
inferior to the highest art of
all history-painting at which
the two Americans, West and
Copley, were so successful.
Fortunately, with Reynolds this
was all theory; and his psycho-
logical intuition makes him as
great as anyone painting in
Europe at that time. Modem
William Hogarth
William Hfsgarth Dot id Garrici:
taste, perhaps, is more sym-
pathetic to Gainsborough, with
his more delicate touch, more
sensitive insight into character,
and his natural, rather than con-
ventionalised, poses and back-
grounds.
Certainly, Georgian taste did
not appreciate the ruthless
honesty of Hogarth's portraits ;
and fashionable people did not
run the hazard of giving him
commissions. On the other hand, the engravings of what Garrick
called his 'pictur'd Morals' had a wide sale with the public at
large. These sets of documentary social criticism were strikingly
original. They were *a field*, Hogarth said, "not broken up in
any country or any age' and well cultivated by Rowlandson
and Gillray, and by cartoonists ever since. Like the full-blooded
novels of his contemporary Fielding, they are Georgian England
to the life.
ARCHITECTURE
The formation of the Royal Academy in 1768 heralded, not the
hardening of Georgian art into its mould, but the break-up of
standards which was bound to occur with the elevation of the
artist to a professional level. It happened in literature; and a
similar evolution can be seen in architecture. At the start of the
period, architects tended to be under the thumb of the great
magnates who patronised them. The Duchess of Marlborough,
who found Vanbrugh too independent-minded at Blenheim, said
that 'anybody that has sense, with the best workmen of all
sorts, could make a better house without an architect*. Lord
Burlington, and others, did. And he, more than anyone, set the
fashion for patrician building for which Georgian England is
renowned, and which its devotees can still enjoy, not only in
London, Bristol or York, but also in Boston, Massachusetts, or
Newport, Rhode Island.
Burlington returned from the Grand Tour in 17 15 in love with
143
CULTURAL LIFE
the work of Palladio, the Italian Renaissance architect. His
enthusiasm swung English building on to its new tack, helped
by the Influence of two books which began publication in the
same year. These were Vitrumus Britannicus, by Colen Campbell,
and the translation of Palladio *s I quattro libri dell' architettura,
with plates by Giacomo Leoni. The great Whig families
preferred the clarity and balance of the new rules to the near-
baroque of the previous age. Wren, Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor
now seemed too theatrical and extravagant, smacking of
popery and absolute monarchy. Official building naturally
went the same way; and soon the Office of Works, which had
been dominated till then by these three, was filled by Burlington
men.
There followed an era of splendid architecture. Year after
year, in every corner of the kingdom, country palaces and city
mansions, churches and colleges, town-halls and customs-
houses, farm-houses and assembly-rooms rose from the drawing-
boards of Campbell, Leoni, Flitcroft, Kent (the genius of the
group) and lesser men following their lead. Counterpoint
was provided by Gibbs, who built more in the Wren tradition.
One brilliant innovation was the treatment of whole rows of
houses as single units in the classical manner. Grosvenor
North Parade, Bath, in 1777
CULTURAL LIFE
Square in the 'thirties began a style of town-planning which
was followed by other London streets and squares, and wonder-
fully exploited in the circuses and crescents of centres like Bath
and Buxton and Brighton, which had the good fortune to expand
rapidly in the latter part of this period.
Later Georgian times saw an advance in the status of the
architect. He ceased to get his board and lodging as part of a
noble retinue, and became an independent virtuoso, courted by
the great. At the same time, Augustan certainties began to
waver. Historical research was revealing that classical architec-
ture was much less hide-bound than the version of it which the
Renaissance had handed on. An appreciation of medieval work
also emerged, and a taste for Chinese and Indian styles. The
late-Georgian architect thus has a wider choice of styles to
exploit, and, with the expansion of the business community,
a more varied clientele to satisfy. The way was clear for the
more eclectic work of Sir William Chambers, the personal
manner of Robert Adam, and the architectural free-for-all with
which the period ended.
Further Reading
H. Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, 1957.
A. R. Hall, The Scientific Revolution, 1954.
Basil Willey, The Eighteenth Century Background, 1940.
G. R. Cragg, The Church and the Age of Reason, Pelican, 1961.
N. Sykes, Church and State in England in the Eighteenth Century y 1934.
David Daiches, A Critical History of English Literature ; Vol. II, 1961.
Boris Ford (ed.), The Pelican Guide to English Literature, Vol. 4: From
Dry den to Johnson, 1957.
E. K. Water-house, Painting in Britain, 16SO-179Q, Pelican History of
Art, 1953.
J. N. Summerson, Architecture in Britain, 153Q-183O, Pelican History of
Art, 1953.
145
VI
The End of
Georgian England
The beginning of the end of the Georgian era is plainly visible
in the early 'eighties. In those years, the graphs of economic
activity took a sharp turn upwards. In 178, Watt took out a
patent for the Sun and Planet gear, which enabled his steam-
engine to turn machinery. In 1783 the American colonies gained
their independence, the younger Pitt became Prime Minister,
and Charles James Fox advanced the novel constitutional opinion
that the House of Commons could tell the king what ministers
to appoint. In 1784, Cartwright invented his power-loom;
Dr Johnson died; and Henry Cort took out his puddling and
rolling patent for the mass-production of wrought iron. In
1785, Pitt introduced a motion for parliamentary reform; the
first steam-driven spinning mill opened; and Wilberforce was
converted to Evangelicalism. The rate of social change accelera-
ted; and in 1789 the fall of the Bastille began a series of
traumatic experiences, after which neither England nor Europe
could ever be the same again.
POLITICS
The personal authority of the monarch was on the wane. The
failure of the American war, to which George III was so
personally committed, threw him into the hands of his enemies,
the Rockingham Whigs, who were out to win back for the
great aristocratic families the power they had enjoyed under the
Pelhams during George IFs old age. The programme of Econo-
mical Reform, which they forced down the king's throat, aimed
146
Ill
at reducing royal patronage and
rousing 4 Country' support, so
that they could rule undisturbed,
George out-manoeuvred them,
and eventually found what he
thought was his man. Pitt formed
a minority government in late
1783, and he and the king
obstinately survived the attacks
of Fox and Burke, while John
Robinson organised the election
of March, 1784. This, in time-
honoured Georgian fashion, pro-
duced a House of Commons'
majority for the new ministers.
But this victory was as much the
result of popular support as
royal influence, for the body of
voters were not yet willing to see the royal power pared down
to Victorian size. Fox was too far ahead of them; and, in any
case, they had been thoroughly scared by the radical movement,
This began in the 'sixties and 'seventies, when the libel-
trials of Wilkes, the refusal of the House of Commons to let
him sit for Middlesex, the dispute with the Americans and the
Irish made it appear that the corrupt Georgian parliament
was more dangerous to liberty than the Stuart been.
These struggles led to some bold re-thinking over the whole
range of political institutions. They brought to the surface a
liberal tradition which had been steadily flowing underground
since the seventeenth century, and which was swollen now by
rationalistic schemes from the Continental Enlightenment. For
these theorists, 1688 had not gone far enough; but they were
supported by many more who were only anxious to return the
constitution to its Revolutionary purity.
For the radical movement at first to be another of
those respectable 'Country*, "Patriot* or 'Tory' crowds,
which opposition politicians had long been used to bringing
out on the streets to serve their own ends. But when it started
147
John IFilkes
to paddle its own canoe, to demand
parliamentary reform, and to exploit
new methods of agitation like mass-
meetings, remonstrances and instruc-
tions to M.P.s, the machine-politicians
and the country-gentry began to have
second thoughts. And when it organised
itself into an Association on a nation-
wide scale, and when its big campaign
of 1779 led to the Gordon Riots in 1780
(when London was at the mercy of a
drunken mob for several days), the
Rockinghams and the Shelburnes, and
even the Wilkeses, realised they had
bitten off more than they could chew.
The mass of the people rallied round
Pitt and the throne. The French
Revolution confirmed their loyalty, and the ensuing war stiffened
it with patriotism. It was the radical philosopher, Joseph
Priestley, whose house was burned down by the mob in the
Birmingham riots. But the radical movement was not dead. The
year 1780 left behind a hard core of agitators idealists and
cranks, liberal-minded aristocrats and angry working-men,
radical Dissenters and atheistic planners who built upon the
imperishable experience of that year. They were given new
hope by the French Revolution, and new numbers by the
Industrial Revolution. Whenever business slumped and food was
short, during the war and the post-war depression, they swelled
their ranks and perfected their techniques. Their pressure was
so great by 1832 that parliamentary reform was at last conceded.
The Whigs, fearing revolution, abolished the rotten boroughs
and gave the upper-middle class the vote, to save England from
democracy.
By that time the power of the crown was only a ghost. The
election of I 834 showed that the king could no longer guarantee
a majority for the ministers of his choice. He had lost his patro-
nage; and this was due, not to the Economic Reforms of Burke
and the Rockingham Whigs, but to the administrative reforms
148
THE END OF GEORGIAN ENGLAND
of Pitt George Ill's choice, and idol of the Tories, In the
interests of economy and efficiency, he initiated in
government departments which were quietly by
succeeding ministries. Public officials to receive
salaries, instead of making what they could of
perquisites. Their appointment and promotion to
on merit rather than political connection. Similar
occurred in the armed forces and the Church.
England fighting revolutionary France could no
the incompetence and waste of government by favouritism; but
the substitution of civil servants for 'placemen* was trans-
forming the political scene.
Other forces were pushing in the same direction. George Ill's
insanity meant a stronger Prime Minister; and Pitt's grip over
his cabinet and House of Commons was firmer than of any
previous minister. Moreover, politics was ceasing to be solely
concerned with foreign affairs, and was becoming what it is now:
a matter of Commissions of Enquiry, and White Papers
House of Commons
THE END OF GEORGIAN ENGLAND
Acts of Parliament. Industrial growth and the massing of the
population made it impossible to leave social problems to the
initiative of the Justices and the borough councillors. The
result was that governments could no longer deal with problems
as they came along, facing parliament now and then, when extra
sailors for the navy, or a subsidy for a German elector needed
its consent. Prime Ministers from Pitt onwards had programmes,
and they needed steady majorities to put them into legislative
form. And this involved the slow construction of parties, based
on principle rather than patronage. The placemen were dwind-
ling; and so were the independents, as they were drawn into
one side of the battle or the other. Later Georgian England was
taking the first steps towards the two-party system of Victorian
times.
The little world of Georgian politics was thus expanding
beyond the king and his circle of grandees. The radical move-
ment showed that the electorate, and the masses outside that,
were no longer content to sit quietly while their destinies were
decided for them far above their heads. The middle classes were
expanding; and at least the skilled section of the working classes
was getting enough education to read parliamentary debates
and government reports, as well as the newspapers, themselves
being industrialised. England was far from democracy, but the
welfare of the people could no longer be ignored by those in
power.
Political theory \vas also increasingly concerned with allevia-
ting human suffering; a perhaps not unexpected culmination of
an era which regarded life as a search for happiness, with reason
as the guide. The Dissenters proved very fertile in speculation.
Having no orthodoxy to defend, they were drawn into some very
adventurous thinking; while Churchmen sought more subtle
ways of defending the status quo. Even a Watson, whose refusal
to become a government scribe condemned him to a lifetime
on the bottom rung of the episcopal ladder, could preach a
sermon on 'The Wisdom and Goodness of God in having made
both rich and poor'. In contrast, Richard Price and Joseph
Priestley, both Dissenting ministers, were prominent theorists
in the radical movement from Wilkes* time onward. Starting
150
Tom Paine
from an emphasis on the natural rights
side of Locke, these radicals reached
some very democratic conclusions, In-
deductive methods which sometimes led
them astray from the observable be-
haviour of man in society. The deist,
Tom Paine, though a practising revolu-
tionary in America and in France,
followed the same rationalist route in
the Rights of Man. "In order to a
clear and just idea of the design and end
of government/ he said, Met us suppose
a small number of persons settled in
some sequestered part of the earth.' But the most thorough-
going pursuit of pure reason is to be found in William Godwin's
Political Justice, which so inspired Wordsworth, Coleridge and
Shelley. Godwin, the son and grandson of Dissenting ministers,
had a congregation at Stowmarket till reason and the
led him into atheism. Convinced that reason would to the
reign of virtue were it not for the corrupting influence of
and political institutions, he proposed to abolish all, and
build society afresh in the light of naked reason. With his
free-thinking, his high moral tone and his exciting
he is the culmination of the Age of Reason, its
were blasted by the failure of the French revolutionaries to live
up to them.
The great break with this rationalist tradition was made by
Burke, whose writings on aesthetics, morals politics are
filled with that awareness of the value of feeling, instinct and
tradition, wHich was also revolutionising literature and the arts.
This supporter of the Americans in 1776, and hammer of George
III, broke with Fox over the French Revolution, and with his
Reflections became the founder of modem conservatism. Even
George III said that it was 'a good book, a very book,
and every gentleman ought to read it'. Burke preferred the
ancient institutions which had slowly evolved through history to
the blueprints of the abstract calculators. "The science of con-
structing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is,
151
THE END OF GEORGIAN ENGLAND
like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori.*
With his feet firmly on the ground of day-to-day politics, he had
a profound appreciation of the complexity of human nature and
society. 'Polities', he said, 'ought to be adjusted, not to human
reasonings, but to human nature; of which the reason is but a
part, and by no means the greatest part/ For better or worse,
Burke's pragmatism has affected the growth of English institu-
tions ever since.
INDUSTRY
The politicians were now having to face new problems thrown
up by the runaway industrial growth which began in the 'eighties
and which was bound up, in ways not fully understood, with the
growth of the population. This latter phenomenon is probably
the most powerful of the forces which were wrecking the Georg-
ian way of life, but, unfortunately, its causes are far from clear.
Whether it was mainly due to a fall in the death-rate, or a
rise in the birth-rate, or a combination of the two, is still an
open question; particularly as we are not very sure exactly
what these rates were. The falling death-rate was probably
due to a number of factors: better food-supply, and better
housing; the decline in gin-drinking and the increase in the
supply of soap; the paving and draining of the streets; the
wearing of easily washable cottons instead of woollens;
inoculation, vaccination and many other medical advances.
Perhaps the ravages of disease in the middle years of the
century produced a more resistant population later ; perhaps the
diseases themselves became less virulent.
And the fall in the death-rate probably increased the popula-
tion less by adding to the numbers of surviving adults than by
preserving from death children and adolescents who would
later have children. In other words, the death-rate acted via the
birth-rate. And the latter, of course, was affected by other factors.
The improved standard of living may have increased fertility.
The improvements in transport helped, for would-be husbands
and wives were given a wider area of choice, and many found
partners who would have remained unmarried earlier in the
century. This is one of the ways in which the Industrial Revolution
15
nj
impinges on the population rise.
Another Is the breakdown of
the apprenticeship system which
encouraged people to marry
earlier. The changes on the land
had the same effect, by elimina-
ting the cottagers and increasing
the size of farms. This process
swelled the ranks of the farm-
labourers, who now married and
settled in cottages, instead of living in the farmers'
as bachelors. The quickening economic activity
encouraged workers to have more children by it
to feed and clothe them. Or, as Arthur Young thought, by
providing jobs for them, 'Away! my boys', he "get
children, they are worth more than ever they were/
Whatever the causes, the population graph wing in the
'eighties, and soared upwards through the nineteenth century.
And, in its turn, It was one of the important stimulants of
economic growth. It increased production by extending the
demand for goods; and it made this feasible by supplying the
necessary labour. During the "twenties, 'thirties and 'forties,
shortage of skilled labour had been one of the of the
slowing down of that business activity which had so
buoyant since late Stuart times. It was nothing In the
eighteenth century to find employers desperately for
staff in one part of the country, and widespread unemployment
near by. The mobility of labour was, of course, reduced by the
poor-law system and by the inadequate transport arrangements;
but, apart from that, the Georgian worker was not one to move
automatically to higher wages, or to work as regularly or as
long as possible. That was the Victorian worker, and he was
not yet born; or, rather, he had not been made,
One of the tasks of the first generations of industrial entre-
preneurs was to create a labour force out of intractable material.
The low r er classes, before the factories came, were used to the
greater freedom and easier rhythm of farming or domestic
industry. The farm-labourer worked long hours in the summer,
16$
THE END OF GEORGIAN ENGLAND
enjoyed a great deal of leisure in the winter. The weaver
working in his own home could take his own decisions about
when to work and when to rest. And irregular habits were
encouraged by an economic system which went by fits and starts,
according to the season, the weather, the fashion, the trade-
cycle or the cycle of war and peace. Weavers often left their
looms to get the harvest in. The fulling-mills of Yorkshire
often closed down in summer for lack of water. London house-
painters and plasterers could only work in the summer, while
the best people were away. When the Season began in the
autumn, they were thrown out of work. The result was, accord-
ing to a writer in the 'forties, that 'the journeymen of this branch
are the dirtiest, laziest, and most debauched set of fellows there
are of any trade in and about London'.
Intemperate habits were partly due to the irregularity of
pay of those who were working. Ambrose Crowley's iron-
works was unusual in paying its workers regularly every week.
Farm workers were paid annually; servants quarterly ; employees
in the domestic system every two or three months; casual
labourers when they had finished the job. Moreover, living
conditions were getting easier, especially in the middle decades
when food was cheap, and labourers tended to put in half a
week or so to earn enough to live on, and then opt for leisure
in the alehouse for the remainder. * When wages are good % said
Defoe, 'they won't work any more than from hand to mouth;
or if they do work they spend it in riot or luxury/
Neither that type of worker, nor the self-employed weaver
or file-smith or smallholder found it easy to adjust himself to the
relentless regularity of the machine ; and many preferred starva-
tion in their own village to the nightmare of the town.
Factory work was regarded as the last stage of degradation, in
spite of the higher wages, and the type of migrant worker who
submitted to it was not very malleable material. The employers
resorted to a number of devices to instil discipline. Samuel
Oldknow had a system of fines to cut down ' the horrid and im-
pious Vice of the profane CURSING and SWEARING [[to quote a
notice in his works^] and the Habits of Losing Time, and
DRUNKENNESS*. Men were often hired by the year, and then the
154
THE END OF GEORGIAN ENGLAND
law could be brought to bear on recalcitrants. One runaway
from Cromford was given a month's hard in the house
of correction at Derby, *he being charged by Mr. Arkwright,
Cotton-Merchant, with having absented himself from his
Masters Business without Leave, (being a hired Servant for a
Year) and likewise been guilty of divers Misdemenors
Misbehaviour*.
Some employers were slave-drivers, but the of
that type has been exaggerated. In any case, it was not the way
to get results. Successful entrepreneurs like Boulton were
wiser in their approach. ' I have trained up many, am training
up more, plain country lads into good workmen", he said.
Arkwright usually took a patriarchal line with his and
used the carrot as well as the stick. At Cromford lie ran an
annual festival when his workers were regaled with food and
drink, music and dancing. 'This makes them industrious and
sober all the rest of the year*, wrote one diarist who saw it.
Arkwright also gave bonuses to his most deserving workers,
and in 1783, according to the Derby Mercury y he gave 'to 27 of
his principal Workmen, Twenty-Seven fine Milch Cows,
worth from S to 10 each'. Some
of the early industrial centres had an
air of the feudal village about them,
with the factory-owner as the almighty
squire.
One of the difficulties of recruiting
labour, particularly in the textile areas,
was that most of the men were only
required in the initial stages of build-
ing the mill and setting up the
machinery. After that, the bulk of the
employees were women and children.
When Arkwright began his second mill
at Cromford, he advertised: 'Wanted
. . . Forging & Filing Smiths, Joiners
and Carpenters, Framew T ork-Knitters
and Weavers, with large Families.
Likewise Children of all Ages, above
155
THE END OF GEORGIAN ENGLAND
seven years old, may have constant Employment/ As we have
seen, there was nothing new in the employment of children.
Childhood as we know it, as a special age with its own needs and
customs, did not exist in the Georgian lower classes. It had to be
invented in the nineteenth century ; just as we have created in the
twentieth century a new age, unheard of before the 'teenage*.
Writers like Defoe expressed pleasure at seeing children making
their contribution almost as soon as they could walk: it was a
sign of a healthy economy. The factories employed children
along with their parents as well as binding pauper apprentices.
Some of them imported whole batches of poor children from
London parishes; and they were probably no worse off in a
Lancashire factory than they would have been tied to a metro-
politan chimney-sweep.
Children were preferred to adults because they were cheaper.
Moreover, since their minds were still pliable, they were easier
than their fathers to mould into good industrial labour. The
new middle class thus had an enormous influence over the forma-
tion of the new working man. And this educational process was
not limited to the 12 hours or so that the children worked in the
factory each day (or night), but extended to Sunday as well.
Strutt built a Unitarian chapel at Helper, and Arkwright began
an Anglican church at Cromford. And all the employers were
warm supporters of the Sunday School movement, which began
in 1780 and spread rapidly in the next decades. Strutt opened
one for his cotton-workers at Helper, and earned the praises
Children in a rope factory
T HE END OF GEORGIA N E N G L A N U
of the Derby Mercury for his "Liberality to
the human Heart'. 'It becomes the Duty of every
Person*, added the article, 'in this Age of Refinement, Luxury,
and Vice, to hold forth an assisting Hand, to the Tide of
Immorality, which threatens speedily to Deluge "The of
Liberty"/
It was when the lower classes to in the
new industrial areas that the upper ranks to
that they were sitting on a moral and political volcano. The
of the Evangelical movement were trained on
and probably the Sunday Schools were the effective
weapon of all. Robert Raikes, the owner of the
Journal, who provided the initial drive for
described its effect on working children in his town. * From
idle, ungovernable, profligate, and filthy in the extreme,
say the boys and girls are become not only cleanly in
appearance, but are greatly humanised in their manners-
more orderly, tractable and attentive to business/ It was partly
by such measures as these, and partly by stern police action,
that the Georgian ruling classes managed to survive the
testing times when industrialisation, French Revolutionary
ideas and the crises of a war-time economy converged to
society to its very foundations.
Some contemporaries, of course, felt that the of
the poor was exactly the wrong way to maintain ' subordination '.
One sceptic was the Hon. John Byng, who, speaking of the
Sunday Schools, wrote: *I am point-blank against these
institutions; the poor should not read, and of writing I never
learnt, for them, the use/ And Richard Guest, looking
from just after the end of our period, hit the nail on the
when he wrote: 'The operative workmen being thrown to-
gether in great numbers, had their faculties sharpened
improved by constant communication/ "They took a greater
interest in the defeats and victories of their country's arms',
he added, 'from being only a few degrees above their cattle in
the scale of intellect, they became political citizens/ In the
run, then, John Byng's fears were justified.
157
Coach leaving the Turf Hotel, Newcastle
CULTURE
While they were
teaching the
workers to read,
the middle classes
were sending
their own child-
ren to school, and
improving their
own minds with
circulating librar-
ies and Literary and Philosophical societies. A mass readership
was coming into being which had lasting effects on Augustan
culture. And improved transport quickened the process. 'A new
fashion*, said Sir John Hawkins, 'pervades the whole of this
our island almost as instantaneously as a spark of fire illuminates
a mass of gunpowxler/ But it was not only clothes. Every
department of cultural life now served a national market, as
ideas spread down through the classes, and across through the
provinces. Nor was it a one-way traffic, for writers and artists
could not be indifferent to the wants of their new audience.
'The author, when unpatronized by the Great/ wrote
Goldsmith, 'has naturally recourse to the bookseller. There
cannot be, perhaps, imagined a combination more prejudicial
to taste than this/ He was right about Georgian taste. The
various ingredients of the Romantic movement are visible from
the 'forties onwards. In Fielding, there was a warm sympathy
for humanity, based on the heart not the head. Richardson's
novels exploited sentiment and explored feelings. Poets shifted
their emphasis from the general to the particular, from society
to the individual, from the normal to the unusual. In Thomson,
Shenstone, Young and Collins, tenderness, pity, melancholy
and mystery add new dimensions to verse. And this cultivation
of the emotions and probing of the heart mark a break with the
Augustan tradition, which believed with Johnson that the in-
fluence of the passions *is uniform, and their effects nearly
the same in every human breast: a man loves and hates, desires
158
THE END OF GEORGIAN ENGLAND
and avoids, exactly like his neighbour". Moreover, the
of verse-forms was weakened, the rules were
became softer, and its object was to cast a to
make a point.
Visible also, in many forms, is a desire to move away
the urban sophistication of Georgian life. Cowper
the simple pleasures of country life. He had a eye for the
beauties of nature. And so did Thomson, who from
simply describing scenery to imbuing it with 'He
describes not to the eye alone \ wrote Hazlitt, "but to the
senses, and to the whole man. He puts his heart into his subject,
writes as he feels, and humanises whatever he touches.' Gray
escaped into History; Beckford in Vathek to oriental romance;
Walpole in the Castle of Otranto to medieval horror; Percy
to his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.
The steady assurance of Georgian literature was
endangered by shifts in the intellectual sub-soil. A number of
writers found that reason could not bear the weight tiiat the
eighteenth century placed on it. A strong tradition
Shaftesbury, Burke and Adam Smith based ethics on
sentiments rather
than on rational Charles in Ms
calculations. And
with Hume rea-
son itself dug its
own grave.
Moreover, the
Methodists and
the rest of the
Evangelicals
were rousing sup-
port by appeals
to the heart not
the head. And
England, like the
rest of Europe,
came under the
spell of Rousseau,
THE END OF GEORGIAN ENGLAND
whose Nourelle Heloise and Emik were charged with emotion;
and of the German philosophers, who were drowning empiricism
in oceans of intuition, illumination and faith.
In the end came the French Revolution which was decisive.
The generation of Wordsworth and Coleridge were intoxicated
with joy at this opportunity for men to create the perfect society,
based on justice and equality, and shorn of the evils that reason
found in Georgian life. But with the excesses of the Terror and
the aggressions of French nationalism, the dream became a
nightmare. They awoke to the realisation that pure reason
could lead to unadulterated evil, and rational ethics to a moral
vacuum.
Their disappointment was intense. Coleridge wrote that he
had withdrawn from 'French metaphysics, French politics,
French ethics, and French theology'. In the same year, 1798,
he and Wordsworth published the first edition of their Lyrical
Ballads, poetical experiments, designed, they said, 'to ascertain
how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower
classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure'.
They wished to make a clean break with the artificialities and
proprieties of Augustan verse, which had become, in Cowper's
earlier phrase, 'a mere mechanic art'. They also broke with
Georgian society in favour of 'humble and rustic life', as they
said in 18OO, 'because, in that condition, the essential passions
of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their
maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more
emphatic language*. Above all, they wished to live close to
nature. * I love fields and woods and mountains', said Coleridge,
'with almost a visionary fondness/ And this was not the nature
of the Georgian writers: the attractive background to urban
life and pleasant relief from social sophistication. The Romantics
responded to nature with rapture. They felt that its close presence
would soothe their anguish and teach them the deepest truths
about life itself.
We have here the evolution of a new concept of the artist
and his place in society. In fact, during these years the word
'art* acquired its present meaning. What it meant to Georgians
a few years before comes out in a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote
16O
tt'illiam
home while visiting England: 'I could
write you volumes on the improvements
which I find made, and making here, in
the arts. One deserves particular notice
. . . the application of steam as an agent
for working grist mills/ Wordsworth,
on the other hand, asked, 'What is a
Poet?'; and answered that he was a man
'endowed with more lively sensibility,
more enthusiasm and tenderness, who
has a greater knowledge of human
nature, and a more comprehensive soul,
than are supposed to be common among
mankind'. With his heightened percep-
tion and visionary imagination he reveals
truths about ultimate reality; and is
thus rated far above his Augustan pre-
decessors, who told us, though in a very diverting way, what
we knew already.
'Imagination is My World; this world of Dross is beneath
my notice/ So wrote Blake, who swung even more violently
away from the Age of Reason into visions and mysticism.
Reynolds had lectured; 'in the midst of the highest flights of
fancy or imagination, reason ought to preside from first to last".
Blake replied: 'If this is true, it is a devilish foolish thing to
be an artist/ And elsewhere he wrote; '"What", it will be
questioned, "When the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of
fire somewhat like a guinea?** O no, no, I see an innumerable
company of the heavenly host crying, " Holy, Holy, Holy is
the Lord God Almighty"/
Painting did not escape the restlessness which was disturbing
Georgian life in all its aspects. After mid-century, taste began
to shift from formal portraits and conversation-pieces to the
landscapes of Claude, Caspar Poussin and Salvator Rosa.
Craggy mountains and steep precipices, hanging woods and
cascading torrents were now in demand the grand and the
sublime. The young gentlemen were even enjoying the Alps
on the way to Italy; the Lake District found its admirers; and
161
THE END OF GEORGIAN ENGLAND
gardeners like ( Capability' Brown were given orders to remould
the view from the Palladian window to make It look like a
picture. Native talent continued to be neglected. Richard
Wilson's * picturesque* treatment of English and Welsh
scenes in the Italian manner found little support. He died a
poor man, unmentioned in the newspapers. Nor was typically
English scenery appreciated at this stage. 'Our ever-verdant
lawns', wrote Walpole, 'rich vales, fields and haycocks and hop
grounds are neglected as homely and familiar objects/ Gains-
borough died with his house stacked with unsold landscapes.
These were not appreciated till the very end of this period;
and then, with the Romantic movement, we find the greatest
talent painting, not faces or 'elevated' landscapes, but nature
itself.
Similarly, the Palladian 'rule of taste* was coming to an end
in building. As architects became more emancipated socially,
they grew less subservient artistically, and a variety of styles
emerged. The chameleon-like James Wyatt, who could run up a
building in any style required, typifies the fragmentation of
taste that marks the end of the Georgian era. His Pantheon,
the new fashionable assembly-rooms in Oxford Street, was a
version of the church of Sancta Sophia at Constantinople. His
Fonthill, designed to satisfy the Romantic taste of Beckford,
rose at first as an artificial ruin. Later it was elaborated into a
great mansion looking
Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshire
like a Gothic cathedral
The Augustans had
despised Gothic: it was
uncivilised and against
reason. Addison was
impressed by the 'pro-
digious pains and
expenses that our fore-
fathers have been at in
these barbarous build-
ings ' ; and wondered
'what miracles of archi-
tecture they would have
JJ/J1 /7J. -TV
left us had they only been In-
structed In the right way*. On
the other hand, churches and
colleges, and other buildings in
the Gothic style, were going
up all through the century.
Vanbrugh, when designing
Blenheim, wanted to leave part of the old of Woodstock
standing. Later architects built ruins, especially the
of the 'picturesque' came in. Though, as Gilpin, the on
this subject, remarked, 'It is not every who can a
house that can execute a ruin. To give a stone its
appearance to make the widening chink run naturally
all the joints to mutilate the ornaments/
Ruins clearly took some building; but Horace Wai pole
even more elaborate with his whimsy. Strawberry Hill was
built by various friends over a long period, and its
irregularity was supposed to simulate the chaotic growth of
medieval structures. And in the last decades of the period,
had begun as an eccentricity turned into an earnest pursuit.
Buildings like Lacock Abbey and Downton Castle suited the
mood of a generation anxious to break loose from Georgian
rules into other worlds. Nash, before his Regency days, was an
expert in castellated mansions and ornamental
'Chinoiserie* was another symptom of the same break-up; and
so were the balconies and verandas in the Indian style. The
Royal Pavilion at Brighton was not far away.
MORALS
One final metamorphosis must be mentioned: these decades
saw the Georgian ethos change into Victorian middle-class
morality. The Methodist and Evangelical movements had
spreading with inspired energy among sections of the middle
classes, and making an impressive mark on the lower orders.
Nevertheless, the unsettling of the traditional order of society
by industrialisation made it appear that vice was gaining.
' High and low, cobblers, tinkers, hackney coachmen, men and
maid servants, soldiers, tradesmen of all ranks, lawyers,
163
THE END OF GEORGIAN ENGLAND
physicians, gentlemen, lords', wrote Wesley in 178, 'are as
ignorant of the Creator of the world as Mohametans or Pagans/
He was unduly pessimistic, for at this very time an extra-
ordinary phenomenon was occurring : puritanism began to receive
powerful recruits from the haul monde. The reasons why the
upper classes began to look to their morals are complex. The
intense pressure of a buoyant manufacturing class is one factor.
The transfer of the economic centre of gravity to the provinces
and the north is another. The concentrations of godless prole-
tarians made the ruling class uneasy, especially after such night-
mares as the Gordon Riots. But, undoubtedly, the French
Revolution clinched the matter. The collapse of the Ancien
Regime under violent atheism sent a chill down patrician
spines ; and the long war that England fought against an icono-
clastic enemy continued the shock treatment.
"Whatever the reasons, old Georgian reprobates began to
wilt under the frowns of their children and grandchildren.
Some took no notice, like old grandfather Wilberforce who
said, * If Billy turns Methodist, he shall not have sixpence of
mine*. Some indulged in the even wilder extravagances that
we associate with the Regency. But most of the upper classes
had at least to appear to support the new standards, and many
were genuinely converted, like the Duke of Grafton. This old
rake from the 'sixties wrote a pamphlet in the 'eighties on the
theme that there could be no improvement in morals till the
superior classes mended their ways.
The key convert was William Wilberforce. As the son of a
rich commercial family in Hull, M.P. for Yorkshire and fre-
quenter of the most exclusive social circles, he was able to
exert a powerful influence in high places. He was also the leader
of the Clapham Sect, the general staff of the whole Evangelical
campaign. This group of wealthy philanthropists lived at
Clapham Common, just outside London, where John Venn, son
of one of the first Evangelicals, was vicar, and Henry Thornton
the banker was patron of the living. Their impetus was behind
most of the drives of this period, from the Anti-Slavery Society
to the Sunday School movement.
The war on vice was waged on many fronts. In 1787, after
164
THE END OF GEORGIAN ENGLAND
persuading George III to publish a proclamation against various
forms of immorality, Wilberforce formed the Proclamation
Society, which set to work on the lines of the old Society for the
Reformation of Manners. In 1802, this was absorbed into the
more powerful Society for the Suppression of Vice, which
came down heavily on Sabbath-breaking, swearing, brothel-
keeping and using false weights and measures. The inn-
keepers of Margate were warned that their licences would be
suspended if they hired out their premises for masquerades.
At Brighton, a notice went up threatening gentlemen's servants
with prosecution if they bathed in the nude. The Rev. Sydney
Smith, a Georgian survivor, called it 'a society for suppressing
the vices of persons whose income does not exceed ^500 per
annum'.
Wilberforce received mighty assistance from Hannah More,
the former bluestocking, successful playwright and friend of
Johnson and Garrick. Now converted, she too realised the urgent
necessity of purifying upper-class life. Her pamphlets, Thoughts
upon the Importance of the Manners of the Great, and An Estimate
of the Religion of the Fashionable World, went into several editions
Recreation inside the Fleet Prison
Hannah More
in the 'nineties. Following
Raikes' example, she and her
sisters founded a Sunday School
in Cheddar, and then a dozen
others in the area. The success
of these and others all over the
country meant that more child-
ren were learning to read than
ever before. Sceptics still thought
that this was playing with fire,
especially with the levelling and
deistical writings of Tom Paine
circulating so widely. She herself
said that 'to teach the poor to
read without providing them with safe books has always appeared
to me as a dangerous measure'. And, consequently, she launched
her Cheap Repository of monthly tracts, which reached a circula-
tion of two million a year. These moral tales and verses spread
the Evangelical message to all classes. The Roguish Miller, who
cheated his customers, finally landed in gaol. In The Story of
Sinful Sally, the heroine took her first step down the slippery
slope by becoming a kept woman, and then suffered moral
collapse after reading novels. The ballad called The Riot, or half
a Loaf is Better than No Bread is said to have quelled two bread
riots in the famine year of 1795.
So powerful was her voice on behalf of loyalty in Church and
State, that the Religious Tract Society was founded to extend
the campaign. A few years later, leading Evangelicals of all
denominations formed the British and Foreign Bible Society.
Appealling for funds from the 'rich and middle ranks', the
Christian Observer said, 'By what other means can you contribute
so essentially to the preservation of order, to authority of the
law, and the stability of government?* It was therefore 'a
matter of policy as well as of duty, to create an interest among
the lower classes for the possession and perusal of the sacred
records*.
Unfortunately, there is no room here to examine certain
aspects of this vast campaign, for example, the work of the
166
THE END OF GEORGIAN ENGLAND
Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts
of the Poor, or the Society for Promoting the Observance of the
Sabbath. The government's work in suppressing seditious
literature and locking up radicals must be passed over; and we
can only glance at the efforts of private persons to expurgate
the body of English literature. Shakespeare was emasculated
and rewritten years before Bowdler took to his scissors.
'Barefaced obscenities, low vulgarity, and nauseous vice so
frequently figure and pollute his pages', wrote a leading
Methodist preacher, 'that we cannot but lament the luckless
hour in which he became a writer for the stage/ Authors like
Addison or Richardson, who had written in their day with
moralising motives, were too indelicate to place In the hands of
later-Georgian young ladies.
These changes are but part of that vast shift in outlook
which has affected English society down to the present day.
As a result of it, slaves w r ere liberated in the colonies and children
were chained to machines In the factories. Moral earnestness
produced the upright public servant along with the tyrannical
husband and father; the mutilation of the classics along with the
sublimest of poetry. Hypocrisy coincided with the clear-eyed
pursuit of scientific truth; humanitariamsm with the harshest
of penal codes. Increased
control over nature
promised an end to
immemorial poverty,
while reducing thou-
sands to misery. The
Georgian era left prob-
lems of the direst kind ;
but the productive capa-
city, the political institu-
tions and the moral
force to solve them
were Georgian products
no less. 'What has
rendered England the
wonder and envy of
Improving the poor
THE END OF GEORGIAN ENGLAND
Europe ?% Horace Walpole once asked. His answer was:
'Freedom'.
Further Reading
Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement, 1959.
Boris Ford (ed.), The Pelican Guide to English Literature, Vol. 5: From
to Byron, 1957.
M. J. Quintan, Victorian Prelude, 1941.
G. Rattray Taylor, The Angel-makers, 1958.
Steven Watson, Reign of George III, I960.
168
Index
Figures in bold type refer to pages on which illustrations appear
Actors, 59
Adam, Robert, 139, 145
Addison, Joseph, 138, 162-3, 167
Agriculture, 5, 16-17, 25, 47-8,
64-6, 89-94, 153
Aldborough, Yorkshire, 24
Amelia, Princess, 5
Anne, Queen, 83, 138
Anti-Slavery Society, 164
Appleby, Westmorland, 15
Apprentices, 63, 66, 70, 71, 107-8,
126, 153, 156
Architecture, 31, 32, 41, 58, 59,
74-5, 143-5, 162-3.
Aristocracy, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13,
15, 21-54, 72, 73, 164, 165
Arkwright, Sir Richard, 10, 19,
67, 68, 69, 72, 155, 157
Armed Forces, 59, 63, 74, 149
Arne, Thomas, 141
Ascot, Berkshire, 36
Bach, Johann Christian, 141
Bakewell, Robert, 17
Banking, 18, 56, 58, 69, 71, 86,
164
Banks, Sir Joseph, 125
Bath, 53, 144, 145
Beckford, William, 159, 16
Bedford, Dukes of, 6, 24, 25, 31-2,
33,43
Bellomont, Earl of, 51
Bentham, Jeremy, 130
Berry, Henry, 18
Berkeley, George, Bishop, 130-1
Berkeley, Earl of, 53
Bertie, family of, 25
, Lady Elizabeth, 53
Berwick, 63
Biology, 122, 125-6
Birmingham, 3, 96, 97, 148
Black, Joseph, 124, 127
Blake, William, 161
Blenheim, 25, 27, 28, 31, 32, 143,
163
Bolingbroke, Viscount, 46, 82, 119,
132, 137
Bolton, Lancashire, 67
Boroughbridge, Yorkshire, 24
Boston, Massachusetts, 143
Boswell, James, 59, 134
Boulton, Matthew, 120, 155
Brasenose College, Oxford, 38
Brewing, 6, 18, 59, 67, 69, 71, 79,
80, 114
Bridgeman, Charles, 31
Bridgnorth, Shropshire, 11
Bridgwater Canal, 10, 25
, Duke of, 25, 41
Brighton, 53, 69, 76, 145, 163, 165
Brindley, James, 18, 68
Bristol, 2, 4, 57, 61, 76, 119, 143
, Earl of, 14
British and Foreign Bible Society,
166
Broadlands, Hampshire, 32
Brown, Lancelot ('Capability'),
32, 162
Buckinghamshire, Lord, 126
Buffon, Comte de, 125
Burgoyne, General John, 140
Burke, Edmund, 6, 49, 147, 148,
151-2, 159
Burlington, Lord, 41, 143-4
Burney, Dr Charles, 141
Burton-on-Trent, 6
Bury St Edmunds, 14
Business men, 7, 8, 18-19, 21, 9,
55-9, 66-9, 72-88
Bute, Earl of, 1 1
Butler, Joseph, Bishop, 13
Buxton, Derbyshire, 145
169
INDEX
Byng, Hon. John, 112, 126, 157
Byrd, William, 69, 77, 101, 126,
139
Cadogan, Earl of, 29
Campbell, Colen, 31, 144
Canons, 32, 111
Carlisle, 14
, Earl of, 45, 51
Caroline, Queen, 39, 42, 51, 142
Carrington, Lord, 85
Carteret, John, Lord, 11, 29, 46
Cartwright, Rev. Edmund, 67, 146
Castle Howard, 1O
Cave, Edward, 67
Cavendish, Henry, 123
Chambers, Sir William, 145
Chandos, Duke of, 32, 33, 34, 111
Chatham, Kent, 99
Chaytor, Sir William, 22-3
Chemistry, 123, 124-5, 126, 128
Cheselden, William, 127
Chesterfield, Earl of, 4O, 73, 137
Chichester, 116
Child, James, 67
Church of England, 7, 10, 18, 26,
38, 48, 63, 74, 83, 86, 87, 124,
132-6, 149, 150, 156
Cipriani, Giovanni, 31
Civil Service, 10, 26, 59, 63-4,
74, 149
Clapham, near London, 164
Claremont, Surrey, 47
Clements, Mrs, 51
Clubs, 44, 45, 46, 116, 118, 127-8
Coal-mining, 98, 99, 110
Cobbett, William, 3
Coffee-houses, 43-4, 56, 75, 76-7,
136, 139
Coke, Thomas, 16, 17, 25, 9O
Coleridge, S. T., 151, 16O
Collecting, 32-4, 4O-1, 69, 159
Collins, William, 158
Colman, George, 14O
Colquhoun, Patrick, 66, 102
Cook, Capt. James, 125
Copley, J. S., 142
Coram, Thomas, 106
Cort, Henry, 19, 146
Cotchett, Thomas, 68
Cotesworth, William, 57-8, 70
Cottagers, 18, 92-4, 153
Court, the, 23, 41-2, 44, 136
Cowper, William, 36, 134, 137,
159, 160
Craftsman, The, 23
Craftsmen, 94, 96-8, 108
Crime, 117-20, 155
Cromford, Derbyshire, 67, 155,
157
Crompton, Samuel, 19
Crowley, Ambrose, 110, 154
Cumberland, Duke of, 53
Dalton, John, 128
Darlington, Durham, 22
Darby, Abraham, 19
Darwin, Erasmus, 125
, Charles, 125
Davy, Sir Humphry, 123
Dawson, Samuel, 60
Deering, Dr, 103, 115
Deffand, Madame du, 40
Defoe, Daniel, 3, 4, 7, 55, 56,
82-3, 89-90, 92-3, 99, 138,
154, 156
Deism, 131, 132, 151, 166
Derby, 5, 78, 79, 96, 142, 155, 157
Devonshire, Duke of, 6, 50
, Duchess of, 50, 52, 69
Dissenters, 14, 58, 67, 70-1, 78,
86-7, 88, 134, 148, 150, 151,
156
Diversions, 72, 73-9, 116-17
Doddridge, Philip, 71
Domestic Servants, 9, 22, 33,
100-102, 111, 116, 117, 154
'Domestic System', 92-3, 95-6,
110, 111, 153, 154
Downton Castle, 163
Drama, 72, 139-140
Drinking, 9, 14, 22, 33, 37, 45, 46,
47, 61, 65, 77, 82, 83, 115-16,
152, 154
Duncan, Lady Mary, 53
Dundas, Sir Lawrence, 33
Durham, 76
East India Company, 56
East Retford, Nottinghamshire, 24
Edgecumbe, Lord, 44
170
I NBEX
Education, 34-9, 69-71, 84-5, 120,
156-8
, Charity Schools, 83, 120-21
, Dissenting Academies, 19, 37,
70-1, 84
, Grammar Schools, 34, 35,
69-70
, Public Schools, 34-7, 69
, of Girls, 51
, Sunday Schools, 83, 121, 156-7,
164, 165
, (see also Apprentices, Univer-
sities)
Egmont, Earl of, 42
Electricity, 123
Ellison, Henry, 69
, Robert, 71
Enclosure, 17, 90-2, 93, 112, 119
Epsom, Surrey, 53, 77
Eton College, 34, 35, 36, 37, 57,
69
Evangelicals, 83, 85, 88, 121, 134-
6, 146, 157, 159, 163-6
Factories, 34, 81, 93, 94, 96, 153,
154, 155, 156
Farington, Joseph, 50
Farmers, 8, 47, 64-6, 72, 81, 89-
92, 153
Felsted School, 70
Fenton, Richard, 60
Fielding, Henry, 43, 138, 143, 158
, Tom Jones 9 23
Fitzwilliam, Lord, 33
Fletcher, Rev. John William, 135
Flitcroft, Henry, 144
Fonthill, 162
Food, 33, 4tf, 47, 61, 65, 66, 1 14-
15, 119, 120, 152, 154
Foster, Lady Elizabeth, 5O
Fox, Charles James, 11, 36, 38,
44, 49, 56, 82, 146, 147, 151
Fox, Henry, 29, 30, 44, 126
Fox, Stephen, 30, 41
Fox-Strangways, Lady Susan, 52
3
Francis, Philip (Jumus*), 15, 36
Franklin, Benjamin, 113, 11516,
123
Frederick, Prince of Wales, SI,
42, 53, 140
Frederick the Great, 5
French Revolution, 53, 121, 146,
148, 149, 151, 157, 160, 164
Fuseli, Henry, 142
Gainsborough, Thomas, 142, 143
Gambling, 22, 29, 33, 37, 44, 69
Games, 50, 52
, Cricket, 37, 52, 53
, Football, 37, 120
Garnett, Dr Thomas, 128
Garrick, David, 45, 59, 140, 14S,
165
Gateshead, Durham, 57, 69
Gay, Thomas, 42
, , Polly, 42
, , Beggar's Opera, 42, 103,
141
Gentleman's Magazine, The y 68, 69
Gentry, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11-12, 13, 15,
21, 22, 23, 26, 28-54, 55,
63, 64, 72, 84, 142
Geoffrin, Madame, 40
George I, 122
II, 11,41-2, 117, 140, 141, 142,
146
Ill, 11, 23, 29, 36, 46, 61, 72,
117, 146, 147, 149, 151, 165
Gibbon, Edward, 36
Gibbons, Grinling, 31
Gibbs, James, 58, 144
Gideon, Samson, 567
Gillray, James, 143
Gilpin, William, 163
Gloucester, 14, 157
Godwin, William, 151
Goldsmith, Oliver, 138, 140, 158
Gordon Riots, 119, 148, 164
Government, central, 5, 6, 9, 1O-
15, 16, 21, 26-27, 41-2, 56,
63-4, 79, 80-2, 113, 117-18,
146-150
, local, 5, 10, 48, 50, 57, 60-1,
72, 76, 77, 79, 82, 83, 92,
106-1Q, 150
Grafton, Dukes of, 52, 164
Grand Tour, 39-^1, 78, 141, 143,
161
Gray, Stephen, 123
Gray, Thomas, 137, 159
Grey, Lord, 51
171
INDEX
Grimshaw, William, 135
Guest, Richard, 157
Hackney, near London, 59, 70, 71,
103
Hales, Stephen, 124, 125
Halifax, 108
Hamilton, Duke of, 35
Hanbury- Williams, Sir Charles, 44
Handel, G. F., 140, 141
Hanway, Jonas, 83, 101, 102, 106-
7, 108, 109
Hardwicke, Lord, 61
Harley, Robert, 31
Harrow School, 34, 35, 36
Harwich, Essex, 13
Hawkins, Sir John, 158
Hawksbee, Francis, 123
Hawksmoor, Nicholas, 31, 144
Hazlitt, William, 159
Hertford College, Oxford, 38
Hervey, Lord, 30, 31, 33, 41, 42,
44, 46, 47, 5O, 140
High Wycombe, 126
Hillary, Dr, 103
Hogarth, William, 7, 142, 143
Holkham, Norfolk, 16, 17, 25, 9O
Holland, Henry, 32
, Lord, 36
Houghton, Norfolk, 27, 30, 31, 33,
47
Housing, 11114
Howard, John, 83
Hull, Yorkshire, 57, 63, 164
Hume, David, 130-3, 136, 159
Hunter, William, 61, 127
, John, 61, 125
Hunting, 47, 49, 52
Huntsman, Benjamin, 67
Hutcheson, Francis, 130
Incomes, 9, 1O, 21-7, 134, 140
Industrialists, 9-1O, 5, 66-9, 72,
80-2, 85-8
Industrial Revolution, 3, 9, 17-20,
25, 66-9, 70, 81, 85-8, 94,
98, 99, 121, 127-8, 134, 148,
152-7, 164
Industry, 5, 16, 17-19
'Influence 1 , 6, 12-13, 24-5, 26-7,
41, 42, 52, 81-2, 126-7,
136-7, 148-9
Jefferson, Thomas, 160-1
Jenyns, Soame, 72, 129
Johnson, Samuel, 55, 67, 70, 73,
106, 113, 118, 129, 134,
136, 137, 138, 141, 146, 158-
9, 165
Justice of the Peace, 5, 48, 57, 79,
106, 109, 150
Kay, John, 19
Kendal, 71
Kensington, 43
Kent, William, 144
Kenyon, Lord Chief Justice, 35, 61
Keppel, Lady Caroline, 53
Kettering, Northamptonshire, 120
King, Gregory, 1, 2, 65, 66
King, the, 10-11, 13, 26; see also
George I, etc.
Kingston, Duke of, 65
Kneller, Godfrey, 142
Knife-grinder, 9
Knipe, Rev. Robert, 47
Knole, Kent, 53
Lacock Abbey, 163
Ladies 9 Magazine, The, 51
Lavoisier, Antoine Laurent, 124,
125, 128
Law, William, 134
Lawyers, 7, 58-61, 68, 7O, 71, 72,
74, 87
Leeds, 3, 95
Leeds, Duke of, 22
Leicester, 119
Leoni, Giacomo, 144
Lichfield Grammar School, 70
Linnaeus, Carl, 125
Liverpool, 4, 57, 76, 108
Locke, John, 118, 128-9, 130, 131,
132, 151
Lombe, Thomas, 68, 99
London, 2, 3, 4, 6, 41-6, 57, 66,
68, 75, 80, 97, 101-2, 111,
115, 118, 143, 145, 154
, Adelphi, 3
, Aldgate Prison, 119
172
INDEX
, Bartholomew's Fair, 52
, Bedford Square, 25
, Berkeley Square, 25, 53
, Bethnal Green, 103, 117
, Billingsgate, 104-5
, Bloomsbury, 24, 43, 113
, Bridewell, 77, 83
, Cavendish Square, 25
, City, 7, 15, 23, 25, 43, 55, 58,
7O, 79, 81, 82
, Clerkenwell, 97
, Covent Garden, 24, 39, 77,
112, 139, 140
, Drury Lane, 139
, Fleet Ditch, 113
, Fleet Prison, 22, 165
, Grosvenor Square, 144
, Guy's Hospital, 127
, Hampstead Wells, 77
, Hanover Square, 24, 32
, Harley Street, 25
, Holborn, 103, 106
, Hyde Park, 43
, Lambeth Wells, 77
, Lincoln's Inn Fields, 140
, Mayfair, 53
, Newgate, 118
, Oxford Street, 25
, Pall Mall, 44, 45
, Pantheon, 16
, Ranelagh, 45, 141
, St Bartholomew's Hospital, 127
, St Giles, 24, 113
, St James's Park, 39, 77
, St James's Street, 44
, St Pancras, 107
, Shoreditch, 109
, Smithfield, 17
, Soho, 43, 141
, Southwark Fair, 77
, Spitalfields, 96, 97, 113
, Thames, 5, 7, 55, 77, 104, 114
, Tottenham Court Road, 116
, Tyburn, 50, 118
, Vauxhall, 45, 141
, Westminster, 15, 22, 52
, Westminster Hall, 60
, Windmill Street, 61
Longden, Henry, 85
Louis XIV, 1, 22, 32, 33
XV, 40, 79
LuttreE, Narcissus, 24
Macadam, John Loudon, 18
Machinery, 18, 19, 98, 154
Malmesbury, Lord, 38
Manchester, 3, 4, 8, 25, 76, 81,
128
Manchester Mercury , The, 72, 128
Mandeville, Bernard, 121
Margate, 78, 165
Market Har borough, Leicester-
shire, 71
Marlborough, Dukes of, 1, 21, 22,
23, 24, 26, 28, 31, 32, 41, 46
, Sarah, Duchess of, 21, 26, 40,
41, 50, 52, 143
Marriage Settlements, 7, 22, 28-9,
60
Medicine, 7, 51, 59, 61-3, 71, 76,
83, 103, 106-7, 108, 118,
126-7, 152
Melbourne, Lord, 36
Merchants, 55-9, 66, 71, 72, 79-
80, 81
Metcalf, John, 18
Methodists, 83, 86, 88, 108, 120,
121, 134-6, 159, 163, 164,
167
Middle classes, 7, 55-88, 150,
156, 158, 160, 163
Middleton, Lord, 24
Morals, 44-7, 49-54, 71-4, 82-8,
116-17, 12O-1, 138, 154,
157, 160, 163-7
More, Hannah, 165-6
Mountford, Lord, 118
Music, 33, 76, 140-1
Napoleon, 1
Nash, John, 163
Need, Samuel, 67
Newark, Nottinghamshire, 24
Newcastle, 57, 76, 111, 158
, Duke of, 6, 24, 25, 37, 46, 133
, Royal Grammar School, 70
Newmarket, Suffolk, 53
Newport, Isle of Wight, 49
, Rhode Island, 143
Newton, Rev. John, 135
, Isaac, 122, 123, 124, 129, 132
173
INDEX
Nichols, Ann, 103
North, Lord, II, 12, 29
Northampton, 5, 67, 71
Northington, Lord, 46
Norwich, 4, 68, 1 19
Nottingham, 24, 66, 76, 78, 80,
103, 112-13, 115
O'Brien, William, 52-3
Oldknow, Samuel, 154
Onslow, Lord, 39
Orford, Suffolk, 13
Oundle School, 37
Owen, Robert, 102
Oxford, 25
Oyster-seller, 8
Paine, Tom, 132, 151
, Rights of Man, 120, 166
Painting, 141-3, 161-2
Paley, William, 130
Palladio, Andrea, 144
Palmerston, 1st Viscount, 9,9
, 2nd Viscount, 2,9, 32, 39-40,
41, 45,49, 52
, 3rd Viscount, 29
Parliament, 2, 11-15, 27, 36, 44,
49, 60, 76, 90, 91, 107, 109,
117, 148, 149
, elections, 5, 13-15, 24-5, 41,
48-9, 52, 60, 61, 77, 134, 147
Parsons, Humphrey, 79
Parties, 6, 11-13, 15, 23, 31, 81,
146, 147, 148, 149, 150
Paupers, 79, 83, 92, 94, 103-10,
113, 118, 119, 153, 156, 167
Peel, Sir Robert, 10
Pelham, Henry, 11, 56, 146
Pembroke, Earl of, 50
Percy, Thomas, 159
Philosophy, 128-32, 136, 138,
150-2, 159-60
Physics, 122-3, 124
Pitt, William, 11, 61, 80, 146, 147,
148, 149, 150
, William, Earl of Chatham, 1,
3
Place, Francis, 47, 116
Placemen, 12-13, 23, 26
Plymouth, 63
Poetry, 136-8, 158-161
Pope, Alexander, 5, 122, 129, 136,
137
Population, 1-4, 10, 18, 19, 152-3
Price, Richard, 150
Priestley, Joseph, 70, 123, 125,
127, 148, 150
Prince Regent, 33
Princess Royal (Anne), 46
Proclamation Society, 83, 165
Proctor, Widow, 118
Professions, 7, 10, 59-64, 70, 88,
138, 145
Prose, 138-9, 158
Quakers, 67, 86
Queensberry, Duchess of, 42
Raikes, Robert, 83, 157
Ray, John, 122
Redlynch, Somerset, 30
Religious Tract Society, 166
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 40, 142, 161
Richardson, Samuel, 138, 158, 167
Richmond, Duke of, 29
Riots, 119-20, 135, 140, 148, 166
Ripon, Yorkshire, 103
Robinson, John, 61, 147
Robinson, Sir Thomas, 33
Rockingham, Marquess of, 6, 11,
60, 146, 148
Roebuck, John, 127
Rogers, Samuel, 36
Romantics, 158-63
Romney, George, 142
Rotherham, Dr Caleb, 71
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 159-60
Rowlandson, Thomas, 143
Royal Academy, 143
Rugby, Warwickshire, 5
Rugby School, 35, 36, 37
Russell, Fanny, 52
Ryder, Sir Dudley, 58-9, 71, 76-7,
87, 133, 134
Rysbrack, J. M., 31
Sackville, Lord John, 53
Savery, William, 112
Saville, Jonathan, 108
174
INDEX
Scarborough, Yorkshire, 53, 78
Science, 19, 37, 122-8, 131
Sedbergh, 70
Selwyn, George, 45
Shaftesbury, Lord, 129, 159
Sheffield, Yorkshire, 8, 60, 66, 97
Shelburne, Lord, 125, 148
Shelley, P. B., 151
Shenstone, William, 158
Sheridan, R. B., 140
Shops, 58-9, 64, 66, 71, 102, 137
Shrewsbury School, 37
Simeon, Rev. Charles, 135
Smith, Adam, 130, 159
Smith, Rev. Sydney, 165
Smollett, Tobias, 138
Society for Promoting Christian
Knowledge, 83, 120-1
Society for the Reformation of
Manners, 82, 165
Society for the Suppression of Vice,
83, 165
Soho Ironworks, 10
South Sea Bubble, 19
South Sea Company, 56
Squatters, 18
Stahl, Georg Ernst, 124
Steele, Richard, 138
Steers, Thomas, 18
Sterne, Laurence, 138
Stowe, 47
Stowmarket, 151
Stratford, near London, 59
Stratford-upon-Avon, 112
Strawberry Hill, 103
Strutt, Jedediah, 19, 66-7, 73,
79, 80, 88, 96, 156-7
Stubbs, George, 142
, Peter, 10
Sunday Observance Society, 83
Sunderland, 10
Swift, Jonathan, 59, 82, 101, 137
Taunton, Somerset, 14
Tavistock, Devon, 24
Taylor, Rev. Dr John, 134
Telford, Thomas, 18
Temple, Sir William, 29
Thomson, James, 158, 159
Thorney Abbey, 24
Thornhill, William, 31
Thornton, Henry, 164
Thrale, Henry, 67, 69, 79
, Mrs, 55, 69
, Ralph, 67, 69
Tillotson, John, Archbishop, 132-3
Tindal, Matthew, 132
Towneiey, Charles, 159
Towns, 4, 75-6
Townshend, Viscount ('Turnip'),
16
Transport, 4, 5, 6, 10, 18, 52, 55,
57, 60, 68, 75-6, 77, 99, 104,
152, 158
Trevor, Lord, 50
Tucker, Josiah, 95
Universities;
Oxford, 37-9, 61, 67, 69
Cambridge, 37-8, S3, 61, 69
Edinburgh, 61
Leyden, 61
Trinity College, Dublin, 61
Vanbrugh, John, 31, 143, 144, 163
Venn, Henry, 85
_, John, 164
Volta, Alessandro, 123
Voltaire, Francois, 128
Wages, 9, 111, 153, 154-5
Walpole, Horace, 41, 42, 48, 51,
53, 57, 117, 118, 133, 137,
159, 162, 168
, Sir Edward, 51
, Sir Robert, 9, 11, 12, 26-7,
31, 4, 46, 57, 79
Warburton, William, 134
Warrington, 96
Academy, 7O
Watch-making, 67, 97-8
Waterpower, 67, 99
Watson, Richard, Bishop, 38, 15O
Watt, James, 19, 120, 127, 146
Watts, Isaac, 120
Wedgwood, Josiah, 68, 73^, 80,
127
Wednesbury, Staffordshire, 135
Welbeck, 31
Welch, Saunders, 106
Wentworth, 33
Wentworth, Lady Henrietta, 53
175
INDEX
Wesley, John, 105, 119, 120, 134-
6," 164
, Mrs, 84
West, Benjamin, 142
Westminster School, 35, 36, 37
Weymouth, Lord, 22
\Vhitbread, Samuel I, 19, 66, 69,
87
9 II, 69, 81, 87
White, Gilbert, 112, 125
Whole Duty of Man, 120
Wigston, Leicestershire, 91, 92,
93, 94, 11 1
\Vilberforce, William, 83, 146,
164, 165
Wild, Jonathan, 117
Wilkes, John, 23, 103, 119, 147,
148, 15O
Wilkinson, John, 19, 71, 72
William III, 1
Wilson, Richard, 162
Winchester School, 35
Woburn Abbey, 24, 26, 31-2, 43
Wolfe, Maj.-General James, 5O
Women, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53
Woodforde, Rev. James, 110
Woodstock, Oxfordshire, 25, 163
Woolwich, 77
Wordsworth, William, 151, 160,
161
Workers, 3, 8, 9, 10, 80, 82, 90,
91, 92-102, 103, 104, 107,
108, 109, 114, 150, 153-7,
164
Worsley, Lancashire, 25
Wotton, Mary, 108
Wren, Christopher, 144
Wright, Joseph, of Derby, 142
Wyatt, James, 162
Yarmouth, Countess of, 52
Yeomen, 3, 8, 10, 65-6, 89-92
York, 4, 143
Young, Arthur, 47, 65-6, 85, 90,
101, 111, 114, 153
Young, Edward, 158
Zinke, Christian Frederick, 142
176
INT
L
J. J.
tct
LIFE INT
n
1 1ST
EARLY TUJJOOR
"Williams
LIFE I1ST
T
Birian.
