by Will Durant
Probably some readers were shocked by Mary’s declaration of a woman’s right to feel, or to confess, physical satisfaction in coitus.34 But she warned both sexes that “love considered as an animal appetite cannot long feed itself without expiring”;35 indeed, in that sense “it is the most evanescent of all passions.”36 Love as a physical relationship should be gradually replaced by friendship. This requires mutual respect, and respect requires that each mate should find in the other an individual and developing character.37 Hence the best beginning of woman’s liberation lies in recognizing her faults, and realizing that her freedom will depend upon her education in mind and conduct.
The Vindication proceeded to list some feminine faults of that time: the affectation of weakness and timidity, which feeds and pleases the male’s assumption of superiority; the addiction to cards, gossip, astrology, sentimentality, and literary trash; the absorption in dress and self-admiration.
Nature, music, poetry, and gallantry all tend to make women the creatures of sensation,… and this overstretched sensibility naturally relaxes the other powers of the mind, and prevents intellect from attaining that sovereignty which it ought to attain;… for the exercise of the understanding, as life advances, is the only method pointed out by Nature to calm the passions.38
Nearly all these faults, Mary felt, were due to inequalities of education, and to man’s success in making women think that (as a lady authoress had told them), “Your best, your sweetest empire is to please.”39
Mary resented these fripperies and artifices, and looked with envy upon those Frenchwomen who insisted on getting an education, and who learned to write letters that are among the fairest products of the French mind. “In France there is understandably a more general diffusion of knowledge than in any other part of the European world, and I attribute it, in part measure, to the social intercourse that has long subsisted between the sexes.”40 A generation before Balzac, Mary Wollstonecraft noted that
the French, who admit more of mind into their notions of beauty, give the preference to women of thirty…. They allow women to be in their most perfect state when vivacity gives place to reason, and to that majestic seriousness of character which marks maturity. … In youth, till twenty, the body shoots out; till thirty the solids are attaining a degree of density, and the flexible muscles [of the face], growing daily more rigid, give character to the countenance—that is, they trace the operation of the mind with the iron pen of fate, and tell us not only what powers are within, but how they have been employed.41
The faults of women, Mary believed, were nearly all due to the denial of educational opportunities, and to the male’s success in getting women to think of themselves as sex toys before marriage, and as decorative ornaments, obedient servants, and maternity machines afterward. To give both sexes an equal chance to develop mind and body, boys and girls—up to the time of technical vocation—should be educated together, with the same curriculum and, when possible, the same or equivalent sports. Every woman should be made sufficiently strong in body and competent in mind to earn her own living if necessary,42 but “whatever tends to incapacitate the maternal character takes woman out of her sphere”;43 sooner or later the biological functions and physiological differences will have their say. Maternal nursing is good for maternal health, and might make families smaller and stronger.44 The ideal of woman’s emancipation should be the educated mother in equal union with an educated male.45
Having seen her book through the press, the brilliant young author crossed the Channel to France, fascinated by the creative years of the Revolution, but just in time for the Massacres and the Terror. She fell in love with an American in Paris, Captain Gilbert Imlay, and agreed to live with him in unsanctioned union. After making her pregnant, Imlay took to absenting himself for months at a time, on business or otherwise. Her letters begging him to come back46 are almost as eloquent, and were as futile, as those of Julie de Lespinasse a generation before. In 1794 she bore her child, but this did not hold the father. He offered to send her a yearly fund for her support; she refused it, and returned to England (1795). She tried to drown herself in the Thames, but was dragged back to life by solicitous watermen.
A year later she met William Godwin and became his common-law wife; neither of them believed in the right of the state to regulate marriage. However, for the sake of their expected child, they decided to submit to a religious ceremony (March 29, 1797). Ashamed of their legality, they concealed from their radical friends the fact that they were no longer living in sin. For a while she shone in the rebel circle that gathered around the publisher Joseph Johnson: Godwin, Thomas Holcroft, Tom Paine, William Wordsworth, and William Blake (who illustrated some of her writings). On August 30, 1797, amid intense suffering, she gave birth to Shelley’s future wife. Ten days later she died.
3. Social Morality
By and large, despite those steady and decent lives that history fails to record, each class of the English population in this period shared in a general moral deterioration. Gambling was universal; the government itself (till 1826) took a hand in it with a national lottery. Drunkenness was endemic, as an escape from cold mists and rains, brutalizing poverty, family warfare, political strains, philosophical despair; Pitt and Fox, otherwise so different, agreed in favoring this anesthesia. Taverns were allowed to remain open through Saturday night till 11 A.M. Sunday,47 for Saturday was pay day, and time had to be allowed the “pub” to get its prime cut of the weekly wage. The middle classes drank more moderately; the upper classes drank heavily, but had learned to carry their liquor steadily, like a leaking tub.
A special indulgence allowed political corruption at every stage of government. In many cases, as already noted, votes, boroughs, nominations, offices—in some cases peerages—were bought and sold as openly as shares on the stock exchange. George III, whose virtues were domestic, saw no wrong in laying out money for the procurement of votes for or in Parliament, or distributing offices for political support. In 1809 seventy-six M.P.s held such sinecures. “A favored few connected by relationship or interest with the rich and the powerful received huge salaries for doing nothing, whilst the men who actually did the work were in many cases grossly underpaid.”48 Judges sold the subordinate posts in their jurisdiction, and exacted from their holders a share of the fees which the public paid for official services.
The government could be cruel as well as venal. We have mentioned the severity of its penal code. The forcible impressment of wayfarers into the Navy was a prelude to low pay, bad food, and merciless discipline.49 On several occasions the crews mutinied; one such strike blockaded the port of London for a month. Nevertheless, the English sailors were the best seamen and naval warriors in history.
Many efforts were made for moral reform. In 1787 George III issued a condemnation of Sabbath-breaking, blasphemy (cursing), drunkenness, obscene literature, and immoral amusements; the effect is not recorded. Jeremy Bentham, with his Parliamentary Reform Catechism (1809), led a dozen able disciples in exposing political venality and incompetence. Methodist and Evangelical preaching had some effect, which was doubled when the Revolution raised fears that a nation so morally unhinged could successfully combat French invasion or internal revolt. A Society for the Suppression of Vice campaigned against dueling, brothels, and pornography. Other reformers attacked child labor, the use of children as chimneysweeps, the horrors of the prisons, the ferocity of the penal code. A wave of humanitarianism, stemming partly from religion, partly from the Enlightenment, spread works of philanthropy and charity.
William Wilberforce was the most tireless of the English reformers. Born in Hull (1759) of a family rich in both land and commerce, and going through Cambridge as a comrade of William Pitt, he had little trouble in getting elected to Parliament (1774) a year after Pitt became prime minister. Feeling the influence of the Evangelical Movement, he helped to establish the Society for the Reformation of Manners (1787). Above all he protested that a nation officially Christian still tol
erated the trade in African slaves.
England was now leading in this traffic. In 1790 British vessels transported 38,000 slaves to America, French ships 20,000, Portuguese 10,000, Dutch 4,000, Danish 2,000; each nation contributed according to its ability in what was probably the most criminal action in history. From Liverpool and Bristol the ships carried liquor, firearms, cotton goods, and diverse trinkets to the “Slave Coast” of Africa. There, often with the purchased help of native chieftains, the Christian chieftains exchanged their cargo for Negroes, who were then taken to the West Indies and the Southern colonies in North America. The captives were closely packed in the hulls of the vessels, and in many cases were chained to prevent rebellion or suicide. Food and water were just enough to keep them alive, ventilation was poor, sanitation minimal. To reduce the load in a severe storm, sick slaves might be thrown overboard; sometimes the not sick too, for every slave was insured, and might be worth more dead than alive. It has been calculated that of the approximately twenty million Negroes transported to the British West Indies only twenty percent survived the voyage.50 On the return trip the ships carried molasses; in Britain this was distilled into rum, which was used to purchase slaves for the next run.
The Quakers, on both continents, took the lead in attacking the trade as the first step in the abolition of slavery. A score of writers joined in the English campaign: John Locke, Alexander Pope, James Thomson, Richard Savage, William Cowper, and, not least, Mrs. Aphra Behn, whose novel Oroonoko (1678) had given a revolting description of the West Indian economy. In 1772 the Quaker Granville Sharp secured from the Earl of Mansfield, lord chief justice, a decree forbidding the importation of slaves into Britain; any slave was to become automatically free the moment he set foot on British soil. In 1786 another Quaker, Thomas Clarkson, published an Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, presenting in impressive total the results of almost a lifetime of research. In 1787 Clarkson, Sharp, Wilberforce, Josiah Wedgwood, and Zachary Macaulay (father of the historian) formed the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. In 1789 Wilberforce offered the Commons a bill to end the evil; it was outvoted by mercantile funds. In 1792 Pitt made one of his greatest speeches to defend a similar measure; this too failed. Wilberforce tried again in 1798, 1802, 1804, 1805, and was repeatedly repulsed. It remained for Charles James Fox, in his brief ministry (1806–07), to press the matter to victory; Parliament yielded, and forbade any participation, by British merchants, in the slave trade. Wilberforce and “the Saints” who supported him knew that this victory was but a beginning; they pressed on with a campaign for the emancipation of all the slaves still on British soil. Wilberforce died in 1833; a month later, August 28, slavery was abolished in all territories under British rule.
VI. MANNERS
One of the most startling events of 1797 was the first appearance of the silk top hat; apparently it was worn by a London haberdasher who claimed the Englishman’s inborn right to be unique. Crowds gathered about him; some women, we are told, fainted at the alarming sight. But there is nothing so absurd that couturiers and haberdashers cannot make it an imperative fashion; soon all upper-class London males were carrying stovepipes on their heads.
Swords on the hip and wigs on the head were disappearing. Beards were shaved. Most males let their hair grow to their shoulders, but some youngsters expressed their defiant individuality by having their hair clipped short.51 Pantaloons were winning the battle for men’s legs; by 1785 trousers reached to midcalf; by 1793 they fell to the ankles. Shoestrings were displacing buckles and beginning their irksome reign. Coats were long, and now dispensed with embroidery, but art and income were lavished on waistcoats.
As in contemporary France under the Directory, the crossing of noble and commoner produced the dandy—the “buck” or “beau.” George Bryan “Beau” Brummel (1778–1840) specialized in adorning himself, and spent half the day in dressing and undressing. At Eton, where the students called him “Buck,” he became the intimate friend of the Prince of Wales, who felt that clothing is half the art of rule. Having inherited thirty thousand pounds, Brummel hired separate tailors for each part of his body, and made himself arbiter elegantiarum for London’s males. He was good-humored and kindly, and made cleanliness next to cravats; but he loved gambling even more than finery, ran up debts, fled across the Channel to escape his creditors, lived for twenty years in dingy poverty and slovenly dress, and died, aged sixty-two, in a French asylum for the insane.
Women were abandoning hoops, but they still corseted themselves to keep their breasts poised and full. The waistline was raised, and a generous décolleté attended to the rest. During the Regency (1811–20), fashions drastically changed: corsets were discarded, petticoats were left unused, and gowns were transparent enough to reveal the lines of thighs and legs. Byron thought these revelations were dulling the fascination of pursuit, and, in a rare excursion into morality, complained: “Like Mother Eve our maids may stray unblamed, / For they are naked, and are not ashamed.”52
Nevertheless, there was more modesty in dress than in eating. Meals were immense, not so much through gluttony as because the climate encouraged adipose tissue as a help to body heat. The poor relied basically on bread and cheese, ale or tea, but in the money classes the main meal—sometimes lasting from nine to midnight—could run to several courses: soup, fish, poultry, meat, venison, dessert, plus properly adjusted wines. After dessert the ladies disappeared, so that the men might freely discourse on politics, horses, and women. Mme. de Staël protested that this sexual dichotomy removed a main stimulant to the refinement of manners and the enjoyment of society. Table manners were not as elegant as in France.
Manners in general were hearty and rough. Speech was peppered with profanity; the Archbishop of Canterbury complained, “The torrent of profanity every day makes more rapid advances.”53 Fisticuffs were frequent in the lower classes. Boxing was a favorite sport, and prizefighting drew avid patrons from all ranks. A doubly contemporary description has come down to us from Robert Southey (1807):
When a match is made between two prize-fighters, the tidings are immediately communicated to the public in the newspapers; a paragraph occasionally appears saying the rivals are in training, what exercise they take, what diet—for some of them feed upon raw beef as a preparative. Meantime the amateurs and the gamblers choose their party, and the state of the bets appears also in the newspapers; not infrequently the whole is a concerted scheme, that a few rogues may cheat a great many fools.54
Large crowds—sometimes twenty thousand—gathered for such vicarious violence. Lord Althorp recommended the sport as a purification of the aggressive instincts among the people, but the managers saw it as a purgation of pocketbooks.
Poorer people sought catharsis by tying a bull or a bear to a post, and baiting it with sticks and dogs—in some cases for two or three days—till, in a moment of mercy, they put the victim to death or sent it to the slaughterhouse.55 Cockfighting continued as a diversion until forbidden in 1822. Cricket, which had been played in England as far back as 1550, submitted to formal rules in the eighteenth century, and offered the most stirring matches in the sporting year, with heavy betting and wild partisanship in the immense crowds. Horse racing provided another purge for gamblers, but there was in it, too, an ancient affection for horses, and a loving care in breeding and training them. The hunt was the summit of fashion in sports: the hunters riding to the grounds in handsome coaches, the swift flight over fields and crops, hedges, fences, and streams, on horses and after dogs breathing pleasure in the game.
Every class had its social gatherings, from the coffeehouses—where simple men drank beer, smoked pipes, read newspapers, and talked politics and philosophy—to the sumptuous Royal Pavilion at Brighton, where lucred folk engaged in festivities “almost as gay in winter as in summer.”56 At home gatherings people played cards or other games, heard music, or danced. The waltz had come in from Germany, and had been named from walzen, to revolve. Moralists helped to
make it popular by branding it as sinful intimacy. Coleridge, about 1798, complained convincingly: “I am pestered every ball night to dance, which very modestly I refuse. They dance a most infamous dance called the Waltzen. There are perhaps twenty couples—the Man and his Partner embrace each other, arms and waists, and knees almost touching, and then whirl round and round … to lascivious music.”57
The upper classes could arrange dances or other parties at one of the fashionable clubs—Almack’s, White’s, Brook’s; there too they could gamble for high stakes, and discuss the latest performance of Mrs. Siddons, the frolics of the Prince, the novels of Jane Austen, the engravings of Blake, the storms of Turner, the landscapes of Constable. Among the Whigs the social pinnacle was Holland House, where Lady Holland held soirees at which one could meet such dignitaries as Lord Brougham, Philippe Duc d’Orléans, Talleyrand, Metternich, Grattan, Mme. de Staël, Byron, Thomas Moore, or the noblest Whig of them all, Charles James Fox.58 No salon in France could rival Holland House at the end of the eighteenth century.
