Jane Austen's England

by Roy Adkins,Lesley Adkins

  In Nelly’s view the stage was far too bright for Shakespeare’s Macbeth, though by modern standards theatre lighting was wretched, relying on oil lamps and chandeliers of candles. Even so, she had trouble adjusting to the pitch-black streets and had ‘a dismally dark walk home. It was eleven when we left the theatre. The glare of the house, with its lights, had so affected my eyes, that it was with difficulty I could distinguish my way. Luckily Henry could see better than me, and we got home very safely. We were a full hour in walking two miles and a half.’56

  Theatres were not places of respectful, quiet calm, as Carl Moritz discovered at the Haymarket in 1782:

  For a seat in the boxes you pay five shillings, in the pit three, in the first gallery two, and in the second, or upper gallery, one shilling. And it is the tenants in this upper gallery who, for their shilling, make all that noise and uproar, for which the English playhouses are so famous. I was in the pit, which gradually rises, amphitheatre wise, from the orchestra, and is furnished with benches, one above another, from the top to the bottom. Often and often, whilst I sat here, did a rotten orange, or the peel of an orange, fly past me, or past some of my neighbours; and one of them actually hit my hat, without my daring to look round, for fear another might come plump in my face. Besides this perpetual pelting from the gallery, which renders an English playhouse so uncomfortable, there is no end to their calling out, and knocking with their sticks, till the curtain is drawn up…In the boxes, quite in a corner, sat several servants, who were said to be placed there, to keep the seats for the families they served, till they should arrive.57

  Outside London, travelling players went from town to town putting on performances, something that Silvester Treleaven recorded at Moretonhampstead in Devon in May 1802: ‘A company of comedians came here from Crediton, and are going to act a few nights in Mr. Hancock’s Barn, in Pound Street, which is fitting up for said purpose. A Mr. Smith manager.’58 Three days later, their makeshift theatre was ready: ‘Last night the comedians acted for the first time in Mr. Hancock’s Barn, in Pound Street, which is fitted up for the purpose in a very decent manner. The play was “The Farm House”, after which an interlude called “The Village Barber”. To which was added the farce of “The Spoil’d Child”.’59

  Rather than the theatre, Woodforde was more partial to music, but even for him the tickets were expensive – the equivalent of two weeks’ wages for one servant:

  The tickets to the miscellaneous concert to night [at Norwich] were 7 shillings and 6 pence each. Mrs Custance being a subscriber and having a transferable ticket, was so kind as to lend my niece hers for this evening…A great deal of company indeed at the Hall and full dressed – 911 supposed to be present. The concert was very fine indeed, and Madame Mara, the famous singer, sung delightfully. I never heard so fine a voice – her notes so high. The kettle drums from Westminster Abbey sounded charmingly, beat by a Mr. Ashbridge. Near 100 performers in the orchestra.60

  Especially with the attraction of celebrity performers, musical concerts were increasingly attended by the wealthier classes. Composers such as Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were writing new works and exploring new musical forms that were becoming ever more popular. Music was no longer just an accompaniment to dancing, eating or singing, but an entertainment in its own right.

  Whatever anyone’s class or wealth, leisure occupations were largely active rather than passive. Songs and music were mostly learned from printed sheets. More formal music was sold in shops, while street sellers sold broadside song sheets, also called broadsheets, which were printed on one side of sheets of coarse paper. Moritz noticed the ballad sellers: ‘The [English people’s] love of their country, and its unparalleled feats in war, are in general the subject of their ballads and popular songs, which are sung about the streets by women, who sell them for a few farthings.’61 Over two decades later, Benjamin Silliman also heard the ballad singers and saw them selling the words on printed sheets. Crowds gathered to hear and learn the tunes, since these song sheets had the words, but no music:

  Returning home, about 10 o’clock at night, I observed one of those little circles which are very common in the streets of London; I allude to the audiences which gather around the ballad singers. They are usually poor women, or little girls, with every appearance of extreme poverty, who collect a few pence by singing ballads at the corners of the streets, under the bow-windows of shops, and the porticoes of public buildings. Although their voices are harsh from being so often exerted, and their performances, in every respect indifferent, they immediately draw a circle around and detain them a long time.62

  Contrary to the observations of Moritz and Silliman, ballad selling was not restricted to women, and in March 1780 Woodforde paid sixpence ‘to a poor old man for some ballads’.63 Three years earlier, George Williams appeared before a justice of the peace in Somerset, accused of being a ‘rogue and vagabond’. He swore on oath that he was a former soldier, aged about sixty, and had worked as a day labourer and ballad seller for the last two decades.64

  Most people created their own entertainment at home with friends and family, and diarists like Woodforde noted such everyday events, as in August 1788: ‘Mr. Walker and Betsy Davy came over on single horses this morning from Foulsham and they breakfasted, dined and spent the afternoon with us. We had a good deal of singing to day from my niece and Mr. Walker – the latter sung many new songs. We spent a very agreeable day together.’65 They may well have been singing new ballads bought from a street seller.

  An afternoon spent with guests over dinner and in various forms of entertainment was something the idle rich could enjoy. The labouring classes could relax only in the evening, after their work, when the tavern provided a welcome refuge with its candles and a fire, where customers could drink beer, smoke a pipe and perhaps play cards or join in the singing. Francis Place recalled the taverns of the late 1770s: ‘It was the custom at this time as it had long been for almost every man who had the means to spend his evenings at some public house or tavern, or other place of entertainment. Almost every public house had a parlour…for the better sort of customers. In this room which was large and well lighted with tallow candles the company drank and smoked and spent their evenings.’66

  Tobacco was used by all classes. It was sometimes chewed, but was more likely to be smoked in white clay pipes that were made locally and sold in shops or by the pipe makers themselves. Taverns were the biggest outlet, where pipes could be reburned in an iron rack in the fireplace. Some clay pipes were 12–15 inches long, though shorter ones were preferred by workers since pipes were easily broken – fragments of clay pipe stems are common finds on archaeological sites and in gardens of old houses. Smoking was more popular with the working classes, women and children included, and in July 1809 a woman’s pipe set off an explosion at Portsmouth, killing many people. According to the local newspaper, ‘The cause of this calamity is attributed to the wife of one of the soldiers, who relates, that she was washing near where the baggage lay, on the beach, when another soldier’s wife, who was smoking, asked her if she would take a whiff? She did; but finding the tobacco would not burn, she struck the bowl of the pipe against the pebbles.’67 The smouldering tobacco fell out, causing a fire that spread to several barrels of gunpowder.

  Having given up smoking several years earlier, the clergyman William Jones decided to stop taking snuff as well: ‘Left off snuff, & hope I shall never return to the filthy, worse than beastly, practice! Gave Mrs. Jones [his wife] my whole stock – four ½ lb canisters full of No 37, & Strasburgh – 1 lb. 37 in lead, ¾ lb. of Strasburgh in lead, & my common box full.’68 With a stock of around 4lb of snuff, Jones must have been a heavy user. Snuff was a fine tobacco that was inhaled, a habit largely confined to the upper classes. Woodforde noted purchases of both tobacco and snuff, as in 1790: ‘at Mr. Carys shop for ½ lb. tobacco, pd. 0: 1: 4. At Ditto – for 2 oz: of Scotch snuff 0: 0: 2.’69 After giving away his snuff, Jones said of his wife: ‘O that my deary would give up s
nuff & novels!!’70

  Woodforde also indulged in drinking a fair amount of alcohol and was particularly fond of card games and of gambling for moderate stakes with friends and family. He recorded his failures and successes in his diary and was triumphant in April 1783: ‘At quadrille this evening won 0.4.0. I played the finest Sans Prendre Vole to night, that I ever had – not a loosing card in hand – it was Mattadores, 9 black trumps in spades and the King of Hearts – I was the last player; after the first card was played, I declared the Vole. I did not get home to Weston till 10 at night.’71 Quadrille, a popular game for four players, originated in France, but its complicated rules and special vocabulary were later simplified to make it more like whist. It was eclipsed by other card games in the Victorian period. Lydia Bennet in Pride and Prejudice is obsessed by gambling and by card games, and ‘talked incessantly of lottery tickets, of the fish she had lost and the fish she had won’. The lottery she was playing was a simple card game of chance, in which counters were amassed. Frequently in gaming, the bone or ivory counters were made in the shape of fish.72

  A State Lottery was run by the Government to raise revenue, for which an Act of Parliament was passed each year. Licensed brokers sold tickets, which were expensive, as well as cheaper shares in tickets, frequently sixteenths, and the winning tickets were drawn by lot over several days. Prizes were substantial – half a million pounds in the years 1796 to 1798 and even more in subsequent years. For many, the lottery was their only chance of acquiring wealth, and lottery clubs sprang up, such as one at Moretonhampstead. In February 1800, Treleaven described the hysteria that gripped its members: ‘Last night members of the Lottery Club met at the Red Lion. In the midst of their business a great confusion ensued, owing to many of the members being overheated with liquor, and almost in a state of insanity under an idea of gaining a 30,000 £ prize! Several battles fought…the no. [number] of members now amount to 245, and consists of a few Christians, some Jews, and a number of heathens. Their meetings are every Monday fortnight.’73 A few days later he wrote: ‘Last night the members of the Lottery Club met at the Red Lion, and closed their books. No. of members were 241, each of which subscribed £1.5.0 (viz) £1.2.0 to the fund and 3/-spent in ale: amount to purchase lottery tickets £265.2.0, spent in ale £44.3.8.’74

  In November 1807 William Holland went to Bridgwater to see his lawyer: ‘Ruscombe Poole informed me that Mr Stone his father in law had got a prize in the Lottery of twenty thousand pound, a great thing indeed and will be chiefly for Ruscombe Poole’s benefit, for Mr. Stone cannot want it and he has but two daughters and one of them is Ruscombe’s wife. The Poole family are rising fast.’75 Many poor people were ruined by such gambling, pawning their possessions in the expectation of winning. Frederick Eden described how they were addicted to gambling, especially the lottery: ‘[a]maidservant who has saved a guinea is sensible that if she attempts to be her own banker it will melt away piecemeal. Upon principles of prudence she purchases the sixteenth of a ticket, and concludes that her honesty and frugality will find their reward in a fortunate number.’76

  For the wealthy, travelling abroad – particularly doing the Grand Tour of Europe – was once fashionable, but the continued wars had halted this trend. As Elizabeth Ham witnessed, ‘the Continent was quite shut to the British idler, and Weymouth was all the fashion’.77 She herself lived at this seaside resort, but such attractions were not to everyone’s taste. Some travellers began to explore the more sparsely populated areas of Britain that were formerly regarded as barren and dangerous waste land. Accounts of these travels were increasingly published, many illustrated with topographical prints. What emerged from this new appreciation of the wilder parts of Britain was the Romantic Movement that developed in the arts, with poets such as Wordsworth in the Lake District who went on tours, taking inspiration from nature, and artists such as Constable and Turner painting scenes and landscapes.

  Those inclined to scholarly study, but who were prevented from exploring the classical ruins of the Continent, turned their attention to the more prosaic sites and ruins at home. This happened to coincide with the adoption of the new farming methods, the improvement of roads and the digging of canals, all of which were damaging and destroying prehistoric and historic monuments and unearthing a great number of strange artefacts. Many of the well-to-do, and particularly clergymen who were classically educated and had time on their hands, became ‘barrow diggers’. The architect John Repton, son of the landscape designer Humphry Repton, was one such barrow digger, and in 1808 he ‘opened’ a Bronze Age barrow near Aylsham in Norfolk: ‘Having ordered a hole to be opened [by workmen] in the middle, about four yards wide, and two yards deep, we came to the sand, the natural soil of the whole heath, but continued digging through the sand, about two yards deeper, without finding anything; but on shoving down the side to fill up the cavity…a curious Urn was discovered, which was cut through in the middle by the spade.’78 After this unfortunate accident, all Repton could do was make a quick sketch before the rest of the urn ‘was quite destroyed, it being too soft a substance to be taken up in large fragments’.79

  From such clumsy beginnings, the modern science of archaeology was born and it ran in parallel with a growing curiosity about the history of the country, to the point where it was considered ‘that without a competent fund of antiquarian learning, no one will ever make a respectable figure, either as a Divine, a Lawyer, Statesman, Soldier, or even a private Gentleman’.80 In November 1805, Benjamin Silliman was in London: ‘through the introduction of a friend, I attended a meeting of the Antiquarian Society, which holds its sittings in a spacious room in Somerset-House…Lord Leicester, a nobleman, of a grave and plain appearance, was in the chair. The antiquities are still far from being exhausted, and this society is usefully employed in bringing them to light.’81 This was the illustrious Society of Antiquaries of London, and Lord Leicester would be its president until his death in 1811.82 The discovery and recording of antiquities had in fact barely started.

  For those seeking an impression of places abroad, panorama displays provided the solution. These were models or large paintings (or a mixture of both), depicting views of foreign cities and battles as well as topics closer to home such as the British fleet at Spithead and the state funeral of Admiral Lord Nelson. In London in July 1809 Mary Berry visited the Panorama in Leicester Square, run by Henry Barker:

  Went in the morning with Mr. Playfair to see the two panoramas of Cairo and of Dublin. That of Cairo admirable. The sandy arid look of the country so well given, and contrasting so remarkably with the green fringe of land on each side of the course of the Nile. The near buildings – many of them picturesque and well painted. The interior of the city of Dublin is an ugly subject, but extremely well done, and giving a perfect idea of a meaner dirty-looking London.83

  The purpose-built Panorama still survives, having been converted in 1868 to the Church of Notre Dame de France. Louis Simond saw new exhibits there two years after Mary Berry:

  There are new panoramas this year at Mr Barker’s…We have just seen Malta. The gairish light of day, white and dazzling;—the strong and perpendicular shadows;—the dusty land;—the calm and glassy sea…The inhabitants overcome, lie about in the shade of narrow streets;—a centinel alone is seen pacing his watch before the gate of the arsenal. The smallest details are characteristic…We learned, with much regret, that the panorama of Dover, which we admired so much last year, was painted on this identical cloth. Malta is laid over Dover, and Dover covers half-a-dozen more chefs-d’oeuvre!…The circumference of the panorama is about 270 feet, the height 30 feet, the surface about 900 square yards.84

  London possessed more leisure attractions than anywhere else, and the rival pleasure gardens of Vauxhall and Ranelagh were famous. In 1782 Moritz visited Vauxhall gardens:

  Vauxhall is, properly speaking, the name of a little village, in which the garden, now almost exclusively bearing the same name, is situated. You pay a shilling on entrance…As
you enter the garden, you immediately hear the sound of vocal and instrumental music. There are several female singers constantly hired to sing here. On each side of the orchestra are small boxes, with tables and benches, in which you sup. The walks before these, as well as to every other part of the garden, are crowded with people of all ranks…The rotunda, a magnificent circular building, in the garden, particularly engaged my attention. By means of beautiful chandeliers and large mirrors, it was illuminated in the most superb manner; and every where decorated with delightful paintings and statues, in the contemplation of which you may spend several hours very agreeably, when you are tired of the crowd and the bustle in the walks of the garden.85

  Despite its attractive appearance, Moritz found Vauxhall to be a haunt of prostitutes: ‘what most astonished me, was the boldness of the women of the town, who often rushed in upon us by half dozens, and in the most shameless manner importuned us for wine’.86 Criminals also frequented the place, and at one point ‘there arose all at once a loud cry of, “Take care of your pockets.” This informed us, but too clearly, that there were some pickpockets among the crowd, who had already made some fortunate strokes.’87

  Moritz was more impressed with Ranelagh:

  coming out of the gloom of the garden, I suddenly entered a round building, illuminated by many hundred lamps, the splendour and beauty of which surpassed every thing of the kind I had ever seen before…above, there was a gallery divided into boxes; and in one part of it an organ with a beautiful choir, from which issued both instrumental and vocal music. All around, under this gallery, are handsome painted boxes for those who wish to take refreshments…