Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4

by Peter Ackroyd

  Another eighteenth-century attraction, the ‘spa’, was the epitome of healthful and rational pleasure; it was closely followed in popularity by the regimen of exercise and social intercourse to be found in the seaside towns. It was considered good, and even necessary, to escape from the ‘great wen’ of London with its clouds of disease and corruption. The spas were descended from the healthful wells, or holy wells, that had emerged over many hundreds, and even thousands, of years of religious celebration. But the religion was now wholly forgotten. The Roman goddess of the Bath waters, Sulis Minerva, was silent. The Virgin Mary, patron of many medieval establishments, was no longer heard. St Chad, the patron saint of medicinal springs, was entirely forgotten. Instead we encounter the figure of Beau Nash, the presiding master of ceremonies at Bath, complete with slender cane and white beaver hat. He conducted a regime of what might be described as pleasurable or curative servitude, with the attendant delights of plays, concerts, gaming, horse-racing, card-playing, bookshops and all the other paraphernalia of Georgian cultural life.

  There were competitors in the great game of health but Bath held the palm. This was the place where ageing or ailing politicians, sick of the pressures of Westminster, would go for what generally turned out to be a temporary or wholly ineffective remedy. Any visitors of distinction would be greeted by a peal of bells from Bath Abbey and a musical serenade at the door of their lodgings. There was no question of anonymity in this world; the whole point was to be recognized as an eminent social being. One of the many rules at Bath prohibited the use of screens in public places lest ‘they divide the company into secluded sets, which is against the fundamental institution of these places’. The pre-eminent concern was for society itself.

  The baths were the first engagement of the day, followed by the coffee-shops for the male and shops of dainties for the female; there was time for concerts, lectures, or more spiritual pastimes before noon. The two or three hours before dinner could be filled with outings, promenades and card-playing before another official visit to the pump room in the evening. Large spaces were provided for all these communal activities, once more emphasizing the vitalizing and benevolent flow of social life.

  The life of the seaside towns was perhaps a little more boisterous, with the uncertain impact of the wind and the waves on the polite society assembled there. There was as yet no settled view of nature other than as something vaguely picturesque and, in the right hands, ripe for ‘improvement’. Gardens could be manicured or tempted into sinuous rills but the sea was altogether ungovernable except by those sailors who despite their recent triumphs still had a somewhat unsavoury reputation. For those of an iron constitution there were manuals such as Richard Russell’s Dissertation upon the Use of Sea-Bathing, published in 1749, but even by this decade only the most hardy visitors could be lured into the water. It was much better to promenade along a safely covered walk.

  Civilization meant civility; this comprised, in the spas and seaside towns, order and sociability. It meant all the gestures of recognition and of greeting, all the gradations of talk, the conventions of formal introduction, the manner of advancing into a room or of a male opening the door for a member of the opposite sex. The sociable man was the man par excellence. It was he who, literate and polite and urbane, embodied the spirit of the age. The flow of social life, as it has been described, softened and modulated the person. As the earl of Shaftesbury put it in Characteristics (1737), ‘we polish one another and rub off our corners and rough sides by a sort of amicable collision’. Thus both men and women could be described as ‘genteel’ or ‘complaisant’ if they observed the fashions and conventions of the day. It was not done to be jaunty, or enthusiastic, or even in a hurry. We may be tempted to recall the remark of Tacitus upon the manners of the native English under Roman rule: they called it civilization, when in fact it was part of their servitude. These eighteenth-century worldlings were slaves to the false gods of the aspiring middle classes – the minor gentry, the professional classes, the wealthy merchants – who followed the theatrical posturings of the elite.

  The unruly man, the impolite man, was one who according to Samuel Johnson in the Adventurer of February 1754 manifested ‘a rejection of the common opinion, a defiance of common censure, and an appeal from general laws to private judgement’; he was, in other words, anti-social. The other extreme, from which all polite men also fled, was the effeminate creature of nods and bows and grimaces. The attendance at Italian opera and the drinking of tea were both signs of male effeminacy, and they signalled a very real fear that the new taste of the age was destroying the older masculine culture of the Stuart and Elizabethan worlds. The new fashion of men kissing, on greeting, was particularly deplored. In Colley Cibber’s Love Makes a Man; or, The Fop’s Fortune (1700), one actor congratulates another. ‘Sir, you kiss pleasingly. I love to kiss a man. In Paris we kiss nothing else.’

  The great medium of sociable life was of course the conversation in which public judgement and private taste were finely mingled; it was widely assumed that civilized values and public truth were best acquired through social intercourse and dialogue. Samuel Johnson could not have existed without the conversation with kindred spirits that calmed the over-heated excitements of his brain; it made him aware of the larger world in which he had his being, so different from the silence of terror or torpor that he feared. As he said in the Rambler of January 1752, ‘none of the desires dictated by vanity is more general, or less blamable, than that of being distinguished for the arts of conversation’. This may not have been recognized by Isaac Newton or by William Blake, but it was readily apparent to those who lived in the middle years of the eighteenth century. A man was made for conversation.

  Certainly it accounts for the notable emergence of clubs as the medium of male exchange, not least the ‘Conversation Societies’ which met weekly in well-regulated venues. ‘Whether the study of natural philosophy, or that of profane history, is more useful to mankind?’ ‘Is it a duty incumbent upon parents to inoculate their children, as a means to preserve life?’ The clubs were intended to foster cheerfulness and conviviality, friendship and mutual understanding, perhaps in unconscious aversion to the political and religious divisions of the last century.

  Clubs were now to be found everywhere. Some clubs made their homes in taverns, among them the Essex Head Club, the Ivy Lane Club, the Turk’s Head Club; all of these had some connection with Samuel Johnson. John Macky, in Remarks on the Characters of the Court of Queen Anne (1732), observed that ‘almost every [London] parish hath its separate club where the citizens, after the fatigue of the day is over in their shops, and on the Exchange, unbend their thoughts before they go to bed’. Joseph Addison, one of the high priests of eighteenth-century civilization, remarked that ‘man is a sociable animal’ but perhaps he did not include women within this truism, since none of the clubs noted at the time catered for female members.

  Every male industry, trade, interest, tradition, activity, art, or ambition now had its club. London numbered 3,000, while Bristol had approximately 250. There could scarcely have been a time when an Englishman needed to be alone. It is perhaps no wonder that the pleasures of solitude were among those adumbrated by the coming ‘romantic’ movement of the early nineteenth century. Yet it was also a time of seclusion for those who wished it; partitioned churches and partitioned taverns were as common as more open settings. There is the story of the man who had eaten at the same tavern for twenty-five years. Over those years he and his neighbour in the next cubicle had never spoken. Eventually the man plucked up the courage to call out:

  ‘Sir, for twenty-five years we have been neighbours at dinner, and yet we have never spoken. May I enquire your name, sir?’

  ‘Sir, you are impertinent.’

  It is a very English exchange.

  To ‘club’ was to come together for mutual benefit, to create a common stock or pursue a common end, to become partners or to make up a specified sum. Some clubs were therefore akin to
trading organizations and there were clubs for coal-heavers and clubs for silk-weavers, clubs for hackney-cab men and clubs for shoemakers, clubs for clock-makers and clubs for wig-makers, clubs for farriers and clubs for gingerbread-makers.

  There were Art Clubs and Music Clubs, Philosophical Clubs and Literary Clubs, Mug House Clubs and Fox Hunters Clubs; at the Terrible Club, which met in the Tower at midnight on the first Monday of the month, its members had to cut their beef with a bayonet and drink a concoction of brandy and gunpowder. Some other clubs sound too arcane to be taken seriously. At the Lazy Club members were supposed to arrive in their nightshirts, and at the Silent Club not a word was allowed to be spoken. The Club of Ugly Faces specialized in just that. The Tall Club, the Surly Club and the Farters’ Club had a similarly specialized membership. Some of the members of the Kit-Kat Club, painted by Godfrey Kneller, still adorn the walls of the National Portrait Gallery. With Addison, Vanbrugh, Congreve, Walpole and Steele among them, the visitor will become acquainted with the faces of early eighteenth-century English society, culture and now history.

  11

  Consuming passions

  It is often suggested that the fairs and markets of medieval or Elizabethan England diminished and died a natural death. That was not strictly true; wherever there was a chance of making money a stall could be put up or a trestle table placed against a house door. Fairs and markets survived to serve the needs of their local area, as markets do still. But they were to be ‘improved’. The old open marketplaces were swept away and the market crosses taken down as nuisances to traffic; in the newly designed markets the various goods were grouped together and given a ration of space.

  Yet something else had arrived that would eventually change the nature of retailing all over the country. By the mid-eighteenth century every village had a shop. A shop came to differentiate the village from the hamlet. The impetus had come from London, the source and spring of marketing. There had since Roman times been emporia of many goods and many nations in the capital. So it was at this later date. The Royal Exchange in the City, built in 1567, was, for example, rivalled by the New Exchange on the Strand constructed forty-two years later. They were two quintessentially London institutions. In the earlier years of the seventeenth century shops were usually no more than sheds or stalls or basements, but the Great Fire of 1666 in particular gave them room to expand and to breathe.

  Certain houses, or the ground floors of houses, were designed for retailing; it was not long before the virtues of display became paramount. Glass windows were still too expensive for the poorer retailers, but they could open up their fronts and sell there before boarding them again at night. And in a gawking, loitering age of display it was inevitable that the larger shops should take on the characteristics of a theatre of taste. They had assumed the functions of the Royal Exchange and the New Exchange by being at the same time both warehouses and galleries, auction rooms and bazaars; soon enough sash windows gave way to bow windows for the display of even more goods and delicacies.

  ‘The shops are perfect gilded theatres,’ the Female Tatler observed in 1709, ‘the variety of wrought silks so many changes of fine scenes, and the mercers are the performers in the opera . . . “This, Madam, is wonderfully charming. This, Madam, is so diverting a silk. This, Madam, my stars! How cool it looks”.’ It was a perpetual puppet play, in which commerce is transformed into an art or into a game. Sophie von la Roche noted in her diary for 1786 that ‘behind the great glass windows absolutely everything one can think of is neatly, attractively displayed, in such abundance of choice as almost to make one greedy’. It was the beginning of what has been described as leisure shopping. She passes ‘a watch-making, then a silk or fan store, now a silver-smith’s, a china or glass shop’. These are the harbingers of Heal’s, Swan & Edgar, and Fortnum & Mason, all of which arrived in the eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries.

  It has been described as a ‘commercial revolution’ but of what, precisely, did this revolution consist? The contents of the more prosperous households may provide a clue to the prevailing or fashionable taste. The inventory of a rich City merchant, Mr Crowley, taken in 1728, revealed ‘two pairs of India blue damask window curtains . . . damask hangings lined with canvas, six carved and silvered bark stools shifted and covered with silver and gold brocade . . . a settee and two square stools . . . a Persian carpet, a carved and silvered frame for a tea-table and one ditto for a tea water kettle . . . a small ebony cabinet inlaid . . .’. The list goes on to include other goods of relatively high worth. By the standards of the day this was not necessarily an opulent household although, in earlier periods of English life, it would have been considered lavish in the extreme. A rich grocer’s widow, Mrs Forth, seemed to luxuriate in mahogany with a dressing table, a bed, a chest of drawers, an easy chair and fourteen other chairs of the same wood. The number of households that possessed cups for hot drinks rose 55 per cent in the thirty years before 1725, demonstrating the speed and specificity of fashion.

  An inventory of a great manufacturer, Boulton & Fothergill, gives another impression of the time with ‘snuff boxes, instrument cases, toothpick cases – gilt, glass and steel trinkets, silver filigree boxes, needle books etcetera – all manner of plated goods, as tea urns, tankards, cups, coffee pots, cream jugs, candlesticks, sauce boats, terrines . . .’. By 1702 wallpaper was coming in and, according to an advertisement of the period, ‘at the blue paper warehouse in Aldermanbury (and nowhere else) are sold the true sorts of figured paper hangings, some in pieces of twelve yards long, others after the manner of real tapestry’; in the following year hangings were offered ‘in imitation of gilded leather’. Clocks, pictures, prints, mirrors, all of them could now be seen behind the bay windows of the most select shops.

  But if you turned the corner from the Strand into Catherine Street, or from High Holborn into the passages beside Drury Lane, the characteristics of a consumer society would have been much more difficult to recognize. There were no luxuries here, only the necessary aids for survival. There were no names above the shops, only rudimentary signs. There were no windows, only open doors into dimly lit interiors. In Hogarth’s ‘Noon’ a small girl snatches eagerly from the gutter a piece of broken and discarded pie.

  It has been estimated that there were 3,000 shops in the neighbourhood of Holborn and more than 2,500 in the area of Southwark. In the City approximately 6,500 shops had a ratio of twenty-two customers to each shop; the proportion of people to shops in Clerkenwell was thirty to one.

  The majority of these would be small backstreet shops or ‘petty shops’. Like the village shops which they most closely resembled, they would have a range of essential goods on their shelves including tea, sugar, cheese, salt and butter. Other items were bought occasionally and measured in small quantities, among them yellow soap, spices, dried fruits, nuts, treacle, candles and flour. The customers would buy only on a daily basis, purchasing precisely what they required to survive until the following day. They might often rely on credit. The shopkeepers were frequently as poor as the customers themselves, all of them living off the same plain diet.

  In the more prosperous neighbourhoods, however, the nature and quality of demand were hard to foresee with any accuracy; in an age in which taste and fashion had suddenly become important considerations, the patterns of consumption became of absorbing importance. China-ware was unknown in 1675 but had become so familiar as to be the object of satire by 1715. Cabinet-making became a major trade by the turn of the century, and cane chairs had a brief but spectacular reign in the drawing room. The purchase of books and of clocks, too, suggested a more sensitive awareness among the newly prosperous of what was ‘expected’. Defoe, in his Weekly Review of January 1708, wrote of printed cotton fabrics that they first ‘crept into our houses, our closets and bedchambers; curtains, cushions, chairs and, at last, beds themselves were nothing but calicoes or Indian stuffs’.

  Emulation was the key. As the British Magazine put it in 1763, ‘the
present rage of imitating the manners of high-life hath spread itself so far among the gentlefolks of lower-life that in a few years we shall probably have no common people at all’. A more considered analysis of English society, given four years later by Nathaniel Forster in An Enquiry into the Causes of the Present High Price of Provisions, noted that

  in England the several ranks of men slide into each other almost imperceptibly, and a spirit of equality runs through every part of their constitution. Hence arises a strong emulation in all the several situations and conditions to vie with each other; and the perpetual restless ambition in each of the inferior ranks to raise themselves to the level of those immediately above them. In such a state as this fashion must have uncontrolled sway. And a fashionable luxury must spread through it like a contagion.

  There were no social ‘classes’ in perpetual enmity – the idea had never occurred to anyone except the Diggers and Levellers of the previous century – but rather a multiplicity of different ranks each eager to outdo one another in the race for prosperity.

  The confirmation that this new dispensation also affected the labouring poor can be found in the many surveys that demonstrate the rise of real wages in the first half of the century. In the first book of The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith observed that the increase in wages ensured that ‘the real quantity of the necessaries and conveniences of life which it can procure to the labourer has, during the course of the present century, increased perhaps in a still greater proportion than its money price’. Grain was cheaper. Potatoes were half the price. Turnips and cabbages could be had for a song. Some of this may be explained by wishful thinking, or by faulty observation and calculation, but the general restlessness and busyness of the age suggest that there was a general resurgence in economic activity.