Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4

by Peter Ackroyd

  You have only to look at the printed advertisements, almost a new thing in the culture of England. Sixty different advertisements were placed in the public prints for George Packwoods’s razor cleaners and shaving paste; Dr James Graham advertised his ‘celestial, or medico, magnetico, musico, electrical bed’; he added that ‘in the celestial bed no feather is employed . . . springy hair mattresses are used . . . in order that I might have for the important purposes, the strongest and most springy hair, I procured at vast expense the tails of English stallions’. Hawkin and Dunn offered ‘COFFEE MADE IN ONE MINUTE’, while Jasper Taylor advertised a range of ready-prepared sauces such as ‘SAUCE EPICURIENNE’. Adverts appeared for ‘POMMADE DIVINE’ or ‘PEARS TRANSPARENT SOAP’. Smaller notices promoted Dixon’s antibilious pills, Butler’s restorative tooth powder, Godbold’s vegetable balsam for asthma and Hackman’s pills for the gravel and the stone. The ‘puffs’, as they were often called, were placarded over walls and windows as well as journals and periodicals. It was truly a society of the spectacle, far removed from the sixteenth century when only playbills were plastered on the posts.

  It was perhaps the hyperbole that caused Dr Johnson to confess that ‘the trade of advertising is now so near perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement’. Illustrations of jugs, and shoes, and hats, and plates, and tureens, and capes, and glasses, were everywhere. William Blake, the poet of eternity, designed some advertisements for crockery from Josiah Wedgwood with perhaps one of his great phrases on his lips: Eternity is in love with the productions of time.

  The notion of the ‘consumer’ in the marketing sense emerged first in the 1720s as the belated recognition of the growing phenomenon. Belinda, in William Congreve’s The Old Bachelor, produced in 1693, explains that ‘the father bought a powder-horn, and an almanac, and a comb-case; the mother, a great fruz-tour [false headpiece], and a fat amber necklace; the daughters only tore two pairs of kid-leather gloves with trying ’em on . . .’. Belinda is describing the appearance of a country squire and his family in a fashionable London shop.

  It was no doubt their first visit. These were the newly prosperous who had enough leisure on their hands to travel up to the city in an equipage or at least a coach. No doubt they went back to houses already furnished with carpets, screens and window curtains. The original meaning of ‘consumer’, in the Oxford English Dictionary, is of one who ‘devours, wastes, or destroys’.

  All was done in the name of fashion, the god of the metropolis. Samuel Oldknow, the cotton manufacturer from Lancashire, declared that ‘nothing but new things will please fashionable women’. One of the correspondents of the Spectator, at the beginning of 1712, heard a woman in an adjacent pew of the neighbourhood church whispering to her companion that ‘at the Seven Stars, in King Street, Covent Garden, there was a mademoiselle completely dressed just come from Paris’. A ‘mademoiselle’ was a ‘moppet’ or puppet dressed with the newest fashions in the latest style. A month later another correspondent in the Spectator was complaining that his wife had changed all the goods and furniture in the house three times in seven years. Between 1770 and 1800 some thirty almanacs or annuals were issued for the fashionable woman, with all the panoply of advertisements and prints. No lady in society could afford to be ‘out of the fashion’. The men, too, were encouraged by their tailors ‘to strike a bold stroke’ with their latest attire.

  Henry Fielding, the novelist and London magistrate, noticed in one of his many somewhat acidulous asides that the growth of commerce had quite changed the face of the nation, and particularly of the ‘lower sort’; as far as he was concerned, they had become greedy, crafty and vain. Trade also encouraged equality between buyers and sellers; ready money was the only mark of distinction. The old attitudes of deference to authority, orthodoxy and tradition had no place in the thriving market. There was no question of any religious duty to avoid excess profit. There was no sense of a ‘just price’ to be set by the community at large. In matters of vital sustenance, such as bread, the old tradition of prices was maintained for a little longer. But in the larger world the obligations had been sundered. This was becoming a secular and individualistic, no longer a corporate, world. Trade restrictions, and labour controls, gradually gave way. The power of the old guilds in dictating the terms and the nature of employment was severely curtailed.

  The new commercial world affected other pursuits. Sir John Hawkins, friend of Samuel Johnson and historian of music, wrote that ‘the spirit of luxury rages here with greater violence than ever . . . the great articles of trade in the metropolis are superfluities, mock-plate, toys, perfumery, millinery, prints and music’. Johnson himself might not have agreed with his friend’s judgement since, like many other observers in the eighteenth century, he believed that luxuries gave employment and income to the industrious poor. ‘Now the truth is’, he said, ‘that luxury produces much good.’ Unnecessary and superfluous commodities, such as Venetian looking glasses, Turkey carpets, Japan screens, Flanders lace, vases from China and statues from Italy, were the lifeblood of high commerce.

  The more humble cup or saucer of tea was considered, on its first arrival in England in the middle of the seventeenth century, to be an intolerable luxury that spread depression and lassitude among its consumers. It was conceived by many to be a dangerous, insidious and powerful concoction. It was not nutritious. It weakened the nerves. It prevented healthy sleep.

  By 1717, however, green tea had become the drink of choice; and its use was now common among all classes and any attempt at prohibition, suggested by some, was sure to fail. The average annual import during the 1690s was some 20,000 pounds in weight; by 1760 it had reached 5 million pounds. The amount of sugar consumed, to sweeten the bitter herb, increased fifteen times over the century. The human cost of what was essentially colonial exploitation will be discussed in a later chapter. Behind the spoon of sugar lay the back-breaking labour of the slave. An abolitionist of the late eighteenth century, Elizabeth Heyrick, wrote that ‘the laws of our country may hold the sugar cane to our lips, steeped in the blood of our fellow creatures; but they cannot compel us to accept the loathsome potion’. It is ironic perhaps that the daily diet of sweetened tea helped to sustain the wage-earning slaves of the English cities.

  All the roads of luxury and fashion have the signpost ‘To Etruria’ standing beside them. The master of that destination was of course Josiah Wedgwood, the tradesman who more than any other epitomizes the Georgian culture of commerce. He was born in the summer of 1730 at Burslem in Staffordshire, the heart of the pottery country, and the spirit of place animated him soon enough; he was truly a native genius. Little is known about his early years but it is clear that he soon embarked upon an ambitious programme of research and improvement. He began a life of labour and experiment on glazes and colours while at the same time becoming a pioneer of industrial design; he was determined to fashion the best creamware in the world. ‘I saw the field was spacious,’ he wrote, ‘and the soil so good, as to promise an ample recompense to anyone who should labour diligently in its cultivation.’

  He realized from the beginning that his trade should be concentrated upon the rising ranks of ‘middling people’, ‘which class’, he wrote in a letter of 1772, to his business partner, Thomas Bentley, ‘we know are vastly, I had almost said, infinitely superior in numbers to the Great’. This might be described as the manifesto of the new consumer society. He realized, too, the vast importance of fashion in such an enterprise. ‘Fashion’, he wrote, ‘is infinitely superior to merit in many respects.’ He was reflecting in part on the enormous success of his creamware in the replacement of porcelain. He wrote to Bentley again that ‘it is really amazing how rapidly the use has spread almost over the whole globe, and how universally it is liked’. But then he asked, ‘[H]ow much of this general use, and estimation, is owing to the mode of its introduction – and how much to its real utility and beauty?’ It was a most pertinent question but one that did not and does not readily
afford an answer.

  The ‘mode of its introduction’, however, was of paramount concern to Wedgwood and his associates. His methods included those of elegant display and of widespread advertisement; he pioneered the use of catalogues and of trademarks to distinguish his products. If the name of a patron could be attached to a certain range of ware, so much the better. He opened a London warehouse and other showrooms where the merchandise was treated as if it were part of a gallery or museum; when he opened a new showroom on the corner of St Martin’s Lane and Great Newport Street, he made sure that its address was published in the St James Chronicle perused by ‘people of fashion, and which I suppose is that wherein the plays are advertised’.

  He employed travelling salesmen, and took pains to export his ware to the royal and noble families of Europe. He had the ambition of being ‘Vase Maker General to the Universe’ which, in a manner of speaking, he became. If we can name him one of the founders of a commercial society, he can also be called one of the pioneers of a new industrial society. Many visitors made their way to his factory, where his employees were regimented and distributed with the same precision and order as the cups and tureens that came off the production line. The factory was in effect three large blocks running 150 yards alongside the Grand Trunk Canal with several courtyards and towers containing kilns and ovens. It was described by a foreign rival, Louis Victor Gerverot, as ‘an enormous building, practically a small town . . . a marvel of organisation’. We shall come across similar descriptions of English factories when we descend further into the bowels of the Industrial Revolution. The enterprise was designed for mass production along an assembly line, the first of its kind in the pottery industry.

  Wedgwood divided the manufacture of pottery into components such as slip-casting and transfer-printing, each with its own experts working in unison. His purpose was ‘to make such machines of the Men as cannot err’; continued and uninterrupted production could thereby be achieved. It could have been Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four rather than 1769. He did not tolerate faulty goods. He had an artificial leg, as a result of a childhood illness, and it is said that he would smash inferior items of crockery with a blow from his wooden limb. He rang the bell for work at 5.45 a.m., and devised a form of ‘clocking in’ that became the standard practice of the factory system.

  In the world of English commerce everything, from the time of ‘clocking in’ to the time of leaving, breathes and has its being through the agency of the market; if we may paraphrase Hermes Trismegistus on the nature of the divine, it had its centre everywhere and its circumference nowhere. The concept of the market, in anything like a contemporary sense, was in fact even then being devised. Two of the earliest references are to be found in Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), the book that can be said to be the founding text of the modern economy; when Smith alludes to the trade in a particular commodity or product, he calls it ‘the market’.

  He believed that trade should be free, altogether liberated from the restrictions that had their origin in the medieval system; there should be no control over wages, hours, rates of interest, or prices of good; the mobility of labour and the flow of capital should not be regulated by any external authority. ‘Protection’, in all its forms, should come to an end. The sphere of traditional and paternalistic values should be destroyed and in its place a system of supply and demand should be instituted.

  This of course had wider ramifications. Richard Price, writing on civil liberty in 1776, the same year that Smith completed The Wealth of Nations, wrote that ‘all government even within a State, becomes tyrannical as far as it is a needless and wanton exercise of power, or is carried further than is absolutely necessary to preserve the peace or to secure the safety of the State’. The duty of government was to promote internal justice and to defend against external aggression. That was all. The natural operation of supply and demand, therefore, would be to the advantage of all parties; and the best possible market was one allowed to regulate itself.

  Just as trade was considered pre-eminently good in itself, so the basic principles of trade – to buy cheap and to sell dear – became paramount. What might be called the market nexus covered a whole range of social activities, from marriage to a hackney-carriage licence. Moll Flanders, in Defoe’s novel of that name, remarks that ‘the market is against our sex just now’. The result might be construed as ‘laissez-faire’, a phrase that became popular in the 1750s.

  It was believed, for example, that businessmen and private investors should finance the building of bridges and roads, without involving the central administration, while the promotion of technology and science was to be left to aristocratic patrons and learned societies. Surely this would apply with redoubled force in financial and economic matters? The conviction slowly percolated through to the Commons and in 1796 William Pitt lamented the occasions ‘when interference has shackled industry’ and declared that ‘trade, industry and barter will always find their own level and be impeded by regulations which violate their natural operation and derange their proper effect’.

  This was the permanent consequence of The Wealth of Nations. Smith himself was an unlikely prophet; at a young age he had been kidnapped for a short time by tinkers from his native Kirkcaldy, and it may be that some of his oddities were a result of that unplanned expedition. He had a habit of smiling and talking to himself, proceeding along the streets of Edinburgh in what was described as a ‘vermicular’ – worm-like – manner; he had a harsh voice and teeth like tombstones. He was once discoursing on the division of labour to certain colleagues, when he fell into a tannery pit of fat and lime; he had to be taken home in a sedan chair, complaining all the while.

  He believed that an individual should take his own course in the belief that ‘the natural effort of every individual to better his own condition, when suffered to exert itself with freedom and security’, has enough intrinsic power to carry any society towards ‘wealth and prosperity’. When an individual attends to his own gains he is led ‘by an invisible hand’ to promote an end that was far from his intention, which may be described as the general good. It was he rather than Napoleon who described England as ‘a nation of shopkeepers’, thus justifiably defining the nation as uniquely dependent upon trade. In the second chapter of The Wealth of Nations he proposes that ‘it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner but from their regard to their own interest’. From this sentence sprang an insight that controlled social and economic theory for more than a century. It is in fact one of the enduring legacies of the eighteenth century.

  12

  The What D’Ye Call It?

  The old king had died, after waving farewell to his favourite German palace, but the information did not reach the royal apartments at Richmond Lodge until three days later. It was the duty of the pre-eminent minister, Robert Walpole, to broach the report to his new sovereign, George II, who promptly asked the minister to inform Spencer Compton; Compton was the treasurer of the new king’s household, and seemed likely to secure effective power. Yet it was not to be. Those who gleefully anticipated Walpole’s demise had underestimated his effectiveness.

  His equable relations with George’s wife, Queen Caroline, have been noticed; it also became clear that Walpole had unrivalled command of the Commons. Walpole was in any case by far the most competent and authoritative man in the country, a fact which even a new king could not easily ignore. The king himself spoke English but with a strong guttural German accent, so he might sometimes need the aid of an emollient translator.

  Yet he had lived in England long enough to be acquainted with the most powerful men and women in the country, and seems from the beginning to have decided to rule in a way different from that of his father. This bias obviously gave hope to the Tories who had been systematically excluded from power by George I. They flocked to court, but the best of intentions can sometimes be thwarted by events; as it was, th
e powerful forces ranged against them effectively barred them as possible Jacobites. The Tories had also been averse to the continental wars, of which Hanover had been a part, and were therefore still suspected.

  The king himself was by no means a majestic spectacle. He was very short, and relied upon the effect of wigs and high shoes to accentuate the positive. The flatterers noted that he had bright blue eyes and a noble Roman nose; his enemies saw only feebleness of intellect and of character. He was somewhat stiff in his bearing, with the attendant characteristics of obstinacy and bad temper. It was reported that his ministers were forced ‘to bear . . . even with such foul language that no one gentleman could take from another’. The pattern of his conversation was one of boastfulness, bullying and bluster. Some of his words to his wife have been recorded by Lord Hervey, vice-chamberlain in the royal household. ‘Before she had uttered half of what she had a mind to say the King interrupted her, and told her she always loved talking of such nonsense and things she knew nothing of . . . she was always asking some fool or other what she was to do; and that none but a fool would ask another fool’s advice.’

  Understandably for a monarch he had a great sense of his own importance, but he did not necessarily impress his peers. A caricature shows him with his leg lifted to kick out; he was well known for kicking his servants, and also for being brusque or even rude to casual visitors. He was more obdurate in appearance than in reality, however, and a courtier, George Bubb Dodington, recorded in his Diary that the king ‘would sputter and make a bustle but when they told him that it must be done from the necessity of his service’ he went ahead and did it. He was by obligation, if not by nature, a pragmatist.

  He was aware that a Hanoverian king was not necessarily adored or admired by the English, and took care to manifest his status. He dressed strictly, according to the codes of etiquette, and carried himself with more hauteur than was perhaps necessary; he adored the regal world of pageantry and spectacle. Yet he was also aware of the sensitivities of his subjects; he did not claim any semi-divine status by touching for the king’s evil, and he discouraged any attempt at a cult of majesty with portraits or statues.