A History of Britain, Volume 3

by Simon Schama

  Assuming newborns had been given the healthiest possible start to their lives through the gift of their mother’s milk, the next task of parents of sensibility was to ensure that natural instincts were not prematurely crushed by too heavy a dose of either parental discipline or rote learning. In the older morality books animal spirit was by definition a sign of unchristian diabolical beastliness, Satan frolicking in his favourite playground: the soft and receptive bodies of the young. The first duty of parents wanting to save the souls of their offspring was to thrash this devilry, if necessary literally, out of their bodies. But if the connection between animals and humans were now regarded by the likes of Thomas Day as benevolent and not malevolent, and the resemblance to puppyish or kittenish animal play the sign, not of innate wickedness but of innocence, then it was important to preserve and nurture playfulness as the gentlest route to learning, even if the consequences might sometimes seem, to an older generation, shockingly anti-social.

  A generation of frantically attentive and slap-shy parents was the result. Erasmus Darwin urged parents to follow his example and ‘never contradict children but to leave them their own master’, and was notorious for doing just that (with his own children). Even so flinty a father as Henry Fox, Lord Holland, paymaster-general in Whig governments, capitulated (after hearing endless Rousseau sermons from his wife, Lady Caroline Lennox) to the cult of play. The Foxes were a byword for indulging, not to say grovelling before, the sensibilities of their children. When his son, the future Whig leader Charles James, hurled a brand-new watch to the floor, his helpless papa merely managed a pained smile and muttered, ‘If you must, I suppose you must.’ On that topic of perennial inter-generational conflict, the length of hair, Fox virtually petitioned his older boy, Stephen: ‘You gave me hopes that if I desired it you would cut it … I will dear Stephen be obliged if you will.’

  Although there were plenty of books which still insisted on the strictly enforced moral policing of the young, rather than simply laying down the law to them, a new literature expressly written to be read by as well as to the young, and vividly illustrated, aimed to show through exemplary and cautionary stories what would befall those who took the right or wrong path. John Newbery, the entrepreneurial genius of children’s books who published the tale of Dame Margery (otherwise known as Goody) Two-Shoes in this genre, also specialized in the sixpenny illustrated books that emphasized playful and practical learning. His bestseller, the first popular science book for children, Tom Telescope (1761), was the ancestor of all the ‘do your own experiment’ books, and aimed to make all kinds of knowledge, historical, geographical and mechanical, exciting as well as ‘useful’.

  One of Newbery’s army of illustrators was someone who had himself, without any benefit of exposure to Rousseau, experienced precisely the kind of natural schooling supposed to make virtuous British patriots. Born in 1753 at Cherryburn House in the parish of Oringham in Northumberland, Thomas Bewick was the son of a farmer who also worked a colliery on his land. His family was, then, solid north country yeomanry, neither very rich nor very poor, but in any event many leagues away from the Derbyshire gentry who panted after Rousseau. Even so, he remembered in the lovely memoir written in the 1820s for his daughter, Bewick was spoiled rotten by his aunt Hannah who ‘made me a great “pet”. I was not to be “snubbed” (as it was called), do what I would; and, in consequence of my being thus suffered to have my own way, I was often scalded and burned.’ At Mickley School, close by the colliery at Mickley Bank, Thomas was entrusted to the none too tender mercies of a local schoolmaster who, to judge by his enthusiasm with the switch, evidently had little time for the New Schooling. His punishment of choice was ‘hugging’ in which the little offender was mounted on the back of a ‘stout boy’ – rather like a mating frog – with his bottom bared for the flogging. When subjected to the ordeal, Thomas’s reaction was to bite his mount in the neck, and when grabbed by the master, ‘I rebelled, and broke his shins with my iron-hooped clogs, and ran off.’

  Instead of being made to suffer for his revolt, Bewick compounded matters by playing truant ‘every day, and amused myself making dams and swimming boats, in a small burn’, joining his ‘more obedient schoolfellows’ on their way home. The school of nature, then, became his real tutor – much like the childhood of William Wordsworth 20 years later on the other side of the Pennines. Even when Bewick was eventually obliged to learn fractions, decimals and Latin, he escaped from the dreary chores by filling every surface he could find – slates, books, and then, when he ran out of space, the flagstones of the floor at home, gravestones and even the floor of the church porch – with chalk drawings. His eye feasted greedily on images wherever he could find them, especially inn signs where the birds and beasts of Britain – bulls, horses, salmon – were gaudily displayed. To anyone with half an eye, it was obvious that Thomas had a precocious gift and – after he had chalked his way through every floor in the village – a friend finally supplied him with pen, ink, blackberry juice, a camel-hair brush and colours. His career as the first and greatest of all Britain’s naturalist-illustrators, the British Audubon with a difference, had already begun. He painted scenes of the local woods and moors, and the beasts and birds that inhabited them, and got paid, though not very much, for hunting scenes – every hound ‘faithfully delineated’ on the walls of his neighbours’ houses.

  Two moments from his childhood years stood out in Bewick’s memory as converting him from a rough and ready likely lad of the north into someone already feeling the pangs of sympathy for the rest of God’s creation. The first was when he happened to catch a hare that was being coursed, and although he wrote that it had never crossed his mind for a minute that there was anything wrong or cruel about hunting, when he stood there with the warm, palpitating animal in his arms, and when ‘the poor, terrified creature screamed out so piteously – like a child … I would have given anything to have saved its life.’ Told to hand it over by a farmer, he did so – only to see the hare have one of its legs broken for fun and then made to set off again, limping, in order for the dogs to have theirs; ‘from that day forward, I have ever wished that this poor, persecuted, innocent creature might escape with its life’. Bewick was too much a son of the British countryside to be against all hunting, especially where he considered the animals had a fair chance of giving the dogs and men a run for their money – badgers, for example, could fight back ferociously. But he hated gratuitous cruelty. When he knocked a bullfinch off its perch with a rock he took the bird in his hand, where it ‘looked me piteously in the face; and, as I thought, could it have spoken, it would have asked me why I had taken away its life’, and suffered another terrible pang of conscience, turning the dead bird over and over as he looked at its feathers. ‘This was the last bird I killed,’ he wrote, although he added, perhaps referring to all the stuffed birds he would use as models for his spectacular illustrations, many ‘indeed, have been killed since on my account’.

  Bewick was emphatically not a sentimentalist. He inspected the habits and habitats of the animal kingdom, and especially the combative, bustling universe of insects. Two centuries before the American sociobiologist Edmund O. Wilson, Bewick had already noticed that the colony of ants on Boat Hill, near Eltringham, formed a coherent social community ‘as busily crowded as any among men leading to or from a great fair’ and were so well organized that, when disturbed by a stick, they would quickly regroup and continue their business.

  The social curiosity and compassion that, all through his long life, would remain one of Bewick’s strongest qualities also drew him, when he was still young, towards ordinary people who had their own common, often awesomely encyclopedic knowledge of the world and its ways. One of them was an old pitman from the Bewicks’ mine who had once rescued a fellow worker from a colliery accident; sitting on a stone bench, he showed Thomas the constellations in the sky. Another neighbour, Anthony Liddell, was remembered by Bewick as the ‘village Hampden’, the epitome of the no-nonsens
e free man of the village. He had memorized the works of the first-century Jewish historian Josephus and a lot of other history besides, and dressed as if he were some sort of feral person in old buckskin breeches and a doublet ‘of the skin of some animal’. Liddell was articulate, stubborn and hot-tempered when it came to the subject of liberty and property, especially birds and fish, which, he insisted, God had provided for everyone, giving him the right to poach as freely as he wanted; for him, ‘gaol had no terrors for he lived better there than he did at home’. But it was another of his father’s pitmen, Johnny Chapman, who ‘thought it no hardship’ to work standing up to his waist in freezing cold, filthy water, who stayed in Bewick’s mind as something like the ideal working-class stoical hero. He lived on milk, bread, potatoes and oatmeal; rambled, when he felt like it, in the open country or went off to Newcastle for some ale; and paid for his lodging by singing and telling jokes and stories in his broad Geordie dialect. When he got sick and old, Chapman, the innocent, was turned away from one parish after another as each attempted to offload its responsibility for poor relief. Living hand to mouth from odd jobs, ‘he was found dead on the road between Morpeth and Newcastle’.

  These, along with his open-air Northumbrian playground, were the scenes that lodged in Bewick’s mind when he recollected his childhood; and which in their gritty, black, sharply defined detail were translated into the extraordinary wood-engraved vignettes that punctuate the beginnings and ends of his bird and animal books. Between the plover and the waxwing, and in the guise of little morality tales, he smuggled in a portrait of an entire rural world – one a long way removed from the prettified illusions of ploughmen, shepherds and woodsmen who populated the Gainsboroughs on the walls of Palladian country houses. Bewick’s country people do not pose in fetchingly ragged pastoral dress, nor are their babes in arms all apple-cheeked and dimpled. At the end of the Preface to Volume I of the History of British Birds (1804) a smartly dressed country gentleman, armed with a gun, points adamantly down the road to an old wanderer huddling against a stone wall for some shelter from the Northumbrian wind. The gentleman is not giving helpful directions. Between the black grouse and the red grouse a circle of men huddle strangely together, their backs to the beholder. They are watching cocks tear each other to pieces. Between the spoonbill and the crane, an old soldier with a wooden leg gnaws at a bone, watched by an equally hungry dog. Above him, just visible, is a grand country house. Bewick’s country people break rocks by the side of the road; slurp gruel in a wretched garret; or hang themselves by the wayside. They are documents of a new kind of British politics: the politics of what contemporaries called ‘social affection’ and we would call sympathy: the assumption expressed in the novelist Laurence Sterne’s sermon on philanthropy (based on the Good Samaritan) that ‘there is something in our nature which engages us to take part in every accident to which man is subject’. Bewick carried his sympathy for the many ‘accidents’ befalling the poor of 18th-century Britain wherever he went. When, for example, he walked through the Highlands, unlike more sentimental tourists he saw immediately that the sweeping vistas and empty uplands that so delighted Romantic ramblers were actually the result of the mass clearance of crofters: the conversion of a country which had once supported families to a country supporting sheep.

  Although there is nothing in the canon of illustrated natural history quite like Bewick’s vignettes (Thomas Pennant’s zoology, for example, was scrupulously confined to animal and bird classification), every so often an image of shocking clarity registers an exception to the visual platitudes of Happy Britannia: the country gentleman and family posed on a walk, or resting before their richly improved property. In 1769, for example, a retired officer with a restless moral conscience, Philip Thicknesse, wrote a horrifying account, accompanied with an equally horrifying print, of Four Persons Found Starved to Death, at Datchworth. Such things were not supposed to happen in Hertfordshire, in what were called the Home Circuits surrounding the capital.

  But there were probably as many wretched people like the Datchworth victims in the south (especially the impoverished southwest of England) than in Bewick’s Northumbria. For it was in southern England that the social results of ‘rural improvement’ – for good as well as for ill – were most dramatically apparent, especially in the lean years of the 1760s, when a succession of wheat harvest failures sent prices soaring and unleashed food riots in the towns and cities all the way from London to Derbyshire. The oat-eating northern counties were for the moment in less distress. To the boosters of a rapidly modernizing countryside economy, like Arthur Young, whose Six Weeks Tour through the Southern Counties of England and Wales was published in 1769, after some of the worst harvests of the century, there was absolutely nothing to apologize for: ‘Move your eyes whichever side you will and you will behold nothing but great riches and yet greater resources.’ England’s truly Glorious Revolution (he often used the word) had been achieved not with speeches and acts of parliament (unless they happened to be enclosures) but with turnips, seed drills and sainfoin. Manure moved him to rapture, to the point where he made a verb out of the noun ‘dung’. Much as he appreciated the ‘extensive views’ engineered by the Marquis of Rockingham at his 2000-acre estate in Yorkshire, the very highest compliment he could bestow was to declare it ‘amply dunged’. Drooling with excitement at ‘one compost of which manure mixed with dung … was in so complete a state of corruption that it cut like butter and must undoubtedly be the richest manure in the world’. Let idle Romantics ruminate on the Druids as they crossed Salisbury Plain. All Young could think about was the criminal waste of so much good unenclosed land that might be fenced, divided and ploughed into profit.

  To Young, sentimental hand-wringing about enclosures only betrayed ignorance of the basic facts of rural history and economy. Enclosures – taking the common land, or what was left of the open fields, previously worked cooperatively or in divided strips – were a necessary condition of realizing the full productivity of farmland. And those strips and fields that the poets pined for had been incapable of supporting a peasantry that lacked the capital and – how Young bitterly regretted this – the knowledge to understand even the rudiments of modern farming: proper manuring, letting land lie fallow between crops, the use of seed drills and the like. Besides, although the process had admittedly speeded up in the 1760s, enclosures had been going on for centuries. Moreover, the tool employed to launch the new wave of enclosures, the private act of parliament, required the consent of four-fifths of landowners in any parish.

  But not, the critics pointed out, with the consent of, or even consultation with the hundreds of thousands of smallholders and copyholders who had clung to little lots and patches of land on which they could eke out a living so long as they also had access to common grazing land for their animals. Now they were reduced to wage labourers. Young insisted that the booming market actually generated more, not less, work for the rural poor; that in their new circumstances they were much better off than when they had been attempting to make a living from inherently unviable scraps of land. Many of them did find work in local, rural manufactures, shopkeeping, or newly learned work like shoemaking. But newcomers to these trades would be competing with the already established, and some were reduced to finding casual, seasonal labour as ditch-diggers. Young complained bitterly that in Yorkshire such men earning as much as three or four shillings a day ‘scarce ever work above three days a week but drink out the rest’ and that the price of their labour was pushing up wages so much that ‘labourers in winter [are] so saucy that they are forced to be almost bribed to thresh’.

  It was not, in any case, enclosures that most distressed and angered the critics of Improvement. That dubious honour went to what was called ‘engrossment’: the replacement of many tenants by few, often the result of the incursion of ‘new’ commercial money into the high-price, high-rent land market. The economies of scale were said by Young and others to be another necessary condition for making the k
ind of investment that would bring about improved crop yields and better livestock, and thus enable the burgeoning population of Britain’s cities to be fed. And they were probably right. But the casualty of the estate manager’s relentless drive towards maximizing rents and profits was, so those same critics insisted, not just the countless numbers who now swelled the migrations to the towns – of America as well as Britain – but the collapse of an older, communally based way of life. In one of the great best-sellers of the 1760s (six editions in 10 years) Frances Brooke’s The History of Lady Julia Mandeville, a ‘Lord T’ is upbraided for: