Part 1

SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND

1750-1850

BY F. J. FOAKES-JACKSON

New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1916

_All rights reserved_

COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1916.

Norwood Press J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

ACADEMIAE HARVARDIANAE ET PRAESERTIM

A. LAURENTIO LOWELL

PRAESIDI PROFESSORSIBUSQUE EIS QUI FRATERNO AMORE HOSPITEM ACCEPERUNT CANTABRIGIENSIS CANTABRIGIENSIBUS HOC OPUSCULUM D.D.

PREFACE

This volume contains a course of Lowell Lectures delivered in Boston in March, 1916; and I take this opportunity of tending my thanks to the Lowell Institute for affording me the privilege of delivering them. I must also thank a most indulgent audience for their sympathetic attention.

I desire particularly to thank several friends in England for assistance in the preparation of these lectures. In my investigations into the story of Margaret Catchpole, Mr. John Cobbold of Holywells, Ipswich, Mr. Edward Brooke of Ufford Hall, Suffolk, Mrs. Sylvester of Tonbridge, and the Curator of the Ipswich Museum, allowed me to see original documents of great interest; Mr. Barker of the _East Anglian Daily Times_ and Mr. Goodwin of Ipswich helped by searching the files of old newspapers for information. The Downing Professor of the Laws of England at Cambridge assisted with his advice on the subject of Dickens’ legal knowledge; and Mr. Stoakley of the Cambridge chemical laboratory contributed to the success of the lectures by his admirable reproductions of illustrative maps and pictures.

Above all, I must express my gratitude to two ladies in America, who not only contributed to the pleasure of my visit by their unstinted hospitality, but did all in their power to save me from those pitfalls which beset every one who lectures in a strange country. Mrs. Barrett Wendell of Boston found time in the midst of her many useful avocations to hear several lectures before they were delivered, and to advise how they could be made more intelligible and acceptable to an American audience; and Mrs. Kirsopp Lake proved herself indefatigable not only in revising the lectures before they were delivered, but also in reading the proofs of this book.

UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, NEW YORK, August, 1916.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LECTURE PAGE

I. LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ILLUSTRATED BY THE CAREER OF JOHN WESLEY 1

II. GEORGE CRABBE 42

III. MARGARET CATCHPOLE 81

IV. GUNNING’S “REMINISCENCES OF CAMBRIDGE” 126

V. CREEVEY PAPERS--THE REGENCY 168

VI. SOCIAL ABUSES AS EXPOSED BY CHARLES DICKENS 213

VII. MID-VICTORIANISM. W. M. THACKERAY 261

VIII. SPORT, AND RURAL ENGLAND 302

SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND

LECTURE I

LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ILLUSTRATED BY THE CAREER OF JOHN WESLEY

In order to depict social life in England in the eighteenth century I am going to take the career of one of its most remarkable men, though you may be surprised at the choice I have made. For the eighteenth century was an eminently social age and the stage is crowded with figures of men and women of the world. Their letters, their talk, their scandals, their amusements have come down to us in profusion; and it is not difficult for us to imagine ourselves in their midst. You may well ask me why I did not select a really brilliant character to expound the life of this time. I might for example have taken Lord Chesterfield or Horace Walpole, or Boswell, that most observant of men, or the great character whom he immortalised. Or I might have selected others less known, but equally interesting, and rather than a revivalist preacher like John Wesley. I had written thus far when I came across the following words by the British man of letters, Mr. Birrell:

“How much easier to weave into your page the gossip of Horace Walpole, to enliven it with a heartless jest of George Selwyn, to make it blush with the sad stories of the extravagance of Fox, to embroider it with the rhetoric of Burke, to humanise it with the talk of Johnson, to discuss the rise and fall of administrations, the growth and decay of the constitution, than to follow John Wesley into the streets of Bristol, or to the bleak moors near Burslem, when he met face to face in all their violence, all their ignorance, and all their generosity the living men, women, and children, who made up the nation.”

But I think I could give another reason why John Wesley is a fit person to represent the social life of his century, namely, that though he may undoubtedly be classed among the saints, though he was one of the most unworldly of men, though he took what must seem to most of us an unnecessarily serious view of life, he fell short of hardly any of the great men enumerated in shrewd observation and even in what in the language of his time would have been termed “wit.” Nay, Wesley possessed a caustic humour which many a worldly wit might have envied. “Certainly,” he writes in Scotland, “this is a nation quick to hear and slow to speak, though certainly not ‘slow to wrath.’” “You cannot be too superficial in addressing a ‘polite’ audience” is an aphorism of his which I remember. “I know mankind too well, I know they that love you for political service, love you less than their dinner; and they that hate you, hate you worse than the devil.” Here is a criticism of a tapestry in Dublin. “In Jacob’s vision you see, on the one side a little paltry ladder, and an angel climbing up it in the attitude of a chimney sweeper; and on the other side--Jacob staring at him under a silver laced hat.” The criticisms of books,--for he was an omnivorous reader, especially on a journey,--“History, poetry and philosophy I commonly read on horseback, having other employment at other times,”--are not always fair but nearly always shrewd and often as bitter as anything Johnson himself could have uttered. “I read with much expectation a celebrated book, Rousseau on Education. But how was I disappointed! Sure a more consummate coxcomb never saw the sun.... I object to his temper even more than to his judgment: he is a mere misanthrope; a cynic all over. So indeed is his brother infidel Voltaire; and well nigh as great a coxcomb. But he hides his doggedness and vanity a little better; whereas here it stares us in the face continually.” Here is his opinion of a very famous book. “Tuesday, February 11, 1772, I casually took a volume of what is called, A sentimental Journey through France and Italy. Sentimental! What is that? It is not English: he might as well say Continental. It is not sense. It conveys no determinate idea: yet one fool makes many. And this nonsensical word (who would believe it?) is become a fashionable one! However the book agrees full well with the title; for one is as queer as the other. For oddity, uncouthness, and unlikeness to all the world beside, I suppose the writer is without a rival.” “A book wrote with as much learning and as little judgment, as any I remember to have read in my whole life,” he says of Cave’s “Primitive Christianity.” Despite the fact, therefore, that John Wesley was devoted to the work of missionary preaching, that he was an ecstatic visionary and in many respects the most credulous as well as the most zealous of evangelists, his knowledge of men and critical power was not a little remarkable.

I am not at all sure that sinners are not the right people to write about saints. Saints may be; because sanctity implies something attractive which is almost unthinkable without the sympathy which nearly always reveals itself in a certain playfulness. But good, deserving people are assuredly not qualified to be the biographers of saints; for, in their desire to exalt their hero, they generally strip him of all the qualities for which men loved him (and no one was ever loved for his perfections alone) and present him as their own ideal of what a saint should be. John Wesley is an example of this and he would appear in a far more amiable light in pages written by a kindly man of the world than in a book by a devoted admirer and would-be imitator of his virtues. It was, after all, Boswell’s many failings which contributed to give us so delightful a portrait as that of his great and good friend, Samuel Johnson.

Now John Wesley was an undoubted saint, and the good he did in England, and his society in America for that matter, is incalculable: but I ask his admirers and any who profess to follow him to forgive me for using him as a peg on which to hang a few remarks on social England. Before, however, I do so may I introduce him and some of his family to you?

It is rare indeed to find in any family so much genius transmitted from father to son for more than two centuries as there was in that of the Wesleys. Here are six generations:

1. Bartholomew studied physic at the University and, when ejected for Puritanism in 1662 from the living of Allington in Dorsetshire, he practised as a doctor.

2. His son John was an ardent Puritan, imprisoned on no less than four occasions. He died at an early age and was distinguished when at New Inn Hall at Oxford for his proficiency in Oriental studies.

3. Samuel, Rector of Epworth, a scholar of some repute and father of the famous Wesleys.

4. Charles, the poet of Methodism.

5. Samuel, the musician, one of the pioneers of modern organ playing.

6. Samuel Sebastian, the celebrated composer, organist in Gloucester Cathedral, who died in 1875.

Talent, not without eccentricity, seemed the natural gift of this remarkable family, to which was added beauty in the females and distinction of appearance in the male members. Samuel, the third on our list, was, naturally, a puritan by upbringing; but he became a Churchman by conviction. He obtained the Rectory of Epworth in the Isle of Axholm in Lincolnshire, and the chaplaincy of a regiment. This, however, he lost; and his dissenting enemies stopped his getting any further preferment save the living of Wroote, near to Epworth. He married the daughter of an ejected minister, Susannah Annesley, who was herself connected with the noble family of that name. She had no less than nineteen children, but few of these survived, among them the three famous brothers Samuel, John, and Charles. The girls, had they had their brother’s advantages and education, might have been almost equally distinguished. As it was, however, Samuel had enough to do to give his sons an education worthy of their abilities. The eldest son Samuel was a scholar of Westminster and a student of Christ Church, a friend of Bishop Atterbury, and a sound scholar. Owing to his Toryism he was never more than an usher (under-master) at Westminster and Master of Tiverton School: and he continued to hold the principles of a High Churchman to the last. He was an excellent and affectionate brother, ready to help John and Charles in their education; but from the first he recognised the tendencies of Methodism to be schismatical; and in a letter to his mother just before his death he pointed out the danger of his brothers’ teaching. Because he was not in sympathy with the movement he has been condemned as “worldly,” as dull, as without genius; but a sentence in this letter reveals something of the incisiveness of John. “As I told Jack,” he writes, “I am not afraid that the church should excommunicate him, discipline is at too low an ebb; but that he should excommunicate the church.” John went to school at the Charterhouse, thence to Christ Church, Oxford, and to a fellowship at Lincoln College. Charles followed in the footsteps of Samuel and became a student of Christ Church. Academic distinction was the lot of all the sons of the Rector of Epworth.

The home of the family was amid the fens of Lincolnshire; and the fenland had still many of its peculiar characteristics during the childhood and youth of the Wesleys. The Isle of Axholm had been but recently literally an island, rising out of the swamps and often approached only by boat. These islands were inhabited by a wild uncouth race who lived partly as farmers, and partly by capturing the fish and birds which swarmed in the surrounding fens. Here lived John Wesley and his family. By birth they were emphatically gentlefolk, by education highly cultivated; they were miserably poor, severed from the society of their equals among a people with whom they could have but little sympathy. All of a deeply religious spirit; the father a pious and conscientious but disappointed scholar, the mother sternly determined to do her duty, the sons endowed with singular gifts of leadership, the daughters sensitive and refined, condemned to live as peasant girls. A family so able, so thrown on its own resources, so out of contact with the world, of so imperious a spirit, was almost bound to develop on exceptional lines. Their virtues and their strength were as abnormal as their weakness, their singularly active minds were equally capable of the greatest deeds and the most surprising mistakes. All the girls were unfortunate in the choice of their partners and had sad lives. John, the most gifted of all this gifted household, was able to transform England by his preaching; yet made the most astonishing blunders in the conduct of his private life, though shewing a talent for administration worthy of his celebrated namesake, Arthur Wesley, or Wellesley, Duke of Wellington. In studying the movement we must always keep Epworth in the background.[1] But there was another side of the life of the sons of the Rector. Samuel’s friend Atterbury, the Tory Bishop of Rochester, is one of the most remarkable figures of his age. John and Charles at Oxford were poor enough but found a welcome in society congenial to them. Their birth and manners gave them access to a coterie of religious yet cultured circles, especially at Stanton in Gloucestershire; and they always comported themselves with a consciousness of a perfectly secure position in society. Neither of them was in the slightest degree dazzled by rank, wealth, or worldly position. When Count Zinzendorf, the great German noble, and the patron of the Moravians, spoke with the authority of a pious prince to John, he was answered in a spirit as uncompromising as his own. Selina, the famous and pious Countess of Huntingdon, “the elect lady” of evangelical preachers, might patronise Whitefield; but could not take a high tone with the Wesleys. Indeed, the aristocracy who preferred the treasure of the Gospel to be contained in clergy, who might be described as “earthen vessels,” disliked the Wesleys, whose greatest successes were obtained among the middle class. None the less their influence was in a measure due to the social advantages which they had enjoyed when Oxford students. We, however, have to do with John Wesley as illustrating the England of his day, and we may well begin to use him for our purposes as a traveller. He had been one the greater part of his life; but a good starting point for us will be after his visit to Germany in 1738, immediately after the time from which he dates his conversion. From that day almost till his death in 1791, John Wesley was almost continually on the road, preaching from town to town wherever he could get a hearing.

For years he seems to have travelled constantly on horseback, but later in life he made use of a postchaise. The distances he covered are almost incredible. Here is an extract from his Journal, dated August 7, 1759, when he was in his fifty fourth year. “After preaching at four (because of the harvest) I took horse and rode easily to London. _Indeed I wanted a little rest_; having rode in seven months about four and twenty hundred miles.” As we have seen, Wesley often read as he rode, and this practice taught him the value of a slack rein. “I asked myself How is it no horse stumbles when I am reading? No account can possibly be given but this: because I throw the reins on his back. I then set myself to observe; and I aver that in riding about an hundred thousand miles I scarce remember any horse (except two that would fall head over heels anyway) to fall or to make a considerable stumble while I rode with a slack rein. To fancy, therefore, that a tight rein prevents stumbling is a capital blunder. I have repeated the trial more than most men in the kingdom can do. A slack rein will prevent stumbling if anything will. But in some horses nothing can.” But all his rides were not so leisurely, and I will read you an account of a ride in Wales. He started from Shrewsbury at 4 A.M., and at two in the afternoon was forty two or three miles off, preaching in the marketplace at Llanidloes. He and his companions then rode to Fountainhead where he hoped to lodge; but “Mr. B. being unwilling” they remounted at 7 P.M. and rode on to Ross-fair. They missed the track and found themselves at the edge of a bog and had to be put on the right road; again they missed their way, “it being half-past nine.” They did not find Ross-fair till between 11 and 12. When they were in bed the ostler and a miner had a ride on their beasts, and in the morning Wesley found his mare “bleeding like a pig” in the stable, with a wound behind. This was on July 24; on the 27th he was at Pembroke; “I rested that night, having not quite recovered my journey from Shrewsbury to Ross-fair.” He was in his 62d year! The dangers of travel were considerable, and one of the most remarkable facts in regard to Wesley was that he was never molested by highwaymen, who literally swarmed in England throughout the eighteenth century. They were often in league with the post boys, many of whom were highwaymen themselves. When Wesley was 76 years of age he writes: “Just at this time there was a combination among many of the postchaise drivers on the Bath road, especially those that drove by night, to deliver their passengers into each other’s hands. One driver stopped at the spot they had appointed, where another waited to attack the chaise. In consequence of this many were robbed; but I had a good Protector still. I have travelled all roads by day or by night for these forty years, and never was interrupted yet.” Four years later, in 1782, he writes: “About one on Wednesday morning we were informed that three highwaymen were on the road and had robbed all the coaches that had passed, some within an hour or two. I felt no uneasiness on this account, knowing that God would take care of us: and He did so; for before we came to the spot all the highwaymen were taken.” I cannot but think it remarkable that Wesley was never molested, because, especially in his early days of itinerancy, everything was done to hinder his work and his enemies were quite unscrupulous enough to set the highwaymen on him. Perhaps the highwaymen had their scruples! In the early days of Wesley’s mission the invasion of England by the forces of the young Pretender took place. This was the period at which he and his followers suffered most from mob violence and also from charges of Popery and disaffection. I will take the latter first, as there is hardly any feature in the 18th century so marked in England as the dread and horror with which the Roman Catholic religion was regarded. I remember a few years ago examining a number of cartoons and caricatures during the rebellion of 1745 and almost every one of them had to do with Popery. To the English the invasion of the country by Charles Edward was like the Spanish Armada, an attempt to impose the papal yoke on the land. In the trinity of the nation’s enemies the Pope stood first: “From the Pope, the Devil and the Pretender, Good Lord, deliver us.” It was hatred of Rome that completely blinded people’s eyes to the romance of the young prince’s enterprise, and to his undoubted claim to the throne. Neither the government nor the sovereign were popular; but it was no question of popularity where Popery was concerned. The House of Hanover stood for Protestantism and the nation rallied to its support. Even that rapacious and cynical infidel, Frederick the Great of Prussia, was the darling of England as the “Protestant Hero”; and the Duke of Cumberland’s cruelties were forgotten because he saved England from the Pope. Like Marlborough and Wellington he was known as “the Great Duke.”

No charge could be more effective against an opponent than that of Romanism and many good men had to endure it. The great Bishop Butler was exposed to it for complaining in his visitation charge to the clergy of Durham of the disgraceful neglect into which they had allowed their fabrics to fall. The most deadly shaft levelled against John Wesley was Bishop Lavington of Exeter’s book, “The enthusiasm of the Methodists and Papists compared.” The visions, the trances, the ecstasies of the Methodists, reminded good Protestants of such Catholic mystics as St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross. The reasonableness of Protestantism, whether Anglican or nonconformist, was contrasted with the excited and hysterical manifestation of religious fervour in Popish countries, and the fervour of the Wesleys and their followers was especially unpopular on this account. The furious hatred of anything approaching Romanism is the key to much of the thought and feeling of the age. But though undoubtedly an enthusiast, Wesley was far in advance of his age as regards toleration. He had, moreover, a curious and chivalrous regard for the memory of Mary Queen of Scots; and he considered Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen and Protestant champion, as little better than a royal criminal. He at least would never have said as Puff says in _The Critic_, “Hush! no scandal against Queen Elizabeth.” On the contrary, he says in his Journal, “But what then was Queen Elizabeth? As just and merciful as Nero, and as good a Christian as Mahomet.” Thus he wrote in 1768, and if he held such a view twenty three years earlier, no wonder he was suspected of Jacobitism and Popery.

Far more to his credit is the fact that he resolutely refused to indulge in violent abuse of the ancient Church. On the contrary, he found so little true religion anywhere that wherever it was manifested he welcomed it. Charles Wesley’s son went over to the Church of Rome, to the great grief of his parents and, possibly, to the scandal of Methodism. This is how John writes and his words are so remarkable that I quote them at some length.

“He has not changed his religion; he has changed his _opinions_ and _mode of worship_, but that is not _religion_.... He has suffered unspeakable loss because his new opinions are unfavourable to religion.... What then is religion. It is happiness in God or in the knowledge and love of God. It is faith working by love producing righteousness and peace and Joy in the Holy Ghost. In other words, it is a heart and life devoted to God.... Now either he has this religion or he has not: if he has, he will not finally perish, notwithstanding the absurd unscriptural opinions he has embraced ... let him only have his right faith ... and he is quite safe. He may indeed roll a few years in purging fire but he will surely go to heaven at last.”