The Age of Elegance (41 page)

they resisted it at home, under the unofficial direction of Pitt's old friend, Wilberforce, with a flood of Sunday schools, tracts, free Bibles, benefit societies, soup and clothing clubs and allotments. In
1811
the
National Society for Educating the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church
was founded; in
1814
the
British and Foreign School Society
for non-denominational Bible-reading
. Admiral Corn
wallis, the "Billy-go-tight" of t
he blockade of Brest, refused, li
ke a loyal churchman, to lease his land to a chapel, but gave it to the parish for a church school. While Elizabeth Fry, taking up the work John Howard had begun, strove with love and pity to reform the brutalised prisoners in Newgate—an example followed
by
the formation of prison committees in every English county town—and Hannah More, De Quincey's "Holy Hannah," closed her life-work of charity with the building of cottages for deserving labourers .with large families, young ladies like Jane Austen's sisters occupied themselves in visiting the poor, making them comforts and teaching their children the Scriptures. Cobbett on the way to East Stratton— it was on a Sunday—met a little girl in a camlet gown, white apron and plaid cloak with a prayer book in her hand, all given by the lady of the manor who had had her taught—to his disgust, for he did not like such patronage—to read and sing hymns.

There was nothing new in this; it was the repetition of a recurring pattern in the nation's history. Though its statutory institutions were no longer adequate to the size and energy of its population, its possessing classes and all those who, in its infinitely graded society, enjoyed property, status or privilege, felt, to a degree known nowhere else, the obligation to contribute personally to the alleviation of suffering and the eUmination of vice, brutality and disease among their poorer neighbours. This sprang partly from their Christian faith and the family life which, in England and Scotland alike, was its base, and partly from the necessity for individual responsibility inherent in a State which refused to tolerate either police or bureaucracy. The English had a talent for fighting fire because they regarded it as their duty and because they knew that in the last resort there was no one else to put it out but themselves. "What stately edifi
ces," wrote the author of Acker
mann's
Microcosm of London,
"arise for the relief of every evil, corporate, moral and intellectual, that afflicts the human species: diseases of every name, accidents of every kind, helpless infancy, friendless youth, decrepid age, moral infirmity and mental derangement, find alleviation, restoration, reception, instruction, support, improvement and renovation . . . within these splendid receptacles."

This was pitching it rather high; our ancestors' treatment of the beneficiaries of their charity was practical but spartan. The dining hall of the House of Asylum at Lambeth was floored with stones, lit by high skylights and fitted with long tables and benches, the fires at either end of the hall being carefully fenced round. Other furniture . there was none, but everything was spotlessly clean and the inmates clad in neat white bonnets and tuckers and purple dresses. Here children, deserted or left bereft by their parents, were taught to mend their own clothes, make shifts and table linen, do needlework and perform the business of house and kitchen. They also learnt to read the Bible, write a legible hand and understand the first four rules of arithmetic.
At
the age of fifteen they were apprenticed for seven years to families approved by the governors.
¹

What was true of London was true also of the provinces. In Liverpool, a tenth of the capital's size, there was a
Blue Coat Hospital,
a
House of Industry,
a
House of Recovery,
a
Female School of Industry, a Seaman s Hospital,
a
Dispensary,
a
Welsh Charitable Society,
a
Ladies' Charity,
a
Lunatic Hospital,
a
Magdalene Society,
an
Institution for restoring Drowned Persons,
a
Strangers' Friendly Society,
a
Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor,
a
School for the Indigent Blind,
and a number of free schools, all supported by what was called public patronage. Every village had at least one ancient endowment; at East Burnham in Buckinghamshire there was a free school and a charitable trust with lands and ^2600 in the Funds: at Gainsborough two educational foundations, one providing every scholar annually with a blue coat and a cap trimmed with yellow. Though there was little remedial action by the State outside the rather bleak Elizabethan Poor Law—itself, however, unique in a world which still viewed charity as a religious not a civic obligation —any national or international calamity was sure to provoke among the English a subscription for its mitigation. A fund started after Leipzig by Rudolph Ackermann, the print-seller, to relieve his ruined countrymen in Saxony, was over-subscribed in a few days. The "Association for the Relief of the Manufacturing and Labouring

¹
Ackermann,
Microcosm, III,
119.
See
idem,
II,
611
-79, 137, 196;
Ashton, I,
287;
Berry, III,
308;
Croker, 1,
203
;Leigh Hunt,
Autobiography,
1,
283-309;
Partington, 1,
9,97-8
; Festing,
193
;
Simond
1
,155
-6.

Poor" during the Continental blockade had three royal Dukes and the Archbishop of Canterbury among its patrons. Even the careless Eton scholars competed in charitable contributions "for a poor cad or the widow of a drowned bargee." Most of this spontaneous charity was local; in the severe winter of
1814
,
for instance, the Quakers of Gainsborough organised a fund for distributing free soup, biscuits, potatoes and herrings to the poor of the town.
¹

The effects of such humanitarian action, given a new impetus by the Evangelical revival, were felt in almost every sphere of national life outside the slums and factory
towns. Its supreme achievement w
as the abolition of the Slave Trade, brought about in the teeth of vested interest after twenty years of agitation—a measure of incalculable benefit whose enforcement now became the task of the Royal Navy. Like so much that was best in the national life, it sprang from the protest of a minority of enlightened consciences at the suffering inflicted by the less enlightened. If there was freedom in Britain for men to commit social crimes, the same freedom fostered and helped men of active virtue to mobilise public opinion against them and bring about, after full exposure, their permanent suppression. The process even extended to the prevention of the callous cruelty perpetrated on animals by the unthinking multitude—the background against which man's inhumanity to man in early nineteenth-century slum and factory has to be set. This was no worse than in other lands, but it was very vile; a Loughborough bricklayer, for a bet, worried a hedgehog to death with his teeth, and a crowd cut off the horns of a baited bull and tortured it to death. Yet it was an English workman who, seeing in boyhood a hare's legs broken for sport, recalled that from that moment he became the friend of every living thing that suffered wrong and an enemy to every being who inflicted it. "Humanity" Martin, who protested in Parliament against bull and bear baiting, was burnt by the mob in effigy, but as a result of his brave persistence the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded and the first Act against the ill-treatment of cattle and horses placed on the statute book.
²

¹
Cooper,
26.
See
Fraser's Magazine,
XXXI,
457;
Gaussen, II,
353;
Halevy, I,
12-13;
Ham, II,
168;
English Spy,
I,
35;
Daniell, II,
87-93;
Newton,
270-1.

2
See Ashton, I,
83, 203-4;
Bamford, I,
50;
Bewick,
9-10;
Cranbourn Chase,
64;
English Spy,
i,
72;
Howitt,
415;
Nevill,
213;
Lady Shelley, II,
132;
Woodward,
451;
Smart,
206-7.

The English had a genius for voluntary co-operation. They based action, not on the State as in France, or on the Army, Church or Dynasty as in Prussia, Spain and Russia, but on the voluntarily created team. When after Waterloo the Allies entered Paris, "the English gentlemen,
^”
wrote Gronow, "sought instinctively something like a club." There was a Society for the Prevention of Vice and a Society for the Encouragement of Religion and Virtue; a Society of Antiquaries and a Mechanics' Institute; a Society for the Relief of Foreigners and one for the Conversion and Education of Negro Slaves: a Society for Protecting Trade against sharpers and swindlers, and a Society for giving Bibles to Soldiers and Sailors. It was hard to think of any object for which there was not some voluntary association of English men and women. And almost every corporate national activity, including the Army, was the result of a private contract voluntarily entered into by people of like mind.

Inside such self-chosen associations the English, normally so suspicious of authority, showed themselves astonishingly amenable. At the Beefsteak Club, where even royal dukes served their turn as "boots," members were sworn in with the words, "You shall attend duly, vote impartially, and conform to our laws and orders obediently: you shall support our dignity, promote our welfare and at all times behave as a worthy member in this sublime Society; so Beef and Liberty be your reward!"
¹
So long as they were not coerced from above but felt that they were co-operating of their own free choice, the English of all classes were prepared to contribute to their corporate activities a loyalty, enthusiasm and readiness to serve capable of making any institution work. The Czar remarked after his visit to London that the high state to which the English had advanced was the result not merely of their laws and constitution, but of a temper of mind, a soberness of thought, a habit of reflection, collective and individual, possessed by no other people.

It was because they felt themselves to be freely associated in their country's service that the English viewed it with such loyalty and devotion. The poorest were entitled to discuss its affairs: the vote, like the seals of office, might be the privilege of the few, but the policy of the nation was as vehemently debated in market place and alehouse as in Parliament or Cabinet. Outside the new factory districts and the slum rookeries of the larger cities, this sense of

¹
Nevill,
London Clubs,
37-46.

national proprietorship was almost universal. Love of country was something that transcended class or rank. Looking at that landscape of splendid properties and at the country's mansions, banks, markets, warehouses and factories, it was easy to account for the patriotism of the upper and middle classes. What was remarkable was the national pride of the poor, their instinctive belief in the superiority of their country and its ways of life, and their unfailing readiness to die for it. Theirs was a deep, sensitive love of its beauty, of its peaceful civilisation, and free traditions. At farm feast or in village alehouse the artless chorus would rise, a warning to foreign tyrants who put their trust in lawless strength:

"The race is not always got

By
them wot strive and for it run,

Nor the battel to them peopel

Wot's got the longest gun."

For all its harshnesses and injustice, such simple folk thought there was no country like their own; they felt as Lord Dudley put it, that "abroad was a poor place compared with England." A Wiltshire peasant, sitting at his door on a summer's evening, recalled how, having heard the parson preach of Paradise, he had made up his mind that "if there was but a good trout-stream running down Chicken Grove bottom, Fernditch Lodge would beat it out and out." Even where the dark mists of industrialism were settling on the northern fells and moors, the love of England's beauty remained strong; the young lovers in Manchester in the early years of the century would seek out and walk together in Tinker's Garden, "then a sweet bowery place."
¹

In country districts rich and poor still joined in expressing their pride in the common achievements of the society to which they belonged. A Devonshire child born at the turn of the century recalled how all national celebrations began with a distribution of meat and bread to the poor; Walter Scott, the Hon of fashionable Edinburgh, never failed to hurry home to join his rustic neighbours in a
gaude-amus
on the anniversary of Waterloo. "As I came down here to-day,"

¹
Bamford,
1,
102,187,195,199, 209, 219;
II,
187, 267;
Bewick,
12-13, 31-2, 37-8;
Brownlow,
21;
Cowper,
22-3;
Cranbourn Chase,
85-6:
Fraser's Magazine,
XXXI
(1845), 192;
Granville, I,
436;
Haydon, I,
205, 282;
Leslie,
228;
Dudley,
309;
Smith, I,
335.

wrote Lady Bessborough, "I met a procession that I thought quite affecting—numbers of men without an arm or leg or variously wounded, with bunches of laurel in their hats, and women and children mingling with them. I inquired what it was and found it to be the anniversary of the battle of Talavera." The sense of history had not yet been dulled by the impersonal segregation and ugliness of an industrial society; men still understood something of the march of their country through time, of its traditions and culture. When the Guards' band played the old martial airs of England outside the Palace, a foreign visitor noted that many in the crowd had tears in their eyes. It was not, Paley wrote, by what the Lord Mayor felt in his coach that the public was served, but by what the apprentice felt who gazed on it. To make men love their country, it was still thought necessary to make their country lovely.

For England still preserved a pageantry, beautiful and impressive though homely, that educated men in the meaning of society. The Mayor with his laced cloak, sword-bearer, maces and aldermen, the gentlemen of the shire dining together in lieutenancy uniform, the humble beadles and criers in their cocked-hats, flaxen wigs and silver lace, the very postmen in red and gold were unconsciously teaching history. At Assizes the Judges drove into the country towns in scarlet and ermine, with outriders, javelin men and halberdiers, while the bells pealed and the streets were thronged with gentlemen in dark-blue coats, glossy hats and shining boots, and misses in white muslin and their prettiest bonnets. In Edinburgh the Lord Justice Clerk and Judges passed through the city to their daily tasks in robes of red and white satin; in the grey streets of University and cathedral cities there was usually a flutter of gowns and a glimmer of wands and maces. From Windsor's keep, with its banners and martial music floating on the wind, to the local yeomanry jingling through market town and tented park with glossy horses and shining accoutrements; from the scarlet and buff of the Belvoir uniform flooding the grey, green Leicestershire fields to the ragged London sweeps marching through the streets on May Day with ribbons and trinkets, the English loved to preserve the symbols of their unity and corporate achievements.
¹

So, too, they commemorated their faith and the seasons of the

¹
Ashton, I,
215;
Bamford, II,
80-1, 196;
Dixon,
61-2;
Howitt,
83-5, 447-8;
Letts,
200;
Lockhart, IV,
188, 204;
Ackermann,
Microcosm,
I,
11;
Newton,
206-7;
Pyne,
Costume of Great Britain;
Simond, I,
3, 255, 269, 299, 361;
II,
67, 72, 115.