The Age of Elegance (45 page)

CHAPTER
NINE

The Other Face of Success

"An inventive Age

Has wrought, if not with speed of magic, yet

To most strange issues. I have lived to mark

A new and unforeseen creation rise

From out the labours of a peaceful land

Wielding her potent enginery to frame

And to produce. . . . From the germ

Of some poor hamlet, rapidly produced

Here a huge town, continuous and compact,

Hiding the face of earth for leagues—and there

Where not a habitation stood before,

Abodes of men irregularly massed

Like trees in forests—spread through spacious tracts

O'er which the smoke of unremitting
fires

Hangs permanent.
..."

Wordsworth

W

ith
a society so constituted and with sons so self-reliant, resourceful and loyal to creed and country, Britain had withstood the revolution in arms and defeated, contrary to all expectation, a martial State with a population, at the start of the war, nearly three times the size of her own. Even when all Europe was mobilised against her by an unparalleled military genius, she had triumphed, utterly destroying him and his power. And in the process, for all her immense sacrifices, she had grown rich—richer than ever before. The twenty-two years' struggle, though it had cost her seven hundred millions, had doubled her export trade and trebled her revenue. The carrying trade of the world was in her hands. Despite all her enemies' efforts, her merchant tonnage had risen from a million to two and a half million tons. Her commerce with the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in South America had increased fourteenfold.
By
her conquests in India, her occupation of the Cape, Ceylon and Malta, her voyages of trade and discovery to Australia and the Far East, she had extended her tentacles into every part of the globe and raised the population of her empire from twenty to seventy millions. "I doubt," wrote Lord Dudley, "whether any community ever attained to such a pitch of prosperity and glory."

Everything testified to its wealth, power and empire: the interminable masts in the Thames, Tyne and Mersey, the Chinese, Persian, Parsee and Armenian traders in the Customs Houses, the Souchang tea that Dorothy Wordsworth wrote for from Rydal to Twinings, the rum with which the abstemious Wilberforce laced his bedtime milk.
¹
Even the humblest artisans seemed to share in that flood of prosperity which their virtues and those of their leaders had unloosed. At the time that Napoleon sailed, a prisoner in a British man-of-war, for St. Helena, wages in the manufacturing districts were higher than they had ever been, save in the boom which had followed the short-lived Peace of Amiens. Yorkshire woolcombers were earning five shillings a day, coal-miners almost as much. A few years earlier, Simond had found the brass and iron founders of Birmingham, work
ing by the piece, making up to £3 and
£4 a week—the equivalent of four or five times as much to-day. Everyone with ambition was borrowing to launch out in new ways; even humble Samuel Bamford, finding work for the handloom so easily procurable, had given notice to his employer and, hiring looms, set up on his own. A writer recalled how in the closing years of the war, when Britain was manufacturing for all Europe, a vast working population had been called into existence to supply every manner of article to countries too busy in mutual slaughter to be able to make for themselves. "Everything," he wrote, "assumed a new and wonderful
value....
The tables of mechanics were heaped with loads of viands of the best quality and of the highest price: their houses were crowded with furniture, till they themselves could scarcely turn round in them—clocks, chests of drawers and tables thronged into the smallest rooms, looking-glasses, tea-trays, and prints stuck on every possible space on the walls, and from the ceilings depending hams, bags, baskets, fly-cages of many colours . . . that gave their abodes more the aspect of ware-rooms or museums than the dwellings of the working class. Dress advanced in the same ratio; horses and gigs were in vast request; and the publicans and

¹
Farington, VIII,
22.
See Alison, I,
78-9;
Coleridge,
Unpublished Letters,
II,
72-3
; De Selin
court, II,
558;
Ackermann,
Microcosm,
I,
219;
Pennant,
A Journey to the Isle of Wight,
I,
11;
Simond, II,
63;
Woodward,
199.

keepers of tea-gardens made fortunes."
¹
In the victory summer of
1814
the weavers' wakes at Middleton were celebrated with a hospitality and display never before known, six bands and eleven rush-carts perambulating the parish.

At the time of Britain's victory this material prosperity seemed the most assured thing in the world. Though chequered by spasmodic depressions, sometimes terrible in their intensity, the rise in production and trade had been continuous throughout the war. Now that peace was established over all the earth and her Navy's power to maintain it permanently was no longer even challenged, her statesmen, capitalists and workers expected an even greater prosperity. They not only expected it; they felt they had deserved it. Their victory and the wealth that had come with it convinced them that the world they inhabited had been ordered by the God they worshipped to afford them ever-expanding prosperity. They did not wish to conquer that world like the vainglorious French; they merely wished to enjoy it and the fulness thereof. The richer they were, the more certain they became that this was their right. They were like the Jews of the Old Testament. They saw themselves as God's successful instruments for scourging those who broke His laws. Having emerged from tribulation into unbroken sunshine, they were totally unprepared for any reversal of fortune, for they could not conceive, having done so much for righteousness, how they could deserve misfortune. The shock when it came, therefore, found them unprepared.

No one could gainsay the tireless energy with which the British worked to achieve success. The hours of the north country factories ranged from sixty-five to seventy-five a week.
²
The operatives who combed and sheared the cloth of the West Riding worked from four in the morning till eight at night; the children who pulled the trucks and emptied the baskets in the Northumberland mines did so with a fierce, daemonic rapidity. At Birmingham, a foreigner reported, no

¹
Howitt,
202-3.
See Alison, I,
80;
Bamford,
1,
122,152-3,188-9;
Fremantle,
1,
145;
Letts,
134;
Simond, I,
95-6;
Smart,
414.

2
Smart,
196-7.

one spoke or thought of anything but labour. The London shops closed their shutters at midnight and opened again at dawn. When the first edition of Scott's
Fortunes of Nigel
reached London from Edinburgh on a Sunday—the one day of rest observed by this nation of toilers—the bales were cleared from the wharves by one o'clock on Monday morning and 7000 copies distributed before ten. The wives of the farm labourers in the Vale of Aylesbury woke at four on summer mornings to plait straw for an hour before rising.

Punctuality and dispatch were almost universal attributes. "With habits of early rising," Cobbett asked, "who ever wanted time for any business?" "Sharp's the word and sharp's the action," was the motto of the great carrier, William Deacon. In this the English resembled their hero, Nelson, who, as he was borne dying from the
Victory's
deck, noticed something wrong with the tiller rope and ordered it, as was his habit, to be put right at once. The founder of W. H. Smith's built up his firm's fortunes by galloping the morning newspapers to catch the out-going mails. Even the postmen went from door to door ringing their bells "with an indefatigable rapidity."

There was something heroic about the energy of the English and Scots in their struggle for existence. Many resembled Wordsworth, whom Carlyle described as having "great jaws like a crocodile cast in a mould designed for prodigious work." George Stephenson's father looked "like a peer o' deals nailed thegither an' a bit of flesh
i'
th' inside."
¹
A Northumberland pitman of Bewick's acquaintance was so strong that he thought it no hardship to spend his days at the bottom of a pit, breast high in icy water, filling buckets as they were lowered to him. Within this race of toilers burned a tireless and passionate intensity. Bewick himself set off at five every morning to walk ten miles to Newcastle, wading through streams and never troubling to change his clothes, even when they were frozen stiff. Even the gentle Charles Lamb, rusticating at Dalston, walked every morning into the Temple to get shaved, while Keats—a consumptive —tramped six hundred miles in a month through the Highlands, rising always before dawn to complete twenty miles by noon. A penniless widow in a little Lincolnshire town made and hawked pasteboard boxes for sixteen hours a day to feed and educate her son; her only respite was an occasional pipe with a neighbour who

¹
Smiles,
Lives of the Engineers,
III,
17.

kept her children by sewing sacks for a factory, whereupon, her son wrote, "the two brave women would go again to work after cheering each other to go stoutly through the battle of life."
¹

They wasted little. The refuse of the capital was sold to the Essex and Hertfordshire farmers; the scourings of the streets were shipped to Russia to mix with clay for rebuilding Moscow. The great Walter Scott, who, to save cutting up a book worth a few shillings, would spend whole days transcribing passages in his own hand, taught his son-in-law his youthful expedient of sinking his wine into a well in the morning and hauling it up as his guests arrived for dinner. Frugality was the handmaid of industry; the possession of property, saved or inherited, was viewed as the one way a man could become master of his fate and the foundation of independence.

With energy and frugality went a high sense of enterprise and adventure. A nine-year-old Gainsborough boy, having raised four-pence by selling old bits of iron salvaged from the Trent, turned it into half a crown by begging a lift to Hull, fifty miles away, and returning with a bag of cockles for sale in his native town. From Peg Pimpleface, the costermonger's daughter, driving her donkey-cart round Poplar and Limehouse to sell vegetables from the Middlesex market gardens, to Captain Gordon of Calcutta chartering a vessel to penetrate the sea of Okhotsk and offer British goods to Siberian savages, the English were heroically on the venture. Where-ever they went they fended, and expected to fend, for themselves. Simond, going over a West Indiaman, found her cabin hung with pikes, muskets and pistols, and four great guns projecting from the cabin windows. In the same year—
1810
—he reported that "the light troops of English commerce" were finding entrances to a forbidden continent, consigning their goods in packages which could be carried by hand and making them up to resemble the manufactures of the lands to which they were sent, even to the wrappers and trade labels; in a Leeds factory he saw the name of
Joumaux freres de Sedan
on broadcloth destined for export. A few years later, a clergyman, travelling behind the Allied lines, found all the uniforms of British make and even Prussian soldiers wearing brass lions in their caps. The Flemish burghers whom Dorothy Wordsworth saw after the

¹
Cooper,
8-9, 26-7.
See
idem,
17;
Bewick,
3, 35-7, 59-60, 95-7;
Cobbett,
Rural Rides,
I,
28-9;
Colvin,
Keats,
293;
Dixon,
66;
Eland,
98;
Espriella,
I,
129;
Farington, VII,
175;
Hazlitt, "The Letter Bell,"
Monthly Magazine,
March,
1831;
Lamb, VI,
495» 581-5;
Letts,
125,133-4;
Lockhart, V,
170;
Lucas, I,
43-4;
Simond, II,
77;
Smart,
196-7;
Sydney,
149;
Woodward,
36.

war had their clothes made in Yorkshire. The very cottons of India were undersold by Lancashire on the banks of the Ganges.
¹

It was the blast furnaces that had made the armaments that had destroyed Napoleon. With the growing demand for iron—the main sinew of war—and the exhaustion of the south country forests that had fed the old charcoal furnaces and built the nation's wooden ships, steam-power, the invention of a succession of native geniuses, had been applied to the new coke furnaces of the North and Midlands.
By
the end of the war these were turning out between a quarter and half a million tons more than at its beginning. Coke, not charcoal, lit the funeral pyre of the armed Revolution. Simond in March,
1811
—the month in which Wellington's light infantrymen were shepherding Massena's starving army out of Portugal— was shown an ironworks in which three hundred men, operating enormous hammers driven by a 120-h.p. engine, produced 10,000 gun barrels a month. To feed the furnaces and the steam-power engines which inventors and capitalists were evolving in every industry to do with one man's labour what it had needed a dozen to do before, landowners and contractors prospected eagerly for coal and, finding it in abundance, made power-pumps and machinery to mine it and canals and iron-grooved or railed tracks to carry it to their customers.
²

The British at the time were the most ingenious people on earth. A society that venerated freedom of thought and action, peopled by an hereditary race of skilful mechanics, was a seed-plot for invention. Man in England was a tool-making animal. The first suspension bridge in Europe was built over the Tagus in
1812
by a major of the Royal Staff Corps to ensure swift communication between the two wings of Wellington's army. When, in a ship distressed at sea, a

¹
Anderson,
117-20;
Bamford, I,
201;
II,
86;
Bewick,
16-18;
Cooper,
24-5;
De Selincourt, II,
883;
Lockhart, V,
100,124;
T. Moore,
Diary,
3rd
April,
1823;
Pyne,
Picturesque Views,
Plates III, VII; Simond, I,
243;
II,
77;
Stanley,
185, 192;
D. Walker,
General View of the Agriculture of the County of Hertford
(1795),
ext.
Ernie,
191;
Woodward,
369, 444.

²
"We
crossed several iron railways leading from foundries and coalmines in the country to the sea. Four low cast-iron wheels run in an iron groove lying along the road. It is now, however, the general custom to place the groove on the circumference of the wheel, running upon the rail, which is a mere edge of iron, upon which no stone or other impediment can lodge. Five small waggons and sometimes six, fastened together, each carrying two tons of coal, are drawn by three horses, that is four tons to each horse, besides the weight of the waggon—about five or six times as much as they could draw on a common road." This was in South Wales in
1810.
Simond, I,
212.
See Porter; Smart,
19.