Sweet Hampstead and Its Associations

by Caroline A. White

To lift the cup, and make the world admire.’

Or they stroll off to ransack the raffling-shops for gloves, fans, etc., while the gentlemen smoke, play at bowls, or adjourn to cards. In the Long Room the musicians play, and those who like may dance, or rehearse their steps and figures for the evening exhibition of them. Some wander away to the green skirts of Caen Wood, or seek the deep-hedged lanes, where the elm boughs meet overhead. While others are content to find their pleasure on the Heath, with its ever-varied, ever-lovely views, or choose the pleasant shade of its leafy groves, that both diversify the scene and break the force of the winds that blow upon it. Others, again, ride or drive to some of the many pretty places, or the seats of friends in the vicinity, Highgate, and Hornsey, and Colney Hatch being in much favour with the gentry as sites for country-houses. Then at the orthodox hour for the promenade, what a flutter of fans, and tapping of fine snuff-boxes, and lifting of laced or feathered hats, as the company bow, and curtsey, and smile, and ogle, as they pass and repass in the walks, the ladies resplendent in ‘stained silks,’ damasks, and flowered satins, that from the perfection of their texture would, in the parlance of old folks describing them, have literally stood alone. Nor was the dress of the gentlemen less superb. Their quaintly-cut, wide-skirted coats, with great cuffs bound with gold or silver lace, and deep flapped waistcoats richly embroidered, were often of the most costly materials, accompanied with flowing cravats—or falls, as they were called—and hanging ruffles of Mechlin or other lace. Then there were the shoes—the beaux wore them—with red heels and silver or brilliant buckles; and, again, the sword-hilt, band, and knot, allowed of a variety of dainty devices, the sword-hilt being sometimes of plain steel or silver only, but sometimes gilt and jewelled.

No record remains to us of the great ladies who gave the encouragement of their presence to the fashion of the Hampstead Wells in those early years; but we know that Addison, and Garth, and Steele, and Arbuthnot, Sir Godfrey Kneller, Swift, and all the Kit-Cats, were of the company. And their presence there has made the Heath and Well Walk classic ground for all who love the eighteenth century. It was a time of lordly bows, deep curtseys, stately manners, and coarse speech, and the day of depraved morality and affected sentiment. Women in want of an expletive had hardly given up the use of oaths; Her Grace of Marlborough habitually retained them; and men felt but little restriction in the presence of women. Indecent equivoke and double entendre were thought witty even in good society, and judging from Swift’s correspondence with Lady Betty Germain and Miss Arbuthnot, there was a freedom of speech between the sexes that astonishes one. Modesty must have been relegated to the fan, for evidently it was not on guard in the ear any longer.

Away from the temptations, engagements, and frivolities of town life, as housewives and mothers (to give them their due), these ladies took an active part in domestic affairs, and taught their children, harshly enough sometimes, the lesson of dutifulness and obedience—a lesson too much neglected in modern education. But for a woman to exhibit a love of learning or a predilection for its pursuit was to incur the suspicion and contempt of her own sex, and the derision of the other. Ordinarily women read, in the language of the day, ‘to kill time,’ and this amusement was chiefly supplied to them by the playwrights or the novels of Fielding or Mrs. Aphra Behn, works of fiction that taught their readers a new use for the squabs of the settee or sofa whenever a visitor was announced.

The mission of the essayists who produced the Spectator and Guardian was to purify the manners of the times, to awaken an interest in literature for its own sake, and to show through the amusing medium of narrative and anecdote the meanness and wickedness of much that was going on unconcealed, and yet unnoticed, around them.

It is said that the publication of these works exercised a perceptible influence on society, and produced a permanent improvement in morals, no mean mission, nor contemptible result, if they ever effected it.

Few country ladies, unless privileged persons who desired to keep up their relations with the Court, came to London in those days, except on urgent occasion. The great trouble and expense the journey involved, the execrable condition of the roads, and terror of the highwaymen who infested them, were reasons quite sufficient to account for the home-staying, which has often been put to their account as a virtue, and flaunted in the face of their travel-loving great-great-great-grand-daughters. The principal event in the lives of many country ladies was the summer visit to one of the fashionable spas—Bath or Harrogate, Tunbridge or Hampstead Wells—where they met old friends and renewed acquaintances, picked up the threads of unfinished family histories, saw dress ‘as worn in the politest circles,’ compared notes with one another, and acquired the newest information of the world that lay outside their own, so that on their home-going they became exemplars and oracles on all social and society matters to those of their acquaintance who had not had the felicity of visiting the spa.

But to return to Hampstead. The light-hearted indifference to what was going on around them enabled the fashionable visitors to endure the scandal of the runaway marriages at Sion Chapel, the hurly-burly of the four days’ fair, and the company brought together by these doings; but at last the cheating play at the raffling-shops, and the morals of Hampstead, became so notorious ‘that persons of character were almost ashamed to be seen there, even with their own relations,’ and the most reckless of the rank and file of fashion found it necessary to turn their backs upon it. Yet, before it reached this last depth of moral degradation, Hampstead Wells must have exhibited a brilliant epitome of Bath and Tunbridge. Of course, the behaviour of the company at the Assembly and Long Room was not lost sight of by the wits and satirists of the day. The ballad-singers preserved the follies of the Wells in wicked verse; the playwrights—at least one of them, as we have seen—dramatized them; and I should not wonder if Baker’s holding of the ‘mirror up to Nature,’ or the modish pretence of Nature that so often passes for it, had something to do with the waking up of thoughtful people, and the falling-off of fashion from the place.

A few people of the upper class, who had learned to love sweet Hampstead for its own sake, continued, from season to season, to return here for change of air, so that the better kind of lodging-houses in Pond Street and elsewhere were not wholly deserted. Neither were the Wells, of which we have a rather deterrent proof in the following advertisement from the Daily Courant of June 18, 1718:

‘Hampstead.—Whereas it has been reported that a robbery has been committed this season upon the road to Hampstead Mineral Well, this is to inform ladies and gentlemen that for the future at half-past ten in the evening, every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday (being public days), there will be a sufficient guard, well armed, sent by the inhabitants of the said Wells, to attend the company thence to London.’[241]