SOCIETY—EXCLUSIVE, GENTEEL, AND SHABBY GENTEEL
For the manners and customs of High Life in the 'forties and 'fifties Punch cannot be regarded as a first-rate authority for the excellent reason that, with the exception of Thackeray, none of the staff had the entrée to these exalted circles. They were busy, hard-worked, often overworked, journalists and officials, and their recreations and diversions did not bring them into intimate contact with the dwellers in Mayfair or Belgravia. They kept a watchful eye upon the extravagances and vagaries of High Life, but mainly as it revealed itself in its public form or in politics. In the study of the Geology of Society, which appeared in one of his earliest numbers, Punch subdivides the three main strata of Society—High Life, Middle Life, Low Life—into various classes. The superior, or St. James's series, contains people wearing coronets, related to coronets, expecting coronets. Thence we pass to the Russell Square group, and the Clapham group, and thence to the "inferior series" resident in Whitechapel and St. Giles, and it was of these groups, especially the transitional, genteel and shabby genteel, that Punch, in his earliest days, had most first-hand knowledge.
Almack's
The exclusiveness of fashionable society cannot be better illustrated than by the existence of such an institution as Almack's. It was nothing less than a stroke of genius on the part of that shrewd Scot from Galloway—Almack is said to have been an inversion of his real name, MacCaul, though another account of his origin represents him as a Yorkshire Quaker—who came to London as a valet to the Duke of Hamilton, and, soon after starting Almack's Club, a fashionable resort for aristocratic gamblers, afterwards merged in Brooks's, opened the famous Assembly Rooms in King Street, St. James's, where, for more than seventy-five years, weekly subscription balls were held during the twelve weeks of the London season. Almack gave his name to the Assembly Rooms, but the management was entirely vested in the hands of a committee of lady patronesses of the highest rank and fashion, who distributed the ten-guinea tickets. By the beginning of the nineteenth century it was "the seventh heaven of the fashionable world to be introduced to Almack's." Grantley Berkeley, who frequented the Assembly Rooms in their golden prime, speaks of the committee as "a feminine oligarchy, less in number, but equal in power to the Venetian Council of Ten." They issued the tickets "for the gratification of the crême de la crême of Society, with a jealous watchfulness to prevent the intrusion of the plebeian rich or the untitled vulgar; and they drew up a code of laws, for the select who received invitations, which they, at least, meant to be as unalterable as those of the Medes and Persians."[16] Great care was taken that the supply of débutantes should not exceed the demand, and so many engagements were entered into to the accompaniment of Collinet's band that Almack's was regarded as, perhaps, the greatest matrimonial market of the aristocracy. The maximum attendance recorded was seventeen hundred. Almack himself died in 1781, bequeathing the Assembly Rooms to his niece, who married Willis, after whom they were subsequently named. By 1840 their glory had largely departed, but so serious a review as the Quarterly wrote respectfully of their decline: "The palmy days of exclusiveness are gone by in England. Though it is obviously impossible to prevent any given number of persons from congregating and re-establishing an oligarchy, we are quite sure that the attempt would be ineffectual, and that the sense of their importance would extend little beyond the set." Yet Almack's lingered for several years. In its august precincts, which had welcomed and sanctioned the waltz (originally condemned as an unseemly exhibition), the ravages of the successor of the waltz and quadrille—the polka—are described by Punch (after Byron) in the lament of the sentimental young lady at the close of the season of 1844. The craze for dancing was not so widely diffused as in 1920, but to judge from the "History, Symptoms, and Progress of the Polkamania," all strata of Society were affected:—
THE POLKA
1. My Polka before Six Lessons.
