A lady so domineering, so aristocratic, so virtuous could not be expected to receive poor Becky with her doubtful antecedents and still more questionable conduct. She vows she will leave Queen’s Crawley if ever Mrs. Rawdon sets foot in the home. But Pitt Crawley knows womankind: “She has spent her last dividends, and has nowhere to go. A countess living in an inn is a ruined woman.” This shrewd diagnosis is correct: her ladyship remains and manifests her disapproval of Becky by a stony silence. That astute little woman, however, is not daunted. She reads the countess’s tracts; she is troubled about her soul. Her ladyship cannot resist the temptation of snatching such a brand from the burning. She hopes to convert Becky, who is prepared for a greater sacrifice. She offers her body as well as her soul, and consults Lady Southdown about her health. The victory is won. That night the fearsome form of the great lady appears in night attire at Becky’s bedside and forces her to drink the decoction she has prepared. Her victim swallows it and makes so good a story of the incident that her male friends are convulsed, and thus, “for the first time in her life, Lady Southdown was made amusing.” It is when Mrs. Rawdon Crawley forces her way into the company of the real leaders of London society that we get a true glimpse of the social life of the period, and I shall ask your permission to read the well-known but I think rarely quoted account of her début at the dinner party at Gaunt House. To me, I confess, it seems inimitable. I must, however, remind you of the scenes which lead up to it. First, there is Lord Steyne’s request or rather order to the ladies of his household to call on Becky, which they do, and when his lordship pays her a visit he is amused to find her gloating over the cards they have left. “All women,” he says, “are alike. Everybody is striving for what is not worth having.... You will go to Gaunt House. It’s not half so nice as here. My wife is as gay as Lady Macbeth and my daughters as cheerful as Regan and Goneril.... And gare aux femmes; look out and hold your own! How the women will bully you!” Then there is the interview of Lord Steyne with his wife and daughters. Lady Steyne is told to write and ask Becky to dinner. Lady Gaunt, the eldest son’s wife, says she will not be present. Lady George, the second son’s wife, reminds him of the money she brought into the family—all in vain. Steyne treats them to a vigorous allocution. “You will be pleased to receive her with the utmost cordiality, as you will receive all persons whom I present to this house.... Who is master of it, and what is it? This temple of virtue belongs to me. And if I invite all Newgate and all Bedlam here, by—they shall be welcomed.” The ladies of course yield but they make it hot for their presumptuous little guest.
“It was when the ladies were alone that Becky knew that the tug of war would come. And then indeed the little woman found herself in such a situation as made her acknowledge the correctness of Lord Steyne’s caution to her to beware of the society of ladies above her own sphere. As they say that persons who hate Irishmen most are Irishmen: so, assuredly the greatest tyrants over women are women. When poor little Becky, alone with the ladies, went up to the fireplace whither the great ladies had repaired, the great ladies marched away and took possession of a table of drawings. When Becky followed them to the table of drawings, they dropped off one by one to the fire again. She tried to speak to the children (of whom she was commonly fond in public places), but master George Gaunt was called away by his mamma; and the stranger was treated with such cruelty finally, that even Lady Steyne pitied her, and went up to speak to the friendless little woman.”
Later on she had her triumph, for when the gentlemen came in they crowded round the piano. “And Mr. Paul Jefferson Jones (an American guest) thought he had made a conquest of Lady Gaunt by going up to her ladyship, and praising her delightful friend’s first-rate singing.” Once Becky had been recognised at Gaunt House, other ladies began to acknowledge her, none the less eagerly because she was known not to be too favourably regarded by the Steyne females. The great Lady Fitz Willis paid her marked attention. When anyone was taken up by this lady, her position was safe. Not that she was amusing or clever or beautiful, “being a faded person of fifty seven”: but nevertheless she was a recognised leader whose social verdict was undisputed. Under her ægis Becky was safe; and it was thrown over our little adventuress because of an early rivalry between Lady Fitz Willis and Lady Steyne. Now the success of Becky with all her disadvantages was not undeserved. She had wit, tact, courage. She could flatter where necessary: but she could defy an enemy when she thought fit. Very great ladies feared her biting sarcasm if they provoked it; and she won her place because of her weapons of defiance as well as her powers of attraction. She fell from her high position because she was found out; but, even after her exposure and Rawdon’s eye-opening to her unfaithfulness to his cause, she fought on in the social battle; and the last glimpse of her is at a charity bazaar!
But the society which Becky Sharp conquered by her brains was soon to be stormed by wealth. And Thackeray describes the process in the novels of a later period. The strife was only beginning in “Vanity Fair.” Lord Steyne’s younger son, we are told, married the daughter of the great banker Lord Helvellyn; but this was exceptional. The city was just beginning to intermarry with the lesser nobility. Miss Schwartz, the rich West Indian, who was destined for young George Osborne, was married into the noble family of McMull. The younger Miss Osborne married, after much haggling over settlements, Frederick Bullock of Hulker Bullock and Co., whose family was allied with the impecunious nobility; but she was completely out of society. She would have gone on her knees to Gaunt House to be asked to dinner there. Her father, whose means would have procured him an entrance into any society a few years later, then lived in an unfashionable part of London, and his dinner parties were dull, pompous gatherings, the most honoured guest being Sir Thomas Coffin, “the hanging judge” for whose benefit the famous tawny port was always produced.
It was about a decade after the Reform Bill of 1832 that the walls of the Jericho of Good Society began to shake at the trumpet sound of wealth. Before we enter upon the subject let me remind you of two marks of the great novelist’s skill, (1) the names he gives his characters and (2) his careful tracing of their pedigrees. The Earl of Dorking lives at Chanteclere, his eldest son is Viscount Rooster, his daughters are the Ladies Adelaide and Hennie Pulleine. Who cannot with a very little knowledge of London conjure up Gaunt House and Great Gaunt Square? The character of the Marquis of Steyne is shown in his numerous titles. He is Viscount Hellborough and Baron Pitchley and Grillsbury, etc., etc. The Crawley family name their sons after the most popular man of the day. So Sir Walpole Crawley was evidently born about 1730, Sir Pitt between 1757 and 1761, the Reverend Bute about 1761, Sir Pitt, the second, after the time younger Pitt rose to power—that is, later than 1784, and Rawdon when Lord Rawdon was the favourite of the Prince of Wales.
The pedigrees, especially of the rising families, are traced very carefully. Do you remember Mr. Foker, the charming young man of fashion in “Pendennis”? His unfailing good humour, his shrewdness, his gaudy garments, his advice to Pendennis, when he was infatuated with Miss Fotheringay, and when he was going the pace at Oxbridge; his love for Miss Amory and his recovery when he found out how heartless she was? Though he plays a minor part, his character is as subtle a delineation as any by this master hand. Now notice how we get this blend of aristocracy and commercialism; for Foker is a true gentleman, honourable, chivalrous, with healthy instincts, yet with a good deal of the man of business in him, for all his idleness and eccentricity a man not easily duped. In the “Virginians” George Warrington, when lately married and very poor, gets to know a Mr. Voelker, a rich, vulgar but kindly brewer, our hero’s grandfather. His father has Anglicised himself and become Mr. Foker whose porter is of world-wide celebrity. He marries an Earl’s daughter and yet insists on the family beverage being served at every meal, and Major Pendennis feels bound to taste it when he dines though the old gentleman found it disagreed with him. In Harry Foker, the young man of pleasure, we have the half-and-half beer and the peerage, and no bad blend either. In Barnes Newcome we have a less attractive type of the same class. The Newcomes are as humble in origin but more pretentious than the Fokers. They do not parade the family business, being bankers; but have discovered a noble ancestry. Their family can be traced back to the “Barber Surgeon of Edward the Confessor.” Thomas Newcome, the second founder, had however to begin as a very intelligent factory hand who left his native Newcome, made a moderate fortune, gallantly returned and married a girl of his own class, and became the father of that prince of gentlemen, Colonel Newcome, whose son Clive, Thackeray wishes us to admire, though I confess I find him insufferable. Then his first wife dies and Thomas flies at higher game. He woos and wins the great heiress, pietist, and philanthropist, Sophia Alethea Hobson, to the amazement of the serious Clapham circle in which she moves. Their twin sons are Sir Brian, who marries Lady Ann Barnes, daughter of the Earl of Kew, whose eldest son is Lord Walham—all neighbouring suburbs of London give the name to this aristocratic family,—and Hobson, a thorough man of business, who marries a lawyer’s daughter, and affects the farmer, whilst his wife professes to admire talent. Hobson is shrewd, Brian pompous, and as the former says of himself, you must get up very early in the morning to take him in. If in Foker we have the attractive side, in Sir Brian Newcome’s eldest son Barnes we have the other aspect of the blending of birth and business. Had Harry Foker sprung from two noble grandfathers, he might have been just as simple-hearted and good-natured as he now appears, like Lord Southdown in “Vanity Fair,” or Ethel Newcome’s lover, Lord Kew; but he would not have been quite so shrewd—for it is no impeachment of a man’s natural good sense that he should have been taken in by the purely imaginary virtues of a Blanche Amory. But in Barnes Newcome we see the mixture of the hardness of a well-bred man of the world and the business ability inherited from a commercial ancestry. I cannot resist quoting at some length the introduction of Barnes to his uncle Col. Newcome at Mrs. Hobson Newcome’s evening party. The description of it is sketched for the Colonel’s benefit, by Frank Honeyman, the popular preacher.
“The Jew with a beard, as you call him, is Herr Von Lungen the eminent haut-boy player.... At the piano, accompanied by Mademoiselle Lebrun, is Signor Mezzocaldo the great barytone from Rome. Professor Quartz and Baron Hammerstein, celebrated geologists from Germany, are talking with their illustrious confrère Sir Robert Craxton, in the door. Do you see that stout gentleman with snuff on his shirt? The eloquent Dr. McGuffog of Edinburgh talking to Dr. Ettore, who lately escaped the Inquisition at Rome in the disguise of a washerwoman, after undergoing the question several times, the rack and the thumbscrew.... That splendid man in the red fez is Kurbash Pasha—another renegade, I deeply lament to say,—a hair-dresser from Marseilles, by name Monsieur Ferchaud—”
But I need not trouble you by reading more. Mrs. Hobson Newcome could not get the aristocracy, so she collected notabilities and felt herself intellectual. As you will remember, the guest of the evening was “Rummum Loll, otherwise his Excellency, otherwise his Highness, ... the chief proprietor of the diamond mines of Golconda, with a claim of three millions and a half upon the East India Company.” The Rummum was the lion of the year and went everywhere, and the whole company was amazed when with the air of the deepest humility he saluted Colonel Newcome, who in his old-fashioned coat and diamond pin was being mistaken for a Moldavian boyar. At this juncture Barnes comes in and makes himself known to his uncle. The art with which the scene is drawn is consummate. Barnes behaves as a thoroughly well-bred man, greets the Colonel with unaffectedly good manners, snubs his aunt by a few quiet words, and finally turns to his uncle to discuss the Rummum. “I know he ain’t a prince any more than I am.” Then Barnes warms to the subject and frankly asks the Colonel to tell him if the bank can trust the Indian magnate. “The young man of business had dropped his drawl or his languor, and was speaking quite goodnaturedly and selfishly. Had you talked for a week, you could not have made him understand the scorn and loathing with which the Colonel regarded him.”
Barnes is of course the villain of the piece: but the interest in his character to us lies in the fact that he reveals in its worst aspect the blending of two types, the aristocratic, with its pride and narrow exclusiveness, and the commercial, with its rapacious selfishness. In many respects the “Newcomes” is a tragedy, as is seen in Colonel Newcome’s quarrel with Barnes and the tale of his ruin in the affair of Rummum Loll’s Bundlecund Bank, and the motive is the struggle for wealth by one of a class whose first object ought to have been honour and to whom money should have been always a secondary consideration.
Let us however turn now to lighter themes. One of Thackeray’s most delightful characters is the old Countess of Kew, the sister of the late Marquis of Steyne and the grandmother of Lord Kew and Ethel Newcome. The old lady frankly, and with a cynicism worthy of her brother, accepts the new order. She marries her daughter, Lady Ann, to Sir Brian Newcome, with complete disregard of the young lady’s preference for her cousin, Tom Poyntz. “Sir Brian Newcome,” she would say, “is one of the most stupid and respectable of men; Ann is clever but has not a grain of common sense. They make a very well-assorted couple. Her flightiness would have driven any man crazy who had an opinion of his own. She would have ruined any poor man of her own rank. As it is I have given her a husband exactly suited to her. He pays the bills, does not see how absurd she is, keeps order in the establishment and checks her follies. She wanted to marry her Cousin, Tom Poyntz, when they were both very young, and proposed to die of a broken heart ... a broken fiddlestick! She would have ruined Tom Poyntz in a year, and has no more idea of the cost of a leg of mutton than I have of Algebra.” Her ladyship was under no delusions as to the antiquity of her husband’s family, the founder of which was a fashionable doctor who had attended George III. She recognised that the great houses to which she belonged had had their day and was resolved to make the best she could out of the world she lived in. She had the brains and the character to make that world thoroughly uncomfortable if it did not bow to her will, and with her the old order began to come to an end. “Was my grandfather a weaver?” asks Ethel Newcome. Her answer is: “How should I know? And what on earth does it matter, my child? Except the Gaunts, the Howards, and one or two more, there is no good blood in England. You are lucky in sharing some of mine. My poor Lord Kew’s grandfather was an apothecary at Hampton Court, and founded the family by giving a dose of rhubarb to Queen Charlotte. As a rule nobody is of good family.”