Leaving the novels, we come to the Book of Snobs, where the storming of society is seen at a later stage. In Chapter VII on “some respectable snobs” we have the rise of the noble family of de Mogyns. The first of this ancient race who appeared above the horizon in these degenerate days was a Mr. Muggins, banker, army contractor, smuggler, and general jobber, lent money to a R-y-l P-rs-n-ge, and by way of payment was made a baronet. His son paid undue attention to Miss Flack at a county ball. Captain Flack, her father, offered the alternative of a duel or marriage, in accordance with the custom of the Irish nation to which he belonged and of the age; young Alured Smith Muggins preferred to marry the lady and on the death of his father became a baronet. The editor of Fluke’s Peerage found him a pedigree. The family was really founded by the patriarch Shem, whose grandson began to draw up its pedigree on a papyrus scroll now in the possession of the family. In the days of Boadicea, Hogyn Mogyn of the hundred beeves aspired to marry that warlike princess. Whether he wooed and also won is not stated, but he married someone and became the ancestor of Mogyn of the golden harp, the black fiend son of Mogyn, ancestor of the princes of Pontydwdlm. These succumbed to the English Kings; but their representative David Gam de Mogins fought bravely at Agincourt and from him Sir Thomas Muggins was descended.

This sounds a mere satire. I turn to Burke’s Peerage 1895. I find that the son of a famous contractor, whose father was celebrated for having begun as a navvy and ended as a millionaire many times over, sprang from a very ancient Norman family which became obscure in 1603 and rose again to fame two centuries later. I notice that a brewer now a baron, whose beer had a world-wide fame, was the scion of a noble house, the first of whom was Gamellus who flourished when Henry Beauclerc ruled the land from 1100 to 1134.

One of the ladies of this famous family was christened by the delightful but unusual name of Temperance, but this was in the reign of Charles I before the brewery was established. Are not such pedigrees as ridiculous as any fiction of the brain? But how much is it to be regretted that the writers of our peerages do not study the Book of Snobs. They would at least avoid parodying it at the order of their ennobled patrons. Disraeli, like Thackeray, exposed this business in his novel “Sybil, or the Two Nations.”

I need not say, however, that it was not because of their descent from the great Hogyn Mogyn that the de Mogyns got into society. They pushed, they schemed, they suffered rebuffs undaunted, and at last they won the coveted reward. Lady de Mogyns cut her friends as she ascended, and at last became a recognised power in the great world.

The day had scarcely dawned when Thackeray died, when instead of wealth’s striving to win a place in society, society sought to obtain the recognition of the very rich. His satire had not to expend itself on aristocrats who hastened to abase themselves before the millionaire, and snobbery changed from a worship of rank to a worship of wealth. Our author has often been criticised for his abuse of the nobility. It has been said that it was prompted by envy. I venture to doubt this. To be as great a satirist as he, a man must feel deeply and have a saeva indignatio against a great evil. This, like all his predecessors, Thackeray had. He saw the hardness that the spirit of his age engendered.

In all Thackeray’s novels and writings we see how ashamed the new aristocracy was of the trades and businesses by which they made their money and how contemptuous the real aristocracy was of ennobled trade. Lord Steyne sneers at the idea of his son’s wife being a banker’s daughter. The Newcomes conveniently forget the weaver from which they sprang. We are sneeringly reminded that Mr. Wenham’s father was a coal merchant; Major Pendennis conveniently forgets that his brother was a mere apothecary. But this was not part of the old tradition of England. A very little time before people of high birth felt no shame in being in trade. The Nelsons are as good a family as any, yet Nelson himself served as a common sailor before the mast, and his near relatives kept shops in small towns. Let me read you a passage from a recently published book on Wordsworth:

“Dorothy Wordsworth ... lived first with her maternal grand-parents, and was not happy with them. She loved an open-air life, and was held closely indoors—serving in fact in a mercer’s shop which they kept.... In 1788 a change came, for she went to live with her uncle at Forncett Rectory near Norwich. The Rector was also a Canon of Windsor, and in the Summer of 1792 ... Dorothy was meeting King George III and his family—the princesses at least ... and going to races and balls.”

Trade was no bar to good society till it was able to buy it and there was a great mingling of classes now rigidly separated. This feeling of shame for having practised some perfectly reputable calling has had I believe very serious results. It has made for the separation of employers and employed. It has caused people to take less pride in integrity and thoroughness and made them desirous of amassing wealth in order to enjoy ease. It has tended to make those of the second generation more desirous to pose as nobles than to follow the calling of their fathers. It has destroyed a commercial aristocracy and has put a plutocracy in its place. It tended for a time to substitute prudery and respectability for real Christianity; and, before the war at least, even these poor substitutes were growing so out of fashion as to be regretted. It has also deepened the rift between classes. Between the old nobility and the poor there was a certain sympathy. The humbler class appreciated the fact that their rulers were gentlemen, they liked their courage, their courtesy, they did not even object to being ordered by them, their very vices were comprehensible. But they have never had any fellow feeling with a plutocracy; with their present pay-masters they have been more impatient than with their former rulers; and the difficulties of the present age are in no small degree due to the snobbery which Thackeray denounced.

LECTURE VIII

Sport, and Rural England