These grotesque splendours of domestic living went out with the eighteenth century. Dr. Johnson, who died in 1784, had already noted their decline. There was a general approach towards external equalization of ranks, and that approach was accompanied by a general diffusion of material enjoyment. The luxury of the period was prodigal rather than refined. There lies before me as I write a tavern bill for a dinner for seven persons in the year 1751. I reproduce the items verbally and literally, and certainly the bill of fare is worth studying as a record of gastronomical exertion on a heroic scale:—
The total charge for this dinner for seven amounted to £81, 11s. 6d., and a footnote informs the curious reader that there was also "a turtle sent as a Present to the Company, and dressed in a very high Gout after the West Indian Manner." Old cookery-books, such as the misquoted work of Mrs. Glasse, Dr. Kitchener's Cook's Oracle, and the anonymous but admirable Culina, all concur in their testimony to the enormous amount of animal food which went to make an ordinary meal, and the amazing variety of irreconcilable ingredients which were combined in a single dish. Lord Beaconsfield, whose knowledge of this recondite branch of English literature was curiously minute, thus describes—no doubt from authentic sources— a family dinner at the end of the eighteenth century:—
"The ample tureen of potage royal had a boned duck swimming in its centre. At the other end of the table scowled in death the grim countenance of a huge roast pike, flanked on one side by a leg of mutton à la daube, and on the other by the tempting delicacies of Bombarded Veal. To these succeeded that masterpiece of the culinary art a grand Battalia Pie, in which the bodies of chickens, pigeons, and rabbits were embalmed in spices, cocks' combs, and savoury balls, and well bedewed with one of those rich sauces of claret, anchovy, and sweet herbs in which our grandfathers delighted, and which was technically termed a Lear. A Florentine tourte or tansy, an old English custard, a more refined blamango, and a riband jelly of many colours offered a pleasant relief after these vaster inventions, and the repast closed with a dish of oyster-loaves and a pomepetone of larks."
As the old order yielded place to the new, this enormous profusion of rich food became by degrees less fashionable, though its terrible traditions endured, through the days of Soyer and Francatelli, almost to our own time. But gradually refinement began to supersede profusion. Simultaneously all forms of luxury spread from the aristocracy to the plutocracy; while the middle and lower classes attained a degree of solid comfort which would a few years before have been impossible. Under Pitt's administration wealth increased rapidly. Great fortunes were amassed through the improvement of agricultural methods and the application of machinery to manufacture. The Indian Nabobs, as they were called, became a recognized and powerful element in society, and their habits of "Asiatic luxury" are represented by Chatham, Burke, Voltaire, and Home Tooke as producing a marked effect upon the social life of the time. Lord Robert Seymour notes in his diary for 1788 that a fashionable lady gave £100 a year to the cook who superintended her suppers; that at a sale of bric-à-brac 230 guineas were paid for a mirror; and that, at a ball given by the Knights of the Bath at the Pantheon, the decorations cost upwards of £3000. The general consumption of French and Portuguese wines in place of beer, which had till recently been the beverage even of the affluent, was regarded by grave writers as a most alarming sign of the times, and the cause of a great increase of drunkenness among the upper classes. The habits and manners prevalent in London spread into the country. As the distinction between the nobility, who, roughly speaking, had been the frequenters of the capital, and the minor gentry, who had lived almost entirely on their own estates, gradually disappeared, the distinction between town and country life sensibly diminished.
The enormous increase in the facilities for travelling and for the interchange of information contributed to the same result; and grave men lamented the growing fondness of the provincial ladies for the card-table, the theatre, the assembly, the masquerade, and—singular social juxtaposition—the Circulating Library. The process of social assimilation, while it spread from town to country and from nobility to gentry, reached down from the gentry to the merchants, and from the merchants to the tradesmen. The merchant had his villa three or four miles away from his place of business, and lived at Clapham or Dulwich in a degree and kind of luxury which had a few years before been the monopoly of the aristocracy. The tradesman no longer inhabited the rooms over his shop, but a house in Bloomsbury or Soho. Where, fifty years before, one fire in the kitchen served the whole family, and one dish of meat appeared on the table, now a footman waited at the banquet of imported luxuries, and small beer and punch had made way for Burgundy and Madeira.
But the subject expands before us, and it is time to close. Now I propose to inquire how far this Social Equalization was accompanied by Social Amelioration.