A round and a half of some hot buttered toast;
With a slice of cold sirloin from yesterday's roast."
Luncheon, or "nuncheon" as some very ancient friends of mine always called it, was the merest mouthful. Men went out shooting with a sandwich in their pocket; the ladies who sat at home had some cold chicken and wine and water brought into the drawing-room on a tray. Miss Austen in her novels always dismisses the midday meal under the cursory appellation of "cold meat." The celebrated Dr. Kitchener, the sympathetic author of the Cook's Oracle, writing in 1825, says: "Your luncheon may consist of a bit of roasted poultry, a basin of beef tea, or eggs poached, or boiled in the shell; fish plainly dressed, or a sandwich; stale bread; and half a pint of good homebrewed beer, or toast-and-water, with about one-fourth or one-third part of its measure of wine." And this prescription would no doubt have worn an aspect of liberal concession to the demands of the patient's appetite. It is difficult, by any effort of a morbid imagination, to realize a time when there was no five-o'clock tea; and yet that most sacred of our national institutions was only invented by the Duchess of Bedford who died in 1857, and whose name should surely be enrolled in the Positivist Kalendar as a benefactress of the human race. No wonder that by seven o'clock our fathers, and even our mothers, were ready to tackle a dinner of solid properties; and even to supplement it with the amazing supper (which Dr. Kitchener prescribes for "those who dine very late") of "gruel, or a little bread and cheese, or pounded cheese, and a glass of beer."
This is a long digression from the subject of excessive drinking, with which, however, it is not remotely connected; and, both in respect of drunkenness and of gluttony, the habits of English society in the years which immediately succeeded the French Revolution showed a marked amelioration. To a company of enthusiastic Wordsworthians who were deploring their master's confession that he got drunk at Cambridge, I heard Mr. Shorthouse, the accomplished author of John Inglesant, soothingly remark that in all probability "Wordsworth's standard of intoxication was miserably low."[[9]] Simultaneously with the restriction of excess there was seen a corresponding increase in refinement of taste and manners. Some of the more brutal forms of so-called sport, such as bull-baiting and cock-fighting, became less fashionable. The more civilized forms, such as fox-hunting and racing, increased in favour. Aesthetic culture was more generally diffused. The stage was at the height of its glory. Music was a favourite form of public recreation. Great prices were given for works of art. The study of physical science, or "natural philosophy" as it was called, became popular. Public Libraries and local "book societies" sprang up, and there was a wide demand for encyclopaedias and similar vehicles for the diffusion of general knowledge. The love of natural beauty was beginning to move the hearts of men, and it found expression at once in an entirely new school of landscape painting, and in a more romantic and natural form of poetry.
But against these marked instances of social amelioration must be set some darker traits of national life. The public conscience had not yet revolted against violence and brutality. The prize-ring, patronized by Royalty, was at its zenith. Humanitarians and philanthropists were as yet an obscure and ridiculed sect. The slave trade, though menaced, was still undisturbed. Under a system scarcely distinguishable from slavery, pauper children were bound over to the owners of factories and subjected to the utmost rigour of enforced labour. The treatment of the insane was darkened by incredible barbarities. As late as 1828 Lord Shaftesbury found that the lunatics in Bedlam were chained to their straw beds, and left from Saturday to Monday without attendance, and with only bread and water within their reach, while the keepers were enjoying themselves. Discipline in the services, in poorhouses, and in schools was of the most brutal type. Our prisons were unreformed. Our penal code was inconceivably sanguinary and savage. In 1770 there were one hundred and sixty capital offences on the Statute-book, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century the number had greatly increased. To steal five shillings' worth of goods from a shop was punishable by death. A girl of twenty-two was hanged for receiving a piece of woollen stuff from the man who had stolen it.
In 1789 a woman was burnt at the stake for coining. People still living have seen the skeletons of pirates and highwaymen hanging in chains. I have heard that the children of the Bluecoat School at Hertford were always taken to see the executions there; and as late as 1820 the dead bodies of the Cato Street conspirators were decapitated in front of Newgate, and the Westminster boys had a special holiday to enable them to see the sight, which was thus described by an eye-witness, the late Lord de Ros: "The executioner and his assistant cut down one of the corpses from the gallows, and placed it in the coffin, but with the head hanging over on the block. The man with the knife instantly severed the head from the body, and the executioner, receiving it in his hands, held it up, saying in a loud voice, 'This is the head of a traitor.' He then dropped it into the coffin, which being removed, another was brought forward, and they proceeded to cut down the next body and to go through the same ghastly operation. It was observed that the mob, which was very large, gazed in silence at the hanging of the conspirators, and showed not the least sympathy; but when each head as cut off and held up, a loud and deep groan of horror burst from all sides, which was not soon forgotten by those who heard it."
Duelling was the recognized mode of settling all personal disputes, and no attempt was made to enforce the law which, theoretically, treated the killing of a man in a duel as wilful murder; but, on the other hand, debt was punished with what often was imprisonment for life. A woman died in the County Jail at Exeter after forty-five years' incarceration for a debt of £19. Crime was rampant. Daring burglaries, accompanied by every circumstance of violence, took place nightly. Highwaymen infested the suburban roads, and not seldom plied their calling in the capital itself. The iron post at the end of the narrow footway between the gardens of Devonshire House and Lansdowne House is said by tradition to have been placed there after a Knight of the Road had eluded the officers of justice by galloping down the stone steps and along the flagged path. Sir Hamilton Seymour (1797-1880) was in his father's carriage when it was "stopped" by a highwayman in Upper Brook Street. Young gentlemen of broken fortunes, and tradesmen whose business had grown slack, swelled the ranks of these desperadoes. It was even said that an Irish prelate—Dr. Twysden, Bishop of Raphoe—whose incurable love of adventure had drawn him to "the road," received the penalty of his uncanonical diversion in the shape of a bullet from a traveller whom he had stopped on Hounslow Heath. The Lord Mayor was made to stand and deliver on Turnham Green. Stars and "Georges" were snipped off ambassadors and peers as they entered St. James's Palace.
It is superfluous to multiply illustrations. Enough has been said to show that the circumscription of aristocratic privilege and the diffusion of material luxury did not precipitate the millennium. Social Equalization was not synonymous with Social Amelioration. Some improvement, indeed, in the tone and habit of society occurred at the turn of the century; but it was little more than a beginning. I proceed to trace its development, and to indicate its source.
NOTES: