Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 53, No. 328, February, 1843

by Various

There are ten thousand varying shades and degrees of this pretension, from the truly fashionable people who hanker after the exclusives, or seventh heaven of high life, down to the courier out of place, who, in a pot-house, retails Debrett by heart, and talks of lords, and dukes, and earls, as of his particular acquaintance, and how and where he met them when on his travels.

The exclusives are a queer set, some of them not by any means people of the best pretensions to lead the ton. Lady L—— and Lady B—— may be very well as patronesses of Almack's; but what do you say to Lady J——, a plebeian, and a licensed dealer in money, keeping her shop by deputy in a lane somewhere behind Cornhill? Almack's, as every body knows who has been there, or who has talked with any observing habitué of the place, contains a great many queer, spurious people, smuggled in somehow by indirect influence, when royal command is not the least effectual: a surprizing number of seedy, poverty-stricken young men, and, in an inverse ratio, women who have any thing more than the clothes they wear: yet, by mere dint of difficulty, by the simple circumstance of making admission to this assembly a matter of closeting, canvassing, balloting, black-balling, and so forth, people of much better fashion than many of the exclusives make it a matter of life and death to have their admission secured. Admission to Almack's is to a young débutante of fashion as great an object as a seat at the Privy Council Board to a flourishing politician: your ton is stamped by it, you are of the exclusive set, and, by virtue of belonging to that set, every other is open to you as a matter of course, when you choose to condescend to visit it. The room in which Almack's balls are held we need not describe, because it has been often described before, and because the doorkeeper, any day you choose to go to Duke Street, St James's, will be too happy to show it you for sixpence; but we will give you in his own words, all the information we could contrive to get from a man of the highest fashion, who is a subscriber.

"Why, I really don't know," said he, "that I have any thing to tell you about Almack's, except that all that the novel-writers say about it is ridiculous nonsense: the lights are good, the refreshments not so good, the music excellent; the women dress well, dance a good deal, and talk but little. There is a good deal of envy, jealousy, and criticism of faces, figures, fortunes, and pretensions: one, or at most two, of the balls in a season are pleasant; the others slow and very dull. The point of the thing seems to be, that people of rank choose to like it because it stamps a set, and low people talk about it because they cannot by any possibility know any thing about it."

Such is Almack's, of which volumes have been spun, of most effete and lamentable trash, to gratify the morbid appetites of the pretenders to fashion.

We must not omit to inform our rural readers, that no conventional rank gives any one in London a patent of privilege in truly fashionable society. An old baronet shall be exclusive, when a young peer shall have no fashionable society at all: a lord is by no means necessarily a man in what the fashionable sets call good society: we have many lords who are not men of fashion, and many men of fashion who are not lords.

Professional peers, whether legal, naval, or military, bishops, judges, and all that class of men who attain by talents, interest, and good fortune, or all, or any of these, a lofty social position, have no more to do with the exclusive or merely fashionable sets than you or I. A man may be a barrister in full practice to-day, an attorney-general to-morrow, a chief-justice the day after with a peerage: yet his wife and daughter visit the same people, and are visited by the same people, that associated with them before. If men of fashion know them, it is because they have business to transact or favours to seek for, or because it is part of their system to keep up a qualified intimacy with all whom they think proper to lift to their own level: but this intimacy is only extended by the man of birth to the man of talent. His family do not become people of fashion until the third or fourth generation: he remains the man of business, the useful, working, practical, brains-carrying man that he was; and his family, if they are wise, seek not to become the familiars of the old aristocracy, and if they are foolish, become the most unfortunate pretenders to fashion. They are too near to be pleasant; and the gulf which people of hereditary fashion place between is impassable, even though they flounder up to their necks in servile mud.

It is the same with baronets, M.P.'s, and all that sort of people. These handles to men's names go down very well in the country, where it is imagined that a baronet or an M.P. is, ex officio, a man of consequence, and that, rank being equal, consequence is also equal. In London, on the contrary, people laugh at the idea of a man pluming himself upon such distinctions without a difference: in town we have baronets of all sorts—the "Heathcotes, and such large-acred men," Sir Watkyn, and the territorial baronetage: then we have the Hanmers, and others of undoubted fashion, to which their patent is the weakest of their claims: then we have the military, naval, and medical baronet: descending, through infinite gradations, we come down to the tallow-chandling, the gin-spinning, the banking, the pastry-cooking baronetage.

What is there, what can there be, in common with these widely severed classes, save that they equally enjoy Sir at the head and Bart. at the tail of their sponsorial and patronymic appellations? Do you think the landed Bart. knows any more of the medical Bart. than that, when he sends for the other to attend his wife, he calls him generally "doctor," and seldom Sir James: or that the military Bart. does not much like the naval Bart.? and do not all these incongruous Barts. shudder at the bare idea of been seen on the same side of the street with a gin-spinning, Patent-British-Genuine-Foreign-Cognac Brandy-making Bart.? and do not each and every one of these Barts. from head to tail, even including the last-mentioned, look down with immeasurable disdain upon the poor Nova Scotia baronets, who move heaven and earth to get permission to wear a string round their necks, and a badge like the learned fraternity of cabmen?

Then as to the magic capitals M.P., which provincial people look upon as embodying in the wearer the concentrated essence of wisdom, eloquence, personal distinction, and social eminence. Who, in a country town, on a market day, has not seen tradesmen cocking their eye, apprentices glowering through the shop front, and ladies subdolously peeping behind the window-shutter to catch a glimpse of the "member for our town," and, having seen him, think they are rather happier then they were before? The greatest fun in the world is to go to a cul-de-sac off a dirty lane near Palace Yard, called Manchester Buildings, a sort of senatorial pigeon-house, where the meaner fry of houseless M.P.'s live, each in his one pair, two pair, three pair, as the case may be, and give a postman's knock at every door in rapid succession. In a twinkling, the "collective wisdom" of Manchester Buildings and the Midland Counties poke out their heads. Cobden appears on the balcony; Muntz glares out of a second floor, like a live bear in a barber's window; Wallace of Greenock comes to the door in a red nightcap; and a long "tail" of the other immortals of a session. You may enjoy the scene as much as you please; but when you hear one or two of the young Irish patriotic "mimbers" floundering from the attics, the wisest course you can take will be incontinently to "mizzle." These men, however, have one redeeming quality—that they live in Manchester Buildings, and don't care who knows it; they are out of fashion, and don't care who are in; they are minding their business, and not hanging at the skirts of people ever ready and willing to kick them off.

Then there are the "dandy" M.P.'s, who ride hack-horses, associate with fashionable actresses, and hang about the clubs. Then there is the chance or accidental M.P., who has been elected he hardly knows how or when, and wonders to find himself in Parliament. Then there is the desperate, adventuring, ear-wigging M.P., whose hope of political existence, and whose very livelihood, depend upon getting or continuing in place. Then there is the legal M.P., with one eye fixed on the Queen's, the other squinting at the Treasury Bench. Then there is the lounging M.P., who is usually the scion of a noble family, and who comes now and then into the House, to stare vacantly about, and go out again. Then there is the military M.P., who finds the House an agreeable lounge, and does not care to join his regiment on foreign service. Then there is the bustling M.P. of business, the M.P. of business without bustle, and the independent country gentleman M.P., who wants nothing for himself or any body else, and who does not care a turnip-top for the whole lot of them.