There are many popular bachelors and old maids who live about half the year in the country-houses of their friends. A gentleman of this sort will have his chambers in London and his valet, whilst the lady will have her lodgings and maid. In London they will live cheaply and comfortably, he at his club and dining out with rich friends, she in her snug little room and passing half her time in friends' houses. There is not the slightest surrender of independence about these people. They would not stay a day in a house which they did not like, but their pleasant manners and company make them acceptable, and friends are charmed to have them.
One of the special recommendations of a great country-house is that you need not see too much of any one. There is no necessary meeting except at meals—in many houses then even only at dinner—and in the evening. Many sit a great deal in their own rooms if they have writing or work to do; some will be in the billiard-room, others in the library, others in the drawing-room: the host's great friend will be with him in his own private room, whilst the hostess's will pass most of the time in that lady's boudoir.[4]
In some respects railroads have had a very injurious effect on the sociability of English country life. They have rendered people in great houses too apt to draw their supplies of society exclusively from town. English trains run so fast that this can even be done in places quite remote from London. The journey from London to Rugby, for instance, eighty miles, is almost invariably accomplished in two hours. Leaving at five in the afternoon, a man reaches that station at 7.10: his friend's well-appointed dog-cart is there to meet him, and that exquisitely neat young groom, with his immaculate buckskins and boots in which you may see yourself, will make the thoroughbred do the four miles to the hall in time to enable you to dress for dinner by 7.45. Returning on Tuesday morning—and all the lines are most accommodating about return tickets—the barrister, guardsman, government clerk can easily be at his post in town by eleven o'clock. Thus the actual "country people" get to be held rather cheap, and come off badly, because Londoners, being more in the way of hearing, seeing and observing what is going on in society, are naturally more congenial to fine people in country-houses who live in the metropolis half the year.
It is evident from the following amusing squib, which appeared in one of the Annuals for 1832, how far more dependent the country gentleman was upon his country neighbors in those days, when only idle men could run down from town:
"Mr. J., having frequently witnessed with regret country gentlemen, in their country-houses, reduced to the dullness of a domestic circle, and nearly led to commit suicide in the month of November, or, what is more melancholy, to invite the ancient and neighboring families of the Tags, the Rags and the Bobtails, has opened an office in Spring Gardens for the purpose of furnishing country gentlemen in their country-houses with company and guests on the most moderate terms. It will appear from the catalogue that Mr. J. has a choice and elegant assortment of six hundred and seventeen guests, ready to start at a moment's warning to any country gentleman at any house. Among them will be found three Scotch peers, several ditto Irish, fifteen decayed baronets, eight yellow admirals, forty-seven major-generals on half pay (who narrate the whole Peninsular War), twenty-seven dowagers, one hundred and eighty-seven old maids on small annuities, and several unbeneficed clergymen, who play a little on the fiddle. All the above play at cards, and usually with success if partners. No objection to cards on Sunday evenings or rainy mornings. The country gentleman to allow the guests four feeds a day, and to produce claret if a Scotch or Irish peer be present."
A country village very often has no inhabitants except the parson holding the rank of gentry. The majority of ladies in moderate or narrow circumstances live in county-towns, such as Exeter, Salisbury, etc., or in watering-places, which abound and are of all degrees of fashion and expense. County-town and watering-place society is a thing per se, and has very little to do with "county" society, which means that of the landed gentry living in their country-houses. Thus, noblemen and gentlemen within a radius of five miles of such watering-places as Bath, Tonbridge Wells and Weymouth would not have a dozen visiting acquaintances resident in those towns.
To get into "county" society is by no means easy to persons without advantages of position or connection, even with ample means, and to the wealthy manufacturer or merchant is often a business of years. The upper class of Englishmen, and more especially women, are accustomed to find throughout their acquaintance an almost identical style and set of manners. Anything which differs from this they are apt to regard as "ungentlemanlike or unladylike," and shun accordingly. The dislike to traders and manufacturers, which is very strong in those counties, such as Cheshire and Warwickshire, which environ great commercial centres, arises not from the folly of thinking commerce a low occupation, but because the county gentry have different tastes, habits and modes of thought from men who have worked their way up from the counting-room, and do not, as the phrase goes, "get on" with them, any more than a Wall street broker ordinarily gets on with a well-read, accomplished member of the Bar.
A result of this is that a large number of wealthy commercial men, in despair of ever entering the charmed circle of county society, take up their abode in or near the fashionable watering-places, where, after the manner of those at our own Newport, they build palaces in paddocks, have acres of glass, rear the most marvelous of pines and peaches, and have model farms which cost them thousands of pounds a year. To this class is owing in a great degree the extraordinary increase of Leamington, Torquay, Tonbridge Wells, etc.—places which have made the fortunes of the lucky people who chanced to own them.
English ladies, as a rule, take a great deal of interest in the poor around them, and really know a great deal of them. The village near the hall is almost always well attended to, but it unfortunately happens that outlying properties sometimes come off far less well. The classes which see nothing of each other in English rural life are the wives and daughters of the gentry and those of the wealthier farmers and tradesmen: between these sections a huge gulf intervenes, which has not as yet been in the least degree bridged over. In former days very great people used to have once or twice in the year what were called "public days," when it was open house for all who chose to come, with a sort of tacit understanding that none below the class of substantial yeomen or tradesmen would make their appearance. This custom has now fallen into disuse, but was maintained to the last by the Hon. Doctor Vernon-Harcourt, who was for more than half a century archbishop of York, and is yet retained by Earl Fitzwilliam at Wentworth House, his princely seat in Yorkshire. There, once or twice a year, a great gathering takes place. Dinner is provided for hundreds of guests, and care is taken to place a member of the family at every table to do his or her part toward dispensing hospitality to high and low.
During the summer and early autumn croquet and archery offer good excuses for bringing young people together, and reunions of this kind palliate the miseries of those who cannot afford to partake of the expensive gayeties of the London season. The archery meetings are often exceedingly pretty fêtes. Somtimes they are held in grounds specially devoted to the purpose, as is the case at St. Leonard's, near Hastings, where the archery-ground will well repay a visit. The shooting takes place in a deep and vast excavation covered with the smoothest turf, and from the high ground above is a glorious view of the old castle of Hastings and the ocean. In Devonshire these meetings have an exceptional interest from the fact that they are held in the park of Powderham Castle, the ancestral seat of the celebrated family of Courtenay. All the county flocks to them, some persons coming fifty miles for this purpose. Apropos of one of these meetings, we shall venture to interpolate an anecdote which deserves to be recorded for the sublimity of impudence which it displays. The railway from London to Plymouth skirts the park of Powderham, running so close beside it that each train sends a herd of deer scampering down the velvety glades. One afternoon a bouncing young lady, who belonged to a family which had lately emerged from the class of yeoman into that of gentry, and whose "manners had not the repose which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere," found herself in a carriage with two fashionably-attired persons of her own sex. As the train ran by the park, one of these latter exclaimed to her companion, "Oh look, there's Powderham! Don't you remember that archery-party we went to there two years ago?" "To be sure," was the rejoinder. "I'm not likely to forget it, there were some such queer people. Who were those vulgarians whom we thought so particularly objectionable? I can't remember." "Oh, H——: H—— of P——! That was the name." Upon this the other young lady in the carriage bounced to her feet with the words, "Allow me to tell you, madam, that I am Miss H—— of P——!" Neither of those she addressed deigned to utter a word in reply to this announcement, nor did it appear in the least to disconcert them. One slowly drew out a gold double eye-glass, leisurely surveyed Miss H—— of P—— from head to foot, and then proceeded to talk to her companion in French. Perhaps the best part of the joke was that Miss H—— made a round of visits in the course of the week, and detailed the disgusting treatment to which she had been subjected to a numerous acquaintance, who, it is needless to say, appeared during the narration as indignant and sympathetic as she could have wished, but who are declared by some ill-natured persons to have been precisely those who in secret chuckled over the insult with the greatest glee.