Fifty Years Ago

by Walter Besant

(From a Drawing by George Cruikshank in ‘London Characters’)

There was no end to the tricks of this abominable person. Once he received an invitation to a great ball, which a Royal Personage was to honour with his presence. The Royal Personage was to be regaled in a special supper-room, apart from the common herd. The table had been laid in this room with the most elaborate care and splendour: down the middle of the table there meandered a beautiful canal filled with gold and silver fish—a contrivance believed in those remote ages to set off and greatly increase the beauty of a supper table. Our ingenious friend quickly discovered that the room was accessible from the garden, where some workmen were still putting the finishing touches to their work, the men who had constructed the marquee, and had arranged the lamps and things. He went, therefore, into the garden: he invited these workmen to partake of a little refreshment, led them into the Royal supper-room, and begged them to help themselves, and to spare nothing: in a twinkling the tables were cleared. He then put certain chemicals into the canal, which instantly killed every fish: this done, he returned to the ballroom, and waited for the moment when the Illustrious Personage, the hostess on his arm, should enter that supper-room, and gaze upon those empty dishes.

On another occasion, he discovered that a respectable butler was in the habit of creeping upstairs, in order to listen to the conversation, leaving his slippers, in position, at the head of the kitchen stairs. He therefore hid himself while the poor man, after adjusting the slippers, walked noiselessly upstairs. He then hammered a tintack into the heel of each slipper, and waited again, until a confederate gave the alarm, and the fat butler, hurrying down, slipped one foot into each slipper, and—went headlong into the depths below, and was nearly killed. ‘Never laughed so much in all my life, sir.’

At Oxford, of course, he enjoyed himself wonderfully. For, with a party of chosen friends, he met no less a person than the Vice-Chancellor, at ten or eleven at night, going home alone, and peacefully. To raise that personage, lift him on their shoulders, crown him with a lamp cover, and carry him triumphantly to the gates of his own College, was not only a great stroke of fun, but a thing not to be resisted. And he blew up the group of Cain and Abel in the Quadrangle of Brasenose. And what he did with proctors, bulldogs, and the like, passeth all understanding. It was at Oxford that the funny man made the acquaintance of the Major. Now the Major was in love, but he was no longer so young as he had been, and his hair was getting thin on the top—a very serious thing in the days of long hair, wavy, curled, singed, and oiled, flowing gracefully over the ears and the coat-collar. The Major, in an evil moment, commissioned the Practical Joker, whose character, one would think, must have been well known, to procure for him a bottle of a certain patent hair-restorer. Of course, the Joker brought him a bottle of depilatory mixture, which being credulously accepted, and well rubbed in, deprived the poor Major of every hair that was left. It is needless to relate how, when he was at Richmond with a party of ladies, the introduction of the ‘maids of honour’ was a thing not to be resisted; and one can quite understand how one of the young ladies was led on to ordering, in addition to another ‘maid of honour,’ a small Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod, if they had one quite cold.

The middle-class of London, before the development of omnibuses, lived in and round the City of London, Bloomsbury being the principal suburb; many thousands of well-to-do people, merchants and shopkeepers, lived in the City itself, and were not ashamed of their houses, and filled the City churches on the Sunday. Some lived at Clapham, Camberwell, and Stockwell on the south; a great many at Islington, where a vigorous offshoot of the great city ran through the High Street past Sadler’s Wells as far as Highbury; a few even lived at Highgate and Hampstead. There were the ‘short’ stages from London to all these places, but, so far as can be gathered, most of those who lived in these suburbs before the days of the omnibus had their own carriages, and drove to town and home again every day. On Sunday they entertained their friends, and the young gentlemen of the City delighted to hire horses and ride down. The comic literature of the time is full of the Cockney horseman. It will be remembered how Mr. Horatio Sparkins rode gallantly from town to dine with his hospitable friends on Sunday.

A SCENE ON BLACKHEATH

By ‘Phiz’

(From ‘Sketches in London,’ by James Grant)

The manners and customs of the Islington colony, which may, I suppose, be taken for the suburban and Bloomsbury people generally—except that Russell and Bedford Squares were very, very much grander—may be read in Albert Smith’s ‘Adventures of Mr. Ledbury,’ his ‘Natural History of the Gent,’ ‘The Pottleton Legacy,’ and other contemporary works. Very good reading they are, if approached in the right spirit, which is a humble and an inquiring spirit. Many remarkable things may be learned from these books. For instance, would you know how the middle-class evening party was conducted? Here are a few details. The gentlemen, of whose long and wavy hair I have already spoken, wore, for evening dress, a high black stock, the many folds of which covered the shirt, and were enriched by a massive pin; the white shirt-cuffs were neatly turned over their wrists, their dress-coats were buttoned, their trousers were tight, and they wore straps and pumps. The ladies either wore curls neatly arranged on each side—you may still see some old ladies who have clung to the pretty fashion of their youth—or they wore their hair dropped in a loop down the cheek and behind the ear, and then fastened in some kind of band with ribbons at the back of the head. The machinery of the frocks reminds one of the wedding morning in ‘Pickwick,’ when all the girls were crying out to be ‘done up,’ for they had hooks and eyes, and the girls were helpless by themselves. Pink was the favourite colour—and a very pretty colour too; and there was plenty of scope for the milliner’s art in lace and artificial flowers. The elder ladies were magnificent in turbans, and the younger ones wore across the forehead a band of velvet or silk decorated with a gold buckle, or something in pearls and diamonds. This fashion lingered long. I remember—it must have been about the year 1850—a certain elderly maiden lady who always wore every day and all day a black ribbon across her brows; this alone gave her a severe and keep-your-distance kind of expression; but, in addition, the ribbon contained in the middle, if I remember aright, a steel buckle—though a lady, one thinks, would hardly wear a steel buckle on her forehead. Sometimes there was a wreath of flowers worn like a coronet, and sometimes, but I think hardly in Islington, a tiara of jewels. In middle-class circles, the fashion of evening dress was marred by a fashion, common to both sexes, of wearing cleaned gloves. Now kid gloves could only be cleaned by one process, so that the result was an effect of turps which could not be subdued by any amount of patchouli or eau-de-Cologne. There were, as yet, no cards for the dances, and when a waltz was played, everybody was afraid to begin. Quadrilles of various kinds were danced, and the country dance yet lingered at this end of the town. The polka came later. Dancing was stopped whenever any young lady could be persuaded to sing, and happy was the young man whose avocations permitted him to wear the delightful moustaches forbidden in the City and in all the professions. Young Templars wore them until they were called, when they had to be shaved. For a City man to wear a moustache would have been ruin and bankruptcy.