‘Familiarity is the greatest vice of Society. When an acquaintance says “My dear fellow,” cut him immediately.’
‘Never enter your own house without bowing to every one you may meet there.’
‘Never ask a lady any questions about anything whatever.’
‘If you have drunk wine with every one at the table and wish for more’—Heavens! More! And after drinking with every one at the table!—‘wait till the cloth is removed.’
‘Never permit the sanctity of the drawing-room to be violated by a Boot.’
CHAPTER VIII.
AT THE PLAY AND THE SHOW.
Fifty years ago the Theatre was, far more than at present, the favourite amusement of the Londoners. It was a passion with them. They did not go only to laugh and be pleased as we go now; they went as critics; the pit preserves to this day a reputation, long since lost, for critical power. A large number of the audience went to every new performance of a stock piece in order to criticise. After the theatre they repaired to the Albion or the Cock for supper, and to talk over the performance. Fifty years ago there were about eighteen theatres, for a London of two millions.[2]
[2] The following were the London theatres in the year 1837: Her Majesty’s, formerly the King’s; Drury Lane, Covent Garden, the ‘Summer House,’ or Haymarket; the Lyceum, the Prince’s (now St. James’s), the Adelphi, the City of London (Norton Folgate), the Surrey, Astley’s, the Queen’s (afterwards the Prince of Wales’s), the Olympic, and the Strand, the Coburg (originally opened as the Victoria in 1833), Sadler’s Wells, the Royal Pavilion, the Garrick, and the Clarence (now the King’s Cross).
These theatres were not open all the year round, but it was reckoned that 20,000 people went every night to the theatre. There are now thirty theatres at least open nearly the whole year round. I doubt if there are many more than 20,000 at all of them together on an average in one night. Yet London has doubled, and the visitors to London have been multiplied by ten. It is by the visitors that the theatres are kept up. The people of London have in great measure lost their taste for the theatres, because they have gone to live in the suburbs. Who, for instance, that lives in Hampstead and wishes to get up in good time in the morning can take his wife often to the theatre? It takes an hour to drive into town, the hour after dinner. The play is over at a little after eleven; if he takes a cab, the driver is sulky at the thought of going up the hill and getting back again without another fare; if he goes and returns in a brougham, it doubles the expense. Formerly, when everybody lived in town, they could walk. Again, the price of seats has enormously gone up. Where there were two rows of stalls at the same price as the dress circle—namely, four shillings—there are now a dozen at the price of half a guinea. And it is very much more the fashion to take the best places, so that the dress circle is no longer the same highly respectable part of the house, while the upper boxes are now ‘out of it’ altogether, and, as for the pit, no man knoweth whether there be any pit still.