The Age of Elegance

by Arthur Bryant

  Lads of humbler parentage, heirs of generations of fine craftsmen, finding their ingenuity sought and rewarded, applied themselves to the evolution of new technical processes. Sirriles's Lives of the Engineers is a saga of miraculous achievement wrought out of the native genius and character of a succession of Scottish and English country lads: Rennie, the millwright's apprentice who drained the Lincolnshire Fens and built docks and iron bridges; weavers and machinists like Crompton and Thomas Johnson who, backed by their employers, made lonely Lancashire the economic corner-stone of the world; the engineers, Bramah—a village carpenter's boy— Maudslay, Roberts and Whitworth; Trevithick, the Cornish giant, and George Stephenson, the Northumberland collier's son who laid the foundations of the railway age. Steam-power to raise water and coal, and drive engines, ships and vehicles, eliminating the horrors of wind-bound voyages and such winter exposure on coach tops as killed Keats; gas to light streets, shops and houses;1 safety lamps to prevent explosions in mines; water-closets instead of foul-smelling privies; wooden legs with elastic springs to reproduce the motions of nature, and pull-over bar-room taps, umbrellas and waterproof hats, patent folding carriage-steps, automatic cheese-toasters, chairs that sprang out of walking-sticks and braces to keep up trousers, were all, in their different modes, manifestations of the tireless British will to tame nature for amenity and social betterment and grow rich in the process.

  1 "The effect of the new apparatus in the dining-room at Abbotsford was at first superb. In sitting down to table in autumn no-one observed that in each of the three chandeliers there lurked a tiny bead of red light.... Suddenly, at the turning of a screw the room was filled with a gush of splendour worthy of the palace of Aladdin.... Jewellery sparkled, but cheeks and lips looked pale and wan in this fierce illumination; and the eye was wearied and the brow ached if the sitting was at all protracted." Lockhart, V, 267-8. See idem, 263, 306, 375; Ann. Reg., 1816, Chron., 134; Clapham, I, 191-2; Colchester, II, 441-2; Farington, VIII, 211; Klingender, 88-9; Simond, I, 127; II, 94; Smart, 151-2, 405; Sydney, II, 5. The Speaker in 1814 opposed a similar installation in Westminster Hall. Colchester, II, 496.

  So were the ingenuities of the scientists—

  "the varied wonders that tempt us as we pass,

  The cow-pox, tractors, galvanism and gas"1—

  who, voyaging ahead of the practical possibilities of their age, were laboriously charting new courses for the future: young Faraday, the Newington Butts blacksmith's son, at his work on electricity; Dalton studying the combination of the elements and determining atomic weights while teaching mathematics at half a crown an hour; Sir Humphry Davy, who invented the safety lamp for miners in the year of Waterloo and thrilled fashionable audiences with his chemical discourses at the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street.2 It was part of the same revolutionary urge that threw up in philosophy a Rousseau, in politics a Robespierre, and in war a Napoleon. Being a practical people, the English and Scots made their contribution to it in a utilitarian form. By doing so they did more to transform the material world than any of the other aspirants of the age.

  Improved transport was the first condition of this revolution. The unlettered Derbyshire millwright, James Brindley, who with James Watt, the Greenock-born contriver of the expansive use of steam, was, in his humdrum, practical way, British counterpart of Rousseau, conceived the revolutionary idea of making canals independent of rivers on a nation-wide scale. He and his fellow engineers created radical, man-made waterways, straight and easily navigable, to take the place of God's, controlling water-levels, tunnelling mountains and bridging valleys with aqueducts. Before and during the war, more than three thousand miles of such waterways were built, enabling coal, iron, timber, pottery and other heavy goods to be carried to any part of the country as easily and as cheaply as by sea.

  At the same time the character of road travel was transformed. Before the war, even on the main trunk roads, postilions had to quarter ceaselessly from side to side to avoid huge pools of water and ruts deep enough to break a horse's leg; as late as the winter of 1797-8 the highway from Tyburn to Oxford was from a foot to eighteen inches deep in mud. The genius of two Lowland Scots,

  1 Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.

  2"The husband of a young lady who is very assiduous at the lectures said the other day he approved much of this taste in the sex in general; 'It keeps them out of harm's way.' " Simond, J, 34. In his popular lectures on light and heat in Edinburgh Professor Leslie electrified audiences by turning a cup of water into ice in seven minutes and then, like a good practical Scot, selling an apparatus devised for this useful domestic end at twenty guineas a piece. Simond, I, 378. See Hamilton of Dalzell MS., 168.

  Telford, a Dumfriesshire shepherd's son, and Macadam, provided the country, during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, with smooth-metalled highways built on the principles of Roman science. Their engineered gradients, culverts and bridges raised the speed of post-chaises and coaches from four or five to ten and even twelve miles an hour. The cost of such travel remained heavy; an inside ticket from London to Liverpool cost four guineas without tips and meals. But the gain to traders and men of money was immeasurable. Commerce and finance were given the speed and certainty required to control the fast-revolving machinery of Britain's new industrial production. The mail-coaches, with their chocolate-coloured panels, scarlet wheels and melodious horns, became the national timepieces. Such was their regularity that all along the roads men set their clocks by the "Nimrod," "Regulator" or "Tally-ho."1

  Where Britain's own resources were insufficient for the needs of trade, men risked their lives and capital to seek them beyond the seas. Her naval victories had given her a preponderating influence in all the outer continents and opportunities of illimitable commercial expansion. Even at the height of the blockade, when European ambassadors were almost unknown at St. James's, there had been several bearded ones from Asia and Africa, and the streets of the capital had been brightened by Indian merchants with immense coloured umbrellas. Of the old European colonial empires Britain's alone survived the war. Though her statesmen seemed scarcely more interested in it than those of Vienna and Berlin, and political economists proclaimed that colonies were useless, trade still followed the flag. The Empire was the nation's chief overseas customer, even after the loss of the United States—the next largest. India and the West Indies, with their non-European populations, were still by far the most valuable part of it. Canada had only 300,000 French and 80,000 British settlers, mostly of the humblest kind. The Cape was a port of call, where a few officials and troops uneasily watched the growing bitterness between Dutch farmers and Kaffir tribesmen; Australia an empty and unconsidered continent fringed with a few

  1 Dixon, 61, 72; Fowler, 216-17. See Ashton, II, 230; Austen, II, 423; Clapham, I, 59, 92-7; Creevey, Life and Times, 115; De Quincey, Autobiographical Sketches; Ernie, 203-5; Farington, VII, 97; VIII, 270; Hammond, Rise of Modern Industry, 75-79; Klingender, 13; Lockhart, V, 86; McCausland, 18-19, 23; Mitford, Our Village, 63; Nevill, 143-8, 153-4; Newton, 21; Simond, I, 17, 184, 201-2; Smart, 28-9; Sydney, I, 53-6, 58; Woodward, 4.

  pathetic convict settlements and sheep-farms—Newgate, jested Sydney Smith, become a quarter of the globe. Yet even here their traders penetrated, for wherever there was money to be picked up, Englishmen and, still more, Scotsmen were sure to come. And though the Empire made no appeal to the fashionable, and Harriette Wilson was bored to distraction by her first protector's drawings of West Indian cocoa trees, the imagination of the poor and the young was perennially fired by it. "He used to tell us," wrote a village boy, "the most delectable tales about elephants and tigers . . . of guavas, bananas, figs, jacks and cashew apples, and your hat full for the value of a farthing! . . . Miller and I often vowed we would go to that grand fruit country when we became men."1

  Britain's trade with India was a romance; so was the conquest of sixty million Indians by a chartered company of merchants who "maintained armies and r
etailed tea." A foreigner speculated as to the idea an Indian might form beforehand of the mighty Company and its august Courts, but thought he would be surprised as he approached the foot of his sovereign's throne in Leadenhall Street. Within its dingy walls the first prose writer of the age sat at his desk, totting up the price of tea, drugs and indigo. Like the rest of the empire the Company's dominion and wealth depended on the Royal Navy, which, even after its reduction at the Peace, remained the controller of the world's waterways. Wellington, with his grasp of strategic reality, thought it indispensable that the capital of British India should remain at Calcutta or some place near the coast. Without sea-power the conquests of Clive, Wellesley and Hastings and the trade they had won could not have been maintained for a month. With it there was no place within reach of flowing water where Britons might not venture and set up shop or factory. Some of them, out-distancing Marco Polo, traded broadcloth and shalloons for tea at the far ends of the earth with pigtailed Chinese.2

  Year in, year out, the ships of maritime Britain carried her trade abroad, sailing from her estuaries under great wings of white sails, with manufactured cottons, woollens, hardware and cutlery, guns, wrought copper and brass, refined sugar, linens, lace and silks,

  1 Cooper, 18. See Farington, VIII, 123-4; Halevy, II, 106; Leslie, 293-8; Harriette Wilson, 1-2; Woodward, 7, 350-2, 359-62, 368-9, 379-80.

  8 "Dear father, Here I am comfortably settled in an arm-chair by the fireside in a Chinese temple which has been appropriated to the Embassy during their stay here and has been made to look like an English house by the kindness of the gentlemen of the British factory." Hon. C. Abbott from Canton to Lord Colchester, 2nd Jan., 1817. Colchester, III, 13.

  saddlery and tanned leather, pottery, china clay, ironware, coal and rock salt, and returning with raw cotton from the United States, timber from the Baltic, wine from France, Sicily, Portugal and the Atlantic islands, sugar, rum and mahogany from the Caribbean, tea and spices from the East Indies, cod from the Newfoundland fisheries. For England did not only enjoy her unrivalled sense of elegance and comfort; she exported it. From Wedgwood's famous factory at Etruria in Staffordshire went out the wares—"neat, strong and beautiful"—which were famed all over the world. In every good inn from Paris to St. Petersburg, it was said, travellers were served on English ware.

  For four miles from London Bridge to Deptford the forest of masts was almost continuous. Often there were two thousand seagoing ships lying in the river—more than four times the number a century before. Newcastle, Liverpool and Sunderland, the next largest ports, had between them almost as many. Bernadotte, crossing to Sweden in 1810, saw more than a thousand British merchantmen in the Belt convoyed by six men-of-war. The annual value of imports had risen during the war from nineteen to thirty-two millions, of exports from twenty-seven to fifty-eight millions. "What are we to think of this trade," wrote a foreigner, "of which a whole immense city could not contain the stock and is merely its counting house. . . . The mind forgets that the immediate object is sugar and coffee, tobacco and cotton, and sees only a social engine which rivals in utility, in vastness of operation as well as wisdom of detail, the phenomena of nature itself."1

  Even more remarkable than the volume of this trade was its continuous increase. Britain's exports in 1815 were small compared with what they were to become—the overwhelming bulk of consumption was still domestic—yet they were multiplying with every decade. The principal article exported was now manufactured cotton. This industry—trifling when the war began—had outdistanced even the cloth trade, for centuries the country's premier commercial interest, though this, too, under the impact of war and machinery, was expanding fast. Spinning had become almost entirely a machine and factory activity: the spinning-jenny and steam engine, it was said,

  1 Simond, I, 30. See Alison, I, 78-9.

  together financed the overthrow of Napoleon. In Glasgow alone there were more than forty mills employing over two hundred workpeople apiece; Dale and Owen at the great New Lanark Mills —though this was exceptional—employed as many as sixteen hundred. Flax and worsted spinning were following the example of cotton, though weaving in all branches of the textile trade was still mainly done "out." But the steam-power loom, first set up in Manchester in 1806 as the rival of the handloom, was already proving a godsend to manufacturers trying to capture the markets which Britain's naval victories had opened. Three years after Waterloo two thousand power-looms were in operation; thereafter their numbers doubled every other year, rising during the 'twenties to prodigious figures.

  The quality of the goods exported, and the integrity and dispatch with which British traders met their customers' demands, earned prodigious dividends. So did the ownership of land in the new industrial areas. The rent-roll of the Shakerleys, a typical Lancashire and Cheshire landed family, rose during George Ill's reign from £3000 to over £30,000 p.a. A traveller, passing through the Vale of Clwyd in the last year of the war, was shown the house of a formerly poor clergyman who enjoyed an income of £75,000 from a copper mine discovered on a barren piece of land of which he was part owner. Vast underground estates of coal and iron-ore, worthless a generation before, were transformed by the use of steam-power into properties bringing their proprietors rents and royalties transcending even those of high farming, and still greater fortunes to the thrusting, able men who developed them.1 The Bridgwater Canal, which cost .£200,000 to build, returned an annual profit of .£100,000; the thirty-nine original proprietors of the Mersey and Irwell Navigation Company received their capital back in interest every other year for half a century. The first Sir Robert Peel, a dispossessed yeoman's son

  1 Simond in March, 1811, wrote of a 5000-acre "subterranean farm" for which a rent of £3000 p.a. was paid and a royalty or percentage on the quality of coals extracted which doubled it. "When the estate in which this mine is situated was sold thirty years ago, the purchaser refusing to pay a trifling consideration for the right of mining, this right. . . was reserved; not that either party were ignorant of the existence of coals, but the steam engine was not then generally applied to mining, and the other branches of the art had not then reached their present improved state.... What is now worth £6000 p.a. was not deemed worth one year's purchase thirty years ago." Simond, II, 61. See idem, I, 182, 206, 216, 230, 243, 331; II, 62, 72, 224, 242, 278, 292,294; Farington, II, 145; VII, 142; VIII, 194-201; Newton, 184; Shakerley MSS.; Smart, 569; Woodward, 45.

  who invested in a few of the early spinning jennies, left nearly a million sterling. A Bristol merchant, worth at the beginning of the war under a thousand pounds, possessed half a million when Faring-ton met him at its conclusion. A shopkeeper of the Exeter Exchange in the Strand amassed £100,000 merely by selling shilling packets of powder to sharpen razors.

  The value of farm land had also soared with its use. A population which had grown during the war by thirty per cent, had had to be supported by improved farming. In the decade between Trafalgar and Waterloo Lord Aberdeen's rents increased by fifty per cent. Arable in the Wye Valley, which in the seventeen-eighties had sold for ten pounds an acre, was letting by 1814 at forty shillings an acre per annum and selling at thirty years' purchase. In the Lothians of Scotland, formerly the poorest of western European countries, rents rose more than fourfold in a generation. In the Vale of Festiniog, where embankment had been carried out by the gentry, rents had gone up from seven shillings to three guineas an acre, in parts of Essex from ten to fifty shillings, in Berkshire and Wiltshire from fourteen to seventy shillings. In Yorkshire the best land fetched as much as ^8 an acre. At the summit of the boom in the last years of the war it could scarcely be bought at all.

  One saw that illimitable wealth as one travelled the country: "farmhouses in sight everywhere . . . large fields fresh ploughed, black and smooth, others ploughing, always with horses, never with oxen; farmers riding among their workmen, great flocks of sheep confined by net-fences in turnip fields, meadows . . . of the most brilliant green." At the autumnal shee
p fair at Weyhill more than a quarter of a million pounds changed hands annually to be borne home by plaided shepherds or their top-booted, blue-coated masters who gathered over the "ordinary" in the White Hart. At Falkirk Fair a tenant of Lord Egremont's bought twelve thousand head of cattle with £30,000 Bank of England bills carried in his pockets.1 A man who could raise prize bullocks or grow outsize turnips did not need a pedigree; in their passion for agricultural improvement the

  1 "This is probably the only country in the world where people make fortunes by agriculture. A farmer who understands his business becomes rich in England with the same degree of certainty as in other professions, whilst in most countries a farmer is condemned by the nature of his trade to be a mere labourer all his life." Simond, I, 174. See Cobbett, Rural Rides, I, 49.

  English even forgot to be snobs. Members of Parliament and leaders of fashion spent half the year on their estates, planting, raising stock, experimenting in crops and vying with one another in enriching their lands and country. After local ploughing competitions and carthorse trials the worthies of a whole county, gentle and common, would dine together to discuss over roast beef and October ale the methods they had successfully pursued. The Duke of Bedford's or Coke of Norfolk's annual sheep-shearing were events as important as the Derby or the meeting of Parliament. Coke's rustic palace, Holkham, became a place of pilgrimage that rivalled Walsingham in the age of faith: the interminable drive, the triumphal arch, the lakes, the woods, the obelisk, the distant view of the sea, the overawed Norfolk church peering through its modest cluster of trees, the exquisite changes of autumnal leaf as the shooting parties, in green and buff and brown, moved like regiments across the landscape, the coverts with never-ending partridges rising out of wastes of sand bearded with stunted corn, and, all around, the wilderness flowering like a garden.1