Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4

by Peter Ackroyd

  ‘Our trade is our chief support,’ Lord Carteret explained in the Lords, ‘and therefore we must sacrifice every other view to the preservation of our trade.’ Where once the English had congratulated themselves on the purity of their religion or the balance of their unwritten constitution they now prided themselves on the extent of their commerce; it was widely believed, and reported, that it was the most considerable in the world. Which nation, effectively, could rival it? Which country had the navy to do so? In one of the Letters Concerning the English Nation, ‘On Trade’, Voltaire, the French philosopher and historian, noticed opportunely that England had become ‘so powerful by its commerce, as to be able to send in 1723 three fleets at the same time to three different and far distanc’d parts of the Globe’.

  Commerce was, essentially, power gained without war. John Gay conveniently expressed it in verse:

  Be commerce, then, thy sole design;

  Keep that, and all the world is thine.

  And of course all this implied great social changes, in which the merchant and the trader were no longer considered to be in the lower half of the social spectrum some way down from clergymen or barristers. In the same letter Voltaire noted that the brother of Lord Townshend, a minister of state, was a merchant in the City and that the son of the earl of Oxford was a tradesman in Aleppo. Robert Walpole married the daughter of a timber merchant. Commerce possessed not only freedom but also prestige. That is why the Whigs, the patrons and masters of commerce, had the advantage over the Tories. Trade now created gentlemen, even if they had not yet permeated the upper ranks of the aristocracy.

  The merchants were now accepted as potentially the most useful members of the commonwealth. Thomas Turner, a local shopkeeper from East Hoathly, near Lewes, kept a diary between 1754 and 1765 in one entry of which he notes ‘how pleasant is trade when it runs in its proper channels, and flows with a plentiful stream. It does, as it were, give life and spirit to one’s actions.’ It was as necessary as the blood running through the veins. It had become the national metaphor.

  The two great topographical facts of the century, related in necessarily intimate ways, are the growth of London and the growth of the towns. The union of England and Scotland had created the largest free trade area in the world, and therefore within the bounds of this island state the finance of London was combined with the commerce of Liverpool, the coal of the midlands and the industries of the textile north. So everything grew together as if they were under the silent guidance of a fundamental law of being.

  The figures tell their own story. In the course of the eighteenth century imports, as well as exports, increased five times; in the same period re-exports increased by a factor of nine. In the years between 1726 and 1728 imports rose 22 per cent, exports rose 27 per cent, and re-exports increased by 57 per cent. Re-exports is the neutral name for colonial produce that by law had to be shipped to Britain before being taken in turn to continental Europe. The English then got the best of the bargains by buying cheap and selling dear. It was also the most effective manner of acquiring, in return, much-needed European goods.

  The cloth from the East India Company, the sugar from the West Indies, the tobacco from Virginia and Maryland as well as all the tea and the rum and the spices from various parts of the world transformed the appurtenances of English life; this transformation amounted to great cultural and social as well as commercial change. When the commodities and fashions and luxuries were poured into the country, trade and customs naturally expanded.

  In his Tour Defoe notes the sudden and unexpected growth of English towns. Frome, in north-east Somerset, ‘is so prodigiously increased within these last twenty or thirty years that they have built a new church, and so many new streets of houses, and these houses are so full of inhabitants’. The population of Halifax has ‘increased one fourth, at least, within the last forty years, that is to say since the late Revolution’. Of Liverpool he writes that ‘I think I may safely say at this my third seeing it, for I was surprised at the view, it was more than double what it was at the second; and, I am told, that it still visibly increases both in wealth, people, business and buildings: what it may grow to in time, I know not.’

  In 1700 Norwich was the only provincial town with more than 25,000 inhabitants; by 1820 fourteen more could be found. The inhabitants of towns such as Hull and Nottingham, Leeds and Leicester, had increased five times in the same period. The populations of Liverpool, Birmingham and Manchester had expanded twenty times. In 1700 less than one quarter of the people lived in towns; a century later that figure had risen to an average between one-third and two-fifths. England was slowly but ineluctably becoming a cohesive urban society, quite unlike Germany, France, or Italy.

  There was hardly a town, large or small, that had not been in part rebuilt. They arrived as wattle-and-daub, or as oak and other timber, but they were revived in brick. The marble for the assembly rooms and the baths would soon arrive. Brick, however, was the material of choice for the emerging middle class. The prosperous enjoyed the comfort of brick with the additional advantage of large windows; the houses were considered to be ‘classical’, meaning of regular proportions, and they were built into a variety of well-tempered shapes. The square, the circus, the arcade and the crescent were all in the height of architectural taste.

  The paradigm for this extensive renovation and refurbishment was London itself. On one of her journeys Celia Fiennes observed of Nottingham that it was ‘the neatest town I have seen, built of stone and delicate, large and long streets, much like London and the houses lofty and well-built. The marketplace is very broad – out of which runs a very large street, much like Holborn, but the buildings fine.’ The emphasis here is upon space and spaciousness; the new town was to be carefully distinguished from the cramped and noisome quarters of the Jacobean and Stuart city. These were increasingly reserved for the poor or for the industrial workers. As population increased throughout the century, and as the need for space grew ever more pressing, the more prosperous citizens tried to create enclaves for themselves like Old Square in Birmingham that has now in its turn been razed.

  And so we can date the rise and rise of the country town. It was no longer the small town, no longer the market town, but the prosperous hub of what was quickly becoming a provincial society with its services, its shopkeepers, its entertainments and its meeting places. There was an increasing need for domestic and professional services; lighting and clean streets would soon become required in this newly constructed environment. By the 1730s sixteen provincial towns had introduced oil-burning lamps onto the thoroughfares. Coffee-houses and concerts, balls and literary societies, were also no longer the prerogative of the capital.

  The architecture of the period was one characterized by harmony and restraint; Gothic excesses or mannerist convolutions were no longer required. As in the social conduct of the gentlemen and ladies, all was to be governed by restraint and decorum. The proportions of the edifice were to be exact and harmonious, following the golden rule of symmetry in the placing of windows and the subdued use of ornament. This in turn encouraged a balance and proportion of streets, crescents and squares with the stated ambition of promoting social harmony in the newly built or newly extended towns and cities of the country. Nothing should be singular, excessively individual, or idiosyncratic. There was a new lightness in the air, eschewing the heaviness and ponderousness of the recent past. White was the colour of modernity. But were the houses and public buildings, with their Doric columns and pilasters, like unto whited sepulchres? Propriety can itself act as an enervating force, as became obvious in the regimented and restrictive life of Bath or Tunbridge Wells. For turbulent or eccentric spirits, if any by chance happened to find themselves there, these spas might have been the equivalent of open prisons.

  In the domestic interiors of the middling sort, in the 1740s or 1750s, the fashion for propriety and harmony also prevailed. To drink tea out of a blue-and-white china cup was the beau idéal. The cup could then
be placed upon a tea table, made of walnut or mahogany, highly polished and lacquered. Oak was no longer fashionable, too redolent of the Stuart times. Silver tea sets and linen napkins were part of the setting. The windows would have curtains, if they were to be wholly respectable, and the walls themselves were furnished with a clock, a mirror, a print and an engraving. The floors were no longer made up of plain boards but were covered with deal and ornamented with carpets. The old stone fireplaces had given way to marble. Writing tables and card tables were expected. There might even be a bookcase. The plain and thick-set furniture of a previous age was supplanted by chairs and sofas of a greater lightness and curvilinear elegance. The line of beauty was, according to Hogarth, serpentine. In advertisements for the new domestic comforts, praise was lavished upon the ‘neat’ and the ‘neatly done’.

  Of the poorer dwellings we know very little. The hovels of the labourers, the rooming houses of the clerks, the small houses of the shopkeepers, the lodgings of the artisans, all have been swept away or so changed as to have become unrecognizable. The small cottages and shacks have been torn down, sometimes by human agency and sometimes by the wind and the rain. They did not contain Wedgwood china or patterned wallpaper; at most they included a bed, a table, and two or three chairs that were so badly made that they would not even now find their way into a provincial museum.

  The more affluent dwellings possessed between three and seven rooms, designed for a family of approximately five members with two or three servants. Two female servants and a boy were the standard repertoire of domestic service. The rooms themselves were arranged on a different pattern. In earlier periods an observer would be forgiven for thinking that the whole range of human activity could take place in one or two rooms; but by the eighteenth century, in the wealthier households, there was a noticeable separation of functions. The [with]drawing room came to be used for conversation, the dressing room for female intimacies; the bedrooms and nurseries were always upstairs, and the servants were relegated to the back of the house. In poorer families the parlour took the place of the drawing room, but in even more pinched quarters the life of the household still revolved about the kitchen. These domestic conditions survived well into the twentieth century.

  There is no better evidence for the growing wealth of the country than the rising status of the provincial town as a focus for social life. Just as the population began a steady migration towards the towns and other urban centres, so the national culture in turn acquired an urban tone that had previously been confined to London and the largest cities. Much of it derived from the pressure of emulation, the greatest solvent of social change. The weekly stagecoach brought down the newest London goods, and it was the ambition of every relatively prosperous householder to make the annual journey to the capital. London actors trod the boards of the New Theatre in Norwich or the Leeds Theatre in Hunslet Lane; London books made their way onto the shelves of the circulating libraries, by means of which books were rented for a period rather than purchased. The Annual Register of 1761 noted that ‘the same wines are drunk, the same gaming practiced, the same hours kept and the same course of life pursued in the country and in the town . . . Every male and female wishes to think and speak, to eat and drink, and dress and live after the manner of people of quality in London.’ And so by a miracle of metamorphosis emerged the gardens, the walks, the pleasure gardens, the theatres, the concert venues, the libraries and the booksellers.

  The ‘walk’ might be a gravelled path, or a promenade, or a tree-lined avenue, or a terrace, where ladies and gentlemen might perambulate without being accosted by the lower sort or polluted by unnecessary noises or smells. These walks also outlined a form of social discipline and observation where the fashionable or the notable could be greeted with a bow. It was customary for the upper and middling classes to go on parade when the lower classes were still at work, thus avoiding any untoward encounters. It is perhaps worth noting, in this increasingly commercialized culture, that these rural walks were the direct begetters of the shopping parades or ‘window-shopping’.

  Those who now considered themselves to be part of what became known as ‘polite society’ patronized these places as much to be seen as to see; there was nothing so snobbish as a country town, even in its new incarnation. There were now certain ways to dress, to greet acquaintances, to sip coffee, to converse, or to dance. The local theatres were schools of manners that replaced the ‘courtesy books’ of an earlier civilization. The concern for ‘improvement’ that played so large a part in the mercantile and mechanical aspects of life could now be applied closer to home. Throughout human history the city has always been the symbol of political and aesthetic life; it is possible to speculate that, in the eighteenth century, Britain began that urban experiment on a national scale.

  The professions flourished, creating an entirely new class of middling society. The town gentry made space to accommodate the clergymen, the attorneys of common law courts and the solicitors of Equity and Chancery; the physicians and even the surgeon-apothecaries were also acquiring new status with the emergence of the charity hospitals which provided treatment for the poor at no charge. The number of professional government servants rose, creating a career bureaucracy which became well versed in business of every sort pertaining to the administration of the country. By the beginning of 1714, 113 commissioners were at the head of eighteen different offices, each of them well staffed. By the 1720s some 12,000 public servants had become permanent employees. The eighteenth century marked the emergence of government as we have come to know it.

  The public buildings – the town hall, the corn exchange, the guildhall, the court house, the mansion house, the financial exchange – began to be dressed in a new and more imposing fabric in which civility and sociability were the guiding principles. Fashions were followed even in charity: the schools were the first to be granted more imposing premises, succeeded in turn by hospitals and then by prisons. The polite person was also the sociable person that, by definition, meant the charitable person. The great increase in charitable funding happened at precisely the time when polite society found its name and calling. Twenty-four hospitals were established between 1735 and 1783, nine of which were raised in the 1740s and 1750s. The public institutions of the time, from prisons to schools, were the project of voluntary organizations and had nothing whatever to do with any central administration. So we read of the Marine Society, the Philanthropic Society, the Royal Humane Society and many others, all of them memorialized in stone buildings that largely survive. Politeness also meant morality.

  If the public institutions of the provincial town represented its spirit of improvement, one other new arrival epitomized the recent fashion for sociability. ‘Assembly rooms’ were precisely that, large rooms in which people might congregate for a variety of functions. They were quite a modern thing, infinitely preferable to the old gatherings at assizes or at horse-fairs; in his Tour Defoe in fact criticized ‘the new mode of forming assemblies, so much, and so fatally now in vogue’. He was possibly commenting upon what might be considered the indiscriminate mingling of the sexes on such occasions, although the codes of conduct were very severe.

  The Assembly Rooms at York looked like nothing so much as the gallery of a great palace with individuals, couples, or groups sauntering idly through. A tearoom and a card-room were among the more polite amenities; but the great venue was the ballroom, in which three tiers of seating around the room allowed the spectators to see the dancing, the dresses and the jewels.

  Balls, and dances, were often held on a weekly basis; an annual subscription or ticket allowed you access to a supposedly glittering world of wax candles, chandeliers, branched candlesticks and lighted sconces. To the sound of a score of musicians in the gallery the couples would dance the minuet or, later, the more robust country dances of the period. Everyone would be watching everyone else; strangers would be observed and criticized; sudden meetings and pairings would be noticed at once. This was still the count
ry, and not the city.

  It was all very artificial and very tiring, the exhaustion of the male participants no doubt alleviated by frequent resort to the bottle. Balls might be described in somewhat impersonal terms as mating displays in which either sex looked for and, if fortunate, found a prospective partner. There was an element of make-believe in it, with a veneer of classical order and harmony coating some more traditional activities, but no more so than in many eighteenth-century social pursuits.

  The other great innovation of the age was the ‘pleasure garden’, a direct descendant of the ‘tea garden’ of the seventeenth century which had generally been the rural adjunct to an inn. Yet the pleasure garden was planned on an altogether more brilliant and ambitious scale, with musical performances, balls and promenades along tree-lined walks; even plays were sometimes performed. Statues and ornaments and paintings and frescoes and architectural conceits completed the panoramas of pleasure.

  The two most celebrated of these gardens, Vauxhall Gardens south of the River Thames and Ranelagh Gardens in Chelsea, were soon attracting thousands of visitors who were regaled with tea, liquor and ham sandwiches so exiguous that they became the butt of theatrical jokes. It was claimed that a competent waiter could cover the 11 acres of Vauxhall with the slices from one ham.

  The gardens were lit at night by a thousand lamps, thus giving the illusion of Scheherazade and the nights of Arabia, but in a relatively short time they became the venue for more impolite colloquies and engagements in which darkness was favoured. It was almost inevitable, perhaps, that the more high-minded aspirations towards culture should be turned into what were essentially entertainments of a not very inspiring kind. It is said that there were more prostitutes in the gardens than there were waiters. This may also provide an insight into the eighteenth-century city.