Dickens's England: Life in Victorian Times

by Pritchard, R. E.

  That which they have done but earnest of the things that they shall do:

  For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see,

  Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

  Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,

  Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;

  Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew

  From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;

  Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,

  With the standards of the people plunging thro’ the thunder-storm;

  Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled

  In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

  There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,

  And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapped in universal law. . . .

  Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range,

  Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves* of change.

  [* Tennyson thought that railway lines were grooved.]

  Alfred Tennyson, Locksley Hall (1842)

  TWO

  Ladies, Gentlemen and Others

  I’ll lay you a hat, a guinea one . . . that he’s a man of dibs and doesn’t follow no trade or calling, and if that isn’t a gentleman, I don’t know what is.

  R.S. Surtees, Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities (1838)

  At the top of the social pyramid were some 4,000 aristocratic families, their wealth derived from large estates and investments; at the bottom were the urban prostitutes: the police estimated some 30,000 in England and Wales, and over 8,000 in London (a tenth of some others’ more sensational figures) – though numbers declined later in the century.

  The aristocracy remained a fairly self-contained social group, though frequently ‘marrying out’ into the upper squirearchy and wealthy professional classes. The wives supervised access through elaborate rituals and etiquette, admission being dependent more on background and lifestyle than on (‘new’) money, though by the late 1870s, with the landed classes’ economic base weakened by the agricultural depression, society had to open up to wealthy business families and even American heiresses. The upper classes generally tended to marry later than the others, producing irregular behaviour among the young men, and a higher proportion of unmarried women.

  There were generally more women than men (the marriage rate, low early in the century, increased in mid-century, and declined in the last quarter). Figures suggest that of 100 Englishwomen of marriageable age, 57 would be married, 12 would be widows, and 30 spinsters: there was recognition of the problem of the unmarried middle-class woman (the 25,000 governesses were in a difficult, anomalous position, genteel but employed, not family or guests or servants, suspect as marital predators).

  While women generally needed to marry, their legal position left much to be desired. Until 1870, all a wife’s property was her husband’s (Charlotte Brontë was not pleased to have her copyright and royalties transferred to her father’s curate when she married him); the upper classes sought to circumvent this with pre-marital trust arrangements. Divorce was only possible by individual Acts of Parliament until 1857, though the new law really only benefitted the better-off; a husband could obtain divorce on grounds of adultery, but a wife had to prove adultery aggravated by various nastinesses.

  The middle classes, a group always hard to define, were more anxious about definitions and assertions of social identity. Status required that women should be idle, occupying themselves with making calls, water-colours or embroidery (though a fair number did engage in ‘good works’, pestering the poor with fruit, advice and religious tracts); to support them, some 750,000 lower-class women were employed as domestic servants, mostly in one- or two-servant households. Before marriage, middle-class young women – as foreigners commented – had (or took) notable freedom in behaviour, which they largely lost on marrying. Sobriety of behaviour, and a cult of the self-sacrificial helpmate wife in a paternalistic family, increasingly became the norm. Much has been made of Victorian middle-class prudishness, which certainly existed, but appears to have been notably less than that of the Americans. Whether or not piano-legs were concealed, everything else in the house was smothered, with thick, double curtains, silk-lined or flock-patterned wallpaper, Brussels carpets, heavy, polished furniture and innumerable ornaments to occupy the housemaids’ time. Also smothered was discussion of sexuality, in accordance with the public belief that ‘the majority [of women] are not much troubled by sexual desire’ (numerous private journals and letters suggesting that, on the contrary, they found it no trouble at all). It is worth noting here the sharp decline in the national birth rate from the early 1870s, indicative of family planning, probably by use of barrier methods.

  There were many reports on the working classes by middle-class explorers, shocked and anxious to shock in order to provoke reforms. Living conditions could be horrible in the big-city slums, but there were improvements, and, if one third of working-class housing was poor or wretched, another third was considered ‘decent’ and ‘comfortable’. It was assumed – thrillingly – that over-crowding and multiple occupancy of bedrooms would lead to promiscuity and incest, though other accounts suggested reasonable care for modesty and propriety; again, suggestions of millowners’ and overseers’ ‘droits de seigneur’ over women workers were often contradicted (though sexual licence in the mines seems well documented).

  Many reports, then and since, have dwelt on prostitution, rife in all the cities and industrial, military and naval towns (provoking the notorious Contagious Diseases Act that permitted the arrest, detention and compulsory examination of any woman suspected of being a prostitute). ‘Prostitution’ was a blanket term to cover many frailties – even including ‘fast’ behaviour. At the upper end, ‘demi-mondaines’ and courtesans such as Polly Evans in Manchester and ‘Skittles’ Walters in London earned £50 a week, with servants and carriages, mingling with the unfastidious well-to-do. Many women in the lower classes were in effect concubines, living in serial, semi-permanent individual relationships; others sought to supplement inadequate regular incomes, or looked for better opportunities and variety, or were driven by sheer poverty. Child prostitution made a busy trade: in 1848 The Times suggested that 90 per cent of fourteen-year-olds released from workhouses went on the street. In 1885, the journalist W.T. Stead’s well-publicised purchase of a thirteen-year old brought about the Criminal Law Amendment Act, raising the age of consent from twelve to sixteen, making procuration criminal, and increasing penalties for underage sexual assault.

  Meanwhile, the ‘gay ladies’ and ‘soiled doves’ of the West End – one night in 1857 some 200 were counted in the Haymarket and Regent Street area – earned a workman’s weekly wages in one night; many others worked in the industrial and dock areas, usually in mean, dirty brothels, for whatever they could get, for food and shelter.

  They may sneer as they like about eating and drinking,

  But help it I cannot, I cannot help thinking

  How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!

  A.H. Clough, ‘Spectator Ab Extra’ (1863)

  * * *

  THE DINING ANIMAL

  (I)

  Man, it has been said, is a dining animal. Creatures of the inferior races eat and drink; man only dines. It has also been said that he is a cooking animal; but some races eat food without cooking it. . . . It is equally true that some races of men do not dine any more than the tiger or the vulture. It is not a dinner at which sits the aboriginal Australian, who gnaws his bone half bare and then flings it behind to his squaw. And the native of Terra-del-Fuego does not dine when he gets his morsel of red clay. Dining is the privilege of civilization. The rank which a people occupy in the grand scale may be measured by their way of taking their meals, as well as by their way of treating the
ir women. The nation which knows how to dine has learnt the leading lesson of progress. It implies both the will and the skill to reduce to order, and surround with idealisms and graces, the more material conditions of human existence; and wherever that will and skill exist, life cannot be wholly ignoble.

  Isabel Beeton, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861)

  ENGLISH DINNER

  As you never were in England, I must say a few words on the routine of an English dinner, which, as I have said, is ‘à peu de chose près’, everywhere alike. . . .

  The gentlemen lead the ladies into the dining-room, not as in France, by the hand, but by the arm; and here, as there, are emancipated from the necessity of those antiquated bows which, even in some of the best society in Germany, are exchanged every time one hands out a lady. On the other hand, there is a most anxious regard to rank . . .

  After the soup is removed, and the covers are taken off, every man helps the dish before him, and offers some of it to his neighbour; if he wishes for anything else, he must ask across the table, or send a servant for it . . .

  It is not usual to take wine without drinking to another person. When you raise your glass, you look fixedly at the one with whom you are drinking, bow your head, and then drink with great gravity. Certainly many of the customs of the South Sea Islanders, which strike us the most, are less ludicrous. . . .

  At the conclusion of the second course comes a sort of intermediate dessert of cheese, butter, salad, raw celery and the like; after which ale, sometimes thirty or forty years old, and so strong that when thrown on the fire it blazes like spirit, is handed about. The tablecloth is then removed; under it, at the best tables, is a finer, upon which the dessert is set. At inferior ones, it is placed on the bare polished table. It consists of all sorts of hot-house fruits, which are here of the finest quality, Indian and native preserves, stomachic ginger, confitures and the like. Clean glasses are set before every guest and, with the dessert plates and knives and forks, small fringed napkins are laid. Three decanters are usually placed before the master of the house, generally containing claret, port and sherry or madeira. The host pushes these in stands, or in a little silver waggon on wheels, to his neighbour on the left. Every man pours out his own wine, and if a lady sits next to him, also helps her; and so on till the circuit is made, when the same process begins again. . . . The ladies sit a quarter of an hour longer, during which time sweet wines are sometimes served, and then rise from the table. The men rise at the same time, one opens the door for them, and as soon as they are gone, draw closer together; the host takes the place of the hostess, and the conversation turns upon subjects of local and everyday interest.

  Prince von Pückler-Muskau (trans. S. Austin), Tour by a German Prince (1832)

  AN UNACCUSTOMED GUEST

  Mr Watkins, who had previously requested friend Facey to take his wife into dinner, having finished a platitude he was enunciating about the state of the moon, now presented his great red arm to Mrs Somerville and led her off to the radiant apartment illuminated with the joint efforts of fire, candles and oil. It was a perfect blaze of light. Mrs Somerville having trod the passage, entered the dining-room with measured step, like a Tragedy Queen, and subsided in her seat on Mr Watkins’s right. . . .

  Facey . . . brought up the rear with Mrs Watkins, our master [of hounds] hoping, as he crossed what he called the vale of the entrance-hall, that – in schoolboy parlance – her meat might presently stop her mouth. So they sailed majestically up the spacious dining-room to the top of the table, where, by one of those masterly manoeuvres that ladies understand so much better than men, Facey found Cassandra Cleopatra spreading her napkin over her voluminous dress on his right, just as Mrs Watkins subsided in her great armchair on the left. ‘Rot it,’ thought Romford, ‘but I shall be talked to death between you.’ He then picked the bun out of his napkin, and spreading as much of the latter over his legs as his fair friend’s dress allowed him to do, he took a glance down the table to see what there was in the way of what he called ‘grub’.

  ‘Humph! I thought it had been a dinner,’ observed he, in tones of disappointment, to his hostess; ‘but there seems nothin’ but fruit and things, like a flower-show.’

  ‘Dinner à la Russe,’ replied Mrs Watkins, thinking he was joking, at the same time handing him a finely embroidered French bill of fare.

  ‘Ah, there’s nothin’ like a good cut at a round of beef when one’s hungry,’ observed Facey, laying it down again.

  A servant with two plates of soup then asked him whether he would take thick or clear turtle.

  ‘Thick,’ replied Facey, thinking it would be the most substantial of the two.

  The servant then set it down before him.

  ‘Here! Give us both!’ exclaimed he, seeing how little there was in the plate he had got. He then took the other and placed it in front of him until he was done with the first. And he supped and slushed just like one of his own hounds.

  ‘What’s this stuff?’ now demanded Facey, as a servant offered him a green glass of something.

  ‘Punch, sir,’ replied the man.

  ‘Set it down,’ replied Romford, continuing his soup. Having finished both plates of turtle, he quaffed off the glass, and was balancing himself on his chair, raking the guests fore and aft, and considering whether mock-turtle or real turtle was best, when his lisping friend on the right interrupted his reverie by asking him if he was fond of flowers.

  ‘Whoy, yes,’ replied Facey carelessly, ‘they are well enough in their way,’ adding, ‘and I’m fond of hounds, but I don’t like havin’ them in the dinner-room.’ . . .

  Facey then got some fish, not so much as he liked, but still he would take it on account. So, helping himself copiously to lobster-sauce – taking nearly half the boat – he proceeded to attack his turbot with great avidity.

  Then came some hock and white hermitage; next, some incomprehensible side-dishes, or rather entrées, for, of course, they never got on the table at all; then some sparkling Moselle and Burgundy, followed by more anonymous viands, of all of which Facey partook greedily, not knowing but that each chance might be the last. And when he had about ate to repletion, a servant came and offered him some mutton, which he couldn’t resist, saying as he took it, ‘I wish you’d brought me that at first.’ Next came the ‘sweet and dry,’ to which he paid the same compliment of wishing it had come before, observing confidentially to Mrs Watkins that he thought champagne was just the best white wine there was, adding that Lucy and he managed a bottle between them almost every hunting day. Meanwhile Miss Cassandra, baffled with her flowers, but anxious to be doing, thought to ingratiate herself by asking him a pertinent question connected with the chase; namely, whether he liked ladies hunting. . . .

  ‘Dangerous enough for the men,’ replied Facey, filling his mouth full of potato; adding, ‘besides, they’re always gettin’ in the way.’

  Having finished his mutton, they now offered him some turkey. Facey eyed it intently, wishing it, too, had come before. ‘Well – no,’ said he, after a pause, ‘ar can’t eat any more!’ So saying, he dived his hands into his trousers pockets, and stretched out his legs, as if he was done. But his persecution was not over yet.

  After another round of ‘sweet and dry,’ the game began to circulate – grouse, woodcocks, partridges, snipes – to all of which offers our master returned a testy negative. ‘No! no!’ exclaimed he, upon a third tease, ‘ar’ve had enough!’

  Still there were the sweets to come – sweets without end – sweets in every sort of disguise – for Lubbins was great in that line. And they baited Facey with creams and jellies, and puffs and pastry, till he was half frantic. . . .

  Footman (with a silver dish) – ‘Little fondieu, sir?’

  Facey – ‘No, ye beggar! I don’t want any more!’ growled he. . . .

  At length there were symptoms of a lull. The chopped cheese having made its circuit, was duly followed by Port wine, Beaujolais, Badminton cup, bi
tter and sweet ales; and Facey began to feel a little more comfortable. His roving pig eyes raked either side of the table – now glancing at Lolly, now at Miss Mowser, now at Felt, now at Salver, now at Lucy, and anon at Mrs Watkins. Then they reverted to his fair neighbour on his right. ‘Good-looking lass,’ thought he, examining her minutely behind. . . .

  ‘Cream or water ice, sir?’ now asked a footman.

  ‘Who said I wanted either?’ growled Facey, just as he would to a shopkeeper who asked him, ‘What’s the next article, sir?’ . . .

  Just then a persecution of fruit commenced – pineapple, grapes and Jersey pears arrived – thus making a break in the conversation . . . And the science of ‘eating made easy’ having been further developed by [the butler] Burlinson helping them all round to a glass of wine and offering them another, an ominous lull suddenly took place in the conversation, and all the guests arose simultaneously – the gentlemen standing a pace or two back, while the ladies extracted their enormous crinolines from under the table. Then, the door being opened by the obsequious host, Mrs Somerville sailed out of the room, with the same stately air with which she entered it; and, after a little of the usual mock-modesty about each not going first, Mrs Watkins at length got the whole party collected, and drove them before her like a flock of sheep . . . while the gentlemen closed up at the table, to see what they could make of old Facey.

  R.S. Surtees, Mr Facey Romford’s Hounds (1865)

  FOOD FOR THE WORKERS

  (I)

  In the great towns of England everything may be had of the best, but it costs money; and the workman, who must keep house on a couple of pence, cannot afford much expense. Moreover, he usually receives his wages on Saturday evening, for, although a beginning has been made in the payment of wages on Friday, this excellent arrangement is by no means universal; and so he comes to market at five or even seven o’clock while the buyers of the middle-class have had the first choice during the morning, when the market teems with the best of everything. But when the workers reach it, the best has vanished, and, if it was still there, they would probably not be able to buy it. . . . As nothing can be sold on Sunday, and all shops must be closed at twelve o’clock on Saturday night, such things as would not keep until Monday are sold at any price between ten o’clock and midnight. But nine-tenths of what is sold at ten o’clock is past using by Sunday morning, yet these are precisely the provisions which make up the Sunday dinner of the poorest class. The meat which the workers buy is very often past using; but having bought it, they must eat it. . . .