‘I walked home along the Embankment this morning at two o’clock with the editor of the Standard,’ wrote Ralph D. Blumenfeld, an American journalist who moved to London in 1894. ‘Every bench from Blackfriars to Westminster Bridge was filled with shivering people, all huddled up – men, women and children.’ Some had come to London looking for work, others were unemployed. Pickpocketing was rife, with crowds waiting for omnibuses or trains being favourite targets. Watches were removed from chains, purses from pockets.
What everyone noticed about London was the filth, mostly the result of soot. England in the 1880s was a coal-burning economy, with every fire in every house coal-based and factory chimneys pumping out billows of sooty smoke. ‘The compartment in which I sat was filled with passengers who were smoking pipes, as is the British habit, and as the smoke and sulphur from the engine fill the tunnel, all the windows have to be closed,’ wrote Blumenfeld of a journey on the Underground.
‘The atmosphere was a mixture of sulphur, coal dust and foul fumes from the oil lamp above; so that by the time we reached Moorgate Street I was near dead of asphyxiation and heat. I should think these Underground railways must soon be discontinued, for they are a menace to health.’
* * *
Domestically, soot deposits meant that furniture had to be cleaned constantly to remove the steady film of greasy soot. On warm days a summer shower could bring soot-laden drops down on anyone walking beneath trees, with the consequent ruin of hat or dress, and the filthy air produced the notorious, dreadful London fogs (the poor in the East End suffered slightly more because the prevalence of west winds pushed this suffocating miasma eastwards).
On some days, these heavy blankets of polluted air were so thick that a person could not see the ground and inhaling was intensely painful. ‘The air we breathed scarified where it went, and set up a temporary inflammation,’ wrote the London correspondent of one newspaper of the terrible fog of December 1873, when cattle at the Islington Cattle Show were asphyxiated and fifty either died or had to be slaughtered. Seven men fell into the West India Docks and drowned during the week the fog lasted; and the death rate of the elderly and those suffering from lung complaints rose sharply. Cab men shouted their lungs hoarse to avoid crashes, lamps were kept burning all day long, and through the yellow pall a greasy black sediment settled on everything from furniture to lungs.4 The only people who profited from fog, at its peak in the 1880s,5 were burglars and pickpockets.
Fogs were the only time the noise of London abated. Otherwise, straw laid in front of a grand house helped to muffle some of it and was also a signal of sickness or death. Other exterior signs on a house were those of festivity: the striped awnings that covered doorways leading to dances and the strip of red carpet laid from the road to the doorway so that when carriages, emblazoned with the arms of their owners, drew up, the evening slippers and skirts of the ladies would not be sullied. At most of these houses the host and hostess would be standing at the top of the stairs to greet the guests surging several deep up huge marble staircases, glittering with orders, the family tiara and the family jewels – almost invariably diamonds, though many women were also festooned with great ropes of pearls.
‘Mary and I attended Lady Rothschild’s ball, arriving at 12.00 o’clock,’ wrote Mrs Leiter of one of these entertainments in her daily journal in 1891. ‘The Prince and Princess of Wales, the Princesses Victoria and Maud, Duke of Teck, Princess Mary and Princess May came in the Royal suite. Lady Rothschild asked Mary to dance in the Royal Quadrille. The Princess of Wales spoke to Mary and shook hands with her, most friendly. The house is superb, having a court of white marble to the roof and the marble stairway was most grand. The jewels were magnificent, Lady Rothschild wearing a magnificent set of pearls three strands, very large. Mary wore a white lace dress and a diamond swallow in her hair. I wore a blue satin and mauve velvet with my tiara and necklace of diamonds and rubys. We stayed till 3. p.m.’
At these dances, with their quadrilles, polkas and waltzes – though reversing was banned in royal circles – the conservatories that often led off ballrooms were popular for sitting out; comfortable basket chairs half-hidden by tall palms, the heady fragrance of the flowers, and the champagne already drunk made these bowers of romance. Invitations to such balls were by handwritten note; in the 1890s there were twelve postal deliveries a day in London.
* * *
A vital part of the London season (roughly from 1 May to the end of July) concerned the bringing-out of that year’s crop of debutantes. Now began the strict control of whom they would meet and whom they should marry. Marriage was crucially important, not only for reasons of status, children, an establishment of their own and, hopefully, love: it was the only option for an aristocratic young woman if she were to avoid being dependent on the charity of a brother or other relation after her father died and she had perforce to leave the family home.
Before coming out, a young girl would be trained in how to climb in and out of a carriage gracefully, how to curtsey and how to walk out of a room backwards while holding a long court train – necessary for her presentation at one of the four afternoon Drawing Rooms a year. For this ritual, she wore a low-cut, short-sleeved white dress with a train not less than three yards in length depending from her shoulders, with three ostrich feathers in her hair, worn slightly to the left-hand side of her head, and long white gloves. If the debutante was the daughter of a peer, the Queen leant forward and kissed her; if she was the daughter of a commoner, she kissed the Queen’s hand.
Arrival at the Palace, another of the required formalities, presented a spectacle for the crowds. Beautifully dressed women, heavy with jewels and family tiaras, sat in the family state coach, brought out for the occasion, with a bewigged coachman alone in front, seated on a splendid ‘hammercloth’, and powdered footmen in the family livery glittering with silver or gold lace hanging on to embroidered straps at the back. As they queued to enter the Palace forecourt crowds would peer in through the windows, often making disconcerting comments to each other. Sometimes a hairdresser ran from coach to coach to make last-minute adjustments to his clients’ veils and feathers.
Night after night these young girls, dressed in virginal white, made their appearance in ballrooms, under the assessing gaze of the young men whom, it was hoped, they would fairly shortly marry. The young Winston Churchill used to stand in the doorway of a ballroom, rating female looks on the Helen of Troy basis: ‘Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?’ he would ask a friend standing with him, receiving in answer a murmured: ‘Two hundred ships?’ as a young woman passed. ‘By no means,’ Winston would respond. ‘A covered sampan or a small gunboat at most.’ There was no equivalent of the American belle; in England the beauties were married women and actresses, and by the late 1880s the Professional Beauties had upped the stakes for feminine loveliness.
Proposals during one’s first season were seen not only as a route to the desirable state of matrimony but as a benchmark of attractiveness; all girls hoped for several during their first season. ‘Anyone who failed to secure a proposal within six months of coming out could only wait for her second season with diminishing chances. After the third there remained nothing but India as a last resort before the spectre of Old Maid became a reality,’ wrote Mabell Gore, underlining the assumption that acquiring a husband quickly was essential. Behind her dire prediction, however, hovering like a spectre at a feast, lay something darker, and unspoken – the complex mystery of sex.
For decades the medical profession had been tying itself in knots over female sexual attitudes. Doctors were in no doubt that men needed sex, and indeed might be adversely affected without it. But as the famous Dr William Acton wrote (in The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, a book widely read in England and reprinted in America), ‘The majority of women (happily for society) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind,’ and as late as 1910 the well-known doctor and sex specialist Havelock Ellis was commenting:
‘by many, sexual anaesthesia is considered natural in women, some even declaring that any other opinion would be degrading to women’.
But at the same time, many of these (all-male) doctors prophesied that for a woman denied sexual intercourse, hysteria and ‘neurasthenia’ were the least of the ailments she could suffer. Even an early and fervent proponent of women’s rights, Richard Carlile, claimed that ‘women who have never had sexual commerce begin to droop when about twenty-five years of age, become pale and languid, a general weakness and irritation … takes possession of them … their forms degenerate, their features sink, and the peculiar character of the old maid becomes apparent’.
Friends and relations did their best to avert this fate by inviting the girl in her first season on a round of house parties and dinners, where she could polish up her conversational skills and become accustomed to the grown-up world. As Beatrice Webb wrote on coming out in 1876, it was all ‘an existence without settled occupation or personal responsibility, having for its end nothing more remote than elaborately expensive opportunities for getting married’.
Now that they were ‘out’, these young women, who might have romped freely with brothers and male cousins as children, were guarded as if in imminent danger of violent sexual assault or – worse – falling into the arms of some attractive but penniless ‘unsuitable’. Although the rules of chaperonage had moved on – a little – from the mid-century, when they were so strict that an unmarried woman under thirty could not go anywhere, or be alone even in her own house with an unrelated man unless there was a married woman or servant there (no unmarried woman, however old, could be a chaperone), they were still fairly comprehensive. Even a married Englishwoman of the upper classes would never have travelled alone or bought a railway ticket – a footman would have done it for her.
As for young girls, they were not allowed to walk down St James’s Street as this was overlooked by the windows of gentlemen’s clubs (if they were inadvertently taken past them in a vehicle they should cast their eyes down), the north side of Piccadilly (where bachelor chambers abounded) or go to Burlington Arcade, famous for its shops, in the afternoon because of the danger of meeting streetwalkers there. At balls, they were not allowed to sit out a dance with a young man or dance more than three dances with the same one.
To parental eyes, the ever-present danger that a daughter might suffer not so much a fate worse than death but have been in a situation where, with a stretch of the imagination, she could have suffered it, was to be avoided at all costs. To secure the unquestioned legitimacy of a male heir she must be known to be utterly innocent when she went to her marriage bed. Thus an early marriage was considered highly desirable, often for boys as well as girls: what was vital was the production of this heir and if possible a spare, to ensure the continuance of the line and the smooth passing of the estate from one generation to the next.
It was only after marriage that girls, kept in the schoolroom virtually until being presented at court, began to blossom, to make their own friendships and, with a reasonably complaisant husband, perhaps otherwise occupied himself, indulge in a love affair or two.
What was essential was discretion: scandal had to be avoided at any price. So a child of such a liaison – a second daughter, maybe, or a third son – was brought up in the marital nursery, as a child of the house, with no questions asked. ‘Never comment on a likeness,’ Lady Moncreiffe advised her debutante daughter. It was all very different from the American model of marriage.
Or, as Mary Elizabeth Lucy put it more cynically of another case: ‘Sir Edward is a regular made-up old dandy, with a wig, false dyed moustache, false teeth and very crotchety on his legs! But what does that matter? When a man, however old, has a fine house in the country, ditto in London and a fine income, he can always get a wife, and I am sorry to say a young one too if he wishes it [Sir Edward’s wife was forty years younger than her husband]. A rich old woman also can get a penniless young man for her husband, for instance that poor Baroness Cheque Book, as an American named the Baroness Burdette Coutts.’ (Widely known as the richest heiress in England, the sixty-seven-year-old Angela Burdett-Coutts had shocked polite society by marrying her twenty-nine-year-old secretary, the American-born William Lehman Ashmead Bartlett.)
What was agreed, on both sides of the Atlantic, was the overwhelming desirability of marriage. Age, bad behaviour, the likelihood of infidelity – all were as nothing compared with the horror of being left ‘on the shelf’. Few could have mustered the blistering retort of the novelist Marie Corelli when asked why she had remained single. ‘I never married because there was no need. I have three pets at home which answer the same purpose as a husband. I have a dog which growls every morning, a parrot which swears all afternoon, and a cat that comes home late at night.’
CHAPTER 5
Living in the Country
What often came as a rude shock to the American heiresses who married into the British aristocracy was just how much of their lives they were expected to spend in the country, rather than in the exciting milieu in which they had first met their husbands.
For it was land that had supported the aristocracy for centuries, from which they drew their wealth and their great houses, on which they led their sporting lives – sporting lives that ruled the social calendar – and land on which lay the village or small market town that marked the nucleus of their greater or lesser fiefdom. In 1873 almost a quarter of England belonged to the great landowners.
Primogeniture had kept these large estates in one piece, aided by the process known as ‘strict settlement’ that prevented heirs from selling any part of the family estate to pay off debts. Thus the great country house was not so much the property and home of an individual and his family as the seat of a clan that he, as head of the whole family, held in trust for his descendants. It followed – another shock for American girls – that the wife was absolutely subservient to her husband. ‘After the Almighty, let your husband reign in your heart,’ was the advice given by her father to Lady Cecil Talbot when she married Lord Lothian. ‘You have no duty but to obey him. Watch his looks and fulfil all his wishes, conform yourself to his habits and inclinations.’
Unfortunately, these seldom took him in the direction of creature comforts for his new bride. To an American girl, accustomed to a nice warm house and plenty of hot water when she felt like a bath, the icy corridors and inadequate plumbing of the English country house often came as a hideous shock. Mildred Sherman, from Ohio, who became Lady Camoys, gave up going to dinner at country houses because she couldn’t withstand the temperatures in an evening dress (shawls and wraps were never worn at night).
Mary Leiter, on marrying Lord Curzon, was staggered to find that she was expected to bathe in a tin hip bath which was filled with hot water brought up by a housemaid from the boiler in the kitchen. Her sister Marguerite (‘Daisy’), who married the Earl of Suffolk and Berkshire, felt the same. She, however, a less yielding character than Mary, insisted on building her own bathroom amid the ancient splendour of Charlton Park, the house built for her husband’s ancestor, the 1st Earl, in 1607, even bringing her own bath, a lavish affair with eight taps, from Chicago.
It was all so different from home. Before the Civil War, Americans had been as dirty as Europeans, but by the 1880s, middle-class city dwellers had begun getting water pumped into their houses. The first American bathrooms were largely found in hotel basements (plumbing then seldom extended to the first floor), catering for those who had journeyed across the vast distances of America and so were weary and travel-stained. Soon private houses followed, and by the time the great mansions of the Gilded Age were being built, bathrooms had become a necessity to everyone who could afford them.
This was far from the case in England. Although the most famous writer of the age, Charles Dickens, had an up-to-the-minute bathroom installed in 1851, in which he took a cold shower every morning (‘I do sincerely believe that it does me unspeakable service’), he was one of the v
ery few with such an advanced approach. Most people were happy with a daily sponge bath, while in great houses a combination of apathy, disinclination and snobbishness fought successfully against modern plumbing: because the middle classes and nouveaux riches welcomed such things as gas, water closets and piped-in water, the upper classes tended to regard them as – well, middle-class and therefore to be avoided.
Then, too, for some time baths had a flavour of ill-repute. The famous courtesans and actresses – mistresses, in other words, of rich men – were known to spend long hours soaking themselves in their luxurious baths and then anointing their bodies with exotic preparations. And what for? was the unspoken question. When it became known that Cora Pearl and La Païva, celebrated belle époque courtesans in Paris, had respectively a magnificent bronze bath and a bathroom walled in onyx with a silver tub, both furnished with mysterious and delicious oils and unguents with which to prepare their bodies for further sensual delights, there could be only one answer.
So for many years the whole idea of a female removing all her clothes to enjoy bathing in warm, possibly scented (quelle horreur!) water had a frisson of forbidden erotic pleasure – many convent-educated girls were ordered to bathe in a shift to avoid the corrupting influence of nakedness. In country houses, however, the lack of bathrooms was due much more to a lethargic contentment with the status quo: there were plenty of servants to cart hot water up to bedrooms, so why bother to install expensive plumbing?
To come from New World steam heat and hot baths to the English equivalent was to experience an unpleasant surprise, although for many American girls the sense of isolation and culture shock was even worse. If a husband did not, or would not, entertain, they might find themselves stuck for weeks or months on end in a large house with few comforts and little to do except gaze at the rain. Life for them felt wretched, and most of them, with their huge dowries handed over to their husbands, could do little about it, a situation that must have accounted for a good many of the unhappier marriages.
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