What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew

by Daniel Pool

  Here is a guide to the meaning and significance of those that were among the more common:

  Bart., Bt.—Abbreviations for baronet.

  Esq. (Esquire)—Originally, an esquire was the young man who attended on a knight and was in training to be a knight himself. The name, then, was a job description rather than, as knight, a title of honor. By the nineteenth century, the term had become somewhat casual in application, although denoting in theory that one was a member of the gentry, ranking below a knight and above a mere “gentleman.” There were subsequent, doomed attempts to maintain that it should be used only by justices of the peace, military men, barristers and physicians, and certain sons of knights and peers, but eventually it became merely a title of indeterminate respectability. Thus, after the farmer’s wife has mingled with the quality at Squire Thorne’s “fete champetre” in Barchester Towers, “it might fairly be expected that from this time forward the tradesmen of Barchester would, with undoubting pens, address her husband as T. Lookaloft, Esquire.”

  Gent.—Short for gentleman, in social terms an increasingly imprecise status, though it carried an unmistakable air of gentility. A gentleman was defined by the law as someone with no regular trade or occupation.

  B.A.—Abbreviation for bachelor of arts, a degree apparently often associated with clergymen who had gone straight from Oxford or Cambridge to an incumbency.

  D.D.—Abbreviation for doctor of divinity.

  K.C.—King’s Counsel, an honor given to a senior, distinguished barrister in recognition of an outstanding career. Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, K.C. replaced serjeant as the highest honor within the bar to which a barrister could aspire.

  Q.C.—Queen’s Counsel, the equivalent during Victoria’s reign of the K.C.

  C.B.—Companion of the Bath. Lowest of the three honors within the Order of the Bath. In Vanity Fair, the renewed campaign against Napoleon means that before the fighting ended, Thackeray says, “Mrs. Major O’Dowd hoped to write herself Mrs. Colonel O’Dowd, C.B.”

  G.C.B.—Grand Commander of the Order of the Bath. A high distinction of knighthood often conferred for distinguished military service. One of Jane Austen’s brothers was a G.C.B. Originally, part of the ceremony of becoming a knight involved bathing in order to purify oneself.

  K.C.B.—Knight Commander of the Bath (less status than a G.C.B.). The honor held by Sir Archibald Macleod, “who had been a soldier.”

  Kt.—A knight.

  K.B.—A knight bachelor, same status as the plain knight with no trimmings. (In another context, K.B. was an abbreviation for the Court of King’s Bench.)

  K.G.—Knight of the Garter. The highest order of knighthood, given, as a rule, only to peers.

  M.P.—Member of Parliament.

  R.A.—Member of the Royal Academy, the officially sanctioned institute of painting founded by George III as an art school and a forum for annual exhibits of work by contemporary artists.

  V.C.—The Victoria Cross. A very high military award and not an honor of knighthood like the Bath. It was first given in 1857 to Crimean War heroes and was traditionally manufactured by a London jewelers’ firm out of metal from captured Russian guns. Not to be confused with the D.S.O., the Distinguished Service Order, an award for officers only that came into being in 1886.

  STATUS: GENTLEMEN AND LESSER FOLK

  The order of precedence explained whether a bishop’s wife had precedence over the daughter of a peer and whether a duke outranked the archbishop of Canterbury and other easy-to-grasp distinctions. On a daily basis, however, the average Englishman would also have had to deal with more subtle distinctions of class and status for which there was no readily available guide.

  At the beginning of the century everyone knew where he or she stood. Dukes, marquises, and earls were on top, except that possession of a distinguished family name and great landholdings for generations would outrank a paltry title of lesser age, as witness the immense deference accorded by everyone to the titleless Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. Below the great nobles and landowners were the gentry, the locally based “county families” of squires, clergy, baronets, and knights with properties not as great as those of the dukes but large enough to have tenants. Bishops and physicians and barristers would rank somewhere in here, and then came the yeoman farmers, the independent landowners with their large or small holdings, and the bankers, and then the lesser tradesfolk, artisans, and at the very bottom the working poor and farm laborers.

  The changes in English society in the 1800s altered this somewhat static hierarchy. To begin with, industry and manufacturing created new sources of wealth that could compete with land, even though its holders frequently had to put some of their wealth into landownership of a country estate to be really “accepted.” Second, the professions became both more influential and more respected: doctors acquired real scientific training for a change; the clergy became more conscientious about its duties and education; and suddenly there was a new class of people, like Lydgate in Middlemarch, demanding to be taken seriously—socially and professionally. Meanwhile, a lower middle class made up of Bob Cratchits and Sue Brideheads and Charles Hexams popped up to serve in the counting houses and the great bureaucracies of government, such as the educational system. At the same time, the enclosure acts and the mechanization of agriculture dramatized so vividly in novels like Tess drove many off the land and destroyed the traditional village life that had sustained the cottager and the rural laborer.

  In effect, these vast and rapid changes meant that status was more and more what you yourself could make it. If you were Bradley Headstone, you tried to have people treat you as a solid member of the middle class. If you were Ferdinand Lopez or Pip, you asked to be taken seriously as a gentleman. Progress into a higher class necessitated mastery of various social rituals, speech patterns, and even habits of spending. Estella makes fun of Pip in Great Expectations for his “coarse hands,” and we are told of Lizzie Eustace in The Eustace Diamonds that to be “lady-like” she insists on never combing her own hair or doing even the most trivial of tasks associated with putting on or maintaining her wardrobe. These were part of the prejudice against manual labor that marked someone as having aspirations to gentility. In fact, the resolute display of a hopeless inability to do anything oneself became increasingly the distinguishing mark of a lady or gentleman as the century wore on, and along with it, of course, went a growing reliance on servants.

  Indeed, the first thing any household with pretensions to middleclass status did was to hire a housemaid or even a maid-of-all-work. When you really arrived, you hired a manservant, an index of social propriety that reassures the timid maidens of the ladies’ boarding school into whose midst Mr. Pickwick makes his erring way: “ ‘He must be respectable—he keeps a man-servant,’ said Miss Tomkins to the writing and ciphering governess.” This was something of a change, as Jane Austen’s nephew pointed out in a memoir of his aunt written in 1870. “Less was left to the charge and discretion of servants, and more was done, or superintended, by the masters and mistresses,” he writes of her era. “Ladies did not disdain to spin the thread of which the household linen was woven. . . . A young man who expected to have his things packed or unpacked for him by a servant, when he travelled, would have been thought exceptionally fine, or exceptionally lazy. When my uncle undertook to teach me to shoot, his first lesson was how to clean my own gun.”

  But as the century wore on, more and more of the attributes of status fell into the category of behavior to be avoided—and things that could be “acquired.” One had at all costs to avoid doing manual labor, and also one could not be “in trade.” And what things should one try to acquire? Stated baldly, if you were well-off, you had to have a carriage and servants, and, if you had real pretensions, you had to have land, an ancient family, and a title—probably in that order.

  If you already had a carriage and servants and were socially ambitious, then you wanted land and—hopefully—a distinguished and ancie
nt pedigree. “She has no fair pretence of family or blood,” observes Mr. Weston crushingly of Mrs. Churchill in Emma. An ancient pretension to family grandeur in and of itself, of course, was ridiculous if there were nothing to back it up; this is the moral of the absurd pretensions of Tess Durbeyfield’s father, but they are echoed in the aspirations of Alec’s father, Mr. Simon Stoke, the imitation d’Urberville in Tess who digs the name d’Urberville out of a book in the British Museum while looking for “a name that would not readily identify him with the smart tradesman of the past.” Minimally, it would seem, descent from a Norman family was imperative. The parson tells Durbeyfield “that you are the lineal representative of the ancient and knightly family of the d’Urbervilles, who derive their descent from Sir Pagan d’Urberville, that renowned knight who came from Normandy with William the Conqueror.” The Normans, after all, had created the whole system of lords of the manor whose descendants continued down through the nineteenth century to exact fealty from their social inferiors. Is it an accident that Mr. Darcy—was it not probably d’Arcy at one point?—and his relative, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, have a suggestion of something French about their names?

  Land was perhaps more the key than anything else to real social distinction. You certainly needed land to support a peerage with the appropriate style, and at one time it was fashionable to reward poor but impoverished military heroes with great chunks of land along with their titles so they wouldn’t disgrace the peerage. “A Countess living at an inn is a ruined woman,” as Sir Pitt Crawley sneers of his mother-in-law in Vanity Fair. Not that you would expect to get a peerage right away if you bought land, but if you were middle class it was vital to the attainment of any genuine social status. “Mr. Bingley,” we are informed in Pride and Prejudice, “inherited property to the amount of nearly a hundred thousand pounds from his father, who had intended to purchase an estate, but did not live to do it. Mr. Bingley intended likewise, and sometimes made choice of his county,” but then changed his mind—which drove his social-climbing siblings crazy: “his sisters were very anxious for his having an estate of his own.” Once settled, it was recommended by a contemporary that one try to marry a daughter to one of the county gentry and at the same time try to become a justice of the peace.

  Above all, people craved a title, the problem being that as you got down among the lower reaches of the gentry there was a danger that anybody could become a baronet or knight—as Jane Austen is quick to point out. That friend of the Bennets, for example, “Sir William Lucas had been formerly in trade in Meryton, where he had made a tolerable fortune and risen to the honour of knighthood by an address to the King, during his mayoralty. The distinction,” Austen adds loftily, “had perhaps been felt too strongly.”

  But no one ever said it would all be easy. The easiest way to be in this enviable position was to have a huge estate, the sort of property that went with all old feudal families and obviated the necessity for working because you simply collected the rents from your tenant farmers. “You misled me by the term gentleman,” observes a character in Persuasion. “I thought you were speaking of some man of property.”

  Nor did the socially hopeful wish to be in trade. Why? Because being a gentleman or lady denoted freedom, in true aristocratic fashion, from the need to earn a living. As George Eliot observes of Dorothea Brooke’s forbears in Middlemarch, “the Brooke connections, though not exactly aristocratic, were unquestionably ‘good’: if you inquired backward for a generation or two, you would not find any yard-measuring or parcel-tying forefathers.”

  A barrister’s wife could be presented at court while a solicitor’s could not. Surely, this was in some measure because the solicitor took fees directly, i.e., was in trade, while the barrister only received an honorarium. Doctors, it was said, could rarely rise to the peerage, and at least one contemporary observer noted approvingly that this made sense in view of the fact that they actually accepted money from people, i.e., seemed to be in trade.

  One should not be in trade, and one should avoid manual labor. Hence, for status one needed servants. There was one other minimal prerequisite to respectable middle-class status besides servants. “Lady Fawn and her daughters,” says Trollope in The Eustace Diamonds, “were poor rich people. . . . The old family carriage and the two lady’s maids were there—as necessaries of life.” “Your father’s only a merchant, Osborne,” says the long-suffering Dobbin to the unbearable George Osborne one day at school in Vanity Fair.

  “My father’s a gentleman, and keeps his carriage,” retorts the obnoxious boy. Carriages were an enormous status symbol; it is a measure of the devotion felt by some Victorian heroines for their husbands that they submit when all looks black to the ignominy of being able to live with only one carriage.

  Education and upbringing were important to gentlemanly status, too. “A clergyman is a gentleman by profession and education,” observes Mr. Riley in The Mill on the Floss. The story of the nineteenth century is, in fact, that of the efforts of many to obliterate their humble origins in an ascent to gentlemanly status without a great landed estate. This upward mobility through education is, in some measure, the story of Great Expectations, where Magwitch determines to make a “gentleman” of Pip.

  SOCIETY

  Society and “The Season”

  The chief target of the socially ambitious—and the main arena of those who had already arrived—was London. The fancy London society that swirls on the outskirts of Trollope’s Palliser novels and glitters just beyond the reach of the social-climbing Veneerings in Our Mutual Friend was composed of perhaps some 1,500 families in all, totaling among them some 10,000 people.

  In the season.

  In London, “Society” dwelt within a relatively small area of the West End. The most desirable residences were right next to Hyde Park on Park Lane, the western border of Mayfair and the residence in Vanity Fair of the selfish old Miss Crawley whose £70,000 Becky Sharp schemes to obtain. Then, just east of the park, came Grosvenor Square and Berkeley Square in Mayfair itself. Farther south and west was the still respectable area of St. James, where Pall Mall and its clubs were, and Buckingham Palace, and even farther south was the slightly less desirable but still fashionable area of Belgrave Square. Society shopped on Bond Street and Regent Street, and the latter—for men, after the theater and dinner—was the place to meet unmarried ladies of a more forthcoming sexuality than those whose prospects and futures were so carefully chaperoned by the anxious mammas and papas of the regions farther north. This was “the Belgrave-cum-Pimlico life, the scene of which might extend itself to South Kensington, enveloping the parks and coming round over Park Lane, and through Grosvenor Square and Berkeley Square back to Piccadilly. Within this,” thinks the young Frank Greystock, trying to decide on a course of life in The Eustace Diamonds, “he might live with lords and countesses and rich folk generally, going out to the very best dinner-parties, having everything the world could give.”

  As a rule, the nobility and gentry began coming to town to the West End from their country estates sometime around Christmas to prepare for the opening of Parliament. “The season depends on Parliament,” wrote a contemporary, “and Parliament depends upon sport.” Until then shooting and fox hunting made leaving the countryside more or less unthinkable, or, as an observer put it, “the sessions of Parliament cannot be held til the frost is out of the ground and the foxes begin to breed.”

  In London, it was up early to go riding in Hyde Park, preferably on the sandy track known as Rotten Row (there was also the Ladies’ Mile for the women), then home for breakfast. Shopping and paying bills for the ladies and making calls on those one knew extremely well came next. Then lunch, followed for men by the club—if they were not in Parliament or it was not in session just then—while the ladies took to their carriages to leave cards and to pay still more calls. Dinner followed at around six or seven and in the evening there were soirees or the opera (dinner parties, too, especially on the Wednesdays and Saturdays when ther
e were no evening parliamentary sessions) and then balls or dances starting at ten or later that could go until three o’clock in the morning.

  The height of the season, however, did not come until sometime after the opening of Parliament, and through midwinter, indeed, up through March, many families still remained in the country. Drawing rooms and levees at St. James’s Palace were rarely crowded as yet, people actually went to the opera or the theater, and you could still afford the luxury of stopping to chat if you encountered a friend on your way up Piccadilly. It was not until after a short Easter holiday—during which Parliament adjourned and families returned briefly to the country—that the real season began, a dizzying three-month whirlwind of parties, balls, and sporting events. In May came the annual exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art, the first of the gala court balls and concerts, and the beginning of the round of debutante-delighting private balls and dances. Despite all the surface gaiety, these latter gatherings revolved around the deadly serious business of marrying off the young girls of the family to eligible and wealthy young men in what Trollope and others referred to as the “marriage market.” This could be done only with difficulty in the country, given the relative paucity of prospects, but at the round of balls, concerts, and gay parties which the London season offered, there were such great numbers of wealthy and titled young men and women brought together from all over England that it was inconceivable that demure young Lady Elizabeth wouldn’t catch somebody’s eye once she was “out.” In fact, her first season marked a dramatic turning point in the life of a well-bred young girl. Until she was seventeen or eighteen, she was not considered socially alive and, in a telling phrase of the era, was deemed to be “in the schoolroom”; at dinners when guests were present she did not speak unless spoken to and then it was only to answer questions yes or no. “A girl not out, has always the same sort of dress,” observes Miss Crawford in Mansfield Park, “a close bonnet for instance, looks demure, and never says a word.” She was not to encourage or entertain romantic attentions from the opposite sex. Then, overnight, everything changed: she was suddenly expected to dress and wear her hair in an adult fashion, and she “came out,” which meant that she was formally presented along with a host of other young debutantes to the sovereign in a formal drawing room at St. James. It was, naturally, a momentous and eagerly anticipated event in a girl’s life. “Before the carriage arrived in Russell Square,” Thackeray tells us as Amelia Sedley and Becky Sharp leave Miss Pinkerton’s Academy for the great world at the start of Vanity Fair, “a great deal of conversation had taken place about the Drawing-room, and whether or not young ladies wore powder as well as hoops when presented.”