What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew

by Daniel Pool

  The Treasury Department was the center of political power. The title of prime minister really denoted a position of collegial leadership (unlike, say, the post of the American president) rather than an actual executive position. However, the post of first lord of the treasury was always given to the prime minister along with the first lord’s official residence, a house at 10 Downing Street next to the offices of the Treasury in Whitehall. (The front-row bench where the prime minister and other members sat in the House of Commons was known as the Treasury Bench.) Given the first lord’s preoccupation with running the nation, it then devolved on the Chancellor of the Exchequer to actually run the department and the nation’s financial affairs; in his hands, for example, lay the preparation of the budget. Chancellor of the Exchequer was an enormously influential post; it is Plantagenet Palliser’s goal, of course, in Can Your Forgive Her? More important from the party’s standpoint, there were always three junior lords of the treasury appointed from within the party. Nominally charged with supervising the nation’s finances, they actually assisted the party’s chief whip in Parliament—the parliamentary secretary to the treasury—in lining up members of the party for key votes. Phineas Finn, as befits a rising young political star, is happy to become one of the junior lords of the treasury in the novel that bears his name. The fact that these posts could have whacking good salaries when an M.P. received nothing is a consideration to Phineas, as it no doubt was to other ambitious young politicos. “Even as a junior lord he would have a thousand a year.” As a barrister, Phineas thinks, it would have been years before he earned so much.

  The departments of government tried to influence relevant matters in Parliament or respond to questions about their ministry by strategically placing their leaders in Parliament. Generally, each department therefore had a parliamentary secretary who was a political appointee, in addition to a permanent undersecretary who was a career official. As a rule, a parliamentary undersecretary would sit in one house while his boss sat in the other so they could keep both legislative bases covered. Lord Fawn in The Eustace Diamonds, who woos Lizzie Eustace, was a “Peer of Parliament and an Under-Secretary of State,” we are told. He would thus have been used as a member of the Lords to counterbalance a department head who was a commoner.

  All the important parliamentary ministers sat in the House of Commons on the Treasury Bench, which was placed at right angles to the Speaker’s chair. Behind them sat the lesser members of the party, or “backbenchers.” Opposite them—across the aisle—sat the Opposition, the members of the party out of power. Halfway down the benches was a passageway to the back called the gangway. Phineas Finn moves his seat “below the gangway” in what would have been seen as a move to register his dissent from a measure proposed by his party; to “cross the aisle,” however, was a much more serious step.

  The reader of nineteenth-century English novels is likely to come across two sorts of dramatic major parliamentary activity. The first is the questioning of ministers; they were expected to make themselves available several afternoons a week to defend government policies to the Opposition. The second is the passage of legislation, which required three readings of the proposed measure in each House and approval by both Houses, formal votes in favor being counted through a “division” in which the members of each party walked out of their House of Parliament into one of the two adjoining lobbies to be counted for or against the measure. The “bill,” as it was called, if it then passed Parliament went to the monarch for signature, whereupon it became an “act.”

  A ministry generally stayed in power until it was defeated on a piece of legislation with which it was strongly identified or had suffered an explicit vote of no confidence. The prime minister then either resigned, in which case someone else would be requested to become prime minister and form a cabinet, or else he dissolved Parliament and called for new general elections. Dissolution was obviously a more extreme measure than simple resignation, and it was generally done only if the prime minister thought the popular sentiment in the country favored him a good deal more than the vote in the House of Commons had, or, sometimes, simply if he felt the question was of such urgency that a direct popular vote on it should be held. Resignation was more likely if an administration had suffered a number of reverses and was clearly unpopular. At the beginning of Phineas Finn, “Lord de Terrier, the Conservative Prime Minister, who had now been in office for the almost unprecedentedly long period of fifteen months, had found that he could not face continued majorities against him in the House of Commons, and had dissolved the House. Rumour declared that he would have much preferred to resign, and betake himself once again to the easy glories of opposition; but his party had naturally been obdurate with him, and he had resolved to appeal to the country.” No one—including one’s opponents—particularly liked having to stand for election, and, as Trollope suggests, a prime minister could therefore use the threat of dissolution against an unruly opposition. In Phineas Finn, he tells us that “the House of Commons had offended Mr. Gresham by voting in a majority against him, and Mr. Gresham had punished the House of Commons by subjecting it to the expense and nuisance of a new election.”

  The conduct of parliamentary government could require endless speech making, sometimes four or five hours worth from the prime minister alone when a major issue was at stake. Plantagenet Palliser, we are told in The Eustace Diamonds, speaks for three and three-quarter hours on decimal coinage. This loquacity was no doubt facilitated by the fact that until 1888, the Commons met at 3:45 on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday with no cutoff time. Debates therefore often went on until well after midnight. Several hours after the afternoon session began members would begin drifting away for dinner. Then around ten o’clock they would wander in wearing evening dress, ready to go again and sometimes not adjourning til two or three in the morning. Conducting late-night business was also possible because quorums for conducting business were quite small. “The mystic forty,” as Trollope puts it in Phineas Finn, were needed in the Commons—a mere “three” in the Lords.

  A line-of-battle ship, and a merchant brig alongside.

  Britannia Rules the Waves

  In the days when Fanny Price’s brother went off to join the Royal Navy as a midshipman in Mansfield Park, the fleet was composed of great three-masted square-rigged sailing “ships-of-the-line” carrying crews of hundreds that sailed into battle launching broadsides from their several decks of cannon against the enemy, hoping to pound them into submission. A line of battle consisted of three squadrons of ships, 100 yards apart, each squadron commanded by “flag officers” (that was how they communicated), a vice-admiral in a leading ship (with a white flag), the commanding admiral in the center (a red flag), and a rear admiral in the ship at the back (his flag was blue). During Jane Austen’s era, ships were officially rated according to the number of guns they carried. A first-rate and second-rate ship carried 90 guns or more, each capable of firing every three minutes two 18-pound cannonballs a distance of about 2,000 yards. Typically, each ship had a crew of about 900 men, cost about £120,000 to build, and required an average of 3,500 oak trees (which took a century to mature)—the equivalent of about 900 acres of forest—for their construction. They were commanded by a captain assisted by a commander, with lieutenants and young midshipmen like Fanny’s brother beneath him, after which there were warrant (noncommissioned) officers like the boatswain and master, and then the ordinary seamen to do the actual heavy work. Under full sail, the vessels went about ten knots an hour.

  Once the British defeated Napoleon, they had no other major naval engagements to fight (except in the Crimean War) until World War I and spent a good deal of their time patrolling the periphery of the empire, cracking down on the slave trade and sending people off on jaunts like the ill-fated Franklin expedition to explore the more obscure parts of the globe.

  This was just as well, because the navy was extraordinarily unpopular among those who fought in it, at least among the ordinary sailor
s, and, in addition, Parliament kept cutting it to tatters and then being surprised when it was unable to fight effectively.

  Recruitment techniques were a major source of unhappiness. The navy recruited its ordinary sailors through the “press-gang.” This meant that whenever it needed crews the navy just grabbed civilian seamen off the streets, sometimes nabbing them as they returned from a long voyage in the regular commercial fleet, and then slapped them aboard men-of-war. Given the technological similarity between warships and regular vessels and the relatively simple nature of armaments, this was a perfectly feasible method of obtaining personnel, however unpopular. There was no career security. Until the 1850s, after each voyage you were dumped on the dock—now suddenly an ex-navy man—and there were no pensions.

  Officers had other gripes. For many years the system worked on the basis of “interest,” that is to say, connections. “Interest” got you your initial berth as a midshipman when you were in your early teens, aboard, say, the vessel of a captain with whom your family had connections or to whom he owed a favor. After six years you were entitled to take the test for lieutenant, and thereafter you could become a captain. The problem, however, was that—pensions being what they were—no one ever retired. At one point after the Napoleonic Wars, for example, there were some 5,339 commissioned officers in the Royal Navy and only 550 of them were working; since you could not advance to captain without the requisite number of years at sea, you could literally get stuck as a lieutenant for decades. And the determination of who did get a shot at the available positions was usually made on the basis of “interest.” Admiral Croft chides Captain Wentworth in Persuasion for what he imagines is the man’s complaint about the sloop he commanded: “He knows there must have been twenty better men than himself applying for her at the same time. Lucky fellow to get any thing so soon, with no more interest than his.” (Once you hit captain the rules changed—you were promoted to rear, vice, and full admiral in strict order of seniority as those ahead of you died.)

  Unlike the army, however, you did not have to purchase a commission, which meant that for poorer boys or younger sons, like William Price, the navy could be a more viable career than the army, or, as Sir Walter Elliot remarks, again in Persuasion, “a man is in greater danger in the navy of being insulted by the rise of one whose father, his father might have disdained to speak to, and of being prematurely an object of disgust himself, than in any other line.”

  Cavalry and artillery reinforcements, l. to r.: 8th Hussars, 17th Lancers, Royal Horse Artillery, 5th Dragoon Guards, 4th Dragoon Guards, 1st Royal Dragoons, 14th Hussars.

  The Army

  In the 1800s the army was built around the regiment, a unit nominally commanded by a colonel, in reality usually by a lieutenant colonel. In the case of the infantry, a regiment usually consisted of some 750 or more men, divided into eight to ten companies of 60 to 100 men each. These were in turn each commanded by a captain who was assisted by a commissioned officer like a lieutenant and by an ensign, as well as by a “ranker,” or noncommissioned officer, like a sergeant. In battle several regiments might be slapped together to form a brigade. Thus, the “Charge of the Light Brigade” was composed of the 8th Light Dragoons, the 11th Hussars, the 13th Light Dragoons and the 17th Lancers. Units such as brigades were never more than temporary forms of organization, however, for the spirit and identity of the British army, perhaps uniquely among European armies, lay always in its regiments.

  Partly this was owing to the system of officers having to purchase their commissions, a practice that was not abolished until 1871. The hapless Richard Carstone, we are told in Bleak House, decides at one point on a military career, and accordingly “his name was entered at the Horse Guards as an applicant for an ensign’s commission; the purchase-money was deposited at an agent’s.” This purchase system meant that an officer literally had an investment in his regiment. When he left the service the only way he could make some money, especially in prepension days, was to sell the commission to somebody else. In Can You Forgive Her? Trollope tells us that Captain Bellfield “had been obliged to sell out of the army, because he was unable to live on his pay as a lieutenant. The price of his commission had gone to pay his debts.” This is why being “cashiered” was so feared—in addition to the dishonor, being discharged from the army in that manner meant that you were barred from selling your commission.

  Commissions were not cheap either: in 1821 it cost £1,200 or more to buy a commission in the Household Foot Guards or Cavalry, £800 for a regular cavalry post, and £450-£500 for the infantry. (Artillery and engineer ranks were not for sale.) This, of course, meant that the army was characteristically officered by the well-to-do—especially, perhaps, the younger sons, like Rawdon Crawley in Vanity Fair, who would not inherit the family estate.

  The oldest and most prestigious regiments were the Household Troops or Guards that guarded the royal family, which were composed of the Foot Guards (infantry), made up of the Scots, Grenadier, and Coldstream Guards, and the Household Cavalry, which was made up of regiments of the Life Guards and the Horse Guards (the so-called Blues). Rawdon Crawley, being well connected and able to afford an expensive commission, has, Thackeray tells us, his “commission in the Life Guards Green.” These were the “tony,” aristocratic units, headquartered, of course, in London. (The Horse Guards building in Whitehall became the army headquarters, and the term “Horse Guards,” like the term “Pentagon” in the United States, a synedochal appellation for the military high command.) Below them ranked the other cavalry, which included the dragoons (originally mounted cavalry who dismounted and fought on foot), the lancers (so named for their weapons), and the hussars (known for their colorful uniforms). The regular “line” infantry came last, numbering among its regiments the fusiliers, so named from the light muskets they carried at one time, and the grenadiers, the grenade throwers who were supposed to be taller than the average, in order to lob their explosives a long distance. “Ensign Spooney,” says Thackeray, contrasting him with a short soldier in another regiment, “was a tall youth, and belonged to [Captain Dobbin’s] the Grenadier Company.” Because of the costs associated with the obligatory entertaining of fellow officers in the mess and the like, the cheapest place to be an officer was India—this was where the more impecunious of the younger sons who entered the army generally went.

  To the population at large, the cavalry were the glamorous branch of the army. Like the aristocracy, they rode horseback and their costumes could be elaborate and colorful, since they did not, like the infantry, have to wade through mud and dirt. There was also an aura of recklessness about them, born perhaps of their dashing charges, and their prowess in the legendary “sword exercise” which taught them the use of their primary battle weapon (guns were too difficult to aim charging on horseback). It is thus almost invariably the cavalry who really set feminine pulses racing in nineteenth-century English fiction. “I saw an officer of the Hussars ride down the street at Budmouth,” Eustacia Vye tells Clem Yeobright passionately in The Return of the Native, “and though he was a total stranger and never spoke to me, I loved him till I thought I should really die of love.” In Far from the Madding Crowd, the dashing Sergeant Troy, we learn, is of the 11th Dragoon Guards, and Bathsheba Everdene is bedazzled by his virtuoso display of the sword exercise’s finer points. In Vanity Fair, we are not surprised that the virtuous but plodding Captain Dobbin is in the infantry—and the stupid but swaggering Rawdon Crawley in the Life Guards.

  The army as a whole was treated miserably by the English for most of the 1800s. They were quartered in the Tower of London and in local alehouses until Pitt got them barracks to live in, and they were fed only two meals a day for many years (beef—and only three quarters of a pound of it at that—plus bread) with the consequence that they were often sick and hungry and drank heavily to compensate for it. In his observations on Brompton, Stroud, Rochester, and Chatham, Mr. Pickwick records that “the streets present a lively and animated appearance
, occasioned chiefly by the conviviality of the military. It is truly delightful to a philanthropic mind, to see these gallant men staggering along under the influence of an overflow, both of animal and ardent spirits.” Until 1847 enlistment was for life, and men were typically sent overseas with their regiment for periods of up to sixteen years to places like the West Indies, where death rates from tropical diseases could be appallingly high. In Vanity Fair, Napoleon’s escape from Elba occasions rejoicing in the regiment of Dobbin and George Osborne, we are told, because it allows them “to show their comrades in arms that they could fight as well as the Peninsular veterans, and that all the pluck and valour of the———th had not been killed by the West Indies and yellow fever.” Until the 1890s, many citizens regarded soldiers as little better than unsavory felons and made meager provision for their relief in old age beyond providing in-patient care for a few doddering veterans at the army’s Chelsea Hospital. But then England cherished a long-standing distrust of standing armies that required Parliament to authorize the army’s existence and size anew every year through the passage of the famous Mutiny Acts.

  Indeed, when it came to defending England itself against attack the tendency was to rely on amateurs rather than beef up the real army. Hence the presence of the militia to which the wicked Wickham in Pride and Prejudice belongs, a novel that takes place during the era of worries about a trans-Channel invasion by Napoleon. The militia was an institution dating back to Saxon times, but in the early 1800s, when Napoleonic invasion seemed likely, Parliament mandated that men be selected from each parish by lottery to serve for five years in a local anti-invasion force with twenty-eight days’ annual training, uniforms courtesy of His Majesty. There was never an invasion, of course, and the militia languished—to be revived briefly during the Crimean War when they garrisoned Gibraltar and Malta—and their place was taken in the late 1850s by the Volunteers, when a new Napoleon, Napoleon III, seemed menacing. The Volunteers were basically middle-class gentlemen who liked parading around with—or shooting—rifles on the weekend. At their peak there were about 200,000 of them; George Vavasor, so Trollope tells us in Can You Forgive Her?, was one.