Yet, while de Saussure believed that English men and women washed their hands, arms, faces and necks every day ‘in winter as well as in summer’, this was as far as most of them went and many did not trouble themselves even as much as that. Occasionally a bath might be taken in a tub of hot water; but many of the social superiors of Thomas Turner, the mid-eighteenth-century Sussex grocer, agreed with him that once a year was often enough for a bath. The smoke and soot of London made it necessary for Boswell to change his linen every day; but he would not have done so otherwise. He enjoyed living rough on his Grand Tour and in Germany exulted in not having taken his clothes off in a week. Samuel Johnson was far from alone in having ‘no relish’ for clean linen, while his upper-class friend, Topham Beauclerk, seemed to take a perverse pleasure in shaking the bugs out of his wig in the presence of ladies. Some of his female contemporaries were no cleaner than he was himself. When someone commented to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu on the dirtiness of her hands, she replied, ‘If you call that dirty, you should see my feet!’ At Chelsea, old pensioners cheerfully gambled on races between the lice extracted from beneath their coats.
In 1775 Alexander Cumming, a Scottish mathematician who had a watchmaker’s business in Bond Street, took out a patent for a water-closet; and in 1778 Joseph Bramah, a cabinet-maker from Yorkshire, invented an improved model which, with various modifications, remained in use for most of the nineteenth century. But very few water-closets were yet installed and those that were, without adequate pans and traps, were unsatisfactory and smelly. Few men, perhaps, would now take Pepys’s way out and relieve themselves in a fireplace, and few women were likely to be discovered, as Lady Sandwich was, ‘doing something upon the pot’ in a dining-room; but chamber pots were commonly placed in the drawers of sideboards so that gentlemen need not leave the table after dinner. And Hogarth thought nothing of pulling down his breeches in a churchyard and, when his friends tickled his bare bottom with a bunch of thistles, he merely went off to squat down by the church door.
Modest homes, like those of the well-to-do, were much more adequately furnished than they had been in the past, even if the most cherished pieces were oak tables, chests and settles which had been passed down in the family from generation to generation and which would long since have been thrown out of smarter houses. Many middle-class houses contained a large number of attractive ornaments, collecting being now a widespread and eclectic pursuit. Even the small houses of artisans were likely to contain several pictures and looking-glasses as well as curtains, chests of drawers, tables and beds complete with bolsters, pillows and bedspreads, sheets and blankets. The inventory of a Colchester weaver, who was taken to the workhouse in 1744, includes all these items and, in addition, numerous kitchen utensils, some of copper, candlesticks and bellows, glass dishes, pewter measures, smoothing irons, four teapots, sixteen cups and saucers, sixteen plates, two silver spoons, two chamber pots and a bird-cage.12
In the country it was often difficult to find a vacant cottage. In many places custom still allowed a man to build on village waste land, but he was traditionally obliged to complete the dwelling in one night; and waste lands were, in any case, being rapidly encroached upon by enclosure. Also, one of the duties upon parish constables was to ensure that no cottages were built without proper authority.13
There were areas, particularly in the north, where hovels still abounded; but in most villages by the end of the eighteenth century the cottages, though primitive and frequently crowded, were not as uncomfortable as neglect and poverty later made them. They certainly compared very favourably with the dreadful shacks of the peasants which Arthur Young described in his Travels in France. In 1788 Gilbert White maintained that in his village in Hampshire all the mud cottages had disappeared and even the poorest people now lived in brick or stone cottages which had upstairs bedrooms and glass in the windows.14 To buy a four-bedroomed house cost no more than £150.
In London and the industrial centres, however, housing conditions were much worse. The rows of back-to-back hovels in the north and the tenement slums of London, where the occupiers of a few squalid rooms were asked to pay 2s 6d a week, and by the end of the century more than this, were already a disgrace to humanity.
31 Manners and Dress
It was generally agreed by foreign visitors that the manners of Englishmen were slowly improving. They were still violently xenophobic, to be sure. César de Saussure said that it was ‘almost dangerous for a well-dressed foreigner to walk the streets of London, for he ran a great risk of being insulted by the vulgar populace, the most cursed brood in existence. He is sure of not only being jeered at and bespattered with mud, but as likely as not dead dogs and cats will be thrown at him.’1 The English were also inveterate swearers. Carl Moritz thought that a stranger in London might well suppose that everyone who lived there was called ‘Damme’, although a character in Sheridan’s The Rivals, which was first performed in 1775, observes that the damms have had their day.2 The people were often still cruel to animals, but perhaps not more so than in other countries; and towards the end of his life Hogarth believed that this cruelty was abating. He had produced his Four Stages of Cruelty ‘in hopes of preventing in some degree that cruel treatment of poor animals which makes the streets of London more disagreeable to the human mind than anything whatever’, and he congratulated himself that these prints, of which he was more proud than any of his other works, had helped to check the once so prevalent spirit of barbarity.3 The English still made money out of a savage trade in slaves; but protests against the traffic were growing ever louder and it was abolished by Act of Parliament in 1807.
English people were gradually becoming politer as well as more humane. There was less spitting in the streets, less overt drunkenness and rampant whoring. There was also less eating with the fingers. And the advent of cheap cotton made clothes easier to wash and led to the far wider use of clean sheets and table napkins.4 From about 1770, so Joseph Farington, the painter, wrote:
A change in the manners and the habits of the people of this country was beginning to take place. Public taste was improving. The coarse familiarity so common in personal intercourse was laid aside, and respectful attention and civility in address gradually gave a new and better aspect to society. The profane habit of using oaths in conversation no longer offended the ear, and bacchanalian intemperance at the dinner-table was succeeded by rational cheerfulness and sober forbearance.5
Vulgar words in common use at the beginning of the century were no longer heard in respectable society. The word ‘respectability’ itself, in the sense of ‘the state, quality or condition of being respectable in point of character or social standing’, first came into use in 1785. ‘Prudishness’ had entered the language as early as 1704, and was a word increasingly required. Codpiece Row in London was renamed Coppice Row; words like ‘belly’ and ‘bitch’ were banned from genteel tongues; popular novels were roundly condemned in such intemperate words as those used in 1793 in the Evangelical Magazine which castigated them as being in general ‘instruments of abomination. A fond attachment to them is an irrefragable evidence of a mind contaminated, and totally unfitted for the serious pursuits of study or the delightful exercises and enjoyments of religion.’6
Thomas Bowdler, a physician from an ancient Shropshire family – from whose Family Shakespeare all words and expressions which could not ‘with propriety be read aloud in a family’ were deleted – was working when he died on a purified version of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ‘with the careful omissions of all passages of an irreligious or immoral tendency’.7
Sensuality came to be the antonym of respectability [so Dr Porter has written]. By association, cleanliness became a cardinal virtue. For Wesley it was next to godliness, yet Hannah More rated it a higher priority, at least for the poor: ‘The necessity of going to church in procession with us on the anniversary, raises an honest ambition to get something decent to wear, and the churches on Sunday are now filled with
very cleanlooking women.’ All in all ‘Victorianism’ was already casting its long shadows in the age of Victoria’s grandparents. ‘By the beginning of the nineteenth century,’ wrote G. M. Young, ‘virtue was advancing on a broad, invincible front.’8
This was reflected in fashions in clothes which had become far less extreme and ostentatious, and in some cases almost austere as a reflection of their wearers’ approval of the styles of revolutionary France. Writing of what he called the ‘era of Jacobinism’ in London in 1793–4, Sir Nathaniel Wraxall observed:
It was then that pantaloons, cropped hair, and shoestrings, as well as the total abolition of buckles and ruffles, together with the disuse of hair powder, characterised the men; while the ladies having cut off those tresses which had done so much execution, exhibited heads rounded à la victime et à la guillotine, as if ready for the stroke of the axe.9
A few years earlier Carl Moritz had observed that the most usual dress in summer was ‘a short waistcoat, black breeches, white silk stockings and a frock, generally of a very dark blue cloth which looks like black’. The English, he added, seemed in general to prefer dark colours.10
Earlier in the century young men had paraded in the most extreme Italian and French styles with glittering gold and silver buttons on their coats and diamond buckles on their shoes, with embroidered waistcoats open to reveal shirts of fine linen and the lace ends of well-ironed ties, with ruffles at the wrist, silk handkerchiefs dangling from huge pockets, gold fobs loaded with seals jingling by their stockinged legs, diamond-hilted swords swinging at the waist. They wore flamboyantly cocked hats and in cold weather often held their hands in muffs or carried canes with long tassels in their gloved hands. One such Macaroni appeared at an assembly in a coat of shot-silk, a pink satin waistcoat, breeches covered with silk net, white stockings with pink clocks, and pink satin shoes with large pearl buckles. His hair was dressed to a remarkable height and stuck full of pearl pins.11 Samuel Johnson commented to Boswell, ‘Fine clothes are good only as they supply the want of other means of securing respect.’12 Yet even he, who was usually dressed untidily in sombre brown, astonished the audience at Drury Lane where his tragedy, Mahomet and Irene, was performed, by walking into one of the side boxes in a brilliant scarlet waistcoat, richly embroidered with gold lace and a gold laced hat. Later he spent no less than £30 on a new suit and Bourgeois wig to wear in Paris.
The variety of wigs that came in and went out of fashion was extraordinary. There were story wigs and bob wigs, busby wigs and scratch wigs, bag wigs, brown George wigs, riding wigs, nightcap wigs, periwigs, tie wigs, queue wigs, dark majors, grizzle majors, grizzle ties and several more. Many were extremely expensive and were in constant danger of being snatched from the head in busy streets by thieves who cut holes in the backs of hackney coaches or, disguising themselves as bakers, carried ‘sharp boys’ in big bread-baskets on their shoulders. They were carefully tended by peruquiers who, before powdering them, dressed them with pomatum to keep the curls in place. Their owners carried tortoise-shell wig-combs about with them in their pockets. Generously powdered, they were a minor hazard in the streets, particularly on windy days. In his poem, Trivia, John Gay warned his readers:
You sometimes meet a Fop of nicest Tread
Whose mantling Peruke veils his empty Head …
Him, like the Miller, pass with Caution by
Lest from his Shoulders Clouds of powder fly.
In the 1760s it became fashionable for gentlemen to wear their own hair, tied perhaps at the back with a ribbon as General Wolfe had done and George, Prince of Wales, was for a short time to do. But wigs were still to be seen until the 1790s; and, even after they had been generally abandoned, gentlemen continued to powder their hair. Walter Savage Landor, who entered Trinity College, Oxford, in 1793, the year of the execution of Louis XVI, was perhaps the first undergraduate to give up hair-powder. When he insisted on wearing his ‘plain hair and queue tied with black ribbon’, his tutor warned him: ‘Take care. They will stone you for a republican.’13 The practice of powdering hair stopped, however, soon after 1795 when Pitt imposed a heavy tax upon hair-powder. Attempts were made to find suitable alternatives: one of the Duke of Atholl’s sons took out a patent for the extraction of starch from horse-chestnuts; but no satisfactory substitutes could be found and the use of hair-powder died out with the century.
Women, too, used powder and pomatum. Mary Frampton recalled dressing her sister’s hair in 1780:
At that time everybody wore powder and pomatum; a large triangular thing called a cushion to which the hair was frizzed up with three or four enormous curls on each side; the higher the pyramid of hair, gauze, feathers and other ornaments was carried the more fashionable it was thought, and such was the labour employed to rear the fabric that night caps were made in proportion to it and covered over the hair, immensely long black pins, double and single, powder and pomatum and all, ready for the next day.14
High headgear for women was by then, however, on the verge of going out of fashion. Earlier the hair had been piled up to a startling height.
There is not so variable a thing in nature as a lady’s headdress [Addison had written]. Within my own memory I have known it rise and fall within thirty degrees. About ten years ago it shot up to a very great height, insomuch as the female part of our species were much taller than the men. The women were of such enormous stature that we appeared as grasshoppers before them … I remember several ladies, who were once very near seven feet high, that at present want some inches of five.15
The hair was not merely piled up, it was decorated with ribbons, blossoms, fruit, ostrich feathers and even the flowers of the scarlet runner bean. In April 1777 Hannah More met some young ladies who had on their heads ‘an acre and half of shrubbery, besides slopes, grass-plats, tulip beds, clumps of peonies, kitchen gardens and greenhouses’.16 It is said that Garrick helped to abolish the fashion by appearing in the character of Sir John Bute dressed in female attire with his cap decorated with a profusion of every kind of vegetable, a huge carrot hanging below each ear.17 Certainly, in 1786 when four ladies entered the Haymarket Theatre in extravagant head-dresses and huge nosegays on their bosoms, the entire audience ridiculed them and the play was stopped while four actresses went off to dress in similar garb and reappeared to join in the general mockery.18
By then tall head-dresses were an unusual sight, but the long feathers with which they were adorned remained in fashion. Queen Charlotte, whose cheeks were often brushed by them as ladies made their obeisances on being presented to her, disliked feathers intensely. ‘For two or three years no one ventured to wear them at Court,’ Lady Louisa Stuart said, ‘except some daring spirits either too supreme in fashion to respect any other kind of pre-eminence, or else connected with the Opposition and glad to set Her Majesty at defiance.’ The queen, however, had to give way eventually, and feathers were established as the orthodox head-dress at court by the end of the century.
In other respects the court lagged far behind fashion. The clothes worn there both by men and women were certainly very splendid, as they nearly always had been. The gentlemen at a birthday court, so Mrs Delany said, were arrayed in ‘much finery chiefly brown with gold or silver embroidery and rich waistcoasts’; and of another birthday court in 1764, Mrs Montagu wrote, ‘I never saw anything equal to the Court on Wednesday. There was hardly a gentleman or gentlewoman in London who was not expiring under a load of finery. Indeed, I was one of the fools myself.’ When the Duke of Bedford appeared at court in 1791 he was wearing a coat and breeches of brown striped silk, shot with green, with a white waistcoat. All these clothes ‘were embroidered in silver, blue and foil and stones in wreaths of flowers for the borders and seams and the ground covered with single brilliants and silver spangles and it was estimated that it cost him £500.’19
Yet fine as the display was, it was not always fashionable. ‘If I were to describe their clothes to you,’ wrote Lady Hartford of those attending one birthda
y court, ‘you would say you had seen them (or just such) at every birthday you can remember.’ The hoop which came into fashion in about 1710 had disappeared in society by the 1780s but it was worn at court and remained a court fashion until 1820. At their coronations, both Queen Caroline in 1727 and Queen Charlotte in 1761 wore a form of dress which had already gone out of fashion by the end of the seventeenth century.20
Like the grotesquely tall head-dress, the hoop, the precursor of the crinoline, was much ridiculed and much attacked for its inconvenience. It was almost universally worn by fashionable ladies in the middle of the century. ‘The only thing that seems general,’ Mrs Pendarves told a correspondent in 1746, ‘are hoops of an enormous size’, although the year before the author of a pamphlet entitled ‘The Enormous Abomination of the Hoop Petticoat’ had condemned the style as an intolerable nuisance, maintaining that he had seen a young lady taking up the whole side of a street with her immense hooped petticoat and that another woman had walked down the aisle of a church, after receiving the sacrament, with one side of her hem brushing the pews on the right and the other side on her left.
It seemed to Oliver Goldsmith that a lady’s long train was as great a nuisance and absurd an affectation as the hoop, whether held up by a page or allowed to trail on the ground, tripping up both its owner and those who trod on it.
What chiefly distinguishes the sex at present is the train. As a lady’s quality or fashion was once determined here by the circumference of her hoop, both are now measured by the length of her tail. Women of moderate fortunes are contented with tails moderately long, but ladies of true taste and distinction set no bounds to their ambition in this particular.21
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