The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only)
Page 62
The first Course was Cod & Oysters, Ham, Fowls, boiled Beef, Rabbits smothered with Onions, Harroco of Mutton, Pork Griskins, Veal Collops, Puddings, Mince Pies, Roots etc – The Second Course was a very fine rost Turkey, Haunch of Venison, a brace of Woodcocks, some Snipes, Veal Olive, Trifle, Jelly, Blomonge, Stewed Pippins, Quinces preserved etc … Madeira, Old Hocke and Port wines to drink etc. A desert of Fruit after Dinner – we stayed till near 8.
Among the undergraduates there was much drinking of tea, and more of ale and claret, port and arrack-punch. Extracts from the accounts of Humphrey Senhouse indicate how enjoyable a time most undergraduates had. Among items commonly listed appear port, sherry, claret, horse-hire to Newmarket, ‘two barrels of oysters’, china teapots, cream jugs, decanters, goblets, pipes and tobacco.13
Examinations were oral and were considered by critics no more than a formality. They were even said to be conducted during drinking bouts or on horseback. John Scott, later Lord Chancellor Eldon, maintained that his examination in Hebrew and History for his Bachelor’s degree in 1770 consisted of just two questions:
EXAMINER: What is the Hebrew for the place of a Skull?
SCOTT: Golgotha.
EXAMINER: Who founded University College?
SCOTT: King Alfred.
EXAMINER: Very well, sir, you are competent for your degree.14
At Cambridge, however, examinations seem to have been rather more conscientiously conducted. ‘We got into the theatre at eight in the morning,’ wrote a candidate for the bachelor’s degree in 1753, ‘all that day, all the next and the forenoon of the next we sit to be examined by the officers of the University, and by the Masters of Arts … On the Friday morning we are severally invested with the Cap of the degree by the Vice Chancellor.’15
Certainly the examinations undergone by aspiring Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, seem to have been severe enough. Richard Cumberland gave an account of his examination by the Master in 1752:
[He was sitting] in a chamber up stairs, encompassed with large folding screens, and over a great fire, though the weather was uncommonly warm: he began by requiring of me an account of the whole course and progress of my studies in the several branches of philosophy … When he had held me a considerable time under this examination, I expected he would have dismissed me, but on the contrary he then proceeded … to demand of me an account of what I had been reading before I had applied myself to academical studies … He bade me give him a survey account of the several great empires of the ancient world, the periods when they flourished, their extent when at the summit of their power, the causes of their declension and dates of their extinction … He gave me a sheet of paper written through in Greek with his own hand, which he ordered me to turn either into Latin or English, and I was shewn into a room containing nothing but a table furnished with materials for writing, and one chair. I was required to use dispatch … When I had given in my translation in Latin I was remanded to the empty chamber with a subject for Latin prose and another for Latin verse.16
Since the universities were renowned for idleness and debauchery, many parents chose to send their sons to Dissenting Academies instead. ‘The education of my children in a right way is what I have much at heart and I forsee many dangers in sending them to the university,’ wrote Lord Kilkerran in 1743. ‘I have been of the opinion that the better way is to send them to an academy under virtuous people.’17 At Charles Morton’s Academy, Newington Green, there were ‘not a few knights’ and baronets’ sons and one Lord’s son who were sent hither to avoid the debaucheries of the University’, wrote Samuel Wesley, their fellow-student, ‘though some of em made themselves sufficiently remarkable while they were with us.’18
These Dissenting Academies were cheap as well as respectable. At Jennings’s Academy in 1720, £8 10s sufficed for half a year’s board and tuition, and an additional 10s 5d was charged for books. It could not very well have charged more, since the majority of students came from modest homes. Samuel Mercer, the son of a Lancashire cheese factor, was at Northampton Academy in 1750 studying to be a Nonconformist minister like many other students at such places:
My gown is so far gone that it will scarce last me till a few weeks longer [he told his father]. I have bought a new wig which I stood in great need of. I wore my old one till it was not worth a penny … And I have bespoke a new pair of boots which I cannot possibly do without (as you would agree) if you knew what I undergo by going into the country towns to repeat sermons …
Dear Father – I should esteem it not only a great favour, but as a great honour paid to me if you would be so good as … to make a present to the doctor of a couple of Cheshire cheeses, and likewise to send my Dame for she is a widow and behaves very well to me. I hope, father you will not forget.19
At the Northampton Academy, as at other similar establishments, the students were far more closely supervised than they were at the universities. They had to get up at six o’clock for roll-call, prayers and private reading. There were more prayers before breakfast, lectures between ten o’clock and two when there was a short break for dinner. After dinner there were tutorials and further lectures before supper at nine. The gate was locked at ten, and the students were expected to retire to their rooms at half past.20
There were fines for breaking the rules, 1d being demanded for missing the early-morning roll-call, 2d for being late for a lecture or absent from prayers, is for being out after the locking of the gate. No students were ‘to go into a Publick House to drink there on penalty of a public censure for the first time and a forfeiture of a shilling the second’. They were, however, allowed to have tea with their tutor in his parlour, provided they took their own tea and sugar with them. But only the most privileged students were allowed to make toasted cheese in their rooms, which was considered a most extravagant habit. There were two weeks’ holiday at Christmas and six at Whitsun.21
At many academies the dominant subjects were theology and ethics, Bible Study, the classics and history, mostly English, ecclesiastical and Jewish history. But at Kibworth Academy in Leicestershire the syllabus also included astronomy, mechanics, hydrostatics, geometry, algebra and French, though this was studied ‘without regard to pronunciation’, with which the proprietor, John Jennings, honestly admitted ‘he was not acquainted’.22
At Warrington Academy the emphasis was placed upon subjects likely to be useful for those going into trade, upon book-keeping, drawing and designing, shorthand, mathematics, French (with stress here upon correct pronunciation), geography and upon the commercial details, such as the coinage, of the countries studied.23 At Newington Green Academy students had the benefit not only of ‘a fine garden, bowling green and fish pond’ but also of ‘a laboratory and some not inconsiderable rarities with air pump, thermometer and all sorts of mathematical instruments’.24
Many of the subjects offered at these Dissenting Academies were also available, at a price, in courses of public lectures. A course of lectures in mathematics was offered at Manchester in 1719 and a series in chemistry in Scarborough in 1733. And Richard Kay, the son of a Lancashire physician, attended lectures in Manchester between 1741 and 1743 on geography, anatomy, trigonometry and general science.25
Courses of lessons in French were widely popular and advertisements similar to the following in a 1751 edition of the Cheshire Courant could be read in numerous papers all over the country:
Monsieur Reillie lately from Paris begs leave to inform the public that he intends to teach the French tongue, in a method the most concise and intelligent that has hitherto been practised, with due accent as spoke by the nobility in Paris and Blois. Attendance will be given at the Widow Shereman’s, staymaker, in Bridge Street, Chester from nine to eleven in the forenoon and from two to four in the after; the other hours he reserves for the use of such gentlemen and ladies as choose to be taught in their own houses.26
Many young gentlemen had already learned French on the Grand Tour, an aristocratic institution which had lo
ng been accepted as an important, if not an essential part of upper-class education and which, so Adam Smith declared in 1776, had been brought into repute by ‘the discredit into which the universities [were] allowing themselves to fall’.27
Although it was not until the eighteenth century that it assumed its peculiar significance, the Grand Tour was not a new institution. In Elizabethan England – a century before Richard Lassels in his Voyage of Italy of 1670 first used the phrase in a printed work – the Grand Tour had been recognized as a means of gathering information which could be turned to the nation’s advantage, and of training young gentlemen in the arts of diplomacy. Sir Philip Sidney, for example, later to be appointed English amabassador to the Emperor, Rudolf II, had been trained for this important post by a long tour of Europe. Following a preliminary education at Shrewsbury and Christ Church, Oxford, and a few months spent at Queen Elizabeth’s court, Sidney had left England in 1572 for Paris. Accompanied by a half-Italian tutor, three servants and four horses, he had travelled through France, Germany, the Low Countries and Italy, learning the languages and the ways of foreign courts. Thereafter, despite the dangers and discomforts which attended a European tour, the number of Englishmen who travelled abroad as part of their education and training increased year by year. They were expected to spend their time while abroad gaining knowledge rather than enjoying themselves in idleness. They must make an effort not only to perfect their mastery of foreign languages but also to learn all they could about the history, geography, trade, climate, crops, minerals, food, clothes, customs, fauna, flora, politics, laws, art and military fortifications of the district. On entering a strange town the tourist should at once ascend the highest steeple to gain a good view of it and pick out the buildings worthy of further inspection.
Having inspected these buildings he must make drawings of them, take the necessary measurements, endeavour to learn how any curious details were executed, list their valuable contents and striking furnishings, constantly bearing in mind his future as inheritor and patron. ‘Take particular note of the French way of furnishing rooms,’ Lord Annandale advised his nephew who was making the Grand Tour in 1725 and who, some time after his return, could expect to become the owner of a fine country house, ‘especially with double doors and windows and door curtains and finishing them with looking-glass, marble, painting, and gilded stucco.’
The tourist was advised in one of those numerous books written for his guidance never to travel by night and never to travel alone; to avoid the company of young women in the interests of virtue and of old women because they always want the best seats; if travelling by sea, to keep clear of the sailors who are sure to be covered with vermin and to remove his spurs, otherwise they would be stolen while he was being sick; always to carry something to eat on a journey both as a means of assuaging hunger and of keeping off starving dogs; on reaching his inn at night to look behind all the big pictures or looking-glasses in the room to make sure they do not hide secret doors.28
He was expected to return from his travels with a broadened mind as well as a good command of foreign languages, a new self-reliance and self-possession as well as a highly developed taste and grace of manner. Some did do so, but many did not. France and Italy were full of young Englishmen such as the one Dr John Moore came across in Rome who, having ordered a post-chaise and four horses to come to his lodgings, drove through ‘churches, palaces, villas and ruins with all possible expedition’ to get all his sightseeing done in the shortest possible time so that he could settle down to enjoy himself, perhaps in the manner of James Boswell who ‘sallied forth of an evening like an imperious lion’, having resolved to have a different girl every day. Many such young men returned from their Grand Tour with scant command of French or Italian and little improvement in their store of general knowledge. Samuel Johnson, who considered that the Grand Tour was generally undertaken at far too early an age, complained of one particular young lord whom he had only once heard speak of what he had seen and then it was merely to tell a tiresome story of ‘a large serpent in one of the pyramids of Egypt’.
A young man who goes abroad at seventeen or eighteen and returns home at one-and-twenty [Adam Smith concluded] … commonly returns more conceited, more unprincipled, more dissipated and more incapable of any serious application either to study or to business, than he could well have become in so short a time had he stayed at home.29
The influence of the Grand Tour on English taste was, nevertheless, profound, and the experiences of the discerning tourist eventually brought about a lasting transformation of English art and manners. The third Earl of Burlington, champion of the Italian architects, Palladio and Scamozzi, was only one of numerous rich Englishmen who upon their return built houses in the classical Italian style, decorated them under the influence of Continental models and surrounded them with gardens in the romantic manner of Nicolas Poussin and other landscape artists whose work they had admired abroad. At the same time the treasures which found their way into England, either as purchases made on the Grand Tour or in consequence of tastes formed on Continental travels, were of an extraordinary range.
42 Masters and Workers
Foreign visitors to England in the middle of the eighteenth century repeatedly stressed the comfortable circumstances in which most people seemed to be placed, the complacent contentment with which they regarded their country and their own lot, the satisfaction which the middle classes took in making money and all but the very poor took in spending it. It was a view of a country widely shared by its own inhabitants. ‘You would not know your country again,’ Horace Walpole told Sir Horace Mann who had left it to become assistant to the British Envoy in Florence in 1737 some fifty years before. ‘You left it as a private island living upon its means. You will find it the capital of the world.’ And Tobias Smollett, who was so cantankerous and captious in France and Italy, had words of high praise for England which was ‘smiling with cultivation: the grounds exhibiting all the perfection of agriculture, parcelled out into beautiful enclosures, corn fields, lay pasture, woodland and commons’.
Industrial output was soaring, and by 1790 the value of exports was almost twice as high as it had been eight years before and by the end of the century totalled 22 million pounds. The merchant marine had increased from 3300 vessels in 1702 to 9400 in 1776. Trade with the colonies had created the largest free trade area in the world, while demand for goods at home was increasing fast with the growth of population, there being nearly 9 million people in England and Wales when the first official census was taken in 1801, 3 million more than there had been in 1760. Over two-thirds of the people still lived in the country, and agriculture was still the largest occupation, but towns were growing fast. Liverpool, where Fuseli, the painter, thought that he could ‘everywhere smell the blood of slaves’ – in 1771, 107 slave ships sailed from Liverpool – was how one of the largest towns in the kingdom with 78,000 inhabitants in 1801, more than any other provincial city, except Manchester which with Salford had 84,000.
The mill towns of Lancashire were larger than all but two or three towns had been anywhere in England at the beginning of the century. Wigan had a population of nearly 11,000, Blackburn and Preston of almost 12,000, Bolton of more than 12,000 and Stockport of nearly 15,000.1
Between 1770 and 1830 the national income doubled. By 1797 there were 290 banks in the country; by 1821 there were 370, all issuing their own notes.2 Vastly increasing amounts were being expended on insurance and advertising. It has been estimated that whereas the average family was buying £10 worth of British-made goods a year in 1688, £25 worth was purchased in 1750 and £40 worth by 1811.3
More canals were being dug, more navigable rivers extended, more mines opened up, more factories built. A small factory could be started for £2000 or even less: Abraham Walker established his iron foundry in Sheffield for no more than £600 in 1741, and by 1801 the business was worth £235,000. Most entrepreneurs were self-made men, the sons of yeomen or tradesmen, and many we
re Dissenters, a high proportion of them Quakers like Abraham Darby, the iron-smelter. Many of these men were hard taskmasters; most laid down strict rules for their men’s conduct: Abraham Crowley, the iron-master, built houses for his workers but he required them to be at home in them by nine o’clock at night, and, while he paid poor relief, those in receipt of it had to wear a badge labelled, ‘Crowley’s Poor’. All were ambitious. ‘I shall astonish the world all at once,’ Josiah Wedgwood told his partner, ‘for I hate piddling you know.’ His was no piddling enterprise. Yet large as his Etruria works were, there were numerous other factories all over the country which could be compared with it. Robert Peel, of Haworth, Peel and Yates, calico printers, was proud to be the employer of ‘some fifteen thousand persons’.4
Like all his fellow-manufacturers, Peel introduced machinery whenever it was profitable to do so; and it was probably through fear that the introduction of new machinery would provoke the jealousy of his handloom workers that he moved a branch of his business to Tamworth in Staffordshire from Blackburn. Handloom weavers did, indeed, burn down a factory in Manchester after the introduction there of a new power loom; but such attacks were, as yet, quite rare, and most workers were prepared to tolerate the innovations so long as the opportunities of employment kept pace with the rapid increase in population. They took pride in producing articles of fine workmanship.
With regard to the neatness and solidity of work of all kinds they succeed better in the least towns of England, than in the most considerable cities of France [wrote the Abbé le Blanc] … The English artisan has the quality, extremely commendable, and peculiar to him, which is, never to swerve from the degree of perfection in his trade which he is master of: whatever he undertakes he always does as well as he can. The French workman is far from deserving this commendation.5