False hair and hair dyes were still employed in the 1880s but a painted face was rarely seen except on the stage or in those establishments in the Haymarket from whose very doors the eyes of respectable ladies were averted. Sarah Bernhardt appeared in polite society with white powder on her face and black lines around her eyelids to emphasize her eyes. But actresses were allowed a certain licence which would never have been extended to ladies; and it was another actress, Ellen Terry, who noted how ‘astonishing’ it seemed when Bernhardt, while talking to Henry Irving, ‘took some red stuff out of her bag and rubbed it on her lips’.5
If a lady wanted to use cosmetics, she had to do so with such discretion that the effects appeared to be only the slightest improvement upon nature. Lip-salves containing a hint of carmine might perhaps be used by those with the excuse of a chapped skin; and rich and daring ladies might secretly visit such establishments as Madame Rachel’s in New Bond Street where ‘Chinese Leaves for the Cheek and Lips’, ‘Circassian Beauty Wash’, ‘Favourite of the Harem’s Pearl White’, ‘Magnetic Rock Dew Water of the Sahara’, ‘Venus’s Toilet’ and similar preparations were offered for sale at prices commensurate with the magical ingredients that they were alleged to contain. Madame Rachel’s ‘Royal Arabian Toilet of Beauty’, a course of baths, ranged in price from 100 to 1000 guineas. Most ladies, however, apprehensive of being detected in some unseemly artifice, had to be content with soap and water, sponge and brush, to bring the contrast of colour to a pale face.
Towards the end of the century, while obvious lip colouring was still unusual, rouged cheeks were more often seen in upper-class society, so were kohl-shadowed eyes, eyelashes painted with mascara and thickened with coconut oil, and lightly coloured, highly polished finger-nails. In Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance of 1894 a character comments that there are now only two kinds of women in society, ‘the plain and the coloured’; and two years later Max Beerbohm lamented:
It is useless to protest. Artifice must queen it once more in town … For behold! The Victorian era comes to an end and the day of sancta simplicitas is quite ended. The old signs are here and portents to warn the seer of life that we are ripe for a new epoch of artifice. Are not men rattling the dice-box and ladies dipping their fingers in the rouge-pot?6
The clothes of a late-Victorian gentleman were scarcely more suited to his various occupations than were those of his wife and daughters until the less formal wear required for playing games had their effect upon the dress worn at other times. In the 1830s black was the established colour for business and professional wear, though for sport and upon social occasions of all kinds other colours were acceptable from brown and grey to green and blue. Even for evening dress black did not become universal until late Victorian times. Breeches were being discarded for trousers in the 1830s except by elderly gentlemen of conservative tastes. The trousers had flaps buttoned across the waist, were usually worn very tight and were often extremely colourful: Brougham’s were of tartan, Macaulay’s of nankeen, Disraeli’s of green velvet. Coats for wearing outdoors had full skirts for riding and were closely buttoned; those worn indoors had lapels rolled well back to reveal an expanse of linen, neck-cloth, glittering jewels and brightly embroidered waistcoats.7 David Copperfield wears a gold watch and chain, a ring upon his little finger, a long-tailed coat, straw-coloured kid gloves, shoes too small for him, and a great deal of pomade on his hair. It sometimes takes him two hours to dress, and in his buttonhole he sports a flower, a ‘pink camellia japonica, price half a crown’. His tastes are those of his creator who loved to parade the streets in ‘crimson velvet waistcoats, multi-coloured neck-ties with two breast pins joined by a little gold chain, and yellow kid gloves’. At a banquet given in honour of the actor William Charles Macready, in 1851, Dickens appeared ‘in a blue dress coat faced with silk and aflame with gorgeous brass bottons, a [waistcoat] of black satin, with a white satin collar, and a wonderfully embroidered shirt’.8 Later on in the century such dandified clothes were considered insufferably vulgar; and the well-dressed gentleman in town wore a frock coat with a black waistcoat, a tall black top-hat, a silk cravat, and wide tubular trousers which touched the ground at the heel of the boot and rose over the instep in front. In the country, less formal though not too brightly coloured attire was now considered acceptable. What were to become known as sports coats and business suits were often seen in fashionable country houses in the late 1860s, when a gentleman could also walk the streets without fear of ridicule in the headgear recently put on sale by the London hatter, John Bowler, or in summer in a round, flat straw hat with a silk ribbon, known as a boater. Many gentlemen, however, still wore black frock coats in the country: if Millais’s portrait is to be believed, John Ruskin wore his when climbing mountains; and Lord Salisbury certainly went so far as to don his for shooting rabbits. As late as the 1890s the Prince of Wales could be seen riding down Rotten Row in a long coat and silk hat.
The prince, of course, was an expert on all matters sartorial and was a supremely important influence in the development of male fashion. ‘My dear fellow,’ he once said (‘more in sorrow than in anger’) to a groom-in-waiting who was to accompany him to a wedding, ‘where is your white waistcoat? Is it possible you are thinking of going to a wedding in a black waistcoat?’ And to a secretary who had thought it odd to present himself ‘in a sort of Stock Exchange’ attire for a visit to a picture gallery and had thought it prudent to question the instructions, the prince replied: ‘I thought everyone must know that a short jacket is always worn with a silk hat at a private view in the morning.’ He himself was infallible. He even knew what the answer was when the Russian ambassador asked him if it would be proper for him to attend race-meetings while in mourning: ‘To Newmarket, yes, because it means a bowler hat, but not to the Derby because of the top hat.’9
Although generally conservative, even reactionary in some respects, trying to prevent the demise of the frock coat, reviving the fashion of wearing knee-breeches with evening dress, and deriding those who wore Panama hats, the prince originated some new fashions and made others respectable. His adoption of a short, dark blue jacket with silk facings, worn with a black bow tie and black trousers while on a voyage to India, led to the general acceptance of the dinner jacket; his fondness for the loose, waist-banded Norfolk jacket made this type of coat popular all over England; while photographs of him wearing a felt hat with a rakishly curved brim brought back from Homburg, or a green, plumed Tyrolean hat from Marienbad, led to hundreds of thousands of similar hats being sold at home. He found it more comfortable – then decided it looked elegant – to leave the bottom button of his waistcoat undone, and soon no gentleman ever did that button up.
The prince also did much to make smoking more acceptable. His mother disliked the habit intensely. She had once been seen puffing on a cigarette at a summer picnic to keep the midges away, but her aversion to smoking indoors was so extreme that when two of her younger sons entered her room suddenly one day to offer their condolences upon some disaster, they thought it as well to apologize profusely for having dared to appear before her in their smoking jackets. Even Prince Albert had not presumed to smoke in her presence; and at Osborne House, the mansion that Thomas Cubitt, with his royal master at his elbow, designed for the royal family on the Isle of Wight, a special smoking-room was built, the only room with a lonely A above the door instead of an A intertwined with a V. The queen could always detect the smell of tobacco on documents which were sent up to her; and her Assistant Private Secretary, Frederick Ponsonby, once received a sharp injunction not to smoke while decoding telegrams which made the smell of their official box ‘most obnoxious’. He and his colleagues took to carrying peppermints in their pockets in case a summons to the queen came at a moment when their breath was sure to offend her.10
Smoking at Windsor [Ponsonby wrote in his memoirs] necessitated a very long walk for the guests, as the billiard room, which was the only room in which smoking was allowed, was a long way
off. In conceding the billiard-room to smokers the Queen thought she was really doing all that was necessary. If any gentleman wished to indulge in the disgusting habit of smoking he should go away as far as possible.
When her third daughter, Princess Helena, married Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, Queen Victoria heard to her horror that he smoked.
It was not so bad as if he drank, but still it was a distinct blemish on his otherwise impeccable character. The Queen, however, decided to be broad-minded and actually to give him a room where he could indulge in this habit. A small room was found near the servants’ quarters which could only be reached by crossing the open kitchen courtyard, and in this bare room was placed a wooden chair and table. She looked upon this room as a sort of opium-den. Later when Prince Henry of Battenberg married Princess Beatrice he induced the Queen to alter this barbarous smoking-room, and although she insisted on its being more or less in the servants’ quarters, it could be reached without going out of doors, and it was suitably furnished with armchairs, sofas, and writing-tables.11
The queen’s dislike of smoking was widely shared. Lord Melbourne always made ‘a great row about it’ and, if he smelled tobacco, ‘swore perhaps for half an hour’. The Duke of Wellington required his guests to smoke in the servants’ hall; Sir John Boileau never repeated an invitation to a guest who had been caught smoking; and George Murray, Bishop of Rochester, confessed that he would have refused a candidate for ordination if it came to light that he had been smoking in his bedroom when staying in the Bishop’s Palace.12
After the smoking-room was installed at Osborne in 1845, however, most country houses were provided with rooms where the host and his male guests could smoke and tell stories free from the constraints imposed by the company of ladies, most securely so at Bryanston which was built by Norman Shaw for Lord Portman in 1890 and in which there was a completely masculine wing of billiard-room, smoking-room, sitting-room, lavatories and bachelor bedrooms.13 Smoking-rooms were not innovations. There were, for example, such rooms at Canons in 1727 and at Kedleston in 1767; but towards the end of the eighteenth century smoking had gone out of fashion among the upper classes. Heavy smokers, like the fifth Earl of Bedford, and those who chewed tobacco while talking, as the Duke of Albemarle had done, became virtually unknown in England, though pipes were smoked and cigars handed freely around in the courts of Germany, as young men on the Grand Tour had often noticed. The German Prince Pückler-Muskaü, who arrived in England on a tour in 1826 and next year attended a dinner given in honour of the king’s brother, the Duke of Sussex, was surprised to notice that cigars were offered to him and to the other gentlemen after the ladies had left. It was the first time he had seen this done in England.14 But then the Duke of Sussex had been at Göttingen university and had spent much of his time abroad; and it was known that he had acquired a taste for tobacco in Germany. It was not for another generation that cigar-smoking in England became general.
By then billiard-rooms as well as smoking-rooms had become integral parts of most gentlemen’s country houses, and guests who did not appear in them for a convivial smoke or game after the ladies had retired were liable to be dragged out of bed to conform to a recognized social convention. There were still, however, houses which were not provided with smoking-rooms. One such was Cragside, Northumberland, built by Norman Shaw for Lord Armstrong, the inventor, scientist and armaments manufacturer in the 1870s; and it was ‘curious to see’, so The Onlooker observed in 1901, ‘a row of Japanese or other foreign naval officers, in charge of some war vessel building at the famous Elswick works [apart from Krupps, the biggest armament factory in the world] sitting on the low wall outside the front door, puffing away for all they were worth’.15
Smoking-rooms and billiard-rooms were far from being the only new requirements of most owners and builders of country houses. The ninth Duke of Marlborough was exceptional in his reluctance to install new bathrooms and lavatories. In his day nearly all large country houses were well supplied with water-closets and, if bathrooms were not so common, there was usually running water on every floor. Some had had showers, baths and water-closets for many years. By 1813 the Earl of Moira had installed at least six water-closets at Donington Park in Leicestershire; and both he and the countess had their own bathroom, his leading off his study and powdering-room, hers off her dressing-room. By the 1840s the Duke of Buckingham had at least nine water-closets at Stowe, four bathrooms and a shower-bath.16
At the same time candles were being replaced by oil. Belvoir Castle was already mostly lit by oil in the 1830s, as many as 600 gallons being used in the sixteen or seventeen weeks of ‘the season of his Grace’s residence’.17 Gas was also coming into favour; but this was very expensive and, although in use at the Marine Pavilion, Brighton, before the Prince Regent succeeded to the throne as George IV in 1820, it was generally considered too hot and too smelly for domestic use. At Brighton guests were constantly complaining of the excessive heat of the rooms.18 But by the end of the century gaslight had become almost universal; and in some houses, had already been replaced by electricity. Cragside was the first private house in England to be properly fitted with electric light, Swan lamps being installed throughout the house by the end of 1880.19 Electricity was introduced into Hatfield soon afterwards; and twenty years later several other houses were also lit by electricity and many more had central heating.
While the interiors of country houses were being altered to make them more comfortable and convenient, the outsides of many were also being transformed. Classical, eighteenth-century façades were being swallowed up by the Gothic and neo-Elizabethan exteriors such as those which enveloped the earlier Shadwell Park in Norfolk and the Earl of Carnarvon’s house at Highclere. The Gothic and Elizabethan styles were also usually preferred for new houses rather than the Italianate. Prince Albert chose the Italianate for Osborne; but far more representative was Eaton Hall as rebuilt by Alfred Waterhouse for the Duke of Westminster in the 1870s at a cost of about £600,000. Gothic houses such as this eschewed the porticoes, the sham fortifications and those machicolations which Wyatville had incorporated into the fabric at Windsor Castle and which, hitherto unknown there, were, it was to be hoped, no longer of practical use. But late Victorian domestic architecture, while generally rejecting the impression of a fortress, did often contrive to hint at a kind of comfortable, Anglican monasticism. Architects and their clients had a strong taste for stained glass and tracery, for chapels and for such inscriptions carved over lintels as, ‘Except the Lord buildeth the house they labour in vain that build it.’ At Eaton Hall, where bells played ‘Home Sweet Home’ when the Duke returned from London, a tall tower and a chapel contrived to dominate the rest of the building.
While some of the most imposing of Victorian country houses were built or reconstructed by aristocratic families, Burges’s Cardiff Castle by Lord Bute, for example, and the neo-Georgian Bryanston by Lord Portman, there were others which were built for men or the sons of men who had made fortunes in banking, in industry, from newspapers or shipping. Lord Wolverton’s house at Iwerne Minster was built with the profits of railways; Arthur, Wilson’s Tranby Croft with those of ships. A cotton tycoon built Orchardleigh House in Somerset, a wool millionaire, Milner Field in Yorkshire; the printer and principal proprietor of The Times spent some £120,000 reconstructing Bear Wood in Berkshire. These new owners, joining in the field sports of the older families, sending their sons to expensive schools, obeying the rules of upper-class society, were eventually accepted by the ancient aristocracy, without being welcomed into it. Yet, while they Were eager to share in the enjoyment of prestige and influence, they were not at all anxious to usurp it. Nor had the middle classes, who had no pretension to landed estates, any desire to see the eclipse of nobility. ‘It is not our aim to overthrow the aristocracy’, an industrialist told Hippolyte Taine in the 1860s.
We are ready to leave the government and high offices in their hands. For we believe … that the conduct of nation
al business calls for special men, born and bred to the work for generations, who enjoy an independent and commanding position. Besides, their titles and pedigree give them a quality of dash and style … But [there must] be no mediocrities and no nepotism. Let them govern, but let them be fit to govern.20
The Victorian aristocracy certainly adapted itself skilfully to the changing conditions of the time. The lessons of the European revolutions of 1848 had not been lost upon it; nor had the aspirations of the Chartists. The arrogance, frivolity and selfish extravagance which had characterized so many noblemen during the regency and reign of George IV were discarded for different, more responsible and worthy attributes. It was a revealing sign of the times that Lord Hatherton contended that in 1810 only two gentlemen in Staffordshire had family prayers and that by 1850 only two did not.
There were still eccentric and profusely wasteful aristocrats such as the fifth Duke of Portland who had an underground tunnel a mile and half long built between Welbeck Abbey and the nearby town of Worksop so that his curtained carriage could be driven to the railway station, lifted on to the train and transported to London without his being seen. When he arrived in London, this duke – who was known to have any maid who encountered him in the corridors at Welbeck dismissed on the spot – was driven to his town house where huge ground-glass and cast-iron screens, 200 feet long and eighty feet high, ensured that he was protected from his neighbours’ prying eyes.21 There were still also such flamboyant figures as the Earl of Cardigan, leader of the most famous cavalry charge in history, seducer of women and savage snob, whose career showed that while most noble families contrived to conceal their black sheep and to hide their skeletons in cupboards, there remained aristocrats not merely irresponsible and immoral but brazenly so. Yet far more characteristic of his time was the first Duke of Westminster, once Liberal Member of Parliament for Chester, subsequently supporter of Gladstone in the Lords, philanthropist, Christian, Lord-Lieutenant, honorary colonel of yeomanry, model landlord, promoter of education, sportsman, art collector, race-horse breeder, good and faithful husband – though his first wife was often unfaithful to him – and kind father of fifteen children.22
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