The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only)
Page 81
Oh thank you cried Mr Salteena feeling very towzld compared to this grand fellow. Then to his great surprise Procurio began to open the wardrobe and look at Mr Salteena’s suits making Italian exclamations under his breath. Mr Salteena dared not say a word so he swollowed his tea and eat a Marie biscuit hast illy. Presently Procurio advanced to his bed with a bright blue serge suit. Will you wear this to-day sir he asked quietly.
The Earl of Clincham, under whose tutelage Mr Salteena is placed at Crystal Palace, is advised by Bernard Clark that his pupil ‘is not quite the right side of the blanket as they say, in fact he is the son of a first rate butcher but his mother was a decent family called Hyssops of the Glen so you see he is not so bad and is desireus of being the correct article’. Lord Clincham does his best with his rather mere material, supervises his instruction (for a suitable fee) in such matters as ‘proper Grammer, clothes and etiquett to menials’, and arranges an introduction both to various members of the Aristokracy and to the Prince of Wales who wears a lovely ermine cloak and a small but costly crown as he laps up strawbery ice-cream and complains that all he wants is peace and quiet and a little fun. ‘Who did you say you were?’ he asks Mr Salteena in a puzzled tone.
Lord Hyssops responded our hero growing purple at the lie.
Well you are not a bit like the Lord Hyssops I know replied the Prince could you explain matters.
Mr Salteena gazed helplessly at the earl who had grown very pale and seemed lost for the moment. However he quickly recovered.
He is quite alright really Prince he said. His mother was called Miss Hyssops of the Glen.
Indeed said his royal Highness that sounds correct but who was your father eh.
Then Mr Salteena thourght he would not tell a lie so in trembly tones he muttered, My poor father was but a butcher your Highness a very honest one I may add and passing rich he was called Domonic Salteena and my name is Alfred Salteena.
The Prince stroked his yellow beard and rarther admired Mr Salteena for his truthful utterance – Oh I see he said well why did you palm off on my menials as Lord Hyssops eh.
Mr Salteena wiped his swetting brow but the earl came to the rescue nobly. My fault entirely Prince he chimed in, as I was bringing him to this very supearier levie I thought it would be better to say he was of noble birth have I offended your Royal dignity.
Not much said the prince it was a laudible notion.
The concern for social standing which pervades the whole of Daisy Ashford’s book – and which was one that she must have heard endlessly discussed by the grown-ups in her family – was an almost universal preoccupation in middle-class society. Trollope, well aware of this, elaborates the problems presented to Miss Thorne of Ullathorne when making her arrangements for her fête champêtre. She had arranged for the quality to have a breakfast and the non-quality to have a dinner, and two marquees had been erected for these two banquets, that for the quality on the garden side of a deep ha-ha and that for the non-quality on its paddock side. But
No one who has not had a hand in the preparation of such an affair can understand the manifold difficulties which Miss Thorne encountered in her project.
In the first place there was a dreadful line to be drawn. Who were to dispose themselves within the ha-ha, and who without? To this the unthinking will give an off-hand answer, Oh, the bishop and such like within the ha-ha; and Farmer Greenacre and such like without. True, my unthinking friend; but who shall define these such-likes? It is in such definitions that the whole difficulty of society consists. To seat the bishop on an arm chair on the lawn and place Farmer Greenacre at the end of a long table in the paddock is easy enough; but where will you put Mrs. Lookaloft, whose husband, though a tenant on the estate, hunts in a red coat, whose daughters go to a fashionable seminary in Barchester, who calls her farm house Rosebank, and who has a pianoforte in her drawing-room? The Misses Lookaloft, as they call themselves, won’t sit contented among the bumpkins. And yet Mrs. Lookaloft is no fit companion and never has been the associate of the Thornes and the Grantlys. And if Mrs. Lookaloft be admitted within the sanctum of fashionable life, if she be allowed with her three daughters to leap the ha-ha, why not the wives and daughters of other families also? Mrs. Greenacre is at present well contented with the paddock, but she might cease to be so if she saw Mrs. Lookaloft on the lawn.
As it happens the Lookalofts do manage to gain admittance to the quality precinct, much to the consternation of the footman.
But he had not the courage to tell a stout lady with a low dress, short sleeves, and satin at eight shillings a yard, that she had come to the wrong tent; he had not dared to hint to young ladies with white dancing shoes and long gloves, that there was a place ready for them in the paddock. And thus Mrs. Lookaloft carried her point, broke through the guards, and made her way into the citadel. That she would have to pass an uncomfortable time there, she had surmised before. But nothing now could rob her of the power of boasting that she had consorted on the lawn with the squire and Miss Thorne, with a countess, a bishop, and the county grandees, while Mrs. Greenacre and such like were walking about with the ploughboys in the park. It was a great point gained by Mrs. Lookaloft, and it might be fairly expected that from this time forward the tradesmen of Barchester would, with undoubting pens, address her husband as T. Lookaloft, Esquire.3
Such snobberies extended throughout society. Paul Blouet discovered that English boys began ‘swaggering about their social position’ as soon as they left the nursery; and he recorded how amusing it was to follow a group of public schoolboys on their way home. The sons of professional men pointed out other boys and commented, ‘Sons of merchants, don’t you know!’ But ‘these are not without their revenge, as they look at a group close by, “Sons of clerks, you know!” But you should see the contemptuous glances of the latter as they pass the sons of shopkeepers, “Tradespeople’s sons, I believe!”’4
To be considered middle class a certain minimum income was required, a certain style of family life and a certain form of employment, preferably professional. In the eighteenth century there were only three professions – apart from those of the army and navy – the law, the church and medicine. These were still regarded as superior to all others, but some additional occupations were now beginning to rank with them in social acceptability. Among these occupations were those of architects, surveyors and engineers; actuaries, senior civil servants and accountants; writers and artists (provided they were respectable); schoolmasters (if they taught in good schools); and, though in a rather lower class, Nonconformist ministers, dentists and veterinary surgeons. There were recognized classes, too, in the superior professions. There was a world of difference between a fashionable London doctor and a medical practitioner in the service of a Poor Law Union, just as there was still a social gap, though increasingly less marked, between a physician and a surgeon. Although not likely to be treated with the hauteur of Lady Carlisle – who, considering it beneath her dignity even to address her physician directly, instructed her maid to ‘inform the doctor that he may bleed the Countess of Carlisle’ – the family physician with an ordinary general practice would not normally expect to be acknowledged as an equal by the squire and would not presume to consider his daughter a suitable match for the squire’s son. Nor would he be asked to stay to dinner as would the well-to-do London doctor whose advice was sought in most cases of grave illness in families who could afford his fees. The social standing of general practitioners rose, however, with the passing of the Medical Act of 1858 which, among other reforms in the profession, required doctors to pass examinations before practising; and thereafter doctors from good families such as Trollope’s Thomas Thorne, who marries the heiress, Miss Dunstable, became far less of a rarity; while it was also less rare for the children of a physician to rise in the world as do those of Dr Roberts, the physician from Exeter, a man ‘of no private means but enjoying a lucrative practice’, whose son goes to Harrow with the rich Lord Lufton and whose daughter marries him.
If the medical profession was a hierarchy within the larger hierarchy of Victorian society, so was the legal profession. The president of the Law Society and the rich lawyers of his acquaintance with their grand and spacious offices in Chancery Lane and Lincoln’s Inn Fields – and their membership of the Conservative Club (founded in 1840) or the Junior Carlton (1864), the New University Club (1864), the Devonshire Club (1875), the National Liberal Club (1882), or one of those numerous other clubs established for the growing numbers of the prosperous middle class – were very different people from the solicitors whom Dickens had known when himself a clerk with Messrs Ellis and Blackmore. These professional men in the lower social reaches of their profession, who appear in one Dickens novel after another, occupy offices as dingy and unsavoury as those of Mr Vholes whose ‘chambers are on so small a scale that one clerk can open the door without getting off his stool while the other who elbows him at the same desk has equal facilities for poking the fire. A smell as of unwholesome sheep, blending with the smell of must and dust, is referable to the nightly (and often daily) consumption of mutton fat in candles, and to the fretting of parchment forms and skins in greasy drawers.’5
The clerks who worked in such places – and who, together with the growing army of clerks in other offices, large and small, constituted so large a proportion of the lower middle class – were themselves, as Dickens said, divided into several grades:
There is the salaried clerk who devotes the major part of his thirty-shillings a week to his personal pleasure and adornment, repairs half-price to the Adelphi at least three times a week, dissipates majestically at the cider cellar afterwards, and is a dirty caricature of the fashion which expired six months ago. There is the middle-aged copying clerk, with a large family, who is always shabby, and often drunk. And there are the office lads in their first surtouts [overcoats], who feel a befitting contempt for boys at day-schools, club as they go home at night, for saveloys and porter, and think there’s nothing like ‘life’.6
There is also the articled clerk who ‘has paid a premium and is an attorney in perspective, who runs a tailor’s bill, receives invitations to parties, knows a family in Gower Street and another in Tavistock Square, goes out of town every vacation to see his father … and who is, in short, the very aristocrat of clerks’. Yet when he has completed his apprenticeship and becomes an attorney, he is not likely to find himself as socially acceptable as he would have done had he become a barrister, or for that matter an army officer or a clergyman. When her cousin announced her intention of marrying an attorney, Lady Amelia de Courcy advised her strongly against it. A clergyman would have been a far better proposition since ‘clergymen – particularly the rectors and vicars of country parishes – do become privileged above other professional men’.7
The sporting parson, however, was becoming a figure of the past. There were still several clergymen who were also landowners and even a few, like Thomas Sweet-Escott, a Somerset rector, who passed on to their ordained sons both their manor houses and their livings. Yet most Victorian clergymen were much more likely to resemble the Rev. Patrick Brontë than the Rev. Laurence Sterne; and Victorian hostesses were most unlikely to entertain in their dining-room such a sporting parson as the one who passed Squire Osbaldeston a note under the table to the effect that their hostess was his mistress and gave him ‘some extremely odd evidence to that effect’. There remained, however, an unbridgeable social gap between most Anglican clergymen and all but a few of their parishioners. In Lark Rise
the Rector visited each cottage in turn, working his way conscientiously round the hamlet from door to door … When he tapped … at a cottage door there would come a sound of scuffling within, as unseemly objects were hustled out of sight, for the whisper would have gone round that he had been seen getting over the stile and his knock would have been recognized. The women received him with respectful tolerance. A chair was dusted with an apron and the doing of housework or cooking was suspended while his hostess, seated uncomfortably on the edge of one of her own chairs, waited for him to open the conversation. When the weather had been discussed, the health of the inmates and absent children inquired about, and the progress of the pig and the prospect of the allotment crops, there came an awkward pause, during which both racked their brains to find something to talk about. There was nothing. The Rector never mentioned religion. That was looked upon in the parish as one of his chief virtues, but it limited the possible topics of conversation. Apart from his autocratic ideas, he was a kindly man, and he had come to pay a friendly call, hoping, no doubt, to get to know and to understand his parishioners better. But the gulf between them was too wide; neither he nor his hostess could bridge it. The kindly enquiries made and answered, they had nothing more to say to each other, and, after much ‘ah-ing’ and ‘er-ing’, he would rise from his seat, and be shown out with alacrity.8
As in the case of lawyers and medical men, there was a wide disparity both between the incomes of clergymen and between their relative social standing. Bishops almost invariably came from old families. In 1868, when A.C. Tait, a member of a family that had owned large estates in Scotland, was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, the Archbishop of York was closely related to the Earl of Marchmont. And in this same year, to take a representative selection, the Bishop of Bath and Wells was Lord Auckland; the Bishop of Norwich was a son of the Earl of Chichester; the Bishop of Winchester was the old Etonian younger brother of a former Archbishop of Canterbury; the Bishop of Lichfield’s father was first cousin of his namesake, the eighteenth-century wit and man of fashion, George Augustus Selwyn; the Bishop of Oxford was a son of the philanthropist William Wilberforce, who came from an ancient Yorkshire family; and the Bishop of Durham was the son of a baronet. In the diocese of the Bishop of Barchester there are several clergymen as well born as these. Theophilus Grantly, the rich Archdeacon, has a daughter who marries the heir of the Marquess of Hartletop; the sister of the Rector of Framlingham marries a nobleman whose income is between £15,000 and £20,000 a year. There are others who, though poor, are recognized as gentlemen, as the Rev. Josiah Crawley, Vicar of Hogglestock, is; while there are some, like the bishop’s dreadful chaplain, the Rev. Obadiah Slope, who are expressly stated to be not. When Dr Stanhope, who spends much of his time in Italy, meets Slope for the first time he is amazed, for, ‘in spite of his long absence, he knew an English gentleman when he saw one’. And when Mr Crawley expresses to the archdeacon his regrets that he cannot provide a dowry for his daughter, who is to marry the archdeacon’s son, the archdeacon replies, ‘My dear Crawley, I have enough for both’, and he interrupts the vicar’s protests that he wished they stood ‘on more equal grounds’ by rising. from his chair and declaring, ‘We stand on the perfect level on which such men can meet each other. We are both gentlemen.’9
There were numerous examples of such wide differences in fortune between fellow-clergymen in every diocese. There were several extremely profitable bishoprics, like that of Durham which was worth – as was the archbishopric of Canterbury – £19,000 a year; and there were more than 100 benefices in the Church of England worth over £2000 a year. There were a good many more as valuable as the living of Framley which brings to the incumbent an income of £900 upon which he can employ a footman, a groom, a cook and a gardener as well as maidservants to help his wife run the parsonage.10 But most Anglican clergymen, not so well connected, had less than £400 a year and a few had no more than £50.
The incomes of the poorest curates still compared most unfavourably, in fact, with men of similar education in other professions. In 1850 one authority wrote that ‘young people of good position’ could get married ‘comfortably on £500 a year and expectations’;11 and in 1857, when Barchester Towers was published, Mrs Eleanor Bold was considered to be excessively well provided for with £1200 a year. Mrs Beeton considered that an income of as little as £150 a year justified the employment of a maid of all work; that a man earning £500 a year could afford a cook, one w
ith £750 a bootboy as well as a cook and a housemaid, and one with £1000 a year a manservant, two housemaids and a cook. But an income of much less than £150, On which so many clergy were expected to survive, was too little for the support of a gentlemanly life.
Many office clerks, the most numerous class of salaried men, had no more than £150 and some less. Apprentice clerks employed on leaving school might get as little as £20 a year, and junior clerks with such institutions as banks and insurance companies could not expect more than about £80. Indeed, the reports of a Lancashire statistician suggest that even these figures might be high: he reckoned that the average salary of clerks in the Manchester area did not exceed £60 and that of responsible cashiers was only £100.12 Anthony Trollope’s income when he started work as a clerk in the General Post Office in 1834 was £90 a year, and after seven years it had risen no higher than £140.13 In the 1870s one firm of solicitors reported that twenty-one of its clerks were earning less than £100 a year, twenty-five had less than £200, six less than £300 and only two over £300. The Mersey Docks and Labour Board in Liverpool, with a staff of about 300 clerks, employed ninety-six of them at under £100 a year, ninety-five at under £200, and only twenty-three at £200 to £500. Clerks in the Civil Service were slightly better paid. Junior clerks had about £125 to £300 a year; assistant clerks £300 to £600; senior clerks up to £900; while chief clerks started at about £1000.14