Dickens's England (7 page)

R.S. Surtees,
Mr Facey Romford's Hounds
(1864)

SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS

(I)

[Not until 1832 were cadavers made legally available for research.] ‘Mary's Ghost': A Pathetic Ballad

'Twas in the middle of the night,

To sleep young William tried,

When Mary's ghost came stealing in,

And stood at his bedside.

‘O William dear! O William dear!

My rest eternal ceases!

Alas! my everlasting peace

Is broken into pieces.

‘I thought the last of all my cares

Would end with my last minute;

But though I went to my long home,

I didn't stay long in it.

‘The body-snatchers they have come    [Burke and Hare]

And made a snatch at me;

It's very hard them kind of men

Won't let a body be!

‘You thought that I was buried deep,

Quite decent-like and chary,

But from her grave in Mary-bone

They've come and boned your Mary.

‘The arm that used to take your arm

Is took to Dr Vyse;

And both my legs are gone to walk

The hospital at Guy's.

‘I vowed that you should have my hand,

But fate gives us denial;

You'll find it there, at Dr Bell's,

In spirits and a phial.

‘As for my feet, the little feet

You used to call so pretty,

There's one, I know, in Bedford Row,

The t'other's in the City.

‘I can't tell where my head is gone,

But Dr Carpuc can:

As for my trunk, it's all packed up

To go by Pickford's van.     [furniture removers]

‘I wish you'd go to Mr P.

And save me such a ride;

I don't half like the outside place

They've took for my inside.

‘The cock it crows – I must be gone!

My William, we must part!

But I'll be yours in death, altho'

Sir Astley has my heart.

‘Don't go to weep upon my grave,

And think that there I be;

They haven't left an atom there

Of my anatomy.'

Thomas Hood (early nineteenth century)

(II)

BALLOONING

In the Great Exposition, we have had the pleasure of examining the new Aërial Machine invented by Mr E. Mason, of Brompton, together with the Locomotive Balloon, and Locomotive Parachute of Mr H. Bell, of Millbank. The former of these presents the appearance of a huge vegetable marrow, with a broad Dutch rudder at the stern, and an apparatus of revolving sails at each bow; Mr Bell's invention is a long silver fish, for a boat, with revolving fans in place of fins for progression, and sustained by a balloon of blue silk. . . . Mr J. Brown of Leadenhall Street has a most solid-looking model, like a mahogany Dutch boat, sustained by an immense inflated bonnet or closed hood, and guided by a jib in front, with a tri-sail for a rudder. Mr H. Plummer has a machine to fly with wings only, the power to be derived from the action of springs, etc. Mr G. Graham exhibits a steering apparatus for a balloon. It resembles some enormous firework case, or skeleton of some great fabulous bird. These long wings are, in fact, to be used as immense oars, a project somewhat resembling that of Messrs Aine and Robert in 1784. Mr W. Sadd of Wandsworth exhibits a singularly light and curious aërial machine, evidently the result of immense consideration in its principles and details. . . .

A pamphlet has just been published by Mr Luntley, with a frontispiece of a very new kind of balloon, in form not unlike two bagpipes of the early Italian shepherds, sewed together. It is to be of prodigious magnitude. The principle of propulsion will be that of the screw; but the balloon is to be its own screw, and work itself, by rotation, through the air. A wheel and strap are to give the rotatory motion, and the inventor is convinced that one end of the bagpipe (or queer curled point) will propel, and the other attract the air in its embrace, which will enable the aëronaut to advance in any direction he pleases. His power is to be derived from steam; and the weight of cargo he expects to be able to carry (besides the weight of his machine and apparatus) is the moderate amount of twenty-seven tons – about the weight of six full-grown elephants, with their ‘castles'.

Richard H. Horne, ‘Ballooning',
Household Words,
Vol. IV (1851)

FORWARD LET US RANGE

Let me feel the wild pulsation that I felt before the strife,

When I heard my days before me, and the tumult of my life;

Yearning for the large excitement that the coming years would yield,

Eager-hearted as a boy when first he leaves his father's field,

And at night along the dusky highway near and nearer drawn,

Sees in heaven the light of London flaring like a dreary dawn;

Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new:

That which they have done but earnest of the things that they shall do:

For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see,

Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,

Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew

From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,

With the standards of the people plunging thro' the thunder-storm;

Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled

In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,

And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapped in universal law. . . .

Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range,

Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves* of change.

[* Tennyson thought that railway lines were grooved.]

Alfred Tennyson,
Locksley Hall
(1842)

I'll lay you a hat, a guinea one . . . that he's a man of dibs and doesn't follow no trade or calling, and if that isn't a gentleman, I don't know what is.

R.S. Surtees,
Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities
(1838)

A
t the top of the social pyramid were some 4,000 aristocratic families, their wealth derived from large estates and investments; at the bottom were the urban prostitutes: the police estimated some 30,000 in England and Wales, and over 8,000 in London (a tenth of some others' more sensational figures) – though numbers declined later in the century.

The aristocracy remained a fairly self-contained social group, though frequently ‘marrying out' into the upper squirearchy and wealthy professional classes. The wives supervised access through elaborate rituals and etiquette, admission being dependent more on background and lifestyle than on (‘new') money, though by the late 1870s, with the landed classes' economic base weakened by the agricultural depression, society had to open up to wealthy business families and even American heiresses. The upper classes generally tended to marry later than the others, producing irregular behaviour among the young men, and a higher proportion of unmarried women.

There were generally more women than men (the marriage rate, low early in the century, increased in mid-century, and declined in the last quarter). Figures suggest that of 100 Englishwomen of marriageable age, 57 would be married, 12 would be widows, and 30 spinsters: there was recognition of the problem of the unmarried middle-class woman (the 25,000 governesses were in a difficult, anomalous position, genteel but employed, not family or guests or servants, suspect as marital predators).

While women generally needed to marry, their legal position left much to be desired. Until 1870, all a wife's property was her husband's (Charlotte Brontë was not pleased to have her copyright and royalties transferred to her father's curate when she married him); the upper classes sought to circumvent this with pre-marital trust arrangements. Divorce was only possible by individual Acts of Parliament until 1857, though the new law really only benefitted the better-off; a husband could obtain divorce on grounds of adultery, but a wife had to prove adultery aggravated by various nastinesses.

The middle classes, a group always hard to define, were more anxious about definitions and assertions of social identity. Status required that women should be idle, occupying themselves with making calls, water-colours or embroidery (though a fair number did engage in ‘good works', pestering the poor with fruit, advice and religious tracts); to support them, some 750,000 lower-class women were employed as domestic servants, mostly in one- or two-servant households. Before marriage, middle-class young women – as foreigners commented – had (or took) notable freedom in behaviour, which they largely lost on marrying. Sobriety of behaviour, and a cult of the self-sacrificial helpmate wife in a paternalistic family, increasingly became the norm. Much has been made of Victorian middle-class prudishness, which certainly existed, but appears to have been notably less than that of the Americans. Whether or not piano-legs were concealed, everything else in the house was smothered, with thick, double curtains, silk-lined or flock-patterned wallpaper, Brussels carpets, heavy, polished furniture and innumerable ornaments to occupy the housemaids' time. Also smothered was discussion of sexuality, in accordance with the public belief that ‘the majority [of women] are not much troubled by sexual desire' (numerous private journals and letters suggesting that, on the contrary, they found it no trouble at all). It is worth noting here the sharp decline in the national birth rate from the early 1870s, indicative of family planning, probably by use of barrier methods.

There were many reports on the working classes by middle-class explorers, shocked and anxious to shock in order to provoke reforms. Living conditions could be horrible in the big-city slums, but there were improvements, and, if one third of working-class housing was poor or wretched, another third was considered ‘decent' and ‘comfortable'. It was assumed – thrillingly – that over-crowding and multiple occupancy of bedrooms would lead to promiscuity and incest, though other accounts suggested reasonable care for modesty and propriety; again, suggestions of millowners' and overseers' ‘droits de seigneur' over women workers were often contradicted (though sexual licence in the mines seems well documented).

Many reports, then and since, have dwelt on prostitution, rife in all the cities and industrial, military and naval towns (provoking the notorious Contagious Diseases Act that permitted the arrest, detention and compulsory examination of any woman suspected of being a prostitute). ‘Prostitution' was a blanket term to cover many frailties – even including ‘fast' behaviour. At the upper end, ‘demi-mondaines' and courtesans such as Polly Evans in Manchester and ‘Skittles' Walters in London earned £50 a week, with servants and carriages, mingling with the unfastidious well-to-do. Many women in the lower classes were in effect concubines, living in serial, semi-permanent individual relationships; others sought to supplement inadequate regular incomes, or looked for better opportunities and variety, or were driven by sheer poverty. Child prostitution made a busy trade: in 1848
The Times
suggested that 90 per cent of fourteen-year-olds released from workhouses went on the street. In 1885, the journalist W.T. Stead's well-publicised purchase of a thirteen-year old brought about the Criminal Law Amendment Act, raising the age of consent from twelve to sixteen, making procuration criminal, and increasing penalties for underage sexual assault.

Meanwhile, the ‘gay ladies' and ‘soiled doves' of the West End – one night in 1857 some 200 were counted in the Haymarket and Regent Street area – earned a workman's weekly wages in one night; many others worked in the industrial and dock areas, usually in mean, dirty brothels, for whatever they could get, for food and shelter.

They may sneer as they like about eating and drinking,

But help it I cannot, I cannot help thinking

How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!

A.H. Clough, ‘Spectator Ab Extra' (1863)

* * *

THE DINING ANIMAL

(I)

Man, it has been said, is a dining animal. Creatures of the inferior races eat and drink; man only dines. It has also been said that he is a cooking animal; but some races eat food without cooking it. . . . It is equally true that some races of men do not dine any more than the tiger or the vulture. It is not a
dinner
at which sits the aboriginal Australian, who gnaws his bone half bare and then flings it behind to his squaw. And the native of Terra-del-Fuego does not dine when he gets his morsel of red clay. Dining is the privilege of civilization. The rank which a people occupy in the grand scale may be measured by their way of taking their meals, as well as by their way of treating their women. The nation which knows how to dine has learnt the leading lesson of progress. It implies both the will and the skill to reduce to order, and surround with idealisms and graces, the more material conditions of human existence; and wherever that will and skill exist, life cannot be wholly ignoble.

Isabel Beeton,
Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management
(1861)

ENGLISH DINNER

As you never were in England, I must say a few words on the routine of an English dinner, which, as I have said, is ‘à peu de chose près', everywhere alike. . . .

The gentlemen lead the ladies into the dining-room, not as in France, by the hand, but by the arm; and here, as there, are emancipated from the necessity of those antiquated bows which, even in some of the best society in Germany, are exchanged every time one hands out a lady. On the other hand, there is a most anxious regard to rank . . .