Frederick John Foakes-Jackson

“ SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND
LECTURE I Life in the Eighteenth Century Illustrated by the Career of John Wesley
In order to depict social life in England in the eighteenth century I am going to take the career of one of its most remarkable men, though you may be surprised at the choice I have made. For the eighteenth century was an eminently social age and the stage is crowded with figures of men and women of the world. Their letters, their talk, their scandals, their amusements have come down to us in profusion; and it is not difficult for us to imagine ourselves in their midst. ”

“ In the ‘forties,’ and even ‘fifties,’ many people could remember the time when it was unsafe to approach London after dusk on account of the highwaymen, when men, women, and children were hung by the score for the merest trifles, when duels were of almost daily occurrence, when the grossest abuses existed in church and state, when immorality in the highest quarters flaunted itself unashamed before the world. Old men could recall a time when to get drunk and use the foulest possible language was almost necessary, if a man were not to be written down as a milksop. ”

“ LECTURE III Margaret Catchpole
May I invite you to-day to a remote corner of England and ask you to associate with rather humble folk? Our heroine is a servant maid; her romance is her love for a smuggler and the faithful affection of a young farmer. The greatest personages to whom I shall introduce you are a Suffolk brewer and his worthy lady and uncommonly numerous family, one of whom was my grandfather. ”

“ Now to imitate Pope’s versification is easy, and to copy his mannerisms not impossible; but to gain a double portion of his spirit, to emulate his epigrammatic terseness, above all to acquire anything like his knowledge of life and human nature can only be done by a man who is even in a measure akin to him in genius. Whether Crabbe was, it must be our endeavour to decide. ”

“ And yet he had the elevation of character and the genius with fearless hand to tear the veil which hid the lives of the poor from their richer neighbours, to expose the cruelty, injustice, and rapacity of an age which for all its greatness was singularly callous and unsympathetic of weakness and suffering; and Crabbe may take his place not only with the poets of his time, but with the Clarksons, the Howards, the Frys, and the good men and women who succeeded in inaugurating an era of practical humanity. ”

“ III. Perhaps it may be said that the subject of my lecture was after all rather a commonplace old gentleman, and if what I have said leaves this view, it is because I have failed to convey the effect which the study of his works has left upon me. He certainly made a great impression in his time, and was hailed as a true poet in an age of poets. Nor is an age always wrong when it acclaims a man in whom posterity sees little merit. To compare Crabbe with Byron as a poet would be as absurd as to place his little stories on a level with the romances of Scott, whether in prose or verse. ”

“ Head of the state in the days of its greatest military glory, when the moral and political influence of England was paramount in Europe; living in the days of great industrial and mechanical triumph, in which his country had the fullest share; confronted as King with some of the gravest social problems, which its poets and philosophers were taxing their utmost to expose and remove,—the marvel is that any man could have occupied such a position, and yet interested himself almost exclusively in frivolous pleasures and sensual amours. ”

“ When we come in my next lecture to deal with academic life we shall find men of the highest intellect marked by much of the uncouthness of the people described by Crabbe or Cobbold, for many scholars had passed their early days in the same surroundings; and when we go a step higher and associate with the wits, dandies, and politicians of the Regency, I think we shall acknowledge that only a very thin crust of superficial polish lay between them and the people whom they affected to despise. But this similarity does not merely extend to the faults of society ”

“ At times it is amusing, but often it is tragic; and, believe me, in those parsonage houses in the picturesque villages of England some veritable tragedies have been enacted. How many a clergyman and his wife have succumbed before the work of bringing up an enormous family on insufficient means! How many a man of high culture has found in the parish he entered with such high hopes the end of his career! How many have dreariness and isolation led to find relief in habits which have proved their ruin! The story of the rural clergy of England is the theme of many a novelist, from Fielding onwards ”

“ The life of Crabbe the poet as told by his son is an admirable piece of biography, and the Rev. George Crabbe, junr., was to my mind at least as good a realist in prose as his father in poetry. I wonder if I am right in conjecturing that you in New England had at the same time old farmers not very unlike Mr. Tovell who lived in prosperous simplicity like the old Suffolk Yeoman, rough in manner, coarse in expression, and blunt in sensibility, yet with an honest independence of character which redeemed much which to our eyes may seem repulsive. ”

“ Trollope, to my mind, has a real genius for interesting his readers in uninteresting people; because he describes so faithfully the characters one meets every day, gives their conversation exactly as they talked to one another, and exhibits them in the same commonplace attitude, in which we all are for the greater part of our lives. He wrote not by inspiration, when he felt in the mood, but regularly and systematically, turning out his novels, when he had leisure from his duties as a government official, at so many pages an hour. ”

“ Under the Regency and during the reign of George IV and William IV the court was essentially aristocratic, and neither monarch gave it any prestige on the side of morality. Queen Victoria took a middle-class view of life; domesticity was the key-note of her reign. The Prince Consort was the model husband and father, [Pg 265] so correct, so admirable, so exemplary, that even now we are apt to forget how able and wise a man he was and how heavy a debt his adopted country owes him.
One of the effects of the Victorian age was that England awoke to a most amazing sense of its own virtue. ”

“ Rightly to appreciate this curious country we must divest ourselves of modern ideas, forget that we can be in London in two hours, ignore the fact that the commons have been turned into golf courses, that the people are occupied by letting lodgings, that their harvest is the holiday season, and that we can motor on most of the roads in comfort. ”

“ From the steeple of Glasgow Cathedral Wesley surveys the country.
“A more fruitful and better cultivated plain is scarce to be seen in England. Indeed nothing is wanted but more trade (which would naturally bring more people) to make a great part of Scotland in no way inferior to the best counties in England.” ”

“ It is getting more difficult to live on the land, as the older gentry had done; and estates are becoming rather a tax on a commercial fortune than the support of an aristocratic family. Surtees represents the old landowners as somewhat out at elbows, trying in vain to compete with the new men who are buying up their estates. In one of his novels we have a great Jewish magnate, Sir Moses Mainchance, who would have been practically impossible twenty years earlier. Sport changes with society. The railway has made country and town one, as a few hours bring all England within reach of London. ”

“ The ruling aristocracy came to an end when the Reform Bill was passed in 1832, but their prestige remained. The middle class entered the Promised Land and took their share in its government: but not triumphantly. I may almost say they were abashed by their success. The peers could no more return a great proportion of the House of Commons, they could no more promote or cast down common men much as they pleased. They dare no longer defy public opinion as their predecessors had done. ”

“ Men, as we have seen, like Creevey, occasionally managed to make themselves indispensable, but for a woman to do so was a most difficult task. At first Becky was a complete failure so far as her own sex was concerned. Miss Crawley was never taken in for a moment. She recognised her attractions and allowed her to amuse her, but had no idea of regarding Becky as anything more than a sort of upper servant. “She’s just a companion as you are, Briggs, only infinitely more amusing.” When she married Rawdon, she did for herself so far as the old lady’s good graces were concerned. ”

“ Now John Wesley was an undoubted saint, and the good he did in England, and his society in America for that matter, is incalculable: but I ask his admirers and any who profess to follow him to forgive me for using him as a peg on which to hang a few remarks on social England. Before, however, I do so may I introduce him and some of his family to you?
It is rare indeed to find in any family so much genius transmitted from father to son for more than two centuries as there was in that of the Wesleys. ”

“ The day had scarcely dawned when Thackeray died, when instead of wealth’s striving to win a place in society, society sought to obtain the recognition of the very rich. His satire had not to expend itself on aristocrats who hastened to abase themselves before the millionaire, and snobbery changed from a worship of rank to a worship of wealth. Our author has often been criticised for his abuse of the nobility. It has been said that it was prompted by envy. I venture to doubt this. To be as great a satirist as he, a man must feel deeply and have a saeva indignatio against a great evil. ”

“ Even to-day there is one to whom England looks with confidence, though his stern practical ability inspires but little affection, among whose proud and well-deserved titles is the name of his mother’s home, an out-of-the-way Suffolk village; for on entering the peerage Earl Kitchener assumed the style of Baron Kitchener of Khartoum and Aspal. [11]
The force of character which produces great men is certain almost to manifest itself for evil also, and we recognise the truth of much of Crabbe’s stern realism in the characters to which he introduces us. ”

“ They are the people Thackeray himself knew, in the garb of their supposed period, but really men and women of the middle of the nineteenth century. Esmond and George Warrington, Rachel, Lady Castlewood, and her incomparable daughter Beatrix are, with all their perfect accessories, modern men and women playing a part, admirably it is true, but still a part, in the comedy of a bygone age. ”

“ Among all classes there has been a rush from the country to the towns; and there has been a growing tendency to regard rural England rather as a playground than as the source of the nation’s best inhabitants. This tendency has unfortunately, in my judgment at least, been fostered by a legislation which has refused to give agriculture the encouragement it requires, with the result that our villages in England almost all tell the same tale of falling population. ”

“ Dickens recognised that the education of all classes was killing individuality, and not fostering moral or spiritual qualities. He recognised that in the type of Charley Hexam it was encouraging a desire for “respectability,” consisting, not in taking one’s coat off to work, but in working in a black coat, which was killing the finer feelings in which the poor often shew to the advantage of the rich. ”

“ Jawleyford, as his name implies, is a pretentious fellow, apparently hearty and hospitable, but very deceptive to those who come in close contact with him. He poses as a man of culture and refinement, and also as an ardent devotee of the chase. Sponge cares for only one thing on earth, and that is hunting; and he is emphatically a man of one book, namely, a work on London cab fares by a certain Mogg—whether the title is an invention or not, I do not know. ”

“ Even naturally humane men were found to defend these dreadful abuses in the House of Commons. Here is an extract from a speech: “Although in the higher ranks of society it was true that to cultivate the affections of children for their family was the source of every virtue, yet it was not so among the lower orders.... It would be highly injurious to the public to put a stop to the binding of so many apprentices to the cotton manufacturers, as it must necessarily raise the price of labour and enhance the price of cotton manufactured goods!” ”

“ In it we have the record, not of a diarist, but of an old, old man in his last illness, a man by his own account not devoid of piety or good feeling, yet recollecting every slight, every injury, he had sustained nearly sixty years before, the dislikes of his youth for men long gone to their account being as green and vigorous as they were when he first formed them. One cannot even like him, but nevertheless it is impossible to deny that he can not only amuse but instruct, and that much would have been forgotten but for his dictated notes about the Cambridge of his youth. ”

“ We have seen in Crabbe how what was then called “enthusiasm” in religion drove more than one of his characters into a despair of gloom. Not that there was not a great deal of genuine piety: the churches of East Anglia are the glory of the countryside, and many of the most magnificent are due to the liberality of its traders and manufacturers in the days when it was one of the industrial centres of English life. ”