Walter Besant

“ How bravely do they tread in their tight trousers, bright-coloured waistcoats, and high satin stocks! with what a jaunty air do they tilt their low-crowned hats over their long and waving locks—you can smell the bear’s grease across the road! with what a flourish do they bear their canes! Here comes swaggering along the pavement a military gentleman in a coat much befrogged. He has the appearance of one who knows Chalk Farm, which is situated among meadows where the morning air has been known to prove suddenly fatal to many gallant gentlemen. ”

“ Now, as then, the Court neither attracts, nor attempts to attract, any of the leaders in Art, Science, or Literature. Now, as then, the Court is a thing apart from the life of the country. For the best class of all, those who are continually advancing the country in science, or keeping alight the sacred lamp of letters, who are its scholars, architects, engineers, artists, poets, authors, journalists, who are the merchant adventurers of modern times, who are the preachers and teachers, the Court simply does not exist. ”

“ The leisure of the eighteenth century exists, in fact, only in the brain of painter and poet. Life was hard; labour was incessant, and lasted the whole day long; the shopmen lived in the shop—they even slept in it; the mill people worked all day long and far into the night. If I look about the country, I see in town and village the poor man oppressed and driven by his employer: I see the labourer in a blind revenge setting fire to the ricks; I see the factory hand destroying the machinery ”

“ They do not sit up talking all night. That is, perhaps, because there are no wits to talk with; but I do not know: I think that towards midnight the malice of Count d’Orsay in drawing out the absurd points in the guests, the rollicking fun of Tom Moore, or his sentimental songs, the repartee of James Smith, and the polished talk of Lytton Bulwer, all collar, cuff, diamond pin, and wavy hair, would have begun to pall upon me, and when nobody was taking any notice of so obscure an individual, I should have stolen down the stairs, and so out into the open air beneath the stars. ”

“ It will be a picture of a time so utterly passed away and vanished that a young man can hardly understand it. I, who am no longer, unhappily, quite so young as some, and whose babyhood heard the cannon of the Coronation, can partly understand this time, because in many respects, and especially in the manners of the middle class, customs and habits which went out of fashion in London lingered in the country towns, and formed part of my own early experiences. ”

“ For a hundred and fifty years there had been no loyalty among the people. Loyalty left the country with James II. Not one of the Sovereigns who followed him commanded the personal enthusiasm of the people, not even Farmer George, for whom there had been some kind of affection with something of contempt. From 1687 until 1837, which is exactly one hundred and fifty years, not one Sovereign who sat upon the Throne of England could boast that he had the love of the people. Not one wished to have the love of the people. ”

“ Here comes a middle-aged gentleman who looks almost like a coachman in his coat with many capes and his purple cheeks. That is the famous coaching baronet, than whom no better whip has ever been seen upon the road. ”

“ The people, however, have a surprisingly different appearance. The ladies, because the east wind is cold, still keep to their fur tippets, their thick shawls, and have their necks wrapped round with boas, the ends of which hang down to their skirts, a fashion revived by yourself; their bonnets are remarkable structures, like an ornamental coal-scuttle of the Thirty-seven, not the Eighty-seven, period, and some of them are of surprising dimensions, and decorated with an amazing profusion of ribbons and artificial flowers. ”

“ There has befallen literature of late years a grievous, even an irreparable blow. It has lost the salon. There are no longer grandes dames de par le monde, who attract to their drawing-rooms the leaders and the lesser lights of literature; there are no longer, so far as I know, any places at all, even any clubs, which are recognised centres of literature; there are no longer any houses where one will be sure to find great talkers, and to hear them talking all night long. ”

“ There will be the tyranny of the Caucus to be faced and trampled down; we must endure, with all his vices and his demagogic arts, the professional politician whose existence depends on his party; we must expect—and ceaselessly fight against—bribery and wholesale corruption when a class of these professional politicians, poor,268 unscrupulous, and grasping, will be continually, by every evil art, by every lying statement, by every creeping baseness, endeavouring to climb unto power—such there are already among us ”

“ The Government is no longer a thing apart from themselves, and outside them. It is their own—it is the Government of the People of England. If there is anything in it which they do not like, they can alter it; if there is anything they agree to abolish, they can abolish it, whether it be Church, Crown, Lords, wealth, education, science, art—anything. ”

“ No virtue at all seems to have survived among all the many virtues attributed to our race except a bulldog courage and tenacity. There are glimpses here and there, when some essayist or novelist lifts the veil, which show conditions of existence so shocking that one asks in amazement how there could have been any cheerfulness in the civilised part of the community for thinking of the terrible creatures in the ranks below. ”

“ Nothing could be more untrue. The poor—that is to say, the working classes—have grown distinctly better off. They are better housed; they are better fed; they are more cheaply fed; they are better dressed; they have a thousand luxuries to which they were formerly strangers; their children are educated; in most great towns they have free libraries; they have their own clubs; they are at liberty to combine and to hold public meetings; they have the Post Office Savings Bank; and, as for political power, they have all the power there is, because you cannot give any man more than his vote. ”

“ It is by the visitors that the theatres are kept up. The people of London have in great measure lost their taste for the theatres, because they have gone to live in the suburbs. Who, for instance, that lives in Hampstead and wishes to get up in good time in the morning can take his wife often to the theatre? It takes an hour to drive into town, the hour after dinner. The play is over at a little after eleven; if he takes a cab, the driver is sulky at the thought of going up the hill and getting back again without another fare; if he goes and returns in a brougham, it doubles the expense. ”

“ They have blindly followed the old plan of lighting, and have stuck up a gas lamp wherever there used to be an oil lantern. The theatres and places of amusement are brilliant with gas, and it is gas which makes the splendour of the gin-palace. The shops took to it slowly, but they are now beginning to understand how to brighten their appearance after dark. Go into any little thoroughfare, however, and you will see the shops lit with two or three candles still. ”

“ After you have taken your dinner, friend Eighty-seven, I shall prescribe for you what you will never get, poor wretch—a bottle of the best port in the cellars of the Mitre.
CHARLES DICKENS
My friend, there is one thing in which we of the Thirties do greatly excel you of the Eighties. We can eat like ploughboys, and we can drink like draymen. As for your nonsense about Apollinaris Water, we do not know what it means; and as for your not being able to take a simple glass of port, we do not in the least understand it. Not take a pint of port? Man alive! ”

“ The water is icy cold, but fresh and bright, and always running. The place is never crowded; hardly anybody seems to know that here, in the heart of London, is a monument of Roman times, to visit which, if it were at Arles or Avignon, people would go all the way from London. Some day, no doubt, we shall hear that it has been sold and destroyed, like Sion College, and the spring built over. ”

“ I am only a very poor man.’ ‘Prisoner,’ rejoined the judge, with a twinkle in his eye, ‘it is the glory of the law of England that it knows no distinction between rich and poor.’ Yet it was not until twenty years after the Queen came to the throne that the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes was created. ”

“ There seems also to have been gathered at the University a larger proportion of county people than in these later years, when the Universities have not only been thrown open to men of all creeds, but when men of every class find in their rich endowments and prizes a legitimate and laudable way of rising in the world. ‘The recognised way of making a gentleman now,’ says Charles Kingsley in ‘Alton Locke,’ ‘is to send him to the University.’ I do not know how Charles Kingsley was made a gentleman, but it is certainly a very common method of advancing your son if he is clever. ”

“ In country houses, the simple, light, home-brewed ale, the preparation of which caused a most delightful anxiety as to the result, was the sole beverage used at dinner and supper. Every farmhouse, every large country house, and many town house keepers brewed their own beer, just as they made their own wines, their own jams, and their own lavender water. Beer was universally taken with dinner; even at great dinner-parties some of the guests would call for beer, and strong ale was always served with the cheese. After dinner, only port and sherry, in middle-class houses, were put upon the table. ”

“ We still constantly hear, in the modern School for Scandal, remarks concerning the honour, the virtue, the cleverness, the ability, the beauty, the accomplishments of our friends. But it is behind their backs. We no longer try to put the truth openly before them. We stab in the back; but we no longer attack in front. One ought not to stab at all; but the back is a portion of the frame which feels nothing. So far the change is a distinct gain.
Society, again, fifty years ago, was exclusive. ”

“ How this country got through without a revolution, how it escaped the dangers of that mob, are questions more difficult to answer than the one which continually occupies historians—How Great Britain, single-handed, fought against the conqueror of the world. ”

“ We do not pretend to believe any longer that Rank by itself makes people cleverer, more moral, stronger, more religious, or more capable; but some of us still believe that, in some unknown way, it makes them superior. These thinkers are getting fewer. And the decay of agriculture, which promises to continue and increase, assists the decay of Respect for Rank, because such an aristocracy as that of these islands, when it becomes poor, becomes contemptible. ”

“ There is nothing in the whole history of mankind which shows more clearly the enormities which become possible when men, spurred by desire for gain, are left uncontrolled by laws or the weight of public opinion, and placed in the position of absolute mastery over their fellow-men. The record of the slavery time is black in the West Indies and the United States, God knows; but the record of the English mine and factory is blacker still. It is so black that it seems incredible to us. We ask ourselves in amazement if, fifty years ago, these things could be. ”

“ He is a man of very considerable talent, but has nothing approaching to genius. His abilities are much more the result of an excellent education, and of mature study, than of any prodigality on the part of Nature in the distribution of mental gifts. I have no idea that he will ever acquire the reputation of a great statesman. His views are not sufficiently profound or enlarged for that; his celebrity in the House of Commons will chiefly depend on his readiness and dexterity as a debater, in conjunction with the excellence of his elocution, and the gracefulness of his manner when speaking. ”

“ Saw you ever a finer coach, more splendidly appointed, with better cattle? Ten miles an hour that coachman reckons upon as soon as he is clear of London. They say that in a year or two, when all the railways are opened, the stage coaches will be ruined, the horses all sold, and the English breed of horses ruined. We shall travel twenty miles an hour without stopping to change horses; the accidents will be frightful, but those who meet with none will get from London to Edinburgh in less than twenty-four hours. Next year they promise to open the London and Birmingham Railway. ”

“ On levée days and drawing-rooms the fashionable world went to the Opera in their Court dresses, feathers, and diamonds, and all—a very moving spectacle. Those who only took a box in order to keep up appearances, and because it was necessary for one in society to have a box, used to sell seats—commonly called bones, because a round numbered bone was the ticket of admission—to their friends ”

“ There goes a man who may have been an officer, an actor, a literary man, a gambler—anything; whatever he was, he is now broken-down—his face is pale, his gait is shuffling, his elbows are gone, his boots are giving at the toes, and—see—the stout red-faced man with the striped waistcoat and the bundle of seals hanging at his fob has tapped him on the shoulder. ”

“ Some of the old politeness has been lost, though there are still men with the fine manners of our grandfathers: the example of the women who speak, who write, who belong to professions, and are, generally, aggressive, threatens to change the manners of all women: they have already become more assured, more self-reliant, less deferent to men’s opinion—the old deference of men to women was, of course, merely conventional. They no longer dread the necessity of working for themselves ”

“ WITH THE PEOPLE. When the real history of the people comes to be written—which will be the History, not of the Higher, but of the Lower Forms of Civilisation—it will be found that, as regards the people of these islands, they sank to their lowest point of degradation and corruption in the middle of the eighteenth century—a period when they had no religion, no morality, no education, and no knowledge, and when they were devoured by two dreadful diseases, and were prematurely killed by their excessive drinking of gin. ”

“ There was the Epping Hunt on Easter Monday, where the sporting Londoners turned out in thousands; there were the ponies on hire at any open place all round London—at Clapham Common, Blackheath, Hampstead, Epping. To ride was the young Londoner’s greatest ambition: even to this day there is not one young man in ten who will own without a blush that he cannot ride. To ride in the Park was impossible for him, because he had to be at his desk at ten; a man who rides in the Park is independent of the City ”

“ They loved the cry of ‘Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,’ and still believed in it. They dreamed of a country which they thought could be established by law, in which every man was to be the equal of his neighbour—as clever, as skilful, as capable, as rich, and as happy. ”

“ But perhaps the crowning grievance of all—a grievance felt equally keenly by suitors at law and in equity—arose from the limited powers of the Courts. If there were a remedy at law for any given wrong, for instance, the Court of Chancery could give no relief. In the same way, if it turned out, as it often did, that a plaintiff should have sued in equity instead of proceeding at law, he was promptly nonsuited. Law could not grant an injunction; equity could not construe an Act of Parliament. ”

“ Trade, even of the grandest and most successful kind, even in the persons of the grandchildren, had no chance whatever; no self-made man was admitted; in fact, it was not recognised that a man could make himself; either he belonged to a good family or he did not—genius was not considered at all; admission to Almack’s was like admission to the Order of the Garter, because it pretended no nonsense about merit; wives and daughters of simple country squires, judges, bishops, generals, admirals, and so forth, knew better than to apply ”

“ That seems to be a delightful condition of things when you cannot get justice to listen to you for a year and a half, and when it may cost a defendant three times the amount disputed in order to defend what he knows—though his counsel may fail to make a jury understand the case—to be just and right. I humbly submit, as the next reform in Law, that Justice shall have no holidays, so as to expedite actions, and that the verdict shall in no case carry costs, so as to cheapen them.
As for our recreations, we no longer bawl comic songs at taverns, and there is no Vauxhall. ”

“ The sporting instincts of the Londoner gave the comic person an endless theme for fun. He was always hiring a horse and coming to grief; he was perpetually tumbling off, losing his stirrups, letting his whip fall, having his hat blown off and carried away, and generally disgracing himself in the eyes of those with whom he wished to appear to the best advantage. ”

“ Imprisonment on ‘mesne process’ or, in plain English, on the mere affidavit of a creditor, was the leading principle of this branch of the bankruptcy law; and in prison the debtor remained until he found security or paid. The anomaly which exempted real estate from the payment of debts had been removed in 1825; and, since then, a debtor, actually in prison, could obtain a release from confinement by a surrender of all his real and personal property, although he remained liable for all the unpaid portion of his debts whenever the Court should be satisfied of his ability to pay them. ”