Gentry

“ This is the cause that the country is ruined, And the straw of the thatch is eaten away, The gentry are come to live in the land— Chimneys between the village, And the proprietor upon the white floor! ”

“ It is by living scattered through the realm, amid their own people, their own lands and woods, that our gentry have retained such high independence of principle, and such healthy tastes as they have done. ”

“ It is strange how careless and apathetic are the gentry of the land--they that one would have thought to be most eager, most forward. They stand aloof; and the richer of the trades' guilds will have little to say to us. ”

“ In the sumptuous dwellings of the wealthy, the gentry stretch their pampered bodies on the soft couch of ease and warmth, imitated to a nicety by their dependents. In the dwellings of the middle class, comfort if not absolute sumptuousness is displayed and enjoyed. ”

“ The gentry or nobility—the terms are the same on the Continent—went to live in the towns. They could no longer afford to inhabit their country mansions. They acquired a taste for town life, its conveniences, its distractions, its amusements ”

“ The great house, the church, the village, and the labourers and the servants in their stations and degrees, seemed to me, I say, to be a closed and complete social system. About us were other villages and great estates, and from house to house, interlacing, correlated, the Gentry, the fine Olympians, came and went. The country towns seemed mere collections of ships, marketing places for the tenantry, centres for such education as they needed, as entirely dependent on the gentry as the village and scarcely less directly so. ”

“ There are houses of prosperous gentry, and picturesque dwellings of wood and plaster of a long-ago time. Indeed, the rich and the poor may be equally content with their lot in this fair, fertile, and rarely gifted locality. ”

“ The good old way among the gentry of England to maintain their pre-eminence over the lower rank, was by their bounty, munificence, and hospitality; and it is a very unhappy change, if at present, by themselves or their agents, the luxury of the gentry is supported by the credit of the trader. ”

“ I have considered the great rural establishments of the nobility, and the lesser establishments of the gentry, as so many reservoirs of wealth and intelligence distributed about the kingdom, apart from the towns, to irrigate, freshen, and fertilize the surrounding country. ”

“ The gentry—not chiefs, but tacksmen—as we have said, did not live luxuriously. Examples may be given. ‘Although they have been attended at dinner by five or six servants, they have often dined upon oat-meal varied several ways, pickled herrings, or other such cheap and indifferent diet.... Their houses are sometimes built with stone and lime’ (like Barisdale’s palace) , but other houses of the gentry ‘are built in the manner of the huts.’ Burt [266] mentions one such house, with beasts dwelling under the roof of the owner, or tacksman. ”

“ The inhabitants were divided into three distinct classes--the poor, who gained a scanty livelihood by working in the fields, the shop-keepers, and the gentry, the latter class consisting principally of old maids and widows, ladies of unblemished gentility and limited means. ”

“ Most gentry had a house in London, where they spent most of their time, as well as country mansions. About 4/5 of the land was in the hands of 7,000 of the nobility and landed gentry due in part to entails constructed by attorneys to favor hereditary interests. The gentry had also profited by commerce and colonial possessions. The country life of a country squire or gentleman dealt with all the daily affairs of a farm. He had men plough, sow, and reap. ”

“ Now we have in our upper classes, in our country parsonages and manor houses, in town mansion and suburban villa, among our gentry generally, the very finest material in the world for infusing into the working classes that very element which it lacks. ”

“ A stranger has no more to do but to inquire upon [361] the road where any gentleman or good housekeeper lives, and then he may depend upon being received with hospitality. This good-nature is so general among their people, that the gentry, when they go abroad, order their principal servants to entertain all visitors with everything the plantation affords; and the poor planters who have but one bed, will often sit up, or lie upon a form or couch all night, to make room for a weary traveller to repose himself after his journey. ”

“ The gentry seem to have resided in our vicinity, when there was the greatest inducement to leave it, impassable roads: they seem also to have quitted the country, now there is the greatest inducement to reside there; roads, which improve their estates, and may be travelled with pleasure. ”

“ The consequence is, that the church lands now present some of the finest features in the social landscape, occupied by a class of resident gentry, an essential link, in any well-organised society, between the people and the great proprietors. ”

“ They are learned in sounds, these triangular-headed gentry. See! he looks up; if it were a moonlight night, I should think some of the young neighbouring vagabonds had come to plunder the rookery or the dovecot. ”

“ It has filled our shires with gentlemen; for, as Defoe observed, in the early eighteenth century 'many of the great families who now pass for gentry in the western counties have been originally raised from and built up by this truly noble manufacture'. ”

“ And this we cannot but regard as an indication of application and attachment to rural improvements highly honourable to our nobility and gentry, as superseding many of those pursuits that used to prevail to a great extent with gentlemen residing in the country, which had but little tendency to the improvement of their grounds or estates. ”

“ The fact is, that the small planters who constitute the majority of the land-owners are not in a position to act the Amphytrion, and that the inhabitants of the district can scarcely aspire to be considered what we would call gentry in England, but are a frugal, simple, hog-and-hominy living people, fond of hard work and, occasionally, of hard drinking. ”

“ The gentry usually lived in mansions.
The old yeoman class was disappearing due to their selling their land to larger landowners. Farming on a large scale was more productive.
The next class were the "middling sort". In this class were merchants, lawyers, substantial tenant farmers, smaller freeholders, millers, innkeepers, in town traders, middlemen, clothiers, ironmongers, goldsmiths, grocers, linen drapers, apothecaries, school masters, clerks and civil servants, customs and excise men, and .shopkeepers, who now kept their wares inside and lived on the second floor. ”

“ To supply this deficiency is the intent of the present publication, which aims, as already suggested, at being a handbook to the nobility and gentry of London—the term gentry being understood to include logically those to whom the title of gentleman has been accorded by common consent—those as a rule whose vocation in life p. ”

“ The proprietor of that soil should be the true New England gentleman. His house should be the home of hospitality, the embodiment of solid comfort and liberal taste, the theatre of an exalted family-life which shall be the master and not the servant of labor, and the central sun of a bright and happy social atmosphere. ”

“ These were all signs of habitation, yet no one moved about, no stir or bustle denoted that there were dwellers within. How different from the country life of our great houses in England, with trains of servants and equipages hurrying hither and thither—all the wealth and magnificence of the great capital transported to some far-off county, that ennui and fastidiousness, fatigue, and lassitude, should lose none of their habitual aids! Well, for my part, the life among green trees and flowers, where the thrush sings, and the bee goes humming by, can scarcely be too homely for my taste. ”

“ Morning and evening, from every village within three or four miles of the metropolis, may be remarked a tide of young men wending diurnal way to and from their respective desks and counters in the city, preceded by a ripple of errand-boys, and light porters, and followed by an ebb of plethoric elderly gentlemen in drab gaiters. Now these individuals compose—for the most part—that particular, yet indefinite class of people, who call themselves “gentlemen,” and are called by everybody else “persons.” ”

“ I had no doubt that I was in the neighborhood of some town, but of its name, and the part of the country in which it was located, I was ignorant. I at length found that I was receding from the woods altogether, and entering a champaign country, in the midst of which I now perceived a town of considerable magnitude, the inhabitants of which were entirely silent, and the town itself presented the appearance of total solitude. ”

“ We have contemplated the rural dwelling of the peasant; let us next consider the ruralised domicile of the gentleman: and here, as before, we shall first determine what is theoretically beautiful, and then observe how far our expectations are fulfilled in individual buildings. ”

“ We kept our town-house, into which we returned for a winter or two; but gave it up for a permanent residence here, with which we are perfectly content. We see here all the friends we want to see; we all enjoy ourselves, and the children are healthy and happy." And this is but a specimen of thousands of families in the enjoyment of country life, including the families of men in the highest station, and possessed of sufficient wealth. ”

“ Where is the town in this wide kingdom where hunger does not stalk ferociously through the streets, and howl in the dark alleys? Where is the village where want does not wet the mother’s pillow with tears, and open untimely graves for the gentle and the manly? ”

“ There is a freshness in thy neighbourhood, a quiet beauty in thy streets, a cozy comfort in many of thy dwellings, and a venerable and impressive grandeur in thy religious edifices, belonging alone to an English town of good and ancient descent. ”

“ Can you tell us whether there is a town or a village in the neighbourhood? for, as you see, we stand sadly in need of clothing, food, and shelter. We have no money, but we have good muscles and stout hearts, and could work our way well enough, I doubt not. ”

“ And there are many such primitive towns nestling among our hills and valleys, some even less pretending; and there are lone cottages scattered by the road-side, and huts of squalid poverty, and the thrifty homestead of the farmer, all of which have their heart-histories. ”

“ Such artificers, too, stand, occasionally, in need of the assistance of one another; and as their residence is not, like that of the farmer, necessarily tied down to a precise spot, they naturally settle in the neighborhood of one another, and thus form a small town or village. ”

“ Have you ever realised what those acres and acres of crowded, heated, badly-built houses, over which you pass so quickly by train when you go in and out of London, mean? What kind of homes they make? What sort of human beings live and die there? Have you asked yourselves whether your [Pg 71] presence, your companionship, is needed there? Whether the little children want your teaching? Whether your gentleness, your refinement, your gaiety, your beauty, are wanted there? Neighbourhood! ”

“ Here in our American cities are the overwealthy and the insolently worldly people. They have their palatial town house, their broad inland acres; some of them have their seaside homes, their fish and game preserves as well. Here in our American cities are the alien, the ignorant, the helpless, crowded into unclean and indecent tenements, sometimes 1,000 human beings to the acre. ”

“ Now, alas, almost every country gentleman's house in the neighborhood is no longer occupied by its ancient proprietors, and is sold or let to successful tradespeople, so that the quintessence of society in the town plumes itself on not knowing the occupants of these stately mansions. ”

“ You can not now travel a mile through that midland region of plenty and prosperity without hearing the merry chime of village bells from many a country spire, without passing the happy doors of hundreds of low cottage homes, hundreds of pleasant hamlets courting the mellow sunshine from some laughing knoll, or nestling in the shrubberies of some orchard-mantled hollow. ”

“ He looked up at the large houses on both sides of him, and thought how the owners of these houses had only to decide between one sheltered seaside village and another, between this gentle climate and that gentler one, for pleasure's sake; while he, with the health of his darling in the balance, was tied down to the thick and clammy atmosphere of the streets. ”

“ You would have your tenants to look after, and your property to keep in order, and the whole village looking to you to lead every scheme of pleasure or improvement, and the vicar looking to you to be his right hand, and all the growing boys looking to you to help them to a start in life, and the old people expecting you to make their last days easy. ”

“ It is not possible to conceive a more violent and melancholy contrast than that which the filth, the poverty, and forlornness of these weavers’ and spinners’ dwellings form to the neatness, comfort, and loveliness of the cottages of the peasantry in many other parts of the kingdom. ”

“ Did gentlemen of large estates in the country but once taste the exalted pleasure of making the whole neighbourhood happy, and consider how much honest industry they might support, how much misery they might alleviate, and how many daily blessings they might have poured forth upon their heads from hearts overflowing with love, respect and gratitude, almost to adoration, we should not so often see them leave their noble country mansions to repair to noise and folly ”

“ Hence it behooves every town to make itself a desirable place of residence; for many people are always puzzling themselves over the problem of where and how to live, and those towns which have their floors swept and garnished and their lamps trimmed and burning ready to receive the bride and bridegroom, will be most likely to attract within their borders the seekers of farm life and rural homes. ”