# A Short History of Social Life in England/Chapter 23

CHAPTER XXIII
Circa 1785—1802
THE "QUALITY"
"Opinions, like fashions, descend from those of quality down to the vulgar, where they are dropped and vanish."—Swift.
THE growing wealth of the commercial classes affected all ranks of society, and none more than the proud old aristocracy of England, the "quality" as they were called in the eighteenth century. Although George III. had decreed that "no individual engaged in trade, however ample might be his nominal fortune," should be created a British peer; although they were the natural heads of landed interest in England, the "centre of a traditional popular reverence unmistakable in its … sincerity," the acknowledged leaders of public life, inasmuch as they entirely constituted the House of Lords, and by their borough ​patronage materially influenced the House of Commons—for all this, the position and power of the nobility and gentry were almost unconsciously diminishing year by year. And this change was to grow more marked with the inevitable rise of the democracy in the nineteenth century. But the "quality," as heretofore, still led the manners and fashions of the people, and it is to them we must still look for the momentous changes of the eighteenth century. The century divides itself into two parts: the first half coarse, godless, merry and careless; the latter part growing in refinement, delicacy, simplicity, and soberness.
Amid the numerous varieties in women's dress, the most marked characteristics were the hoop and the powdered head-dress. The famous hoop petticoats had been increasing steadily in size and clumsiness since the reign of Queen Anne. Extravagance throughout the reign of George II. afforded ample scope to the satirist of the period; their inconvenience and want of grace have been made well known to us by contemporary writings. We see the poor ladies, martyrs to this deplorable craze, sidling up and down stairs, edging themselves through narrow doors, occupying the whole of the narrow pavements, thereby compelling men ​to walk in the roads, blocking church pews, filling aisles, ill at ease in shops and places of amusement—grotesque figures and conspicuous in their gaudy colours. For these hoop petticoats were made of the richest damask velvets, elaborately embroidered with gold and silver. Mrs. Delany tells us of a white brocaded lustring at 13s. a yard, "with great ramping flowers in shades of purples, reds, and greens," adding with quite unnecessary candour: "It will make a great show." A yet more startling petticoat was of black velvet embroidered with chenille, the "pattern being a large stone vase filled with ramping flowers that spread over the whole," and as if this was not enough, between the vases of flowers was a device of gold shells and foliage embossed and "most heavily rich."
At the accession of George III., and before the dawn of moderation, the head-dress of women reached a climax of absurdity. Enormous structures were worn stuffed with horse-hair puffs and powdered with a preparation of pomatum and meal; they were surmounted with ribbons, jewels, artificial flowers or plumes of feathers, introduced by the famous Duchess of Devonshire. This raised the whole head-dress to such a ​grotesque height that we hear of the tops of sedan chairs being removed to allow room for these unsightly heads, and ladies had to take refuge on the floors of their carriages to enable them to drive at all. Neither was it uncommon to find fruits mingled in the head-dress—"an acre and a hall of shrubbery," remarked Hannah More, "beside slopes, grass plots, tulip beds, clumps of peonies, kitchen gardens and greenhouses." The fashion was ended by the appearance of Garrick on the stage dressed as a woman of the age, with every kind of vegetable on his head and a large carrot hanging down on either side.
Equally artificial was the complexion of the day. Rouge and white lip salve, "Dutch Pink," "Bavarian Red," wash-balls made of poisonous chemicals, scented oils, cosmetics made of borax, vinegar, bread, eggs, and the wings of pigeons; false eyebrows and perfumed waters—all helped in the vital art of beautifying and rejuvenating the "quality" of the eighteenth century.
But changes were at hand. The flood of English-made cotton goods created new fashions. Expensive silks, damasks and velvets, which had played such a large part in the dress of the upper classes, began to disappear, and with them the ​hoops; all woollen goods went out of fashion—and here it is interesting to note that, although wool was England's main trade, the value of woollen underclothing was as yet unrecognised. Cottons, muslins, crapes, and calicoes became more and more popular, and while these materials were changing the quality of dress, "a great wave of fashion in France was moving in the direction of a republican simplicity." But it took time to revolutionise English dress.
Meanwhile Protection was the keynote of our commercial life in this age. To encourage native manufactures, George III. actively opposed all importation of foreign goods by the levy of heavy duties. Thus gloves, which had now become an important feature of dress, and were imported into this country from abroad, were taxed 1d. and 3d. a pair, according to their quality, with the result that smuggling went on merrily. It is a well-known, if melancholy fact that women were famed for their ingenuity in smuggling, velvet and laces being specially secreted. "The pattern of velvet you sent me is so pretty," writes a lady to her friend abroad, "that it determines me to risk the vigilance of the Custom House officers."
Flemish lace was not infrequently smuggled ​into the country in coffins, and it is said that £6,000 worth of foreign lace was discovered hidden in the coffin of a certain man who died in Paris, which speaks well for the vigilance exercised by the Customs officers on the English coast. Lace was as popular with men as with women, forming as it did an important part of their dress. Thus we find Horace Walpole discussing the merits of lace with a friend in terms of the deepest interest. "I have chosen you a coat of claret colour," he writes, "but I have fixed nothing about the lace. Barrett had none of gauze but what was as broad as the Irish Channel. Your tailor found a very reputable one at another place, but I would not determine rashly; it will be two or three and twenty shillings the yard; you might have a very substantial real lace for twenty." It is impossible to conceive such a correspondence between two men in these days. The wigs, worn religiously by men and boys till the middle of the century, now began to disappear; men of fashion allowed their hair to grow long, tied it in a pig-tail or queue, and dressed it in front with a curl on either side of the head. The hair was worn powdered till 1795, when Pitt levied a tax of a ​guinea on every powdered head, expecting to add considerably to the revenue from the pockets of the rich. But, contrary to his expectations, the gay world eluded this ingenious tax by giving up the use of powder.
"Take care," said an Oxford tutor to young Landor, who was the first undergraduate to discard powder for his hair—"take care, or they will stone you for a republican." "But," said the poet, looking back across past years, "I stuck to my plain hair and queue tied with black ribbon."
This was but part of the dress revolution. The reign of the cocked hat trimmed with gold and silver was drawing to its close, and in its stead arrived the ancestor of the modern top-hat, only at present rounder, higher, and broader in the brim. One cannot but regret the change from canary-coloured pantaloons, long, grass-green, wide-skirted coats, and pink and buff waistcoats, reaching nearly to the knees, to the sombre-hued garments which were already beginning to replace these cheerful tints. The diamond-hilted sword, the clouded cane, and the suspended muff completed the eighteenth-century costume. These muffs had been used by both sexes during the Stuart period, but they did not come into general ​use till this time. They were small, and often made of feathers and lace. "I send you a smallish muff that you may put in your pocket, and it costs but 14s.," writes Horace Walpole to a friend. Muffs grew larger as time went on, and we find a London citizen going to church with a large white muff—the last new thing from Paris—suspended from his neck. A little pet dog belonging to a lady in the same pew crept in, curled up, and went to sleep, while the owner was occupied with his prayers. The sequel of the story may be easily imagined!
But though there was nothing effeminate in wearing a muff, it was beneath contempt for a man to carry an umbrella. The story of Jonas Hanway—the first man who dared to hold up an umbrella in London, and to brave the jeers and hoots of a London crowd—reads like a fairy-tale to-day, but the innovation made way very slowly, and thirty years after this, there was only one umbrella in Cambridge, and it was kept at a shop and let out by the hour!
With more rapidity the distinction between the dress of the quality and of the commercial classes was being obliterated. Sumptuary laws were already matters of past history. "If great men ​will dress like tradesmen, and tradesmen like great men, it will be necessary to make a new law for fashion," sighed one whose mind could not grasp the inevitable change. As in dress, so in manners and morals changes were taking place. The King had stopped gambling at the Palace, and in one short year the four hundred lottery offices in London had decreased to fifty-one. Two of the highest ladies in the land were summoned for playing high stakes, and fined £50, after which gambling was no longer reputable.
The hard drinking of the early Hanoverian period was likewise diminishing. Dr. Johnson, who had systematically drunk three bottles of port at a sitting in his young days, and remembered the time when all decent people got drunk every night without social criticism, ascribed the change to the substitution of wine for beer. But there was also a growing delicacy of feeling in the matter, and a repulsion to the demeanour and language of a drunken gentleman. True, they still ate enormously. "I see here every day," writes Walpole, "men who are mountains of roast beef, and only seem just roughly hewn out into the outlines of human form." He himself was moderate in all things, and usually drank ​iced water. But, like men in all ages, he greatly resented innovation. "Everything is changed," he sighs from time to time. "I do not like dining at nearly six nor beginning the evening at ten at night If one does not conform, one must live alone. … I am a remnant of the last age. … I don't care a rush for gold and diamonds, I don't understand horse-racing, I never go to reviews." Wistfully he yearned, as so many had yearned before him, to return to the simplicity of ancient times, "when we were the frugal, temperate, virtuous old English … before tea and sugar were known."
But if Walpole could not enter into the amusement of horse-racing it was greatly on the increase among his friends, and this period saw the inauguration of the famous Derby Stakes, which started with thirty-six subscribers at £50 each.
Among the refining influences of the times may be included the revival of Shakspere's dramas by Garrick, who purged the English theatre of the coarse and scandalous plays that had so delighted our forefathers throughout the early Hanoverian period. Persons of quality were still accommodated with chairs on the stage, which were retained by footmen in gorgeous livery till they ​arrived; there were no stalls, the whole floor being given up to the pit, where sat the critics, while boxes and galleries contained the general public. The play began at five o'clock, seats varying from five shillings to one shilling. The occupants of some of the boxes attended as much to be seen as to see. "I rose and sat down, covered and uncovered my head, twenty times between the acts," says Roderick Random, "pulled out my watch, wound it up, set it, displayed my snuff-box, affected to take snuff, wiped my nose with a perfumed handkerchief, dangled my cane and adjusted my sword-knot, in order to attract attention."
It was the rising middle-class folk who really appreciated the plays on their own merits, and delighted in "As You Like It," the "Merry Wives," and "A Winter's Tale." Perdita appeared in a dress of pink lustring, a long stomacher and a hoop festooned with flowers, Othello in a regimental suit of the King's bodyguard and a flowered wig, Lady Macbeth in a hoop eight yards in circumference, and Cleopatra had a powdered commode and a jewelled fan. The same improvement in taste that revolutionised the stage affected the lighter literature of the day, and a "wave of delicacy" created a new ​epoch in the reading world of our ancestors. The change is practically illustrated by Sir Walter Scott's lady who, having enjoyed the books of her youth, turned from them in horror in her old age to the moral works of Miss Edgeworth. The new departure was inaugurated by a woman—Miss Burney, with her novel "Evelina." The opposition that women writers of the day had to encounter is illustrated by the fact that Miss Burney was almost forced to burn her first MS. on the representation of her stepmother that authorship for woman was most reprehensible. But from the ashes sprang the inimitable "Evelina," written in stolen moments, in disjointed fragments, copied out in a feigned, upright handwriting, smuggled to the publisher by a young brother, who was disguised for the occasion, and bought outright for the magnificent sum of £20. Of its success, of the generosity of the publisher, and the sudden fame of the young author, it is superfluous to speak here. Miss Fanny Burney had opened up new possibilities to the novelist by the purity of her writing; she had inaugurated the circulating library, such a feature in modern life to-day; she had prepared the ground for Miss Edgeworth, Miss Martineau, ​Miss Jane Austen, and others, who all easily excelled her in literary achievement. It was this sense of refinement that prompted Miss Burney's words when she heard that henceforth the banns of marriage were to be published in church on the three Sundays preceding the event: "A public wedding. Oh, what a gauntlet for any woman of delicacy to run!"
Many a clandestine marriage still took place, and elopement with an heiress was very common. Indeed, fortune played as large a part as heretofore in the marriages of the eighteenth century, as may be gleaned from the current advertisements of the day. In the Gentleman's Magazine for 1781: "Married, the Revd. Mr. Roger Waina, of York, about twenty-six years of age, to a Lincolnshire lady upwards of eighty, with whom he is to have £8,000 in money, £300 per annum, and a coach and four during life only." A Liverpool doctor takes to wife "an agreeable young lady of eighteen years of age, with a very genteel fortune"; a Kendal Colonel is wedded to "an agreeable young lady with a fortune of £14,000," while "an eminent hosier marries Miss Betty Newby, a genteel lady with £900." But change was dawning even in these delicate matters, and a ​band of women, mockingly known as "Blue Stockings," pioneered a new movement This little circle, which numbered in their midst Elizabeth Montague, Elizabeth Carter, Fanny Burney, and Hannah More, were the first to encourage intelligence in women, and to see that it was no hindrance to personal charm or matrimony. They gave a more serious turn to the frivolous society of their day, and shook the time-worn prejudice which had treated study as "unbecoming in a woman."