A Short History of Social Life in England/Chapter 24
CHAPTER XXIV
Circa 1802—1820
DAWN OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
"New times demand new measures and new men:
The world advances and in time outgrows
The laws that in our fathers' days were best."
Lowell.
STARTLING as were the inventions of the last period, numerous as were the innovations, they pale before the breathless progress of the age upon which we are entering. Yet in its early days there was nothing to distinguish it from the eighteenth century, and but slight indication of the vastness and rapidity of the coming changes. The Hanoverian Kings were to wear out their inconsequent lives before the greatness of our country developed to its present capacity. Hence we have to deal with a condition of society, progressing truly, but not with the breakneck speed of the latter half of the century. We have reached the age of our own great-grandfathers, and the portraits which hang upon our walls have familiarised us with the general bearing of the men and women of this generation, the cut and colour of their clothes before the dawn of photography, when the travelling artist made his way from country house to country house, painting his model in home surroundings.
As yet there were no trains, although the birth of "Puffing Billy" in 1813 had suggested vast and appalling possibilities to the faint-hearted of the earth. But while a revolution in road-making had taken place, thanks to the genius and perseverance of Macadam, coaching from place to place was still slow and laborious, though in this way whole English families travelled to the various sea-side resorts, which were springing into fashion. Brighton was becoming a favourite watering-place, in spite of Dr. Johnson's description of the country as "so desolate, that if one had a mind to hang oneself for desperation at being obliged to live there, it would be difficult to find a tree on which to fasten a rope."
Here George, Prince of Wales, first as Regent and later as King, played his part, danced and gambled and made love, built the famous Pavilion, and started Brighton on its brilliant career. Margate, Ramsgate, Dover, Deal and Weymouth all sprang into fame as watering-places at this time, and to the latter sea-side resort George III took his Queen and family to regain his fast-failing health. Natural springs and sea bathing played a large part in the medical curriculum of the day.
Medicine had advanced but little. The old family doctor was pompous, but ignorant. He carried his gold-headed cane with its round ball top, a relic of the time when it contained an aromatic mixture to guard against infection. In all cases of fever and agues bleeding was freely resorted to, and the surgeon of the day had few other refuges. Chloroform and ether had yet to be discovered; in those days operations were performed roughly, with imperfect and often unclean instruments, while the unhappy patient lay helplessly bound, conscious of every movement and enduring excruciating agonies. It is horrible to contemplate.
"I must enlarge the opening. Give me my uncle's knife," cried the nephew of a famous operator of this period. The operation lasted an hour, after which leeches were applied to prevent fever. After a night of agony, the victim was bled in the arm, more leeches were applied, until, twenty-nine hours after the first shock, death mercifully released the patient. It is small wonder that many preferred to suffer long-drawn-out pain and disease rather than submit to the torture of the knife! Under surgeon, physician and apothecary were an army of dentists, midwives, &c., all more or less ignorant and uncertificated. The new century found vaccination growing in popularity among the cultured classes, together with a consequent decrease of small-pox, but it was not made compulsory till 1840.
But if disease was imperfectly understood, if surgery was handicapped without the help of anæsthetics, and infant mortality was high, yet the population was increasing by leaps and bounds. Indeed, nothing like it had ever been known before. The first census, taken in 1801, showed Great Britain with over nine million inhabitants. Twenty years later it had risen to above fourteen million. In the whole preceding two hundred years it had only risen about two million. The growth was chiefly in the North. Liverpool, Manchester, and Bradford sprang into sudden fame, contributing nearly 75 per cent, of the increase. The cause is not far to seek. The newly discovered power of steam had increased the manufactures and created a tremendous demand for coal. Hence a vast population grew up around the northern coalfields, and the most desolate parts of the island became alive with struggling humanity. There appeared to be work and wages for all, though later developments showed how totally inadequate those wages were. Boys and girls married early, and families were large at this time in all classes of society. The Queen herself had given birth to nine sons and six daughters, and it was no unusual thing to find fifteen and twenty children in a family—a rate which soon peopled our islands with astonishing rapidity!
There was little enough organisation ready to cope with the masses of children added to the population. Both in town and country the children of England at this time were the wildest morsels of humanity, plunged in ignorance, steeped in vice, only half clothed and half fed, and, moreover, in many parts of the country, worked in mine and factory as little beasts of burden, atoms of a great industrial machine.
"'For oh,' say the children, 'we are weary,
And we cannot run or leap—
If we cared for any meadows, it were merely
To drop down in them and sleep. …
For all day we drag our burden tiring
Through the coal dark underground—
Or, all day, we drive the wheels of iron
In the factories round and round.'"
Few people thought much about the children then. A Bill was introduced in 1802 proposing that children should only work twelve hours a day, and that they should not be allowed to be employed between the hours of 9 p.m. and 6 a.m., but both parents and manufacturers were against it, the Bill was dropped, and the children struggled on, till the great heart of England was melted with pity.
Private enterprise and philanthropy have ever forestalled legislation. This was now the case with regard to the children. The Sunday-schools opened by Raikes in Gloucester at the end of the last century were successfully making their way, despite the ordinary opposition from all sides. They were very different institutions to the Sunday-school of to-day. The teachers, who were paid 1s. 6d. for the Sunday, assembled the children at 8 a.m. For two hours they were taught the alphabet, spelling and reading, with lessons from the New Testament, catechism, and Watts's Divine and Moral Songs. The children then went home, to reassemble in the afternoon, when they were taken to church for public catechism, returning to their lessons till 5.30, when they were dismissed for another week. Attendance was insured by the distribution of sweets and gingerbread.
"It is my wish that every poor child in my kingdom should be taught to read the Bible," said the poor King, before he was "put away" in the padded room at Windsor, there to drone his own dismal hymns in the intervals of madness. The wish was more practically echoed by Hannah More, who struggled manfully against the prevailing prejudice with regard to learning. She would personally visit cottage after cottage among the poor, explaining, arguing, and endeavouring to overcome scruples. The only benefit to themselves that the short-sighted parents could see was that their apples would get a chance of ripening in the orchards, for the children would not be free all day to steal them! At last, after weeks of patient and thankless work, she collected her children and bought an old ox-shed to serve as school-house. Then a teacher had to be found. Few qualifications were necessary in these days. A little private fortune was desirable, for salaries were low, "A woman of excellent natural sense, good knowledge of the human heart, activity, zeal and uncommon piety," with a grown-up daughter, was one of the selected teachers for these early elementary schools. She taught reading, sewing, knitting and spinning. "I allow no writing for the poor," says Hannah More, "my object is not to make fanatics, but to train up the lower classes in habits of industry and piety." As in the Sunday-schools, regular attendance was rewarded with sweets and gingerbread, augmented once a year by prizes of Bibles, calico aprons, caps and tippets. A marked improvement took place in the neighbourhoods where such schools as these had been started, and others began to rise up all over the country, until the private enterprise of a few individuals was merged in various societies, which undertook the education of the poor, till, in 1818, 605,704 children out of two millions were at school. Teachers being insufficient and funds low, most of the teaching was done by children themselves—a method which was the forerunner of the pupil-teacher system. Classes were divided into eight "drafts," marked by semicircular lines chalked on the floor. Each child was supposed to attend for two years between the ages of seven and fourteen to learn reading from the Bible, writing on a ruled slate, and the first four rules of arithmetic. This was given free till 1827, when a fee of 2d. a week was charged to defray expenses. Punishment by ridicule was the fashion in these days, though the stick was never absent. Thus the idle boy was rocked in a cradle by a girl, the fidget had his legs tied to logs, the truant was fastened to his desk, bad boys were yoked together, and sluggards were put into a basket and hoisted up to the ceiling by a rope. But better days for the children of England were dawning.
A change in dress, moreover, was widely welcomed. Throughout the centuries boys and girls had been dressed in exact imitation of their parents. Boys had worn their hair long or short according to the fashions of the day; they wore tight breeches, cut-away coats and embroidered waistcoats, while their little sisters had been doomed to long skirts, hoops and stomachers, and whatever folly in fashion characterised their age. Now, though girls still wore their frocks to their feet, yet the newer fashion allowed more ease and grace than had formerly been possible; there was childish simplicity in the long folds of plain material that fell from neck to feet, only broken by a high-waisted sash. Low necks and short sleeves were worn from babyhood, while frilled trousers, white socks, and sandals completed the costume. The boys are familiar, too, in their nankeen trousers buttoning up over their waistcoats, their frilled shirt-collars, white stockings and pumps. Nankeen for children was freely used. Thus Miss Martineau gives us a glimpse of her family starting off on a journey from Norwich to Newcastle. "My mother, aunt Margaret, sister Elizabeth, aged fifteen, Rachel, myself, and little James, aged four, in nankeen frocks, were all crammed into a post-chaise for a journey of three or four days."
Caps or turbans, as they were called, were worn by all women and girls at this time. They were made of silk, velvet, muslin, lace crape, and trimmed with feathers, flowers, ribbons in all sorts of fantastic shapes, till, after a time, the turban was relegated to old-fashioned matrons and merged into a simple cap. It was an age of capacious bonnets and weeping veils, of voluminous muffs, long mittens, prunella slippers, embroidered scarfs and boas: it was also the era of the Empire gown, long and straight, low-necked, short-sleeved, and high-waisted, as worn by Napoleon's Empress.
Perhaps the most important change in men's dress was the disappearance of the pig-tail in 1808. So great was the joy in the army at getting rid of this foolish fashion, that, when the order came, one regiment, already starting abroad on foreign service, gave three cheers and flung the pig-tails into Portsmouth harbour while others made bonfires of these relics of a barbarous custom. But, indeed, there was little time and thought to bestow on men's fashions during these troubled years that ushered in the new century. The momentous struggle against Napoleon monopolised men's attention, and the conversation of our great-grandfathers centred around "Old Boney," whom they regarded as the very devil. Shop windows were full of caricatures representing "His Satanic Majesty" with tail, horns and hoofs complete. Exaggerated stories were told in the clubs, and repeated in the drawing-rooms, of his adventures, his regal display, his hatred of England, and his schemes for attacking her. His name was used as a bogey to frighten children. In 1807, preparations had been made along the Norfolk coast for an expected invasion, and the five-year-old Harriet Martineau was twitching her pinafore in terror at the thought of the monster's arrival.
"Papa, what will you do if Boney comes?" she asked, trembling.
"What will I do?" he answered cheerfully, "Why, I will ask him to take a glass of port with me."
The idea that the dreaded "Boney" was human enough to be entertained with port comforted the nervous child not a little.
Men and women wept over the death of Nelson in 1805, and were equally ready to toast the hero of Waterloo, when their old foe was no longer a terror in the land.
Notwithstanding their foreign interests, our great-grandfathers still found time to oppose the introduction of gas, the new method of lighting their capital at home. In the year 1805 the Morning Post announced that a shop at the corner of Piccadilly "is illuminated every evening with gas. It produces a much more brilliant light than either oil or tallow, and proves in a striking manner the advantage to be derived from so valuable an application." Although at this time the smell made people sick and the fumes well-nigh asphyxiated them, yet such an innovation was bound to make its way. In 1810 the Gas Light and Coke Company obtained their charter, and gradually the main streets of London were lit with gas, and the manservant armed with a lantern for conducting home "the quality" from ball or theatre became extinct. But till Queen Victoria's accession the clergy of some of the leading City churches preached against the introduction of gas into churches "as profane and contrary to God's law." And the aristocratic inhabitants of Grosvenor Square absolutely declined to be lit with gas till the year 1842!
The gas lamps were still lit by means of the original tinder box, friction matches not being invented till 1830; but the Morning Post in 1808 foreshadows the idea of producing fire by other means. "The success of the Instantaneous Light Fire Matches daily increases, and the manufactory in Soho has now become the daily resort of persons of the first fashion and consequence in town, who express themselves highly gratified with the utility and ingenuity of these curiosities." The first successful phosphorus matches were named "Lucifer," from their supposed dealings with the Evil One. "Matches that light themselves will find no place in my house," cried an indignant woman in 1829. "Give me my old-fashioned tinder-box." People were gravely warned of their dangers, so that the general use of matches was delayed till nearly 1840.
These are but a few of the great innovations that characterised the dawn of the new century:
"The old times are dead and gone and rotten,
The old thoughts shall never more be thought;
The old faiths have failed and are forgotten,
The old strifes are done, the fight is fought;
And with a clang and roll, the new creation
Bursts forth, 'mid tears and blood and tribulation."