was then looked upon as a social necessity. In addition to the royal family and their servants, clergymen not possessing 1001. a year, subalterns in the army, and officers in the navy under the rank of masters and commanders were exempted, and in private families all daughters except the two eldest.1 The tax was a guinea a head, and it was expected to produce 210,000l. a year, but it was soon very generally evaded. Many, through the pressure of economy, gave up the use of powder. A few great Whig families, and among them the House of Russell, discarded it as a protest against the French War, which the tax contributed to support; 2 and when corn rose shortly after the outbreak of the war almost to famine price, most men deemed it a matter of charity and patriotism to prevent a large and useless expenditure of flour. Hair-powder was abandoned at court, and in a short time it totally disappeared from fashionable attire.3 From this time English male dress assumed substantially its modern aspect, though the love of bright and contrasted colours was not immediately replaced by the Puritan sobriety which now prevails. Like all great changes of fashion, this was not effected without producing some severe temporary distress," and if it has added considerably to the simplicity and inexpensiveness of life, if it has diminished or destroyed a great sphere of vanity and weakness, it will hardly, I suppose, be denied that the world has lost something by the total banishment of all ideas of beauty and grace from one great department of human things. Wraxall, in a book which was published in 1815, declared that the two preceding centuries had scarcely produced a greater alteration in respect to dress, etiquette, and form, than the last 1 Ann. Reg. 1795, p. 179. * See Ashton's Old Times, p. 61. * Full particulars about the abandonment of hair-powder will be found in Fairholt's History of Costume; Ashton's Old Times; Pictorial History, vii. 760, 761. * See the interesting remarks of Mr. Mozeley, Reminiscences of Towns and Villages, i. 414. Thus a pamphleteer in 1798 writes: 'The whole tribe of staymakers must now be in extreme distress because the female sex have thought proper to throw off their bodice. The silk and stuff weavers must be equally wretched from the universal wear of linen and muslin; the buckle-makers can be little less embarrassed from the general adoption of leather shoe-strings, and the unfortunate corps of hair-dressers are consigned to misery and despair by the new generation of round-heads.'Essay on the Political Circumstances of Ireland under Lord Camden, pp. 89, 90. forty years, and that a costume which, at the end of that period, was confined to the Levee and Drawing-room, was in the beginning of it worn by persons of condition, with few exceptions, everywhere and every day.'1 The growing simplicity of English dress must not, however, be regarded as any index of the decline of luxury. Wealth had been increasing with great rapidity to the eve of the American War, and though English prosperity was then for a time severely checked, a rapid revival took place during the Administration of Pitt. The political importance which the Indian Nabobs obtained may have perhaps produced some exaggeration of their social weight, but it is impossible not to be struck with the great and baneful influence which was constantly ascribed to them. I have already quoted the eloquent sentences in which Chatham deplored the sudden influx of Asiatic wealth, which not being 'the regular natural produce of labour and industry' was bringing in its train Asiatic luxury as well as Asiatic principles of government. Burke looked upon the invasion with at least equal alarm. Voltaire, in a letter to Chesterfield written about 1772, expressed his belief that Indian wealth had so corrupted England that she had now entered upon her period of decadence, and Horne Tooke, as we are told by his biographer, 'observed of English manners that they had not changed by degrees, but all of a sudden; and he attributed it chiefly to our connection with India that luxury and corruption had flowed in, not as in Greece like a gentle rivulet, but after the manner of a torrent.'3 The prevailing types of amusement had not very materially changed since the first half of the century. Ranelagh and Vauxhall still retained their popularity, but not their position, for formidable rivals were drawing away the upper classes. Almack's Rooms were opened in 1765, a subscription of ten 1 Wraxall's Mems. i. 135. Some curious particulars of the way in which the ordinary dresses of fashionable life in one generation were utilised for the theatre in the next will be found in Tate Wilkinson's Memoirs (1790), iv. 86-88. He says: Thirty years ago not a Templar or decent dressed young man but wore a rich gold-laced hat and scarlet waistcoat with a broad gold lace . . . also laced frocks for morning dress,' and he mentions that his actors still occasionally wore, 'for old characters of wealth, a suit of purple cloth with gold vellum holes that I frequently wore when a young man as a fashionable dress.Tate Wilkinson's Memoirs, iv. 87, 88. 2 Annual Register, 1773, p. 217. Stephens's Life of Horne Tooke, ii. 488. guineas entitling the members to a weekly ball and supper for twelve weeks, but their real attraction was the deep play, of which they soon became the special centre. Nearly at the same time, Madame Cornelys, a foreign singer, who was described by Walpole as the 'Heidegger of her age,' opened a social club called 'The Society,' at Carlisle House in Soho Square; and her assemblies, her subscription balls, her harmonic concerts,' and above all, her masquerades, for a few years attained the wildest popularity. Masquerades were constantly spoken of as one of the chief demoralising influences of the time, and Horace Walpole mentions one which so emptied the House of Commons as to produce an adjournment. The taste, however, like many others, fell as suddenly as it had arisen, and the brilliant manager, who had for some years chiefly provided the fashionable amusements in London, ended her days in the Fleet Prison. The Pantheon, a splendid assembly room intended as a winter Ranelagh, was opened in Oxford Street in 1770. It was the first great work of James Wyatt, and it for a time enjoyed much popularity. Gibbon mentions a subscription masquerade there which cost the subscribers no less than 5,000l., but a few years later the taste diminished, and the Pantheon was converted into an ordinary concert room and theatre.3 In 1764, by the King's order, the immemorial custom of playing hazard on Twelfth Night at Court was discontinued, and the King afterwards issued strict orders that no gaming was to be allowed in the royal palaces. But, in spite of royal precept and example, and in spite also of a number of laws which had in the preceding reign been enacted against gaming,5 there was as yet little or no diminution of this passion. Charles Fox once said that the highest play he had ever known was between 1772 and the outbreak of the American War, and the statement seems to be corroborated by Horace Walpole. Jesse's Life of Selwyn, i. 360, 366. She is called so by Walpole. She is said, however, in Edwards's Anecdotes of Painting, p. 69, to have been by birth an Irishwoman. Walpole to Mann, ii. 82-84, 96, 97, 133, 134, 149; Ann. Reg. 1771, pp. 139,140; see too Miss Burney's Evelina; Ashton's Old Times, pp. 217-224; Angelo's Reminiscences, i. 88–97. About 1780 faro superseded loo as the popular game, and, although it was one of those which a law of George II. had distinctly specified as illegal, it was notoriously carried on at the houses of several ladies of the first position in society. In 1796 Chief Justice Kenyon delivered a charge in which he dwelt on this scandal and threatened to send even the first ladies of the land to the pillory if they were convicted before him, and Gillray caricatured three of the most conspicuous of the offenders as 'Faro's daughters' standing in the pillory. In the following year Lady Buckinghamshire and two other ladies of position were, in fact, condemned, not, indeed, to the pillory, but to pay fifty pounds each for illegal gambling. It was proved that they had gaming parties by rotation in each other's houses, and sat gambling till three or four in the morning.1 Private lotteries had been already condemned by law, but public lotteries were still annually instituted by authority of Parliament. They gave rise to a multitude of frauds and abuses, and to a great additional system of gambling in the form of an insurance of undrawn tickets, and the Corporation of London in 1773 presented a petition to the House of Commons praying for their suppression. Such a measure found little or no support, but a law was passed in 1778 which put an end to some of their abuses, and reduced the number of dealers in lottery tickets in England to fifty-one. In the previous year there had been more than four hundred lottery offices in London and its neighbourhood alone.2 The growing lateness of the hours, which we have noticed during the first sixty years of the century, still continued. In the country, it is true, the fox-hunter was already in his saddle at break of day, and at the universities it was not until the last quarter of the century that the old dinner hour of twelve was abandoned; but the House of Commons during the reign of George III., and especially during the American debates, sat later than it had ever done before, and Horace Walpole, when an old man, complained bitterly of the difficulty he found 1 See Ashton's Old Times, pp. 166182. 2 18 George III. c. 22; Macpherson's Annals of Commerce, iii. 620; Adolphus, iv. 211–213. * Bishop Watson's Anecdotes of his 4 Life, i. 35; Gilbert Wakefield's Life, i. 153. Townsend's Hist. of the House of Commons, ii. 380, 382-389; Correspondence of George III. and Lord North, i. 281. in adapting his habits to the increased lateness of London hours. Everything,' he wrote in 1777, 'is changed. . . . 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.' 'The present folly is late hours. Everybody tries to be particular by being too late. . . . It is the fashion now to go to Ranelagh two hours after it is over. You may not believe it, but it is literal. The music ends at ten; the company go at twelve. Lord Derby's cook lately gave him warning. The man owned he liked his place, but said he should be killed by dressing suppers at three in the morning.' Among the minor social habits which may be noticed was the introduction from France about 1770 of the custom of visiting not in person, but by cards; and a great increase of lounging rides on horseback. Burke noticed the latter as a serious check to economy among the gentry. Few beside elder brothers,' he added, 'ever thought of riding in the middle of the day, except on particular occasions, till within the last thirty years. Men who could have no other object but that of sauntering made more use of their limbs.'3 6 1 Hard drinking among the upper orders, though it had diminished, was still very common, almost imposed by the social code, practised by men who conducted the affairs of the nation, and countenanced to an extreme degree by the example of the heir to the throne. There were hackney coachmen who derived their chief gains from cruising at late hours through certain quarters of the town for the purpose of picking up drunken gentlemen. They conveyed them to their homes if they were capable of giving their address; and, if not, to certain taverns where it was the custom to secure their property and to put them to bed. In the morning the coachman called to take them home, and was in general handsomely rewarded." Horace Walpole describes a violent quarrel at the Opera, which was due to Lord Cornwallis and Lord Allan having come in 1 Letters to Mann, iii. 7, 30, 112. See too, on the hours of the eighteenth century; Gomme's Gentleman's Magazine Library, Manners and Customs, pp. 16, 17. 2 Walpole's Last Journals, ii. 12. one of his conversations with Mrs. Crewe. Some curious particulars about the excessive drinking of the Prince of Wales will be found in the recently published reminiscences of Wraxall. Walker, The Original, p. 41. |