LECTURE VII
Mid-Victorianism. W. M. Thackeray
The word respectable has a strange history. In the days of the later Roman Empire its equivalent “spectabilis” was applied to the highest dignitaries. In France it is a title of honour—“votre respectable mère” means something very different from “your respectable mother.” In England respectability is associated with primness, faded clothes, and possibly necessary penuriousness. One would not seek a way to a lady’s good graces by describing her as a respectable woman. When we say a man’s abilities are “respectable,” it is in order to get someone else to give him employment. It is a word which conveys ridicule ever since the famous dialogue in Thurtell’s trial for murder:
Witness.The prisoner was a respectable man.
Counsel.What do you mean by respectable?
Witness.Well—er—he kept a gig.
The characteristic of Mid-Victorian society was respectability, and I shall try to show that its chief exponent W. M. Thackeray was its prophet.
The English race has always had a bias in favour of what is known as Puritanism, not only in religion but in life. I think it may be said of us that we dislike intensely to have a thing forbidden by law, but love to have many forbidden by custom. We abhor a number of notices put up to say we must do this or that, that most things are forbidden, we detest a police who interfere with the ordinary affairs of life and force us under penalty to submit to trivial regulations. But we have no objections to the erection of a number of conventions far more irksomethan any legal code of morals and we submit to a police system created by ourselves, more vigilant, more inquisitive, more given to informing than any secret service in the world. For what laws were ever devised more drastic in their operation than those of public opinion, and has anyvehmgerichtor inquisition ever judged unseen and condemned unheard on the report of the police, in a more secret and summary fashion than that of the tea table of Mrs. Grundy? Never was society more under the thrall of these dominating influences than in the Early and Mid-Victorian age.
The reason for this seems plain enough. The eighteenth century had been distinguished for the coarseness of its language, manners, and morals. The upper classes combined a good deal of old world politeness with a surprisingly frank disregard of moral considerations. There were conspicuous exceptions, but the singular impunity enjoyedby men of high rank and position made them often callous as to the opinion of their inferiors. The lower classes were accustomed to brutal sports and cruel amusements and unrestrained by any effective police, besides being entirely uneducated. The middle class, which was daily becoming more and more important to the life of the nation owing to the rapid development of trade and manufacture, was gradually monopolising the political control of the nation. It was in this class that the evangelical and Methodist movements had achieved their chief successes; and those who composed it were fundamentally serious minded. Under the Regency and during the reign of George IV and William IV the court was essentially aristocratic, and neither monarch gave it any prestige on the side of morality. Queen Victoria took a middle-class view of life; domesticity was the key-note of her reign. The Prince Consort was the model husband and father,so correct, so admirable, so exemplary, that even now we are apt to forget how able and wise a man he was and how heavy a debt his adopted country owes him.
One of the effects of the Victorian age was that England awoke to a most amazing sense of its own virtue. People were continually contrasting the present with the past, to the disadvantage of the latter. In the ‘forties,’ and even ‘fifties,’ many people could remember the time when it was unsafe to approach London after dusk on account of the highwaymen, when men, women, and children were hung by the score for the merest trifles, when duels were of almost daily occurrence, when the grossest abuses existed in church and state, when immorality in the highest quarters flaunted itself unashamed before the world. Old men could recall a time when to get drunk and use the foulest possible language was almost necessary, if a man were not to be written down as a milksop.And the contrast was almost too delightful to the newly emancipated middle class in their neat villas with trim gardens, whence they went to church decorously, sat in their select pew, their large families around them, and thanked God that they were not as other people’s wicked ancestors had been.
In one of Lever’s novels—I believe—an Irish solicitor was asked by an Englishman the reason for the success of a famous Counsellor with juries and replied, “He first butthers them up; and then slithers them down.” I am going to take the same liberty with that great novelist W. M. Thackeray, only I protest that my butter is genuine and were I an Irishman myself I should say it came from the heart. I cheerfully bow before the genius of England’s master of fiction. His characters are my friends, his kindly wisdom my delight, his pathos can move me almost to tears, his cynicism is a constant stimulant. His style is to meincomparable and fills me with envy and despair. His books are my best companions in sickness and in health, in depression and in my most cheerful moments. If I am his critic, it is because he is so old a friend that I love him alike for his weaknesses and peculiarities and for his great merits. With the utmost humility I commend his scholarship and appreciation of the literature of the eighteenth century. His “Four Georges” and “English Humorists” are to me models of what literary lectures should be. I could praise him till I wearied my audience, and all my praise would be absolutely genuine.
No student of Thackeray can fail to admire the way in which he prepared himself by study for his historical novels. In “Esmond” and the “Virginians” he saturated himself in the literature of his period. He could catch the style of the pamphleteer, the newspaper writer; he reproduces the conversation of the wits so as occasionally to deceivethe very elect. The descriptions of life at Castlewood, of the service in Winchester Cathedral, the letters of the old Marchioness of Esmond, Henry Esmond’s contribution to theSpectator, the account of the battle of Wynandael, etc., are all masterpieces. So are some of the minor characters in these novels—Will Esmond in the “Virginians,” for example, Father Holt, Esmond’s Jesuit tutor and, above all, Parson Sampson in the “Virginians.” But his principal actors are not, I think, of the eighteenth century at all. They are the people Thackeray himself knew, in the garb of their supposed period, but really men and women of the middle of the nineteenth century. Esmond and George Warrington, Rachel, Lady Castlewood, and her incomparable daughter Beatrix are, with all their perfect accessories, modern men and women playing a part, admirably it is true, but still a part, in the comedy of a bygone age. In the days of Anne and theGeorges I am confident no one felt or acted or thought as they are represented by our author. It is only when Thackeray is out of sympathy with his heroes that he makes them true to their age. In “Barry Lyndon” we have the genuine article, so we do in his uncle, the Chevalier de Balibari, so again in every character in “Catherine,” which was intended as a burlesque. But in the more serious novels I feel somehow that Thackeray did not really transport his characters into a bygone age.
Of this he seems to have been conscious himself. When he drew pictures to illustrate “Vanity Fair,” he did not depict Rawdon Crawley as a Waterloo guardsman, nor Becky as a lady of fashion in 1816, nor Pitt as an aristocratic member of the Clapham set. He drew them as the people he knew himself and dressed them in the costume of his own time, thus acknowledging how he really regarded his own creations.
The ruling aristocracy came to an end when the Reform Bill was passed in 1832, but their prestige remained. The middle class entered the Promised Land and took their share in its government: but not triumphantly. I may almost say they were abashed by their success. The peers could no more return a great proportion of the House of Commons, they could no more promote or cast down common men much as they pleased. They dare no longer defy public opinion as their predecessors had done. Yet to the middle class they still appeared august enough. Their manners, their breeding, the state in which many lived, inspired no little awe among those immediately below them. Society was divided into castes almost as rigidly, though less formally, than in India to-day. The old Whig nobility still considered themselves divinely called to rule the country and to dictate to the sovereign. The county familiesheld aloof from the inhabitants of the town; and barely tolerated the professional classes. The beneficed clergy, barristers, medical men, lesser army officers, etc., scorned the traders. The wholesale trader held the retail storekeeper in scorn and so onad infinitum. But in England the barriers of rank were never insurmountable, and in a free country anyone was at liberty to try to climb them. Hence everybody endeavored with varying success to ascend the social ladder, and did not scruple to use other people as stepping stones. Thus arose the fierce fight to get into what is still called “Society” and the rampant snobbery which Thackeray was never tired of denouncing. With this we may begin the investigation of his attitude towards the society of his age.
The great example of this pushfulness is Thackeray’s most delightful creation in “Vanity Fair,” Becky Sharp, though she assuredlywas no snob. With all her doubtful antecedents, however, Becky, at least, married into the ranks of the aristocracy; and in her husband our author has created so real a person that one is actually disposed to question whether he was rightly judged by the author of his being. We are told that Rawdon Crawley was stupid, badly educated, unaccustomed to good society, at least when ladies were present. But if he were such an oaf why did his rich aunt Miss Crawley, who had known Sheridan and the wits, make such a fuss about him and make him sit at table with herself and Becky because “we are the only Christians in the county.” Why was he allowed to act in the Charades at Gaunt House on that memorable night of his wife’s triumph? The fact is that Thackeray was obsessed with the idea that all young men of fashion were necessarily stupid. It is a thoroughly middle-class tradition and we find it constantly in hispages. Because of certain mannerisms and affectations, because they cared little for literature, because they fought duels and gambled, all young men about town were not necessarily fools; and it was a mistake to depict Rawdon Crawley as on the one hand uncommonly sharp and also a fool. But it is because Thackeray’s genius has created such a living being that we are indignant at his failure to make him conform to our ideas of what we think he really was. We regard him as a living man whom his creator has misjudged, and not as the figment of the brain of the author.
“Vanity Fair,” however, holds up the mirror to social England in the unrivalled description of Becky’s climb up the rungs of the ladder till she arrived at the very apex of fashionable success. Her husband’s position gave her every opportunity with the men, and with them it was easy enough. Where her genius was seen was in her dealingswith her own sex. Apart from the skill displayed in the description of her career, she is interesting to us as an example of the gradual invasion of society by those who were born outside its pale. Men, as we have seen, like Creevey, occasionally managed to make themselves indispensable, but for a woman to do so was a most difficult task. At first Becky was a complete failure so far as her own sex was concerned. Miss Crawley was never taken in for a moment. She recognised her attractions and allowed her to amuse her, but had no idea of regarding Becky as anything more than a sort of upper servant. “She’s just a companion as you are, Briggs, only infinitely more amusing.” When she married Rawdon, she did for herself so far as the old lady’s good graces were concerned. In her early married life she was equally unsuccessful. At Paris, where her husband was in the army of occupation, her success with the men and her popularitywith the great ladies of French society, owing to her mastery of the language, only increased the bitterness of her countrywomen against her. When she came back to London, men crowded her little house in Curzon Street, but the ladies held sternly aloof. Social distinctions were very marked in the early “twenties” in London, and the great ladies of the day had no idea of allowing people of doubtful birth to push themselves into their company. You doubtless recollect how Jane Austen describes the dinner party at Lady Caroline de Burgh’s in “Pride and Prejudice” to which Elizabeth and Mr. and Mrs. Collins were invited, and the studied rudeness with which her ladyship treated her guests in order to keep them conscious of their inferiority. We find the same sort of thing in Lord Lytton’s early novel “Pelham,” where the man of fashion treats the people he meets in the country as beings of a different species. Every description of fashionable life tellsthe same story and we have to realise this to understand “Vanity Fair.”
I must ask you to pardon me if I linger over this theme and try to elaborate it. Becky had had a good deal of experience before her chance came, and she was fit to take it. Her brother-in-law, Pitt Crawley, was always a little smitten by her charm and determined to do the right thing by Rawdon by inviting him and Becky to Queen’s Crawley. Becky strikes the right note at once—they go by coach, “it looks more humble.” Once there, she captivates Lady Jane by affecting interest in her nursery. But these are only the outworks, Lady Jane is kind and soft, Pitt is pompous and easily flattered. But the citadel remained unvanquished in the person of Lady Southdown, Pitt’s mother-in-law. Here we have Thackeray’s counterpart of Lady Caroline de Burgh, a countess of austere evangelical piety, combined with a firmbut by no means constant belief in patent medicines and more or less irregular clergy and medical practitioners, who forces her doctrines and her doctorings without mercy upon her dependants and inferiors. “She would order Gaffer Hodge to be converted, as she would order Goody Hicks to take a James’ powder, without appeal, resistance or benefit of clergy.” Our author describes her as “this awful missionary of the Truth,” driving about her estate administering tracts and medicaments.
A lady so domineering, so aristocratic, so virtuous could not be expected to receive poor Becky with her doubtful antecedents and still more questionable conduct. She vows she will leave Queen’s Crawley if ever Mrs. Rawdon sets foot in the home. But Pitt Crawley knows womankind: “She has spent her last dividends, and has nowhere to go. A countess living in an inn is a ruined woman.” This shrewd diagnosis iscorrect: her ladyship remains and manifests her disapproval of Becky by a stony silence. That astute little woman, however, is not daunted. She reads the countess’s tracts; she is troubled about her soul. Her ladyship cannot resist the temptation of snatching such a brand from the burning. She hopes to convert Becky, who is prepared for a greater sacrifice. She offers her body as well as her soul, and consults Lady Southdown about her health. The victory is won. That night the fearsome form of the great lady appears in night attire at Becky’s bedside and forces her to drink the decoction she has prepared. Her victim swallows it and makes so good a story of the incident that her male friends are convulsed, and thus, “for the first time in her life, Lady Southdown was made amusing.” It is when Mrs. Rawdon Crawley forces her way into the company of the real leaders of London society that we get a true glimpse of the social life of the period,and I shall ask your permission to read the well-known but I think rarely quoted account of her début at the dinner party at Gaunt House. To me, I confess, it seems inimitable. I must, however, remind you of the scenes which lead up to it. First, there is Lord Steyne’s request or rather order to the ladies of his household to call on Becky, which they do, and when his lordship pays her a visit he is amused to find her gloating over the cards they have left. “All women,” he says, “are alike. Everybody is striving for what is not worth having.... You will go to Gaunt House. It’s not half so nice as here. My wife is as gay as Lady Macbeth and my daughters as cheerful as Regan and Goneril.... Andgare aux femmes; look out and hold your own! How the women will bully you!” Then there is the interview of Lord Steyne with his wife and daughters. Lady Steyne is told to write and ask Becky to dinner. Lady Gaunt, the eldest son’s wife,says she will not be present. Lady George, the second son’s wife, reminds him of the money she brought into the family—all in vain. Steyne treats them to a vigorous allocution. “You will be pleased to receive her with the utmost cordiality, as you will receive all persons whom I present to this house.... Who is master of it, and what is it? This temple of virtue belongs to me. And if I invite all Newgate and all Bedlam here, by—they shall be welcomed.” The ladies of course yield but they make it hot for their presumptuous little guest.
“It was when the ladies were alone that Becky knew that the tug of war would come. And then indeed the little woman found herself in such a situation as made her acknowledge the correctness of Lord Steyne’s caution to her to beware of the society of ladies above her own sphere. As they say that persons who hate Irishmen most are Irishmen: so, assuredly the greatest tyrantsover women are women. When poor little Becky, alone with the ladies, went up to the fireplace whither the great ladies had repaired, the great ladies marched away and took possession of a table of drawings. When Becky followed them to the table of drawings, they dropped off one by one to the fire again. She tried to speak to the children (of whom she was commonly fond in public places), but master George Gaunt was called away by his mamma; and the stranger was treated with such cruelty finally, that even Lady Steyne pitied her, and went up to speak to the friendless little woman.”
Later on she had her triumph, for when the gentlemen came in they crowded round the piano. “And Mr. Paul Jefferson Jones (an American guest) thought he had made a conquest of Lady Gaunt by going up to her ladyship, and praising her delightful friend’s first-rate singing.” Once Becky had been recognised at Gaunt House, other ladies beganto acknowledge her, none the less eagerly because she was known not to be too favourably regarded by the Steyne females. The great Lady Fitz Willis paid her marked attention. When anyone was taken up by this lady, her position was safe. Not that she was amusing or clever or beautiful, “being a faded person of fifty seven”: but nevertheless she was a recognised leader whose social verdict was undisputed. Under her ægis Becky was safe; and it was thrown over our little adventuress because of an early rivalry between Lady Fitz Willis and Lady Steyne. Now the success of Becky with all her disadvantages was not undeserved. She had wit, tact, courage. She could flatter where necessary: but she could defy an enemy when she thought fit. Very great ladies feared her biting sarcasm if they provoked it; and she won her place because of her weapons of defiance as well as her powers of attraction. She fell fromher high position because she was found out; but, even after her exposure and Rawdon’s eye-opening to her unfaithfulness to his cause, she fought on in the social battle; and the last glimpse of her is at a charity bazaar!
But the society which Becky Sharp conquered by her brains was soon to be stormed by wealth. And Thackeray describes the process in the novels of a later period. The strife was only beginning in “Vanity Fair.” Lord Steyne’s younger son, we are told, married the daughter of the great banker Lord Helvellyn; but this was exceptional. The city was just beginning to intermarry with the lesser nobility. Miss Schwartz, the rich West Indian, who was destined for young George Osborne, was married into the noble family of McMull. The younger Miss Osborne married, after much haggling over settlements, Frederick Bullock of Hulker Bullock and Co., whose family was allied with theimpecunious nobility; but she was completely out of society. She would have gone on her knees to Gaunt House to be asked to dinner there. Her father, whose means would have procured him an entrance into any society a few years later, then lived in an unfashionable part of London, and his dinner parties were dull, pompous gatherings, the most honoured guest being Sir Thomas Coffin, “the hanging judge” for whose benefit the famous tawny port was always produced.
It was about a decade after the Reform Bill of 1832 that the walls of the Jericho of Good Society began to shake at the trumpet sound of wealth. Before we enter upon the subject let me remind you of two marks of the great novelist’s skill, (1) the names he gives his characters and (2) his careful tracing of their pedigrees. The Earl of Dorking lives at Chanteclere, his eldest son is Viscount Rooster, his daughters are the Ladies Adelaide and Hennie Pulleine. Who cannotwith a very little knowledge of London conjure up Gaunt House and Great Gaunt Square? The character of the Marquis of Steyne is shown in his numerous titles. He is Viscount Hellborough and Baron Pitchley and Grillsbury, etc., etc. The Crawley family name their sons after the most popular man of the day. So Sir Walpole Crawley was evidently born about 1730, Sir Pitt between 1757 and 1761, the Reverend Bute about 1761, Sir Pitt, the second, after the time younger Pitt rose to power—that is, later than 1784, and Rawdon when Lord Rawdon was the favourite of the Prince of Wales.
The pedigrees, especially of the rising families, are traced very carefully. Do you remember Mr. Foker, the charming young man of fashion in “Pendennis”? His unfailing good humour, his shrewdness, his gaudy garments, his advice to Pendennis, when he was infatuated with Miss Fotheringay, and when he was going the pace at Oxbridge; hislove for Miss Amory and his recovery when he found out how heartless she was? Though he plays a minor part, his character is as subtle a delineation as any by this master hand. Now notice how we get this blend of aristocracy and commercialism; for Foker is a true gentleman, honourable, chivalrous, with healthy instincts, yet with a good deal of the man of business in him, for all his idleness and eccentricity a man not easily duped. In the “Virginians” George Warrington, when lately married and very poor, gets to know a Mr. Voelker, a rich, vulgar but kindly brewer, our hero’s grandfather. His father has Anglicised himself and become Mr. Foker whose porter is of world-wide celebrity. He marries an Earl’s daughter and yet insists on the family beverage being served at every meal, and Major Pendennis feels bound to taste it when he dines though the old gentleman found it disagreed with him. In Harry Foker, the young man of pleasure, wehave the half-and-half beer and the peerage, and no bad blend either. In Barnes Newcome we have a less attractive type of the same class. The Newcomes are as humble in origin but more pretentious than the Fokers. They do not parade the family business, being bankers; but have discovered a noble ancestry. Their family can be traced back to the “Barber Surgeon of Edward the Confessor.” Thomas Newcome, the second founder, had however to begin as a very intelligent factory hand who left his native Newcome, made a moderate fortune, gallantly returned and married a girl of his own class, and became the father of that prince of gentlemen, Colonel Newcome, whose son Clive, Thackeray wishes us to admire, though I confess I find him insufferable. Then his first wife dies and Thomas flies at higher game. He woos and wins the great heiress, pietist, and philanthropist, Sophia Alethea Hobson, to the amazement of the seriousClapham circle in which she moves. Their twin sons are Sir Brian, who marries Lady Ann Barnes, daughter of the Earl of Kew, whose eldest son is Lord Walham—all neighbouring suburbs of London give the name to this aristocratic family,—and Hobson, a thorough man of business, who marries a lawyer’s daughter, and affects the farmer, whilst his wife professes to admire talent. Hobson is shrewd, Brian pompous, and as the former says of himself, you must get up very early in the morning to take him in. If in Foker we have the attractive side, in Sir Brian Newcome’s eldest son Barnes we have the other aspect of the blending of birth and business. Had Harry Foker sprung from two noble grandfathers, he might have been just as simple-hearted and good-natured as he now appears, like Lord Southdown in “Vanity Fair,” or Ethel Newcome’s lover, Lord Kew; but he would not have been quite so shrewd—for it is no impeachmentof a man’s natural good sense that he should have been taken in by the purely imaginary virtues of a Blanche Amory. But in Barnes Newcome we see the mixture of the hardness of a well-bred man of the world and the business ability inherited from a commercial ancestry. I cannot resist quoting at some length the introduction of Barnes to his uncle Col. Newcome at Mrs. Hobson Newcome’s evening party. The description of it is sketched for the Colonel’s benefit, by Frank Honeyman, the popular preacher.
“The Jew with a beard, as you call him, is Herr Von Lungen the eminent haut-boy player.... At the piano, accompanied by Mademoiselle Lebrun, is Signor Mezzocaldo the great barytone from Rome. Professor Quartz and Baron Hammerstein, celebrated geologists from Germany, are talking with their illustriousconfrèreSir Robert Craxton, in the door. Do you see that stout gentleman with snuff on his shirt? The eloquentDr. McGuffog of Edinburgh talking to Dr. Ettore, who lately escaped the Inquisition at Rome in the disguise of a washerwoman, after undergoing the question several times, the rack and the thumbscrew.... That splendid man in the red fez is Kurbash Pasha—another renegade, I deeply lament to say,—a hair-dresser from Marseilles, by name Monsieur Ferchaud—”
But I need not trouble you by reading more. Mrs. Hobson Newcome could not get the aristocracy, so she collected notabilities and felt herself intellectual. As you will remember, the guest of the evening was “Rummum Loll, otherwise his Excellency, otherwise his Highness, ... the chief proprietor of the diamond mines of Golconda, with a claim of three millions and a half upon the East India Company.” The Rummum was the lion of the year and went everywhere, and the whole company was amazed when with the air of the deepest humilityhe saluted Colonel Newcome, who in his old-fashioned coat and diamond pin was being mistaken for a Moldavian boyar. At this juncture Barnes comes in and makes himself known to his uncle. The art with which the scene is drawn is consummate. Barnes behaves as a thoroughly well-bred man, greets the Colonel with unaffectedly good manners, snubs his aunt by a few quiet words, and finally turns to his uncle to discuss the Rummum. “I know he ain’t a prince any more than I am.” Then Barnes warms to the subject and frankly asks the Colonel to tell him if the bank can trust the Indian magnate. “The young man of business had dropped his drawl or his languor, and was speaking quite goodnaturedly and selfishly. Had you talked for a week, you could not have made him understand the scorn and loathing with which the Colonel regarded him.”
Barnes is of course the villain of the piece:but the interest in his character to us lies in the fact that he reveals in its worst aspect the blending of two types, the aristocratic, with its pride and narrow exclusiveness, and the commercial, with its rapacious selfishness. In many respects the “Newcomes” is a tragedy, as is seen in Colonel Newcome’s quarrel with Barnes and the tale of his ruin in the affair of Rummum Loll’s Bundlecund Bank, and themotiveis the struggle for wealth by one of a class whose first object ought to have been honour and to whom money should have been always a secondary consideration.
Let us however turn now to lighter themes. One of Thackeray’s most delightful characters is the old Countess of Kew, the sister of the late Marquis of Steyne and the grandmother of Lord Kew and Ethel Newcome. The old lady frankly, and with a cynicism worthy of her brother, accepts the new order. She marries her daughter, Lady Ann, to Sir Brian Newcome, with complete disregard ofthe young lady’s preference for her cousin, Tom Poyntz. “Sir Brian Newcome,” she would say, “is one of the most stupid and respectable of men; Ann is clever but has not a grain of common sense. They make a very well-assorted couple. Her flightiness would have driven any man crazy who had an opinion of his own. She would have ruined any poor man of her own rank. As it is I have given her a husband exactly suited to her. He pays the bills, does not see how absurd she is, keeps order in the establishment and checks her follies. She wanted to marry her Cousin, Tom Poyntz, when they were both very young, and proposed to die of a broken heart ... a broken fiddlestick! She would have ruined Tom Poyntz in a year, and has no more idea of the cost of a leg of mutton than I have of Algebra.” Her ladyship was under no delusions as to the antiquity of her husband’s family, the founder of which was a fashionabledoctor who had attended George III. She recognised that the great houses to which she belonged had had their day and was resolved to make the best she could out of the world she lived in. She had the brains and the character to make that world thoroughly uncomfortable if it did not bow to her will, and with her the old order began to come to an end. “Wasmy grandfather a weaver?” asks Ethel Newcome. Her answer is: “How should I know? And what on earth does it matter, my child? Except the Gaunts, the Howards, and one or two more, there is no good blood in England. You are lucky in sharing some of mine. My poor Lord Kew’s grandfather was an apothecary at Hampton Court, and founded the family by giving a dose of rhubarb to Queen Charlotte. As a rule nobody is of good family.”
Leaving the novels, we come to the Book of Snobs, where the storming of society is seen at a later stage. In Chapter VII on“some respectable snobs” we have the rise of the noble family of de Mogyns. The first of this ancient race who appeared above the horizon in these degenerate days was a Mr. Muggins, banker, army contractor, smuggler, and general jobber, lent money to a R-y-l P-rs-n-ge, and by way of payment was made a baronet. His son paid undue attention to Miss Flack at a county ball. Captain Flack, her father, offered the alternative of a duel or marriage, in accordance with the custom of the Irish nation to which he belonged and of the age; young Alured Smith Muggins preferred to marry the lady and on the death of his father became a baronet. The editor of Fluke’s Peerage found him a pedigree. The family was really founded by the patriarch Shem, whose grandson began to draw up its pedigree on a papyrus scroll now in the possession of the family. In the days of Boadicea, Hogyn Mogyn of the hundred beeves aspired to marry thatwarlike princess. Whether he wooed and also won is not stated, but he married someone and became the ancestor of Mogyn of the golden harp, the black fiend son of Mogyn, ancestor of the princes of Pontydwdlm. These succumbed to the English Kings; but their representative David Gam de Mogins fought bravely at Agincourt and from him Sir Thomas Muggins was descended.
This sounds a mere satire. I turn to Burke’s Peerage 1895. I find that the son of a famous contractor, whose father was celebrated for having begun as a navvy and ended as a millionaire many times over, sprang from a very ancient Norman family which became obscure in 1603 and rose again to fame two centuries later. I notice that a brewer now a baron, whose beer had a world-wide fame, was the scion of a noble house, the first of whom was Gamellus who flourished when Henry Beauclerc ruled the land from 1100 to 1134.
One of the ladies of this famous family was christened by the delightful but unusual name of Temperance, but this was in the reign of Charles I before the brewery was established. Are not such pedigrees as ridiculous as any fiction of the brain? But how much is it to be regretted that the writers of our peerages do not study the Book of Snobs. They would at least avoid parodying it at the order of their ennobled patrons. Disraeli, like Thackeray, exposed this business in his novel “Sybil, or the Two Nations.”
I need not say, however, that it was not because of their descent from the great Hogyn Mogyn that the de Mogyns got into society. They pushed, they schemed, they suffered rebuffs undaunted, and at last they won the coveted reward. Lady de Mogyns cut her friends as she ascended, and at last became a recognised power in the great world.
The day had scarcely dawned when Thackeray died, when instead of wealth’s striving to win a place in society, society sought to obtain the recognition of the very rich. His satire had not to expend itself on aristocrats who hastened to abase themselves before the millionaire, and snobbery changed from a worship of rank to a worship of wealth. Our author has often been criticised for his abuse of the nobility. It has been said that it was prompted by envy. I venture to doubt this. To be as great a satirist as he, a man must feel deeply and have asaeva indignatioagainst a great evil. This, like all his predecessors, Thackeray had. He saw the hardness that the spirit of his age engendered.
In all Thackeray’s novels and writings we see how ashamed the new aristocracy was of the trades and businesses by which they made their money and how contemptuous the real aristocracy was of ennobled trade. Lord Steyne sneers at the idea of his son’swife being a banker’s daughter. The Newcomes conveniently forget the weaver from which they sprang. We are sneeringly reminded that Mr. Wenham’s father was a coal merchant; Major Pendennis conveniently forgets that his brother was a mere apothecary. But this was not part of the old tradition of England. A very little time before people of high birth felt no shame in being in trade. The Nelsons are as good a family as any, yet Nelson himself served as a common sailor before the mast, and his near relatives kept shops in small towns. Let me read you a passage from a recently published book on Wordsworth:
“Dorothy Wordsworth ... lived first with her maternal grand-parents, and was not happy with them. She loved an open-air life, and was held closely indoors—serving in fact in a mercer’s shop which they kept.... In 1788 a change came, for she went to live with her uncle at Forncett Rectorynear Norwich. The Rector was also a Canon of Windsor, and in the Summer of 1792 ... Dorothy was meeting King George III and his family—the princesses at least ... and going to races and balls.”
Trade was no bar to good society till it was able to buy it and there was a great mingling of classes now rigidly separated. This feeling of shame for having practised some perfectly reputable calling has had I believe very serious results. It has made for the separation of employers and employed. It has caused people to take less pride in integrity and thoroughness and made them desirous of amassing wealth in order to enjoy ease. It has tended to make those of the second generation more desirous to pose as nobles than to follow the calling of their fathers. It has destroyed a commercial aristocracy and has put a plutocracy in its place. It tended for a time to substitute prudery and respectability for real Christianity; and,before the war at least, even these poor substitutes were growing so out of fashion as to be regretted. It has also deepened the rift between classes. Between the old nobility and the poor there was a certain sympathy. The humbler class appreciated the fact that their rulers were gentlemen, they liked their courage, their courtesy, they did not even object to being ordered by them, their very vices were comprehensible. But they have never had any fellow feeling with a plutocracy; with their present pay-masters they have been more impatient than with their former rulers; and the difficulties of the present age are in no small degree due to the snobbery which Thackeray denounced.