The Age of Elegance (44 page)

2
Bamford, I,
38;
Bewick,
31-2, 165, 182;
Lamington,
6-7;
Creevey,
Life and Times,
158^
Charles Dibdin, Songs No.
34,
"Nautical Philosophy";
Simond, I,
306.

solvent of class distinction. Even foxhunting, with all its expense and showy competitiveness, had still something of a rough democracy about it, at once exclusive and classless, of Master and huntsman, groom and whipper-in, dog-stopper and stable boy, meeting day after day on the level of a common love. The coloured prints that depicted its scarlet coats and glossy horses hung in village alehouses as well as manor houses; when the Manchester weavers, true to their country past and oblivious of their proletarian future, went out hunting on the Cheshire Hills, Sam Stott, the huntsman, used to treat them to a warm ale and ginger.
¹
On the cricket field too, the conventions of rank were forgotten; the best man was "the hardiest
swipe,
the most active
field,
the stoutest
bowler."
"Who that has been at Eton," asked the author of the
English Spy,
"has not repeatedly heard Jem Powell in terms of exultation cry, 'Only see me
liver this here
ball, my young master'?" The game was played by the Prince Regent—before he let down his belly—on his ground at Brighton, by the aristocracy who liked to gamble over it, and by the young farmers and labourers of almost every south country village.
At
East Burnham, until the
Sabbatarians
stopped it, the common every Sunday afternoon "presented a lively and pleasing aspect, dotted with parties of cheerful lookers-on, with many women, children and old persons." Mary Mitford from her Berkshire cottage window could see two sets of cricketers, one of young men surrounded by spectators, standing, sitting or stretched on the grass, all taking a delighted interest in the game, and the other a merry group of little boys, shouting, leaping and enjoying themselves to their hearts' content.
²

For the English, as Hazlitt said, were a sort of grown children. They loved Punch and Judy and games like skittles and shove-halfpenny, leap frog, blind man's buff, hunt-the-slipper, hot cockles and snapdragon. When Nelson went round the
Victory s
gun-decks before Trafalgar, the men were jumping over one another's heads to amuse themselves until they were near enough to fire."Cudgel-playing, quarterstaff, bull and badger-baiting, cockfighting," Hazlitt wrote, "are almost the peculiar diversions of this island.. . . There is no place where trap-ball, fives, prison-base, football, quoits, bowls

¹
Bamford, I,
189.
See Hazlitt, "Merry England,"
New Monthly Magazine,
Dec,
1825;
Osbaldeston,
32.

²
Mitford,
Our Village,
18;
Assheton Smith,
21;
English Spy,
I,
28, 72;
Grote,
45;
Old Oak,
132-43;
Sea-Bathing Places,
120.

are better understood or more successfully practised, and the very names of a cricket bat and ball make English fingers tingle." Nothing would deflect them from their sport; when "Long Robinson," the cricketer, had two of his fingers struck off, he had a screw fastened to one hand to hold the bat and with the other still sent the ball thundering against the boards that bounded old Lord's Cricket-ground.
¹

They liked, and honoured above all, what they called "game, bone and blood." It was because their rulers possessed these qualities that, despite all their unimaginativeness and selfishness, they had so little difficulty in ruling them. It is this that makes so much of the economic interpretation of the time seem a little unreal; one is left at times with the impression that the people of Regency England had never seen a horse, snared a rabbit or set a dog to a badger or sack of rats. Most Englishmen were far more interested in dog-fighting, coursing, hunting, vermin, fishing and fowling, boxing and wrestling, than in the pursuit of equality or the class war. The man of the age was not the Benthamite-philosopher, the radical martyr or the wage-hungry cotton spinner—however important in retrospect— but the sporting type. "Jem Flowers," the Eton boys sang of a local cad,

"baits a badger well

For a bullhank or a tyke, sir,

And as an out-and-out bred swell

Was never seen his like, sir!"

The national norm was "J
oe
y" of the Westminster cockpit—"a small man of about five feet high with a very sharp countenance and dressed in a brown jockey coat and top boots"—to whom Francis Ardry introduced the future author of
Lavengro.
After trying to sell the "green one" a dog, this gentleman expatiated on the future of society.

"A
time will come, and that speedily, when folks will give up everything else and follow dog-fighting." "Do you think so?"

"Think so? Let me ask what there is that a man wouldn't give up for it?"

¹
W. Hazlitt, "Merry England,"
New English Monthly,
Dec,
1825;
Bamford, I,
108;
Eland,
19-23;
English Spy,
II,
332-3;
Life in London,
27-8, 145, 180;
Haydon,
Table Talk;
Howitt,
495;
Strutt,
Sports and Pastimes,
522-44;
Real Life in London,
I,
81;
II,
108
n.

"Why . . . there's religion."

"Religion! How you talk. Why, there's myself, bred and born an Independent, and intended to be a preacher, didn't I give up religion

for dog-fighting Religion! Why the parsons themselves come to

my pit, and I have now a letter from one of them asking me to send him a dog."

"Well, then, politics."

"Politics! Why, the gemmen in the House would leave Pitt himself, if he were alive, to come to my pit. There were three of the best of them here to-night, all great horators. Get on with you, what comes next?"

"Why, there's learning and letters."

"Pretty things, truly, to keep people from dog-fighting! Why, there's the young gentlemen from the Abbey School comes here in shoals, leaving books, letters and masters too. To tell you the truth, I rather wish they would mind their letters, for a more precious set of young blackguards I never seed.
..."

"You show by your own conduct that there are other things worth following besides dog-fighting. You practise rat-catching and badger-baiting as well. . . ."

"Your friend here might call you a new one! When I talks of dog-fighting, I of course means rat-catching and badger-baiting, ay, and bull-baiting, too, just as when I speaks religiously, when I says one, I means not one but three."
¹

One common denominator in particular linked Englishmen of all classes—the horse. The first goal of every boy or girl visiting the metropolis was Astley's circus. The friend who called Charles Lamb the only man in the country who had never worn boots or sat in a saddle, was only slightly exaggerating. Not that all Englishmen rode well; it was remarked of Wellington, though unfairly, that no conqueror ever combined more victories with more falls. Yet almost every Englishman born within sight of a highroad or a field thought it the height of felicity to be "well mounted on a spunky horse who would be well in front." The English loved horses. O'Kelly, owner of Eclipse, declared that all Bedford Level could not buy him. "When you have got such a horse to be proud of," the ostler told

¹
Lavengro,
212-13.

the Romany Rye, "wherever you go, swear there a'n't another to match it in the country, and if anybody gives you the he, take him by the nose and tweak it off, just as you would do if anybody were to speak ill of your lady!"
¹

"Something slap," a "bit of blood," "an elegant tit," were the phrases with which the English expressed this love. A smart or "spanking" turn-out was, more than anything else, the symbol of national pride; there was no comparison, a visitor to Paris in
1815
reckoned, between French and English equipages; neatness, beauty, finish, lightness, quality, all were on the side of the islanders. "The exercise which I do dearly love," wrote Mary Mitford, "is to be whirled along fast, fast, fast by a blood-horse in a gig." During the first years of the nineteenth century the great coachbuilders of London and the provincial capitals turned out a wonderful succession of equipages, perfectly adapted for their purposes, from the fashionable landau and deep-hung, capacious barouche to the dashing curricule, tilbury, buggy and gig, and the phaeton "highflyer" with its towering wheels and yellow wings. The most wonderful of all were the mail-coaches built for speed on the new metalled highways, with their blood-horses, bright brass harness, blazoned colours, horn-blowing guards and coachmen with squared shoulders, vast capes, multiple coats and nosegays.
²
Young aristocrats prided themselves on mastering the accomplishments of the professional knights of the road, even to filing and spitting through their teeth; to handle the "ribbons" and be a first-rate "fiddler" was passport to any company.

Supporting the noble institution of the horse was an immense community of grooms and ostlers, of sharp-eyed, wiry little men with bow legs and highlows and many a string dangling from the knees of their breeches, and lads in dirty pepper-and-salt coats and low-crowned hats with turn-up ears. They were members of an
alma mater
of which almost every English lad aspired to be a graduate.
³
Under its splendid clothes and yellow varnished equipages, Regency England stank of the stable and was proud of it. The fraternity of the curry-comb—that knowing underworld of inn tap-rooms and raffish-looking parties with hats on one side and straws in their

¹
Romany Rye,
188.
See Aiken,
National Sports of Great Britain;
Bell, 1,
170;
Leigh Hunt,
Autobiography,
I,
134;
Lamb, VI,
518;
Newton,
220-1;
Simond, II,
155.

²
English Spy,
I,
165, 275-6, 279-81;
Gronow, I,
129-30;
Life in London,
37-8;
Real Life in London,
I,
43-4;
Simond, I,
129-30;
McCausland
passim.

³
Even factory lads, like Bamford in the Manchester warehouse, liked looking after their employers' mounts, and learned like him "how to bed my master's neat tit down, to rub the bits and stirrups and sponge the bridle and girths." Bamford, I,
162-3.

mouths—stretched from Dover to Galway; without it, the economist's Great Britain of the early nineteenth century seems as insubstantial as the two-dimensional world of the cinema. From it sprang the English poet whose mastery of sensuous imagery has only been surpassed by the offspring of the Stratford-on-Avon corn dealer. John Keats was the son of an ostler who married his master's daughter and succeeded him as keeper of a livery stable in Moorfields.

Horse jockeyship, the making of traffic in horseflesh, was "the most ticklish and unsafe of all professions." Coleridge heard a clerical Nimrod at Salisbury boast that he would cheat his own father over a horse. "Then how would you, Mr. Romany Rye," the ostler asked Borrow, "pass off the veriest screw
...
for a flying dromedary?"

"By putting a small live eel down his throat; as long as the eel remained in his stomach, the horse would appear brisk and livery to a surprising degree."

"And how would you contrive to make a regular kicker and biter appear . . . tame and gentle?"

"By pouring down his throat four pints of generous ale
...
to make him happy and comfortable."

The itch for horse-dealing and betting created, like everything English, its institutions. Weatherby's was to the Turf what the Bank of England was to the City, and Tattersall's, "that hoarse and multifarious miscellany of men" below Hyde Park Corner, with its circular counter—a kind of temple to the goddess of chance—and its painting of Eclipse over the fireplace, was the Stock Exchange of the equine world.
¹
A little Newmarket quizzing or hocussing was reckoned an essential part of a young gentleman's education for a rough, wicked world. It taught him, in the cant of the day, to keep his peepers open. It helped to give him and his race that strong practical sense—horse sense, they called it—that made them, where-ever they went, the lords of the earth.

¹
English Spy,
I,
327-9;
Dixon,
92-3;
Life in London,
191;
Lockhart, IV,
77, 290, 292;
Acker
mann,
Microcosm; Real Life in London,
160-5;
Romany Rye,
187-8, 335;
Coleridge,
Miscellanies,
236.