Doubtless many of them did steal from the pantry. They would have been inhuman not to have done it; outside in the dark and cold were relatives who had left the land, like them, and had found no jobs. These were the drifting poor who could not even afford a twopence Whitechapel breakfast and whom Shaw and H. G. Wells would soon discover. During the day they lived in London’s parks, but when the parks closed at sunset they would shuffle out and huddle in doorways or on Embankment benches, wrapped in rags and newspapers against the cold, until 4:15 A.M., when the gates of the first to open, Green Park, were unbolted. Primitive as street life was, it was considered preferable to the desperate workhouses. Now and then these institutions created by the Poor Law were humane; Maggie, Little Dorrit’s protégée, was so thankful for her treatment in a workhouse hospital that she called all kindness “hospitality.” But to most of the suffering masses they meant pitilessness and terror and were a major reason for the emigration of nearly three million Englishmen between 1853 and 1880. The system was against them. The purpose of law enforcement was the protection of property. Policemen deferred to top-hatted gentlemen and hounded wretches in ragged clothes. Under the Master and Servant Law, employees could be arrested in the dead of night for disobeying the most outrageous of orders, and under the Prevention of Poaching Act, suspicious constables could stop and search anyone in “streets, highways, and public places.” The woman in a middle-class servant’s hall, warm and well fed, not only knew her place but was grateful for it.
Her mistress had solved the middle-class woman’s greatest challenge just by reaching the altar. With so many men of her social standing abroad in the Empire, the supply of bachelors was limited, and marriage was the only respectable occupation open to her. Failing that, she was doomed to lifelong submissiveness in her parents’ home, serving as an unpaid servant. There were many like her. Indeed, W. L. Burn noted in The Age of Equipoise that “the dependent daughter was one of the fundamentals on which the mid-Victorian home was based.” Not all daughters suffered in silence; Florence Nightingale denounced “the petty grinding tyranny of a good English family. What I complain of… is the degree to which they have raised the claims upon women of ‘Family.’ It is a kind of Fetichism.”30 Miss Nightingale is one of the few women whose names have survived, an outrider of twentieth-century feminism. Another, who was actually more useful to her sisters, was Isabella Beeton, born within the sound of London’s Bow Bells and therefore a cockney. Like Florence, Isabella was a human dynamo. Before her death at twenty-eight of puerperal fever, that assassin of Victorian mothers, she had given birth to four children, served as fashion editor for her husband’s periodical, the British Domestic Magazine, and produced a tremendously successful volume of her own, her 1,111-page Household Management, with fourteen color plates and hundreds of black-and-white illustrations. (It weighed two pounds and cost seven shillings and sixpence.) By 1871, six years after her funeral, two million copies had been sold.
“Mrs. Beeton,” as Englishwomen called the book, was to them what “Dr. Spock” became for American mothers four generations later. The needs it filled tell us a great deal about their circumstances. As wealth poured into England from its colonial possessions abroad, the waves of growing affluence enriched and complicated life in a nation arriviste. Brides had no precedents for orchestrating sophisticated social skills; their mothers, having lived in simpler times, were of little help. So Mrs. Beeton explained when to wear gloves, how to maneuver on the pavement so that gentlemen escorts walked on the street side, and what the French names for courses of food meant. The British were still an insular people. (A headline of the period was FOG IN THE CHANNEL, CONTINENT CUT OFF.) And serving as hostess at dinner parties was a wife’s most important role. Ladies did not eat out until the Savoy Hotel opened in 1889, with César Ritz as the headwaiter. Entertaining was done at private residences only. Mrs. Beeton told her readers, in extraordinary detail, which wines to serve with meat and fish, when the ladies should leave the gentlemen to their brandy, and how to cope with a party of three dozen, counting the coachmen who had to wait for their masters and mistresses. She provided recipes, information on how much to order, and what to do with the leftovers. One entry was: “Bill of Fare for a Picnic for Forty Persons.” It recommended, among other things, 122 bottles of refreshment for the entire group, including servants, coachmen, and lady’s maids. The food was absurdly cheap, but the logistics were staggering. Moreover, this was a middle-class affair. The upper class entertained on a scale unmatched today. It was expected of them, which sometimes presented difficulties. Winston Churchill, born to a noble family, simply could not afford it. He had to live by his wits most of his life.
Upper-class hostesses had no need to plan picnics in the country. They were already there. They had London mansions, too, but the soul of the leisure class was in the land. It always had been. Chaucer wrote of his medieval franklin, or landowner, that “It snewed in his hous of mete and drinke, / Of alle deyntees men coude thinke.” Arundel Castle, in Sussex, goes back even farther. It is mentioned in the will of King Alfred, who reigned eleven centuries ago. An ancestor of the present tenant, the sixteenth Duke of Norfolk, won it when an arrow from the bow of one of his archers pierced the eye of Harold in the Battle of Hastings. Socially, a duke in the country has always had the best of all possible worlds. In the British aristocracy the twenty-seven dukes are outranked only by members of the British royal family; the College of Arms advised a hostess, who was worried about seating arrangements for her dinner party, that “the Aga Khan is held to be a direct descendant of God,” but “an English Duke takes precedence.” The other degrees of the British peerage, in descending order, are marquess, earl, viscount, and baron, and though these don’t carry as much weight as they once did, in Victoria’s time to be titled, in most instances, still meant to be landed. On the estates of the nobility stood the great country houses, where England’s three hundred ruling families celebrated the weekly three-night British holiday, which is popularly thought to have been a brainchild of the Queen’s hedonistic Prince of Wales, but which was actually created by, of all people, Oliver Cromwell; in 1899 one of Cromwell’s biographers, S. R. Gardiner, found that “Oliver… may be regarded as the inventor of that modified form of enjoyment to which hard-worked citizens have, in our day, given the name of ‘week-end.’ ”31
But upper-class Victorians weren’t hard-worked. Most of them didn’t work at all. That was what set the upper class apart from the upper-middle class. The two mingled, but never as equals; as Lady Warwick explained to Elinor Glyn, “Doctors and solicitors might be invited to garden parties, though never of course to luncheon or dinner.” The elite kept themselves to themselves. This small, select, homogenous patriciate, this “brilliant and powerful body,” in Churchill’s admiring phrase, passed most of their time by passing the port, sherry, and claret; by discussing cricket; by playing billiards, admiring their horses, and shooting grouse—a thousand grouse were felled in a single shoot attended by Churchill’s mother. Unlike the French, they did not cultivate tête-à-têtes; Robert Laird Collier found that “they are poor talkers as a rule, and conversation seems to be a labor to most of them,” that they “never express the least feeling in their social intercourse,” and that “all the social talk is stupid and insipid.” In an age which cherished the Latin motto laborare est orare, when Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help could be found in almost every middle-class home, an idle nobility seemed an affront to social critics. In Edward Lear’s Book of Nonsense the likable figures are Floppy Fly and Daddy Long Legs, who are ejected from court because their legs are ill-made. Lewis Carroll depicted patricians as tyrants and muddlers. Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe described the House of Lords as a body that “did nothing in particular and did it very well.” But the ruling class was unperturbed. Ideas bored them. “As a class,” Lady Warwick said, “we did not like brains.” A contemporary work, Kings, Courts and Society, saw Britain comprising “a small, select aristocracy, booted and s
purred to ride, and a large, dim mass, born, saddled and bridled to be ridden.” On Sunday the weekenders gathered in the chapels found under every country-house roof and sang:32
The rich man in his castle
The poor man at his gate
God made them high and lowly
And orders their estate.
Later Churchill wrote: “The old world in its sunset was fair to see.” It doesn’t seem very fair to us. In their portraits titled Victorians, particularly the men, seem to be oozing complacency and self-esteem, wholly indifferent to the fact that 30 percent of the inhabitants of their capital city were undernourished while they feasted, at a typical lunch for six, on cold pheasant, a brace of partridges, a pair of roast fowls, steak, salmon, and a choice of two soups. As late as 1940 Clare Boothe Luce, though an anglophile, fumed: “Sometimes they are so insolent, so sure of themselves, so smug, I feel as though it would do them good for once to be beaten.” But by then they had become an anachronism, and the brightest among them knew it. To put them in context is to see them against the background of nineteenth-century Eurasia. From the Barents Sea to the Mediterranean, from the Rhine to Vladivostok, monarchs not only reigned but ruled through bewildering hierarchies of grand dukes, archdukes, princelings, and other hereditary nobles—twenty-two dynasties in Germany alone. The masses having accepted the saddles and bridles, threadbare commoners also sang about God making men high and lowly. It was, James Laver writes, “probably the last period in history when the fortunate thought they could give pleasure to others by displaying their good fortune before them.” Bagehot wrote: “The fancy of the mass of men is incredibly weak; it can see nothing without a visible symbol…. Nobility is a symbol of mind.” So ingrained was the habit of forelock-tugging that by 1875, when Trollope wrote The Way We Live Now, that society accepted the exploitation of titles by impecunious nobles who sold their prestige by consenting to serve as directors of businesses in wobbly shape.33
This did not declass them. Their social status was their birthright, and nothing could deprive them of it. Even if a peer committed murder, he was entitled to a trial by the House of Lords, and if sentenced to the gallows he was hanged with a silken rope. Of course, most of the upper class was merely related to peers. Given primogeniture, with all property going to the eldest son, including the title, the patriciate was heavily populated with younger sons who had inherited nothing and usually entered the navy, army, church, or diplomatic corps—the traditional order of preference. (Two generations passed before a descendant became a commoner. The firstborn son of the seventh Duke of Marlborough was his heir. The second son was called Lord Randolph Churchill. Randolph’s wife was Lady Randolph Churchill. Their son was simply Mr. Winston Churchill.) Yet all retained the life-style of the aristocracy. Characteristically, members of the upper class never lifted an unnecessary finger. It was said of Lady Ida Sitwell that she not only did not know how to lace up her own shoes; she would have been humiliated by the knowledge. Churchill’s cousin, the ninth duke, while visiting friends and traveling without his valet, or “man,” complained that his toothbrush didn’t “froth properly.”34 He had to be told gently that toothpaste had to be applied to the brush before it would foam. His man had always done that, and he hadn’t realized it. Winston himself lived ninety years without once drawing his own bath or riding on a bus. He took the tube just once. His wife had to send a party to rescue him; helpless, he was whirling round and round the tunnels under London. And all his life he was dressed and undressed by someone else, usually a valet, though during one period by a secretary in her twenties. There are those among his friends who believe that this sort of thing taught him how to use people properly.
It was during the London “Season”—from the Queen of Charlotte’s Ball in mid-spring to the Goodwood races in midsummer—that the great peers were to be found in their town houses. These were surrounded by barbered gardens, high walls, and gates manned by gatekeepers who fought off beggars and other street people. Sometimes they shot them. This aroused neighbors, who knew their station but believed a line should be drawn short of homicide. Actually, the very sites of many of the huge homes were outrageous. In Mayfair, Belgravia, Marylebone, and St. Pancras, streets maintained at public expense had been included within such walls, which meant that fire engines were blocked and buildings burned down. All attempts at legislation outlawing this extraordinary practice were defeated in Parliament.
In London the upper classes had their stylized rituals, most of them frivolous. Every morning after breakfast processions of victorias—low four-wheeled carriages with folding tops—debouched from the West End and trotted along Park Lane, gay harnesses tinkling and erect postilions wearing uniforms, glistening high boots, and varnished, high-crowned hats. Daughters were presented at court; the ladies, en grande toilette, wore three ostrich feathers in their hats if married, two feathers if not. Wasp-waisted, their gowns off the shoulder, skirts voluminous and rustling, the debutantes would be waited upon by uniformed members of the Corps Diplomatique, Gentlemen of the Household in full court dress, and Yeomen of the Guard in scarlet and gold. The fathers of the girls being brought out would be absent, loitering in their clubs: the Athenaeum, White’s, the Carlton, the Reform, and the rest. They did not care to be “seen” then. But the sexes did mingle on other public occasions. Everyone enjoyed the royal enclosure at Ascot, gorging on champagne, strawberries, and lobster mousse. And—rowing being considered manly—it was rather a good thing to turn out for the Henley Regatta. Dress there was about as informal as it ever got for that class. Ladies appeared in blouses and long linen skirts; their husbands, in straw boaters, blazers, and flannels.
The best club in London was Parliament, which, by no coincidence, held its key sessions between Easter and August—in effect, the Season. At the time of Winston Churchill’s birth, MPs were not only unpaid; they were expected to contribute generously to charities in their constituencies. So the upper class controlled both the Lords and the House of Commons. B. Cracroft, analyzing the House in his Essays on Reform, found that 326 members were patricians, including 226 sons or grandsons of peers, and a hundred others “connected with the peerage by marriage or descent.” Over a hundred more belonged “substantially to the same class,” which meant that three out of every four MPs were linked to each other and to the older generation in the Lords by blood as well as by conservative outlook. Between a third and a half of all cabinet members were from the upper house—six of Disraeli’s thirteen ministers, five of Gladstone’s fourteen. As we have seen, their hold on key posts in the Empire was even greater. Every viceroy of India was a peer by inheritance. In Little Dorrit Dickens wrote caustically of the Barnacle “clan, or clique, or family, or connection” that “there was not a list, in all the Circumlocution Office, of places that might fall vacant anywhere within half a century, from a Lord of the Treasury to a Chinese Consul, and up again to a Governor-General of India, but, as applicants for such places, the names of some or every one of these hungry and adhesive Barnacles were down.”35
So the opening of Parliament, or a heralded debate in the Commons, was not unlike a family reunion. Broughams, landaus, barouches, victorias, and hansoms tingling their unmistakable bells clattered over the cobblestones of New Palace Yard and drew up in front of the Westminster Hall entrance. Men in striped trousers and frock coats descended carrying bulky red leather boxes stuffed with state papers, then disappeared into lobbies brightened by flaring gas jets. In the Strangers’ Dining Room wives and daughters awaited them, wearing flowing skirts of tulle and hats as large as the displays at the Chelsea Flower Show. Gossip was exchanged, outcomes predicted, Liberals scorned by Tories or Tories by Liberals—it scarcely mattered, since their interests and social positions were virtually identical. The mighty seemed completely secure. Yet there were those who worried. Macaulay had warned against “the encroachments of despotism and the licentiousness of democracy.” Bagehot said “sensible men of substantial means are what we wish to be rul
ed by” and cautioned that “a political combination of the lower classes… is an evil of the first magnitude…. So long as they are not taught to act together there is a chance of this being averted, and it can only be averted by the greater wisdom and foresight in the higher classes.” The Queen, alarmed, let it be known that “a democratic monarchy is what she will never belong to.”36 Skittish patricians held their breath when the franchise bill of 1884 swept away 216 seats in rotten boroughs and increased the electorate. One man in five now had the vote—but at the next election the Conservatives were returned to power, with Lord Salisbury succeeding Disraeli. Salisbury was eminently a patrician of his time. A descendant of the two Cecils who had been Elizabeth I’s and James I’s chief ministers, he was a towering, massive man—acerbic, gauche, preoccupied, disdainful, and possessed of a penetrating intellect. He declined to live at 10 Downing Street, preferring his own more elegant London home, in the chapel of which he prayed each morning upon arising. He suffered spells of depression which he described as “nerve storms.” It was Salisbury’s firm belief that only uncontentious legislation should be brought before Parliament. If it was controversial, England wasn’t ready for it.