Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub

ing an opinion with regard to the manners and morals of a by-gone age, and that is, lest we should mistake satire for truth and caricature for likeness. In making use of the novels for this purpose some caution is no doubt necessary.

But here an important distinction must be made. It would be very wrong to consider that particular characters in the hands of novelists truthfully represent a class, where it is obvious that the object is to indulge in exaggeration and provoke a laugh. Nobody believes that the grotesque personages who figure in the pages of Dickens are anywhere to be found in real life. His plan was to seize upon some oddity of human nature, and invest his puppets with it so completely that they can never open their lips without betraying it. Who ever met with such a compound of impudence and wit in a shoeblack, or a groom, as we find in the immortal Sam Weller? It may have been our lot to know "a great man struggling with the storms of fate," but where shall we look for a man who is jolly in proportion as he is unfortunate, like Mark Tapley? Who can believe in the actual existence of such persons as Miss Flite and Miss Mowcher and Toots? Gradgrind is so practical that he ceases to be human; Micawber is full of maudlin sentiment and emphatic nonsense; Mrs. Nickleby is always par

enthetical and incoherent; Boythorn never opens his lips without being intensely and boisterously energetic; and Major Bagstock always describes himself as "tough old Joe;" "Joe is rough and tough, sir! blunt, sir, blunt is Joe." It would be in the last degree absurd for a future writer to take these characters as types of English society in the middle of the nineteenth century; and, to a certain extent, the same kind of allowance must be made for the characters in the novels of the last century. For it is impossible to believe that the portrait of Squire Western represented in all its brutal details the country gentleman of England; that Parson Adams and Parson Trulliber give us a just idea of the clergy, or that the Roxana of Defoe, the Mrs. Waters and Lady Bellaston of Fielding, the Miss Grizzle Pickle and Miss Tabitha Bramble of Smollett, the Mrs. Harriet Freke of Miss Edgeworth, and the Mrs. Bennett of Jane Austen, are true types of the modesty, education, refinement, and intelligence, of Englishwomen of the time. I say that this allowance should be made only to "a certain extent," for I believe that the characters drawn by the old novelists are, with a few exceptions, intended to be less imaginary than the creations of fiction in our own day, and have a substratum of reality which is wanting in many of the amusing characters of Dick

ens. But, at all events, we may use the novels as evidence of a state of society and manners on two grounds, which are independent of the question whether particular characters truthfully represent a class. First, we may be sure that in the general tone of conversation and description, and the unconscious introduction of little incidents of every-day life, the writers hold the mirror up to Nature and reflect the image they themselves received from the world around them. And next the degree of popularity which their works enjoyed is evidence that their coarseness did not disgust nor their licentiousness repel the public taste. Such scenes as they described, and such language as they put into the mouths of their heroes, would now make a book unsalable-whereas, then, 'Clarissa Harlowe' was thought to teach lessons of virtue, and young ladies were not ashamed to avow their familiarity with 'Tom Jones.' We are not therefore to conclude that they were rakes and ready to throw themselves into the arms of the first adventurer they met; but we must infer that their delicacy was less susceptible and their modesty less sensitive than now. In Lockhart's 'Life of Scott'* there is an instructive anecdote told by Sir Walter, which remarkably illustrates this change in the public taste. A grand-aunt *Vol. v. pp. 136, 137.

of his, Mrs. Keith of Ravelstone, when a very old lady, once asked him whether he had ever seen Mrs. Behn's novels. Sir Walter confessed that he had. She then asked him whether he could get her a sight of them, and, “with some hesitation," he said he believed he could, but he did not think that she would like either the manners or language. "Nevertheless," said the good old lady, "I remember their being so much admired, and being so much interested in them myself, that I wished to look at them again." "So," says Sir Walter, "I sent Mrs. Aphra Behn, curiously sealed up, with 'private and confidential' on the packet, to my gay old grand-aunt. The next time I saw her afterward she gave me back Aphra, properly wrapped up, with nearly these words: Take back your bonny Mrs Behn, and, if you will take my advice, put her in the fire, for I find it impossible to get through the very first novel. But is it not,' she said, 'a very odd thing that I, an old woman of eighty and upward, sitting alone, feel myself ashamed to read a book which sixty years ago I have heard read aloud for the amusement of large circles, consisting of the first and most creditable society in London ?" "

CHAPTER II.

DRESS.-MASQUERADES.-DRUMS.—“PRETTY FELLOWS" AND "MACCARONIES."-CLUBS.-RANELAGH AND VAUXHALL.-LONDON.DANGERS OF THE STREETS.-STATE OF THE ROADS.-HIGHWAYMEN.

LET us now go a little more into detail, and consider some of the aspects of the social life and habits of our great-great-grandfathers and great-great-grandmothers.

And first as to the dress of the ladies. At the beginning of the last century the fashionable headdress was the commode, or fontage, by which the hair was piled up on wires to a prodigious height. Then there came a sudden fall, so that women who were more than seven feet high were reduced to five. In a letter in the 'Spectator,' from a barrister of the Middle Temple who "rode" the Western Circuit, he says that one of the most fashionable women he met with in all the circuit was the landlady at Staines, and her commode was not half a foot high, and her petticoat "within some yards of a modish circumference." The writer of a letter in the 'London Magazine' of

« VorigeDoorgaan »