16
A Fair Kingdom: Fame,
Taste and Fashion
The aristocrats who dominated eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain were highly visible public figures, whose daily lives and conduct were under constant scrutiny. Forever changing, aristocratic aesthetics offered the middle orders a guide as to what was desirable, proper and, therefore, worth imitating. Ordinary people were not only allowed to inspect the houses of noblemen, they were able to peer into their intimate lives through the prism of the press. Between about 1680 and 1710 a highly significant but little noticed revolution occurred in Britain: the emergence of newspapers as a force in political and social life. In 1714 2.5 million newspapers were printed in London and the provinces, and titles and circulations soared during the next hundred years.
The aristocracy provided journalists with a vast amount of copy which was avidly read, mostly by men and women of the middle class. Newspapers printed routine announcements as to which peers were arriving in London, Bath and later Brighton, and there were lists of aristocratic births, marriages, illnesses and deaths with appropriate details. In January 1758 the London Public Advertiser announced the death of the sixth Duke of Hamilton from an ‘inflammation of the bowels’, and reported a wedding in which the bride was ‘a beautiful young lady with a handsome fortune and every other gratification necessary to render the married state happy’.1 Such material obviously appealed to the bon ton, who were eager to keep abreast of metropolitan gossip.2
High-life scandal was soon established as a press staple, although editors always had to be circumspect, or risk a challenge or a horse-whipping. In 1824 the ‘Fashionable Herald’ column of Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle (which relished this kind of story) announced that: ‘Lord ++++ is given to understand that Lady ++++ has been called “a person of doubtful character by Sir +++++”’.3 Sexual innuendo, often coyly written, was very popular, although it was only fully intelligible to a limited circle. Outsiders drew their own conclusions, tutted and enjoyed the frisson of sharing in part the secret lives of their betters.
Aristocratic entertainments were regularly reported, often in a grotesquely obsequious prose. Four hundred guests turned up for a ball held by the Countess of Galloway in June 1800, and readers of The Oracle heard how she and her daughters ‘displayed all the assiduities of which warm hospitality and good breeding are susceptible in the first rank’. These ladies were all but outshone by the ‘youth and beauty’ of the Marchioness of Donegal, whose ‘elegant’ dress was worn with ‘much grace and dignity’.4
The fictional counterpart of this type of reporting was the ‘silver fork’ novel mostly written by and for women, which enjoyed a large readership. They were picaresque high-life adventures, and their content and mildly scandalous flavour was caught by a 1785 puff for Anna, or the Memoirs of a Welsh Heiress, ‘written from real life’ by ‘a lady’ and dedicated to Princess Charlotte, George III’s daughter; its chapter headings included ‘The Kept Mistress’, ‘Immaculate Peer’ and ‘Masquerade Adventure’.5 Levées, salons and grand balls were the background to Lady Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon, which appeared anonymously in 1816. The ‘world of fashion’, she believed, was ‘like a fairy kingdom’ whose inhabitants’ wit, manners and sophistication had made them perfect. Amusement and an ‘incessant hurry after novelty’ dominated their lives and relationships.6 Her readers wanted to enter this magic world and Lady Caroline was a well-qualified guide. She was an earl’s daughter who had married Lord Melbourne, the future Whig Prime Minister, was divorced and subsequently became the mistress of Lord Byron and, it was rumoured, the Duke of Wellington.
Those outside this enchanted domain of handsome lords, demure beauties, gossiping peeresses, witty badinage and self-indulgence were drawn towards it like moths to a candle, an illumination provided by the press and silver fork novels. Some writers warned their impressionable younger readers that the world of the bon ton was an amoral hothouse whose pleasures were artificial and unsatisfying. This was the message of A Sentimental Journey, written by ‘a Lady’ and serialised in the Lady’s Magazine in 1773. Her heroine wisely wonders whether ‘politeness’ is a poor substitute for ‘humanity’ and, after an assembly, decides that the ‘Trifling elegancies of high life too frequently make us forget what is essential to happiness.’7
The real or imagined ambience of society and those eager to break into it brings us close to the familiar modern world of ‘celebrity’. In essence, it was an eighteenth-century invention and was then called ‘fame’. Fame was the goal of the vain and ambitious outsider, and it was as brittle and transient as modern celebrity. As Dr Johnson tartly observed:
Unnumber’d Suppliants crowd Preferment’s Gate
Athirst for wealth and burning to be great,
Delusive Fortune hears th’incessant call,
They mount, they shine, evaporate and fall.
Fame required press coverage and aristocratic patronage. Both were extended to the mistresses of peers, beautiful girls, often from nowhere, who thrived on notoriety. In 1758 the Public Advertiser contrived what must have been the first photocall when it arranged for a famous courtesan, Kitty Fisher, to fall from her horse in Hyde Park to reveal her thigh and perhaps more (knickers were then not worn) to watching crowds.8 A nobleman’s mistress attracted press attention and secured status for herself and her keeper. On arriving in Paris, gentlemen undertaking the Grand Tour felt immediately obliged to take one of the ‘Filles D’Opera’ into their protection.9
In the same year, the necessities of the fashionable aristocrat were enumerated as membership of White’s Club (celebrated for gambling), horses at Newmarket and ‘an actress in keeping’.10 When ordering his wife’s portrait from Joshua Reynolds, the second Lord Bolingbroke instructed the artist ‘to give her the eyes of Nelly O’Brien [a well-known courtesan], or it will not do’.11
Reynolds would have known what was expected from him. He was a tireless and unashamed self-promoter and a toady to the aristocratic patrons who helped him. Speaking with his Devon burr and having gained the fame he had craved, Reynolds told young painters that they would never succeed as artists unless they secured public fame. ‘I never saw so vulgar and so familiar a forward fellow,’ sneered one aristocrat, but his fellows were glad to have Reynolds portray themselves, their wives and mistresses.
Reynolds was a member of the Dilettanti Society, which had been founded in 1734 to distil and define the elements of taste. Aristocratic collectors rubbed shoulders with artists and together they drank wine, examined works of art (chiefly classical) and endeavoured to create and promote a scientific and absolute rationale for connoisseurship.12 It was synonymous with taste and exclusive to collectors who had studied and discussed shade, colour and form. When the aristocratic connoisseur evaluated a painting, he talked with authority; knowledge separated him from the mere collector who hoarded indiscriminately. His rooms were crammed not just with works of art, but curios and natural history specimens which intrigued or amazed onlookers, but had no aesthetic merit. Typical were the stuffed birds, fossils, shells from the cabinet of ‘a gentleman under misfortune’ which were auctioned at his creditors’ request in 1785.13
The informed pursuit of beauty had close affinities with the pursuit and possession of beautiful women. Italian mistresses were among the trophies of the Grand Tour and aristocratic mothers rightly feared that their charms would prepare their sons for lives of vice and indolence.14 Two leading Dilettanti, the fourth Earl of Sandwich and Sir Francis Dashwood Bt., were infamous rakes and the connection between dissipation and connoisseurship was lampooned by Thomas Rowlandson’s The Connoisseurs, painted about 1800. Clinical aesthetic judgement and sexual voyeurism are linked by three connoisseurs peering at a painting of a voluptuous Susanna surprised by the peeping elders. The trio clearly desire to possess both the image and the person of Susanna.15
Rowlandson’s satire on the motives of the connoisseurs was a symptom of a new public attitude towards art which was critical of its dominance by the nobility. The essentially aristocratic absolutism of taste belonged to that ancien régime of the mind and spirit which had been overthrown in France in 1789. There, significantly, the royal collection in the Louvre was opened to every citizen in 1793. In Britain art was largely hidden from view in private collections. Artists were under the thumb of the Royal Academy, an exclusive and intensely conservative association of established figures, which had close links with the aristocratic connoisseurs who flocked to its annual exhibition held early in May.
Benjamin Haydon called it a ‘despotism’ which resembled a ‘House of Lords’ without a Commons or a King. The Academy’s outlook was patrician and haughty as the painter John Henning recalled. As a young artist in 1810 he had asked permission of the seventh Earl of Elgin to draw the marbles from the Parthenon which he purchased from the Turkish government. The Earl refused because Henning had no recommendation from an academician. ‘My Lord,’ he protested, ‘I cannot understand why noblemen or gentlemen should dare not allow an individual to draw or model from the works of art in their possession.’ This was the ‘popery of art’ and a form of slavery. As for the Royal Academy, it represented a ‘selfish spirit of exclusion’. Elgin, who had once been blackballed by the Dilettanti, warmed to Henning’s spirit and relented.16
The ‘selfish spirit of exclusion’, the rigid orthodoxies of taste and the veneration of the Classical retarded creativity, and private collections hid genius from the public. Hennings’s feelings blended with that wider movement for political and institutional reform which was then gathering momentum. The aristocracy’s grip on taste and the arts reflected its political dominance and was, as Hennings’s choice of the words ‘popery’ and ‘slavery’ implied, autocratic and unjust.
Wider questions emerged: was art like a rotten borough, a possession over which the owner had an unqualified right? Did the aristocracy have the same monopoly of wisdom in connoisseurship as it did in politics? These issues were raised in a symbolic contest fought in 1816 over the future of the Elgin Marbles. A mainly Tory Parliamentary committee was appointed to assess the ‘merits and value’ of the sculpture and it decided in favour of what today would be called ‘art for the people’. Its report claimed that Elgin’s collection would ‘improve our national taste for the Fine Arts and diffuse a more perfect knowledge of them throughout this Kingdom’. The Times concurred and hoped the Marbles would both inspire native artists and stimulate the taste of the public once they were in the British Museum, which, since 1810, was legally bound to admit anyone ‘of decent appearance’.
This decision was a reverse for the Dilettanti, who wanted the Marbles to have been placed on the market for private collectors. This principle of delivering art to the people was further advanced a few years later, when Lord Liverpool and Sir Robert Peel backed plans for the National Gallery, whose exhibits would include works bought from aristocratic collections. Inviting the people to discover and enjoy art was a Tory concession which did not directly compromise the aristocratic principle. Paintings and sculpture were still private property at the disposal of their owners, but now the state competed with collectors when they came up for sale.
The preferences and influence of aristocratic taste remained. John Constable, who wanted to paint landscapes, complained about commissions for portraits and the tendency of patrons to be swayed by the fashions of France. In 1823 a friend predicted that ‘English boobies, who dare not trust their own eyes, will discover your merits when they find you are admired in Paris.’ Constable made compromises, but Benjamin Haydon refused to and discovered painfully that potential patrons did not recognise his unique genius. In consequence he spent most of career teetering on the brink of insolvency. In 1829 he wrote enviously of the young Edwin Landseer, whose portraits of animals and children secured abundant commissions, riding on his ‘blood horse’ (thoroughbred) with the ‘airs of a man of fashion’. Haydon consoled himself that he had not surrendered to the ‘vices of fashion’.17
Haydon’s use of the word ‘fashion’ is instructive: ‘a man of fashion’ indicates social status and the ‘vices of fashion’ refers to prevailing, if ephemeral, addictions. The nature and manifestations of eighteenth-century fashion and how and why it changed have been extensively analysed.18 From the point of view of this history what matters is that the rest of the world was on the whole content to follow whatever found favour with the aristocracy from styles of dress to musical taste. Political ascendancy went hand in hand with cultural ascendancy and both were challenged in the next century.
Aristocratic cultural power was demonstrated in 1728 when only the determined influence and financial backing of the Duchess of Queensberry secured the first production of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, which broke with convention and verged on the subversive. A ‘prodigious concourse of nobility and gentry’ gathered for the first night and applauded generously when the curtain fell. Gay was delighted and confessed to Jonathan Swift his amazement at and gratitude to the Duchess’s ‘brave spirit’ and ‘goodness’.19
Aristocrats dictated musical taste, although they disagreed passionately over the merits of one composer or style over another. In 1720 half of the twenty directors of the Royal Academy of Music were peers, some of whom, like the first Earl of Egmont, were keen amateur players. He was devoted to Handel’s music, the popularity of which was ‘convincing proof of our national taste’ according to a newspaper of 1754.20 Over ten years before he had abandoned composing ‘Italian’ operas which had been favoured by the nobility, but which upset patriots. In 1737 a newspaper deplored the ‘vast sums of money’ paid to Italian performers for a decadent form of entertainment. ‘The ancient Romans . . . did not admit of any effeminate music, singing and dancing on their stage, till luxury had corrupted their morals and the loss of liberty followed soon after.’21
Xenophobes of the John Bull tendency feared that noblemen paying thousands of pounds to hire and listen to famous Italian castrati were a symptom of impending moral collapse. The aristocracy’s infatuation with foreign, particularly Italian novelties was unpatriotic: they drained the country of money and encouraged the physical and moral ennervation of the nation’s leaders. Solid, British sustenance was scorned by men of fashion, who ‘regale on macaroni or piddle with an ortolan’ and judge the quality of a meal by its cost rather than its constituents complained a journalist in 1754.22 Tenants languished while their landlord trifled with alien frivolities. They were spurned by the new squire of Harpswell in Lincolnshire and his tenants were grateful:
Their consequence some may presume they advance,
By learning the capers and vapours of France;
Home-bred and home-fed, what we tenants admire,
Is the true English spirit display’d in our Squire.23
This young fellow (reminiscent of Goldsmith’s Squire Lumpkin) had clearly not made a Grand Tour.
The xenophobes were mistaken. There is abundant evidence which suggests that many dedicated followers of fashion did not shirk their public duties and were not uncaring landlords. Consider the career and interests of James, seventh Earl of Findlater, a Scottish landowner who took the Grand Tour in the company of the neoclassical painter Colin Morrison. He made several extended visits to Paris and Brussels between 1776 and 1784 and between 1790 and his death wandered across central Europe. During this time and because of financial strains, Findlater worked in Dresden as an architect and had his plans published in Les Plans et Desseins tirés de la Belle Architecture, which appeared in Paris in 1798.24 His medical bills indicate either fragile health or hypochondria, although his payments for food and wine indicate a stalwart appetite. There is the distinct likelihood that he was a homosexual, so that his absences abroad were a means to avoid prosecution for what was then a capital offence.
Findlater was clearly a nobleman of taste attuned to current fashions. During a visit to Bath in 1783 he purchased a ‘superfine’ blue coat, ‘fine ostrich feathers’, ‘pomade au jasmin’, a ‘brown Canadian fox muff’ and a swansdown puff for applying powder to his face, and, in Paris, he bought quantities of gold and silver silk. In Bath he dined on English food (eel pie) and foreign (an ‘Italian’ cutlet and chicken fricassee). He subscribed to British Magazine and Les Nouvelles de la République des Lettres et des Artes.25
Findlater also fulfilled his responsibilities as a landowner. He invested in the development of his estates, the construction of a local canal and the rebuilding of the harbour at Banff in Moray. When in Scotland, he gave between seven and eleven shillings a week to the poor. Findlater also funded what was in effect a free health service for his tenants and labourers, paying a local surgeon for their treatment. During 1785 and 1786 the bill came to fifty-three pounds and covered, among other things, quinine, a ‘mercurial purge’, expectorants and ‘extirpating a cancerous tumour’.26 It was a remarkable and humane service and a signal reminder that the pursuit of fashion did not obliterate the traditional social duties of a nobleman.
In 1782 Findlater paid twelve guineas for a pair of fine duelling pistols.27 It was a large sum, but it provided protection for the Earl’s person (Lord North’s carriage had been attacked by a pair of mounted highwaymen near Gunnersbury in 1774) and his honour.28 Gentlemen of all ranks continued to believe that their honour and public reputation demanded that they submitted to tests of courage if these were in any way slighted. By the mid-eighteenth century pistols had become the commonest weapon. Between 1760 and 1820 there were 170 duels which resulted in sixty-nine deaths, and there was an unknown number of confrontations which ended in apologies.29 Prosecutions were infrequent, and during this period there were eighteen trials, fourteen convictions for manslaughter and murder, and just two hangings.
The law was broadly tolerant of duelling. The jurymen in the Macnamara case accepted the plea that the duel was the only way in which the accused could have upheld his honour as an officer and gentleman. The prevailing opinion was expressed in a newspaper editorial of 1789, which accepted that the duel was ‘a remnant of chivalry’, but it was a ‘necessary evil which operates to preserve a proper order in that part of society where laws would be ineffectual’. It was impossible for juries and judges to comprehend the nuances of the arcane code of honour in which the ‘insult of a frown’ or the ‘malignity of emphasis’ were grounds for a challenge. Moreover, the duel protected ‘female innocence’ and preserved ‘the decorum of familiar intercourse, and the respectability of honour’.30
Newspapers and their readers were fascinated by the causes and outcomes of duels. Affronts to honour varied enormously from the trivial to deliberate provocation: ‘allegations of effeminacy’ led to a challenge in 1731, whilst ‘marks of rudeness’ including picking teeth and lounging at a table with his feet in the challenger’s face led to another in 1777.31 One duel in 1824 was a consequence of a squabble over billiards and another concerned ‘unjustifiable assertions’ against a gentleman’s sister, which compelled him to travel from Madras to issue the challenge.32 The voyage was worth it, for his shot shattered the thigh of his sister’s traducer.
Reports of the incidents which culminated in duels added to a perception of the world of fashion as amoral and self-indulgent. Gambling for high stakes, adultery, fornication, drunkenness and violence seemed endemic amongst the bon ton. A joke of 1754 alleged that the difference between prostitutes and ‘fine ladies’ was that the first had a ‘trade’ and that the second lived by smuggling.33 At a ball in 1789, two young ladies were admiring the dress of men and one whispered behind her fan, ‘I am for the undress – what say you?’ ‘I see we are certainly sisters,’ her companion answered, ‘for I was just thinking of the same thing.’34 The louche and purblind pursuit of pleasure led towards decadence and effeteness. It was epitomised by ‘exquisites’ like Lord Dallas in Lady Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon, who was ‘quite thorough bred though full of conceit’. His conversation passed effortlessly from the ‘nature of love’ to the beauty of the Greek language and the ‘insipidity of all English society’.35
During the first two decades of the nineteenth century the excesses of the bon ton came under increasing censure and what had once been tolerated or ignored was now being challenged and condemned. During the French wars radicals castigated aristocratic extravagance and found themselves in an alliance of convenience with right-wing patriots. In 1800 the Anti-Jacobin railed against the ‘depravity of the age’, which was manifest in the behaviour of theatre audiences. There were ‘horrible outrages of modesty, the most obscene language, and the most indecent conduct’ in the lobbies and the boxes, where richer patrons sat.36
There were suggestions that the antique codes of honour which sanctioned duelling needed revision to bring them in line with modern reason.37 What moral or logical justifications were there for one section of society to claim immunity from laws which were framed for the whole community? Furthermore, the aristocracy’s resort to duelling set an appalling example to those who looked to it for leadership; in 1810 the Gentleman’s Magazine was disturbed by reports of duels fought by shopkeepers.38 Submission to the ‘cruel and false principles of his class’ drive the gentleman to commit murder argued the Evangelical William Wilberforce in an appeal designed to remind the upper levels of society of their Christian duty.39 Better known for his campaigns against the slave trade and slavery, Wilberforce devoted almost as much energy to persuading the landed classes to reform their lives according to Christian doctrines.
For Wilberforce, perceived aristocratic licentiousness and hedonism set a bad example to the rest of society which looked upwards for moral guidance. Traditional duties were neglected: in 1818 the writer and caricaturist George Cruikshank wrote that ‘Dame Fashion’ was subverting the nobility:
For one rout – for one year she shuts her gate on the poor,
Then the box at the opera, shar’d with a few,
Makes her give up, in church the old family pew.40
There were parallels between the criticism of the aristocracy’s moral failings and assaults on its political power. Both were integral to the ‘old corruption’ which reformers wanted to uproot and both were products of middle-class ideologies which rejected the ‘wisdom of our ancestors’.
There was a paradox here, for the middle class remained in thrall to aristocratic taste. The eighteenth-century consumer revolution had witnessed an increasingly prosperous middle class spending its disposable income on carriages, clothes, furniture, silver and tableware, and clothes which copied styles then in favour with the nobility. Retailers advertised themselves as suppliers of goods or provisions to the ‘nobility and gentry’ to tempt middle-class customers. Middle-class women could pore over prints of the latest Paris fashions in the Lady’s Magazine and instruct the local sempstress to reproduce them. The results could be paraded at social gatherings whose rituals were aristocratic in form, but which had been commercially organised. A new breed of impresarios organised concerts and masquerades which charged for admission. The beau monde was often present at these entertainments and rubbed shoulders with lesser creatures. Even the ‘impures of Marylebone’ attended a public masquerade at the Pantheon in 1786, mingling with ‘people of fashion’ who maintained ‘that kind of reserve usual for them at guinea masquerades’.41
Commercialisation made art less exclusive and less reclusive. The mushroom growth of the print industry after 1750 meant that the banker or the surgeon could acquire engraved copies of Old Masters and fashionable modern painters such as Reynolds. Living artists got the reproduction fees, which made them less dependent on aristocratic patrons, and the middle-class collector could create his own private gallery.42 Commercialisation infiltrated the world of music. The fourth Earl of Abingdon had been the patron of Haydn’s proposed but later abandoned visit to London in 1782, but it was a professional impresario, Johann Saloman, who organised his concerts during the early 1790s. Their press advertisements carried the usual formula ‘For the Nobility Gentry’, but many others clearly attended, for Haydn was delighted to find that he had established a ‘credit with the common people’.43
The nature of musical performances was very gradually changing. They had always been social occasions at which the fashionable gathered to meet and converse with familiar friends, although this did not mean that they were inattentive audiences.44 This custom had disappeared by the middle years of the nineteenth century, when the aristocracy’s attendance at operas and concerts declined. Middle-class listeners replaced them and tended to concentrate solely and intensely on the music.45
A different kind of earnestness pervaded the middle class’s attitude to visual art, which laid a heavy emphasis on didactic instruction and moral worth. In 1849 the Art Union, which had been formed to mass produce and sell prints to the middle class, was offering The Death of Boadicea, The Fall of Satan and Richard II and Bolingbroke. In the same year, in an analysis of the utilitarian functions of art, a critic referred to its capacity to ‘strengthen the bonds of the social order’ and its ‘moral and social value’.46 This was a long way from the spirit and vision of the Dilettanti, although their principles still animated an older generation of noblemen. In 1845 Wellington told Benjamin Haydon that the aristocracy did not want ‘High Art’, rather it desired ‘first-rate specimens’, by which the Duke meant Old Masters.47
The moral ethos of society was being transformed, slowly and in accord with the temper of the middle classes. The new mood was apparent at Queen Victoria’s court, and after a stay at Windsor in 1838 Charles Greville disapprovingly noted an absence of ‘the sociability which makes agreeableness of an English country house’ and a lack of room for ‘guests to assemble, sit, lounge and chatter’.48 Public antipathy to duelling intensified. In 1842, Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel responded by adding clauses to the Articles of War which outlawed it, insisted that officers who fought duels were cashiered and withdrew pension rights from the widows of officers killed in duels.
One stalwart of the anti-duelling movement had been Lord Lovaine MP, who was also a fierce supporter of strict Sabbath observance. Evangelicalism had permeated the aristocracy and with it philistinism. During the 1857 debate on the Obscene Publications Bill, two older peers, Lords Brougham and Lyndhurst, wondered whether many Renaissance paintings might be liable to prosecution. The former Lord Chief Justice, Lord Campbell, was unmoved and horrified by the idea of rich collectors possessing such corrupting material.49 The bill became law and its passage was a significant token of the loss of aristocracy’s influence over matters of social conduct. There was some hankering after the old ways: in 1881 Lord Randolph Churchill challenged Lord Hartington to a duel after he had called him ‘vile, contumacious, and lying’. Hartington apologised.50