The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (15 page)

Home was sanctuary, a place of peace and stability with sturdy furniture, in which evenings were spent reading aloud, whence the family departed for church and reunions with grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins, and where children were trained to assure the continuity of generations to come:

Keeping the Empire growing “strong and most beautiful” would be the solemn legacy of these children. Middle-class Victorian parents had no Rousseauistic illusions about youthful innocence; their young were never allowed to stray from adult supervision. The inference of repression is not necessarily justified. Children were taken to Punch-and-Judy shows, “suitable” plays in Drury Lane, and summer holidays at the seashore. But their lives revolved around the family. London evenings found them in the parlor, the boys in Norfolk jackets and the girls in beribboned bonnets and buttoned boots, joining in indoor games, handicrafts, watercolors, tableaux vivants, and, most colorfully, standing around the cheap upright pianos which began to be mass-produced in the 1870s, singing ballads. Over seven hundred publishers thrived in the city selling sheet music, including such favorites as “Danny Boy,” “I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls,” “Yes, Let Me Like a Soldier Fall,” “I’ll Sing Three Songs of Araby,” “Annie Laurie,” “Oft in the Stilly Night,” “Come into the Garden, Maud” (from Tennyson), selections from Handel’s
Messiah
and Mendelssohn’s
Elijah,
and Sullivan’s “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “The Lost Chord,” which sold a half-million copies before Victoria’s death.

The music would be read—and everyone with social aspirations could read music—by gaslight. By the 1880s gas had been installed in most middle-class neighborhoods. (Lower-class illumination was still provided by wax, oil, and tallow; penny-in-the-slot meters did not arrive until 1892.) The light flickered on gleaming brass coal scuttles and much that would seem stifling today: heavy repp curtains; reproductions of pre-Raphaelite paintings; patterned carpets, patterned wallpaper, even patterned ceilings; overstuffed Tavistock chairs with the new coiled springs; ebonized Chippendale music stools; and almost unbelievable clutter, with whatnots displaying bric-a-brac, ostrich feathers in vases, fans fastened to the walls, and marble-topped tables crowded with family photographs, china nodding cats, vases of flowers, and, on the mantel, a “Madeleine” clock in black marble with bronze columns from Oetzmann’s which cost thirty-two shillings and sixpence.

All this required a great deal of dusting. That was the point of it. Keeping it clean, and polishing the brass knockers, bedsteads, taps, and andirons, required servants, and the number of servants was a sign of status. They were cheap. A clerk making seventy or eighty pounds a year could afford a charwoman or a scullery maid (“skivvy”) at twelve pounds a year, less than five shillings a week, plus such fringe benefits as broken dishes and cast-off clothes. At the very least, a middle-class family would have a staff of four—cook, housemaid, parlormaid, and kitchen maid—and many homes would have six or seven bustling around in their lavender-print dresses and freshly laundered Breton caps. There were also butlers, footmen, and coachmen, but most domestic servants were young women. In 1881 there were 1,545,000 Englishwomen “in service”; one of every three girls between fifteen and twenty years of age was waiting on someone. Their employers complained endlessly about their dishonesty, their incompetence, and the expense of them. (A first-class cook made nineteen pounds a year, ninety dollars, though experienced lady’s maids earned more.)
Punch
was always having fun with them, depicting them as insolent and pretentious. Actually, they were almost pathetically servile. They had little choice. To be dismissed without a reference was a girl’s nightmare. Moreover, in her situation she was learning domestic arts and might attract the eye of a promising footman. If that led to matrimony it meant a step up. It was the responsibility of the butler, or the housekeeper, to see that it led nowhere else, though sometimes it did. One’s heart is wrung by the plea of a maid begging her mistress to let her keep her illegitimate baby: “It’s only a little one, ma’m.”

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.”
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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.

U
pper-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 spurred 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