Wilson Decency and Disorder

The Age of Cant 1789-1837
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-31720-2
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 544 Seiten

Brilliant young historian Ben Wilson explores a time when licentious Britain tried to straighten out its moral code, ridding itself of its boisterous pastimes, plain-speaking and drunkenness - raising uncomfortable but fascinating parallels with our own age. Decency and Disorder is about the generation who grew up during the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars, and some of its most exciting figures.

Ben Wilson was born in1980 and studied history at Pembroke College, Cambridge - both as an undergraduate and postgraduate. His first book, THE LAUGHTER OF TRIUMPH: WILLIAM HONE AND THE FIGHT FOR THE FREE PRESS, was published by Faber in 2005 to universal accalim. This was followed in 2007 by DECENCY AND DISORDER: THE AGE OF CANT 1789-1837.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wilson, Ben

Leseproben

Introduction: Untaught Feelings

‘If liberty produces ill-manners and want of taste, she is a very excellent parent with two very disagreeable daughters.’

William Hazlitt1

William Palfrey, a recent graduate of Cambridge, paraded naked along the side of a canal on a summer’s day in 1818, loudly proclaiming that ‘he would not put on his clothes for any man living’. The parish of Camberwell, where the offence took place, had recently stationed constables on the banks of the canal to arrest those who engaged in the ‘indecency and immorality’ of swimming on Sundays. Palfrey, as he saw it, had started a one-man war against puritanism.

When the case came to court, Palfrey’s attorney said that his client was naked for the purpose of swimming: ‘men are not to be indicted for a healthful and beneficial amusement because indelicate women pass by’. Palfrey had taken off his clothes not as an early statement of nudism, but to test the boundaries of British liberty. No petty parish official had the authority to dictate morality to the rest of the community. People had always been able to bathe, and until recently no one had complained. He ‘conceived that if this squeamishness of seeing naked figures was to be listened to, there would soon be an end of our boasted constitution!’2

The crusade failed, and Palfrey was fined one shilling. It was a silly case and it had occurred only because people felt alienated by the fastidious meddling of a minority of self-appointed moral guardians. In 1815 Parliament had discovered that ‘a pious fraud’ had been played upon it: a clause which effectively banned swimming had been slipped into the Thames Police Act it had passed the year before. Despite the pleas of the evangelical lobby, the House of Commons repealed the clause; one MP said that if a few women were offended they had better stay at home rather than make the lower orders ‘suffer for the accommodation of their delicacy’. He told the House that ‘this is one of those melancholy evils which result from an itch for legislating which prevails in the subordinate offices of the state’. Since Parliament would not help, local authorities and individuals had taken matters into their own hands; there had been a spate of prosecutions against bathers who had not even been fully naked. A magistrate said of canal bathing that a ‘practice more offensive to decency could not well be imagined’.3

Palfrey deliberately provoked the law to expose this kind of nonsense. The concern over exposed flesh was seen as something new. A decade before, people had been free to amuse themselves as they liked without being accused of endangering public morals. In August 1803 had reported from Brighton on the unashamed and natural habits of the ladies of the fashionable world: ‘To-day the bathing has been very numerously and attended, OLD NEPTUNE must have a happy time on’t, when such shoals of beauty daily rush to his gelid embraces; and afterwards rise, like so many , glowing with new blushes from his briny bed.’ The curious observer might enjoy ‘the sportive frolics and various forms of the fair , displayed by their thin bathing costumes’.4

But the unrestrained language of was out of step with the moral feelings of some very respectable and very sensitive people. The origin of the canal prosecutions lies in a test case of a few years before. In March 1809 a young man called John Crendon found himself summoned to court for a crime which was ‘most offensive to common decency’. He had, as fashionable people were wont to do, bathed off Brighton beach. ‘Can it be in a civilized country that females are subjected to such an insult?’ the Society for the Suppression of Vice asked. ‘Can any husband or father endure that the feelings of his wife or daughter shall be thus outraged? Can any youth be willing that the female, on whose domestic virtues he has staked his hopes of connubial happiness, shall be subjected to such insults?’

Some of the townsfolk of the resort had formed a private prosecuting committee, which dug up old laws to put a stop ‘to the very indecent and scandalous practice of bathing in public’. The young sportsman had persistently ignored its officious notices warning that bathers who paraded their flesh in front of dwellings were a nuisance and would be prosecuted. Crendon laughed at the prudish vigilantes, claiming that the sea was free and he could do as he pleased. The Brighton Committee prosecuted him for indecent exposure. Crendon and most of the country must have assumed that the case would be laughed out of court.

When he was brought to trial at Horsham, Crendon defended himself on the grounds that the place where he had swum was formerly out of the way of housing; the new dwellings were the ‘nuisance’, not him. He also said that there was no evidence that he had done anything indecent or exposed any part of his body further than was necessary for the purposes of bathing. But the trial judge declared that ‘wherever houses come, decency comes with them’. He recommended those who were offended by others’ conduct ‘to admonish by handbills, by boards, and by persons appointed to attend the beach, and if any one is obtuse, and will persist after remonstrance, as this young man has done, to bring him here, and ask a jury whether this is to be endured? In my opinion this is a very bad case.’

Crendon was duly found guilty. The moral of the story was that people were not just entitled to form vigilante groups but duty bound to see that the law upheld public manners. As the judge affirmed, ‘Every person has a right to prosecute those who commit indecency.’5

There was a growing squeamishness about naked flesh, whether real or represented in literature, song or art. People talked of ‘false delicacy’ and a ‘verbal decorum’ which was placing taboos on what was previously considered normal. It was not that people were offended, but that they were affecting a claim to virtue by crying loudly against minor infractions; in other words, an insincere and entirely manufactured moral outrage. People were self-conscious, afraid that toleration might be taken as connivance or that indelicate words suggested impure thoughts and deeds. This unease with the body was expressed by the nineteen-year-old Drusilla Way when she encountered the . ‘As to the Venus, she looks like what she , and ought to be. I never saw before, and how ladies can stand and and with gentlemen at it, I cannot conceive and hope I never shall.’6

We should not doubt that Miss Way’s response was sincere. She was born in a country and a time when anxieties about sex, nudity and bodily functions were mounting. It was a generational change. In her autobiographical jottings, Lady Sarah Lennox mused that, compared to her youth back in 1760, what was permissible now in common parlance was very different. It was ‘thought too indelicate’ to say ‘breeding’ or ‘with child’ by 1818: people preferred to say ‘in the family way’ or ‘in confinement’; ‘stomach’ became a generic term for any internal organ. Anna Laetitia Barbauld wrote that in the past, when manners were less strict, writers might have used uncouth words, but ‘in our more refined age we do not call a a ’. Modern women were said to ‘go into fits at the bare mention of , or expire at the dinner-table if you were to name the of a chicken’, as if to hear such things with equanimity would call into question their modesty and chastity. Lady Sarah was ticked off by her prim grandchildren for saying ‘belly’.7

Her grandchildren were only following the fashion in verbal niceties. They may not have been more moral than older generations, but they were aware that society expected an exaggerated display of modesty and decorous language in young ladies. This book is about their generation – whatever their class, high, low and middling. They were born in the shadow of the French Revolution and decades of war, cyclical economic depression and aberrations in the climate. They grew up in fear of invasion by the French, domestic revolution, natural disaster and crime. It was a time of anxiety and apocalyptic nightmares; yet they also saw Britain advance in wealth and industry to become the richest country in the world. Many of them lived to celebrate the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837. They imbued their children – ‘the Victorians’ – with the moral and religious values that had taken root and flourished in the early part of the century. Many looked back on the coarseness and vulgarity of Britain in their youths with horror and prided themselves on having conquered their noxious habits and turbulent emotions. Others pined for a freer, less censorious world.

The journalist Hewson Clarke joked in 1811 that one day society would ban ‘every object that seems to bear a outline’; there was a suggestive obelisk on...