A Short History of Social Life in England/Chapter 22
CHAPTER XXII
Circa 1742—1785
THE NEW PHILANTHROPY
"Taught by time, our hearts have learned to glow
For others' good and melt for others' woe."
UNDER the early Hanoverians, religion in this country was in a very languid condition. The Church after the Revolution had slowly lessened its hold on the people; the force of Puritanism was almost spent. A professed contempt for religion was a distinguishing feature of the age. Christianity was ridiculed, reverence for tradition scorned; and the manners and the morals of the eighteenth century steadily deteriorated. Bishops and clergy alike neglected their duties. "Every one laughs if one talks of religion," said a foreigner visiting England. Yet still only persons professing the Anglican religion were eligible for civil and military posts. True, Sunday continued to be kept as it had been from the days of the Commonwealth, cards, opera, bands of music, and games being forbidden. A wave of unbelief was sweeping through the land; drunkenness, immorality, and coarse conversation were fashionable in all ranks of society. Fidelity to marriage vows was "sneered out of fashion." "We saw but one Bible in the parish of Cheddar," said Hannah More long years after this, "and that was used to prop a flowerpot." But perhaps Butler, introducing his famous "Analogy," goes the furthest of all. "It is come," he says sadly, "I know not how, to be taken for granted by many persons, that Christianity is not so much as a subject for inquiry, but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious." Be this as it may, it is pleasant to realise that there were still some of the country clergy who remained true to their trusts.
Was there ever a more attractive figure than the Vicar of Wakefield, the clergyman farmer? Familiar enough is his humble home at the foot of a sloping hill in the midst of his twenty acres of land, his one-storied house covered with thatch, the newly whitewashed walls adorned with pictures of family design, kitchen and parlour scrupulously clean, "dishes, plates, and coppers well scoured and all disposed in bright rows on the shelves." We see the family rising with the sun, the Vicar and his boys going forth to labour in the fields, while his wife and daughters prepare the breakfast at home. All worked alike till sunset, when one of the younger children read aloud the Lessons of the day, he who read best being awarded a halfpenny for the poor-box on Sunday. And yet the spirit of immorality that was abroad must needs disturb this happy home.
Different indeed were the life and duties of the eighteenth-century clergyman to those of our clergy to-day.
"Of Church preferment he had none;
Nay, all his hopes of that was gone;
He felt that he content must be
With drudging in a curacy.
Indeed on ev'ry Sabbath day
Through eight long miles he took his way
To preach, to grumble, and to pray,
To cheer the good, to warn the sinner,
And, if he got it—eat a dinner.
And all his gains, it did appear,
Were only thirty pound a year."
Outwardly there was no mistaking the parson. Invariably he walked abroad in a cassock reaching to his knees, surmounted by a long coat, while his wig, his bands, his knee-breeches, buckled shoes, and cocked hat formed the rest of the clerical dress. Indeed, the bishop's apron is the remains of the cassock and the archdeacon's hat the survival of the cocked hat.
Yet England was at heart religious, and it required but a spark to awaken her dead ashes into life. That spark was now lit by John Wesley, whose life and teaching were the means of creating a new form of religion, which "carried to the hearts of the people a fresh spirit of moral zeal."
This is not the place for an account of Wesley's work. It is well known how he and a few friends led strictly religious lives in the midst of the demoralised many; how they rose at four each morning, abstained from drinking and gambling, and methodically planned out every hour of the day for some beneficial use, till they were mockingly named "Methodists"; how Wesley became a clergyman and worked zealously for the Church in the recently formed colony of Georgia, under the auspices of the newly instituted S.P.G. But though at first a devoted Churchman, Wesley soon sought to establish a definite Christian society within the limits of the Church. Like the Puritan attempt before, this was doomed to failure, and a separate Christian society came into being under the name of Methodist. As the clergy refused their pulpits to such as these, the new preachers went forth into the fields and meadows of England. They made their voices heard "in the wildest and most barbarous corners of the land, among the bleak moors of Northumberland, or in the dens of London, or in the long galleries where in the pauses of his labour the Cornish miner listens to the sobbing of the sea." By their intense earnestness, their keen enthusiasm, their deep convictions, they stirred vast multitudes of their fellow-countrymen. If the rich and wealthy sneered at them, they found the poor country folk ready to listen and to learn. The newly aroused enthusiasm took undesirable forms: "Women fell down in convulsions, strong men were smitten suddenly to the earth; the preacher was interrupted by bursts of hysteric laughter or of hysteric sobbing. All the phenomena of strong spiritual excitement, so familiar in our "Revivals," but strange and unknown then, followed on their sermons; and the terrible sense of a conviction of sin, a new dread of hell, a new hope of heaven, took forms at once grotesque and sublime." But the masses were leavened. At the death of Wesley there were some eighty thousand Methodists; a hundred years later there were some twenty-five million. This revival not only roused the lethargy of the Church of England, but a "new moral enthusiasm" broke over the whole country, and henceforth a steady attempt was made to relieve human suffering, to educate the ignorant, to place a higher ideal before those of our ancestors who were depraved by the surrounding vice. Hospitals grew and thrived, Sunday-schools sprang into life, charities were endowed, the slave trade was put down, prisons reformed, and more mercy, pity, and human sympathy were bestowed on those who so sorely needed it. Perhaps the new movement may best be summed up in the familiar words: "Not only with our lips, but in our lives."
The lives of the agricultural labourers of this time called loudly for reform. At the accession of George III., England's wealth was derived mainly from agriculture, and her peaceful valleys were as yet undisturbed by the numerous factories that characterise the whole country to-day. The lot of the eighteenth-century peasant must have been even more monotonous than that of the country squire or the vicar of many parishes. He was totally uneducated, unable to read or write; his amusements were few, for the sports that had brightened the rural life of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had been swept away by the Puritans, and the sports of today were still in their infancy. Cricket indeed was coming in, but as yet the cricket bat was not invented, and the game seems to have been popular with country girls as well as boys. In 1775 a cricket match was played between six unmarried men and the same number of unmarried women, and though one woman made seventeen runs, or "notches," as they were then called, the men won the game. Sometimes a match was played by girls only, eleven on either side, "dressed all in white," and the Derby Mercury records the fact that "the girls bowled, batted, ran, and caught as well as any men could do." Wrestling was popular among the natives, as were also cock-fighting and bull-baiting.
Then, as now, the village alehouse was the popular resort. Here they heard any news that might be stirring: a stray paper would unfold to them the current news from India; here they would learn the progress of America's successful struggle for independence; here they could discuss the small doings of their neighbours and learn what passengers had gone by in the weekly coach. They smoked smuggled tobacco and drank smuggled tea, both of which commodities were expensive and heavily taxed. Their staple food was rye bread and "stony cheese, too hard to bite," or coarse bread soaked in skim milk. All was as yet in a state of rural simplicity—
"Between her swagging paniers' load
A farmer's wife to market rode."
These country folk still dressed in English woollen materials, woven on the spot Articles of clothing often descended from father to son, and it was not uncommon to find on the heads of country folk hats that had been fashionable in the days of Charles II.
But changes in the agricultural world were at hand. The introduction of the field turnip and an improvement in stock breeding brought about a complete revolution in the farming province. Waste lands were henceforth reclaimed and brought under cultivation, low-lying meadows were drained for pasturage, and general activity brought an increase of wealth and prosperity to those engaged in agriculture. But great as was this progress, it was slight in comparison with the enormous industrial revolution, which, in the latter half of the century, raised England to a condition of wealth and power hitherto undreamt of.
The Indian calicoes, muslins, and chintzes have already been alluded to. They became more and more popular in England, and legislation failed to arrest their importation into the country. Cotton was shipped in ever increasing quantities from the West Indies to Manchester, then known as "the largest, most rich, populous, and busy village in England." Here some two thousand families quietly pursued their home industries of making fustians, tickings, and tapes from cotton yarn mixed with their native wool. All through the ages the spinning of thread had been done by young women, known as the spinsters of the family. In the middle of the eighteenth century these spinsters still sat with their distaffs round the weaver's hand-loom, spinning each single thread by hand, a slow and laborious method. But invention was in the air. A new flying shuttle was followed by the spinning jenny, which worked several spindles at once. This innovation threw many out of work and was stoutly opposed by the uneducated workers, unable to look ahead. But no opposition can stay new inventions.
A new spinning machine, worked by water-power, was attacked by the old hand-workers, and the first water-mill in England was burned to the ground. But such things must be, and before long the water-wheel was an accepted thing and cotton workers were collected together in a factory on the banks of some little stream, the home industry slowly languished, and the old spinning-wheel became a thing of the past. These labour-saving inventions created an increasing demand for cotton goods, as the following figures distinctly indicate. In 1775 the importation of cotton into England was over four million pounds; ten years later it was over eleven millions, and in 1789 it had risen to over thirty-two millions, while as yet the American importation had hardly begun.
The carriage of these ever-increasing goods by means of rumbling wagons and pack-horses stumbling along the rotten and lonely roads was already totally inadequate, when the idea of cutting canals supplied the requisite means of communication. The gain to industry was both immense and immediate. With three thousand miles of navigable canals all over England, and a race of navigators, or navvies, to manipulate the shallow boats which carried the merchandise from place to place, the problem of communication was for the moment solved.
But if these canals were useful for the transport of cotton goods, yet more invaluable were they to the owners of coal and iron mines, for whom, indeed, they were originally designed. A new importance was now gathering round the coal mines of the North. Through the long centuries that had passed, the vast stores of iron beneath the tread of man had lain unworked, owing to the prevalent idea that it could only be smelted by means of wood, and this was growing scarce with the advance of agriculture. An invention for smelting iron by means of coal revolutionised the whole trade and at once raised that material to take its high place in the modern working world. "It is," says a recent historian—"it is its production of iron which more than all else has placed England at the head of industrial Europe. The value of coal as a means of producing mechanical force was revealed in the discovery by which Watt transformed the steam engine from a mere toy into the most wonderful instrument which human industry has ever had at its command," Here was a new labour-saving machine, the crowning invention of an age which as yet had surpassed all others in ingenuity and that indomitable perseverance in the teeth of opposition which has ever been such a characteristic of our people.