you pay the bill without making any remark, and mamma shakes hands with you at leaving, and you are not altogether displeased with your treatment—always excepting the persevering manner in which the nets are replaced to catch you every morning, notwithstanding that you have tucked some under the sofa, thrown others up into dark corners, or, as a last resource, stowed others away in the cupboard in the passage, believing that from thence at least they would never be brought to light. Alas! for the vanity of human wishes, all are carefully smoothed out the next day like a poacher’s paraphernalia. You learn afterwards that that very genteel old lady and her daughter have the worst possible character for ill-treating and half-starving the unfortunate young women ^^ho toil in their employ, and when you meet them on a Sunday, dressed in the pink of fashion, you revert unconsciously to hearts and homes, and weary hours, and aching brows, and hot tears, and to Thomas Hood, and his never-to-be-forgotten Sling, attuned in the angelic sorrow of his loving heart. Well, well, this is how the world wags, and has always wagged, and it is not for me, Robert Horatio Green, of Blotting Paper Buildings, Temple, to break a lance with the windmills of social ills, or I shall be deemed as mad as the hero of La Mancha himself.
What with the perpetual passing and repassing of pedestrians, the rolling, gritting, and grumbling of carriages, the caracoling of horses, the prattle of voices, and, to crown all, the glory of the sunsets, bathing in splendour the ocean and the strand, the scene at Brighton, at about three o’clock on a tine autumnal afternoon, is one never to be forgotten. The universal occupation of every living soul seems to be staring and being stared at; so much so, that if an inhabitant of some other sphere were to witness for the first time a fashionable promenade, he would think that everybody had something inside them that everybody else was desirous of getting at!
But see, here come some wonderful specimens of the interesting bipeds under survey. Pork-pie hats, from which tresses flow behind, caught up in nets, are stuck jauntily on their heads; jackets, in which they thrust their hands (like saucy schoolboys), fall back to discover waistcoats like men’s, but fortunately for their sex, from the waist downward they are dressed as women, and ample skirts stick out with indignant protest at any too near an approach to Balmoral boots, laced with red ribbon. I grieve to say the sunset, or some other glowing influence, has become fixed upon their cheeks, and altogether, what with their bearing of insouciance, and their unfeminine independence of style, and the total absence of quiet, modest bearing in every movement and gesture, they present an example of the English girl of the nineteenth century which I would rather that a foreigner, forming his first impression of English manners, should not behold. In the morning they are tearing up and down the cliff on horseback, and in the evening I shall most likely meet them at Mrs. Helvetius Squaws so extremely décolletée, you fancy that permanent flush upon the cheeks is owing to the shame which they ought to feel at the display of shoulders. But what does it all signify? Their father is enormously rich, gives what is termed in the slang of the day “regular swell parties,” and they dance the entire evening with the best partners in the room, while the pretty modest Arabella Goodward has only had one quadrille with the youth of sixteen just from Eton. Their conversation, interlarded with slang caught up from their fast young brothers, or worse still, from the stables which they constantly frequent, patting their horses’ necks and feeding them with apples, passes for wit with their numerous male admirers, and their impertinent remarks upon those social amenities which they outrage are considered as proofs of their spirit, originality, and talent.
“Clever girls, those Fastlies,” says Tom Lilliput of the 40th, “and dooced amusing. Rather fast, but those sort of girls often settle down (do they?) and make capital wives. By Jove, what fun there is in the youngest, Fanny,—the fat one I mean; she told me the other day she smokes she-roots because she is feminine, and laughed at the joke so heartily that she never felt me squeeze her plump little hand. She is only just sixteen, but looks older.”
Cigars, horses, shoulder-showing, rouge, slang, at sixteen! If this be not something to turn away from with sorrow, if not with wholesome and honest disgust, what in earth’s name is?
As a contrast to this family of the Fastlies is that tall graceful woman leaning upon the arm of a pale-faced man with evidences of care and suffering in his refined features. Look at that black silk dress she wears, falling so gracefully and fitting so well. No, by Jupiter! it’s alpaca, made probably by herself; and the embroidery on her shawl, I would wager a dozen pairs of gloves, is worked by her own little hand. Would you not swear among ten thousand that she is a lady? and yet, if you take her to pieces—her toilet, I mean—one dress of the Misses Fastlies would, in value, purchase her entire wardrobe. Her husband walks feebly, for he is at Brighton to recover from a long illness, and you can see how tenderly she now and then glances at his careworn features, and how her dear hand presses his arm when he stops to watch those indigo clouds fringed with flame which are gathering in the west. He married a lady with a very moderate fortune, imagining employment was easily obtainable, and that friends and relations would assist him in his exertions. Bitter was the lesson taught him that, unless a man be early pushed on to the tramways of life—such as the various professions or some business or trade—he will never after succeed in getting into the ranks, except by some extraordinary good fortune, or Owing to some kind hand who reins in his horses and backs a little, to the confusion of the entire row, and lets him enter. What a history he could write of the deep mortifications and dirt-eating which are involved in waiting upon the great in their ante-chambers, or in those terrible interviews with “Jacks-in-office,” who, masters of the position, topographically and morally, have too often not the gentlemanly feeling to treat a stranger (if only because they are the genii loci) with something better than freezing civility, or with an insolent brusquerie a degree