On everything/A Reconstruction of the Past
A Reconstruction of the Past
"IT has been said with some justice that we know more about the Victorian Period in England than we do of any one of the intervening nine centuries, even of those which lie closest to our own time, and even of such events as have taken place upon our own soil in the Malay Peninsula. I will attempt to put before you very briefly, as a sort of introduction to the series of lectures which I am to deliver, a picture of what one glimpse of life in London towards the end of the Nineteenth Century must have resembled.
"It is a sound rule in history to accept none but positive evidence and to depend especially upon the evidence of documents. I will not debate how far tradition should be admitted into the reconstruction of the past. It may contain elements of truth; it must contain elements of falsehood, and on that account I propose neither to deny nor to admit this species of information, but merely to ignore it; and I think the student will see before I have done with my subject that, using only the positive information before us, a picture may be drawn so fully detailed as almost to rival our experience of contemporary events.
"We will imagine ourselves," continued the professor, with baleful smile of playful pedantry, "in Piccadilly, the fashionable promenade of the city, at nine o'clock in the morning, the hour when the greatest energies of this imperial people were apparent in their outdoor life; for, as we know from the famous passage which we owe to the pen of the pseudo-Kingsley, the English people, as befitted their position, were the earliest risers of their time. We will further imagine (to give verisimilitude to the scene) the presence of a north-east wind, in which these hardy Northerners took exceptional delight, and to which the anonymous author above alluded to has preserved a famous hymn.
"Piccadilly is thronged with the three classes into which we know the population to have been divided—the upper class, the middle, and the lower, to use the very simple analytical terms which were most common in that lucid and strenuous period. The lower class are to be seen hurrying eastward in their cloth caps and 'fustian,' a textile fabric the exact nature of which is under dispute, but which we can guess, from the relics of contemporary evidence in France, to have been of a vivid blue, highly glazed, and worn as a sort of sleeved tunic reaching to the knees. The head-gear these myriads are wearing is uniform: it is a brown skull cap with a leather peak projecting over the eyes, the conjectural 'cricket cap,' of which several examples are preserved. It has been argued by more than one authority that the article in question was not a headgear. It appears in none of the statuary of the period. No mention of it is made in any of the vast compilations of legal matter which have come down to us, and attempts have been made to explain in an allegorical sense the very definite allusions to it with which English letters of that time abound. I am content to accept the documentary evidence in the plain meaning of the words used, and to portray to you these 'toiling millions' (to use the phrase of the great classic poet) hurrying eastward upon this delightful morning in March of the year 1899. Each is carrying the implement of his trade (possession in which was secured to him by law). The one holds a pickaxe, another balances upon his head a ladder, a third is rolling before him a large square box or 'trunk'—a word of Oriental origin—upon a 'trolley' or small two-wheeled vehicle dedicated to some one of the five combinations of letters which had a connection not hitherto established with the system of roads and railways in the country. Yet another drags after him a small dynamo mounted on wheels, such as may be seen in the frieze illustrating the Paris Exhibition of ten years before.
"Interspersed with this crowd may be seen the soldiery, clad entirely in bright red. But these, by a custom which has already the force of law, are compelled to occupy the middle of the thoroughfare. They are of the same class as the labouring men round them, and like these carry the implements of their trade, with which we must imagine them from time to time threatening the passers-by. All, I say, are hurrying eastward to their respective avocations in the working part of this great hive.
"Appearing as rarer units we perceive members of the second or middle class proceeding at a more leisurely and dignified pace towards their professional or commercial pursuits, the haunts of which lie less to the eastward and more in the centre of the city. These are dressed entirely in black, and wear upon their heads the round hat to which one of my colleagues erroneously gave the title of a religious emblem, a position from which, I am glad to see, he has recently receded. Nothing is more striking in the scene than the absolute uniformity of this costume. In the right hand is carried, according to the ritual of a secret society to which the greater part of this class belong, a staff or tube. The left hand grasps a roll of printed paper which we may premise without too much phantasy to be the original news-sheet from which the innumerable forgeries and copies of the succeeding dark ages proceeded. We are, of course, ignorant of its name, but we may accept it as the prototype of that vast mass of printed matter which purports to be contemporary in date, but which recent scholarship has definitely proved to be of far later origin. Beyond these, but in numbers certainly few, the exact extent of which I shall discuss in a moment, are the upper classes, or Gentry. How many they may be in such a crowd. I repeat, we cannot tell. We know that to the whole population they stood somewhat as one to 10,000. The proportion in London may have been slightly higher, for we have definite documentary information that in certain provincial centres 'not a gentleman' could be discovered, though for what reason these centres were less favoured we are not told. In a street full of some thousands we shall certainly not be exaggerating if we put the number of the Gentry present at certainly a couple of individuals, and we may put as our highest limits half a dozen. How are they dressed? In a most varied manner. Some in grey, some in pink (these are off to hunt the fox in the fields of Croydon or upon the heath of Hampstead, or possibly—to follow the conjecture of the Professor of Geology in his fascinating book on the Thames Valley—to Barking Level). Others are in black silk with a large oval orifice exposing the chest. Others again will be in white flannel, and others in a species of toga known as 'shorts.' These are students from the university, or their professors, and they will be distinguished by a square cap upon the head which, unlike so many other conjectural forms of headgear, we can definitely pronounce to have had a religious character. A tassel sometimes of gold hangs from the centre of this square. With the exception of this headgear the Gentry discover upon their heads as uniform a type of covering as their inferiors of the middle class, who salute them as they pass by lifting the round hat with the right hand. This headgear is tubular and probably of some light metal, polished to a highly reflecting surface, and invariably (as we know by the fascinating diaries recently collected by the University Press) polished in the same direction upon some sort of lathe.
"If we are lucky we may see at this hour one member of a class restricted even among the few gentlemen of that period, the Peers. Should we see such an one he will be walking in a red plush robe. It is probable that he will carry upon his head the same species of hat as the others of his rank, but I admit that it is open to debate whether this hat were not surrounded by a circle of metal spikes, each surmounted with a small ball. Such a person will be walking at an even more leisurely pace than the few other members of the Gentry who may be present, and upon the accoutrements of his person will be discovered a small shield, varying in size from a couple of inches to as many feet, stamped with a representation of animals and often ornamented by a device in the English or in the Latin tongue. These devices, many of which have come down to us engraved upon metal, are of the utmost value to the historian. They have enabled him to reconstruct the exact appearance of animals now long extinct, and it is even possible in some cases to ascertain the particular families to which they belonged. No class of object, however, has suffered more from frequent forgeries than these emblems. Luckily there is an almost invariable test for recognising such forgeries, which consists in the use of the French language misspelt. Of some thousands of such signs many hundreds affect a legend in the French tongue, and of these hardly one is correctly spelt. Moreover, essential words are often omitted, and in general the forgeries betray that imperfect acquaintance with the contemporary language of Paris which was one of the marks of social inferiority at that time. When I add that the total number of Peers at any given moment was less than seven hundred out of forty million people, while the number of these shields which have been discovered already amounts to over five hundred thousand, it will be apparent that the proportion of genuine emblems must be very small. Now and then a house will bear the picture of some such shield painted and hung out upon a board before it. This sometimes, but not universally, indicates the nobility of the tenant. In the matter of religion . . ." At this point the professor looked narrowly at his notes, held one sheet of them in various positions, put it up to the light, shook his head, and next, observing the hour, said that he would deal with this important subject upon the following Wednesday or Thursday, according to sale of tickets during the intervening days. With these words, after a fit of coughing, he withdrew.