“The duchess seemed a quiet, commonplace woman, of gentle manners, with a countenance guiltless of much meaning, and in fact with no very distinguishing character about her. She fluently uttered some good-humoured, everyday civilities, praising, among other things, the beauties of Brackingsley, for which it turned out that she had mistaken another place, and inquiring after a supposed near neighbour, whom Lady Jermyn had never seen. Her daughter was an old young lady, whose celibacy might be considered fixed.”
So writes Thomas Henry Lister in his first novel, Granby, published in 1826. With a few deft strokes Lister captures a whole world of social emptiness, polite ignorance and inherited position—an aristocracy whose manners were impeccable even when their understanding was not.
In the early nineteenth century, however, the humble labourer in Armitage or Handsacre would probably have perceived very little difference between himself and the local tradesmen or those with smallholdings. (Skilled artisans brought in from the Potteries for the newly opened pottery may well have thought otherwise.) The labourer may have regarded the small farmer, or yeoman, as slightly apart, but they all drank in the same public houses, knew one another’s family histories, and were often related, if only by marriage.
They would have known the local clergyman—Henry Binfield, or later the Rev. Francis Wilson, who in the late 1830s had sufficient means to build the Running Hills estate, later known as the Towers. They would also have known the professional men: lawyers such as Thomas Birch, for example, who purchased Armitage Lodge. Some labourers would have worked for these men in their fields or homes, and most would have seen them regularly at church. If they were chapel folk—as many were, particularly those from the Potteries—they would certainly have encountered the Birch family, who built both the Congregational Chapel in Armitage and another at Yoxall.
This was the “middle class” world that Jane Austen wrote about: the minor landed gentry, the professional men, and the country clergy. It was a world familiar, visible, and comprehensible to the labouring poor, even if they did not belong to it.
The labourers would also have been aware of the “upper class”, though more distantly. They could witness baptisms of the Lister family—who had built Armitage Park in 1760—and the marriage of Baron Ribblesdale (Thomas Lister) to his second cousin, Adelaide Lister, at St John the Baptist church in 1828. Yet as most, if not all, of the Listers’ servants were brought in from elsewhere, local people would have known little of the family’s private life. They may not have realised that the gulf between the upper class and the middle class was far greater than that between themselves and the middle class.
The aspiring middle class—epitomised by Josiah Spode IV, who later bought Armitage Park (now Hawkesyard)—sought to better themselves, but entry into high society was fraught with pitfalls. How were they to learn the intricacies of such a world? Which shops and suppliers were acceptable? Where should one rent a house for the Season, and indeed, what exactly was “the Season”? Fortunately for them, some members of society wrote novels describing this way of life. These fashionable works became known as the Silver Fork novels, and one of their finest exponents was Thomas Henry Lister of Armitage Park.
Born in Armitage in 1800, Lister was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, before undertaking the ‘obligatory’ Grand Tour of the Continent. He moved comfortably within fashionable circles and became part of the fast set. After Granby, he published Herbert Lacy (1828) and Arlington (1832). He wrote from inside a clearly defined society of privilege: aristocrats, politicians, hostesses, wits and dandies living in a gilded world that largely ignored the “lower orders”. It was governed by an unwritten code of manners and morals in which gambling, duels and extra-marital affairs were commonplace. Lister knew the language, assumptions and habits of this world intimately, and his novels offer vivid, enjoyable portraits of it.
Society followed a clear annual rhythm. By 1822 the Parliamentary session had moved back to February from its earlier October start, a change made practical by improved transport. Macadamised roads—particularly on new turnpikes—had been introduced after John Loudon McAdam’s innovations of 1815, making travel faster and more comfortable. Parliamentarians could now spend winter in the comfort of their own (or borrowed) country houses. Members of both Houses returned to London in February, and when the fox-hunting season ended in March, the rest of Society followed. Although the West End became livelier, it was not until after Easter that the Season truly began.
The Season lasted through April, May and June, winding down when Parliament went into recess in July, and officially ending on 12 August—time for grouse shooting. Every day was crowded with activity: opera, theatre, concerts, horse racing, boat racing, cricket, balls, lawn tennis, breakfast parties, and rides through the parks. Young women from titled families were formally launched into society as debutantes, presented to the monarch at Queen Charlotte’s Ball. The Season also functioned as a marriage market. Once presented, a young woman might attend fifty balls, fifty parties, thirty dinners and thirty breakfasts in a single year.
Above all, the Season was about being seen and being correctly dressed by the right suppliers. George Bryan “Beau” Brummell was for years the arbiter of men’s fashion. Lister satirised him in Arlington through the character of Arthur Davison, whom Sir Gerald Denbigh describes as “a pretty-faced, well-whiskered, walking machine, for the display of rings, chains, studs, and embroidered waistcoats… an overgilt piece of mere ballroom furniture”.
The interconnectedness of society is delightfully illustrated in Herbert Lacy, when someone enquires about the family of the recently returned Lacy:
“She was a Bellingham of the Upperville family; and as for the Lacy’s, they, you know, are as old as the flood, and very well connected too…”
The chain of associations spirals outward, revealing a world in which everyone is linked by blood, marriage, scandal or gossip.
When the Season ended, Society returned to its country estates, perhaps after a continental tour or a stay at a spa such as Bath or Cheltenham. Then began the round of country-house parties, often lasting ten days or more. Great houses might employ over a hundred servants, and guests brought their own. Outdoor pursuits—hunting, shooting, riding—filled fine days; bad weather trapped everyone indoors. Lister captures the resulting boredom, or ennui, in Herbert Lacy, with a wonderfully detailed catalogue of futile amusements, from music and billiards to battledore and shuttlecock, until luncheon mercifully arrives.
Lister is also revealing about society’s attitudes to religion and the poor. In Granby, Sir Thomas Jermyn observes that religion, like cheap soup, is “excellent for the poor”. It made them industrious, deferential and punctual in paying rents. It was, at the very least, “worth encouraging in them”. This was emphatically a “them and us” society. Servants are largely invisible in Lister’s novels, just as they were in the consciousness of the society he described.
In Herbert Lacy he acknowledges social change, particularly the wealth of the middle classes and their ability to marry into society, but his tone is unmistakably mocking. New money may build Italianate villas and even acquire fashionable ruins, but Lister makes it clear that such people do not truly belong.
Lister remains a pleasure to read. His sharp eye for character, his clarity of description and his intimate knowledge of high society give us a vivid sense of life in the upper reaches of English society in the 1820s and 1830s—a world that, from Armitage, could be glimpsed only at a distance, yet was profoundly shaping the aspirations of those below it.
References:
Granby, Herbert Lacy and Arlington by Thomas Henry Lister
Silver Fork Society by Alison Adburgham