(ii) Ignorance, Lawlessness and Savagery
ENGLAND:
BEFORE AND AFTER WESLEY
Conscious Lovers (1722) was the "' first comedy," after the Restoration, "' which can be called moral."!
Indeed, so revolting was the general run of comedies with their smutty assortment of ' doubles ententes, that for decades "ladies of respectability and position," whose curiosity led them forth to " first nights," appeared in masks.?
David Garrick, admittedly, did much to raise the level of theatrical performances and to popularise Shakespeare ; but the liberties Garrick was capable of taking with the Master
Dramatist are truly amazing; and W. J. Lawrence, in his essay, The Drama and the Theatre, describes the theatrical atmosphere of the era as that "' of malice, intrigue and caprice.''®
Most of the acclaimed actresses of the period, too, were women of easy virtue.
Anne Oldfield, buried in Westminster Abbey (1730), lived clandestinely with different men of affairs ; while the famous beauty, Peg Woffington (1720-60), whose portrait hangs in the Victoria and Albert Museum, once said to 'Thomas
Sheridan (Richard's father) that "' there were two things " her sister '"' should never become, by her advice—a whore, and an actress, for she had sufficiently experienced the inconveniences of those ways of life herself.""* 'The same Sheridan, in language true to the age, describing the said stage idol to William
Windham, the statesman, pronounced her "'a most willing bitch, artful, dissembling, lewd and malicious" ; but withal
a very captivating woman.''> (ii) Ignorance, Lawlessness and Savagery Yet even as England's privileged and literary classes boasted the glories of their Constitution and the theatre mirrored their
"liberty" ; at the very zenith of the '' Age of Enlightenment," when '' Nature" was God, the gross ignorance and barbarism of the general populace was rapidly increasing.
Nonconformity, representing an intelligent middle class minority, villainously segregated from social and national institutions, had been forced for its livelihood, almost exclusively, into channels of trade, commerce and craftsmanship ; a fact which bode ill to the coming Industrial Revolution.
For a philosophy of ultraindependence and individualism had been foisted upon 1 Henry Hallam, History of Literature, Vol. IV, p. 284.
See Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, Comedian (Autobiography, 1740), Chap. viii.
3 Fohnson's England (1933), Vol. II, p. 168.
4 R. W. Ketton-Cremer, Early Life and Diaries of William Windham, p. 79f.
5 Sir Chas. Petrie, The Four Georges, p. 105.
DAWN DEFERRED
Dissenters before the advent of the Factory System, with its catastrophic social effects; and what here applied to Nonconformists was true largely of Roman Catholics and Jews.
The Church of England, on the other hand, was in no real sense a National Church; it was an assuming and superior department of State, a proud branch of the Civil Service, whose directing officers represented quite consciously the landed and governing class.
The working multitudes therefore were left as sheep without true shepherds, and all manner of ravenous beasts battened~ upon the fold.
Till the advent of the Sunday School movement, in the seventh and eighth decades of the century,' little or no provision was made for the free education of the poor save the Church system of Charity Schools, dating from the close of the sevententh century ; and they commonly were a farce.
Most Charity School teachers were half illiterate ; their average pay was less than that of sturdy labourers, and habitually they lived on the very verge of the "' subsistence margin."'
But they could supervise the '' dreary droning of the catechism,' dogmatise mechanically on " piety, industry and thrift," teach the A.B.Cs. and lay down the " first principles" of reading and ciphering.
And there their duties stopped.
In Lambeth Palace Library or the British Museum Reading Room, one may still examine the Reports and Accounts of early Charity Schools.
The present writer has perused many of them and repeatedly he finds that the ecclesiastical instructions issued to the masters remind them that they are to teach children " humility,"
" placid obedience and a "' due reverence for their superiors" ; they are to guard against all inculcation of " unbecoming airs" and against educating children "' out of their station " ; while also, they are to see that their pupils are " inured to the meanest services," and taught "willingly" to perform "all labours of the lowest kind."
A typical Charity School Report (1714) informs us that the summer hours of instruction were 7 a.m. to II a.m., and I p.m. to 5 p.m., while in winter the schools opened an hour later and closed an hour earlier.
The ages of the children ran between seven and twelve years.
The teaching was " mainly from the Catechism"; scholars wore "distinctive" hats, bands, etc., which marked them off as charity children ; and the ordinary cost of 'a school for fifty boys, including the charge of a school-room, books, firing, master's salary, and three bands,
1In 1769, in High Wycombe, Hannah Ball, under Wesley, started a flourishing Sunday School; but not till Robert Raikes began his work in Gloucester (1780) did the movement begin to assume national proportions.
ENGLAND:
BEFORE AND AFTER WESLEY
one cap, one coat, one pair stockings and one pair shoes, given annually to each boy," is laid down as "' about £75 a year."
The annual cost ofa similar Charity School for fifty girls, however, is set out at ' about £60."
Few of the masters received as much as £20 a year: most got six shillings to seven shillings a week.
Ludicrous, nevertheless, as these schools were, an occasional teacher had an idea of his own, and some children happily learned more than was written on the blackboard or conned by rote.
Charity Schools, moreover, were not found in all districts : generally they were limited to the more populous areas ; and, in any case, they were designed only for the very poor.
The children of artisans, farmers, traders, industrial workers, etc., if they got any education, procured it in some sort of struggling private school whose fee was anything from eighteen shillings a year, per child, with family reductions for several children.
Millions of the eighteenth century populace were never inside a school of any description, and multitudes received such rough, practical training as they got in the shape of " apprenticeship "' to some craft, business, industry or trade. Apprenticeship, however, at this period reached its nadir of debasement, representing often but a hollow mockery of its original intent.
The contemporary revelations of Jonas Hanway and the Old Bailey Session Papers, together with the detailed researches of different modern scholars, reflect the incredible abuses upon which the old apprenticeship system had fallen.
'' Parish children," for instance, were customarily indentured from an early age till twenty-four years old; yet they could be conscripted by the Government for war at eighteen, in which case their masters could legally draw their army pay till their twenty-fourth birthday.
Gin shops, gambling dens, the collapse of moral standards and the Zeitgeist of the age, all played havoc with the old apprenticeship basis of craft education.
Some masters beat, half-starved and half-enslaved their apprentices, who commonly lived in their homes ; others let them run riot on the streets at night.
Many inhuman wretches of both sexes took apprentices for no other purpose than villainously to exploit them ; while many debauched apprentices, on the other hand, robbed and defamed decent masters.
In the meanest "trades," too, apprentices were actually bought and sold, as was the case with Blake's little Chimney Sweep: a . my father sold me when yet my tongue Could scarcely cry, ''Weep! "Weep! 'Weep! 'Weep !'
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep."
Besides Charity School Reports, Accounts and Sermons, see Dr. George, op. cit., pp. 218-22 and 251-4.
DAWN DEFERRED
The incessant and bitter litigation in the first half of the eighteenth century relative to masters and apprentices, proves conclusively that, as a basis of social and practical education, the prevailing system of apprenticeship was bankrupt.
The vivid outline sketched by Francis Place of the life of his own immediate forebears and their associates, sheds a revealing light on the semi-savagery of the '' lower orders"? during the era under discussion.
Going back to his maternal grandfather and to the birth of his own father (about 1717), the unfolding of the known facts of his family history records a tale of drunken brawls, violent assaults, the breaking of indentures, repeated ruinations through gambling, wife desertions, highway robbery, transportation and the like. Workhouse, jail and murder all enter into the vicissitudes of this humble family history ; when fifty-seven, Place's own mother was reduced to taking in washing to support her family, his father meanwhile retiring to Fleet prison.
This domestic history, notwithstanding its seeming incredibility, Francis Place believed fairly typical of the early and middle eighteenth century; and internal evidence makes it abundantly plain that the pre-eminent causes of such ruin, were moral and social rather than economic.?
Place indeed continually ridiculed the notion that the lot of the toiling masses, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, was growing worse.
The Social Conscience, he argued, had meanwhile been fully awakened, and people then were becoming keenly sensitive to evils which, for generations, they either had accepted as inevitable expressions of a necessary social order, or had passed by unseen.
Indeed many hoary social evils already were submitting to the pressure of the reforming conscience, before their existence became generally recognised.
Hence the common, but fallacious, belief that such evils were new.
The plunder of shipwrecked vessels, again, is indicative of the then prevalent savagery.
Lecky records how ships, particularly off the Cornish coast, were, at times deliberately 'lured by false signals upon the rocks' ;3 and Defoe relates an occasion on which a Spanish ship, observing the sinking of a British vessel and crew off the coast of Biscay, denied them any succour, its captain observing:
"that, having been shipwrecked 1 See Hanway's Earnest Appeal for Mercy to the Children of the Poor, p. 102f ; Dr. George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century, chap. v, and pp. 275-86; Sir Chas. Petrie, The Four Georges, pp. 86-8 ; G. D. H. Cole,
'Town Life in the Provinces " (Fohnson's England, I, pp. 220-1).
2 Francis Place, Autobiography, Brit. Mus. Addl. MSS., 35,142 3 Op. cit., Vol. I, p. 488.
ENGLAND:
BEFORE
AND AFTER WESLEY
somewhere on the coast of England, the people, instead of saving him and his ship, came off and robbed him, tore the ship almost to pieces, and left him and his men to swim ashore for their lives while they plundered the cargo; upon which he and his whole crew had sworn never to help an Englishman in whatever distress he should find them, whether at sea or on shore."
Wesley's Journal, too, contains several references to this savage practice.
In June, 1760, for instance, during an Irish preaching tour, he recorded the. following observation:
'"' A Swedish ship, being leaky, put into one of our harbours.
The Irish, according to custom, ran to plunder her.
A neighbouring gentleman hindered them; and for so doing demanded a fourth part of the cargo.
And this they said, the law allows."
It should be noted, in this case, that the craft was not yet actually shipwrecked.
Professor G. M. Trevelyan pronounces Dr. Johnson " the most abnormally English creature God ever made"
;? and so warm in time became the Doctor's attachment to his beloved Metropolis that finally he averred anyone " tired of London " to be "' tired of life' ; nevertheless, there is more than humour in Johnson's couplet from London, written in 1738—the very eve of Wesley's world-stirring crusade :
" Prepare for death if here at night you roam, And sign your will before you sup from home."
The drunkenness and inefficiency of the watchmen, or constables, as Fielding, Walpole and other contemporaries so often point out, was notorious.
Smollett in his History of England, referring - to the year 1730, says:
'' Thieves and robbers were now become more desperate and savage than they had ever appeared since mankind was civilised.'
Footpads armed with " bludgeons, pistols, cutlasses,"" etc., infested '"' not only private lanes and passages, but likewise public streets and places of usual concourse," committing daring and dastardly outrages even at such times of day as were '' hitherto deemed hours of security."
Often indeed constables passed by a notorious robber, not daring to apprehend him lest he give signal and " twenty or thirty armed villains' rush to his assistance.¢
In John Gay's Trivia (1716) the lines:
"' Yet rather bear the show'r, and toils of mud Than in the doubtful quarrel risk thy blood,"
1 Walter Wilson, Life of Daniel Defoe, Vol. 1, p. 209.
2 Trevelyan, The Age of Johnson (Fohnson's England, Vol. I, p. 6).
3 See Address from Mayor and Aldermen of London (1744) to the King imploring protection against these bandits.
; 4 See Henry Fielding, Increase of Robbers.