Voices of the Georgian Age: 100 Remarkable Years, In Their Own Words

By James Hobson

Voices of the Georgian Age is the story of seventeen witnesses to the remarkably diverse Georgian century after 1720. While being very different in many ways, the voices have two things in common: they have an outstanding story to tell, and that story is available to all for free on the internet.

Despite the obvious constraints of surviving evidence, men and woman, rich and poor and respectable and criminal are all covered. Some wrote out their life story with deliberation, knowing that it would be read in future, while others simply put their private thoughts to paper for their own benefit. All are witnesses to their age.

This book guides you through their diaries, memoirs and travelogues, providing an entertaining insight in their lives, and a personal history of the period. It is also a preparatory guide for those wishing to read the original documents themselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: Feb 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9781399006071

James Hobson

James Hobson has taught and written about History as teacher for twenty-five years. His first book was The Dark Days of Georgian Britain, a social history of the Regency period. His other interest is the English Civil War – studying this as his specialism under Professor John Morrill while at the University of Cambridge.

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Introduction

Nobody puts pen to paper, to use an old-fashioned term, without a motive. Our first Georgian witness, William Hutton, makes this clear:

None is so able to write a life as the person who is the subject because his thoughts, his motives and his private transactions are open to him alone. But none is so unfit, for his hand, biased in his favour, will omit or disguise simple truth, hold out false colours and deceive all but the writer. I have endeavoured to divest myself of this prejudice.¹

Hutton claims to be free of the vices that make history difficult to write, while at the same time declaring, correctly, that most bias is unconscious rather than malicious. Hutton also claims to be wiser and more alert than the average person, which is a prejudice itself, and one he does not recognise because misjudgements of this kind are unconscious.

So our diaries, travelogues and memoirs are problematic but no more so than other historical sources; just because they are attached to a named, frail human being does not change anything. All survivals from the past need to be treated with caution, and the normal questions about provenance asked.

Some were commercial endeavours, written to be bought and read, while others were private and reflective. The difference is easy to spot and relatively easy to take into account. One major advantage is that our witnesses are already well-known people; our sources are not scraps of letters or diaries that have survived with no context, but documents that can be interpreted with specific background knowledge.

This is a social rather than a political history, so our witnesses focusing on the small practicalities of their lives is a strength rather than a weakness. We also go beyond their personal reminiscences to paint a picture of wider Georgian society, as, no matter how interesting our seventeen subjects are, they must represent something bigger than themselves to be worth our time and scrutiny. That they are human beings, with fundamentally the same emotions and core desires as us today is obvious, almost a cliché, so it cannot be a focus of the book. It is the differences that tell us much more, and there are lots of them.

The other focus is travel, hospitality and tourism, mostly in England, but also in Wales and Scotland. These activities are meant to be different to normal life, and people record events with fresh eyes and new perspectives when they are on the move. That’s useful and interesting.

The witnesses appear in rough chronological order. William Hutton’s life spans most of the Georgian era, and we cover his struggles and boasts up to 1782. All of the witnesses have been edited, and events selected from a great number that cannot be included for reasons of space. These kinds of sources are factually very dense and the challenge was to keep them representative, and this is particularly true with Hutton.

Our next witness is our only foreigner, Karl Moritz, who loved England but did have some critical things to say about it. As with all of our voluntary travellers (Richard Warner, John Byng and Elizabeth Chivers), I have not felt the need to follow their itineraries slavishly. Many of our witnesses repeat themselves; when Moritz or Warner were in rapture over the scenery, it has been mentioned once in detail, later in outline and again only for a very good reason.

Next is our only member of the British cabinet, William Windham. He bears absolutely no resemblance to the major British politicians of the twenty-first century, although it has to be said that he bears little resemblance to those of the late Georgian period either. He is hard to understand and appreciate, and his diary is exceptionally hard reading. Some of the sources are a joy to read, others are much more difficult – this one is a challenge.

Our next witness is John Byng, briefly a member of the House of Lords and an acquaintance of William Windham, one of the very few links between our witnesses. He is a grumpy, entitled and rich traveller with a hankering for a return to the past. Neither is he a great believer in ‘abroad’. His type still exists today, in outline if not in detail.

Another archetype that still exists is the cocooned, arty member of the metropolitan establishment. Our example is Joseph Farington, a key member of the Royal Academy, who had direct links with the monarchy and the art world. However, he is included because of his interest in money, death and scandal. Gossip is oral, and is therefore a scarce historical resource. It may be a little uncultured, but I have judged the tittle-tattle of the age as more enlightening than the internal politics of the Royal Academy; you can have both if you read the diary.

At this point, you may be asking where are the poor and powerless? The short answer is ‘not writing travelogues and diaries’. The exception is James Hardy Vaux, a plausible and highly literate criminal who is completely unrepresentative of his class, criminal or otherwise, but his description of the Georgian underworld is accurate and fascinating.

Richard Warner is next, a semi-radical cleric with an interest in history and archaeology and a determination to be as nice as possible to the Welsh when he visits them, as long as they stay within his assigned stereotype; another kind of person that still exists, except today they fly in by jet to hot countries rather than walk through Wales with a large shabby overcoat.

Our next witness is Jane Austen, a twenty-something member of the middle classes who wrote a series of light-hearted letters to her sister Cassandra. After her is another, less famous member of the same class called Fanny Chapman, who lived in the same part of the world. There are acres of print about Jane and nothing about Fanny, for the fair reason that the latter did not produce novels of genius, but in the book, they are both treated in the same way: as genteel Georgian women who had little agency in life and hours of time to fill.

Sandwiched between them is Quaker Hannah Chapman Gurney and the difference is glaring. Her constant spiritual examinations are not to mainstream modern tastes, but the summary and conclusions are still interesting. With this witness, the past definitely feels like a foreign country where they really do think differently.

The next story is gruesome yet compelling. The appalling crimes of Joseph Naples and his community of body snatchers (not grave robbers) are brutally exposed in his eleven-month diary of 1811–1812. He is our second working-class witness, and second criminal, but an organised, literate one who was clearly running an efficient business operation. If you can forget what he was actually doing, it is possible to admire his skills.

Next is another working-class ‘criminal’, but his miserable fate merely reminds us who made the law. Thomas Holden was a Luddite, convicted and transported for conspiring to destroy machinery, and was just literate enough to tell his own story. His brief and scrappy reminiscences are sad and sullen, and show the utter helplessness of the working man and woman in the late Georgian era.

Our next diary belongs to the inexhaustible tourist Elizabeth Chivers. Its tick-box, trophy destination superficiality and love of cakes might make you think ‘plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’ when it comes to tourism, but delving deeper there are other things going on.

Thomas Lucas of Stirling in Scotland is next. He has new perspectives – he is our only Scot, our only middle-class provincial male, and the only rich person who lived a few streets away from the poor. His strength is his recording of events, big and small, and his opinions, which were sufficiently mainstream to be representative but unpredictable enough to be interesting.

Our next witness also knew about the poor, but unlike Lucas, tried to do something to help them. He was the radical weaver Samuel Bamford. Bamford believed in protest within the law, despite those laws being made by a political class which did not have the workers’ interests at heart. His extensive journal has been edited to only include class struggle; his interest in Lancashire folklore, fairies, trolls and spirits has been omitted, but is available for all to read.

We finish with two completely different members of the establishment. Ellis Cornelia Knight was a gifted intellectual, who, as part of a long and interesting life, devoted her time to the Royal Family, with very mixed results. Our last is the Welshman Rees Gronow. He knew about the army, the clubs of London and the fashionable world of the Regency. His reminiscences were a deliberate attempt to make money by shocking people with gossip and interesting stories, and it still does the trick today.

This brings us to accessibility. The work of all our witnesses is available for free on the internet. This book makes no assumption about which, if any, original sources, will be read, and it depends on the interests and stamina of the reader. If they are read, this book has been designed as an introduction to each person; these sources are so rich and varied, there can never really be a full and final conclusion about them. I have only scratched the surface but isn’t that always the case with history?

Chapter 1

Family, Friends and Society

William Hutton 1723–1782

Our first Georgian witness is William Hutton (1723–1815). He had a successful life as a businessman, poet and author, but his childhood and family background were modest and life was a struggle. Our source is his biography, The Life of William Hutton, Stationer, of Birmingham and the History of His Family, published for the first time in 1817 and reprinted in 1841.

Hutton was born on 30 September 1723 and, like most children before or since, his first thoughts were about his mother, named Ann. Unlike most children today, his memories of her were to be limited as Ann was to survive a mere nine years after his birth. For most of that time, she struggled – ‘time produced nothing but tatters and children,’ said Hutton in one of his many thought-provoking poetic turns of phrase.

In the eighteenth century, the death of one’s mother at 41 would bring grief but not much surprise. Ann’s husband, William, had been a self-employed wool-comber, but when William junior was 2 years old, William senior’s business failed and he became a journeyman – a day worker for other people. Wool-combing was a hot and greasy job which was done at home. Raw wool was straightened with large combs of increasing fineness so it was separated and of equal length. It was a precarious occupation, as Hutton was to discover, but his family were made poorer than they should have been by their father’s lack of application. Both before and after his business failure, William seemed to be supine and intemperate. He delayed decisions, drank too much and alienated his wife, and the whole family suffered.

It was a coarse, cruel and often calamitous life. At the age of 2, Hutton set fire to his petticoats, frock and bib – normal clothing for both Georgian girls and boys. These clothes were flammable; he was playing next to an open fire with a paper fan that his sister had given him, and he just avoided self-immolation. Hutton recounts this story in a direct and matter-of-fact tone that suggests his childhood was typical of the time. This is another example:

My mother observed I was the largest child she ever had, but ordinary – a softer word for ugly – [she was] afraid she should never love me.

In the Georgian era, childhood ended at about 4 to 6 years old. Hutton’s ended at the age of 4 when he was breeched.² Up to this point, he would have had long hair and petticoats and been indistinguishable from a girl, and the breeching was a rite of passage at which he should have been the centre of attention. Reaching 4 years old was a milestone worth celebrating; Hutton knew this, as his brother George had just died, aged 3 and a half. The eighteenth-century graveyards contained large numbers of 70- and 80-year-olds but average life expectancy was a mathematical calculation, rendered low by the regular death of children before the age of 5. Every family, even the rich ones, knew this fact painfully.

Life wasn’t great. Hutton was not at home when he was breeched so had nobody to buy him new clothes. With his mother and father’s relationship being in a mess he was moved away, spending his time alternately between his mother’s bachelor uncle at Mountsorrel, Leicestershire and his ‘three crabbed aunts’, all single and living 2 miles away. None of them liked him. They called him ugly, like his father, and Hutton wondered why they would insult somebody with a fault that could not be rectified.

When his mother came to get him, he was dragged out of his bed half-naked by a servant girl, placed on a horse with the uncle and they rode to Loughborough to pick up a goods wagon to take them on to Derby. Hutton had a pillow under him on the horse, but there would be no suspension of any kind on the wagon. His father, seeing him for the first time in 15 months, said two words only; ‘Oh Bill.’

Aged just over 4, work became part of Hutton’s life. He went on errands, wearing his best suit, cocked hat and walking stick when going to school. He looked after his two brothers when his mother was at work, and gave the family their milk porridge in the morning (one day he completely forgot his father who, characteristically, did not notice or do anything about it.)

‘My days of play were coming to an end,’ Hutton said; he was 6 at the time. He needed paid work; child labour in the eighteenth century was only regarded as a problem if there was none available. The first job proposed was a domestic occupation like his father’s; winding thread around bobbins. The second was in a grocer’s, stripping tobacco leaves.

Hutton was one of the first ever witnesses to the Industrial Revolution. The family lived in Full Street, Derby, almost within sight of Britain’s first ever factory. Hutton was one of the youngest workers in this new form of employment. The Derby Silk Mill had been operating since about 1717, and was a curiosity and a tourist attraction. When Daniel Defoe visited, he said it was ‘a curiosity in trade worth observing, as being the only one of its kind in England.’ The new ways of factory working may have been born in Derby, but Hutton hated it. The 5.00 am start, the cruel use of the cane for every trivial infraction, and the foul language and manners of those who worked there revolted him. It was made much worse because he was the youngest of the 300 workers, and needed lifts on his shoes to operate the machines.

The Hutton family were not members of the Church of England. They were Unitarians – nonconformists of a moderately unpopular variety. They denied the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit and regarded Jesus more as a religious teacher to be admired than part of the deity to be worshipped. They did not attend the local parish church, although Hutton did so because he was bribed a halfpenny to go to divine service; his father knew, but did not mind, or care. When Hutton went to the church, he sat himself somewhere unobtrusive and played ‘push pin’, a pointless game where one pin is manipulated over another on a flat service. It can only be played properly by two people, and was a metaphor for Hutton’s lonely and aimless early life.

Aged 4 and a half, Hutton’s teacher grabbed him by the hair and smashed his head against the wall. The fact that it was worthy of only one sentence says a lot. Extreme violence against children was commonplace. At Christmas 1732, Hutton was beaten so badly that his father’s walking stick was smashed into pieces. His crime was two-fold; he lost a halfpenny when he was flipping and tossing it, and he was cheeky when told off. He took the bits of the stick and used them as a toy; he always, in his mind, made the best of a bad job, a theme he would revisit regularly to explain how a boy from a normal background made it good.

All this explains how he put up with, but still hated, the regular violent bullying at the mill. His master Richard Porter hit him repeatedly on the same place on his back and the point of his cane pierced an existing wound. Putrefaction set in and even his father was alarmed. Young William was bathed in Kedleston water, local spa water that cured the gravel (kidney stones) when drunk and healed skin and ulcers when bathed in. ‘A cure was effected, and I yet carry the scar,’ said Hutton, and this was not a metaphor.

Accidents were common in all areas of life and the mill was no better, but not necessarily much worse. He had a near miss, almost losing a hand in an accident where the machine could not have been stopped in time if it had been more serious. Hutton resented the unnaturalness of it all; the lack of choice in personal relationships, and the inability to make lasting friends, learn a trade or make personal progress. After his seven years of servitude, his ‘apprenticeship’ had failed to find him a job, and he was not surprised at all.

On 29 March 1732, aged 9, Hutton attended his first execution. John Hewitt had poisoned his wife, with the assistance of his lover Rosamund Ollerenshaw, and the pair, walking to the gallows with a clergyman on either side and surrounded by a great crowd, were hanged in their shrouds. The crowds were so enthusiastic that he had the greatest trouble getting there, being pushed into the river at the stepping-stones.

Death, poverty and coarseness were everywhere. Hutton’s mother died in 1733, after the birth of yet another child, Samuel. Her nurse was useless and Ann did the work herself; Hutton claimed it was rinsing sheets in cold water that hastened her death. Ann had a miserable life living with her drunken spendthrift husband; the days of involuntary fasting did her more damage than washing in cold water. Hutton recalled the Christmas of 1728, when the lack of food in the house was made worse by having no knives, and his father, who ‘was never in the habit of buying except ale’ sent out Hutton’s sister to borrow one.

When he was told about his mother’s death, Hutton burst into tears but immediately went back to work at the mill. He was told by a friend of his late mother that it was fruitless to cry for he, too, would be dead soon. In the 1817 edition of his book, he mentioned his grandfather’s children who had also died early. ‘They slept before their time; nor is it of much consequence whether a man sleeps at one or one hundred. When the candle is out, no matter how long it has burnt.’

Then Hutton’s father lost the plot completely. He moved away, set up with a widow who had four children, forcing Hutton to fend for himself, aged 9. He lived on cheap hasty pudding, which was merely flour and water. He developed the rustic-sounding illness of ‘chin cough’ that is, in fact, whooping cough and he suffered this lung infection for three months. He also developed boils; and all this time his father was in the pub. On his tenth birthday, in a small rite of passage, his father gave him a quart of tuppenny beer. A quart is four pints, and it would have been much stronger than anything available in twenty-first century pubs – the equivalent of six pints today.

Hutton tried to look upon his father in a rational way. He marvelled at his success with women, despite being old (42), drunken, not very handsome and not very clean (due to his hot and greasy occupation). Hutton senior also only had one eye, having lost the other in a botched operation that involved it coming out of its socket; when the eye was returned, it no longer worked, and grew disproportionately bigger as he grew older; yet the women of the area ‘were still much inclined to pull caps for him.’

In 1734 Hutton witnessed an outbreak of vicious lawlessness in Derby. There was ‘drinking, fighting, cursing, injuring, animosity and murder were the result.’ This was not civil war or insurrection, but an election to the House of Commons or, more precisely, a contested election. Most seats were two member constituencies, which would normally be divided up by the local influential families. The Tory candidate Lord George Cavendish was elected successfully, but a fight ensued between the Whig candidate and an interloper. A mob appeared outside County Hall, windows were broken and there was fighting in the street. One man who tried to stop the mob had a stick thrust into his eye and died the next day.

By 1737, Hutton’s apprenticeship at the Silk Mill had finished, and it had achieved nothing. What was to be done now? His father dithered; he did not want his son to be a wool-comber like him, or a stocking-frame worker like his brother. Hutton chose to be a gardener, which his father agreed to, but did nothing to make happen. Another hasty U-turn was made. His father now allowed his son to move to Nottingham and be an apprentice frame-knitter to his Uncle George.

He was 15 and entering yet another seven-year period of servitude. There was no reason to believe that he and his two fellow apprentices would have any kind of secure future. It was no more a learning experience than the mill had been. He was expected to produce garments from the start; if he earned 5 shillings and 10 pence, he would get sixpence. There was no more bitter way of learning the exploitation of labour. If he earned less than this, then he owed them money. His aunt watched every mouthful he ate with resentment as well.

By 1739, Hutton was looking at girls, but they were not looking at him. The importance of clothing was great, perhaps even more than today. Clothes were ‘a passport to the heart, a key to unlock the passions and guide them in our favour.’ ‘My resources were cut off, my sun was eclipsed,’ Hutton complained. Paradoxically, as long as people like Hutton produced textiles by hand, people like him would not be able to afford nice clothes. Our mass-produced clothing can hide social status to some extent, but in the eighteenth century it was different.

Winter 1740 was freezing; snow fell on New Year’s Day, and it was still around in March. Both of his fellow apprentices had gone away. Uncle George had problems recruiting, which confirmed Hutton’s suspicions about the quality of the apprenticeship. By 1741 things were improving just a little; he hated his frame but persevered, his aunt was still watching every mouthful of food with resentment, but he had found some reasonable clothes and better company – ‘the girls eyed me with some attention, nay I eyed myself as much as any of them.’

It all went wrong in the week of the Nottingham races. Work in domestic industries would stop during such traditional events. Hutton had been idle for five days – it hovered over him – and on the sixth day it did not leave him, despite being threatened with a thrashing if he did not do some work. His uncle produced a birch broom handle and attacked him with it. The locals heard the noise, correctly worked out that somebody was being thrashed, and did not care. His pride was hurt more anything:

Standing by the palisades of the house in a gloomy posture a female acquaintance passed by and turning with a pointed sneer said ‘You were licked last night.’ The remark stung me to the quick I had rather she had broken my head.

Hutton was nearly 18, getting better known and popular with girls; and then this humiliation. The next day his uncle seemed a little contrite and offered him cherries, but there was to be no compromise. He decided to run away. Leaving the house, he found 10 shillings and took 2 for himself, leaving the rest. He left with one bag, a sixpenny loaf of coarse blencorn bread, some butter wrapped in the