Social Transformations of the Victorian Age: A Survey of Court and CountryEscott, T. H. S. (Thomas Hay Sweet)
History
Social Transformations of the Victorian Age: A Survey of Court and Country
Escott, T. H. S. (Thomas Hay Sweet)
Great Britain -- Civilization -- 19th century; Great Britain -- Social life and customs -- 19th century
No single element conspicuous in the Hyde Park of the later years of the
Victorian era was absent from that earlier crowd at whose composition we
have glanced. The social prominence of English plutocracy whether
represented by the great money brokers, whom, Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic,
Piccadilly has always known, or by Yorkshire Hudson, whom it knew fitfully
during the short spell of his splendour, has been, from Elizabethan or
still earlier times, a feature and a force in the social economy of the
town. That which, seen between the Magazine and Apsley House, would have
most surprised Hyde Park loungers in the early Victorian days, had they
been able to lift the curtain of the future, is not the fact of the best
coaches of the Four in Hand Club being owned by men whose names have no
English sound, and whose taste for horseflesh is not hereditary; but
rather the vogue now attained by prevailing bicycles. Even here, perhaps,
one ought rather to recognize the reintroduction of a fashion whose idea
is as old as the hobby horse itself than a mode as indisputably modern as
the safety wheel or the pneumatic tyre.
The Princes and Princesses who once rode their ponies between Albert and
Stanhope Gates are now bearing a part in the government of Empires, but
are seldom for long unrepresented in the moving and glittering throng.
The 'city' in the Row is not a novelty. The Church began with Archbishop
Tait to be more prominently represented than was ever known before. The
most emancipated of bygone occupants of Lambeth would scarcely have looked
forward to the time when a cavalcade composed of archiepiscopal children,
led by a Primate himself in the van, with his Chaplain bringing up the
rear, would canter to and fro along the Row. Hyde Park is not to-day
visited by early water drinkers who believe in the virtues of the probably
forgotten spring in Kensington Gardens hard by. But not many hours after
dawn, the novelty, as to early Victorian observers it would have seemed,
may be witnessed of ladies and gentlemen issuing in bands from their
Tyburnian or Kensingtonian homes to gain an appetite for breakfast, and a
store of fresh air for the day's confinement, by making at least once the
circuit of the Park while the roads are at their emptiest, and the
dewdrops still glisten on the flowers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account