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
That is only to say that England is not Paradise. Meanwhile, socially as
well as educationally, the progress made is so great that two decades
since the most sanguine prophets would have pronounced it to be
impossible. The Staffordshire miner, the roughest perhaps of his class,
would no longer be represented, even by _Punch_, as proposing to 'heave
half a brick' at a new comer for the offence of having a strange face. As
for setting the bull-pup at the parson's little boy, the suggestion is
less likely to come, if at all, from the collier than from the mischievous
undergraduate, the son of the collier's employer who is home for his
College vacation, and indulges a pretty canine fancy. The eighth Duke of
Devonshire is not a social leveller. But on a public occasion he had the
frankness to define the difference between the Sunday crowds in Hyde Park
round the Reformers' Tree, and the week day crowds in the Ladies' Mile as
being that the former were not nearly as well dressed as the latter. That
implied compliment to the manners of a metropolitan mob at once showed the
discernment of him from whose lips it fell, and emphasizes the truth of
the views expressed in the present context. Even the carnival of Lord
Mayor's Day has felt the touch of those humanities that are said in the
Latin grammar example to soften manners and not permit them to be brutal.
The London crowd which, as Mr Disraeli knew, was the most emotional in the
world, is to-day the best conducted, and incomparably the least drunken.
As for its occasional rowdiness: what are these little outbursts in
comparison with the horseplay of the prosperous gentlemen in glossy, silk
hats, with high white collars, and deep wristbands, who, having placed a
new rose in their button hole, drive high-stepping cobs to their suburban
railway station every morning and who, if a stranger strays into their
Stock Exchange deal with that unfortunate person as an Epsom mob treats a
welsher. Continuation schools, lectures, universally accessible for adults
who wish to carry on their education beyond the limit of their school
days, the discipline of collective sight-seeing in museums and galleries;
the habits formed at free libraries; these are the agencies that share
with the teaching which the State provides the distinction of rearing a
new generation, not merely veneered by a superficial decorum, but
wholesomely controlled by a public opinion of its own quite as real as
that which dominates Belgravia or Pall Mall.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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