TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES: —Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected. —There are two symbols of a pointing finger; they have been rendered as [hand]. —Where an adequate character is not available, superscripts have been rendered as word^[superscript]. [Illustration] THE DAWN OF THE XIXTH CENTURY IN ENGLAND A Social Sketch of the Times BY JOHN ASHTON AUTHOR OF _“Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne,” “English Caricature and Satire on Napoleon I.,” “Old Times,” &c_ _WITH 114 ILLUSTRATIONS DRAWN BY THE AUTHOR FROM CONTEMPORARY ENGRAVINGS_ THIRD AND POPULAR EDITION London T. FISHER UNWIN PATERNOSTER SQUARE MDCCCXC [Illustration] PREFACE. THAT Sir Walter Scott, when he called his novel “Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since,” thought that the time had come, when the generation, then living, should be presented with a page of history, which would bring to their remembrance the manners and customs of their grandfathers, must be my excuse for this book. For, never, in the world’s history, has there been such a change in things social, as since the commencement of the Nineteenth Century; it has been a quiet revolution—a good exemplar of which may be found in the Frontispiece, which is a type of things past, never to be recalled. The Watchman has long since given place to the Police; the climbing boy, to chimney-sweeping on a more scientific plan; and no more is “Saloop” vended at street corners; even the drummer-boys are things of the past, only fit for a Museum—and it is of these things that this book treats. The times, compared with our own, were so very different; Arts, Manufactures, Science, Social Manners, Police, and all that goes to make up the sum of life, were then so widely divergent, as almost to make one disbelieve, whilst reading of them, that such a state of things could exist in this Nineteenth Century of ours. In the first decade, of which I write, Steam was in its very babyhood; locomotives, and steamships, were only just beginning to be heard of; Gas was a novelty, and regarded more as an experiment, than the useful agent we have since found it; whilst Electricity was but a scientific toy, whose principal use was to give galvanic shocks, and cause the limbs of a corpse to move, when applied to its muscles.