The Season did not, of course, spring into being with all its events, manners and codes of speech fully formed. It evolved gradually over two or three hundred years, during which royalty, the aristocracy and social behaviour were constantly changing. It was always inspired, however, by the same three motives: the lure of the Court and the great offices of the state, from which honours, preferment and influence derived ; the magnetic pull exerted by the entertainments and fashion of London ; and the perennial ambition of the nobility to marry off its sons and daughters well.
The boredom and monotony of country life must have weighed especially heavily upon women. Men were preoccupied by the demands of their estates, and found entertainment in country pursuits like hunting and fishing. But, in the days when a household’s circle of intimate friends was bounded by the radius of – at most – half a day’s journey by horse, carriage or post-chaise (say, fifteen miles), their wives and daughters must have longed for fresh faces to break the tedium and offer a wider choice of marriage partners. The London Season (although nobody called it that in the seventeenth century) arose naturally out of the isolation of people living in great country houses, albeit in large families served by a huge retinue of servants. For them, London was an opportunity and a diversion. For their men, it might herald promotion, which would make up for the expense and disruption of removing themselves and their families (and servants and livery and plate and linen and books and horses and carriages) up to town for a season – how easily the word leaps to mind: no wonder it came to be called that.
Even those who already lived in London were attracted by Court life – like that engagingly typical social climber, Samuel Pepys. Here he is in December 1662, describing a ball at Court with all the wonder and envy of the arriviste:
first to the Duke’s* chamber, where I saw him and the Duchess at supper, and thence into the room where the Ball was to be, crammed with fine ladies, the greatest of the Court. By and by comes the King and Queen, the Duke and Duchess, and all the great ones; and after seating themselves, the King takes out the Duchess of York, and the Duke the Duchess of Birmingham, the Duke of Monmouth my Lady Castlemayne, and so other ladies; and they danced the Bransle. After that, the King led a lady a single Coranto; and then the rest of the lords, one after another, other ladies. Very noble it was, and a great pleasure to see…. Having stayed here as long as I thought fit, to my infinite content, it being the greatest pleasure I could wish now to see at Court, I went out, leaving them dancing.1
By the following year, Pepys has gone so far as to engage a dancing master, having concluded that it will be a useful accomplishment: for him as well as for his wife:
by and by the Dancing Master came; whom standing by seeing him instructing my wife, when he had done with her he would needs have me try the steps of a Coranto; and what with his desire and my wife’s importunity, I did begin, and then was obliged to give him entry money, 10s. – and am become his Scolar. The truth is, I think it is a thing very useful for any gentleman and sometimes I may have occasion of using it; and though it cost me, which I am heartily sorry it should … yet I will try it a little while; if I see it comes to any great inconvenience or charge, I will fling it off.2
Pepys and his wife never had children, so an advantageous marriage could not have been his reason for wishing to ingratiate himself at Court, and, living in London as they did, its pleasures were all to hand. But for advancement in his career, influential friends were all-important – and Pepys made the most of his.
Three years later, Lord Herbert was writing to his wife, still stuck in the country, about the Queen’s birthday ball which he had attended on 15 November 1666: ‘I never saw greater bravery: a hundred vests [i.e. robes, vestments] that at the least cost a hundred pounds. Some were adorned with jewels above a thousand … the ladies much richer than the men.’3 Poor lady – how she must have longed to be there!
The Revolution of 1688 brought William and Mary to the throne, and after them a succession of dull or eccentric Hanoverian Courts. But the Revolution had also imposed limitations on the powers of the monarchy. The King was no longer the sole source of patronage, office and preferment: these were now dispensed by Parliament as well. Society was beginning to broaden out. Queen Anne and the German Georges reigned over an exciting time. The colonization of America and the opening up of new markets in the East created immense wealth, and led to a new class of successful merchants. The aristocracy, faced with the usual dilemma – could they demean themselves by marrying ‘trade’ ? – reached the usual pragmatic conclusion: yes, they could, providing it had enough money.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the season was starting to be formalized as a Season. In 1709 Steele used the word in the Toiler in its modern sense (‘the Company was gone and the Season over’) although, heaven knows, the Court of Queen Anne cannot have offered much that was brilliant or vivacious. But by now more than half the great landed families had town houses as well, and their excesses made up for the domestic atmosphere at Court. Here, great hostesses entertained lavishly and the complicated merry-go-round of promotion and favours oscillated up and down. The Season lasted for as long as Parliament sat, from February until the end of July.
In 1711 its first recognizably modern component was established, when Queen Anne’s passion for racing prompted her to found a racecourse on the ‘new heath’ at Ascot. She paid for a trophy worth 100 guineas known as Her Majesty’s Plate, and another worth 50 guineas. Ascot quickly became a fashionable event, with well-dressed ladies vying with the horses for attention. One of the Queen’s Ladies-in-Waiting, a Miss Forester, paraded in male riding costume. Jonathan Swift reported sourly to Stella, ‘She is a truly silly maid of honour, and I did not like her, although she be a toast.’4
The role of women was still dictated by the convenience and the commands of men, and even the most spirited rarely defied their fathers or husbands. One who did refuse to submit was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. She had been famous for her beauty at a young age, ever since her father’s friends at the Kit-Kat Club had toasted the length of the little girl’s amazing eyelashes. Not only that, she was intelligent, with an observant and questioning mind. She disliked the hypocrisy of London Society, yet conformed for as long as she could. When she could not bear it any more, she became one of the first of the great lady travellers, accompanying her husband to Turkey, and thence into virtual exile in France and Italy. Her letters reflect both her shrewdness and her contempt for the machinations needed to obtain political promotion and influence. Here she is in September 1714, still only twenty-five years old, yet already far wiser than the dim husband whom she is advising:
I need not enlarge upon the advantages of money. Everything we see and everything we hear puts us in remembrance of it.… as the world is and will be, ’tis a sort of duty to be rich, that it may be in one’s power to do good, riches being another word for power.… The ministry is like a play at court. There’s a little door to get in, and a great crowd without, shoving and thrusting who shall be foremost; people that knock others with their elbows, disregard a little kick of the shins, and still thrust heartily forward, are sure of a good place.5
In that year, 1714, George I succeeded Queen Anne. He spoke practically no English, had no time for levées and drawing-rooms, and retreated whenever possible to his German palace. George II was not much better. When he succeeded to the throne in 1727, he was besieged by people anxious to get on the right side of him, in case he turned out to play a more active part than his father in disbursing favours. Lord Hervey’s Memoirs record the scene at Leicester Fields, where the new King had lived while he was heir apparent:
The King and Queen were already arrived and receiving the compliments of every man of all degrees and all parties in the town. The square was thronged with multitudes of the meaner sort, and resounded with huzzas and acclamations, whilst every room in the house was filled with people of higher rank, crowding to kiss their hands and to make the earliest and warmest professions of zeal for the service…. On the 19th [June] the Court removed to Kensington, where the King, by the audiences that were asked and the offers that were made to him by the great men of all denominations, found himself set up at auction and everyone bidding for his favour at the expense of the public.6
The following year, the King barred the beautiful and popular Duchess of Queensberry from court for what seems to have been a trifling misdemeanour ; the Duchess replied with a spirited letter in which she said she was:
surprised and well pleased that the King hath given her so agreeable a command as to stay from Court, where she never came for diversion, but to bestow a great civility on the King and Queen; she hopes by such an unprecedented order as this, that the King will see as few as he wishes at his Court, particularly such as dare to think or speak truth.7
It was not long before even the greedy and the sycophantic stayed away, and although the King dutifully held regular levées and even the occasional ball, he was indifferent to England and disagreeable to nearly everyone else. His dullness was enlivened only by his love of practical jokes.
London Society cavorted regardless, generating its own scandals and diversions. It was one of those periods when people went mad for fancy dress. Masques and balls and fireworks became ever more lavish and London burned with the same feverish passion for dressing up as it was to do two centuries later (when, coincidentally, George v’s Court was almost as dull as that of his ancestor George II). Horace Walpole wrote with scandalized glee:
I must tell you how fine the masquerade of last night was. There were five hundred persons of the greatest variety of handsome and rich dresses I ever saw and all the jewels of London. There were to be seen Lady Conway as a charming Mary Stuart, their Graces of Richmond as Henry VIII and Jane Seymour – excessively rich and both so handsome – and all kinds of old pictures stepped from their frames.8
Another night, at the opera,
We had a great scuffle which interrupted it. Lord Lincoln was abused in the most shocking manner by a drunken officer, upon which he kicked him, and was drawing his sword but was prevented. I climbed over the front boxes and stepping over the shoulders of three ladies before I knew where I was, found that I had lighted in Lord Rockingham’s lap.9
Yet he must have enjoyed it all, for in 1760 he wrote dolefully, ‘You cannot figure a duller Season, the weather bitter, no party… .’10
The same year saw the first appearance in Society of an enchanting young woman whose early life epitomized many of the problems of women amid the licence and spectacle of that Hanoverian age. She was Lady Sarah Lennox, orphaned daughter of the late Duke of Richmond, whose elder sister presented her at Court when she was not quite fifteen. Dressed in the height of fashion, all feathers and furbelows, her hair piled high on her head, she found the event an ordeal. ‘Up I went,’ she recalled, ‘through three great staring rooms full of men into the Drawing Room.’ There, after she had made her curtsey, George II – who had known her as a small child – made her look foolish by trying to cuddle her on his lap as though she were still five years old. She was saved from utter embarrassment by the then Prince of Wales, George II’s twenty-year old grandson, ‘at that time a fine, pleasing-looking young man, of healthy, youthful-looking complexion, a look of happiness and good humour’,11 who came and made conversation with her until she had regained her equilibrium. There were weighty consequences. A few months later the young man succeeded to the throne as George in, and proposed marriage. Actually it was a very good choice. He had fallen much in love with her; she was fond of him; and with her bright, sociable personality and practical nature she might have saved him from some of his own excesses later on. But, naturally, it could not be allowed. His advisers were appalled. The King must make a better match, and lists of eligible if stodgy German princesses were waved before his eyes. Dutifully he chose one, and did his duty over and over again by producing fifteen children and holding two weekly drawing-rooms and two balls a year.
Meanwhile, two years later, Lady Sarah Lennox surprised everyone by marrying a man of her own choice. His name was Charles Bunbury and he turned out to have been a mistake, though Sarah made the best of it for as long as she could. She was bored to tears in the country: ‘My devil of a horse is as lame as a dog, and Mr B. has been coursing, hunting and doing every pleasant thing upon earth, and poor me sat fretting and fuming at home with Lady Rosse; in short I am patient Grizel to the last degree.’12 Finally, after six glum years, she fell in love with another man, had his child, and was ostracized by society for the next eleven years. The gossips claimed that George III always nurtured tender feelings for her.
London life rolled merrily on without her, and in 1769 the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy was held for the first time. It instantly became – and has remained – a must for fashionable society. Founded by Sir Joshua Reynolds, who became its first President, the Royal Academy showed the work of painters like Romney, Lawrence and Reynolds himself.
The social vacuum left by George III and Queen Charlotte was eagerly filled by the great Whig hostesses, who provided political intrigue and intellectual brilliance, and the royal dukes, who provided scandal and debauchery. Walpole disapproved: ‘The court independent of politics makes a strange figure. The recluse life led at Richmond, which is carried to such an excess of privacy and economy that the Queen’s friseur waits on them at dinner and four pounds of beef only are allowed for their soups, disgusts all sorts of people.’13 Yet the Court remained essential for one thing. Before a young girl could mingle in Society as a recognized adult, she had to be presented to the King and Queen. After that, if she were attractive both physically and financially, she would find mercenary suitors drawn to her like vampires to new blood. An observant matchmaker wrote off to a military friend in the country:
Miss Child comes out this winter…, the moment she is fired off, she will be pursued by all the brawny tribe of fortune hunters, so that for her sake and yours I most sincerely wish (provided you like her) that you took the earliest occasion of showing her that sort of attention which she could not but remark. No time to be lost, and I think you should, even now, get away from quarters and take your measures for throwing yourself in her way. Such a prize as that of an amiable girl, with a fortune suited to your rank, is worth any exertion.14
Poor Miss Child. Not a thought was given to the girl’s happiness. She might have been one victim among thousands: though she, in fact, took charge of her own future by eloping with the tenth Earl of Westmorland. But the majority had less spirit and therefore no choice. Dr Gregory in his book A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters, published in 1774, warned them realistically: ‘Without an unusual share of natural sensibility and very peculiar good fortune, a woman in this country has very little probability of marrying for love.’
The earliest recorded use of the verb ‘to come out’ in its modern sense occurs at this time, 1782, in Fanny Burney’s novel, Cecilia: ‘She has seen nothing at all of the world, for she has never been presented yet, so is not come out, you know; but she’s to come out next year.’ Fanny Burney was Assistant Keeper of the Wardrobe to Queen Charlotte for five years, but despite her loyalty and affection for the royal family, the tedium of Court eventually became quite unbearable and she asked to be relieved of the privilege. In addition there was the increasing problem of the King’s erratic and disconcerting behaviour. Whether he was mad, as his contemporaries believed, or suffered from porphyria, as recent medical research has deduced, made little difference. He was obscene and deluded by turns.
The beau monde of London suffered none of this. George III’s reign coincided with an era when the art of the political hostess reached its peak: stimulated, no doubt, by the absence of any inspiration at Court. Great Whig hostesses like Lady Melbourne and the Duchess of Devonshire more than made up for it. Then there was Holland House, where the twice-married Lady Holland (who was never received on that account by the more rigid; the loss was theirs, not hers) entertained the most interesting men of her time. The operative word is ‘men’. Young women came out into Society only long enough to find a husband, after which they retired into domesticity and gentle accomplishments like sketching and singing and playing a little upon the pianoforte. Only great ladies of exceptional wealth, intellect and manipulative charm had the chance to do any more in life than be their husband’s wife and their children’s mother. In the latter role, their skills as matchmakers were crucial ; small wonder that the aristocracy was so fascinated by the making of marriages. It offered women a rare opportunity to wield power and exert some influence over the lives of those around them. A marriage for love was a rarity but not an impossibility, provided it were also convenient and suitable for both families ; but most daughters had little chance of doing anything other than submit to their parents’ wishes.
There were, of course, exceptions – there are always exceptions. At the turn of the century there were three such. They were all related, all remarkable: the Duchess of Devonshire; her sister, the Countess of Bessborough; and her daughter, Lady Caroline Ponsonby. Between them these three kicked over most of Society’s traces.
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire lived in a ménage à trois with her husband and her best friend, Lady Elizabeth Foster, who became the Duke’s mistress. Between them they bore him a number of children, known collectively as the ‘Children of the Mist’. Legitimate and illegitimate were treated alike – with one significant exception. Lady Elizabeth’s son, who was ill-advisedly born before the Duchess had produced an heir, was left with a foster-mother and brought up in France. Nothing could be allowed to threaten the sacred English bloodline.
The Duchess’s sister was Lady Bessborough, another great hostess who often shared in the brilliance of Devonshire House and who in her fifties – when most of her contemporaries were regarded as old women – was still being ‘courted, followed, flattered and made love to’. Young William Lamb was one of her admirers, despite being half her age or less; at least until her daughter, Lady Caroline Ponsonby, was launched into London Society. She had had a crush on good-looking, black-eyed William ever since she was a hoydenish fourteen-year-old. By the time she reached seventeen she was diaphanously thin (could she have been an early anorexic? All the symptoms are there), highly strung, brilliant, moody and tiresome by turns, a towering egoist – and irresistible. And she still loved William. He, however, was but the younger son of a not very rich peer, and only his brother’s timely death enabled him – now the future Lord Melbourne – to propose marriage to her. She accepted, and became Lady Caroline Lamb. They had three happy years before everything went wrong.
If such strictures ruled the life of a young woman brought up in the least conventional of families, how they must have limited the freedom and the choices of ordinary young women. Daughters were the chattels of their parents, disposable assets to their fathers, prudish misses to their suitors. Byron has a scathing verse describing the products of such a regime:
’Tis true, your budding Miss is very charming,
But shy and awkward at first coming out,
So much alarmed, that she is quite alarming,
All Giggle, Blush ; half Pertness and half Pout ;
And glancing at Mamma, for fear there’s harm in
What you, she, it, or they, may be about,
The nursery still leaps out in all they utter –
Besides, they always smell of bread and butter.
(Beppo, Stanza 39)
By the beginning of the nineteenth century the Season was taking on a recognizable shape. A girl was launched from schoolroom into ballroom or drawing-room at an early age, somewhere between fifteen and seventeen, her emergence into Society being marked by her first presentation at Court. There would be no formal dance to mark her appearance on the social scene; that came a good hundred years later. Putting her hair up signalled her new marriageable status. Henceforth she might accompany her mother or an older, married sister when paying formal calls. Typically, these emergent girls, debutantes in the true sense of beginners, new arrivals upon the social stage, were over-protected, mildly accomplished, wildly romantic, but ultimately passive. How could they be otherwise ? Their sole purpose in life was to be married. Spinster-hood meant failure. A mother’s ambition was to see her daughters safely married off to men slightly (better still, greatly) their social superiors, and their sons to girls who were at least their social equals, but with more money. Love was not an essential component.
Social life already had a number of features in common with the Season of 1939: Ascot, Private View day at the Royal Academy, Founder’s Day at Eton, and some others, like the parade along Rotten Row and the spectators it attracted, or the popularity of Vauxhall and Ranelagh Gardens, which have vanished altogether. Despite the attractions of Bath and other fashionable country towns, which had their own assembly rooms where people could congregate for balls, cards and concerts and to display the latest in fashions and fiancés, London remained the magnet. It was only in London that the Season took place, and at the end of summer everyone dispersed for the sporting pursuits of autumn and the deep family entrenchment of winter. That tidal rhythm, sweeping everyone of consequence into the metropolis for the summer and out of it again for the rest of the year, had not changed for centuries: it was based on the seasons rather than the Season, and on the fact that wealth was derived from land and land had to be cultivated. But the Court as the glittering centre of Society had apparently become obsolete.
In 1837 the long reign of the Hanoverians ended and Queen Victoria came to the throne aged just eighteen. For the next half-century her dominance was such that the whole country reflected her age and stage in life. When she was an unmarried girl, Society was romantic and excitable, volatile and unpredictable. The young Queen alternated between dashing young men and responsible older ones, like her handsome Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, for whom she felt a more than daughterly devotion, while he in turn was touched by her eagerness and dependence. Yet she was acutely conscious of the formalities of Court life, and insistent that they be observed down to the smallest detail.
At a levée in the first summer of her reign her hand was kissed three thousand times, but this did not prevent her from calling it ‘the pleasantest summer I ever passed in my life’, and she left London – ‘the greatest metroplis in the world’ – reluctantly at the end of the Season.15 Then she realized that she took the Court with her; that if she wanted to be gay at Windsor, to dance and go riding and play cards, no one could stop her.
The next Season took place in her Coronation year, and opened with her first State ball in May, followed by two more State balls, two levées and a drawing-room. The young Queen was taking her role as the leader of Society as seriously as she took all the others – not that her responsibilities prevented her from being delightfully irresponsible: ‘a lovely Ball, so gay, so nice – I felt so happy and merry; I had not danced for so long.’16 But by the following year the novelty of reigning and the freedom from restrictions imposed by her mother were already beginning to pall. In April she told Lord Melbourne that she did not enjoy pleasures so much. ‘Oh! you will, when they begin,’ he said, meaning when the Season opened in May.17 The truth was, though she could not bring herself to admit it, that the Queen needed to be married: for all sorts of reasons. In May she gave a ball for a royal guest, the Tsarevitch Alexander, Grand Duke of Russia, and for the next two weeks entertained him with a theatre, two concerts, a reception and another ball. She was just twenty ; ready to fall in love ; falling in love, even: ‘the Grand Duke is so very strong that in running round [in the mazurka] you must follow quickly, and after that you are whisked round like in a Valse, which is very pleasant. … I got to bed by a quarter to three but could not sleep till five.’18 Yet her views on marriage were surprisingly modern: ‘I couldn’t understand the wish of getting married amounting to marrying anyone,’ she wrote ungrammatically;19 and when those around her praised Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha just before his visit, she wrote anxiously, ‘I might like him as a friend and as a cousin and as a brother, but not more. …’20 Queen Victoria at twenty was determined to marry for love: and that included sexual attraction.
She did. She fell in love with Albert on sight, thought him beautiful, clever and good, and five days after he had arrived with his brother for a visit to Windsor, she proposed and was accepted. In February 1840 they were married: and the Court left mazurkas behind and settled down to family life and a nursery full of royal infants.
Queen Victoria’s courtship and marriage are interesting for the light they shed on the restrictions that circumscribed young female behaviour throughout the nineteenth century. Victoria might be Queen, but she had to obey the same conventions of maidenly decorum that hemmed in her subjects. Occasionally her own spirited common sense broke through: as when she overruled the absurd idea that it would be improper for Albert to spend the night before their marriage under the same roof as his bride … even though that roof covered Windsor Castle. True, she fell in love with Albert: but he was still the carefully selected consort whose visit to England had been preceded by months of scheming by her uncle, King Leopold of the Belgians, and half a host of female matchmakers. She might be Queen of England; but the youngest son of a minor peer had more emotional licence than she did.
Once she was married she had to trim her preferences to those of her husband. Victoria loved London; Albert preferred Windsor and the country ; so they spent increasing time away from London. Victoria loved music and dancing and Albert deplored all frivolity, and especially late nights; so they gave fewer balls and were in bed by midnight. His stern sense of duty began to mould hers ; his high-mindedness got the better of her high spirits.
As the century and the Queen moved towards their middle years, Society, like a Victorian family processing publicly to church, also took on an air of whaleboned self-esteem. This ponderousness was reflected in Court manners. No man might sit in the Queen’s presence except at dinner, nor any maid of honour in front of Prince Albert. No one spoke until spoken to. Bowing, curtseying, walking backwards and hand-kissing all became rigidly formalized, and so did the precise Court dress permitted in the royal presence. Spontaneity was impossible, with the inevitable consequence. The Court became dull again. Lord Macaulay complained in 1851 that at dinner ‘a military band covered the talk with a series of sonorous tunes’ ; Lord Ashley was glad of it, ‘for the band filled up long pauses in the conversation’. ‘Cant and Puritanism are in the ascendant,’ wrote Charles Gre ville in his diary in 1856.21
Queen Victoria’s domestic life may have been untroubled by jealousy and subterfuge, but Society had its usual share of scandalous liaisons. The Duchess of Manchester and Lord Hartington carried on an affair for years. Lady Arundel lived with an artist, Basil Hodges, and told her friend Mrs Panton that her legal husband ‘thought he had bought me body and soul with his silly old wedding ring…. Basil is always afraid that I shall kick over the traces again and make off with someone else and he is always my lover and never the stern, unbending husband.’22 Lady Jersey and Lord Abingdon were publicly accepted as lovers ; so were Lady Ailesbury and Lord Wilton, Lady Lincoln and Lord Walpole. But the important thing to remember is that none of these erring couples erred so far as to produce a rival heir. Nor, indeed, would they have been admitted in some of the more high-minded households, let alone at Court. Queen Victoria understood sexual passion, but only within marriage. In 1857 she bore her ninth child, Princess Beatrice, and might well have borne more had not Prince Albert died in 1861, plunging the Queen, the Court and the country into deepest mourning – from which the Queen, at least, never fully emerged.
Away from the Court and away from the scandals, the Season continued to follow its necessary pattern, becoming more like that of 1939 as the century progressed. Debutantes – the word was in common currency by 1837* – were presented to the Queen at an afternoon drawing-room, after their mothers had been carefully vetted by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. Any hint of scandal, let alone a divorce, precluded both mother and daughter from appearing at Court. Divorce at this time was still highly unusual (between 1876 and 1880 there were just 460 divorces) and a divorced woman lost not only her property but access to her children as well, no matter who was the guilty party in the case.
Each new debutante embarked, with her first Season, on a voyage into the unknown. She was launched into the great river of Society and, although surrounded by a flotilla of relatives, chaperones and other nervous cygnets like herself, she had to make her own way safely past the rocks of scandal and seduction on the one side and dullness and neglect on the other. If she were too bold, that would be unfavourably remarked upon; if too timid, she would be dismissed as colourless. And yet within a year or two she was expected to find safe harbour as the fiancée of a young man whom decorum prevented her from getting to know properly until after they were engaged. By then it was often too late. The stately Leviathan of trousseau, wedding list, invited guests and marriage date would have been set in motion, and was almost impossible to reverse. Many a girl must have walked up the aisle knowing already that she was making a mistake.
The luckiest debutantes were those who came from a large and united family, for they would keep bumping into aunts, cousins, older sisters – comfortingly familiar faces among the mêlée of strangers; girls like the Hon. Lucy Lyttelton, daughter of the fourth Lord Lyttelton and niece of Mrs Gladstone. She was seventeen and a half when she entered London Society in the early summer of 1859, and her diaries brim with exuberance and with a touching humility. She was so anxious to please, so easily pleased. ‘I believe it was a dull party,’ she wrote, having just returned from some official function at the Admiralty, ‘but we were much amused.’23 London was a merry-go-round of parties and her enthusiasm found new stimulus every day:
London, 24 May. A little past 3 a.m.! Our first ball is over. We danced much more than I expected: M. [her sister Muriel, fourteen months older] 6 times and me 4: twice with Reginald Yorke, Ld. Skelmersdale, and Mr Something Stone. It was fearfully crowded. I saw [here follows a list of names] … – shall I ever remember them all ?
26 May. ’Tis 1 a.m. after a most delightful party here, of which I must at once tell the great event. I was introduced to the Due d’Aumale, the descendant of the old race of French kings. Low was my curtsey, most gracious was his bow, and oh! he spoke to me, and I said, ‘Oui, Monsieur!’ I thrilled.
28 May. About 1. We’ve been to the Opera! Gazza Ladra at Covent Garden, Lord Ward’s box. There being no ballet, Papa let us go. I believe I was slightly disappointed, but it was because I don’t know the music well enough, and I must always know it well to be properly worthy.
3 June. ¼4 a.m.! and this is written, ill or well, by the light of dawn: mad and dissipated I feel. We have been to Ly. Derby’s ball, which, truth to tell, was very dull: hot crowds of chaperones and old gentlemen, and the dancing a fierce struggle with all-surrounding petticoat.
5 June. My energy is certainly great. I walked to Trinity Ch Vauxhall in the morning with Papa, on the top of yesterday’s perpetual tramp, and the night before’s dissipation. Ain’t a bit tired.
6 June. A little past two, after the pleasantest home ball, that’s to say dance, or it was carefully distinguished from a ball by its smallness, absence of champagne, and substitution of modest p.f. [pianoforte] and harp for band…. I danced everything but one, valses of course excepted, but I can only remember five partners. I think I must have had more than that.24
And so she rattled on, lively and excited despite the restrictions (perpetual chaperonage; valses forbidden to an unmarried girl), until the great day of her formal presentation. In her account of this, her first London Season, a great deal of what Lucy Lyttelton describes would have been the same eighty years later, in 1939. Her emotions, the ceremonial, the graciousness of the Queen: it is all practically interchangeable.
London, 11 June. A very memorable day. … We were presented at 2 o’clock; and after all the frightful bathing-feel [a Lyttelton family word meaning nervousness] and awestruck anticipation, behold ! it was a moment of great happiness to me. The look of interest and kindliness in the dear little Queen’s face, her bend forward, and the way she gave her hand to me to be kissed, filled me with pleasure that I can’t describe and that I wasn’t prepared for. … I feel as if I could do anything for her !25
Within a very few weeks she was becoming harder to please, and even a touch waspish:
4 July. We had a prim luncheon at Ly. Windsor’s, where nice Victoria Clive sang the tunes that all old cows have died of. For the first time, two balls ; duty first, and pleasure afterwards.26
But with discrimination came improved descriptive powers. This scene at a ball could have stood for thousands of balls through many decades:
Mrs Hibbert’s was the most lovely thing I have ever seen in its way: a tent in the open air for ante-room, from whence you descended by a flight of steps into the ball-room, at the top of which you could stand and see the dancing like a magic picture. A smother of flowers, and cool atmosphere.27
The 1860s and 1870s were probably the last years in which the upper class was still to all intents and purposes one large, interrelated tribe. In 1910 Lady Dorothy Nevill wrote in her Memoirs, ‘Society, in the old sense of the term, may be said, I think, to have come to an end in the eighties of the last century.’ It is a recurring vanity to believe that one’s own time was the best time, the only real time; but there is much evidence to suggest that Lady Dorothy was right. By the end of the nineteenth century the invasion of industry and commerce, of Jewish financiers and American millionaires’ daughters, had diluted the aristocratic exclusivity of Society.
One consequence of this change was that Society became more demanding, more cynical, even cruel. If its members could win entry by wealth, or on merit or beauty (like Lillie Langtry) or for talent and coruscating wit (like Oscar Wilde) rather than simply attain it by inheritance, then Society would be ruthless to those new members who did not continue to earn their keep. The English novelist Ouida (the pen-name of Marie Louise de la Ramée) spelled it out brutally in her novel Friendship, published in 1878:
People must make themselves agreeable to be agreeable to the world; yes, and eat a good deal of dust too, that I concede. If they are high and mighty by birth and all the rest of it, of course they can be as disagreeable as they choose, and make others eat the dust always. But if not, there is nothing for it but to toady…. Society is not to be despised. It is pleasant…. We are not brilliant, nor powerful, nor original ; but when we are not murderous, we are pleasant, pre-eminently pleasant; we know how to gild things, we know how to gloss them…. Now, you see, you people who will live on that rock in the midst of the sea only disturb us. That is the truth. You make us think, and Society dislikes thinking. You call things by their right names, and Society hates that.… You shudder at sin, and we have all agreed that there is no such thing as sin…. adultery is a liaison, lying is gossip, debt is a momentary embarrassment, immorality is a little slip, and so forth ; and when we have arranged this pretty little dictionary of convenient pseudonyms, it is not agreeable to have it sent flying by fierce, dreadful old words.… We do not care about anything. Only give us a good dinner and plenty of money and let us outshine our neighbours. There is the Nineteenth Century Gospel.
Elsewhere, Ouida defined it even more unequivocally: ‘Society always had its fixed demands. It used to exact birth. It used to exact manners. Nowadays it exacts money. Have money and spend it well (that is, let Society live on it, gorge with it, walk ankle deep in it) and you may be anything and do anything.’
Something else changed Society radically in the closing years of the nineteenth century: the arrival of the motor-car. It widened people’s social circle because it was now possible to drive fifty miles for lunch or an evening party. The train had been the great stimulus to country-house visiting; the car enabled people to visit one another for less than a weekend, and heralded the Edwardians’ ceaseless entertaining. Previously, people were visited at home almost entirely by their relatives (hence the necessity for a London Season, to widen one’s circle) or by local acquaintances. From the 1890s onwards began an era of frantic party-giving: children’s parties, firework parties and above all fancy-dress parties. Hundreds of pounds were spent on fantastically elaborate costumes designed to be worn once only: the French Ambassador’s wife at the Court of Catherine the Great ; endless Antonys and Cleopatras, mythological gods and goddesses tricked out with breastplates and dubious classical drapery. All this was encouraged by the portly, pleasure-loving figure of the Prince of Wales, soon to become Edward VII.
The last years of Victoria’s reign were also the last when strict social precedence was observed, whatever the inconvenience. One debutante from that time recalled, with an exasperation that the years had not dulled,
At these dinner-parties [i.e. those given before a dance] they never kept the older people together as they do now, but all had to go exactly according to rank, so we used to find ourselves going in to dinner with the most dreary old lords, and any young man who happened to be a duke or a marquess was sure to have to take in the hostess, however old and fat she might be, which was very hard luck.28
Lady Clodagh Anson was presented by her aunt in 1898, at a ceremony which had altered not at all forty years later, except that fewer royalties would have attended:
Queen Victoria held the Drawing-rooms in St James’s Palace in those days in the daytime, so that everyone looked too ridiculous for words sitting all dressed up in evening gowns, veils and feathers at eleven o’clock in the morning in their carriages along the Mall. Crowds came to stare at them, and their comments were very unflattering sometimes. The actual Drawing-room (it was called a ‘Court’ then) was in quite a small room with a door at each end. The Queen sat on a low chair, and as she was very small indeed, you had to make a deep curtsey to get down low enough. She put out her hand which you took and kissed, and if you were a peeress or a peer’s daughter, she kissed your cheek almost at the same time. All the other royalties stood in a close line next to her, which was very convenient, for you really pulled yourself up by their hands, which you shook in turn as you made less and less deep curtsies all along the line; sometimes there were eight or ten of them, and when you got to the last you shot out of the far door.29
By the time Queen Victoria died in 1901, a very old lady whom people were beginning to believe must be immortal, the shape and conventions of the London social Season, its events and priorities, were set: and changed little for the next fifty years. Manners changed, yes. The Bright Young Things of the 1920s picked Society up, twirled the old lady around to the sound of jazz, and set her down again breathless, scandalized and secretly thrilled. Customs changed; drugs had become fashionable during the war years, morphine and cocaine being much used as antidotes to the unbearable casualty lists. The practice of swearing came in briefly but had gone again by the thirties. Sex came in with contraception, even though it was largely confined to girls in their twenties, well past the debutante stage, and precautions were of the Marie Stopes variety. But it remained de rigueur to pretend to one’s family that one was a virgin bride – as indeed the more decorous still were.
Down the generations, one wave of girlhood after another was launched upon the river of Society. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was a quiet English river, the sweet Thames, running softly, and it led into rural backwaters. By the eighteenth century it was already gathering momentum, becoming more sophisticated and treacherous. In the nineteenth century it began to be fed by the effluvia of factory, brewery and commerce by which, to the many people who shared Lady Dorothy Nevill’s old English views, it was polluted. By the beginning of the twentieth century it had become an international waterway, swelled by foreign tributaries, its flow thickened by political undercurrents and checked by the rapids of war. Yet in 1939 Society showed no signs of silting up. It was only in retrospect that people spoke of that year as the last real Season. At the time, not only debutantes but also their parents were often serenely unconscious of the imminent turmoil. None would have forecast that, less than twenty years later, the ritual of presenting debutantes to royalty as a signal that they were now marriageable by their peers, would end for ever.