Abbreviations
AR |
Annual Register |
Bing |
Bingley’s Journal |
CGJ |
Covent Garden Journal |
CM |
Craftsman, or Say’s Weekly Journal |
Conn |
Connoisseur |
DA |
Daily Advertiser |
FFBJ |
Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal |
Fog’s |
Fog’s Weekly Journal |
Gaz |
Gazetteer |
GEP |
General Evening Post |
GM |
Gentleman’s Magazine |
LC |
London Chronicle |
LEP |
London Evening Post |
Lloyd |
Lloyd’s Evening Post |
LM |
London Magazine |
LP |
London Packet or New Lloyd’s Evening Post |
MC |
Morning Chronicle |
Mdsx |
Middlesex Journal |
MH |
Morning Herald |
MP |
Morning Post |
Public Advertiser |
|
St. J |
St. James’s Chronicle |
T&C |
Town and Country Magazine |
White |
Whitehall Evening Post |
1. Observator December 31, 1709–January 4, 1710; Philogamus, Present state of matrimony: or the real causes of conjugal infidelity (London, J. Buckland, 1739), p. 32.
2. GEP November 12, 1751, letter from A Countryman; Conn January 30, 1755 #53: “There are many customs among the Great, which are also practiced by the lower sort of people.”
3. St. J May 19, 1761, “A Sketch of the ruling manners of the Age, from a Discourse on Luxury,” by Thomas Cole; Public Register or Freeman’s Journal March 7–9, 1771.
4. Margaret R. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender and the Family in England 1680–1780 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996), p. 3; Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 61; Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 3rd edition (London, printed for W. Taylor, 1719), p. 3; Diary or Woodfall’s Register October 4, 1790.
5. Amanda Goodrich, in Debating England’s Aristocracy in the 1790s (Rochester, N.Y., Boydell Press, 2005), pp. 15–22, discusses the usage of the term “aristocracy” in political discourse late in the eighteenth century while Paul Langford, in a section labeled simply ‘Aristocratic Vice’ (A Polite and Commercial People, pp. 582–87), sees this as an important feature of the 1770s. Using the same general, catch-all definition of this group, I am endeavouring to consider a longer, less specific historical period.
6. In her moral tale of 1799, The Two Wealthy Farmers (London, F. and C. Rivington), p. 18, Hannah More’s Farmer Worthy, describing the dangers of reading frivolous novels, says such novels make the “crying sins” of “ADULTERY, GAMING, DUELS and SELF-MURDER” seem commonplace, rather than crimes deserving hanging.
7. Thomas Erskine, Reflections on Gaming, Annuities and Usurious Contracts (London, T. Davies, 1786), p. 3.
8. Henry Fielding, Amelia, ed. Martin Battesin (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 375; Henry Fielding, The Covent Garden Journal [1752], edited by Bertrand Golgar (Middletown, Conn., Wesleyan University Press, 1988) #68, October 14, 1752, p. 359.
9. Anthony Holbrook, Christian Essays upon the Immorality of Uncleanness and Duelling (London, John Wyat, 1727); LC January 12, 1790.
10. PA May 17, 1765; Gaz August 11, 1783.
11. A Discourse Upon Self-Murder (London, J. Fox, 1754), p. 15; Times November 21, 1786.
12. See Patricia Howell Michaelson, “Women in the Reading Circle,” Eighteenth-Century Life 13 (1990), pp. 59–69.
13. T. C. W. Blanning, in The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660–1789 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 4, uses the most capacious definition of culture, which he says, was “classically defined by Sir Edwin Tylor as ‘that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.’ ” This is too large an understanding for my purposes. For Geertz on the web of meaning, see The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, Basic Books, 1973), “Thick Description,” pp. 3–30. A discussion of habitus can be found in Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction, trans. Richard Nice (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), “The Habitus and the Space of Life,” pp. 9–225.
14. David Hume, “On the first Principles of Government” in Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (London, A. Millar, 1758), p. 20.
15. GM January 1752, p. 30. It seems to me that, by omitting the word “public” from discussions of “opinion,” one is leaving open and undefined a term which was made, in large part, by appeals to it. By embracing such deliberate vagueness, we avoid problems of locating and specifying who was, or was not, a member of such a group, or who had such an opinion.
16. The OED Online gives 1374 as the date of the first use of “skirmish” in the singular.
17. These critics resemble the diverse groups of eighteenth-century newspaper readers, discussed by Bob Harris, Politics and the Rise of the Press (London, Routledge, 1996).
18. For debating societies see D. T. Andrew, London Debating Societies 1776–1799 (London, London Record Society, 1994) and Mary Thale, “London Debating Societies in the 1790s” in the Historical Journal (1989), “Women in London Debating Societies in 1780” in Gender and Society (1995), and “Deists, Papists and Methodists at London Debating Societies, 1749–1799” in History, 86:283 (2001).
19. One of the earliest and most powerful accounts of the centrality of the press to all sorts of political and cultural change, John Brewer’s Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1976, pp. 139–62) led to a significant change of focus in our understanding of the technologies of social and political power in this period. John Cannon has noted that, in the eighteenth century, “The rise in the number and importance of the middling classes of society—clerks, merchants, teachers, doctors, attorneys, shopkeepers—manifested itself in a great increase in the publication of journals, books and newspapers” (Parliamentary Reform 1640–1832 [Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1972, 1994], p. 48). Kathleen Wilson points out that “printed artifacts” were “one of the first mass cultural commodities” (The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism, 1715–1785 [Cambridge University Press, 1998] p. 31). For more on letters to the editor or printer, see Robert L. Haig, The Gazetteer 1735–1797: a study in the eighteenth-century English newspaper (Carbondale, Southern Illinois Press, 1960), pp. 70–75.
20. Lucyle Werkmeister, The London Daily Press 1772–1792 (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1963), pp. 7, 90.
21. Only a few of the most recent or influential works are here cited: Duelling: V. J. Kiernan, The Duel in European History (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988); James Kelly, “That Damn’d Thing Called Honour”(Cork, Cork University Press, 1995); Markku Peltonen, The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003); Stephen Banks, “Very little law in the case: Contests of Honour and the Subversion of the English Criminal Courts, 1780–1845” (2008) 19(3) King’s Law Journal 575–94; “Dangerous Friends: The Second and the Later English Duel” (2009) 32 (1) Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies 87–106; “Killing with Courtesy: The English Duelist, 1785–1845” (2008) 47 Journal of British Studies 528–58; Robert B. Shoemaker, “The taming of the duel: masculinity, honour and ritual violence in London, 1660–1800” Historical Journal (2002) 45/3 pp. 525–45; idem, “Male Honour and the Decline of Public Violence in Eighteenth-Century London,” Social History (2001) vol. 26, pp. 190–208; Jeremy Horder, “The Duel and the English Law of Homicide,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 1992, 12(3), pp. 419–32. Adultery: Lawrence Stone, Road to Divorce (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990), and Broken Lives (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993); David Turner, Fashioning Adultery (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002); Sarah Lloyd, “Amour in the Shrubbery,” Eighteenth Century Studies (2006) 39.4, 421–42; Gillian Russell, “The Theatre of Crim. Con.: Thomas Erskine, Adultery, and Radical Politics in the 1790s” in Unrespectable Radicals? Popular Politics in the Age of Reform, ed. Michael T. Davis and Paul A. Pickering (Farnham, UK, Ashgate, 2007), pp. 57–70; Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998); Karen Harvey, Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Cindy McCreery, “Breaking all the Rules: The Worsley Affair in Late-Eighteenth-Century Britain,” in Orthodoxy and Heresy in Eighteenth-Century Society: Essays from the DeBartolo Conference, ed. Regina Hewitt and Pat Rogers (Lewisburg and London: Bucknell University Press, 2002) and “Keeping Up with the Bon Ton: the Tête-a-Tête Series in the Town and Country Magazine,” in H. Barker and E. Chalus, Gender in Eighteenth-Century England (London, Addison Wesley Longman, 1997); Marilyn Morris, “Marital Litigation and English Tabloid Journalism: Crim. Con. in The Bon Ton (1791–1796),” in the British Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies, 2005, vol. 28, pp. 33–54. Suicide: Michael MacDonald, “The Medicalization of Suicide in England: Laymen, Physicians, and Cultural Change, 1500–1870,” in Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History, ed. Charles Rosenberg and Janet Golden (New Brunswick, N.J., Rutgers University Press, 1992), pp. 85–103; Michael MacDonald, “Suicide and the Rise of the Popular Press in England,” Representations 22 (1988) pp. 36–55; with Terence Murphy, Sleepless Souls (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990); Georges Minois, History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture, transl. Lydia Cochrane (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); R. A. Houston, Suicide, lordship, and community in Britain, 1500–1830 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010). Gambling: Nicholas Tosney, “Gaming in England, c. 1540–1760” (unpublished PhD thesis, University of York, UK, 2008); Justine Crump, “The Study of Gaming in Eighteenth Century English Novels” (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 1997), Janet Mullin, “We had Carding,” Journal of Social History, vol. 42, #4, (2009) pp. 989–1008.
22. In this I agree with William J. Bouwsma, who argues that, unlike social history in which “gross discontinuities” and rapid change seem possible analytic modes, they are “generally implausible in cultural history, in which change is very slow.” A Usable Past: Essays in European Cultural History (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990) p. 5.
23. Ivor Asquith noted that “Most newspaper proprietors were aware that, if they were to maintain their papers as profitable, or even viable concerns, they had to cater for the tastes of the general reader who was not only interested in politics. Such a committed Foxite journalist as James Perry described miscellany, or non-political features, as “the soul of a newspaper …” Furthermore, “some contemporaries took the view that if a newspaper was of poor quality, it was as much the fault of the public as of the proprietors; it was felt that proprietors had little alternative but to respond to the public’s taste” (“The Structure, ownership and control of the press, 1780–1855,” in George Boyce, ed., Newspaper History from the 17th century to the present day (London, Constable, 1978) pp. 107, 114.
24. Commenting on the symbolic centrality of law to Britons in this period, John Brewer noted that “The essential difference between Britain and other nations was that her constitution was a government of laws …” in which, at least in theory, “All those who held power … were deemed subject to the law.” (Brewer, Party Ideology, p. 244).
25. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1968), p. 8; William Allen (ed.), The Philanthropist, 1801, v, p. 187.
1. The first part of this chapter title is taken from the title of a study by Frank M. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993) which examines the Victorian period; Julian Pitt-Rivers, International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, “Honor,” p. 510.
2. George Stanhope, A Paraphrase and Commentary upon the Epistles and Gospels, vol. 2, p. 94, quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary. See Leviathan [1651] (New York, Macmillan & Co, 1962), p. 51, for Thomas Hobbes’s earlier definition of aristocratic magnanimity as “a contempt for little helps and hindrances,” For more on this long history, see Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility (Oxford, Clarendon, 1998).
3. See, for a similar usage, Amanda Goodrich, Debating England’s Aristocracy in the 1790s (London, Boydell Press, 2005), and Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, p. 582.
4. Antoine Courtin, The Rules of Civility or the Maxims of Genteel Behaviour, with A Short Treatise on the Point of Honour (London, Robert Clavell and Jonathan Robinson, 1703), pp. 3–8, 225–72. This work had gone into its twelfth English edition by 1703. For more on Courtin’s earlier reception, see Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility, pp. 81–100, 131–40.
5. George Berkeley, The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, ed. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop, 9 vols. (London, T. Nelson, 1948–1957), “Alciphron or The Minute Philosopher” [1732] 3: 112.
6. Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, The Life of Edward, First Lord Herbert of Cherbury (London, Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 49; John Mackqueen, Two Essays: the first on courage, the other on honour (London, John Morphew, 1711), p. 2.
7. Herbert of Cherbury, Life, p. 43; LM March 1735, p. 145.
8. A Hint on Duelling, in a letter to a friend (London, M. Sheepey, 1752), p. 3; LM October 1732, p. 361.
9. John Mackqueen, An Essay on Courage p. 13; The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1987) 4: July 22–25, 1710, p. 79; see Bernard Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, ed. F. B. Kaye (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1924, p. 58) for his discussion of the “Rapture we enjoy in other’s esteem [which] overpays us for the conquest of strongest passions.” For more on Mandeville’s thought and importance, see Thomas A. Horne, The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville (New York, Columbia University Press, 1978), M. M. Goldsmith, Private Vices, Public Benefits: Bernard Mandeville’s Social and Political Thought (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985), and J. Martin Stafford, ed., Private Vices, Publick Benefits? The Contemporary Reception of Bernard Mandeville (Solihull, Ismeron, 1997).
10. Robert Heath, “To one who was so impatient,” in Clarasella; together with Poems Occasional (London, Humph. Moseley, 1650), pp. 6–7; ‘self-preserving,’ OED, quoting Ezekiel Hopkins, bishop of Raphoe and Derry, “A Sermon” [on Peter ii 13, 14] preached at Christ’s Church, Dublin, 1669.
11. John Prince, Self-Murder Asserted to be a Very Heinous Crime (London, B. Bragge, 1709), p. 9. Susannah Centlivre in The Perjur’d Husband (London, Bennett Banbury, 1700, p. 15) noted that “if I should betray/You, I bring my self into jeopardy, and of all Pleasures/Self-Preservation/Is the dearest.” Anne Finch, most unusually, thought this the philosophy only of freethinkers; see Free-Thinkers, a poem (London, 1711).
12. Officer [Defoe, Daniel], An Apology for the Army (London, J. Carson, 1715), pp. 8–9.
13. [Bernard Mandeville], An Enquiry into the Origins of Honour and the Usefulness of Christianity in War [1732], 2nd. ed. with a new introduction by M. M. Goldsmith (London, Frank Cass, 1971), p. iv; Officer, Apology, p. 13.
14. Mandeville, Origins of Honour, p. 62; John Oldmixon, A Defence of Mr. Maccartney (London, A. Baldwin, 1712), p. 8.
15. Courtin, Civility, p. 251; Mackqueen, Essay on Courage, p. 1: “Among all the noble Qualities which adorn Mankind, there is none more Excellent in it self, more Illustrious in the Eyes of others, or more Beneficial to the World, than Courage or Valour.”
16. Mandeville, Origins of Honour, p. 60; see also Thomas Hobbes, English Works, ed. Sir William Molesworth, 9 vols. (London, Bohn, 1839–45) 2:160.
17. Daniel Defoe, The Review VII, March 6, 1711, p. 590; see also Mandeville, Origins of Honour, p. 45. For other articulations of this notion of courage as the centerpiece of male virtue, see Addison in The Spectator, edited with an introduction and notes by Donald F. Bond, 3 vols. (Oxford, Clarendon, 1965) #99, June 23, 1711, 1: 416, and The Man #14, April 2, 1755, p. 3.
18. Archibald Campbell, An Enquiry into the Original of Moral Virtue (Edinburgh, Gavin Hamilton, 1733), p. 179; Henry Baker, “The Universe, A Philosophical Poem, Intended to restrain the Pride of Man,” 2nd edition (London, J. Worrall, 1746), p. 6.
19. E. W., Poems Written on Several Occasions, to which are added three essays (London, J. Baker, 1711), p. 117, 120.
20. Courtin, Civility, p. 236–37; Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 200.
21. GM, January 1736, vol. 6, pp. 11–12.
22. Anthony Holbrook, Christian Essays upon the Immorality of Uncleanness and Duelling delivered in two Sermons preached at St. Paul’s (London, John Wyat, 1727, p. 36). In his sermons Holbrook contrasted his own sense of honor as “an honest Concern for the just Dignity of Human Nature” with that other sort, which was only self-regarding and self-serving. [Edward Ward] Adam and Eve Stript of their Furbelows: or the Fashionable Virtues and Vices of Both Sexes, Exposed (London, J. Woodward, 1714), pp. 201–5.
23. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (London, J. Darby, A. Bettesworth, 1726), p. 221; Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law [1650], ed. Ferdinand Tonnies (London, Simpkin, Marshall, 1889), pp. 34–35.
24. Mackqueen, Essay on Honour, p. 7. “True courage,” argued Mackqueen, “is not the Exercise of an imperious, insolent Power, and going on in domineering, hectoring Language …”
25. Captain Abraham Clerke, A Home-Thrust at Duelling intended as an answer to a late Pamphlet intitled A Hint on Duelling (London, S. Bladon, 1753), pp. 14–15; Thomas Comber, A Discourse upon Duels (London, R. Wilkin, B. Tooke, 1720) p. 17.
26. LM September 1732, “Of Courage,” p. 278. The essay was also reprinted in the GM, September 1732, p. 943. Few would have agreed with Mandeville that the flaws were as integral to the code as its virtues. In discussing the inevitability of duelling, for example, Mandeville argued that “to say, that those who are guilty of it go by false Rules, or mistake the Notions of Honour, is ridiculous; for either there is no Honour at all, or it teaches Men to resent Injuries and accept Challenges” (Mandeville, Origin of Honour, p. 219).
27. Timothy Hooker [John Hildrop], An Essay on Honour (London, R. Minors, 1741), p. 4, 15–16. GM September 1731, p. 375.
28. GM May 1737, p. 284; Mackqueen, Essay on Honour, p. 11.
29. Courtin, Civility, p. 230; A Timely Advice, or Treatise of Play and Gaming (London, Th. Harper, 1640), pref. Arguing paradoxically that honor and virtue were two entirely different things, Mandeville applauded the former’s efficacy while derogating the latter: “The Invention of Honour has been far more beneficial to the Civil Society than that of Virtue, and much better answer’d the End for which they were invented (Mandeville, Origin of Honour, pp. 42–43.)
30. Hooker, Essay on Honour, p. 15; Holbrook, Christian Essays, pp. 33–34.
31. Duke of Wharton as cited in the GM September 1731, p. 383. It seems unlikely that Wharton in fact made this observation. He was a founder of the Hellfire Club, and his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography characterized his life as one of “reckless behavior” and “profligacy.” Hooker also employs the comparison of a sick and healthy body: “But whatever Similitude there may seem to be betwixt Pride and Honour, Ambition and true Greatness of Mind, they are as far asunder as the Swelling of a Dropsy, from a full and robust Habit of Body.” Essay on Honour, p. 44; for restatements of this thought, see [Theophilus Lobb], Sacred Declarations or a Letter to the Inhabitants of London (London, J. Buckland, 1753) p. 5; [François Vincent Troussaint], Manners, translated from the French (London, J. Payne & J. Boquet, 1749), p. 2.
32. Mandeville, Origins of Honour, p. 15, 40. Comber, Discourse upon Duels, p. 6, and A Circumstantial and Authentic Account of a Late unhappy Affair (London, J. Burd, 1765), p. 8; both agreed that modern honor was a “gothic” or Germanic invention.
33. Mandeville, Origins of Honour, p. 14; Berkeley, Alciphron, 3:112.
34. An Essay on Modern Gallantry (London, M. Cooper, 1750), p. 4; A Timely Advice, p. 34. The author of this pamphlet, citing St. Augustine, described the gamester as an idolater. “The Gamester therefore may be said to worship the Dice or Cards for his gods, seeing he loveth them more than God.…”
35. Well-wisher, Honours Preservation Without Blood (London, 1680), p. 25.
36. Mandeville, Origins of Honour, p. 2; see Courtin, Civility, “A Duel attacks directly the Sovereign Authority and is therefore High Treason,” p. 272, and Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 117, 120 for the notion that those who follow the dictates of honor deny the power of their sovereign.
37. GM May 1737, p. 284; Person of Quality, Marriage Promoted (London, Richard Baldwin, 1690), p. 46. Hooker, Essay on Honour, p. 21, also believed that for their own good and the nation’s, irreligious immoral men “ought to be laid under proper restraints.”
38. Jeremy Collier, “Upon Duelling” in Essays upon several Moral Subjects [1692] (London, R. Sare, H. Hindmarsh, 1698), p. 124; Comber, Discourse Upon Duels, p. 37.
39. Thus, in Mandeville’s dialogue The Origins of Honour, when the interlocutor, Horatio, asks his companion, Cleo, how many of the gentlemen of his acquaintance would refuse a duel from Christian principles, and Cleo replies, “A great many, I hope,” Horatio retorts: “You can hardly forbear laughing, I see, when you say it” (pp. 79–80).
40. Timely Advice, pref.; Well-Wisher, Honours Preservation, p. 18.
41. GM May 1737, p 286; John Brown, On the Pursuit of False Pleasures and the Mischiefs of Immoderate Gaming (Bath, James Leake, 1750), p. 12.
42. Joseph Trapp, Royal Sin, or Adultery Rebuk’d in a Great King, a sermon delivered at St. Martin’s (London, J. Higgonson, 1738), p. 14.
43. Erasmus Mumford, A Letter to the Club at Whites (London, W. Owen, 1750), p. 7.
44. Alexander Jephson, The henious sins of ADULTERY and FORNICATION, p. 17.
45. Brown, On the Pursuit of False Pleasures, p. 14.
46. An Address to the Great (London, R. Baldwin, 1756), p. 9; Mandeville, Origins of Honour, p. 177; Thus the Man, a short-lived essay-periodical of the mid 1750s, argued that “It is of the highest consequence rightly to instruct the people in the nature of virtue, and fit them for society. The best and shortest way of instructing them is by the example of their superiors; whom they as naturally follow, as soldiers follow their leader, when they have a high opinion of his honesty and abilities” (May 7, 1755, p. 5).
47. Reflexions on Gaming (London, J. Barnes, 1750), p. 44; William Webster, A Casuistical Essay on Anger and Forgiveness (London, W. Owen, 1750), p. 75.
48. GM 1731, p. 428; Hooker, Essay on Honour, p. 14; see also LM July 1732, “Praise of Cowardice,” pp. 175–76.
49. LM July 1732, pp. 186–87, September 1735, pp. 491–92.
50. Hooker, Essay on Honour, p. 18; Webster, Casuistical Essay, pp. 14–15.
51. The Man January 15, 1755, p. 2; GM February 1756, “The Advantages of Ancestry demonstrated,” pp. 81–2.
52. Berkeley, Alciphron, 2nd Dialogue, 3:69; the Man November 19, 1755, p. 5.
53. Mackqueen, Essay on Courage, p. 9; Modest Defense of Gaming (London, R. & J. Dodsley, 1754), p. 23.
54. Toussaint, Manners, p. 1; GM May 1737, “The Character of a Man of Honour in the BEAU MONDE,” pp. 284–85.
55. John Cockburn, A Discourse of Self Murder (London, 1716), p. 6; Self-Murther and Duelling the Effects of Cowardice and Atheism (London, R. Wilkin, 1728), p. 43. Not only were the two vices combined and discussed as one in the later work, but Cockburn himself produced A History and Examination of Duels just four years after his essay on suicide (London, G. Strahan, 1720).
56. Timely Advice, pp. 59, 62; the Devil March 1, 1755, p. 40.
57. Comber made the connection between duelling and suicide clear: “ ’Tis true, in this case the Dueller falls by another’s hand; but he ought to be accounted a Self-murtherer for all that; because he voluntarily and deliberately exposed himself to that Sword by which he fell.” Discourse upon Duels, p. 13.
58. The Man, February 9, 1755, p. 3; The Whole Art and Mystery of Modern Gaming (London, J. Roberts, 1726), p. iv. The LM of 1735 concluded that “At present, Honour is a Man, a Cheat in Gaming, false to his Friend, a Betrayer of the Liberties of his Country, is maintain’d by—a lucrative Office” (p. 426. Note that the first vice mentioned, the root perhaps of all the rest, is gaming.
59. The Connoisseur (London, R. Baldwin, 1755–56), 2 vols., #50, January 9, 1755, 1:296; Jephson, The heinous sins, pp. 8–9; Oldmixon, Defense, p. 3.
60. Steele, Spectator, #75, May 26, 1711, pp. 323–25. Another definition of a gentleman can be found in the Guardian (2 vols., 1756) I, 20 April 1713, 146, “by a fine gentleman I mean a man completely qualified as well for the service and good as for the ornament and delight of society.”
61. John Wesley, The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, 10 vols. (Philadelphia, D& S Neall, 1826–7), The Journal, November 1738, 3: 113.
62. Spectator #99, June 23, 1711, p. 416; the Man #14, April 2, 1755, p. 3.
63. Mandeville, Origins of Honour, p. 54; Keith Thomas, “The Double Standard,” Journal of the History of Ideas 20 (2) (1959), pp. 195–216.
64. Hooker, Essay on Honour, p. 2; Essay on Modern Gallantry, p. 50.
65. Mandeville, Origins of Honour, pref. iii; see also Well-Wisher, Honour’s Preservation, p. 4.
66. Chishull, Against Duelling, p. 5; Holbrook, Christian Essays, p. 38.
67. Clerke, Home Thrust at Duelling, p. 20. Anthony Fletcher points out that the earliest citation for the word ‘masculinity’ was in 1748. He notes that “It is not so much that masculinity was entirely different from manhood or manly behaviour, rather perhaps that the word attempted to express a more rounded concept of the complete man.” Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 322–23; The Gentleman instructed in the Conduct of a Virtuous and Happy Life, 2 vols. (London, R. Ware, 1755), 1:24; the Man, March 12, 1755, #11, p. 3.
68. Mandeville, Origins of Honour, p. 210; Prince, Self-Murder Asserted, pp. 25–26.
69. Chishull, Against Duelling, p. 12; GM December 1731, p. 523.
70. Joshua Kyte, Sermon, “True Religion the only Foundation of true Courage” (London, B. Barker, 1758), pp. 5, 14. Kyte concluded that while many thought “Irreligion and Infidelity, drunkenness and Profaness, with all the appendages of riot and profligacy” necessary to the fighting man, he believed them to have no part of “the polite ingredients for the Military Character.”
71. John Locke, quoted in Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society 1660–1800 (Harlow, England, Longman, 2001), p. 55; Jonathan Swift, quoted ibid., pp. 68–69.
72. Fletcher notes “the gradual substitution from around the 1730s, of the world ‘politeness’ for the word ‘breeding.’ The new term indicates a much stronger focus than previously on external manners alone” (p. 336). See also Lawrence Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994) for an in-depth articulation of the tenets of politeness. Carter, Men and the Emergence, has an interesting discussion on women’s refining role, pp. 68–70.
73. Essay on Gallantry, p. 45. See also Thoughts on Gallantry, Love and Marriage (London, R. and J. Dodsley, 1754), p. 18.
74. Addison, Spectator, June 23, 1711, in The Papers of Joseph Addison, 4 vols. (Edinburgh, William Creech, 1790) 2:90; Berkeley, Alciphron, 3:70. In this dialogue, Berkeley tells the story of Lady Telesilla, who “made no figure in the world” until her husband introduced her to the ways of the beau monde. Thereupon she became a gambler, an extravagant spender, and in exchange for his instruction, gave her husband “an heir to his estate, [he] having never had a child before.”
75. CGJ #66, October 28, 1752, pp. 350–51; Jephson, The heinous sins, p. 7.
76. For the culture of politeness see Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness; “Politeness and the Interpretation of the British Eighteenth Century,” The Historical Journal, Volume 45, Number 4 (2002), pp. 869–98; “The Polite Town: Shifting Possibilities of Urbanness, 1660–1715,” in Tim Hitchcock and Heather Shore, eds., The Streets of London (London, Rivers Oram Press, 2003); and Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence.
77. The first part of this heading is quoted from the Edinburgh Review by Alexander Andrews, The History of British Journalism (London, Richard Bentley, 1859), p. 7; the second part is the title of a letter from “Theseus” to the editor of the MC (August 23, 1786), bemoaning the inclusion of great gobs of morality among the news.
78. George Crabbe, The Poetical Works of the Rev. George Crabbe (London, John Murray, 1838), vol. 2, p. 128. There were those who agreed with him, some, like “Carus” who wrote to the Daily Courant (November 14, 1732), arguing that newspapers were not the appropriate fora to discuss matters of high politics.
79. Edward Bearcroft, representing the plaintiff in the Howard v Bingham divorce cause, cited in the Times, March 6, 1794.
80. Andrews, History of British Journalism, pp. 99, 101.
81. Carter, Men and the Emergence, p. 25.
82. In terms of dates at which periodicals began, the 1730s saw the birth of 2 dailies, 1 tri-weekly, 4 weeklies, and 2 monthlies; between 1750 and 1770, 6 dailies, 2 tri-weeklies, and 7 monthlies were published. The seven monthlies mentioned were the Gentleman’s Magazine (begun 1731), the London Magazine (1732), Samuel Johnson’s Rambler (1750), the Universal Magazine, the Annual Register, the Oxford Magazine and the Town and Country Magazine.
83. For this book I have consulted more than 150 newspapers and magazines from the 1680s through the 1840s; about half of these cover the period 1760–1800. Robert Louis Haig, The Gazetteer, 1735–1797 (Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1960), p. 4. See also John Brewer, Party Ideology.
84. Haig, Gazetteer, p. 70, 71.
85. Bob Clarke, From Grub Street to Fleet Street (Aldershot, Ashgate Publishing, 2004), p. 86.
86. For recent histories of the roles of the coffeehouse see Markman Ellis, The Coffee House: A Cultural History (London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2004), and Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2005). Ayton Ellis, in The Penny Universities: A History of the Coffee-Houses (London, Secker & Warburg, 1956) especially stresses their role as centers of discussion.
87. Haig, Gazetteer, p. 59.
88. Connoisseur #45, December 5, 1754, p. 268.
89. Victoria Glendinning, Trollope (London, Hutchinson, 1992), p. 399.
1. A Full and Exact Relation of the Duel fought in Hyde park on Saturday November 15, 1712, between His Grace James, Duke of Hamilton, and the R.H. Charles Lord Mohun, in a letter to a member of Parliament (London, E. Curll, 1713), p. 15.
2. Victor Stater, High Life, Low Morals: The Duel that Shook Stuart Society (London, John Murray, 1999).
3. The quotation that serves as title to this chapter comes from Chishull, Against Duelling, p. 5.
4. Anthony Holbrook, “The Obliquity of the Sin of Duelling,” in Christian Essays upon the Immorality of Uncleanness and Duelling delivered in two Sermons preached at St. Paul’s (London, John Wyat, 1727), pp. 33–34.
5. See for example a letter against duelling in the LEP April 25, 1765, in which its author discussed “the most effectual way to suppress this devilish custom”; ten years later the author of Duelling, a poem (London, T. Davies, 1775) argued that Satan was the father of both murder and duelling. Even in the late 1820s, following the Wellington/Winchilsea duel which will be discussed in chapter 6, the Age commented that the Duke should not have fought, no matter what the charges against him, but “seduced by Satan, he fell into a fleshly snare, and called for pistols …” [March 29, 1829].
6. Henry Fielding, Amelia [1754], ed. Martin C. Battesin (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 503.
7. For the growth of politeness and civility, see Markku Peltonen, “Politeness and Whiggism, 1688–1732,” Historical Journal (2005) 2:391–414; John Brewer, “The Most Polite Age and the Most Vicious,” in The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800, ed. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (London, Routledge, 1995), pp. 341–61.
8. The Spectator #84, June 6, 1711, p. 359; four numbers of the Spectator mentioned duelling in its first year alone: #1, March 1, 1711; #2, March 2, 1711; #84, June 6, 1711; #99, June 23, 1711.
9. White, April 19, 1750; The Duellist, or a cursory view of the rise, progress and practice of Duelling (London, 1822), quoting Spectator #97, June 21, 1711; Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, p. 25.
10. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a foundling, 6 vols. (London, A. Millar, 1749), 3:116–17.
11. See Susannah Centlivre, The Beau’s Duel (London, D. Brown & N. Cox, 1702), p. 29; William Popple, The Double Deceit (London, T. Woodward & J. Wallace, 1736), and for yet another play, see John Kelly, The Married Philosopher (London, T. Worral, 1732), p. 70.
12. Samuel Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (London, S. Richardson, 1753–54); Richardson, Clarissa or the History of a Young Lady, 8 vols. (London, S. Richardson, 1751), 7: Letters LII–LIV; Eliza Haywood, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless [1751], ed. Christine Blouch (Broadview Literary Texts, Peterborough, Ont., 1998) and The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (London, T. Gardner, 1753); for Fielding, Tom Jones.
13. Tatler, #39, July 9, 1709, pp. 281–87.
14. For the Mohun-Hamilton duel, see The Examiner, November 13, 1712, Stater, High Life, Low Morals, and H. T. Dickinson, “The Mohun-Hamilton duel: Personal feud or Whig plot?” Durham University Journal (1965), pp. 159–65; for the Deering-Thornhill duel, see An Account of the Life and Character of Sir Cholmley Deering, Bart (London, J. Read, 1711), [Richard Steele] The Spectator #84, June 6, 1711, and Richard Thornhill, The Life and Noble Character of Richard Thornhill (London, 1711); for the Clarke-Innes duel, GM March 1750, p. 137, Old England May 12, 1750, White April 19, 1750; for Dalton-Paul, GM 1751, p. 234; and for the Byron-Chaworth duel, see AR 1765, pp. 208–12, GM 1765, pp. 196–97, 227–29. Only in the Pultney-Harvey duel do we read of the presence of seconds.
15. For the Andrews-Lee duel, see the Universal Spectator August 9, 1735; the duel between the Irish friends, ibid., January 22, 1737; the philosophical duel, which occurred in June 1721, was recounted as part of a letter to the Universal Spectator December 25, 1742.
16. For the Grey-Lempster duel see GM April 1752, p. 90.
17. See, for example, the Protestant [Domestick] Intelligence March 2, 1680; the Daily Post April 6, 1723; and the Evening Post September 29, 1724.
18. Woman of Honour (London, T. Lowndes and W. Nicholl, 1768), ii:131. See also The Tatler # 26, June 9, 1709, pp. 202–3: “I expect Hush-Money to be regularly sent for every Folly or Vice any one commits in this Town; and hope, I may pretend to deserve it better than a Chamber-Maid, or Valet de Chambre: They only whisper it to the little Set of their Companions: but I can tell it to all Men living, or who are to live.”
19. The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis, 48 vols. (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1937–1983), To Mann, 14th May 1765, 22:293.
20. See The Trial of Captain Edward Clarke for the Murder of Captain Thomas Innes in a duel in Hyde park, March 12, 1749 (London, M. Cooper, 1750). For more on this, see Nicholas Rogers, Mayhem: Post-War Crime and Violence in Britain, 1748–1753 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2012). My thanks to Dr. Rogers for clarifying this for me.
21. Old England #320, May 12, 1750; see also White April 19, 1750 and GM May 1750, pp. 219–20.
22. See for another instance of these sentiments, a poem written after this duel, False Honour, or the Folly of Duelling (London, A. Type, 1750), p. 9. For a fine analysis of the difficulties faced by Army officers, see Arthur N. Gilbert, “Law and Honour among Eighteenth-Century British Army Officers,” Historical Journal 19 (1976), 75–87.
23. See, for example GM November 17, 1762, p. 550, and May 23, 1763, p. 256. For Wilkes’s own first duel with the Scots Lord Talbot, see John Sainsbury, “ ‘Cool Courage Should Always Mark Me’: John Wilkes and Duelling,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 1997, pp. 19–33.
24. LEP April 25, 1765. The letter appeared on the paper’s front page.
25. For these, see “S.Y.’s” letter in the Gaz March 4, 1765; the letter from “Bob Short” in the LEP April 13 and “Candidus’s” reply ibid., April 18, 1765.
26. LEP April 25, 1765.
27. “WA,” PA May 27, 1765; ibid., July 20, 1765, signed “Philanthropos”; ibid., August 2, 1765.
28. GM, vol. 35, May 1765, p. 229; AR 1765, Appendix to the Chronicle, p. 211.
29. Tatler #93, November 12, 1709, p. 83.
30. These phrases taken from a letter, “Thoughts on the unwritten Laws of Honour,” published in the GM May 1769, pp. 240–41.
31. For Wilkes, see PA November 18, 1763, “An Epigram”; for Pitt, MC May 31, 1798.
32. Fog’s Weekly Journal, January 30, 1731 did report the duel, naming names and giving details. See also M. Dorothy George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires (London, 1978), #2580, “A Parliamentary Debate in Pipes’s Ground,” p. 460.
33. GM October 1762; PA October 7, 1762; LEP October 5, 1762.
34. In my survey of the Burney collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century newspapers, I have found 7 duels in the eighty years between 1680 and 1759 attributed to political differences; in the decade 1760–1769, 16 duels attributed to such differences.
35. LEP November 15, 1763; PA November 18, 1763.
36. Letter signed “Timidus” in LEP November 19, 1763; see also ibid., November 24, 1763. This last letter, as well as that signed “Democritus” ibid., November 29, 1763, and one ibid., December 3, 1763, mentions Martin’s failure to return Wilkes’s letter as well as his target practice. The letter that appeared in the PA on November 30, 1763, and the LEP November 27, 1763, sounds as though it came from Wilkes himself.
37. The conversation between the wit and his friend is recounted in the Gaz December 24, 1770; The Lady’s Magazine December 1770, p. 236 for their account of the duel. The Gaz (December 22, 1770) also reported that after the duel, Johnstone commented to Germaine that “I must declare that I now look upon the reflections (of cowardice) thrown out against your Lordship to be unjust, although at the time I spoke, I thought them well founded, and supported by the general opinion of mankind.” Walpole’s Correspondence, 18 December 1770, 23:256. Germaine’s name at the time of Minden was Sackville; he changed it to Germaine upon inheriting the estate of Lady Betty Germaine.
38. Gaz December 26, 1770, see also Bingley’s December 29, 1770.
39. The Fox-Adam duel was reported in the MC November 30, December 2, 3, 1779; the LC November 27, December 2, 1779; the Gaz November 30, December 1, 2, 1779; Lloyd December 1, 1779 and the PA December 2, 1779; the GM November 1779, p. 610 and the AR 1779, pp. 235–35; the poem to Fox appeared in the Gaz December 7, 1779. The Shelburne-Fullerton duel received coverage in the MC March 23, 24, 25, 27, 1780; the Gaz March 22, 23, 24, 1780; the LC March 23, 1780 and the GM March 1780, p. 151, 152.
40. Two pro-Fox letters, one signed “TW” and the other “WX,” appeared in the MC December 7, and December 13, 1779. A third signed “JB,” violently anti-Foxite, also appeared in the MC on December 15, 1779; I have italicized the words in the quote from this letter. “Right”’s letter also in that paper on January 5, 1780.
41. The three letters on the Shelburne-Fullerton affair: the first, signed “Heath Cropper,” appeared in the Gaz March 29, 1780; the second, in the LC, March 24, 1780; and the third, signed “A little further” also in the Gaz April 1, 1780. For the comment on the impropriety of duels for parliamentarians, see the T& C letter to the Observer, signed “Anti-Duellist,” October 1784, p. 532.
42. For the debates on duelling in the 1770s, see MC October 4, 30, 1773, *August 25, 1777, October 27, 1777, December 29, 1777, July 20, *27, 1778; Gaz October 17, *24, 1777, December 22, 1778. The four debates for which we have votes are indicated with *s.
43. The four debates on duelling after the Shelburne/Fullerton encounter can be found in the LC March* 24, April *3,*10, 1780 and the Gaz April 1, 1780. The debates which specifically refer to this duel are indicated with *s.
44. AR vol. 23, 1780, pp. 150–52.
45. Ibid., p. 151.
46. William Wilberforce, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians (London, T. Cadell jr. and W. Davies, 1797), p. 224.
47. Times March 2, 1792. These comments were made after a member was challenged for his Parliamentary remarks by a republican Irishman.
48. The Observer June 3, 1798; for other expressions of this, see the Evening Mail May 25, 1798, the St. J May 26, 1798.
49. See, for example, the MH May 29, 31, 1798; the MC May 30, 1798.
50. The LP May 28, 1798; the MC May 30, 1798; the MH June 2, 1798.
51. The only newspaper I have found that made these sorts of negative comments was the Weekly Register (May 30, 1798) “We have repeatedly lamented that a practice so lamentable to civilization, and so criminal in the eyes of God, should be permitted in this country; but that it should receive the sanction of persons so high in office as Mr. Pitt, and that the Sabbath should be appropriate to this horrid practice, can never be sufficiently regretted.”
52. For Hodgson’s remarks, see the MC June 1, 1798; “The Ballad of Putney-Heath” in the MH June 4, 1798 and the LP June 1, 1798; the MH May 31, 1798. The St. J of May 29, 1798 argued that there was “no cure for this sort” of offence “but by fire and sword.”
53. The Sun May 29, 1798, MC May 31, 1798.
54. The Evening Post June 4, 1798 and the GEP June 5, 1798; the MC June 4, 1798.
55. Thomas Perceval, Moral and Literary Dissertations (Warrington, W. Eyres, 1789), “True and False Honour,” p. 28.
56. Of the 311 duels I have notice of for the 1780s, more than half (169) involved at least one member of the armed forces and in a little less than a quarter (76) of the cases, both duellists were military or naval men. Of course, this is very impressionistic, since press descriptions of all duellists are vague and often inaccurate.
57. “XY” in LEP September 28/October 1, 1781.
58. The LP April 21, 1783; the MH April 26, 1783. See the press commendation of such action following the Macartney-Stuart duel in the Times June 13, 1786.
59. For similar cases, see MH February 2, 1785; Times December 21, 1787; ibid., August 4, 1788; ibid., September 21, 1791; GM supplement 1805, pp. 1223–24.
60. MH April 26, 1783; GM 1783, p. 302.
61. The GM 1783, p. 443; the GEP May 1, 1783; the LP May 2, 1783; the MC May 2, 1783.
62. The MC April 26, 1783; the GM 1783, p. 485.
63. The LP April 25, 1783; the story about Adolphus appeared in both the GEP May 1, 1783 and the LP May 5, 1783.
64. The LP May 7, 1783.
65. This column, called “Clotted Cream” and signed “Lac Mihi” was an ongoing series. For the one inspired by the Riddell/Cunningham duel see the MC April 26, 1783. The essay in the LP of May 14, 1783 appeared under the heading “The Companion”; Number CXXVII and was called “Duelling.” This last quote appeared in the Gaz May 6, 1783.
66. See Andrew, London Debating Societies 1776–99, #909, p. 155. Eleven debates on duelling took place in London during the 1770s and sixteen occurred there in the 1780s.
67. This duel was reported in the MH, the MP, the MC September 5, 1783 and the GM September 1783, p. 801; the coroner’s inquest following it in the MC September 9, 1783. The exculpatory note is in the MP September 11, 1783. For another bloody duel, the second that the two combatants had engaged in, fought about the American campaign, see the St. J August 3, 1784; the White August 3, 1784, the MC August 3, 1784, the PA August 3, 1784, and FFBJ August 6, 1784; the LC August 7, 1784 and the Gaz August 6, 1784 with the GM reporting the meeting in its August 1784 issue, p. 634.
68. Thus in the April 27, 1765 issue of the LEP, that paper reported that “It is said that duelling will be made a capital offence, without distinction of persons, with regard to the aggressor.” Pharamond’s edict proposed in the MC September 16, 1783 and in the MP September 17, 1763; for legislative changes, see the MH September 12, 1783 and for the Bishop of London’s bill, ibid., September 15, 1783. A month latter, the MH reported that ‘We are well assured that the practice of duelling has become an object of Royal consideration, and that the Secretary of State will have orders to deliver a message to Parliament respecting it’ (October 24, 1783). Needless to say, there is no evidence for this in the public record.
69. The five letters on this duel appeared in the MC September 8, 1783 signed “Humanitas,” September 9, 1783 signed “A Constant Reader,” September 13, and 24, 1783 signed “Scrutator” (the quoted sections are from the second Scrutator letter) and the MP September 10, 1783.
70. The AR October 17, 1783, p. 219; see also Gaz October 21, 29, 1783.
71. An example of the acceptance of duelling as the best of a set of bad alternatives can be seen in the comment of the Times of February 8, 1785, if duelling were to be strongly punished by the law, “something little short of Italian assassination may succeed to the generosity and manliness of the English duel.”
72. The first phrase, “established etiquette,” was used by Lieutenant Samuel Stanton, author of The Principles of Duelling with Rules to be Observed in every particular respecting it (London, T. Hookham, 1790), pp. 6–7, to describe the necessity that the gentleman are under for giving and accepting challenges to fight, while the second, used by Rev. Peter Chalmers in Two Discourses on the sin, danger and remedy of duelling (Edinburgh, Thomsons, Brothers, 1822), p. 165, argued that with a such a change men would no longer engage in such rencounters.
73. Jonathan Swift, quoted in the AR 1762, p. 166; A Hint on Duelling, p. 5.
74. The duel near Kensington was reported in Lloyd (June 19, 1775), the Mdsx and St.J (June 20, 1775), the MP (June 21, 1775), and the CM (June 24, 1775); the duel at Hyde Park reported in Lloyd (September 30, 1795), the Courier and Evening Gazette (October 2, 1795), and the Telegraph (October 5, 1795).
75. The MP January 11, 1775; the Times July 29, 1786.
76. The Times November 11, 1786; MP November 3, 1786.
77. For others wishing only satirical or ridiculous duelling items to appear, see both the LP June 7, 1782 and the PA November 9, 1786. For the mock duel between Jerry Puff, hairdresser, and Jack Grimface, chimneysweep, the Times November 4, 1786. Two years later, a similar mock duel appeared in the Times (January 18, 1788), recounting the battle between “Monsieur Stew-frog, head cook to Lord Bayham … [and] Roast Beef, head cook to Lord Howe.” An impression of the increased coverage can be seen in the rising number of duels and related items in the press; in the 1760s I have found 677 accounts in 20 magazines and papers, and in the 1770s, 1758 accounts in 33 similar works.
78. The Times, June 25, 1789.
79. Thoughts on Duelling (Cambridge, J. Archdeacon, 1773), pp. 3–5; the MP October 23, 1777; William Jackson, 30 Letters on various subjects, 2 vols. (London, T. Cadell, 1784) 1:12–13; Gaz December 22, 1784.
80. The original account of Johnston’s trial can be found in the Times, April 29, 1788, and the two items arguing for the incapacity of legal means to address slurs to gentlemanly honor, in the Times, May 1 and May 2, 1788.
81. T&C January 1779, letter to “the Man of Pleasure,” pp. 27–29; A Short Treatise upon the Propriety and Necessity of Duelling (Bath, 1779), pp. 21–22.
82. The AR 1780, pp. 150–52, gives an account of debate in the House of Commons, in which “a gentleman in high office” commented that duelling “would teach gentlemen to confine themselves within proper limits”; the Gaz November 5, 1783, who argued that duelling “prevails most in those polite nations where the sense of honour is most refined”; the MH November 1, 1783, “The spirit of duelling is a purifier, and may rid the world of many plagues”; two letters to the Times February 7, and February 21, 1785; a letter to the GM June 1788, p. 485.
83. Stanton, The Principles of Duelling, pp. 29, 35, 4. See also Stephen Payne Adye, A Treatise on Courts Martial (London, J. Murray, 1778), p. 32.
84. William Eden, Principles of Penal Law (London, B. White, 1771), pp. 223–26; Old Officer, Cautions and Advices to Officers of the Army (Edinburgh, Aeneas Mackay, 1777), pp. 149–50; “Scrutator” in the MC September 13, 1783; the Gaz October 31, 1783.
85. “Tiresias,” letter to the Times, August 18, 1789; Thomas Jones, A Sermon upon Dueling (Cambridge, J. Archdeacon, 1792.), p. 5; the Times September 4, 1786. For the connection between duelling and barbarity see also the MC September 5, 1780, the Times September 1, 1787 and August 18, 1789; for duelling and politeness, comments in the MP September 30, 1784, An Essay on Duelling, written with a view to discountenance this barbarous and disgraceful practice (London, J. Debrett, 1792), pp. 29–30, and Edward Barry, Theological, Philosophical and Moral Essays, 2nd ed. (London, J. Connor [1797?]), p. 94. “Tiresias,” letter to the Times, August 18, 1789; Jones, A Sermon upon Dueling, p. 5; Times, September 4, 1786.
86. The LP May 2, 1783; Thoughts on Duelling, p. 7.
87. For a later example of the notion that potential duellists should become brave soldiers, see “Tiresias,” Times, August 18, 1789, who noted that such acts would allow intrepidity to “receive the praises of their bravery without a blush.” For the role of such bravery directed against pre-revolutionary France, see Jonas Hanway, Virtue in Humble Life, 2 vols. (London, J. Dodsley, 1774), 1:218; Elizabeth Bonhote, The Parental Monitor, 4 vols. (London, Wm. Lane, 1796), 4:213.
88. Times October 29, 1785 and April 3, 1786, MH November 2, 1786; Times September 4, 1786.
89. M. J. Sedaine, The Duel, trans. William O’Brien (London, T. Davies, 1772), p. 6. See also the Prologue to William Kenrick, The Duellist (London, T. Evans, 1773), “Nay, arrant cowards, forc’d into a fray,/Now fight, because they fear to run away.” William Cowper noted of duelling “That men engage in it compelled by force,/And fear not courage is its proper source” (“Conversation” in Poems (London, J. Johnson, 1782), pp. 220–22.
90. Duelling, a poem (London, T. Davies, 1775), p. 18; Samuel Hayes, Duelling, a poem (Cambridge, J. Archdeacon, 1775), p. 9. Hayes called the father of duelling Moloch, not Satan, but I take these just to be different names for the same malignant spirit; Gentleman of that City, Modern Honour or the Barber Duellist, A comic opera in two acts (London, J. Williams, 1775), p. 27, see also H. H. Brackenridge, “Answer to a Challenge,” in Gazette Publications (Carlisle, Printed by Alexander & Phillips, 1806), p. 20, “Besides; the thing is now degraded/The lowest classes have invaded/The duel province.”
91. Miles Peter Andrews, The Reparation (London, Printed for T. and W. Lowndes [etc.], 1784), pp. 70–72; John Burgoyne, The Heiress (Dublin, John Exshaw, 1786), pp. 67–70.
92. Times March 13, 1792. This is a reference to the action of the Earl of Coventry in complaining of a young challenger to the House of Lords.
93. For the Coventry-Cooksey contretemps and laudatory comments, Times March 13, 1792; for more on the issue, see the Times March 17 and 27, 1792. The AR of February 1769, p. 72, carried the only account I have been able to find of the Meredith challenge; for a letter hostile to Coventry see “A Clergyman,” the Gaz May 6, 1769 and Haig, Gazetteer, p. 76; for a positive, laudatory letter see “A Freeman of Liverpool” in the Mdsx May 9, 1769.
94. Antony E. Simpson has argued that “few misdemeanor arrests or prosecutions occurred in this period” though he mentions in passing, that four potential duellists were charged £600, “a huge amount,” to keep the peace. We have seen that legal recourse, whether through magistrates’ arrests or cases at King’s Bench, grew at the end of the eighteenth century, and that much larger sums than £600 were required as bail. For our story, however, one element that is importantly neglected by Simpson in his fine study is the role of the press in publicizing such options (“Dandelions on the Field of Honour: Dueling, the Middle Classes, and the Law in Nineteenth-Century England,” in Criminal Justice History, 1988, pp. 99–155).
95. From 1730 through 1759 I have found 6 reports of men taking challengers to court; see the British Journal November 14, 1730, the Echo February 10, 1730, the British Journal, or the Traveller February 20, 1731, the DA October 12, 1743, the LEP April 26, 1744 and Old England May 25, 1751. The case of a man challenged going to the magistrates was reported in the MP on November 17, 1778. For a typical case of a duel stopped by the magistrates because “notice had been given” see the LC March 3, 1764. For another discussion of these challenges see Stephen Banks, A Polite Exchange of Bullets (Woodbridge, Boydell & Brewer, 2010), pp. 154–66.
96. See, for example, the Shaw/Delaval case, reported in the Times February 11, 1799; the Cavendish/Bembric case, ibid., February 1, 1800; the Payne/Beevor case, ibid., February 3, 1800, and the Stodthard/Prentice case, ibid., January 26, 1802.
97. Seventeen of the 103 reported King’s Bench cases received at least two notices; a very small number, however, were more fully covered—three, four, six, and even seven accounts (the last in the case of the notorious Lord Camelford) occasionally occurred.
98. The earliest of these complaints to the magistrates can be found in the World, March 17, 1786; the Times July 22, 1786 and March 19, 1787.
99. It was reported that the Duke of Norfolk and Sir John Honeywood were on the brink of a duel, until reconciled by their friends (Times April 4, 1791); that the impending duel between the Earl of Belfast and Lord Henry Fitzgerald was stopped by the intervention of the Earl’s uncle (Times April 14, 1791). For the Scottish courts, see Times March 24, 1790 and July 15, 1805; and for the apology of a drunk officer to John Rolle, MP and Colonel of a militia unit, which terminated the conflict, see the Times September 10, 1791.
100. The initial notice, under the Law Reports, King’s Bench heading, appeared in the Times, February 1, 1800; “Anti-Duellist’s” letter was published on February 12, 1800. Interestingly enough, though Cavendish refused to fight Bembric, he was a second (to Earl Fitzwilliam) in an interrupted duel five years earlier; see Times June 30, 1795.
101. See, for example, the court case brought by the Solicitor General, Sir John Scott, against Robert Mackreth, MP, for issuing a challenge, Times February 26, 1793, or Christopher Saville, M.P.’s suit against G. Johnstone M.P., Times January 25, 1802. The Earl of Darnley brought his former friend and relation, the Honourable Robert Bligh, to court a number of times for sending challenges or attempting to provoke a duel; for some of these see Times April 24, 1801 and August 15, 1805. There was also a suit in King’s Bench in which a Mr. Robert Knight charged his brother-in-law, the son of Lord Dormer, with sending him a letter which attempted to provoke a duel, Times November 27, 29, 1805.
102. See Times June 30, 1795.
103. For Craven’s appearance before the magistrates, see Times August 15, 1799; for St. Vincent and Orde, Times October 5 and October 8, 1799.
104. Times March 29, 1798.
105. For the Opera scuffle, see Times April 2, 1796; for the Newbon-Gibbons almost-duel, ibid., August 11, 1798.
106. Times February 3, 1800.
107. Ibid., September 30, 1796.
108. For the report of seconds being charged £200 see the Times August 12. 1806; those charged £500 each were reported in the Observer August 3, 1800.
109. Times May 4, 1785.
110. See ibid., February 20, 1799.
111. Ibid., June 2, 1794.
112. Ibid., February 5, 1798.
113. Ibid., November 20, 1798.
114. Ibid., February 11, 1799.
115. This fourth case can be found ibid., February 20, 1799. Kenyon’s self-characterization came in a case reported ibid., November 11, 1796.
116. On Erskine overpowered, see ibid., November 25, 1799, and Erskine on the other side, ibid., February 7, 1799.
117. Ibid., February 11, 1799.
118. Ibid., June 11, 1801; January 26, 1802.
119. Ibid., November 22, 1796, and the ruling on January 27, 1797; for the gallant naval Captain, ibid., November 23, 1799.
120. Part of the address of Captain Macnamara to the jury, at his trial in 1803, for the murder of Colonel Montgomery in a duel; see Lorenzo Sabine, Notes on Duels and Duelling (Boston, Crosby, Nichols, 1855), pp. 247–49.
121. Lord Ellenborough made this remark at a case brought to King’s Bench, in which both the challenger and challenged were merchants; see Times November 27, 1812.
122. For Lauderdale/Arnold duel, see ibid., July 2, 1792; for Norfolk/Malden duel, ibid., April 30, 1796, and for the Irish duel between A. Montgomery of Conway, Esq. and Sir Samuel Hayes of Drumboe, Bart., ibid., October 19, 1797.
123. Times March 2, 1792. For the Lauderdale/Richmond quarrel, see ibid., June 5 and June 6, 1792.
124. The Times, the Courier, and the MC reported the incident, but made no condemnatory comment about the duel itself. A very trenchant satirical poem, The Battle of the Blocks, was published shortly afterwards, a few lines of which deserve to be cited: “If this be honour, what is sense of shame?/If this be virtue, who shall murd’rers blame?” (London, Maxwell & Wilson, 1809, p. 14).
125. In his article, “Dandelions on the Field of Honour” Antony Simpson includes a chart of reports of duels which he has assembled from contemporary accounts. He has included in this chart all “duels reported in Britain, or involving Britons overseas.” Thus, for the years under consideration, he has found a greater number than I have. Probably the difference comes about in the scope of my search (I have eliminated all duels of Britons abroad) and the sources I’ve used to find such accounts (a reading of the eighteenth-century press combined with the utilization of the digitalized version of the Times of London).
126. For the Macnamara-Montgomery duel, see Times April 7, 1803, and for a “copy-cat” duel, resembling this first, and fought for the same motive, Times September 23, 1803. For the duel because of the billiard quarrel, see Times May 25, 1797. Lord Falkland, a Captain in the Royal Navy, called a Mr. Powell by “the familiar appellation of Pogey” and a duel followed, Times March 2, 1809. The duel about the girl occurred in Portsmouth, and was reported ibid., October 14, 1812.
127. As early as 1790, the press reported military trials in which officers challenged their superiors, and in which, in all cases, the challengers were found guilty, and faced a variety of punishments. Lieutenant Edwards challenged his Captain and was broke by a naval court, Times March 10, 1790; a naval tribunal found two men guilty for having challenged a Lieutenant Ferguson, ibid., December 30, 1791; a court-martial was held in Dublin against two Army Captains for having delivered a challenge, and being the challenger of the Earl of Bellamont, ibid., July 29, 1796; three young military men taken to Bow Street for challenging their Captain, ibid., October 3, 1797.
128. For the case of Major Armstrong, heavily punished for having challenged his superior officer, General Coote, to a duel, see ibid., June 21, 1800, and June 11, 1801. The King’s letter can be read ibid., July 8, 1800.
129. Rowland Ingram, Reflections on Duelling (London, J. Hatchard, 1804), pp. 98–99; Samuel Romilly, Times February 26, 1805; [John Taylor Allen] Duelling, an Essay (Oxford, S. Collingwood, 1807), pp. 19–20.
130. Rev. William Butler Odell, Essay on Duelling, in which the subject is Morally and Historically Considered; and the practice deduced from the Earliest Times (Cork, Odell and Laurent, 1814), p. 27.
131. Thus in 1823, George Buchan, in his Remarks on Duelling; comprising observations on the arguments in defense of that practice (Edinburgh, Waugh and Innes), argued that “It is an interesting thing, what greatly distinguishes the age in which we live, to see many officers, both naval and military, who now dare to be singular on such points [challenges to duel], and who now live under impressions little known a few years ago. This number is every year on the increase …” To newspaper readers, the incidence of reports of duels in the press might have seemed to suggest a similar decline, though the rate of this varied with the paper read:
Number of duels reported
1. T&C December 1773, “Essay on Suicide,” p. 455.
2. The chapter title is taken from Thomas Knaggs, A Sermon against Self-murder (London, H. Hills, 1708), p. 2.
3. E. Arwaker, Aesop: Truth in Fiction, 4 vols. (London, J. Churchill 1708), “Fable XVII; The Fox and Sick Hen”; John Locke, Two Treatises on Government, ed. P. Laslett (New York, Mentor, 1963), p. 413.
4. Populousness with Economy 1757, pp. 21–22; David Mallet, Mustapha (London, A. Millar 1739), p. 134; John Herries, An Address to the Public on the frequent and enormous crime of suicide, 2nd. ed. (London, John Fielding, 1781), p. 3; advertisement for “Warren’s only True Milk of Roses for the Skin,” in the Gaz January 28, 1778.
5. The Occasional Paper: Number X. “Concerning self-murder. with some reflexion upon the verdicts often brought in of non compos mentis, in a letter to a friend” (London, M. Wotton, 1698), p. 35; John Jeffery, Felo de Se: or a Warning against the most Horrid and Unnatural Sin of Self-Murder in a Sermon (Norwich, A & J Churchill, 1702), pp. 13–14; Self-murther and duelling, p. 3. The Rev. Matthew H. Cooke, in his The Newest and Most Complete Whole Duty of Man (London, [1733?]), followed his essay on the evil of suicide (pp. 118–21) with one on the evils of duelling (pp. 121–23); similarly Caleb Fleming’s A dissertation upon the unnatural crime of Self-Murder, occasioned by the many late instances of suicide in this city (London, Edward and Charles Dilly, 1773, p. 21), followed his discussion of suicide with a similar analysis of duelling. For a later comment on the conjunction, see “A Poor Man’s” letter to the Gaz April 4, 1775.
6. Michael MacDonald & Terence R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 184.
7. Occasional Paper, p. 10.
8. ‘The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark” in Shakespeare’s Tragedies (London, J. M. Dent, 1925), Act V, Sc. 1, p. 559.
9. Occasional Paper, p. 34; Self-murther and duelling, p. 6.
10. John Henley, Cato condemned, or the case and history of self-murder argu’d and displayed at large, on the principles of reason, justice, law, religion, fortitude, love of ourselves and our country, and example; occasioned by a gentleman of Gray’s inn stabbing himself in the year 1730, A theological lecture, delivered at the Oratory (London, J. Marshall, 1730), pp. 6–7; Jeffery, Felo de Se, p. 9; the London Journal August 15, 1724, letter signed “Theophilus.”
11. London Journal August 15, 1724, letter signed “Theophilus”; Occasional Paper, p. 2; Zachary Pearce, A Sermon on Self-murder [1736], 3rd edition (London John Rivington, 1773), p. 5.
12. Knaggs, Sermon, p. 6; Henley, Cato condemn’d, p. 4. See also Zachary Pearce, Sermon on Self-murder, p. 13, and Occasional Paper, p. 10.
13. See MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, pp. 306–7. At times, it appears that they wish to have their cake and eat it; after arguing that polite society rejected supernatural appeals (and one would certainly think that university-educated clergymen might fit into this category) they note (p. 164) that “Even [clergy]men like Francis Ayscough and John Cockburn, who conjured with the name and shape of Satan, relied heavily on philosophical arguments in their sermons.” Are Ayscough and Cockburn here being blamed for invoking the Devil, or for employing philosophical arguments? At other times they show more wariness about what sorts of people continued to believe in the instigation of Satan, (see p. 211).
14. LM March 1762, p. 145; Occasional Paper, p. 33. Samuel Johnson agreed, arguing that human desires and impulses “though very powerful, are not resistless; nature may be regulated, and desires governed.” The Rambler #151, August 27, 1751.
15. Occasional Paper, p. 4.
16. The occasional comment on the weather does appear, such as in the article “Of Self-Murder” copied from the Universal Spectator and reprinted in the LM August 1732, p. 251. The much-copied letter on “Suicide and Self-Murder,” which first appeared in the Weekly Register of April 29, 1732, was reprinted in both the LM of April 1732, p. 32, and the GM of the same month and year, pp. 714–15; Occasional Poems (London, 1726), p. 22. Addison’s hero was Cato the younger, who killed himself; Self-Murther and Duelling, p. 7.
17. The Universal Spectator, April 13, 1734, p. 1; in 1736, a correspondent wrote to the Prompter (in an article later reprinted in the GM January 1736, p. 13, which is cited here) asking if his motives to suicide were not as admirable and justifiable as Cato’s. While Cato’s suicide had some admirers and many mitigators in the eighteenth century, it also had some fierce condemnations; see for example Paradise regained, or the battle of Adam and the Fox (London, J. Bew, 1780), p. 13; Richard Hey, Three Dissertations on the Pernicious Effects of Gaming (1783), on Duelling (1784) and on Suicide (1785) (Cambridge, J. Smith, 1812), pp. 3–4, William Combe, The Suicide from The English Dance of Death, 2 vols. (London, J. Diggens, 1815), 2: 11.
18. Knaggs, A Sermon, p. 14; GM 1756, p. 18; MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, p. 202.
19. For a clear exposition of the philosophic deist view of suicide in this period, see MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, pp. 150–64. LM July 1737, p. 375; Jeffery, Felo de Se, p. 17; GM April 1762, the lead article of that month, entitled “A Letter to a Friend, on Suicide and Madness,” p. 151; thanks for this reference to Randall McGowen.
20. This account of the deaths of the Smiths is taken from the report in the LM April 1732, pp. 37–38. Their deaths were also reported at considerable length in the GM of that month, pp. 722–23. This latter report is eerily detailed, noting the cleanliness of the Smiths’ clothes, the rope with which they hanged themselves, as well as the fact that Mrs. Smith was seven months pregnant. Both magazines also reprinted a letter on self-murder, first published in the Weekly Register, which the GM claimed (p. 714), was occasioned by “a late tragical catastrophe” and then cited the Smith suicides. See also MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, pp. 157–58, 204–5.
21. Voltaire, The Works of Voltaire, 25 vols. (London, J. Newbery, 1761), 10: 31–32. Richard Hey, Dissertation on Suicide, p. 20. For another reference to this case, in an essay published just after the Budgell suicide, see LM May 1737, “On English Suicide,” from Fog’s Journal, pp. 289–90. See also MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, pp. 319–21. Although the count of articles is unscientific and impressionistic, of the four vices covered in this book, accounts and discussions of suicide in the 1730s are a larger proportion of the total number of such items than similar discussions for the other vices in that decade.
22. Barbara Gates, Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1988) pp. 82–83; GM 1737, pp. 315–16; LM 1737, p. 274, see also the reference to the Budgell death, GM July 1737, p. 375. For Johnson, see George Birkbeck Hill, ed., Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 6 vols. (Oxford, Clarendon, 1887), 2:228–29. The suicide of Fanny Braddock, the third suicide much discussed in the eighteenth-century press, will be considered in chapter five.
23. MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, p. 301. Though this chapter is, in many ways, a contrary interpretation of the impact of suicide on popular opinion in eighteenth-century Britain, I would like to express my appreciation for the magisterial quality of their book, and for the assistance it has afforded me in thinking about this difficult subject.
24. Ibid. MacDonald and Murphy argue that “the style and tone of newspaper stories about suicides promoted an increasingly secular and sympathetic attitude to self-killing.” I find few grounds for such a conclusion.
25. All cases cited come from Fog’s Weekly Journal of 1731; the Hunter and Clarke stories are found in the January 2, 1731 edition, the Shelton death in that of April 10, 1731. For a death which cites discontent of mind, see the report of the death of Evan Lewis in the March 20, 1731 edition.
26. LEP July 4, 1765. Lloyd July 5, 1765, noted that, in their column listing deaths, “His Grace the Duke of Bolton, Mq. of Winchester and premier Marquis of England, at his house in Grosvenor Square.” Horace Walpole to Mann, Correspondence, vol. 22, p. 312. For Scarborough, see LM 1740, p. 101, GM 1740, p. 37. The London Daily Post January 1, 1740 and the LEP January 29, 1740 reported his death as due to “an apoplecktick fit.” A review of a pamphlet “A Dialogue in the Elysian fields, between two Dukes,” in the July 1765 edition of the GM, p. 341, which only includes initials, hints that B – n (or Bolton) killed himself because he was refused an army posting. For Walpole’s comment on the use of “sudden” to indicate a suicide, see Correspondence, vol. 24, Letter to Mann 28 November 1779, p. 536.
27. GM September 1760, pp. 399–400, 404.
28. Lloyd June 28, 1765; I have not been able to locate this case elsewhere; GM September 10, 1765, p. 440; this story was also covered in the LM September 1765, p. 485; GM September 17, 1765, p. 441; GM October 30, 1765, p. 535; LM December 1765, p. 643. The rather mundane story was about the suicide of a Mr. Howard, a “schoolmaster and clerk of parish of Cambridgeshire” who, after killing a Mr. Webb who was attempting to seize his possessions for debt, cut his own throat. See LM November 1765, p. 596.
29. “Belinda’s” letter to the MC December 15, 1775; “AB’s” letter to the Westminster Magazine October 1775, pp. 524–25; review of Warton’s poems in the GM 1777, vol. 47, pp. 70–71; for their view of Blair, Warton, and the influence of “the graveyard poets” see MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, p. 193.
30. See Gaz January 22, 1770; GM 1770, p. 47. See also, for reiterations, PA January 22, 1770, Mdsx January 20, 1770, LM 1770, p. 53. The epitaph appeared in the GM p. 60 and the LM p. 61 of January 1770.
31. MC November 24, 25, 1774; LC November 24, 1774; GM 1774, p. 542; LM 1774, p. 562; the letter in MC November 28, 1774.
32. T&C May 1778, “A Dialogue in the Shades,” pp. 243–44; GM 1789, pp. 1080–81, “Reflections on the Laws concerning Suicide” by “J. A.” The rebuke to Kippis came in a letter by “Academicus,” published in the GM 1785, p. 260.
33. Forrest’s obituary appeared in the GM November 1784, pp. 877–78, “HOC’s” critical response in the same journal, December 1784, pp. 963–64.
34. Gaz August 17, 19, 20, 1776; MP August 19, 20, 1776. The GM (vol. 46, August 1776, p. 383) referred to him as the Hon. C, son to Lord C.
35. Both the GM August 1776, p. 383 and the Gaz August 19, 1776 noted his fiscal worth and the Gaz also reported the company that Damer kept just before the fatal shot; the debt was reported by the Gaz and the MP August 20, 1776, as were comments on the annuities he had granted. The GM had described him as “eccentric” and the explanations in the MP came on consecutively on August 19 and 20, 1776. MacDonald and Murphy also discuss Damer’s suicide, but in a different context, see Sleepless Souls, p. 280.
36. The briefest notices of his death are found in the LC November 5, 1774; the LM 1774, p. 592, the PA November 8, 1774 and the MP November 9, 1774. “The Character of a Placeman” with a very complete description of Bradshaw’s career, appeared in the December 1774 issue of the LM, pp. 591–92.
37. For Powell’s death, see MH May 28, 1783, GM 1783, p. 454, p. 539, “X.Y.,” “Anecdotes of the late Mr. Powell” and pp. 612–13, for evidence from the Coroner’s jury. “X.Y.” suggested that the testimony about Powell’s mental incapacity may have been tainted by noting that Fox “found [Powell] a very useful friend,” that Powell had helped Burke “in the accomplishment of a reform in the little abuses of his office.” Again, MacDonald and Murphy add interesting features of these cases, but with very different emphases; see Sleepless Souls, p. 281.
38. Since there were no formal or legal requirements for medical certificates stating the cause of death, or any registration of deaths in England until the passage of the 1836 Births and Deaths Registration Act, it seems quite possible that several instances of suicide were concealed by the families of notable men and women. For more on this, see J. D. J. Havard, The Detection of Secret Homicide (London, Macmillan, 1980), p. 39.
39. The deaths of these thirteen men (Thomas Bradshaw, Robert Clive, John Crowley, John Damer, William Fitzherbert, J. G. Goodenough, Sir George Hay, Hesse, Sir William Keyt, William Bromley, Lord Montfort, Perry, Hans Stanley) stretch from the earliest, Sir William Keyt in 1741 to the last, Lord Saye and Sele in 1788. Keyt’s death, by self-immolation, Damer’s by pistol, Hesse’s, in 1788, Powell’s, and Saye and Sele’s were the only ones that the papers described as self-inflicted. There is an account in the Gaz January 6, 1772, which may be that of William Fitzherbert; the victim is referred to only as “a certain Member of Parliament.” For Saye and Sele’s suicide, see the World July 4, 1788 and for Walpole’s letter, see Correspondence, vol. 31, p. 267.
40. See Andrew, London Debating Societies, especially November 4, 1789, pp. 266–67.
41. Lady’s Magazine June 1773, pp. 298–299; letter from “Plato” in the St. J January 8, 1780. For more see T&C June 1783, “On Suicide,” p. 321 and Evening Chronicle June 3, 1788.
42. Letter in MC November 1774; Times August 12, 1790; MH February 25, 1785 and Public Advertiser March 4, 1785 for Captain Battersby.
43. See the Sentimental Magazine September 1775, pp. 390–92. James Boswell, The Hypocondriack, December 1781, p. 262. For a balanced and unemotional account of Sutherland’s life and death, see the AR 1791, pp. 34–35; the fragment appeared in the Times August 22, 1791. This sort of emotionalism was clearly a very potent and widely sought experience. After the suicide of Eleanor Johnson, a servant girl of seventeen, for the love of a black man named Thomas Cato (a perhaps inauspicious name as things turned out), not only did the Times print the account of her life, death, and inquest in some detail, but copied the entire tear-streaked letter she wrote to Cato, September 25, 1789. This death also occasioned a debate at the Coachmaker’s Hall Debating Society on the question “Does suicide proceed mainly from a disappointment in love, a state of lunacy, or from the pride of the human mind?” Times November 12, 1789. See also MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, pp. 195–96.
44. T&C August 1792, “Reflections on the Prevalence of Suicide in England and Geneva,” pp. 351–52.
45. The earliest reports in the Times, the MC, the MP, and the PA of June 4, 1788 are identical, except for the brief notice in the Times explaining their earlier suppression of the story. The second reports, which the Times entitled Farther Particulars of the late Mr. HESSE, were also identical and appeared in the Times, the MP, and the PA on June 5, 1788. This case is discussed in MacDonald and Murphy’s Sleepless Souls, (pp. 189–90) but seen quite differently. They instead report that the “papers were elegiac” and that the Times “reporter recounted his life and death without a critical word.” I think, even in the Times, though most explicitly in some of the other papers, criticism could be, and was read by contemporaries, in the detailed descriptions of Hesse’s property and prosperity, blown away by a propensity for “deep play.”
46. Both the English Chronicle of June 3, 1788 and the General Evening Post of June 5, 1788 contain the comment about Hesse’s “connexions too splendid.” Hesse’s desire to partake of the gay life with the Great is also found in the English Chronicle of June 3, 1788 and the PA June 5, 1788.
47. GEP June 5, 1788. See also the sentimentalized account of Hesse’s widow in the next edition of this paper, June 7, 1788.
48. MP June 6, 1788, June 7, 1788. The story about the practical trick appeared in the Star and Evening Advertiser June 6, 1788.
49. On the Death of Mr. Hesse in the PA June 9, 1788; EPITAPH on Mr. Hesse by Edw. Beavan in the T&C July 1788, pp. 334–35.
50. The paragraph linking bankruptcy and suicide appeared in The Star and Evening Advertiser of June 6, 1788, in the English Chronicle of June 3–5, 1788, and its first sentence in the Times June 6, 1788. Interestingly the Times continued without mentioning the two suicides alluded to by the other papers, but used the occasion to suggest the need for a general moral reform.
51. In this I once again disagree with MacDonald and Murphy’s assessment, Sleepless Souls, pp. 176–77. Though they claim that “the zenith of sentimental suicide in England … was the massive effusion of emotion that followed the death of the poet Thomas Chatterton” (p. 191) they offer no examples of others who, under the influence of that emotion, either killed themselves or showed increased sympathy to other suicides. For an earlier, sentimentalized and heroic verse whose subject is a female suicide, see The Fair Suicide: being an epistle from a Young Lady to the Person who was the cause of her death (London, Richard Wellington, 1733). For a detailed, though specific, instance of genre discrimination among eighteenth-century readers, see D. Andrew and R. McGowen, The Perreaus and Mrs. Rudd: Forgery and Betrayal in Eighteenth Century London (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001), pp. 200–205.
52. MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, pp. 140–41.
53. In a brief survey of suicides found felo de se, as reported in the Times between 1786 and 1818, 52 men and women were stated to have been found felo de se (38 men and 14 women). Of these, 24 men and 5 women, or more than half of the sample, killed themselves either in jail or after having committed an unlawful act.
54. MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, p. 114.
55. LM, vol. 39, April 1762, “Reflections on Suicide,” p. 182; Lady’s Magazine, May 1773, p. 262; William Rowley, A Treatise on Female … Diseases (London, 1788), p. 341.
56. GM October 1808, p. 880. This is the gist of Andrew Scull’s The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700–1900 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1993); he notes that “what concerns me is the process by which… the medical profession acquired a monopoly over the treatment of the mad” (p. 9, footnote 22). See also Ian Burney, Bodies of Evidence (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), pp. 10–11.
57. Occasional Paper, p. 34; Jeffery, Felo de Se, p. 12.
58. For the centrality of legal discourse in this period, see David Lieberman, The Province of Legislation Determined: Legal Theory in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 1–28. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols. (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1769), 4:189; John Jervis, A Practical Treatise on the Office and Duties of Coroners, 1829, quoted in Sylvia M. Bernard, Viewing the Breathless Corpse (Leeds, Words@Woodmere, 2001), p. 32.
59. See MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, pp. 124–29, for a general discussion of this. According to Charles Moore, A full inquiry into the Subject of Suicide to which are added (as being closely connected with the subject) Two Treatises on Duelling and Gambling (London, J. F. & C. Rivington, 1790), 1:383 footnote, this piece was written by Samuel Johnson. It appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine 1755, p. 43; Francis Ayscough, A Discourse Against Self-Murder, a sermon (London, H. Shute Cox, 1755), p. 14.
60. The Connoisseur quoted in Moore, A full inquiry, p. 323 footnote.
61. T&C January 1773, p. 22; MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, pp. 128–29.
62. Lady Spencer, Althorp papers, July 4, 1780, British Library Manuscript Room.
63. Gaz January 20, 1787, letter signed “W. A.” MacDonald and Murphy quote a passage from an early eighteenth-century writer, John Adams, who blamed the coroner for over-lenient verdicts; they comment (p. 113) that “The coroner’s views did not, however, invariably prevail.” Frequently, however, they did.
64. The man was probably the Honorable Captain Phipps, brother of the earl of Mulgrave. I have been unable to find any record of this coroner’s inquest, nor have MacDonald and Murphy cited it in their account. The comments in the Times come from November 14 and November 17, 1786. See also a follow-up story in ibid., November 21, 1786. I have found no other paper which carried the story of the felo de se verdict. According to Havard, “as late as 1843 instances were given of parish constables accepting bribes from relatives of the deceased who wished to avoid the annoyance of an inquest.” Detection of Secret Homicide, p. 141.
65. “J. A.,” Reflections on the Laws concerning Suicide, GM 1789, pp. 1080–81.
66. This is the description, in the Bury & Norwich Post (June 4, 1823) of the aim of Lennard’s proposed Bill.
67. This quote, from a letter signed “Plato” to the St. J January 8, 1780, was the latest of a several comments on suicide, all “copied” from the Conn January 6, 1755, and also found in the LM of the same month and year, pp. 21–23. An article in the GM of November 1741, proposed the treatment that had worked so well on the young women of Miletus. The Occasionalist #12, 1768, p. 71, suggested exhibiting the skeleton in the local town hall while a note in the General Advertiser of October 12, 1786, thought that suicides should hang in chains, head downward, “at the four corners of the City.”
68. New Monthly Magazine December 1816, “On the Means of Preventing Suicide,” p. 408; GM December 1821, p. 482; the Times December 31, 1818; Richard Hey, Dissertation on Suicide in Three Dissertations, pp. 85–86.
69. LM April 1762, “Reflections on Suicide,” p. 181.
70. General Advertiser October 12, 1786; Times August 12, 1790; Moore, A full inquiry, introduction, p. 2.
71. MC August 25, 1797; the Examiner, 1810, p. 635; ibid., letter from “Medicus Ignotus,” p. 750.
72. Hey, Dissertation on Suicide, p. 25; Moore, A full inquiry, 1:4.
73. Romilly was so described in the Bell’s Weekly Messenger November 8, 1818, p. 353, and Londonderry in the MC August 22, 1822. Robert Stewart, Baron Londonderry, Viscount Castlereagh and Earl of Londonderry is usually referred to as either Londonderry or Castlereagh, and both titles are used interchangeably here.
74. Bell’s Weekly Messenger November 8, 1818, pp. 358, 353; British Review and Critical Journal February 1819, p. 1; Monthly Repository November 1818, p. 725; MP November 5, 1818; Bell’s Weekly Messenger November 8, 1818, p. 357; Sunday Advertiser November 8, 1818; Imperial Weekly Gazette November 7, 1818; Monthly Repository November 1818, p. 721.
75. Belle Assemblée November 1818, p. 227. See also British Luminary and Weekly Intelligence November 7, 1818, p. 41, and Evening Star November 3, 1818; Country Herald and Weekly Advertiser November 7, 1818; Lady’s Magazine December 1818, p. 549, and MP November 5, 1818, p. 82; British Press November 3, 1818; Weekly Dispatch November 8, 1818, p. 356. Monthly Magazine December 1818, p. 421. See also British Luminary November 7, 1818, p. 45; European Magazine November 1818, p. 422.
76. Constitution November 8, 1818.
77. British Luminary November 7, 1818, p. 45; British Press November 5, 1818; Constitution November 15, 1818; Monthly Magazine December 1818, p. 421.
78. Constitution November 15, 1818.
79. Monthly Magazine December 1818, p. 421.
80. Monthly Magazine December 1818, p. 426; Times June 5, 1790; Lady’s Magazine December 1818, p. 549; see also John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793–1796 (New York, Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. ch. 1, and Carter, Men and the Emergence, esp. ch. 3.
81. British Review February 1819, p. 9; George Crabbe, “Miscellaneous Verses Previously Printed: On the Death of Sir Samuel Romilly”; see also Bernard Barton, “Stanzas on the Death of Sir Samuel Romilly” from Poems (London, 1825), British Press November 5, 1818, Monthly Magazine December 1818, p. 426.
82. Although this paper spent little time on this aspect of his death, there were a number of comments on it. See for example, the Champion and Sunday Review November 8, 1818, p. 705; The British Press, November 3, 7, 1818.
83. Constitution November 8, 1818, The British Neptune November 9, 1818, p. 249.
84. Courier November 4, 1818; the British Press November 7, 1818, was only one of the papers in which these sentences were found.
85. Country Herald and Weekly Advertiser November 7, 1818; GM November 1818, p. 466; The Monthly Magazine 1818, p. 721; Lady’s Magazine December 1818, p. 549; Bell’s Weekly Messenger November 8, 1818, p. 358; British Luminary November 7, 1818, p. 42 and see also Lady’s Magazine December 1818, p. 550.
86. Globe November 4, 1818; New Times November 3, 1818. A classic contemporary statement of the view that deep feelings were the source of both public virtue and private misery was published as part of the explanation of Romilly’s act: “The affections of the heart borrow their sensibility from the refinements of the soul, which, like treacherous servants, often point the sharpest weapons against those breasts which have most cherished and indulged them. The innumerable accidents and infirmities … deeply wound those hearts … while they hardly ruffle vulgar minds … Yet these fine feelings, however painful to the possessor, are the parents of all that virtue, compassion and benevolence, which humanize the heart and are the best bonds of society.” MP November 5, 1818. For other press comments of a similar sort, see the Constitution November 8, 1818, and the Examiner November 9, 1818, p. 705. Even the Courier, which had started all of this, admitted the danger of hyperactive sensibility; see Courier November 3, 1818.
87. News November 8, 1818; British Review February 1819, p. 15; Morning Advertiser November 3, 1818; Philanthropic Gazette November 4, 1818, p. 368.
88. News November 8, 1818.
89. Independent Whig November 15, 1818. Although several of the papers reported the public’s sorrow about Romilly’s death, or lauded his accomplishments and also criticized and censured his self-inflicted end, only one that I have found, the British Neptune, printed both sympathetic and critical paragraphs about the act. Most papers took one side of the controversy or the other.
90. Bell’s Weekly Messenger November 8, 1818, p. 354; St. J November 3–5, 1818.
91. Philanthropic Gazette November 4, 1818, p. 368. For Whitbread’s life and death, see Roger Fulford, Samuel Whitbread 1764–1815: A Study in Opposition (London, Macmillan, 1967), esp. ch. 26.
92. MP November 1818. In fact, it was said that a Mr. Elliot, having breakfast, was brought the newspaper on the day after Romilly’s death. “When, after reading the melancholy fate of Sir Samuel Romilly, he suddenly put a period to his own existence by cutting his throat with a razor.” The Traveller November 4, 1818.
93. British Neptune November 9, 1818, p. 249; Sunday Advertiser November 8, 1818; MP November 5, 1818; Independent Whig November 15, 1818; Bell’s Weekly Messenger November 8, 1818, p. 354.
94. The Courier, discussing the death of Romilly, noted that “The character of a public man, when its lineaments have been fixed by the hand of death, becomes as it were a part of public history …” November 6, 1818, ibid., November 3, 1818; the British Monitor November 8, 1818, p. 656, “Varieties”; the Times December 31, 1818, letter to the editor, signed “Ordovex.”
95. “X.Y.” to the Sunday Advertiser, November 1818. Roy Porter comments that England’s medical men had already diagnosed such a malady: “The Enlightenment thus formulated not just progress but its verso; the idea of diseases of civilization, afflicting meritocrats of feeling,” in The Creation of the Modern World (New York, W. W. Norton, 2000), p. 282. See also John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988).
96. MP August 13, 1822.
97. Courier August 13, 1822.
98. MP August 14, 1822; Courier August 13, 1822, and August 22, 1822; see also the Ipswich Journal and Jackson’s Oxford Journal August 17, 1822. See Robert Franklin, “The Death of Lord Londonderry,” The Historian, 96, 2007. Londonderry was another name for Castlereagh.
99. Times August 13, 1822; Examiner August 18, 1822; Liverpool Mercury August 16, 1822; British Freeholder August 17, 1822.
100. MC August 22, 1822; Courier August 20, 1822; Baldwin’s London Weekly August 24, 1822.
101. The Examiner, August 18, 1822, the British Press, August 14, 1822, and the British Mercury, August 19, 1822, discussed the deaths of these three men together.
102. The Examiner, commenting on Londonderry’s religious views, noted that “The best thing we can say of him is, that he never canted about Religion; and accordingly the hirelings, in the midst of all other eulogies, say nothing about his piety” (August 18, 1822). However, the next issue of the Courier contained an anonymous letter asserting Londonderry’s religious faith (August 21, 1822).
103. MC August 14, 1822; the Liverpool Mercury August 16, 1822, Times August 14, 1822 for Coroner’s remarks to the jury; MC August 14, 1822. Interestingly, the paragraph from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, quoted in this MC piece, which advocates sympathy and commiseration for suicides, only appeared in the sixth edition of that work, published in 1790, the year of his death.
104. Times, April 7, 1819, letter “On Suicide” from “Homo.”
105. For newspaper notices of Whitbread’s death see the Examiner July 9, 1815, July 30, 1815; News July 9, 1815; the Public Ledger July 7, 8, 9, 1815; the MC July 7, 10, 1815; the Courier July 6, 10, 1815; the Champion July 10, 16, 1815; the Public Cause July 12, 15, 1815. Comments about Whitbread’s strengths and failings resemble those made three years later about Romilly. In his Memoirs, for example, Romilly himself noted that “the only faults he [Whitbread] had proceeded from an excess of his virtues” (cited in D. R. Fisher, “Samuel Whitbread,” New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). In their report of his death, the Times argued that Whitbread had, in some degree, “fallen a victim to his sense of duty; for the state of his health had long been such, that his physicians had frequently advised him to remit something of his exertions in public affairs” (July 7, 1815).
106. MP February 14, 1818.
107. Ibid., February 16, 1818, “Memoir of Sir Richard Croft.”
108. Examiner February 1818, p. 109. For other newspaper comments on Croft’s death, see the AR March 1818, p. 109; the MP February 14, 16, 19, 1818; the Times July 14, 16, 1818.
109. From 1816 to the end of 1818, three letters on these topics appeared in various press reports. From the last days of 1818 through 1822, fifteen items, eleven of which were letters, appeared in similar venues.
110. Letter from “Humanitas” to the New Monthly Magazine. The letter in the Examiner, September 1818, p. 671, signed “Atticus” was first sent to the MC, which refused to publish it. The second letter, signed “Milesius,” appeared in the Times, September 23, 1819, and used the example of the inquest called on the suicide of Lord Ffrench to argue that it was Ffrench’s Irish politics, not his demise, which led to an attempt to find him guilty of felo de se, an attempt foiled by the presence of an attorney to “speak for” him.
111. Emphasis is mine. This coroner’s statement appeared word-for-word in several newspapers; see, for example, the Courier January 20, 1819, the Examiner January 25, 1819, p. 64, the Times January 20, 1819.
112. Times February 8, 1819 for “Homo’s” first letter; the “Coroner’s” response in Times, February 11, 1819.
113. See Times, April 7, 1819. where Letter III from “Homo” appeared just above another note from “A Coroner.” In this last missive, the coroner seemed to agree that insanity was a very difficult condition to diagnose, but that, given the vindictive legal consequences of finding a verdict of felo de se, the only just verdict was lunacy.
114. Times, December 7, 1818.
115. The early nineteenth century witnessed a general condemnation of judicial violence, publicly performed. Thus, for example, the pillory was severely restricted in 1816 (see J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts [Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1986], pp. 613–16) and almost yearly attempts were made to temper the ferocity of the Criminal Code. The dishonoring interment of felo de ses was frequently presented as yet another example of the bloodthirstiness of the code. “Ordovex’s” letter to the Times appeared on December 31, 1818.
116. Times January 28, 1819.
117. Ibid., April 7, 1819, Letter III “On Suicide” from “Homo.”
118. Times June 24, 1820, Letter from “C.” C was Thomas Chevalier, whose letter was reprinted in the Pamphleteer, vol. 23, 1823. Letter to the GM December 1821 from “W.T.P,” p. 482. The Times was responding to a letter from J. Barker on December 14, 1822.
119. See MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, for a discussion of the decline of forfeiture, pp. 78–86, 114–21, 346–53. J. M. Beattie, in conversation, has assured me that the forfeiture clause was almost never used against those found guilty of felonies from the early eighteenth century onwards.
120. GM 1822, Supplement, letter from “G. W.,” “On the alarming increase of suicide” p. 580.
1. The quotation from which the chapter title is taken appeared in the T&C December 1783, p. 645: “The infidelities of the fair sex have, for some time, been the chief topics of conversation in the polite world …”
2. David Turner, Fashioning Adultery (Cambridge UK, University of Cambridge, 2002), pp. 1–2. A Person of Quality, Marriage Promoted (London, Richard Baldwin, 1690), p. 46, reproduced in Adultery and the Decline of Marriage: Three Tracts (New York, Garland Publishing, 1984).
3. A Person of Quality, Marriage Promoted, p. 9.
4. Ibid., p. 41.
5. Ibid., p. 44.
6. [Josiah Woodward] A Rebuke to the sin of uncleanliness (London, Joseph Downing, 1720), p. 10.
7. Castamore, Conjugium Languens: or the Natural, civil and religious mischiefs arising from conjugal infidelity and impunity (London, 1720), p. 221, in The Cases of Polygamy, Concubinage, Adultery, Divorce, etc. by the most eminent hands (London, T. Payne 1732).
8. David Turner, ‘Representations of Adultery in England c 1660–c 1740: A Study in Changing Perceptions of Marital Infidelity,’ Oxford D.Phil, 1998, p. 5.
9. See David Hayton, “Moral Reform and Country Politics in the late Seventeenth Century House of Commons” Past and Present #128, August 1990, pp. 48–91.
10. Jephson, The heinous sins of ADULTERY and FORNICATION, pp. iv, 17.
11. Grub Street Journal April 9, 1730.
12. Richard Smalbroke, A Sermon to the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, “Reformation Necessary to Prevent our Ruine” (London, Joseph Downing, 1728), pp. 20–21.
13. Universal Spectator February 23, 1734.
14. Turner, Fashioning Adultery, p. 173; Stone, Road to Divorce, pp. 248–51.
15. David Garrick, The Lying Varlet (Dublin, J. Rhames, 1741), p. 30; Lethe (London, Paul Valliant, 1749), pp. 370–71.
16. [Mary Wray], The Ladies Library, 3rd ed. (London, Jacob Tonson, 1722), p. 107.
17. Ibid., pp. 108.
18. Philogamus, Present state of matrimony: or the real causes of conjugal infidelity (London, J. Buckland, 1739), p. 15. See also Woodward, A Rebuke, p. 10.
19. An Essay on Modern Gallantry, pp. 4, 50.
20. Timothy Hooker, Essay on Honour, p. 2.
21. Ibid., p. 39.
22. Based on material in the Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue. This counts each addition as one pamphlet. Abergavenny, 3 pamphlets with 1 to 3 editions; Cibber, 4 pamphlets with one in 6 editions; Biker, 3 pamphlets with 1 in 2 editions; Morice, 1 pamphlet; Knowles 1 pamphlet with 5 editions.
23. Cases of Divorce for Several Causes (London, E. Curll, 1715). The three cases mentioned were that of the Duchess of Cleveland, Sir George Downing’s non-consummation case, and the Dormer adultery trial. The judge’s verdict in Latin was six pages long.
24. Addison, Spectator #99, June 23, 1711, p. 416.
25. GM 1732, p. 756; LM 1732, p. 83; LM June 1734, p. 318 copied from the Grub Street Journal; GM March 1742, pp. 153–54 copied from the Universal Spectator; CGJ # 4 reprinted in GM January 1752, p. 30.
26. CGJ #68, p. 359.
27. GM May 1732, p. 772, for the Goodere case and July 1732, p. 873, for Green’s.
28. The Biker case was one of five considered to have had lots of publicity by Stone or Turner. Papers consulted were the Daily Post, the London Daily Post, the LM, the GM, the LEP, the Champion, the Country Journal or the Craftsman, Commonsense and of course the Daily Gazetteer.
29. For the dealer’s tale see GM March 1751, vol. xxi, p. 136; for the Teat/Craven case GM June 24, 1755, p. 282.
30. GM, 1757, p. 286, Universal Magazine, June 1757, p. 291.
31. PA, June 18, 1757, LEP June 11, 1757. For more on this case, see Proceedings in the Trial of Captain Gambier for Crim Con with Admiral Knowle’s Lady, June 11, 1757 (London, H. Owen, 1757).
32. Junius, [Letters] (London, T. Bensley, 1797), vol. 1, 18 March 1769, p. 88.
33. Ibid., pp. 89–90.
34. T&C July 1771, p. 352.
35. Junius, [Letters], pp. 93–94.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., [Letters], p. 82.
38. “Tullius” in the Oxford Magazine July 1769, p. 20.
39. Junius, [Letters], p. xxviii.
40. See Cindy McCreery, The Satirical Gaze: Prints of Women in Late Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004).
41. GM February 1769, p. 107. See also Oxford Magazine February 1769, p. 77.
42. T&C April 1769, pp. 204–5.
43. See, for example, the Letters of Palinurus and Annabella in the T&C April 1769, pp. 181–82, and GM April 1769, Letters to and from a discarded Mistress, pp. 196–97.
44. Memoirs of the Amours, Intrigues and Adventures of Charles Augustus Fitz-Roy with Miss Parsons (London, J. Meares, 1769). The Amours was used as a source by the author of the DNB biography of Grafton.
45. Civilian, Free Thoughts on Seduction, Adultery and Divorce, with Reflections on the Gallantry of Princes (London, J. Bell, 1771), p. 8: “The Duke of Cumberland’s late amour with lady Grosvenor; a topick that has universally agitated the tongues and pens of the scribblers and tatlers of the present age.”
46. Oxford Magazine January 1770, p. 24.
47. T&C January 1770, p. 53.
48. GM December 1769, p. 607.
49. T&C December 1769, p. 632, Oxford Magazine 1769 Supplement, p. 276.
50. GM 1769 Supplement, p. 622.
51. Oxford Magazine December 1769, p. 227.
52. Except in a novel, published shortly after the trials, called Harriet, or the Innocent Adultress (London, R. Baldwin, 1779), 2nd ed. Here Lady Grosvenor was presented as “an injured beauty thus neglected [by her husband],” who merely “follows his example” in indulging in extramarital amours (pp. x, xii).
53. GM 1769 Supplement, p. 621; Oxford Magazine 1770, pp. 19–20.
54. T&C February 1770, p. 110.
55. This was done by analogy with the Clavering case; for this see GM March 1770, p. 123.
56. I have not been able to locate a copy of this pamphlet. It was reviewed by “X” in the GM September 1770, p. 431.
57. Horace Walpole, Correspondence, vol. 23, To Mann, 31 August 1770, p. 230.
58. GM 1770, p. 317.
59. Oxford Magazine September 1770, p. 88.
60. PA July 7, 1770; Bingley’s August 4, 1770. See also a satiric letter and poem from “Fair Locks” on Cumberland’s adventures in the Ladies Magazine August 1770, p. 31. The beginning of a poem ostensibly written by him to Lady Grosvenor, included in this letter, ran:
To my dear angel now at land,
Her love at sea doth write;
But first would have her understand,
I never could indite.
Tho’ Dr. Charles, great pains he took,
Yet I ne’er learnt my Spelling book.
Another satiric note was found in a “letter” from Leonora, member of the Female Coterie, who noted that they had “Ordered that a new ROYAL SPELLING-BOOK be printed at the expence of the society, for the use of polite lovers, who propose carrying on an amorous correspondence” (T&C August 1770, p. 408). Also, in the PA, a fictitious advertisement: “WANTED, For the Parties abovementioned [i.e., the Duchess of Grosvenor and the Duke of Cumberland], two Spelling-Books and an English Grammar” (July 20, 1770).
61. GM 1770, p. 314.
62. Bingley’s August 18, 1770. Some humorously opined that these disguises were adopted because Cumberland was practicing for a stage career: see PA July 27, 1770, “Intelligence Extraordinary.” “Fair Locks,” in the Ladies Magazine August 1770, p. 31, poked fun at this wig by “praising” Cumberland for the “difficulties he did for our sex,” and paid special attention to his having “turned those pretty red locks of hair of his into a black wig.”
63. Oxford Magazine August 1770, p. 75; the poem, signed “A True Mourner,” p. 74.
64. See GM 1770, p. 316; Oxford Magazine July 1770, p. 17.
65. PA July 21, 1770; Bingley’s August 10, 1771.
66. GM 1770, p. 319.
67. Oxford Magazine July 1770, p. 17. The Oxford reported the case in much more detail than did the Gentleman’s; see GM 1770, vol. 40, pp. 314–19, and a long review of the published proceedings, ibid., pp. 471–74.
68. Civilian, Free Thoughts on Adultery and Divorce, p. 7.
69. Adultery a-la-Mode (London, R. Thomas, n.d.), p. 5.
70. The Adulterer, A Poem (London, W. Bingley, 1769), p. 13.
71. Letter written by “Q in the Corner” to Bingley’s September 15, 1770. “Q” is referring to an overheard conversation between Cumberland and O’Kelley about various aristocratic misdeeds.
72. PA July 31, 1770; see also T&C July 1770, p. 391: “It is a certain fact, that since a late trial, the two lovers are almost daily, and the whole day, together in her Ladyship’s house at Barnes.”
73. T&C February 1771, p. 251.
74. Donna T. Andrew, “ ‘Adultery-A-La-Mode’: Privilege, the Law and Attitudes to Adultery 1770–1809,” History (82) 1997, pp. 5–24.
75. T&C August 1771, pp. 418–19.
76. Letter from “Theophilus,” “Symptoms of public ruin, not imaginary” in the Oxford Magazine June 1771, p. 199.
77. See Andrew, “Adultery a la Mode.” The three pamphlets of 1771 were Thoughts on the Times, but Chiefly on the Profligacy of Our Women; Reflections on Celibacy and Marriage; and Reflections on the too Prevailing Spirit of Dissipation.
78. Thomas Pollen, The fatal consequences of adultery, to monarchies as well as to private families, with a defence of the bill passed in the House of Lords in the year 1771 (London, T. Lowndes, 1772), pp. 230, 112. This pamphlet was cited in a letter to the editor of the MC on March 17, 1777.
79. [Maurice Morgann] A Letter to My Lords the Bishops, on the occasion of the Present Bill for the Preventing of Adultery (London, J. Dodsley, 1779), pp. 21–23, 42, 45.
80. “T.L.” in the T&C August 1769, p. 434. For a story “dressed” as a letter, see ibid., March 1769, pp. 128–29; for a “dream” in the same guise, see ibid., January 1772, pp. 28–29; the candidate’s promises in T&C October 1774, p. 519. For other letters retailing the latest adultery, see “Alpin McAlpin” to the T&C October 1771, pp. 547–48, on the Sutherland adultery; “A Bye-Stander” to ibid., May 1773, pp. 246–47 for the Craven adultery; or the two letters in defense of Lady Grosvenor signed “Cato,” in the MP September 25, September 26, 1775.
81. Letter from “Hinton” in the GM vol. 42, August 1772, pp. 370–71; “BWB” to the GM 1784, pp. 743–44.
82. “An Old Observer” to the T&C November 1783, pp. 577–78; “Theophrastus” in the GM March 1784, i, pp. 171–72.
83. “Hinton” to the GM August 1772, p. 370; “A Well-Wisher to the Fair Sex” in T&C December 1776, p. 656; “A Parent” in Gaz December 31, 1777; “Megaronides,” “To the Lord Bishop of Landaff” in the MP August 2, 1779.
84. See, for example, the essay entitled “Thoughts on the Fashionable Vice,” signed “Senex” which appeared in the LM of June 1780, pp. 252–55. Others who blamed men for the high incidence of adultery were “An Advocate of the Ladies” in the T&C August 1777, pp. 407–8; “Conjux” in the MP January 6, 1779; “An Occasional Correspondent” in the T&C December 1783, pp. 645–46; and “A contented Caro Sposo” in T&C March 1785, pp. 155–56.
85. “Eleanora” in the MP January 13, 1779; “A friend to conjugal felicity” in the MH July 8, 1783; letter to the MP Sept 6, 1784. “Eleanora” may have been Mrs. Thrale, who noted the same idea in her journal: “was a Woman to have her Ring Finger cut off; her Lover would hesitate a little in marrying her I’ll warrant him.…” Thraliana, Katherine C. Balderston, ed. (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1942), April 17, 1779, p. 379.
86. Letters in the T&C May 1776, pp. 654–55; ibid., August 1777, pp. 407–8; MP December 11, 1784; “Civis” in the Times, March 26, 1786; T&C March 1786, p. 172. When the Coachmakers Hall debating society discussed the question of “in which rank of life does conjugal felicity most generally reside?” the audience voted for the middling “by a considerable majority”; General Advertiser November 25, 1785.
87. “An Advocate of the Ladies” in the T&C August 1777, p. 407.
88. For other accounts of this case, see Peter Wagner, “The Pornographer in the Courtroom,” in Paul-Gabriel Boucé, ed., Sexuality in Eighteenth Century Britain (Totowa, N.J.: Manchester University Press, 1982), pp. 120–40; Cindy McCreery, ‘Breaking all the Rules: the Worsley Affair in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain,’ in Pat Rogers and Regina Hewitt, eds, Orthodoxy and Heresy in the Long Eighteenth Century: 1660–1830 (Lewisburg, Pa., Bucknell University Press, 2002).
89. First notices of Lady Worsley’s elopement came in the PA January 25, 1782 and the White January 26, 1782; the evidence about the many other lovers is found in the White February 26, 1782. See also the recent, popular account of this case, Hallie Rubenhold, The Lady in Red (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2008).
90. The first notice, on March 4, 1782, which advertised two presses, appeared in the PA, the second, which announced three presses, in the MC March 5, 1782, followed by another, ibid., which announced the change in the title, on March 12, 1782.
91. The original advertisement for The Whim appeared in the MC March 2, 1782; the latter puff in the White March 30, 1782.
92. All three advertisements for the Epistle appeared in the MH, which was edited at this time by that past master at scandal, the reverend Henry Bate. They appeared on May 1, 2, 6, 1782. For more on Bate, see W. H. Hindle, The Morning Post 1772–1937 (London, G. Routledge & Sons, 1937).
93. Erskine’s opening remark, “that there was going to be no end of adultery” was made at the criminal conversation trial of Andorff v. Langlands, Times July 20, 1791. This connection persisted, and persists: see, for example, Gail Savage, “Erotic Stories and Public Decency: Newspaper Reporting of Divorce Proceedings in England,” Historical Journal 41, 2 (1998): 511–28.
94. While I have found at least pamphlets for thirteen cases which occurred in the 1780s, I have been able to find only seven for the 1790s.
95. The pamphlets were The Trial of Lady Maria Bayntun (London, E. Rich, 1781), The Trial of Lady Anne Foley (London, G. Lister, 1785), The Trial of Mrs. Elizabeth Leslie Christie (London, G. Lister, 1783), The trial of Mrs. Harriet Errington (London, R. Randall, 1785), The trial between William Fawkener and the Hon John Townshend for Criminal Conversation (London, M. Smith, 1786) and The Trial of the Hon. Mrs. Catherine Newton (London, G. Lister, 1782). Five of these six pamphlets contained illustrations, and four of them were published in at least two editions or versions. Included in The Cuckold’s Chronicle (London, H. Lemoin, 1793) were the Arabin/Sutton case, the Christie/Baker case, the Errington case, the Fawkener/Townshend case and the Foley/Peterborough case.
96. MH April 3, 1783; St. J March 23, 1782.
97. The Evils of Adultery and Prostitution with an inquiry into the causes of their present alarming increase (London, T. Vernon, 1792), pp. 48–49.
98. Introduction to volume 5, 1775 of the T&C; [John Andrews] Reflections on the too prevailing Spirit of DISSIPATION AND GALLANTRY shewing its dreadful Consequences to Publick Freedom (London, E. and C. Dilly, 1771), p. 57. Punishment for crim. con. could well result in lifelong imprisonment, for the damages were sometimes many thousands of pounds. This brief summary does not do justice to John Barrell’s marvelous book, The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006).
99. Lawrence Stone, The Road to Divorce: England 1530–1987, p. 273; see also Katherine Binhammer, “The Sex Panic of the 1790s,” Journal of the History of Sexuality January 1996, pp. 409–34.
100. In his first four years as Chief Justice, Kenyon is reported as having begun 20 and completed 19 cases of criminal conversation; by comparison, the press reported Ellenborough, his successor, as having sat on 17 such cases during his whole seventeen-year occupancy of that position. In his fourteen years as Chief Justice at King’s Bench, Kenyon presided at fifty-eight reported cases of criminal conversation, and in only one year (1792) did he preside over only one case. For Kenyon’s addresses to the jury see Moorsom v Clarke (Times July 16, 1791) and Cadogan v Cooper case (Times June 13, 1794). In his argument opposing Thomas Erskine’s writ to have the Boddington v Boddington case tried before King’s Bench, Mr. Law noted that “no particular advantage could be gained to the Public by the greater publicity of that trial” [referring here to one held at King’s Bench] and that this case would be better argued in “a more Private forum,” i.e., the Sheriff’s court (Times July 6, 1797).
101. Of the eighteen cases decided in these four years, only two, Parslow v. Sykes and Martin v. Petrie, were awarded £10,000. Three cases resulted in non-suits or findings for the defendant, four plaintiffs were awarded 40 shillings or under, three husbands received between £200 and £500, three men between £500 and £1,000, and three were awarded between £2,000 and £3,500.
102. Times December 31, 1791.
103. James Oldham notes that this goes back to Mansfield, though he does say he does not quite know why Mansfield felt it to be so; see English Common Law in the Age of Mansfield (Chapel Hill, N.C., University of North Carolina Press, 2004), p. 340.
104. Times December 10, 1789. The coverage of this trial took almost a complete page of that day’s paper.
105. Lovering v Sadler, see Times July 20, 1791. I have argued elsewhere that public opinion, as exhibited in the debates at London debating societies, was more sympathetic to erring women than were judges like Kenyon; see “Adultery-à-la-Mode.”
106. Adultery, The Trial of Mr. William Atkinson, Linen draper of Cheapside for Criminal Conversation with Mrs. Connor, wife of Mr. Connor, late of the Mitre, at Barnet … before Lord Kenyon (London, Couch & Lakin, 1789), pp. 38–39.
107. Kenyon’s comments to the jury were published in the T&C November 1788, pp. 489–90, with the comment that they included “an account of the exemplary charge given by Lord Kenyon …” For Kenyon’s summing-up and verdict in the Hennet v Darley case, see the Times June 14, 1799. The most famous example of this view was articulated by the defense attorney Thomas Erskine, in a case before Lord Kenyon, in which the husband was described as a mariner who had hooked a whale: “As long as the line is fast to the fish, the fish is yours … but the moment she is a loose fish, any body may strike her.” Martin v Petrie in the Times December 26, 1791.
108. Letter signed “Anticornu” reprinted in The Spirit of the Public Journals for 1797 (London, R. Phillips for M. Richardson, 1798), pp. 245–46.
109. Times June 26, 1799.
110. Times February 22, 1797. In arguing about the propriety of allowing full divorce in the Williams divorce case, the Lord Chancellor, addressing the House of Lords, commented that though he himself disapproved of divorce, “If however such was to be the law of this country, why not make it general, and let every man be acquainted with it? Why was it not properly framed into a law, and a court appointed for that purpose, where the public at large might have recourse to it, and not confined to a few individuals, who should apply to that House for a decision, which no court or law in this kingdom had power to make?” (MH February 28, 1783).
111. “Lord Kenyon” in Public Characters of 1799–1800 (London, P. Alard, 1799), p. 565; for Kenyon’s comments in the Howard v Bingham case, The Trial of the Hon. Richard Bingham for Crim Con with Lady Elizabeth Howard (London, J. Ridgway, 1794), p. 73. See also Mrs. Carter’s comments on Lord Kenyon’s campaign in Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter to Mrs. Montague between the years 1755 and 1800 … ed. Rev. Montagu Pennington, 3 vols. (London, F.C. and J. Rivington, 1817), 3: 351–52, June 1797.
112. In a recent piece in Notes and Queries (52:4, 2005, p. 452) David O’Shaughnessy, (in “Kotzebue and Thompson’s The Stranger: a new source for Godwin’s St Leon”), quoting L. F. Thompson, Kotzebue: A Survey of his Progress in France, and England (Paris, 1928), p. 55, notes: “At the close of the eighteenth century August von Kotzebue was ‘a household name from John o’Groats to Land’s End, and there were approximately 170 editions of Kotzebue’s works … equal in number to the aggregate of the editions of all other German writers translated at that time’ available in England.”
113. The play came from a translation by Bernard Thompson, although Sheridan was widely credited with adapted and improving it for English tastes; see Times March 26, 1798; MP March 26, 1798. For the moral improvements to be wrought by the piece, MP March 27, 1798, and Times March 26, 1798: “… above all, there is that which we but rarely meet with in our modern dramas, novelty of virtuous principle and edifying morality, judiciously diffused throughout the serious scenes.”
114. MC March 26, 1798.
115. The word “sympathy,” used ibid., by the MC reviewer to describe the emotion elicited in viewing the play, is a concept central to the “cult” of sensibility, which will be discussed in greater detail below. Sheridan’s quip in the Times March 30, 1798.
116. The report of the trial in the Times (February 20, 1798) (which noted that the trial took four hours) took up virtually all of page 3, in other words, one-quarter of the entire issue, or, if one eliminated advertisements, one-half of the newsworthy stories for that day. The account of the trial in the MP (February 21, 1798) was equally lengthy. Remarks on Taylor’s family appeared in the MP February 23, 1798.
117. The account quoted here is from the MP February 21, 1798. For the debate at the Westminster Forum, see Andrew, London Debating Societies, #2138, p. 374. Like Mrs. Haller, Mrs. Ricketts was married at a very young age (the former at sixteen, the latter at fifteen), both were in their early twenties when the affairs began, and both had children by their husbands (Mrs. Haller two, Mrs. Ricketts three).
118. Times March 26, 1798, Letter to the Right Hon. Lord Kenyon, signed “A Juror.”
119. These were “A Friend to Social Order,” Thoughts on Marriage, and Criminal Conversation, respectfully addressed and inscribed to the Right Honourable Lord Kenyon (London, F. and C. Rivington, 1799); Thoughts on the Propriety of Preventing Marriages Founded on Adultery (London, J. Richardson, 1800); Adam Sibbit, Thoughts on the Frequency of Divorces in Modern Times (London, T. Cadell jr. and W. Davies, 1800); and A Letter to the Hon. Spencer Perceval … of Adultery (London, F. & C. Rivington, 1801). The comment on the lenity of misdemeanor for adultery is from the last, p. 16; the “civil war of lust” comes from the first, p. vi; the conversion of private injury into public concern comes from Thoughts on the Propriety, p. 4, and Kenyon as Cato (probably Cato the Elder, the Censor of Rome) from Thoughts on the Frequency of Divorces, p. 44.
120. “Observator” in the GM December 1805, pp. 1104–5; Times July 20, 1802.
121. Thomas Erskine, in his comments to the jury, in Foote v Jones. Erskine represented the plaintiff, and secured a hefty £5000 award for his client. In Dublin, the Earl of Westmeath was awarded £10,000 in damages from his wife’s lover (Times February 29, 1796); Boddington v Boddington resulted in a fine of £10,000 against the lover (ibid., July 3, 1797); Lord Boringdon was awarded £10,000 by a Sheriff’s jury (ibid., July 20, 1808).
122. “Methodist” to the Gentleman’s Magazine May 1801, pp. 398–99; Windham’s comment ibid., Parliamentary Proceedings ii, p. 1132; the Taylor v Birdwood crim. con. trial in the Times June 2, 1800. This connection between French morals and revolution was frequently made in English adultery cases. For example Erskine, arguing for punitive damages in the Cadogan/Cooper case: asked the jury for a verdict “of such a nature, as to give stability and security to domestic life. This is the foundation of all that is noble among men. And at the present moment, when the country is rejoicing in the success of our arms … every man who hears me, will admit, that all that valour … arise from the habits of virtuous life, and from the different relations of a family.… This is the foundation of all that is good, of all that is great, and of all that distinguishes the most illustrious nations, from nations that are the most barbarous” (Times August 22, 1794). Discussing the conditions under which divorce would be agreed upon, the Bishop of Rochester noted, in the House of Lords, that “the morals of the women depended upon the sanctity of marriage, when he considered the Jacobinical system adopted in a neighbouring country, which made it necessary to take some strong measures to resist its influence on the morals of this, he was sure … that the House would not be inclined to sacrifice much to a little sentimental feeling” (MP March 29, 1798).
123. For Carlisle’s remarks, see Parliamentary Debates 40 Geo. III, pp. 279–80, May 23, 1800; Kenyon’s charge to the Taylor v Birdwood jury in the Times June 2, 1800, and Kenyon’s remarks in August, while at the Maidstone Assizes, see ibid., August 12, 1800. Even before the Adultery Bill came before Parliament, it was well known that both Kenyon and Erskine favoured a criminalization of the law regarding adultery. In the case of Campbell v Addison, Erskine, representing the plaintiff, had hinted ‘that perhaps this offence ought to become the subject of the criminal justice of the country, since civil damages had hitherto been found inadequate to its suppression.’ Kenyon agreed, but said it was a matter for the legislature. MC February 25, 1799.
124. See the Times March 6, 1794, and The Trial of the Hon Richard Bingham for Crim Con with Lady Elizabeth Howard (London, J. Ridgway, 1794).
125. The damages in the Abercorn v Copley case, in which the defendant had ‘suffered judgment to go by default’ occurred in the Sheriff’s Court and was reported in the MP December 21, 1798; the Markham v Fawcett case was similarly undefended and the fine determined by the Sheriff of Middlesex’s special jury; see the Times May 5, 1802 and for Lingham v Hunt, at King’s Bench, ibid., December 25, 1802. A similar sentimental appeal, stressing his honour as a soldier, was used by the attorney of Sir Arthur Paget in mitigation of damages for his adultery with Lady Boringdon; it was spectacularly unsuccessful with the fine adjudged being £10,000 (Times July 20, 1808).
126. This plea was made in Markham v Fawcett case, Times May 5, 1802; it was also made in the Elgin v Ferguson case, where the jury awarded £10,000 damages (ibid., December 23, 1807) and in the Boringdon v Paget case (ibid., July 20, 1808).
127. “J. S.” sent three letters to the Editor of the Times, May 23, 1811, June 21 and 24, 1811. “Benedict’s” letters were published by the Universal Magazine as their lead articles in three subsequent issues, October 1813, pp. 265–67, November 1813, pp. 353–55, and December 1813, pp. 441–43. Two letters to the MP (December 21, 29, 1814), signed “A Clergyman of the Church of England,” another sent to the New Monthly Magazine (June 1, 1815), signed “Spectator,” and an editorial comment in the Times (July 23, 1817) all stressed the need for harsher punishments for adultery.
128. As we shall see, Lord Ellenborough’s stance on the evils of adultery made itself very clear in his comments on the Roseberry divorce proceedings. There he noted that “It was absolutely necessary to the interests of sound morality, to the peace and happiness of social life, and to the purity of private families, that such offences should be marked out as something against nature” (Times June 2, 1815). For Ellenborough’s comments on the proper penalties in the Smith v Smith case, see ibid., July 8, 1803. However, for another view of Ellenborough on divorce, see Ben Wilson, Decency and Disorder (London, Faber & Faber, 2007), pp. 370–71. Gibbs’s charge to the jury at the end of the very long trial between Robert Knight and Lord Middleton appeared in the MC December 6, 1814.
129. MP December 26, 1814, poem, “On a recent event.”
130. The Courier, the Evening Star, the MP, the News, the St. J, and the Times all carried extensive reports on the event, the Post noting that “A great portion of our Paper of this day is occupied with the report of the Crim. Con case of the Earl of Roseberry versus Sir Henry Mildmay …” (December 12, 1814).
131. The press reports are remarkably similar, though not identical. For these quotes I have used the account published in the Evening Star December 12, 1814. In the Courier account of December 12, 1814, Mildmay’s piratical appearance, on being found in Lady Harriet’s bedroom, was thus described by Mr. Primrose, Lord Roseberry’s brother: “Sir H. Mildmay was dressed in a large blue jacket and trowsers and a red waistcoat, which was covered with a profusion of small pearl buttons. His beard was much grown, and his appearance altogether so disguised that [he] was obliged to look twice before he recognised him”(December 12, 1814).
132. Garrow’s opening comments in the Times December 12, 1814; all remaining quotes from the Courier, December 12, 1814.
133. For the proposed duel with Roseberry, see St. J December 103, 1814; for the agony of the guilty pair, the MP December 13, 1814.
134. This almost column-long poem appeared in the MP December 15, 1814.
135. For details of the contents of Mildmay’s house that were going to be bid upon, see ibid., December 17, 1814. For the poem, “The Rose. Lines on the elopement of Lady R. by Mr. Wedderburn Webster” ibid., December 13, 1814, and “On a recent Event” by “AWGB,” ibid., December 26, 1814.
136. Ibid., December 13, 1814.
137. “Homo” in the St. J December 13, 1814.
138. Ellenborough on the gravity of Lady Roseberry’s offence in the Times June 2, 1815; Taylor in the Commons, ibid., June 15, 1815; “X.Y.” ibid., June 19, 1815.
139. Times April 17, 1815.
140. Ibid., February 6, 1815. We have seen that in 1741, Timothy Hooker argued that female repentance for adultery was impossible, not because of the heinousness of the sin, but because prudes and gossips would not allow it to be forgotten. By 1815, the sin itself had become seen, at least by the writer for the Times, as unforgivable.
141. Ibid., July 23, 1817.
142. Ibid., January 17, 1817. See also ibid., January 18, January 20, January 21, January 25, January 27, January 28, January 29, and February 3, 1825. An advertisement from The English Gentleman also appeared in the Times of January 25, 1825, which described a pull-out flyer, which could be read by adults, but removed from the eyes of children, with all the details of the Cox/Kean trial.
1. Both the title of this chapter and source for the quote are from an essay “The Mischiefs of Gaming” in the LM June 1736, p. 313. This chapter uses the words “gaming” and “gambling” interchangeably; most eighteenth-century commentators thought all gamblers to be dishonest, and sometimes used the word “gamester” to also mean a person who cheated at cards, dice, or other games.
2. (Robert) Colvill, Britain, a poem in three books (Edinburgh, Wal. Ruddiman jr. & Co., 1747), p. 65.
3. Conn #50, January 9, 1755, p. 118, also quoted in Moore, 1:388 footnote; An Essay on Gaming, pp. 4–5.
4. PA January 9, 1782; see also the story in Lloyd May 21, 1779, of a clerk to a city merchant, who slit his throat “having lost a sum of money at gaming he was intrusted to receive.”
5. Charles Moore, A full inquiry, p. 2; George Gregory, A Sermon on Suicide [1785] (London, J. Nichols, 1797), 3rd ed., p. 20; GM 1787 Origin of Gaming, p. 216. According to Andrew Steinmetz, in The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims [1870] (Montclair, N.J., Patterson Smith Reprint Series, 1969), vol. 1, pp. 1–3, this allegory originally came from the Harleian Miscellany.
6. Moore described his subject using this metaphor in A full inquiry, p. 285; Times June 9, 1788. For a moral tale that combined all the vices, duelling, gaming, suicide, and an adultery of sorts, see “The Tender Point” in the T&C 1769, pp. 579–81.
7. Hanson T. Parlin, A Study in Shirley’s Comedies of London Life, reprint from the Bulletin of the University of Texas, No. 371, November 15, 1914, p. 8.
8. Edward Moore, The Gamester (1753), introduced by Charles H. Peake (Los Angeles), Augustan Reprint Society, 1948), publication #14. These lines were also quoted on the frontispiece of an essay by a Member of Parliament, Hints for a reform, particularly in the gambling clubs (London, R. Baldwin, 1784).
9. Centlivre’s “Gamester” was performed 86 times in the eighteenth century, though only 3 times after 1749; Garrick’s “Gamester,” performed 38 times during that period, received its greatest number of performances (23) in the 1770s. In contrast, Moore’s “Gamester” received virtually the same number of performances through the 1770s, 1780s, and 1790s, and totalled 112 performances for its 48-year run. For this, see William van Lennup, ed., Index to the London Stage 1660–1800 (Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1979).
10. After Topham Beauclerk mentioned a new gaming-club, whose “members played to a desperate extent” to Samuel Johnson, Johnson responded: “Depend upon it, Sir, this is mere talk. Who is ruined by gaming?” Boswell noted that Johnson loved “to display his ingenuity in argument; and therefore would sometimes in conversation maintain opinions which he was sensible were wrong.” George Birkbeck Hill, ed., Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 6 vols. (Oxford, Clarendon, 1887) 3:23.
11. Steinmetz, The Gaming Table, 1:112.
12. Tatler, 1709, p. 129; Conn #15, 1754, pp. 33–34, 114.
13. [Josiah Woodward], Disswasive from Gaming (London, Joseph Downing, 1726), p. 10; Whole Art and Mystery of Modern Gaming fully exposed and detected (London, J. Roberts, 1726), p. 110.
14. The term “rook” was probably the most commonly used to describe the successful gamester; see for example, its use in Soame Jennings, The Modern Fine Gentleman (London, M. Cooper, 1746), p. 3. The terms “cormorant” and “shark” can be found in the St. J December 31, 1762, “vulture” in the T&C 1770, p. 686. Gamblers and their victims were described as “hawks,” “foxes” and “wolves,” “pigeons,” “geese” or “sheep” in a front page letter in Gaz August 18, 1777, signed “A Friend to Youth.” See also the description of gamblers as “harpies” in the Westminster Magazine 1775, p. 314.
15. Cotton, Compleat Gamester, quoted in John Ashton, The History of Gambling in England [1888] (reprinted by Burt Franklin, New York, 1968), p. 17. Richard Ames, Sylvia’s Revenge, or A Satyr against Man (London, Joseph Streater, 1688).
16. “Henry Hint” in the GM June 1736, p. 313; the Daily Gazetteer February 4, 1745.
17. See GM June 1742, p. 329, and LM 1742, p. 307. For a few accounts of Fielding’s efforts against public gaming establishments, see Ashton, History of Gambling, p. 62, and GM December 1755, p. 516. The organization of gambling in midcentury London was sophisticated and thorough; for this see the GM 1731, p. 25.
18. The Grand Jury for the County of Middlesex, in its presentment, did specifically refer to the gaming houses of Lady Mordington and Lady Casselis, asking for their closure. The editor of the GM in which the presentment was reprinted, added however that they had not yet been shut; see GM vol. xiv, May 1744, pp. 278–79.
19. For Mordington and Casselis, see The Journals of the House of Lords 29 April 1745. Horace Walpole, Correspondence, v. 13, to Richard West, 21 April 1739, pp. 164–65.
20. One of the few essays I have been able to find which strongly suggests that public, not private gaming, should be of more concern to the nation is Reflexions on Gaming (London, 1750), pp. 47–48; “Of Private Gaming” in the LM September 1736, p. 484; “M.E.” in the GM February 1760, p. 90; the same opinion was expressed in the Times January 24, 1788; St. J January 9, 1762; CGJ #5, January 18, 1752, p. 45; “Sunderlandensis” to the GM April 1751, p. 165.
21. Letter from “Anti-Gambler” in the T&C December 1769, pp. 652–53; “A Halfcrown Whist Player” ibid., February 1773, p. 70; Country Justice of the Peace, Serious Thoughts in Regard to the Publick Disorders (London, 1750), p. 11; letter to the MC February 9, 1773.
22. St. J October 5, 1780, front page letter.
23. [Josiah Woodward] Disswasive from Gaming, p. 4; GM 1731, p. 441; Colvill, Britain, p. 66.
24. Essay on Gaming, p. 19; LM 1770, p. 19; Member of Parliament, Hints for a reform, pp. 10–11.
25. LM 1749, p. 587; the Rambler #15, May 1750, p. 69; Gray’s Inn Journal, 2 vols. (London, printed by W. Faden, 1756), #100, September 14, 1754, 2: 307.
26. Thomas Rennell, “The Consequences of the Vice of Gaming, preached 1793” in Discourses on Various Subjects (London, F. and C. Rivington, 1801), p. 31; An Account of the Endeavours that have been used to suppress Gaming-Houses (London 1722), p. 28; Whole Art and Mystery of Modern Gaming fully expos’d and detected (London, J. Roberts, 1726) p. iv.
27. Henry Fielding, An Enquiry into the Late Increase of Robbers in An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers and Related Writings, ed. Malvin R. Zirker (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 92–98. It should be noted, however, that when Fielding spoke “popularly” in the CGJ, or novelistically, in Amelia, he took a much tougher approach to the gaming of the fashionable classes; Conn, #9, March 28, 1754, 1:69. For a fine overview of the contemporary condemnation of gaming, see Phyllis Deutsch, “Moral Trespass in Georgian London: Gaming, Gender and Electoral Politics in the Age of George III,” Historical Journal 39 (1996), 637–56.
28. Essay on Gaming, in an Epistle to a Young Nobleman (London, 1761), p. 25; T&C 1771, “Reflections on Gaming,” p. 89; Moore, Full Inquiry, p. 371.
29. LM, 1749, p. 587; Erasmus Mumford, A Letter to the Club, pp. 37–39; LM 1778, p. 266.
30. Oxford Magazine 1770, p. 139; LM 1758, p. 224; PA May 11, 1775; GEP May 5, 1775; Oxford Magazine 1770, p. 140.
31. Gaz August 11, 1783; Moore, Full Inquiry, pp. 378–79; Times January 14, 1792.
32. Monthly Review 1776, p. 170; Moore, Full Inquiry, p. 384; Rennell, Consequences of Gaming, p. 32.
33. GM 1751, p. 165; Thomas McDonnell, The Eighth Commandment considered in its full extent, and particularly as applicable to the present reigning spirit of gameing: a sermon (Dublin, George Faulkner, 1760), pp. 26–27; Matrimonial Preceptor (London, T. Hope, 1759), #30, pp. 123–25; Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Women in The Vindication of the Rights of Men and the Vindication of the Rights of Women, ed. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 233.
34. Whole Art, intro.; letter to the St. J January 29, 1765, signed “Libertas”; Conn March 6, 1754, 2:181, reprinted in the GM 1755, p. 111. For more on this common notion, see McDonnell, Eighth Commandment, p. 21; T&C 1771, p. 89.
35. [Woodward] Disswasive from Gaming, pp. 2–3; Jonas Hanway, Observations on the Causes of the Dissoluteness Which Reigns Among the Lower Classes of the People (London, J. & F. Rivington, 1772), p. 86; Rennell, Consequences of Gaming, p. 39. For England as an increasingly secular nation, see MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, C. John Sommerville, The Secularization of Early Modern Britain (New York, Oxford University Press, 1992), Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain (London, Routledge, 2001), and Alan D. Gilbert, The Making of Post Christian Britain (London, Longmans, 1980).
36. Voltaire, Philosophical Letters (1733), p. 26; CGJ January 14, 1752, p. 38; T&C 1787, p. 80; Essay on Gaming, p. 2.
37. GM 1761, pp. 152–53; “Pluto” in the Gaz January 1, 1770. In an item in the Times of February 20, 1792, sarcastically entitled “The Mirror of Fashion” its author notes that “the history of the Four Kings [is] substituted for the Vespers of the Gospel; and those who ought to be the visitors of the Church–the Inhabitants of Gaming Houses.”
38. McDonnell, Eighth Commandment, p. 26; Rennell, Consequences of Gaming, p. 42. Compare the tone of Rennell’s condemnation with a similarly critical comment made thirty years before by a letter-writer to the PA (April 20, 1765) who signed his note “Respecter of Sabbath”: “The practice I mean to censure is that of card-playing on the Sabbath. A practice for which no excuse whatever can be brought, as it is directly contrary to the laws of the community; neither can the innocence of the thing itself be pleaded in mitigation of the offense.”
39. For Samuel Johnson on gamblers, see George Birkbeck Hill, ed., Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 6 vols. (Oxford, Clarendon, 1887), 2:176.
40. Fielding, Amelia, p. 384; Johnson in Birkbeck Hill, Boswell’s Life of Johnson 2: 176.
41. Conn #30, August 22, 1754, p. 179; “Respecter of Sabbath” in the PA April 20, 1765.
42. Rambler #80, quoted in Boswell’s Life of Johnson 2:176; GM 1761, p. 389; “JB” in the Gaz January 15, 1765.
43. Universal Magazine 1775, p. 230; T&C 1775, p. 658; Ladies Magazine 1770, p. 114.
44. McDonnell, Eighth Commandment, p. 25; Rennell, Consequences of Gaming, pp. 12–13.
45. British Magazine 1748, p. 549; Conn 1755, p. 83; letter to the PA April 27, 1765. Another letter, to the St.J January 29, 1765 noted that “Parties now sit down to a Table full of the spirit of Gaming … and much Inquietude, sometimes Quarrels, distinguish Persons of the best Sense and superior Rank.”
46. T&C 1771, p. 89; ibid., 1770, p. 686. For an article describing the heartlessness of a female gamester, see LM 1766, p. 417; for a letter from “A Broken Gambler” who was evicted from his gambling ring when he refuses to strip his best friend, see the T&C 1776, p. 308.
47. Member of Parliament, Hints for a reform, p. 14; T&C 1773, p. 480.
48. Conn #58, March 6, 1754, p. 181; Rambler quoted in Boswell’s Life, 2: 176. Both satirical accounts are from the T&C, the first from April 1782, p. 173, and the second, signed “Matthew Mandeville,” from January 1778, pp. 31–32.
49. GM 1739, p. 364; letter to the LM 1770, p. 20; T&C 1770, p. 685. See also McDonnell, Eighth Commandment, p. 21, and The Occasionalist #14, 1768, p. 81.
50. LM 1738, p. 446; see also An Account of the Endeavours, pp. 4–5.
51. McDonnell, Eighth Commandment, p. 21; The Relapse 2 vols. (London, T. Lowndes, 1780) 1:168; Oxford Magazine 1770, p. 253.
52. British Magazine 1748, p. 549; a wife’s letter to the LM 1755, p. 327; letter to the MC December 17, 1774.
53. Whole Art of Gaming, pp. 3, 11; Henry Baker, “Gaming,” in Medulla Poetarum Romanorum 2 vols. (London, 1737) 2:416; GM 1739, p. 364.
54. A Modest Defence of Gaming (London, R. and J. Dodsley, 1754), p. 8; Christopher Anstey, The New Bath Guide, Letter VIII, in the Poetical Works (London, T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1808), p. 42; letter to the MC from “Homo” September 10, 1774; Member of Parliament, Hints for a reform, p. 17.
55. Mr. Addison, A Collection of interesting Anecdotes (London, 1793), p. 139.
56. The contemporary accounts of her death are virtually identical in both the LEP September 11, 1731 and Fog’s September 18, 1731. By the end of the month, the GM posted a longer notice of Braddock’s life and death (and the details of her window poetry), not in the obituary page as might be expected, but as an item in a series called “Surprising Discoveries of Murderers” (GM #9, vol. 1, p. 397).
57. For Montfort’s suicide see LEP December 31, 1755, for Bland’s, ibid., September 11, 1755. The GM noted of Montfort that he had died “suddenly.” GM January 1755, p. 42. Horace Walpole wrote many of his friends about this pair of suicides, as well as making reference to Braddock’s death in a letter to Mann (Correspondence, vol. 20, 492, August 21, 1755); he wrote about the two men to Montagu (vol. 9, pp. 172–73, September 20, 1755), Conway (ibid., vol. 37, p. 405, September 23, 1755), Bentley (ibid., vol. 35, pp. 201–2, January 9, 1755), and Mann (ibid., vol. 20, January 9, 1755, p. 461). Charles Selwyn also wrote to Henry Fox about the Bland death; see ibid., vol. 9, p. 172, footnote 3.
58. Justine Crump, “A Study of Gaming in Eighteenth Century English Novels” (Unpublished PhD thesis, Oxford University, 1997), p. 6; The Guardian, #120, July 29, 1713, edited by John C. Stephens, (University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, 1982), p. 402; LM 1761, p. 206.
59. The Spectator, #140, August 10, 1711, 2: 54; PA August 10, 1771. Much of this last letter came from an article in the GM of August 1735 (v. 5, pp. 480–81) which, in turn, reprinted this piece from The Prompter #35, July 29, 1735.
60. T&C supplement 1770, p. 686; A Modest Defence of Gaming, p. 16.
61. T&C June 1771, p. 294, ibid., February 1771, p. 89.
62. T&C September 1787, p. 43; GEP September 14, 1775.
63. T&C supplement 1770, p. 686; ibid., November 1775, p. 57.
64. Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, June 1778, in Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter to Mrs. Montague June 1778, 3:73–75; Richard Hey, Three Dissertations, p. 48.
65. T&C, supplement 1770, p. 686; ibid., February 1771, pp. 73–77.
66. T&C February 1771, p. 90; ibid., February 1774, pp. 81–84.
67. [Lydia Grainger] Modern Amours (London, 1733), p. 26; John Wood, An Essay towards a description of Bath [1742] 2nd ed., (London, James Bettenhem, 1749), p. 448.
68. Oliver Goldsmith, Account of the Life of Richard Nash [1762] in the GM, October 1762, p. 491, and November 1762, p. 539. The Times November 17, 1785 and Pleasing reflections on life and manners with essays, characters, & poems, moral & entertaining, principally selected from fugitive publications (London, 1787), p. 84. In a letter which appeared in the European Magazine of December 1797, not only was the Braddock story retold, but its anonymous author included the verse mentioned above as having been composed by a gentleman reading the lines she had etched into her window with the only change being that Dice rather than Cards were mentioned as the fatal snares.
69. Another retelling of the Braddock story appeared in A Collection of interesting anecdotes, pp. 139–40. Charles Crawford, “An Essay Upon Gaming,” European Magazine, August 1797, p. 92.
70. The phrase “deep play,” often mistakenly thought to have been invented by Jeremy Bentham, was widely used in the eighteenth century to refer to limitless, irrational gaming, and was seen as the result of a profoundly immoral addiction. For Bentham’s correct use of the term, see footnote 1, page 106 of his Theory of Legislation (London, K. Paul Trench, Trubner & Co., 1931).
71. White February 2, 1748; for other, similar accounts, see Fog’s January 23 and February 27, 1731, the GM January 1731, p. 25 and December 18, 1755, p. 569. My thanks to John Dussinger for sharing with the many readers of the 18th Century Interdisciplinary Discussion group the interesting and unusual notice in the Daily Journal, September 25, 1722, of the arrest of the participants of a “Female Gaming-House.”
72. PA March 12, 1765; Lloyd September 6, 1765.
73. Bingley’s Journal October 19, 1771, March 28, 1772; Mdsx J April 16, 1772. It is likely that an oblique communique in the Public Ledger, June 15, 1761, which reported the gaming of “two great personages” and the resulting loss to one “of the whole of his fortune to within 300l a year” was a veiled reference to the Rigby/Weymouth debt; Mdsx March 12, 1772 for Fox.
74. Oxford Magazine January 1772, p. 132; LM February 1774, p. 55.
75. LM August 1777, p. 421; Letter from “A Friend to Youth” addressed “To the Nobility and Gentry who frequent Bath,” Gaz August 18, 1777. For similar comments, see GEP May 4, 1775, “An Epigram: addressed to all Gamblers in High and Low Life” and a letter from “Anti-Aleator” to the PA May 11, 1775.
76. For more see David Gadd, Georgian Summer (Bath, Adam & Dart, 1971), p. 80.
77. MH April 17, 1782, ibid., March 6, 1782. While the Herald contained many such evaluations, other papers also included them. Thus, for example, negative assessments of the work of the magistrates can be found in the PA February 1, 1782 and the MC July 9, 1782. The Gaz of November 6, 1782 praised their efforts.
78. It is not always possible to tell, from the newspaper accounts, whether they are reporting the same incident or different ones. For April 1782, for example, we get reports of magistrates, aldermen, and constables breaking up gaming establishments in the St. J April 9, 1782, the White April 9, 1782, and the Gaz April 16, 1782. For activity in July, see the MP July 31, 1782, PA July 31, 1782, White July 27, 1782, MH July 31, 1782, and Gaz July 31, 1782; MP August 6, 1782.
79. MH June 19, 1782, White June 18, 1782. For letters to the editor from family and friends, see “A Distressed Parent” in the MC June 18, 1782; “A Tale of Woe” ibid., July 22, 1782 and White July 20, 1782; from “A Father” in the MC August 8, 1782 and PA August 9, 1782. The Bank of England was very concerned about the gambling of its clerks, often with the Bank’s notes. For the most fully recorded story of such a clerk, see MC August 21, 1782 and MH March 7, 1783.
80. For a typical report of gaming losses, of a “pigeon plucked,” see the PA March 9, 1782; for the £50,000 reputedly won in the previous year by Charles James Fox and his friends at their Faro Bank, see the MH May 5, 1782; and for the unnamed Lord who was said to have won £15,000 in one night’s gaming at the EO Tables, see ibid., June 12, 1782 and the PA June 11, 1782.
81. For Dr. Graham and the Temple of Health, see Roy Porter, “Dr. James Graham,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. It has not been possible to determine whether or not Graham himself participated in the Temple’s subsequent transformation into a gambling house. Its various descriptions are all found in the MH: see June 12, June 13 and June 19, 1782. The report of the destruction of the table and the proprietors’ appearance before Sampson Wright in Bow Street appeared in the Gaz August 7, 9, 1782. Addington’s injury was reported in FFBJ August 10, 1782 and the conviction of Wiltshire in the Gaz December 14, 1782.
82. For notice of the “Genius of Nonsense” see the White June 20, 1782, the PA August 6, 1782 and the MP August 7, 1782. This was probably George Colman’s “Genius of Nonsense,” performed at the Haymarket in 1780, with topical lines added. For the “Nymph of the Grotto” see the MC August 8, 26, 1782 and the MH August 12, 1782. I have been able to find no more information on this event. When Byng introduced the EO Table Bill to Parliament, he commented on the ubiquity of these devices, and jocularly supposed that “shortly the electrical bed itself would be turned into an EO Table.” LC June 4, 1782.
83. The irony of gaming as influenza appeared in the MH July 12, 1782; at least six poems concerning gaming appeared in 1782, an example of one is from “To the People, an Ode,” by Pasquin, jr., printed in ibid., June 21, 1782; the “found letter” appeared in the T&C July 1782, pp. 343–44, and the “Cross-Readings” in the MH July 25, 1782. Effingham, thought to be one of those responsible for the loss of the EO Table Bill, had a white staff as an insignia of his office in the Royal Household.
84. For this, see the LC July 9, 1782, the LP July 10, 1792, and the Gaz July 11, 1782.
85. Both the correspondent’s comment and the subsequent insinuation that Fox was behind the failure of the Bill are found in the MH July 15, 1782; the fictitious dialogue between Fox and Sheridan was published in the T&C July 1782, pp. 342–43; Effingham’s part in its failure, and the proprietors’ thanks appeared in the MC July 12, 1782.
86. LP June 26, 1782.
87. Oxford Magazine July 1769, p. 5. See also letter from “Philanthropos” in the MC September 23, 1773, which noted that it was ridiculous to talk of legal enforcement of the laws against gaming when everyone knew such activity flourished in the houses of their parliamentary representatives.
88. LP June 28, 1782; letter in MH July 1, 1782. See also the front page article in the White of June 29, 1782, “On EO Tables,” reprinted from the European Magazine. This piece, while stressing the grave threat of gaming, concludes by warning against the threat of “a gang of constables” intruding at will into the family life of London’s citizens. The MC of July 8, 1782, however, argued that the justices, if granted this enlarged authority, would act with “all proper caution, circumspection, and with conformity to the laws of the land.”
89. This tag comes from a front page letter in the PA July 27, 1782; the full sentence reads: “[W]e are now unhappily distinguished for Want of Principle, and Profligacy of Manners; an universal Passion for Dissipation of every Kind, an Indifference to our public Concerns, and a scandalous Devotion to Gambling, marks our national Character.…”
90. MC July 15, 1782; MH August 31, 1782, and January 1, 1783.
91. For the decline of magisterial activity against EO houses, see the MH May 14, 1783; a letter to Sampson Wright from “AB” ibid., August 6, 1783, and another complaint ibid., August 11, 1783. However, in 1785 the Herald remarked that “The suppression of EO in this metropolis proved of such an infinite service to the public, that we hope the magistrates will immediately interfere and stop the increase of Faro tables, which have made a rapid progress within these last few weeks, and are no less destructive of the morals, fortunes, and, we might say, honesty of the unfortunate youths, who frequent them” (June 25, 1785).
92. Times December 25, 1789; see also Sketches of Modern Life, 2 vols. (London, W. Miller, 1799), 1:100.
93. Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd ed, 2 vols. (London, W. Strahan, 1755–56), vol. 1; Times November 8, 1786, February 16, 1786.
94. The Times (March 5, 1787) reported that Lord Duncannon had lost £5,000 (and not £50,000 as other papers had claimed) at play in one evening. A month before (February 1, 1787), the same paper noted that “The house lately established in St. James’s street, for the purpose of carrying on a Faro Bank, has already proved materially injurious to some of our young noblemen.”
95. The Times praised Lord Belgrave for being unlike others of his generation, “whilst the greater part of our rising nobility have been anxious to excell at the gaming table, his object has been to make himself acquainted with the constitution of his country” (January 30, 1789); it noted of the Duke of Clarence that he had “an aversion to horse racing, and all kinds of gambling” (August 13, 1789); in its eulogy of the late Earl of Huntingdon, that “gaming and its concomitant vices he not only disapproved, but detested” (October 7, 1789); and facetiously commented that one of the chief imperfections of the Marquis of Abercorn is that he is “is too economical to dissipate his estates at the gaming table …” (October 13, 1790).
96. The King’s Proclamation as reported in the Times June 29, 1787. For actions against Sabbath activities see M. J. D. Roberts, Making English Morals (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004), chapter 2, and Vic Gattrell, City of Laughter (New York, Walter and Co., 2006), chapter 15, and especially the Cruikshank cartoon, “The Enraged Politician or the Sunday reformer,” which “shows Belgrave [the introducer of the Bill to prevent Sabbath-breaking among the poor] getting furious at the bawling news-sellers outside his window while he ignore the din made by a fashionable rout in the grand house opposite” (p. 476).
97. Times July 2, 1787; ibid., September 15, 1787; ibid., April 4, 1791. See also the moralistic tale of Sunday card-playing among the better sort ibid., January 21, 1791.
98. One example of the voluminous attack on the magistrates is found in the Times March 5, 1790; for the suicide of a “a young gentleman of the west of England, who would have inherited at his father’s death, a very considerable family estate,” ibid., February 2, 1790; for the new law, see ibid., December 29, 1790, and for the ascendancy of gaming MC January 10, 1792.
99. Comment about Holcroft’s drama and gambling-houses to be found in the MP January 4, 1790, in the Times of February 23, 1792, and February 6, 1793. For gambling and aristocratic females, see Gillian Russell, “Faro’s Daughters: Female Gamesters, Politics and the Discourse of Finance in 1790s Britain,” Eighteenth Century Studies 33 #4 (Summer 2000): 481–504; Times January 31, 1792.
100. Times December 29, 1789; for later attacks on French gambling houses in London, see MP November 25, 1794, Times November 3, 1796, and MP March 20, 1797. For the World’s cry of despair see February 8, 1792.
101. Letter to the White August 24, 1790; Times December 27, 1791.
102. Times January 8, 1798 (emphasis is mine); see also ibid., March 20, 1797, and July 3, 1797.
103. Ibid., December 31, 1791, February 4, 1792.
104. For Judge Ashurst’s two charges to the Grand Jury see the Times November 16, 1790, the Evening Mail, February 1, 1792, and the Times February 3, 1792. While only 7 reports of magisterial activity against gaming houses appeared in the Times for the first six years of the 1790s, 30 such reports appeared in that paper from 1796 to 1799. In fact, in the last four years of the century, public reports from both King’s Bench and the magistrates’ and quarter-sessions courts increased four-fold. For Garrow’s move for a rule to show cause in issuing a writ against Addington and Kenyon’s response, see the Times April 22, 1796. For Kenyon’s threat to act against magistrates, in the case of The King v. Miller, see MC December 1, 1796.
105. For Kenyon as the force compelling magisterial action against gaming, see the Times May 2, 1796; in comparing the severity with which Kenyon would have acted to the lenity taken by Ford of Bow Street, who blandly commented that “Captain Wheeler, or any other private gentleman, did not act illegally by having such a table as found in his house for the amusement of his family and friends,” see ibid., July 28, 1796; for the need for stiff punishment of the Great in a period of democratic turmoil, see the MC June 28, 1796, and for Kenyon’s remarks on the same issue, see the case of Atkinson v. Holbrook, reported in the Times November 17, 1797.
106. The Times February 16, 1793; ibid., September 18, 1794. Although the number of stories about gaming had been diminishing from 1792, they virtually disappeared in 1794 and 1795.
107. MP February 5, 1798; see also ibid., January 30, 1798; Times September 13, 1798.
108. For the fate of the gambling ladies, see Russell, “Faro’s Daughters,” pp. 489–96. The Times Digital Index lists 36 gambling and gaming stories in 1796, 47 in 1797, 16 in 1798, and 25 in 1799. These, however, while useful, are only “gross” figures, including stories about overseas gaming, and gambling used as a euphemism, rather than as an activity. In terms of real stories published in that paper, the number of actual gambling accounts in 1798 was 14, the same number that appeared in the Times in 1817.
109. In 1798, the Times reported 19 stories about adultery and divorce, in 1799, 16, but the numbers rose to 29 in 1800 and 51 in 1801. While the Times published 100 adultery stories for the first decade of the nineteenth century, it only reported 30 gambling stories for the same period.
110. The Times was the first to report the story of an unnamed young nobleman who had lost £70,000 at play on February 4, 1799; the MH repeated the story a day later, as did the White on February 2, 1799. On February 11th, the Herald added salacious details, only to note, three days later, that Cowper’s death (and only after this occurred, did any of the papers refer to him by name) “commenced with a severe cold, which his Lordship caught while doing duty with the Hertfordshire Regiment of Militia, of which he was a Captain.” Despite this attempt to mitigate the situation, on April 18, 1799, two suits were introduced to the Court of King’s Bench against both the Herald and the Times (criminal informations sought and reported in the Sun, February 14, 1799, and MH April 18, 1799, the King v Bell and the King v Brown). The case against the Times was decided in an extraordinarily lengthy trial report (more than 2800 words long) on July 3, 1799 (see the Times for that date).
111. Times April 2, 1795. While this item dealt with gaming on Sundays, we have seen more generally that through the eighteenth century the example of the Great was always held up as an important contributory to the gaming of the rest. This comes from volume 2 of the reprint of Microcosm of London, or London in Minature [1809], 3 vols. (London, Methuen & Co., 1904), 2: 95. The clergyman’s letter to Sidmouth appeared in the Times November 15, 1816, and it was Judge Grose, in his observations on King v Moore, reported in the Times, February 11, 1800, who made the connection between gaming and other crimes.
112. Times July 22, 1819.
1. [John Corry] A satirical view of London at the commencement of the nineteenth century (London, G. Kearsley, 1801), p. 231.
2. Reminiscences and Recollections of Captain Gronow 1810–1860, 2 vols. (London, John C. Nimmo, 1892), 1:131.
3. See, for example, the account of “The young man apprehended a few days ago by Carpmeal and Miller, with a large amount of forged bills of exchange, and 2000l in Bank notes, supposed to have been obtained by discounting these bills at the Bank, [who] is of a respectable family and connections. He is lately returned from the West Indies, and it is believed the gaming table has been his ruin,” in the MP March 4, 1800. See also the comment in the Oracle February 28, 1800.
4. One interesting exception was the court case between a Mr. Whaley and Sir Thomas Southcott, which came before King’s Bench, and was widely reported; see, for example, White November 6, 1800. The Whaley/Southcott case, according to the account in the MC of February 17, 1801, “has made a very great noise in the gay world …” For other accounts see the LP November 7, 1800 and the Times February 7, 1801.
5. J. L. Chirol, A Sermon on Gaming (London, C. & J. Rivington, 1824), p. 21; in his Sermon on the Vice of Gaming (London, C. & J. Rivington) of 1825, Rev. Benjamin Sanford warned his audience that, among its many other evils, in gamesters, “the heart soon becomes callous … [to] every sentiment of honour” (p. 15); A Letter to Ball Hughes, Esq on Club House and Private Gaming (London, J. Evans, 1824), p. 5.
6. LC March 6, 1800; for more on this case, see the St. J March 4, 1800, and the MP March 6, 1800.
7. MP March 5, 1800; MC November 5, 1800.
8. See GEP February 11, 1800.
9. See for example Times October 4, 1810 for the EO table at the Croyden Fair.
10. “Restitutor” in the GM 1818, pt. ii, p. 586; for Davis’s story see the Times April 10, 1820.
11. For the unnamed merchant seeking to understand his nephew’s losses, see the Times May 23, 1820; Similarly, in case of King v Lee, the tradesman who had lost all his property at Lee’s house “had not confined himself to the loss of his own money; but had actually been induced by his appetite for play to pawn the goods with which other persons had intrusted him.” Times July 4, 1820.
12. For more on the Clutterbuck case, see D. T. Andrew, “ ‘How frail are Lovers vows, and Dicers oaths’: Gaming, Governing and Moral Panic in Britain, 1781–1782” in Moral Panics, the Media and the Law in Early Modern England (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 176–94.
13. Times December 25, 1822.
14. See, for example, the letter to the editor, signed “BB,” in the Times November 24, 1821; another letter which argued that gambling houses could not be put down by actions of the government or the law, but that “the cause of their extinction is likely to be the progress of good sense, just taste, and right feeling in the community …” in the Times October 21, 1821; for more points of view see the Times December 23, 1822, February 13, 1823, July 24, 1824, July 28, 1824, August 31, 1824. For a look at Crockford’s and its history see Henry Blyth, Hell and Hazard or, William Crockford versus the Gentlemen of England (London, Weidenfeld, 1969).
15. “Expositor” in the Times, July 23, 1824. Between this letter and 1827, “Expositor” wrote another four letters about gaming-houses to the Times (August 17, 1824, October 14, 1824, December 10, 1824 and July 25, 1826). Captain Gronow also spent several pages of his Reminiscences dwelling on the luxury of the apartments, and the size of the gaming profits, of Crockford’s, 2:81–6. Editorial in the Times December 16, 1824.
16. Times November 29, 1827.
17. Ibid., May 10, 1830. Blomfield’s missive, A Letter on the Present Neglect of the Lord’s Day, was also criticized by John Bull, and defended by A Letter to the Editor of the Times and Christianus, A letter to the Editor of the Times (London, Rivington’s, 1830).
18. Times August 25, 1831.
19. Reported in the Times, May 10, 1833.
20. The Times (October 3, 1832) noted that most of the £45,000 per annum income that the Duke received was “swallowed up by regular payments of interest and annuities upon gambling and other bonds …”
21. The Times September 26, 1843.
22. Ashton, The History of Gambling, p. 149. For more on postwar gambling see Mark Clapson, A Bit of a Flutter (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1992), chap. 2.
23. Thomas Dibdin, Pilgrim’s Progress (London, Harding & King, 1834), p. 109.
24. Thomas Chevalier, Remarks on Suicide [1824], p. 367.
25. Derby Mercury September 26, 1827.
26. The Ipswich Journal July 26, 1823, Jackson’s Oxford Journal July 26, 1823, the Examiner July 27, 1823, the Derby Mercury July 30, 1823, and the Aberdeen Journal August 6, 1823.
27. Hampshire Telegraph September 28, 1829. See also the account of the inquisition on the body of Rebecca Mabbett, a seventeen-year-old girl, in the Examiner October 22, 1826, or the notice of the boy of ten who drowned himself, and was found felo de se in the MC March 27, 1842.
28. The Examiner June 7, 1840.
29. See for example, the verdict in the case of a servant girl who killed herself, and was found to have taken “mercury in the morning, in a state of temporary derangement, from the effects of the liquor she had taken the night before,” in the Hull Packet August 3, 1833.
30. Examiner September 9, 1838.
31. Leeds Mercury November 25, 1809, Aberdeen Journal January 10, 1810.
32. Times March 1, 1831.
33. Ibid., June 16, 1831.
34. The three data bases employed were the Times Digital Archive, the 17th and 18th Century Burney collection, and the 19th century British Library newspaper collection. Those found felo de se, who died while committing a criminal act, or in any sort of prison or holding institution were systematically eliminated from the count. For the period before 1800, I used the first two of these collections, and for the period after, the second two.
35. These numbers come from the national 19th century British Library collection, though the Times numbers (3 in 1815–24; 5 in 1825–34 and 7 in 1835–44), while smaller, go in exactly the same direction.
36. Times March 18, 1840. The Champion of April 26, 1840 reported a similar comment coming at an inquest, this time from a member of the jury: “A juror said, that whatever might be the opinion of his fellow jury men, he for one would not consent to return any other verdict but felo de se. These matters were treated too lightly by juries in general.”
37. Times October 24, 1826.
38. Examiner January 30, 1831.
39. In his response to press outrage, Gell, in a letter sent to the Times (February 11, 1830) remarked that he set the inquest to begin at 9:45 AM, and that it “was held in a public room, open to all persons …”
40. Times February 9, 1830, MC February 10, 1830, and Courier quoted in the Caledonian Mercury, February 13, 1830.
41. See, for example, the two letters in the Times of February 12, 1830.
42. Times January 31, 1831; MC January 27, 1831. Other papers which mentioned the umbrella were the above-mentioned Times, the Hull Packet of February 1, the Derby Mercury of February 2, 1831 and Freeman’s of February 4.
43. “Indicator” in the Examiner July 17, 1831; Times December 25, 1843.
44. John Galt’s introduction to his play “The Apostle, or Atlantis Destroyed” in The New British Theatre, 4 vols. (London, Henry Cobourn, 1814–15), 4:346.
45. Astley v Garth in the MC February 20, 1827; the Clayton v Franklyn case in the Times of July 26, 1830; Calcraft v Harborough in Bell’s Life, February 13, 1831, and the Bligh v Wellesley trial ibid., July 13, 1827.
46. Ipswich Journal March 17, 1830; MC March 18, 1830, Examiner March 21, 1830, Bristol Mercury March 23, 1830, and the Times March 18, 1830.
47. Lawrence Stone, The Road to Divorce, pp. 430–31; tables 9.1, 9.3 and 9.4.
48. Hull Packet March 20, 1846; see also Bell’s Life, April 1, 1832 for the plaintiff, a Mr. Corner, suing his attorney from debtor’s prison for crim. con., and collecting £500 in damages. In another case reported in the Times of August 25, 1847, Gould v Elton, the plaintiff’s lawyer, in his opening speech to the jury, noted that “the plaintiff, who was a man in humble circumstances, and who brought this action to recover compensation from the defendant, a gentleman of station and fortune …” For Platt’s comments see the Hull Packet February 21, 1845.
49. Traveller, The Art of Duelling (London, Joseph Thomas, 1836), p. 2.
50. Eldrid v Cross in the MC December 2, 1839. Langford v Barrett in Times February 9, 1836. Langford could not have been pleased, however, at the damages of 1 shilling awarded by the jury; Bell’s Life February 15, 1836.
51. Tucker v Gooch in Times January 5, 1842; Wallis v Francis in the Examiner March 12, 1842. The plaintiff in this last case originally asked for £10,000 damages. Similarly in the case of Worrall v Atkins (Times April 6, 1833), the plaintiff agreed to accept £200 and costs to terminate the trial, or the case of Ward v Sinkler, reported in the Era December 13, 1840, in which the plaintiff settled for the sum of 20 shillings, explaining he too had “ulterior goals.”
52. Examiner June 5, 1847.
53. Times April 7, 1830. Stone comments that “it was said this was one of the first cases for decades in which there had been neither a prior crim. con. action nor an explanation why not.” Road to Divorce, p. 324 footnote 68.
54. Phillimore on “The Law of Divorce” in the House of Commons, reported in the MC June 4, 1830. Stone argues that “contemporaries were well aware” that from being a preserve of the aristocracy, divorce had become accessible to wealthy people of other classes [Road to Divorce, p. 327]. However, popular discourse, both within and outside of Parliament used different language to describe those with and without access to such remedies.
55. MC April 7, 1830; see also the Examiner April 4, 1830.
56. This notion of the strategic use of the language of fashion, or of rich and poor, rather than the language of class, owes something to both E. P. Thompson’s Making and Gareth Stedman Jones’s The Language of Class. MC April 7, 1830. See also two letters to the editor on this issue, one signed “Homo” to the Times May 15, 1830; the other signed “Civis,” ibid., June 5, 1830.
57. Bristol Mercury August 22, 1840; this piece is attributed to an unspecified “London paper” which I have been unable to identify. “Homo” cited above, went even farther, and recommended solitary imprisonment as an appropriate punishment for those convicted of adultery.
58. The Examiner March 12, 1842, p. 171. The MC November 7, 1828, for the Cazelet cause; the fact that the adulterer was both a clergyman and a cousin of the husband gave this case a special piquancy.
59. Bell’s Life February 14, 1836, “Crim Con in High Life.”
60. The Satirist; or, the Censor of the Times, “TOEB,” letter to the editor, May 14, 1843, p. 159.
61. Stephen Leach, The Folly and Wickedness of Duelling (London, 1822), p. v.
62. A very rough count of duels reported in the press gives us the figure of fifteen duels fought in the five years between 1805 and 1809 and six in the same length of time between 1816 and 1820.
63. Leach, The Folly, vi; Rev. Peter Chalmers, Two Discourses on the sin, danger and remedy of duelling (Edinburgh, Thomsons Brothers, 1822), pp. 10–12; The Duellist, or a cursory view of the rise, progress and practice of Duelling (1822), pp. 95, 112. For an analysis of the first of these duels, see James N. McCord Jr., “Politics and Honor in Early Nineteenth-Century England: The Dukes’ Duel,” Huntington Library Quarterly 62 (1999), pp. 88–114.
64. Leach, The Folly, p. 15; Chalmers Discourses, pp. 138–39; The Duellist, p. 105; Chalmers, Discourses, pp. 194–95.
65. Winchilsea’s letter and Wellington’s challenge quoted in Elizabeth Longford, Wellington, 2 vols. (London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1969), vol. 2, “Pillar of State,” pp. 186, 187.
66. The Standard March 23, 1829; the New Times March 30, 1829. For more on this duel, see Kathryn Beresford, “The ‘hero of a thousand battles betrays us!’ The duke as hero and villain during the emancipation crisis and after,” Wellington Studies IV (2008), pp. 274–98.
67. The Coote v Armstrong case was reported in the Times June 21, 1800; the MC May 18, 1801, and the Times June 6 and 11, 1801. The King’s letter applauding Coote’s correct action appeared in the Times July 8, 1801.
68. These figures are based on the Times Digital Archive and British Newspaper 1600–1900 database for the years 1800, 1810, 1820, and 1830:
Duelling in the Press
69. See MC January 11, 1830 and the Times of the same day for the first reports of this affair; the Bristol Mercury carried the story the next day.
70. The Daily News August 19, 1847.
71. The original comment of Chambers, published in the MC January 14, 1830, was widely reprinted; it appeared in the North Wales Chronicle on January 14, 1830, which said its report was copied from the Observer. Freeman’s Journal, an Irish newspaper, published the story on January 15, 1830, saying that its report was from the Globe, and the Liverpool Mercury ran the story also on the 15th. The editorial on this comment in the MC appeared on January 19, 1830, and the Examiner’s reprint and further criticism on January 24, 1830.
72. This remarkable editorial was published in the North Wales Chronicle on January 21, 1830. For an equally savage commentary, see the letter to the Age of January 17, 1830, entitled “The Force of Example,” and signed by “FRIEND OF POOR CLAYTON, Who is convinced that he fell a sacrifice to a too-rigid adherence to the Wellington-Principles of Duelling.”
73. The trial was fully reported in the Times April 3, 1830. The jury wished, it seems, to find a verdict of manslaughter, but Bayley, when asked said that “if they found the prisoner guilty of any crime, it must be murder …” and so, again after a long discussion, the jury came back with a Not Guilty verdict. See the Examiner April 13, 1830.
74. “One Who Has …” in the Times July 5, 1843; “J.B.” in response in the Times July 7, 1843.
75. Bell’s Life September 3, 1843.
76. Punch, October 24, 1843, p. 162.
77. Thus the Ipswich Chronicle (March 9, 1844) criticized unnamed Cabinet Ministers and the Attorney General, Smith, of either fighting duels or challenging others to fight. Freemans (March 14, 1844) pointed their finger at Sir Henry Hardinge, a minister of state as did the Era in March 17, 1844 and again, following Munro’s conviction, in August 22, 1847.
78. Freeman’s Journal March 14, 1844; the Examiner August 21, 1847.
79. The Caledonian Mercury of August 23, 1847, thought duelling had ceased, and the Preston Guardian of August 21, 1847, felt that new methods of conflict resolution among the Great would now be found. It was the same editorial which contained the self-congratulatory view of the press’s role in shaping public opinion. Different historians give different dates for “last duels” fought in Britain; if 1843 is not the very end of the line, perhaps 1847 is not far off.
80. See Antony Taylor, Lords of Misrule (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) for the argument that such vicious behavior spurred active dislike of the upper classes till the early twentieth century.
1. The Periodical Press of Great Britain and Ireland: or an Inquiry into the State of the Public Journals, Chiefly as Regards their Moral and Political Influence (London, Hurst, Robinson & Co., 1824), 1. See more generally Aled Jones, Powers of the Press: Newspapers, Power and the Public in Nineteenth Century England (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996).
2. Times December 25, 1789, Samuel Parr, A Discourse on the late Fast (London, J. Dodsley and H. Payne, 1781), p. 28. See James Kelly, “The Decline of Duelling and the Emergence of the Middle Class in Ireland,” in Fintan Lane, ed., Politics, Society and the Middle Class in Modern Ireland (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 97: “The rapid expansion of the public sphere in the second half of the eighteenth century, epitomized by the surge in print, is crucial to the growth of a middle-class voice.”
3. “Experience” in the PA June 13, 1765. See also “Tranquilius” to the Gaz September 16, 1765, “Salus Populi Suprema Lex” to Bingley’s Journal June 9, 1770. William Pitt junior was complimented by one of “those who, perhaps rightly, think private and public Virtue to be inseparable” for his attributes of moderation and economy in the PA July 31, 1782. See also John Brewer, “This, that and the other: Public, social and private in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” in Dario Castiglione and Lesley Sharpe, eds., Shifting the Boundaries: Transformation of the Languages of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century (Exeter, University of Exeter Press, 1995), pp. 1–21.
4. “P” in the GEP March 30, 1773.
5. Olla Podrida September 8, 1787. “Observator” to the Times October 11, 1785; Corry, A satirical view of London, p. 231.
6. E. P. Thompson, “Eighteenth Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class,” Social History (May 1978), p. 144. Bob Harris has also pointed out the reciprocal relationship between this group of people and the rise of the press in his fine book Politics and the Rise of the Press (p. 28): “it is from the growing middling ranks, both in urban and rural areas, that the biggest impetus behind the rise of the newspaper in the eighteenth century appears to have come.”
7. Although this book has argued for the moral condemnation of the mores of the world of fashion as central to the creation of a middling self-consciousness, two other, different, and provocative accounts of this development can be found in Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995) and The Making of the Modern Self (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006). See also Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class (London, Methuen, 1989).