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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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RGL e-Book Cover
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THE distresses of the country increase rather than diminish. The burden of public debt, the depression of trade, the Poor Law and the Corn Law, all these combine to depress our standard of living. Session after Session have the talents of the first men of the age been exercised without avail. Nothing has been done, no cure effected.
No, I am not quoting from one of the 1920 reviews, but from a pamphlet published in the year 1820. In 1820 Waterloo was five years past, and the state of our country was in many respects astonishingly similar to what it is to-day. Listen to this, a continuation of the same jeremiad:
Mr. Tierney says that it is paper currency; Mr. Brougham puts it down to excessive taxation; Mr. Baring to restricted trade; while Sir Francis Burdett alleges that our troubles are due to lack of Radical reform.
The more I have read of the state of Britain in 1820 the more I have been struck by the extraordinary closeness of the parallel and the way in which history has repented itself. The price of gold and silver, for instance, was very much the same as to-day. Silver was 7s. 3d. an ounce, and gold 110s. The coinage was almost all paper, which, then as now, was thoroughly disliked. I found a letter from the owner of a country estate who bitterly laments that his rent roll, which had been £8,000 a year during the earlier years of the century, had now fallen to £5,000, out of which he had to pay exorbitant taxes.
The poorer classes were complaining of the price of bread. In the early part of 1820 the 4lb. loaf had been as high as a shilling and a halfpenny. By Christmas it had fallen to tenpence, but wages had not risen greatly, and there is no doubt but that the working classes were hard put to it to make ends meet. Their children often went hungry.
Beef in 1820 varied between three and four-pence and four and tenpence a stone of eight pounds; mutton was about the same; but pork, as now, much dearer. It varied between five and seven shillings a stone. Potatoes, too, were very dear, running up to £7 a ton. Hay was from £3 to £4 15s. a load. These prices, low as they may seem to us, were enormously higher than they had been at the end of the 18th century. The question of the public debt was very much in all men's minds. It stood at the then unheard-of figure of £633,000,000, and the annual charges were forty-six and a half millions. Seeing that the whole revenue of the country was only fifty-four and a half millions, while the outgoings were seventy-three and three-quarter millions, thinking men might be pardoned for taking a serious view of the state of things. It is quite certain that many believed the country to he on the verge of bankruptcy. The heavy duty that had been placed on spirits was a great grievance. One man writes that since a gallon of British spirits sells for fifteen and sixpence, of which the duty amounts to eleven shillings there is no margin of profit left for the unfortunate distiller or publican.
As now, there was much agitation on the subject of education. And with good reason. Out of the 12,500 parishes in England, no fewer than 3,500 had no schools at all of any description, while only 3,000 had endowed schools. Less than half the children had not even a chance of learning their letters.
Hydrophobia comes in for a good deal of mention in the records of 1820. It was a perfect plague in England, and there was, of course, no muzzling order. One doctor of the day suggested the heroic remedy of a bath of pounded ice. As he says, it can't do worse than kill the patient, and if it does, well, it is no worse than the disease itself.
Much interest was taken by our ancestors of a century ago in certain of the inventions of the age, especially in the steam carriage of Messrs. Trevithick and Vivian. This had an engine with a single eight-inch cylinder, and was capable of drawing ten tons of coal at five miles an hour. Another novelty was a passenger boat built of malleable iron. It was called the "Vulcan" and was 63ft. long and 13ft. beam. It was really a glorified barge for canal traffic, was said to be very manageable, and nicely fitted with seats and awning. It was in 1820 that Capt. Marryat introduced his new lifeboat which had airtight compartments and was so constructed that, when upset, it would right itself again. It would carry no fewer than 64 people.
There appears to have been a deal of counterfeit money abroad a century ago. During the year 1820 no fewer than 29,083 forged bank notes were presented for payment. Two hundred and seventy-five persons were prosecuted for trying to pass counterfeit money, and thirty were hanged outright for this offence. One more parallel with the present day. Among the pamphlets of that year of 1820 you may read one dealing with the great advantages of the French decimal system over our confused system of weights and measures. The author makes one point which I do not seem to remember in reading modern arguments on the same much-debated subject. We have, he says, shown our appreciation of the system by already partially adopting it. The Bank of England prints notes, not for £6, £7, £8, but for £5, £10, £20. All his arguments are crisp and to the point. It seems incredible that three generations have passed since that pamphlet was written and yet we still jog on in the old rut of pounds, shillings, and pence, yards, perches, and miles.
In the Annual Register of 1820 we find the usual reference to the extraordinary mildness of Christmas. Primroses, it appears, were in bloom in the woods at Hampstead and Hammersmith, while in many gardens violets were being picked.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page
This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
Original content added by RGL (e.g., introductions, notes,
RGL covers) is proprietary and protected by copyright.