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Charles Elliott on T. H. White - Slightly Foxed Issue 64

Great Gossips

T. H. White (1906–64) was clearly a strange fellow, which should be evident to anyone who has read his books. The best known, of course, is his Arthurian epic, The Once and Future King (progenitor of Camelot), but he also wrote such memorable – and delightful – books as Mistress Masham’s Repose (about a crew of Lilliputians who fetch up in the garden of an English estate, see SF no. 2), a moving account of training a goshawk, and a sort of diary about field sports and flying called England Have My Bones. He even translated a medieval bestiary.

If the range of his writings gives a hint of his eccentricity, his writing itself – quirky, succinct, honest and frequently funny – does the rest. White was not a happy man; he was driven and to a degree self-destructive, yet his enthusiasms and interests were unstoppable. This is why I personally treasure a couple of books out on the edge of his oeuvre, The Age of Scandal and The Scandalmonger, a pair of off-beat anthologies/commentaries on the eighteenth century that deal with what Lytton Strachey called ‘the littleness underlying great events’. Probably nobody else would have put them together with quite the verve and amusement that White did.

It helped that he was by nature conservative if not hidebound, savagely opposed to most aspects of modern life. ‘I believe’, he writes (only slightly tongue-in-cheek), ‘that the peak of British culture was reached in the latter years of George III: that the rot began to set in with the “Romantics”, that the apparent prosperity of Victoria’s reign was autumnal, not vernal: and that now we are done for.’ Such an attitude amply justifies his retreat into the company of those engaging and talkative chroniclers of his favourite period – Horace Walpole, Boswell, Johnson, Thomas Creevy, the wi

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T. H. White (1906–64) was clearly a strange fellow, which should be evident to anyone who has read his books. The best known, of course, is his Arthurian epic, The Once and Future King (progenitor of Camelot), but he also wrote such memorable – and delightful – books as Mistress Masham’s Repose (about a crew of Lilliputians who fetch up in the garden of an English estate, see SF no. 2), a moving account of training a goshawk, and a sort of diary about field sports and flying called England Have My Bones. He even translated a medieval bestiary.

If the range of his writings gives a hint of his eccentricity, his writing itself – quirky, succinct, honest and frequently funny – does the rest. White was not a happy man; he was driven and to a degree self-destructive, yet his enthusiasms and interests were unstoppable. This is why I personally treasure a couple of books out on the edge of his oeuvre, The Age of Scandal and The Scandalmonger, a pair of off-beat anthologies/commentaries on the eighteenth century that deal with what Lytton Strachey called ‘the littleness underlying great events’. Probably nobody else would have put them together with quite the verve and amusement that White did. It helped that he was by nature conservative if not hidebound, savagely opposed to most aspects of modern life. ‘I believe’, he writes (only slightly tongue-in-cheek), ‘that the peak of British culture was reached in the latter years of George III: that the rot began to set in with the “Romantics”, that the apparent prosperity of Victoria’s reign was autumnal, not vernal: and that now we are done for.’ Such an attitude amply justifies his retreat into the company of those engaging and talkative chroniclers of his favourite period – Horace Walpole, Boswell, Johnson, Thomas Creevy, the wits, diarists, letter writers and gossips. The fragments he assembles here add up to nothing profound, which may be why they are so much fun. I was in college when The Age of Scandal was published in 1950 (its companion, The Scandalmonger, came out two years later) and was so delighted by it that I decided to become an eighteenth-century scholar myself. I’m glad to report that this did not happen – I came to my senses sometime around 1954, with the US draft (that is, conscription). In the meantime, however, I rejoiced in everything eighteenth-century, from Gibbon to Stephen Duck, the Thresher Poet. I went so far as to collect Boswell’s poetry for a graduate paper (don’t ask – it’s terrible). To this day I am happy to subscribe to White’s comment that ‘few people seem to realize how charming and peculiar The Age of Scandal was’. The key to its attraction was gossip. In the palaces of royalty and the salons of the aristocracy gossip flourished, spinning off bon mots and stories which were usually disgraceful. Horace Walpole reported with feline delight the ‘fracas at Kensington’ when George II had his chair pulled out from under him and, ‘being mortal in the part that touched the ground’, quite failed to see the joke. George I, it turns out, spent much of his time in his mistress’s apartment cutting up paper, while George IV convinced himself that he had commanded a division at Waterloo (he hadn’t). True or not, the gossip is memorable and, among the jokes and tall tales, White offers dozens of equally memorable facts. Who would have guessed, for instance, that British soldiers used 6,500 tons of flour for powdering their hair every year? Or that officers carried umbrellas during the battles of the Peninsular War? (Wellington disapproved. ‘On duty at St James’s [Guards] may carry them if they please; but in the field it is not only ridiculous but unmilitary.’) If there is a hero in these books, it is Horace Walpole, the epicene son of the great politician Sir Robert Walpole (but possibly the illegitimate offspring of Alexander Pope’s enemy Lord Hervey). Rich enough to be idle, Horry wrote long gossipy letters, published his own books and created a plasterwork palace at Strawberry Hill (‘the little Ark with pinnacles’) that led public fashion into a taste for the Gothic. The parade of human folly delighted him. Writing of the gambling craze in 1770, he describes it as ‘worthy of the decline of an Empire’ and reports how two gentlemen ‘had made a match for five hundred pounds between five turkeys and five geese to run from Norwich to London’. Nor was that the most exotic bet. One gambling man, wagering that a human being could live under water, recruited a ‘desperado’, placed him in a box and submerged him. He drowned. Undaunted, the gambler recruited another, presumably with the same result. Then there was ‘bottom’. White devotes a whole chapter to this concept, which had a very different meaning in the eighteenth century from the one it has today. Bottom was a quality a gentleman was expected to have, and meant something like courage or grace under pressure. It might apply to the ability to hold one’s nerve at cards or to undergo a flogging, or a willingness to out-drink another. Dr Johnson sums up the latter talent with this ‘magnificent apostrophe’: ‘No, Sir, claret is the liquor for boys; port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.’ Displaying one’s bottom might have tragic consequences. To prove that he had the nerve to cure his hiccoughs, the famous daredevil John Mytton set his nightshirt on fire and incinerated himself. It is tempting – and perhaps not such a bad idea – simply to browse through these books plucking out small treasures of wit or narrative. They make ideal bedtime reading. Witness, for example, the terrifying Mrs Schellenberg, an aged member of the court of George III’s queen, whose German accent could ‘shatter’ English idioms. As Fanny Burney reports, Mrs Schellenberg had another peculiarity. She kept a pair of pet frogs. ‘I can make them croak when I will,’ Burney reports her saying. ‘When I go so to my snuff-box, knock, knock, knock, they croak all what I please.’ Dogs were considerably more common companions, and more fashionable; White notes that Mrs Thrale, ‘though not particularly doggy’, had about sixteen of them in the house, while ‘the Marquis de Sade had a hound which conformed loyally to its master’s theories: it ate six sheep and was called Dragon’. Life could be challenging in the eighteenth century. So melodramatic was the time, ‘so much the reverse of the Age of Reason . . . that the strain of living in those decades might have intimidated a cowboy’, White writes.

The heaths were sprinkled with highwaymen and gibbets, the towns patrolled by window-smashing mobs, the people of the sea-ports ready to fly from the press gangs or from the smugglers, London rich in brothels which were called bagnios and in gin shops where it was possible to ‘get drunk for a penny or dead drunk for twopence’.

Nor did you need to be on a country lane to run into trouble. George II, while walking in the very centre of London, was confronted by a highwayman in Kensington Gardens who, ‘with a manner of great deference’, relieved him of his purse, his watch and his shoe buckles. The Neapolitan ambassador was robbed in Grosvenor Square. Violence, in fact, seems to have been pervasive. Even religion had its rough edges, with class distinctions shaping sects from the Ranters (‘these uneducated and generally insane enthusiasts’) to the highest Anglicans. Firmness in one’s faith could reach an alarming pitch. Edward Thurlow, the crusty Lord Chancellor under George III, thus addressed himself to a deputation of Nonconformists:

I’m against you, by God. I am for the Established Church, damme! Not that I have any more regard for the Established Church than for any other church, but because it is established. And if you can get your damned religion established, I’ll be for that too!

The Reverend Sydney Smith showed the same spirit. On his deathbed he complained of being so weak that ‘I verily believe, if the knife were put into my hand, I should not have the strength or energy enough to stick it into a Dissenter.’ The Dissenters, on the other hand, could hardly be ignored. The great Methodist John Wesley (‘dismal and humourless’ in White’s view) preached no less than 42,400 sermons in his long career. All this energy was hardly confined to wit and eccentricity but had a tendency to shift into actual, bloody violence as well. White, possibly to an unfortunate degree, has a taste for this. Executions, duels and general mayhem come in for considerable attention. While he points out that the duels gradually became gentrified, governed by rules of conduct so detailed that opponents ‘could treat each other, even in the act of slaughter, with scrupulous good manners’, it took very little to offend a noble lord. One gentleman took to his bed for six weeks after receiving a letter from a fellow peer that omitted ‘very’ in signing a letter to him as ‘your [very] humble servant’. There was nothing at all genteel about executions. The list of crimes for which hanging could be imposed was improbably long, and each one took place before cheering crowds of onlookers. There was even a fashion for necrophilia. Horace Walpole’s creepy friend George Selwyn achieved a dubious sort of fame for what was described as his ‘passion to see coffins and corpses, and executions’. Selwyn had been sent down from Oxford for celebrating Holy Communion while pretending to be Jesus Christ. Many stories, generally gruesome, were told about him. I rather like the one about Lord Holland, on his deathbed. ‘Next time Mr Selwyn calls,’ Holland told his servant, ‘show him up. If I am alive, I shall be delighted to see him, and if I am dead he will be delighted to see me.’ Given the physical circumstances of life at the time, insouciance about death may have been necessary. ‘Five of Crabbe’s seven children died,’ White notes; ‘Gibbon was the sole survivor of seven siblings; four of Sterne’s brothers died; Gray was the only one who lived, from a family of twelve.’ In a way I’m slightly embarrassed to be recommending The Age of Scandal and The Scandalmonger. After all, great matters were being decided in the second half of the eighteenth century – wars of various sizes fought, the machine age approaching, political movements underway that would change the shape of society. Important stuff, in other words, pretty much none of which touches these books as more than the faintest off-stage echo. What we get instead is history as entertainment. Still, so far as I am concerned, there is room in the world for that.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 64 © Charles Elliott 2019


About the contributor

Charles Elliott is a retired editor and the author of several books of essays.

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