Читать книгу William Hogarth: The Cockney's Mirror - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 8

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The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge were in a state of mental and moral stagnation; the two towns were small copies of London; there were sports, fights, drunken orgies, dirt, brawls, a little work, a good deal of idleness; in many respects the University towns were worse than the capital, as they contained so many lawless young men with little to do, money at their disposal and high opinions of themselves as the future rulers and judges of the land.

There is little to be said about the position of women; the laws largely delivered them and their property to the men, who on the whole did not abuse their power; the Englishman's love of home and of family life persisted through all the distractions of the age.

The aristocracy and the moneyed classes might drink, gamble and riot away health and peace of mind, but the humbler citizen could usually show a pleasant interior to his house.

The home, when domestic necessaries were hand-made and most were made within the household, provided sufficient interests for most of the women, who had only received the scantiest amount of 'book learning,' and who were usually satisfied with the formula of a religion that, to simple minds, seemed to supply all spiritual needs.

For the woman who had no taste for domesticity or piety, there was little scope; a few daring bas bleus protected by birth and means, a few cultured great ladies with position and leisure, might venture to be original in their mode of life, to express individuality in word and action, but for the rest a woman's safety and happiness depended entirely upon her compliance with convention.

Not only an illicit love affair, but the suggestion of one did literally 'ruin' a woman.

Since, even if she owned property, some male never failed to get it by marriage, and it was impossible for her to earn more than the meanest sums at the meanest labours, a woman who broke with her family soon found herself in the position of an outcast and a criminal; the 'dishonoured' woman was treated with a more brutal contempt than that meted out to the vilest and most wretched of the opposite sex.

It was a paradox in the manners of the age that the man who made the seduction of innocent young women one of his sports was excused, no matter what trickery he employed to gain his end, while his victim, however deceived, trapped or forced, was considered forever 'lost;' her only escape from sinking to the utmost degradation was, as Oliver Goldsmith observed, 'to die.'

On the other hand, there was no lack of willing damsels to swell the ranks of 'the votaries of pleasure' and to risk Bridewell, the cart, the lazar-house, for the sake of ease and luxury; the vast underworld of London was peopled with women as clever, as vile, as cruel, as coarse as the men whom they served, and the horribly frequent spectacle of the depths to which women could sink no doubt helped to enforce the severe line of demarcation between the protected, respected woman and her 'fallen' sister.

The morality of the women of the upper classes was, as always, a thing apart; they were expected only to keep up appearances; no great courtezans set the tone of the Court or society, no actress or singer of genius broke all conventions and was a focus of brilliant manners; there were no salons, but many of the aristocratic ladies were cynically Unmoral.

Among the middle classes the female standard was high, but far too self-consciously 'virtuous;' the emphasis given to the value of chastity and its attendant graces, decorum and prudery, put all other qualities in the shade; the 'good' woman was the constant wife or the spotless spinster; no variation was allowed on this theme; the age that romanticized and sentimentalized the 'erring' woman had not arrived, there was no social reformer to pity, no poet to celebrate the woes of the Jennys and Molls who traipsed the London streets and perished in Bridewell or the hospital.

If prostitutes had never been in greater numbers or more openly flaunting, never had they been treated with more harshness; when one false step sent a woman down to the gutter and the jail, female character became, on one hand, timorously rigid and hypocritical, on the other, cynically hardened and debased.