Hutton was born in Derby on 30 September 1723 and like most children before or since, his first thoughts were about his mother. Unlike most children today, his memories of his mother were to be limited, as Ann was to survive a mere nine more years after his birth, and for most of the time she struggled – ‘time produced nothing but tatters and children’ said Hutton, in one of his many thought-provoking poetic turns of phrase.
Wool Comber
In the eighteenth century, the death of your mother at forty-one would bring grief but not much surprise. Her husband William had been a self employed wool comber, but when William junior was two years old his business failed and he became as a journeyman – a day worker for other people. Wool combing was a hot and greasy job which was done at home. Raw wool was straightened with large combs of increasing fineness so it was separated and of equal length. This was a precarious occupation, as Hutton was to discover, but his family were made poorer than they should have been by their father’s lack of application. Both before and after his business failure, William seemed to be supine and intemperate. He delayed decisions, drank too much and alienated his wife, and the whole family suffered.
It was a coarse, cruel and often calamitous life. At the age of two Hutton set fire to his petticoats, frock and bib, normal clothing for both Georgian girls and boys. These clothes were flammable; he was playing next to an open fire with a paper fan that his sister had given him, and he just avoided self-immolation. Hutton recounts this story in a direct and matter of fact tone which suggests that his childhood was typical of the time. This is another example;
My mother observed I was the largest child she ever had, but ordinary – a softer word for ugly-[she was] afraid she should never love me.
In the Georgian era, childhood ended at about four to six years old. Hutton’s ended at the age of four when he was breeched. Up to this point he would have had long hair and petticoats and been undistinguishable from a girl, and the breeching was a rite of passage at which he should have been the centre of attention. Reaching four years old was a milestone worth celebrating; Hutton knew this, as his brother George had just died, aged three and a half. The eighteenth century graveyards contained large numbers of seventy and eighty year olds but average life expectancy was a mathematical calculation, rendered low by the regular death of children before the age of five. Every family, even the rich ones, knew this fact painfully.
Life wasn’t great. He was not at home when he was breached and so had nobody to buy him new clothes. With his mother and father’s relationship being in a mess he was moved away, spending his time alternatively between his mother’s bachelor uncle at Mountsorrel, Leicestershire and his ‘three crabbed aunts’, all single and living two miles away. None of them liked him. They called him ugly, like his father, and Hutton wondered why you would insult somebody with a fault that they could not rectify.
When his mother came to get him, he was dragged out of his bed half-naked by a servant girl, placed on a horse with the uncle and they rode to Loughborough to pick up a goods wagon to take them on the Derby. He had a pillow under him on the horse, but there would be no suspension of any kind on the wagon. His father, seeing him for the first time in fifteen months, said two words only; ‘Oh Bill’.
Aged just over four, work became part of his life. He went on errands, wearing his best suit, cocked hat and walking stick when going to school. He looked after his two brothers when his mother was at work, and gave the family their milk porridge in the morning (one day he completely forgot his father, who characteristically, did not notice or do anything about it.)
‘My days of play were coming to an end’, Hutton said; he was six at the time. He needed paid work; child labour in the eighteenth century was only regarded as a problem if there was none available. The first job proposed was a domestic occupation like his father’s; winding thread around bobbins. The second was in a grocer’s, stripping tobacco leaves.
Derby Silk Mill today- the sanitised and cruelty-free version
Hutton was one of the first ever witnesses to the industrial revolution. The family lived in Full Street, Derby and almost within sight of Britain’s first every factory Hutton was one of the youngest workers in this new form of employment. The Derby Silk Mill had been operating since about 1717, and was a curiosity and a tourist attraction. When Daniel Defoe visited, he said it was ‘a curiosity in trade worth observing, as being the only one of its kind in England’. The new ways of factory working may have been born in Derby, but Hutton hated it. The five am start, the cruel use of the cane for every trivial infraction, and the foul language and manners of those who worked there revolted him. It was made much worse because he was the youngest of the 300 workers, and needed lifts on his shoes to operate the machines.
Aged four and a half, his teacher grabbed him by the hair and smashed his head against the wall. The fact that it was worthy of only one sentence says a lot. Extreme violence against children was commonplace. At Christmas 1732, Hutton was beaten so badly that his father’s walking stick was smashed into pieces. His crime was two-fold; he lost a halfpenny when he was flipping and tossing it, and he was cheeky when told off. He took the bits of the stick and used them as a toy; he always, in his mind, made the best of bad job, a theme he would revisit regularly to explain how a boy from a normal background made it good.
All this explains how he put up with, but still hated, the regular violent bullying at the mill. His master Richard Porter hit him repeatedly on the same place on his back and the point of his cane pierced an existing wound. Putrefaction set in and even his father was alarmed, and young William was bathed in Kedleston water, local spa water that cured the gravel (kidney stones) when drunk and healed skin and ulcers when bathed in. ‘A cure was effected, and I yet carry the scar’ said Hutton, and this was not a metaphor.
Accidents were common in all areas of life and the mill was no better, but not necessarily much worse. He had a near miss, nearly losing a hand in an accident where the machine could have been stopped in time. Hutton resented the unnaturalness of it all; the lack of choice in personal relationships, the inability to make lasting friends and the inability to learn a trade or make personal progress. After his seven years of servitude, his ‘apprenticeship’ had failed to find him a job, and he was not surprised at all.
On 29 March 1732, aged 9 he attended his first execution. John Hewitt had poisoned his wife, with the assistance of his lover Rosamund Ollerenshaw, and the pair, walking to the gallows with a clergymen on either and surrounded by a great crowd, were hanged in their shrouds. The crowds were so enthusiastic that he had the greatest trouble getting there, being pushed into the river at the stepping-stones.
Death, poverty and coarseness were everywhere. His mother died in 1733, after the birth of yet another child, Samuel. Her nurse was useless and Ann did the work herself, and Hutton claimed it was rinsing sheets in cold water that hastened her death. She had a miserable life living with her drunken spendthrift husband; the days of involuntary fasting did her more damage than washing in cold water. Hutton recalled the Christmas of 1728, when the lack of food in the house was made worse by having no knives, and the father, who ‘was never in the habit of buying except ale’ sent out the daughter to borrow one.
When he was told about his mother’s death he burst into tears but went back to work at the mill immediately. He was told by a friend of his late mother that it was fruitless to cry, for he too would be dead soon. In the 1817 edition of his book, he mentioned his grandfather’s children who had also died early. ‘They slept before their time; nor is it of much consequence whether a man sleeps at one or one hundred. When the candle is out, no matter how long it has burnt’. There’s a cheerful thought, but, given Hutton’s earlier life, quite justifiable.
On Tuesday died, of a dropsy, Miss Sarah Hinves, eldest daughter of Mr. Hinves, plumber, aged 26, after three years affliction, and a sixteenth operation, which she bore with much patience and calm resignation to the divine will.
Hampshire Chronicle 29 April 181
Poor Sarah died of one of the more dreaded of the Georgian diseases-dropsy, or, as the article says ‘a dropsy’, as it manifested itself in different ways. Dropsy is a form of acute water retention in the tissues. These days, it is much, much less of a problem; it is now called Oedema and the average first-world resident would only encounter dropsy in their pet fish. In the Georgian era, it was different. It could kill you and make your miserable before it did, and if it killed you, you would be a very unattractive corpse.
.Poor Sarah died of one of the more dreaded of the Georgian diseases-dropsy, or, as the article says ‘a dropsy’, as it manifested itself in different ways. Dropsy is a form of acute water retention in the tissues. These days, it is much, much less of a problem; it is now called Oedema and the average first-world resident would only encounter dropsy in their pet fish. In the Georgian era, it was different. It could kill you and make your miserable before it did, and if it killed you, you would be a very unattractive corpse.
In 1809 when Sarah Hinves first felt unwell, there would have been bloating in the stomach, arms or legs, chest, feet or bowels, or more than one. She would have regarded it as an affliction in itself, but ‘dropsy’ was a symptom of liver, kidney or cardiac disease. Malnutrition could also provoke it; we do not know how poor the Hinves were. Sarah may have suffered in many ways, depending on her dropsy or dropsies. Dropsy in limbs would make walking and working very difficult. A distended stomach was a common symptom, as was constipation (an aversion to motion, as the Georgians might say) as the retained water restricted the bowels. Appetite would be poor as the digestive system clogged up. Breathlessness was common, caused by compression of the lungs by the surrounding liquid. All internal organs would be under pressure. It was usually difficult to sleep because it was difficult to lie down-one victim managed no more than four hours a night over a period of a year
Dropsy courting consumption, with the mausoleum conveniently behind
The first line of defence was purging and diuretics. The more urine you could pass, the more comfortable you would be. You would also need laxatives to compensate for the distended stomach blocking the digestion system. There were folk cures as well, some of them, like taking foxglove, actually worked, as they contained digitalis. Most, like grinding sixteen nutmegs and eating them, did not. Most of our descriptions come from the lurid advertisements of the Georgian quack doctors. This is an alarmist source, of course, but the need for credibility meant that the description of symptoms had to be credible.
The first line of defence was purging and diuretics. The more urine you could pass, the more comfortable you would be. You would also need laxatives to compensate for the distended stomach blocking the digestion system. There were folk cures as well, some of them, like taking foxglove, actually worked, as they contained digitalis. Most, like grinding sixteen nutmegs and eating them, did not. Most of our descriptions come from the lurid advertisements of the Georgian quack doctors. This is an alarmist source, of course, but the need for credibility meant that the description of symptoms had to be credible.
A folk cure that often worked
In 1799, Dr Bodrum’s, reported on a patient Mrs Jewel ( the wife of a linen draper, although the relevance of that is unclear) whose ankles swelled over her shoes as her legs ballooned. She could not breath. She was cured by a course of his Nervous Cordial ( large bottle one pound ten shillings) while others had despaired. Among the list of outlets where his medicine could be purchased was Jenner of Stroud – the same man who was about to revolutionise vaccination. In the next column of the newspaper, (Gloucester Journal 15 April 1799) the same Jenner is selling Whiteheads Essence of Mustard which conveniently cured a host of diseases, as ever in CAPITAL LETTERS – RHUEMATISMS, GOUT, LUMBAGO, PALSY. Most quack doctors claimed that the same medicine would cure lots of diseases; Dropsy was often linked with the Gravel- a painful expulsion of small stones in the kidney through the urinary system. This was the painful Georgian age.
No details were given; but Dr Bodrum’s nostrum would have been a diuretic. Another such medicine, this time in the disguise of an ancient remedy, was posited by the Newcastle Chronicle (1771). This suggested a sulphur and antimony paste twice a day and a limited of the amount of water per day (850 millilitres/ 1.5 pints) and no food with a high water content. Antimony was as poisonous as arsenic, but less likely to kill as it would induce vomiting and the violent evacuation of the bowels before it could kill you; clearly it would be a purgative of the most extreme form.
A slightly less dangerous cure from the Hampshire Chronicle was an eighteen day diet of living on broad beans and as little other liquid as possible; it may have been a cure for the terrible purging and poisoning that it replaced ; it also seems true that the broad bean is a diuretic. The popularity of pills and potions ( vapour baths, fumigations and frictions) was partly because the alternative was horrible. This was tapping.
Tapping involved removing liquid by inserting a drip in the abdomen or navel, puncturing the skin with a large curved needle and allow gravity to push out liquid from the tissues. This means that the patient would need to be standing up while this invasive work took place. The process was a mitigation, not a cure and would need to be repeated if the patient was not to drown in their own body fluid. We know Sarah endured this sixteen times.
Death was often caused by the tapping. In December 1798, an obituary suggested that Mrs Peach of Edgeware had been tapped eighty times; the Hampshire Chronicle ( October 1798) the Hampshire Chronicle recounted thrifty- three tapping for Mr Lad of Ipswich, noting that the liquid that came out was starchy and cloudy.
Dropsy was reasonably democratic. The Prince Regent had gout and dropsy in his final years, which were spent in Windsor in painfull misery. Charles James Fox died of it in 1806. When the obligatory reassurances were given to Fox about his recovery, the suffering politician knew the truth. Was there nothing that could be done about the accumulation of fluid in his body? ‘No was the reply: if the water is let out by one vent, it will only be to make room for more’
This was inspired by my latest research on Edward Law, Lord Ellenborough. His wife Anne had dropsy. Get the book and find out what happened to her!
An extract from my book which features more Victorian Radicals like Anna
In a freezing February in 1888, a vicar’s wife lay dying at the tragically early age of forty-one. Her husband was the vicar at Atcham, Shrewsbury, but her deathbed scene unfolded at their rented flat at 15, Wynnstay Gardens Kensington, a newly-built mansion block of apartments for the respectable middle classes. She had known she was dying since the previous November, but it was taking a very long time. Recuperation in the South of France and the Italian Riviera had not helped. She had suffered with her lungs all through her life; now they were killing her.
When the crisis came, she was attended by a catholic priest and the last rites were administered. She was buried modestly at her husband’s church in the presence of close friends, and her grave can still be seen today, placed prudently at a high point above the waterline of the nearby river, as directed in her will. These were the last days of Anna Kingsford, born Annie Bonus, in 1846. The death certificate revealed nothing; she was a wife of Algernon Godfrey Kingsford, a clerk in Holy orders; she died of Pulmonary Phthisis – Tuberculosis – a scourge of the Victorian era.
She also considered cremation
This sounds dull and conventional. It was neither.
She was not obscure. The tragic news was recorded in the newspapers, and the second clue was the tone of these obituaries:
Anna was the eighteenth British women to qualify as a doctor (1880), which was enough to make her significant at the time, though not quite significant enough for her profession to appear on the death certificate.
‘Remarkable’, and ‘certain sections’ were euphemisms; it was shorthand for a woman with too many unconventional opinions; a middle class vicar’s wife who ought to have known better and fifty years earlier would have not have been heard at all. The obituaries acknowledged her importance but mocked her as an outlier, a maverick and a deluded extremist. This conclusion has not shifted much in the century and a half since her death.
Apart from some recent revival of interest, she is a forgotten woman. This is undeserved. The reasons for her obscurity are many; she was a woman; she was women whose ideas did not prosper until a century after her death, so when her principles became popular she was given none of the credit. Some of her other ideas, the ones that were the most dear to her, are regarded today as unconventional and this means that she has not, like other radicals featured in this book, been able to claim the mantle of a prophet. The final reason for her obscurity is an egotistical man who thought he knew her better than she did herself.
Kingsford was both rash and unpredictable; but at least she was self aware and often surprised herself.
It is quite true that I find myself much the most interesting person I know
It is because I am such a puzzle to myself and I want to be explained.
She was incapable of being controlled by the normal rules, defied classification and could not be pigeon-holed.
She reacted extremely to the traditional education offered to middle class girls Her Brighton finishing school failed to turn her into a marriage- friendly material. Her main objection was the suppression of emotion and feeling Learning Shakespeare became merely reading it aloud, bad enough for a girl who read veraciously, but worse when she was reprimanded for pretending to be the character. She troubled the authorities by asking religious questions that were not satisfactorily answered. She saw an unambitious education system designed merely to provide superficially knowledge of preselected subjects to avoid social embarrassment. An unchallenging education was the first stage in women’s inferiority. The antidote to education was her own reading. Two years after her short two year spell at school, her poems about love, loss and the nature of the soul were being reviewed by the Athenaeum.
She campaigned actively, tirelessly and fearlessly from the late 1860s and crammed a lot into her four decades. She was brave, forthright and charismatic, could hold an audience on the palm of her hand and was an accomplished writer of both fiction and non-fiction. She supported the women’s campaign for property rights and the vote. She rejected the outward form of the Church of England as insufficient to her spiritual needs. She was an anti-vivisectionist as well as a proselytising vegetarian, which was the thing she was most remembered for at her death. She was, according to one paper ‘addicted to vegetarianism’.
Her radicalism was aided by the fact that her family were rich. Anna was allowed to follow her interests after the death of her father John Bonus in 1865. She had around £800 year to live on, enough to do nothing with her life if she had chosen to. The first stage of this life of domesticity was marriage, and her mother rightly saw her as an excellent prospect. The family were rich, successful and prosperous and Annie was intelligent, strikingly beautiful and financially secure.
Her choice of husband was her first cousin Algernon ‘Algie’ Kingsford , a mild mannered clerk who had recently entered Litchfield Theological College- a poor man’s route into the Church of England, much less prestigious than the traditional route via the ancient universities. Her mother was aghast at the prospect of a prospective husband who might as well have had ‘curate for ever’ written on his forehead because of his lack of qualifications, connections, and family money.
The rich and respectable family reacted in the traditional way to such youthful flings, but without the traditional success. Her mother planned to send her to Switzerland with other girls for distraction and a boring elderly relative to ensure that distraction did not become bad behaviour. Kingsford was having none of it. She was able to exploit rigid Victorian rules about conduct before marriage by eloping with Algie unchaperoned for two weeks, thus making marriage inevitable. Algie and Annie married on the last day of 1867 in the parish church of comfortable, middle class St Leonard’s-on-Sea, and event that was recorded three days later in the Times.
Many of our Victorian radicals had little good to say about marriage in the nineteenth century, so when they did form a relationship, it tended to be unconventional. This was certainly the case with Anna and Algie. For a start, she chose him and not the other way around, and the fact Algie promised never to impede her career was one of the main reasons that she married him. They agreed to have only one child, and Eadith Bonus Kingsford was born later the same year, named after the Anglo Saxon Queen.
Their marriage was platonic from that point. According to her friend Florence Fenwick Miller, this was a lifestyle choice rather than a health issue. Her life was not going to be wasted on constant reproduction. Anna would be outspoken, independent, often selfish and a creator of events, not a follower of them. For the rest of their lives, they lived as brother and sister in a relationship where her values and opinions counted as much as his, and probably more so. This was the inversion of a traditional Victorian marriage.
She had started agitating before her marriage, and she did so through writing. In 1868, she supported woman’s suffrage in a pamphlet. She supported the campaign for a Married Women’s Property Act, to allow woman control of their property after marriage, despite the fact not needing such a law herself. Her father had made special legal provisions to protect his daughter’s inheritance of the kind only the rich could afford to make.
In 1872 she used her privileged background to buy her way into a position of influence. She purchased The Lady’s Own Paper with some of the £700 she had been left by her father. She changed the magazine overnight and without apology from ‘a magazine of fashion, fiction, music, literature, drama and domestic economy’ to a progressive journal. The new masthead slogan ‘ A Journal of Taste, Progress and Thought’ matched the content – temperance, women’s rights, cruelty to animals and a sceptical view of male dominated politics at Westminster.
Cobbe also features in my book
One of the articles was on vivisection was prefaced by Frances Power Cobb and this sparked Kingsford’s interest in the subject. Edition three contained a petition against vivisection and polite abuse about male MPs who objected to votes for women. There were only four editions in total. Established readers were lost before new ones could be gained, and Kingsford rejected advertisements that she disagreed with, like corsets or leather products. She was a life-long advocate of rational dress; ‘girls are gravely mistaken if they believe that by deliberately abandoning the form of a human creature to assume that of an insect they are commending themselves to male admiration’
She was more successful as one of Britain’s first woman doctors, although she did not do it by obeying the rules. In 1873 she made of acquaintance of Florence Fenwick Miller, one of the few people impressed by the Lady’s Own Paper. Miller was nineteen, from a comfortable middle class background and totally in agreement with Kingsford. Despite the age gap, it was Miller who was to become the mentor to her older friend.
Fenwick Miller’s lower middle class mother had removed her from school at sixteen and kept her home to learn housework, housekeeping and while away her life with tea parties and social diversions. The daughter had other ideas, and in 1871 she persuaded her parents to allow her to join Sophia Jex-Blake’s campaign to open Britain’s medical schools to women and to seek matriculation at the University of Edinburgh. She passed her initial examinations with distinction. However, Edinburgh’s powerful professors refused to allow women into their classes, so Miller studied medicine at the at the Ladies’ Medical College, completed a clinical practice in midwifery, and set herself up in private practice from her mother’s home-all before the age of twenty.
It was at this point that Fenwick Miller met Anna and Algie. They meet for the first time at her mother’s house, and Florence had gone to the effort of consulting a vegetarian friend about what would constitute a good meal; it was mushroom omelette and macaroni cheese, stewed apple with cream; one of the first consciously created vegetarian meals recorded in British history.
Fenwick Miller visited them in Shrewsbury in 1873, noticing the pleasing unorthodoxy of their marriage. This included religion. There were no many Church of England vicarages where the cleric’s wife had a stature of the Madonna clad in blue robes and baby Jesus surrounded by candles in a permanent vigil. She had converted to the ‘roman religion’, as the Victorian newspapers primly put it, in 1872. She had fallen out of faith with the established Christian church early in her life, and had converted in order to exclude herself from helping her husband in his pastoral role and charitable role as a country vicar. She wished to avoid the daily grind of visiting the sick and attending church (‘tracts, jellies, baby clothes and bazaars’); these were distraction from her own intellectual endeavours; one of the qualifications for being a middle class radical Victorian women was the refusal to live with boredom.
She was fascinated by some aspects of the Catholic faith; she claimed to have seen manifestations of the Virgin Mary and she adopted the name Mary Magdalen. She never actually practised her faith formally despite being confirmed by Cardinal Manning (1872); she fell out with the Pope on the subject of animal cruelty and presence of a priest at her deathbed was contentious. She picked put the things she liked and never adhered to a dogma. An unpleasant interpretation would be that it looks like a 1960s, hippies ‘pick n mix’ religion based on personal need, but in the 1870s it was innovative, contentious, brave and quite blasphemous.
Science was as much as interest as religion to the two women. Both were in agreement about vegetarianism and vivisection, it was the younger women who was more knowledgeable about physiology. It was these discussions that inspired Kingsford to study medicine in Paris; she wanted to become a doctor, not for the usual humanitarian reasons, but to give more heft to her arguments. In the same way that she was a Catholic who rejected the Pope, she became a doctor who rejected science.
The medical bar in England was so complete that she had to do her studies at the Ecole de Médecine in Paris, following in the footsteps of Elizabeth Garrett, who had graduated from the same school four years earlier, in 1870. It introduced Anna to vivisection.
Vivisection was new and not common, except in French medical schools. It was the noise of dogs being experimented on that she heard first; the lecture rooms were next to the dissecting rooms.. The response to her protests was contemptuous and unempathetic; ‘Que voulez vous? C’est pour la science! was the response of the arrogant old men who ran the institution. She hired private tutors to avoid the building She was advised to keep quiet about the whole issue in case the rules were changed pre-emptively to stop her from qualifying; this, at least, she managed in the face of male provocation. She qualified in 1880.She opened a private practice in Park Lane; she did not register as a doctor, she did not need to in order to practice. It would be 1892 before women were allowed to join the British Medical Association.
Kingsford was a radical woman doctor, embracing animal rights, vegetarianism and suffrage, living in an open and equal marriage, but is forgotten today because her name is an embarrassment to many. Late in her life she , she attended the Vegetarian Society’s ‘Great Meeting’ at the Exeter Hall, London as guest of honour and said this;
I always speak with the greatest delight and satisfaction in the presence of my friends and members of the Vegetarian Society. With them I am quite at my ease. I have no reservation, I have no dissatisfaction. This is not the case when I speak for my friends the Anti-Vivisectionists, the Anti-Vaccinationists, the Spiritualists, or the advocates of freedom for women. . . . The vegetarian movement is the bottom and basis of all other movements towards Purity, Freedom, Justice, and Happiness.
She was a spiritualist and an anti-vaxxer. She was also a believer in eugenics – selective breeding to encourage the better part of society to reproduce. Her vegetarianism also seems cranky and obsessive; she believed that not eating meat was the ultimate answer to all social problems. One key reason for her medical work was that it would add credibility to her campaign against meat eating and cruelty to animals. In 1881 she republished her doctoral theses under the title ‘A Perfect Way in Diet’. All the ethical elements of vegetarianism, which had been removed at the insistence of her male examiners because it was unscientific, was put back in again. It was hardly surprising that Kingsford held such a low opinion of a medical profession that was only interested in the mundane materialist elements of life; her work was designed for a higher ambition, as the opening of her book testifies;
By what habits and modes of life has humanity in the past reached its highest development?
The answer was vegetarianism, and the book had some strong arguments to make. Firstly, it regarded meat eating as a modern phenomenon and that the solution was to return to a purer past- the subtitle was ‘A Treaty Advocating the Return to the perfect Diet of Our Race’. The so-called Stone Age ‘Paleo’ diet is not new.
A Perfect Way was a diet book, but went further. Eating meat affecting the body and its functions, changing them for the worse; and it did the same for the mind. She condemned the slaughterhouse and animal transport because they demeaned and desensitised those who took part in them. You became a hypocrite because by eating meat you have deliberately ignored suffering and death; most people, even the most affluent, would have smelt and seen the butcher after a day’s work- ‘no flesh eater considers the slaughter house’.
Still in print today
Meat eating was a visceral, murderous activity which led to male vices of cruelty and vice; men loved their meat; and women were demeaned by cooking and serving it. ‘The super-eminence of man is the super eminence of pain’; and eating animals led to animal passions. Wasn’t sex called ‘carnal delights? Meat stimulated the body and created other morally unacceptable appetites. Kreophagy, an ugly word for meat eating that Kingsford seems to have invented, created genital stimulation that led to prostitution; it caused changes to the gastric system that encouraged alcoholism. To the argument that animals eat and prey on each other, and that it was ‘nature’ so argued that for most of the time ‘ nature was habit’ and that man could improve himself by rising above such habits, and that flesh eating was something to that brought down the level to that of brutes. Being literally- a strong and clever beast was not enough; there was more to life than physical gratification.
There were no upsides to meat eating. Most of the strongest animals were herbivores; the fruit eating gorilla could beat the kreaphagist lion in a fight; the mighty hippopotamus ate no meat. It was the same in great civilisations that were based on fruit, vegetables and grain, both in the past and those that existed now. The Roman gladiator lived on oatcake and oil; Chilean copper miners ate figs, fruit and bread. Modern societies that were prosperous ate meat, just like the meat eating and excess of the Roman Empire at its most corrupt. Meat was moral and bodily corruption. A spiritual person would not eat meat. Purity of diet is pointed out as the open door to intellectual, psychical, and spiritual development.
Kingsford went further; not just believing that people had moral duties towards animals but also that they had souls and could go to heaven. Her Catholicism was shaken when she went to Rome and saw the casual cruelty to animals; horses and dogs kicked and stamped on by those who believed that animals had no spiritual value. Kingsford doubted the compassion of any god who did not allow the poor patient suffering animal into heaven when most humans were less deserving. This is why she expected to see her guinea pig in heaven and why she organized a petition to the Pope to change Catholic doctrine about animals having no souls, but this was met with such a lack of Vatican sympathy that she became quite discouraged. But her religious views had to change to accommodate her views on animal welfare, not vice-versa. Whether it was Charles Darwin or the RSPCA, Kingsford condemned unconditionally all those who refused to condemn Kreophagy.
Kingsford believed in the health benefits of vegetarianism. Some of the claims are a little outrageous today, but they still echo a little. She became a vegetarian due to the recommendation of her brother John Bonus in 1870, as a way of curing her chronic lung weakness, and some Victorian vegetarians claimed meat eating caused TB (a claim that carried some initial credence after 1882 when Robert Koch discovered that bovine and human TB were caused by the same organism). Some people claimed that vegetarians did not get cholera, yellow fever or smallpox. Kingsford herself claimed that eating vegetables was enough to cure TB. Cancer was correctly diagnosed as a disease caused by modern civilisation and what could be more a sign of a brutal civilisation gone wrong that meat eating?
Global vegetarianism would obviate the need for doctors; it would also mean that vaccination, already dangerous in her eyes, would also become superfluous. Although she had joined the ranks of the traditional doctors, she did this to undermine their beliefs and instead promote the philosophy of health without medicine. It was individual choice that created health. The right food should be enough.
Kingsford was worried about population outstripping food supply; but her response was nether moral restraint or birth control, but ‘better distribution of the soil’ She rejected the pious commonplace ‘Where God send mouths, He send food’. An acre of wheat feed 10 times more than an acre of sheep, she pointed out; sheep eat when the poor starve. She also rejected the use of fur, leather and ivory as mere human exploitation of animals for their own luxuries and caprices. She stood up for the silk worm by rejecting silk. On holiday, she walked the Swiss Alps in vegetarian shoes. She condemning the culling of seals a century before it was a commonplace view. ‘The savage may need fur- the civilised man does not’. She also rejected tobacco, alcohol, fish and seafood, cannabis and opium mineral salt, suet, vinegar, mouldy cheese, pickles, most spices and condiments, eggs, and pies made with raising agents.
Kingsford was the key figure in Victorian vegetarianism; when she died, the Vegetarian Society treated her as a secular saint. Vegetarians were niche, noisy and moralizing. The movement started in 1847, by the end of the nineteenth century organised vegetarianism was a tiny movement with 7,000 members and associates of the Vegetarian Society and its London-based rival. It attracted progressives from other areas too-such as Annie Besant, George Bernard Shaw, Isaac Pitman, with a preponderance of woman. It caught on to a certain extent; by 1880, the famous Mrs Beaton’s Book of Household Management had a selection of vegetarian recipes, which is not the same as a vegetarian diet and the personal consequences that went with it.
Lifestyle vegetarians were seen as odd and obsessive; it was still the same a generation later George Orwell liked to characterise the vegetarian socialist as nudist, be-sandaled, fruit-juice drinking and sexually unorthodox. In Victorian times it had a strong whiff of moral purity, which arguably it still has; Purify your bodies , and eat no dead thing that has looked with living eyes upon the light of Heaven, as Kingsford said in one of her semi-religious tracts
Anna Bonus Kingsford 1846-1888
Part Two of this will deal with her spiritualism and her later life as an anti-vivisectionist.
How did middle-ranking gentlewomen of Georgian England fill their waking hours? Were they mostly bored senseless? It seems that the tentative answer is ‘no’ except that this conclusion only applies to woman who were prepared to put the effort in, and obey the social conventions. This is how it could be done.
The first line of defence against ennui was people- friends, family and acquaintances. For the leisured classes of the Regency, it was an era of conversation. You visited, and were visited. When you visited, you chatted and drank tea. There were rules, but there was also flexibility. If it is a nearby close fried or family, it could be unannounced. If they are not in, then there is always tomorrow. You are not that busy.
‘Not being in’ was not the same as ‘not being at home’. You could be ‘in’ but not want to see people. You could issue a blanket ban by telling the servants, who are literally the gatekeepers to your house, or you could be not ‘at home’ to specific individuals. Some people may merely leave their card, as you might do when desiring the acquaintance of somebody new in town. Then you wait for a response; if a week passes, they are not interested.
Assuming you, or you guests get through the door, the visits were flexible. Guests for breakfast were not unusual; the leisured classes had breakfast around nine, and all strata of Georgian society, even the rich, tended to do something before they had their morning meal. If you have unexpected visitors in the morning, then you might invite them to luncheon. The weather and crime made the roads impassable at times, so be prepared for people to stay the night as well. People became fearful of crime on a moonless night. These sleepovers do not involve work for you-remember the servants! – but it may involve entertaining them all evening, and even early morning -more of that later.
Visits could be short, especially if it to people that you see often or don’t hold that much store by. Thirty minutes could be delightful, cake, ginger biscuits and wine would be nice. They could be a few hours as well; in most cases you will be ‘in a party’- sitting or walking in a group. Your conversation will be light and refined, uncontroversial and predictable yet not boring. You will gossip and chat but not start on a subject that cannot be changed to something else instantly. You will talk about your activities, and the activities of others without breaking the rules and social conventions. If you met people you know on the street, you could walk with them awhile, even if this changes the direction you were walking in. You are still not busy. You may be the host, and that brings extra responsibilities to be charming and facilitate conversation. It can be mentally draining, and definitely counts as an activity. Around you are servants, who have cleaned your clothes, cooked your food and cleaned you house. They gave you the scope to be charming, if that is what you choose.
You don’t need to nice. You could occupy your time disliking people. Fail to be at home when visited. Fail to offer luncheon if they inveigle their way into your home. Switch from affection to mere politeness. Don’t be delighted to see somebody- pretend to be delighted. The difference will be noticed. Gossip about them to sympathetic friends. Cut people in the street, skilfully. It has to be obvious that you have seen them for the blow to wound.
Jane Austen’s Entertainment Centre
When not in company, you could write and receive letters. They are a vital activity and source of entertainment. The post is increasingly efficient and for short distances there are servants to pass notes. Mail delivery is not cheap unless you know a Member of Parliament who can give you one of his franks- allowing free postage. Letters need to have content- brevity and platitudes will not do, and you will be marked down for it. But also bear in mind it was the custom to read received letters aloud en familie,so be careful what you write as well.
Copying can be used to fill your day. With some form of education under your belt, you can almost certainly write as well as you can read. Write out old recipes, patterns for clothes, and poetry. Some of these could be gifts. Gifts are important- see below.
Reading is another worthy time consuming activity. Fiction and poetry would be most appropriate. Sir Walter Scott was all the rage. Perhaps Marmion; A Tale of Flodden Field? It is a historical romance in verse, so ticks two boxes. Books, like letters, could be read aloud to family and friends. You would also be welcome at the local subscription library. Newspapers would not be out of the question, though you probably would not be asked your opinion on matters of national importance. If national politics intrude, say the state of Ireland, a man could read aloud and explain as he went along. Stay in your lane, and all will be well.
Clothes are in your lane. You could make or repair them mostly because you wanted to rather than needed too. Make a neckcloth or cut out a shirt from a pattern for a male relative. Go out and collect eider down to make a pillow, and give it as a gift. Learn to knit and sew. Make a cloak from that cloth you were given last year. Buy some straw for a bonnet.
You could make things. You could make fresh products from local ingredients and resources- shoes for your younger sister’s dolls, lip salve for yourself, lavender water to be used by the household, or a nosegay. You could weave a purse. Some of these could be made from a recipe (or ‘receipt’) given to you in one of your many long conversations with the ladies, or copied by you from a book, or copied by somebody else and given to you as present.
Shoe shopping…you have all day.
You could go shopping- for materials to make those clothes or straw to make that bonnet for seasonal foods (all foods), for gifts for your friends, clothes for you. Visit every linen draper in town for that exact piece of lace, yet still not find it. Have the high shopping standards of those who have time to waste. Buy a new toothbrush ( you use tooth powder, not paste). If you are a widowed women-pay your bills in town. The tradesmen have been waiting six months. Pay with a bankers draft or large banknote that you ordered. A banknote can be for any amount; in the Regency there was such a thing as a fourteen pound banknote.
Break your sugar with these
Some shopping brings responsibilities. Sugar, alcohol, candles and tea are a target for theft. You need to look after the luxuries- the household items that you did not trust the servants with. You would bulk buy candles, wine and sugar. Sugar would need to be broken up- sugar cubes were at least thirty years way. Wine, bought by the cask rather than the bottle, would have to be fined with isinglass. Candles, popular with the household and the servants, would have to be accounted for. Your sugar would be in a locked or inaccessible cupboard, which would need cleaning. Your tea will be of excellent quality and immense quantity, as you will drink it in company many times a day. You will need to protect it.
Rich people like you can break the tedium with surprise gifts to other rich people. Send people presents, and receive them to add variety to your life and to cement your social contacts. You are eating better than ninety-five percent of the population, so do some food swaps with your neighbours who have access to foodstuffs you don’t have. We are talking asparagus, strawberries, lobsters, oysters, simnel cake, geese, hares, woodcocks, ham, honey, vinegar, olives and, if sent rapidly, mackerel or lampreys. Make a point with a Pine Apple, or be functional with a pig’s head. It doesn’t have to be food- send textiles, geraniums, holly, ribbons, satin caps, bonnets, pillows, barley water, a nosegay, a servant to help.
Is there anything to look forward to? Something that is literally not in your hands? Well, there are balls and assemblies. Its one of the reasons that you have been creating and repairing your clothes. Its definitely the reason you bought that ivory fan. Look forward to the ideal set of circumstances- an equal gender ratio, a good supper, a place to gossip, acceptable dance partners and adequate transport there and back. And perhaps a husband for you, or for your daughter?
There are subscription concerts and theatre plays as well. A series of six musical events would be a bargain at, say five shillings for ladies ( four times a much for the men). Two plays in the theatre on the same evening, of completely different types, would be normal. It would be rowdy in the pit, but not in the stalls where your party is.
What about the long evenings with nowhere to go? Assuming you have protected your stock of candles, you will have enough illumination…but what can you do? Cue the card table-preferably three or four. The list is huge; there is a game for all occasions. More socially there whist table, gosch ( or gosh), piquet, casino, if anti-social, patience. Quadrille is still nice for for ladies, although it is a little old-fashioned in the Regency. Lanterloo ( or ‘Loo) for larger numbers. Gambling is involved is most of these games, and it is not unladylike to stake, win and lose small sums. A ten shilling loss or win is fine.
Talking of gambling, you could buy a chance for the national lottery. A male relative could do this for you- perhaps a sixteenth of a ticket? Or a quarter? All profits went to pay off national debt. Moderate drinking will be acceptable; the men in your life can be tipsy, have wine enough or be merry, but if you are, people will talk. You drink small amounts all day anyway, as part of your mutual hospitality regime.
Chess can be played. It was not a very sociable game as it would be played in silence, with others watching as their form of entertainment. It was a mixed event, a one-on-one contest and you could ask somebody that you were interested in. It could be a long night, with four games in a row not being out of the question. If you have company, if the activities are engaging and if it is a warm or light evening, you may stay up late-past midnight. You wouldn’t think twice about doing this at a ball. A memorable ball could last until 6.am. You do not need to be an early riser. Other games and activities for an evening would be backgammon; spillikins; charades, and music. You may already be a singer, and learn the piano; you will be expected to entertain on occasions. The flute is popular, depending on how well it is played.
There is more than chess going on here ( Wikipedia Commons )
During the day there is the garden, the hothouse and the surrounding fields. The servants do the dung moving and tree-felling, and you do the nurturing. Cultivate your pink hyacinths. Gather violets. Make a basket from off-cuts of wood to carry your violets in. Check the weather first- there are no official weather forecasts- you would have to be skilled in doing it yourself. Plant sweet peas, geranium and Marvel of Peru in Spring. Use tobacco smoke to fumigate your plants. Tie up your clematis. Remember what you did, so you can chat about it later over bread and butter and a glass of wine with people who do exactly the same thing themselves but still listen politely
You could have other interests- landscapes, butterflies, old monuments, drawing and painting. Charity is a an appropriate hobby for a lady. You could visit the poor. Preferably a blameless widow with children made destitute by illness and bereavement, who deserves help and is grateful. You could contribute a guinea subscription for a distressed clergymen, or a local woman widowed by an industrial accident.
Walking is fine, because you do not need to. You are carriage company, so you can walk if you wish. You have been imprisoned in the house from December to February by the weather and the terrible roads, so walk when you can. Walk into the garden, with or without a hat and gloves; walk to the nearest town; chat with people you know as they pass you on the road; its fine to take a lift. Walk to see of your mother is home. Walk to Church.
Mingle with your equals in the congregation, show some piety and at least pretend to listen to the sermon- just make sure you can comment briefly on it afterwards. You will have your own pew, and you need to remember your key. If the weather is horrible, worship at home. The reading aloud could be the morning prayers, followed by the Bible. The rules on Sunday differ slightly; some people would avoid visiting and resent visitors. It will be duller.
You could mark the seasons; New Years Day is no big deal, at least in England, but there are Sundays, fast days, royal anniversaries, the first day the fire is not routinely lit in the living room, and the day it is lit again for winter. Listen for the first cuckoo ( late April in the South of England) . Wash your dog once a year and your feet once a month. From April to September, save candles by doing things ‘in the dusk’. Christmas has not really been invented yet; expect a nicer meal, a church visit and alms for the poor.
It’s all happening in Weymouth
And there are holidays. Spend late June to early September in a resort such as Weymouth, Brighton or Worthing. Spend a day packing, and another day getting there by select mail coach, private chaise or your carriage. Or take the waters at Tunbridge, Bath or Cheltenham.
But wait. You are not really going to the spa for the waters, or to the coast for the warm bathing. You will not do this daily, and never alone. Nothing could be more dispiriting than walking alone to the well, drinking a glass of sulphur smelling water and going home. You are there for the company, just like at home, and it is the same company. Most of the activities will be the same as home, but with added seaside, boats and the occasional awkward stranger and hint of something different happening…but not very often.
This blog is a selection of interesting things I've come across during my history research. I have a wide interest in history ranging from Wars of the Roses, country houses, Stuarts, Georgians, Louis XIV, Napoleon and criminals. So expect to see a bit of everything on here, with a focus on little known stories.
Prinny's Taylor is the title of a biography of Louis Bazalgette, who was tailor to the Prince of Wales, later George IV, for 32 years. It was written by his great-great-great-great grandson, Charles Bazalgette, and is now available as a trade paperback from Amazon and other distributors.
Georgian and Victorian Britain 