London Dandies, 1793

• Posted by mgr on July 6th, 2008 filed in Zeitdokumente
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The following extracts show the changes that have taken place in English manners and society, and may afford the “whiskered pandour” of our own day an opportunity of contrasting his style of dandyism with that of the preceding generation:

“Separated from the Continent by a long war, the English retained their manners and their national character till the end of the last century. All was not yet machine in the working classes—folly in the upper classes. On the same pavements where you now meet squalid figures and men in frock coats, you were passed by young girls with white tippets, straw hats tied under the chin with a riband, with a basket on the arm, in which was fruit or a book: all kept their eyes cast down; all blushed when one looked at them. Frock coats, without any other, were so unusual in London in 1793, that a woman, deploring with tears the death of Louis the Sixteenth, said to me, ‘But, my dear sir, is it true that the poor king was dressed in a frock coat when they cut off his head?’

The gentlemen-farmers had not yet sold their patrimony to take up their residence in London; they still formed, in the House of Commons, that independent fraction which, transferring their support from the opposition to the ministerial side, upheld the ideas of order and propriety. They hunted the fox and shot pheasants in autumn, ate fat goose at Michaelmas, greeted the sirloin with shouts of ‘Roast beef forever!’ complained of the present, extolled the past, cursed Pitt and the war, which doubled the price of port wine, and went to bed drunk, to begin the same life again on the following day. They felt quite sure that the glory of Great Britain would not perish so long as ‘God save the King’ was sung, the rotten boroughs maintained, the game-laws enforced, and hares and partridges could be sold by stealth at market, under the names of lions and ostriches”

“In 1822, at the time of my embassy to London, the fashionable was expected to exhibit, at the first glance, an unhappy and unhealthy man; to have an air of negligence about his person, long nails, a beard neither entire nor shaven, but as if grown for a moment unawares, and forgotten during the preoccupations of wretchedness; hair in disorder; a sublime, mild, wicked eye; lips compressed in disdain of human naturer; a Byronian heart, overwhelmed with weariness and disgust of life.

“The dandy of the present day must have a conquering, frivolous, insolent look. He must pay particular attention to his toilet, wear mustaches, or a beard trimmed into a circle like Queen Elizabeth’s ruff, or like the radiant disc of the sun. He shows the proud independence of his character by keeping his hat upon his head, by lolling upon sofas, by thrusting his boots into the faces of the ladies seated in admiration upon chairs before him. He rides with a cane, which he carries like a taper, regardless of the horse, which he bestrides, as it were, by accident. His health must be perfect, and he must always have five or six felicities upon his hands. Some radical dandies, who have advanced the farthest towards the future, have a pipe. But, no doubt, all this has changed, even during the time that I have taken to describe it.”

Quoted from: Prescott, William H.: “Chateaubriands English Literature.” In: Biographical and Critical Miscellanies. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1852.

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