Imagined London - Anna Quindlen [35]
But it was not just the noisome air that drove the determination, evident in so many English novels, to stay safely away from London. There was the stench of evil, too, or at least license, so at odds with the sense of village rectitude. The eighteenth century, for instance, marked the heyday of what, in Heyer’s romance novels, is known as the “ton,” a class of cynical dandies who stood prevailing standards of good behavior on their head. Husbands and wives were expected to spend little time together; infidelity was de rigueur. (Hence this tight-lipped exchange in a Heyer novel, Devil’s Cub, one of her typical tales of true love amid the debauchery: “He frowned. ‘Orgies, Fanny?’ ‘Orgies, Hugh. Pray do not ask more.’”)
Stories reached the landed gentry of the escapades of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, the queen of ton society, who used padding to make her upswept hair three feet high, who performed onstage and gambled her husband’s money away, who spoke in a peculiar form of baby talk called the Cavendish Drawl. When Sheridan wrote The School for Scandal, Georgina was the model for the lead role of the good-hearted but loose-living Lady Teazle. But while the upright people of Devon or Kent would have been outraged to see themselves so portrayed, Georgiana’s circle went to the theater to be seen watching a farce, as good as watching themselves and their own dissolute customs.
A century later Victoria had set a more rigid standard, but there were still stories that made London seem like a different, less ordered world than the villages and towns. Victoria’s eldest son, the pleasure-loving Prince of Wales, had a deer brought to the center of the city, perhaps in an attempt to re-create the hunting parties of Henry VIII that led to the creation of London’s most beautiful parks. With his pals, the Prince chased the animal through Harrow and Wormwood Scrubs, cornering and killing it at Paddington Station while railway porters goggled at the sight. The newspapers editorialized darkly about the royal misbehavior.
Even the novelists passed judgment harshly. Reading Trollope’s two great series of novels, one set largely in town, the other in the country, it is manifest that the folks of the Barsetshire chronicles are less hard, cold, and calculating than those we meet in London in the company of the Pallisers. Like the Mitford father, the aged country gentry eschew the city unless absolutely necessary. Sir Alured Wharton may be a baronet, but one “not pretending to the luxury of a season in London for which his modest three or four thousand a year did not suffice.” Trollope adds, “Once a year he came up to London for a week, to see his lawyers, and get measured for a coat, and go to the dentist.” Why venture into the city more? In The Prime Minister, every fashionable street is populated by those whose very names are meant to suggest their venality and dissolution: Sir Damask and Lady Monogram, Mr. Hartlepod, Lord Mongrober, the Marquis of Mount Fidgett. (“Now the late Marquis had been, as was the custom with the Fichy Fidgett, a man of pleasure. If the truth may be spoken openly, it should be admitted that he had been a man of sin.”) These are manifestly not nice people, and, predictably, when his daughter is enmeshed in an unacceptable love affair, the upright Mr. Wharton’s first thought is that he “must take her away from London.” A reader knows at the finale of the novel that Emily Wharton is finally safe because she will spend the rest of her life with the good folks of Herefordshire, of whom her first husband, sophisticated and dishonest, had been so dismissive.
In modern day London there is little talk of the evil that once inspired country folks to stay put and city folks to leave. All the evils of the metropolis—drugs, prostitution,