High-born “locusts”
Wright’s brushes with the aristocracy persuaded him that the rich were a drain on the nation
Wright’s trip to Britain took him into the orbit not just of the nation’s ‘great unwashed’ but also some of the most powerful figures in the empire – and the American was no less appalled by what he witnessed. Describing a ball given by the Duke of Wellington, Wright pictured “900 of the highest nobility” gathering to “look at each other’s diamonds, dance the polka” and “sip headaches or guzzle the gout, in the shape of champagne”. He concluded that “they are truly to be pitied”.
At Eton College, the American was impressed by “the grand aristocratic nursery of the nation”, with “buildings of great… magnificence, and pleasure grounds… of indescribable beauty”. And he was still more struck by the strange three-yearly custom in which royalty and nobility assembled one morning, to be accosted by Etonians, “dressed in silk hose and doublets, with drawn swords, demanding in the style of highwaymen, ‘Salt! Salt!’”. ‘Salt’ was in fact money, and the total takings of £1,300 were “all given to the captain or head boy”, half of which “was invested for his support through the university”.
Meeting the elderly William Wordsworth at Rydal Mount in the Lakes, Wright argued firmly against the poet’s belief that America, like Britain, should have “a class of gentlemen… born to such large property that they could devote themselves entirely to literary pursuits”. “The longer I stayed in England,” he wrote, “the more this class of independent, hereditary gentlemen seemed to me like a perpetual devouring curse of locusts.”