Of pastimes and pleasures
Away from the hushed drawing rooms, society had a cruel and reckless edge
Pastimes and Pleasures in the Time of Jane Austen Sarah Jane Downing (Amberley, £15.99) I POUNCED on this slim volume having just listened to Emma on Audible, beautifully read by Juliet Stevenson. Where and what exactly was Astley’s? Robert Martin was invited by John Knightley to join him ‘at Astley’s’, to which he was taking his two eldest boys, who were clearly excited at the prospect.
Well, among the wonderfully detailed illustrations in this picture-filled book is one of Astley’s Amphitheatre, by the river at Lambeth, from Ackermann’s Microcosm of London (1808); it was ‘one of a growing number of lesser or illegitimate theatres in London who avoided the licensing laws’.
When Jane Austen attended with her family in 1796, there were ‘performances from a clever little pony only 35 inches tall, as well as two Catawba Indian chiefs who gave a display of tomahawk throwing, shooting bow and arrows, and their war dance’.
What a thrill it must have been for those Knightley boys! The stage was the largest in Europe, and ‘the Blood-red Knight show was so popular and overcrowded throughout 1810 it was claimed that profits exceeded £1,000 (the equivalent of £46,500) per week’. You get a whiff of animal cruelty and the Regency habit of gawping at exotic ‘species’ of humans.
This book shows how much of that was going on: the ‘poking and prodding’ of ‘the Hottentot Venus’ at 225 Piccadilly, the crowds laughing at the ‘wild-born Human Beings found in a remote valley adjoining the Alps’ on show at Bartholomew’s fair, those who actually suffered from ‘the inflated throat caused by goitre’ and the baiting of animals. Only after a dreadful fight between the famed Italian monkey of Hoxton, Jacco Macacco, and a dog weighing 20lb did the Metropolis Act of 1822 at last get passed, making it illegal to use a baiting arena within five miles of Temple Bar.
Away from the hushed drawing rooms, in which girls of the Jane Austen class sat for hours doing their needlework, society had a cruel and reckless edge. The men, particularly, did crazy things. The epidemic of gambling on anything and everything reached such a pitch that Lord Alvanley bet £3,000 on the progress of two raindrops trickling down the window of White’s.
This is a book to keep beside your set of Jane Austen novels, neatly putting the ‘little bit of ivory’ of the novels into the context of the brash world around them. Ysenda Maxtone Graham