Yet the knowledge would never be developed without the demand of a market to pay for it, a political system fluid enough to foster it and a society supple enough to reward it: all three were combined in one figure – the king’s son George, prince of Wales, the oldest of an egregious royal brood of depraved, amoral scapegraces.
In 1783, the twenty-one-year-old prince received his own household at Carlton House. Greedy, dissipated, delusional, shameless and running to fat, though refined and artistic, he was scarred by the generational loathing and neglect built into the Hanover family. The king, he said, ‘hates me; he always did, from seven years old’. Allying himself with the opposition against the king and Pitt, he fell in love with a streak of beautiful paramours. When forced to give one of them up, he swooned spasmodically on the carpet, shrieking, ‘How I love her! I’ll go distracted! My brain will split!’ When he finally married a coarse Brunswick princess, Caroline, it was partly to get access to parliamentary money to pay his prodigious £630,000 debts. When he first saw her, he muttered, ‘I’m not well; pray, get me a glass of brandy,’ but drunkenly managed to consummate the marriage perhaps a week after the wedding night – enough to conceive an heiress, Princess Charlotte.
Yet no one so championed and personified the new consumer society as much as ‘Prinny’ and his much younger friend, George ‘Beau’ Brummell, the handsome, self-promoting grandson of a servant, son of Lord North’s secretary. As an Etonian schoolboy then a teenage Guards officer, Brummell had captivated Prinny with his sense of style, replacing sumptuous coats, knee breeches and cotton stockings with a white cravat, pressed shirts, tailored dark coats and trousers, while grooming himself with an elaborate toilette, washing with soap and brushing his teeth – all of which cost a fortune. ‘Why, with tolerable economy, it might be done with £800,’ said Beau at a time when a gentleman could live well on £200 per annum – and a worker on £12.
Prinny and Brummell were the trendsetters for the fashionable elite, known as
Elite clubs – both exclusively male and exclusively female – existed to exclude but tempt the aspirational middle class. Female trendsetters led by the duchesses and countesses flaunted their fashions and affairs and influenced politics through their salons: the five lady patronesses of the female club Almack’s revelled in their whims and lovers. Their fashions were reported in news-sheets and cartoons, then copied by the middle classes who shopped for drapes, hats, gloves, dresses in new shops that sold accessories manufactured in the factories of Manchester, often by female and child workers paid half what men earned. The middle classes could now afford servants, usually poor women from the countryside. This contrast encouraged a cult of middle-class women who not only did not work, protected by their industrious husbands, but personified frail, idealized virtue.
In London, such people could afford to eat out in restaurants; public eating was not just about nourishment but about entertainment, ostentation and gratification. Public pleasure was just as delicious as the private variety. At Vauxhall Gardens, on the south bank of the Thames, an entrepreneur created a shady pleasure dome where nightly 2,000 punters, sometimes 12,000, high and low, mixed to eat, walk, frizelate and find sex. Cities had dark sides. Slums – known as rookeries – were filthy, gin-soaked stews. Prostitution boomed – there were said to be 80,000 part-time prostitutes in London, personified by the artist William Hogarth’s provincial girl Moll Hackabout, to say nothing of famous courtesans.
No one understood this new market as well as a one-legged Staffordshire pottery manufacturer, Josiah Wedgwood, born into a Nonconformist family of potters, who encouraged these first influencers – whom he called ‘legislators in taste’ – to buy his pottery.
As a young man a bout of smallpox gave him the opportunity to develop new potting techniques, but it damaged his leg, preventing him from throwing pots (from then on he walked with a crutch) and made him into a designer. Twenty-five years later, it led to the amputation of a leg, without anaesthetic, and his workers took to calling him Owd Wooden Leg.
