TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
—Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.
—The transcriber of this project created the book cover image usingthe title page of the original book. The image is placed in the publicdomain.
The Dawn
OF
The XIXth Century
IN
England
A Social Sketch of the Times
BY
JOHN ASHTON
AUTHOR OF
“Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne,” “English Caricature and Satireon Napoleon I.,” “Old Times,” &c
WITH 114 ILLUSTRATIONS DRAWN BY THE AUTHORFROM CONTEMPORARY ENGRAVINGS
THIRD AND POPULAR EDITION
London
T. FISHER UNWIN
PATERNOSTER SQUARE
MDCCCXC
PREFACE.
THAT Sir Walter Scott, when he called his novel“Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since,” thoughtthat the time had come, when the generation, thenliving, should be presented with a page of history, whichwould bring to their remembrance the manners and customsof their grandfathers, must be my excuse for thisbook.
For, never, in the world’s history, has there been such achange in things social, as since the commencement ofthe Nineteenth Century; it has been a quiet revolution—agood exemplar of which may be found in the Frontispiece,which is a type of things past, never to be recalled. TheWatchman has long since given place to the Police; theclimbing boy, to chimney-sweeping on a more scientificplan; and no more is “Saloop” vended at street corners;even the drummer-boys are things of the past, only fit fora Museum—and it is of these things that this book treats.
The times, compared with our own, were so verydifferent; Arts, Manufactures, Science, Social Manners,Police, and all that goes to make up the sum of life, were[vi]then so widely divergent, as almost to make one disbelieve,whilst reading of them, that such a state of things couldexist in this Nineteenth Century of ours. In the firstdecade, of which I write, Steam was in its very babyhood;locomotives, and steamships, were only just beginning tobe heard of; Gas was a novelty, and regarded more as anexperiment, than the useful agent we have since found it;whilst Electricity was but a scientific toy, whose principaluse was to give galvanic shocks, and cause the limbs of acorpse to move, when applied to its muscles.
Commerce was but just developing, being hampered bya long and cruel war, which, however, was borne withexemplary patience and fortitude by the nation—England,although mistress