And the Silliest
The Prettiest Girl in England. The Love Story of Mrs. Fitzherbert's Niece from Journals Edited by Richard Buckle. (John Murray,
THIS is the diary, written in 1832, of a charm- ing but empty-pated eighteen-year-old girl. She Jived in what we call the Age of Reform, but Politics were quite beyond her understanding, and this sheltered little corner of society was still essentially unreformed. It was a world where pos- session of £25,000 was considered beggary and hence despicable, nothing less than deprivation of the common necessaries and comforts.
Georgina Smythe's upbringing was such that her weekly routine consisted in little more than a thinly spread succession of social occasions and amorous fancies and intrigues. Each day seems to have been much like the next except for the Weather. After breakfast at eleven, the men would go out with the hunt, leaving the women to bore- dom and languorous imaginings about theii Beaux. When Georgina had a lucky break she would be 'quite done up with the awful quantity of dissipation I had gone through the whole week,' but this dissipation turns out to be nothing more than ddieund at one aristocratic house, the at another, and valses and reels in the privileged coterie of Almack's until daybreak. Occasionally the men were a little 'groggy' at dinner, and read- ing between the lines there is a suggestion that Mama may have been secretly tippling upstairs, but otherwise everything was excessively proper and agreeable. No tragedy came nearer our heroine than that of not being asked to dance, or of being ennuyeed, or suffering les blues and having rheumatism in her head, or of an uncle dying inconsiderately and, so forcing her to attend the week's balls in unbecoming black.
Such an artless diary as Mr. Buckle has edited with family piety can be read as a commentary on the standards of value of an age. Georgina was probably not untypical. She was altogether uncritical except of those who did not keep her amused or of those ill-bred creatures who did not show 'much usage.' She thought that 'refined manners are so very charming in everyone that unless they degenerate into effeminacy they can- , not be too studied in men.' No books seem to have come into her life. Drawing-room ballads were her one strong point, but her knowledge of painting stopped short at 'Guido,' and the theatre was only an occasion for flirting or for overhearing the general on-dits in the boxes. She was much cohcerned with her 'feelings,' as befitted a romantic age, but these 'refined sentiments were too standardised to be of much interest today.
London to her meant not politics or business but simply the. Season. Church is mentioned in. her diary, but not religion, and even Church was
merely an occasion to observe `the reverent man- ner in which he attends to the SCrvice.' She had
no shopping to occupy her mind, no household management, no interest in food and little enough even in clothes. The servants, like the 'lower classes in general, might well' not have existed for all that she was concerned.
Only one thing interested Georgina and her sister, namely selecting the person 'on whom they would fix their affections' and then waiting for him to propose. After the proposal there came a requisite period when the beloved was kept in • suspense and cruelly teased, but then 'all ended happily. This -stereotyped cycle made up the essence of the London season. It was taken in • deadly earnest, as the regular mating -ritual of an inbred and stilted society, and as such it has its interest. Louisa and Georgina Smythe may have had few thoughts but of their prospective husbands, but they both possessed liveliness and charm, and hence the singleminded quest by these estimable • but supremely unimportant people makes a readable and sometimes instructive trifle.
DENIS MACK SIdITH
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