English Home, part IX 1800–37
ON October 5, 1826, Hermann, Prince of Pückler-Muskau, wrote from London to announce his safe arrival in England. The letter was one in a whole series written to his former wife over a period of three years that described a tour of England, Ireland and France. These were soon published anonymously as The Letters of a Dead Man (1830– 31) and enjoyed considerable success.
The Prince, whose home lay in modern-day Saxony, had amicably divorced and was in search of a rich English bride whose fortune might mend his own. His letters reflect the cool detachment necessary to contemplate such a scheme, although he never carried it into effect. The result is an essentially admiring, but penetrating—and occasionally unsparing— portrait of English society and domestic life.
He quickly perceived that the driving force behind the social activities he observed, was ‘not nobility, not wealth, but an entirely new power: Fashion’—what he termed ton— ‘a goddess who in England alone, reigns… with despotic and inexorable sway—though always represented to mortal eyes by a few clever usurpers of either sex’.
One of those ‘clever usurpers’ was George IV, whose constitutional rule during the madness of his father, George III, from 1811–20, has bequeathed us the term ‘Regency’ to describe the Arts between about 1790 and 1830. He made fashionable, for example, the idea of serving dinner, the main meal of the day, in the evening, rather than at about 3pm. At a stroke, the Georgian dining room became a nighttime interior (Fig 1). He was also a keen advocate of the new household technologies that were transforming domestic life in this period, such as central heating, compact kitchen stoves and gas lighting.
The kingdom that Prince Pückler-Muskau visited was brimming with self-confidence. Having emerged victorious from the Napoleonic wars, Britain knew itself to be the most powerful nation in the world. It was also the richest. At home that money was invested in land, the ownership of which both guaranteed political power—it was not until the Great Reform Act of 1832 that the emphasis of Parliamentary representation swung from the country to the city—and offered enrichment.
‘The great wealth of the landholders of England must always strike people from the Continent,’ Prince Pückler-Muskau observed. ‘Almost the whole soil is the property of the aristocracy, who generally let it only on lease; so that when a great man calls a village his… every house is his absolute property... You may conceive what enormous and ever increasing revenues this must bring them, in a country
