The Natural History of the Gent

There is a period in the year of London existence, when that portion of it termed the Season, par excellence, comes to an end with every body, whatever their station; for very few there are who do not, somehow or other, contrive to get out of town, when the great rush from home—that flight of the soul of the departed Season—is at its height. Every body who has not already gone, is going; nobody will own to staying in town, even if compelled to do so. Houses are shut up, blinds newspapered, and furniture tied up in bags: in fact, to make a wretched joke, whilst the family is on the Rhine, its lamps and ottomans are all in Holland. There are no more carriages whirling about the west-end streets: no more thundering knocks echoing all day, and night, too, for the matter of that, in the squares. You write letters, and get no answers: you make calls, and find nobody at home, but a servant on board wages, who runs out into the area to look at you before she answers the door, in great astonishment. You think it almost disreputable to be seen about, so you follow the rest, and go away.

This feeling extends throughout all classes of society: and going down lower and lower, at last reaches the Gent, who copies the gentleman, but sees, as usual, every thing through a wrong medium. In fact, his reflection is that of a spoon, in more senses than one: making the most outrageous images of the original, distorting all the features, but still preserving a strange sort of identity.

The Gent has two favourite places of sea-side resort, according to his idiosyncrasies: if joyous, he goes to Gravesend; if dreary, to Ramsgate. Margate is neither one thing nor the other, and Brighton is really too respectable. He cannot there show off: and to show off is the battle of the Gent’s life. But Gravesend is delicious. The transit is cheap and rapid; the lodgings are moderate; an effect in dress can be made at an easy rate; and, above all, there is that largest ornamental chalk-pit in the world, Rosherville.

We are, perhaps, wrong in putting Gravesend under the head of sea-side resorts: but the Gent considers it to be so. And, indeed, the baths there offer peculiar advantages, combining the properties of both fresh and salt water, with the impurities of both, and the attributes of neither. Yellow slippers may also be purchased in the town; and this circumstance induces the belief, that the neighbouring water is the sea; a delusion which appears common not only amongst the Gents, but most of the settlers. This, however, by the way: we were speaking of Rosherville, the paradise which mainly draws the Gents from town.

The costume of the Gent at Rosherville is analogous to the one he wears at the promenade concerts, with the exception, that he has a more airy cravat, of brighter hue, and smokes perpetually, except in the ball-room; and he would do that, thinking it was “the thing,” if a board did not warn him: showing that such warning was found absolutely necessary. And here, whilst listening to the “military band” of the first detachment of the Light Coldstream Indefatigables, he puts his hat on one side, sits on a table, and tapping his short boot, which discovers its form through his trowsers, with his equally curtailed cane, believes, as usual, that he is the man of the assembly.

The Gent has several fashions in the dancing at Rosherville, different from those of the Casino. In the first place, he takes off his hat, and hangs it on a peg, if there is one vacant; if not, he leaves it at the bar. Then he bows to his partner, and, if he knows her very well, courts at the same time: and, subsequently, he salutes the corners with great politeness, previous to commencing the first set. But this particular set does not stand very high in estimation. In common with other balls for the basse classe, its component Gents prefer dances of intricate and abnormal fashion: and so it is here also considered ton to perform the Caledonians (which nobody ever knows all through, except the master of the ceremonies), the Lancers, Spanish Dances, the Cellarius, even the Gavotte, and other frantic arrangements of gasping professors, including, of course, “La Polka” as it is always termed, in their parlance. And on “Gala Nights,” still more wonderful evolutions are gone through, all of which are due to the inventive genius of the aforesaid inimitable M.C., whose friendship the Gent especially prizes. For at Rosherville that great man is to be seen—actually, really to be seen—walking like an ordinary person, amongst ordinary fellow creatures. He is no longer a phantasy of mental conception—not that zephyr in pumps bounding amidst new-laid eggs and tea-things, or matchlessly performing his Marine Hornpipe in top-boots, or Chinese Fandango in handcuffs, or Milanese Fling in the double jack-chains; but a substantial reality,—the glass of fashion, the mould of form, whom we can never fancy putting off the pumps of ceremony for the high-lows of necessity—in a word, The Baron Nathan.

The Gent at Ramsgate would be the last to persuade that it is really a dull place. He is one of the most strenuous upholders of that greatest of all popular delusions suffered to go unchallenged, that English sea-side watering-places generally are pleasant spots to emigrate to, and Ramsgate in particular. We know, as far as we are concerned, that we once underwent transportation for seven days to that penal settlement; and that we never before suffered (we expect in common with every body else) from such a ghastly gasping after the belief that we were “doing a holiday,” as the Gent would say, as during that time.

How the Gent makes up his mind to go to Ramsgate at all we cannot make out; but there he always is: and he divides the measure of his revelry thereat into four goes of excitement: Going on the sands; Going out sailing; Going on the pier; and Going to Sachett’s.

Going on the sands is the weakest of the Gent’s pastimes: but he says, with a loud laugh, that it is to see the ladies bathe. Elsewhere it would be confined to watching children bury one another in the sand, with small wooden spades—a performance which, like a pantomime, however interesting on first representation, somewhat flags in interest upon repetition. The Gent usually takes two chairs to rest upon, and stares hard at every body else, especially the females, the while he sketches feeble designs with his short stick, which he never by any means parts with, on the sand.

Going out sailing is also a slow business—slower than a few friends after a dinner-party for a carpet polka; or a standard five-act-play; or a wedding breakfast; or the outside half of yesterday’s Times; or a book written with a “high moral purpose;” or a Charing-Cross-to-the-Bank omnibus—and that is saying a good deal: the Gent, however, likes it: for then he puts on a shirt ruled with blue ink, the collar of which he turns down: and talks of “jibs,” and “tacks,” and “sheets,” and also alludes to the man he knows who keeps a yacht. And he takes his cigar—his loved cigar—as soon as he leaves the harbour. And as he leaves the harbour he stands in an attitude, and believes that the young ladies who show their ankles on the pier imagine him to be a Red Rover.

Perhaps Going on the pier is the Ramsgate Gent’s greatest treat: because then he can put on his gay clothes, and once more think that he is rather the thing. But in this the Gent makes a great mistake. He dresses but once in the day, and then puts on a frock-coat, which he wears to dinner, and all the evening; not exactly understanding, we expect, what is the real difference between morning and evening toilets. For as Gentlemen usually dress after a walk, so do Gents dress before one: and if they do not appear in their “best” to walk up and down the pier—which at Ramsgate is the chief straw that the sinking ennuyés clutch at—and stare superciliously at all whom they do not know, they think they are snobs—the snob being to the Gent what the Gent is to the Gentleman.

The prevalence of Gents at Ramsgate, in such numbers that the fine weather brings them out like bluebottles, is easily accounted for. There is a certain class of families who go to Ramsgate every year, because they were there the last. They come either from the Pancras-cum-Bloomsbury district of London, or having shops, or ware-rooms, or counting-houses in the City, live in suburban villas comfortably off, and believing greatly in all conventional rules of society, getting perhaps once a year to the Opera, thinking a great deal of Mansion-house balls, and believing to a great degree in fashion-books. Well, these good folks affect Ramsgate greatly, and so take their families with them. The girls of this class pass muster pretty well; Clapham or Chiswick academies teaching them certain school accomplishments, which pass current for a decent education amongst their equals—but the boys are always Gents. The same feeling which induces their parents to believe that the more showily they can set out their dinner-table the higher they rise in social life, makes these sons imagine that two or three dear and flashy articles of dress place them on a level with the well-born and well-bred Gentleman. Accustomed in their own spheres to take the lead, they will not go where they meet men who attain very good stations in society without large studs or noisy-patterned cravats; and constantly associating, one with the other, they get lost beyond all redemption. And of these is the migratory young-man society of Ramsgate chiefly composed.

Of the same class is the Gent at Boulogne. He is at first a long time being persuaded to go there; because he knows that his ignorance of the language will be an awful drop to his consequence, and bring him down at once to his elements in a very humiliating manner. But after a while, finding that every body else knows something about it but himself, he determines to go. And in this wise doth he deport himself.

Imprimis he alloweth his mustaches to grow, which giveth him the look of an officer-lover in a farce at the Eagle, but assimilateth to the foreigner in nothing. He delighteth in brutal conduct to the native functionaries, which he taketh to be a fine display of national spirit, and thinketh that they are impressed with respect for him thereby. He calleth the vin ordinaire “rot,” but drinketh brandy to intoxication. He shouteth with hoarse joyless laughter at French peculiarities, and thinketh that, by so doing, he displayeth a fine-natured naïveté. He deemeth the greatest discovery ever made to be that of a tavern whereat British stout is retailed; and thinketh that he maketh a joke of excellent pungency when he saith “Waterloo,” to a French soldier. He careth not for the indigenous hotels, but loveth better the English boarding-house, where he can have “a good John Bull joint, and no French kickshaws:” John Bull being represented generally as a vulgar top-booted man verging on apoplexy, with, evidently, few ideas of refinement, obstinate and hard-natured; but the Gent conceiveth that upon occasions it is ennobling to profess attachment to him.