A Memoir of Jane Austen

More oxford books @ www.OxfordeBook.com
Fore more urdu books visit www.4Urdu.com
30 Changes of Customs
hundred years, and especially a century like the last, marked by an
extraordinary advance in wealth, luxury, and refinement of taste,
as well as in the mechanical arts which embellish our houses, must
produce a great change in their aspect. These changes are always
at work; they are going on now, but so silently that we take no note
of them. Men soon forget the small objects which they leave
behind them as they drift down the stream of life. As Pope says––
Nor does life’s stream for observation stay;
It hurries all too fast to mark their way.°
Important inventions, such as the applications of steam, gas, and
electricity, may find their places in history; but not so the alterations,
great as they may be, which have taken place in the appearance
of our dining and drawing-rooms. Who can now record the
degrees by which the custom prevalent in my youth of asking each
other to take wine together at dinner became obsolete? Who will
be able to fix, twenty years hence, the date when our dinners
began to be carved and handed round by servants, instead of
smoking before our eyes and noses on the table? To record such
little matters would indeed be ‘to chronicle small beer.’° But, in a
slight memoir like this, I may be allowed to note some of those
changes in social habits which give a colour to history, but which
the historian has the greatest difficulty in recovering.
At that time the dinner-table presented a far less splendid
appearance than it does now. It was appropriated to solid food,
rather than to flowers, fruits, and decorations. Nor was there
much glitter of plate upon it; for the early dinner hour rendered
candlesticks unnecessary, and silver forks had not come into general
use:° while the broad rounded end of the knives indicated the
substitute generally used instead of them. 1
1 The celebrated Beau Brummel, who was so intimate with George IV. as to be able
to quarrel with him, was born in 1771. It is reported that when he was questioned about
his parents, he replied that it was long since he had heard of them, but that he imagined
the worthy couple must have cut their own throats by that time, because when he last
saw them they were eating peas with their knives. Yet Brummel’s father had probably
lived in good society; and was certainly able to put his son into a fashionable regiment,
and to leave him 30,000l. (Raikes’s Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 207.) Raikes believes that he had
been Secretary to Lord North. Thackeray’s idea that he had been a footman cannot
stand against the authority of Raikes, who was intimate with the son.