<i>Decency and Disorder: The Age of Cant, 1789-1837</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Decency and Disorder: The Age of Cant, 1789-1837 Alistair Heys Decency and Disorder: The Age of Cant, 1789–1837. By Ben Wilson. London: Faber and Faber, 2007. Pp. 544. ISBN 978 0 571 22468 5. £25. Decency & Disorder 1789–1837 is the best book on a Byronic topic that is not primarily about Byron. I write this because Ben Wilson is a historian rather than a Byronist and his concern is with the recorded use of 'cant' in Georgian society. But as readers of this journal will appreciate, cant is a word with strong Byronic associations. The main thesis of the book is that life in Napoleonic England was much more fun than it was during the staid reign of Victoria, and that what the Romantics slightingly refer to as cant marks the beginning of a titanic slide towards a reactionary ethos. Wilson's book is of great interest to Byronists and Romanticists in general because Byron's carnivalesque cry against hypocrisy and cant represents the prime example in Wilson's introduction and is later awarded a very readable chapter all of its own. Wilson defines cant as 'societal clichés which platonically infect the mind', while its merry-andrew enemies prefer the more natural discourse of the body. 'Cant is so much stronger than Cunt nowadays', as Byron notes in a private letter. In Wilson's skilled hands cant refers to moralising social energies that hijack ethical language in order to bully the labouring classes by depriving them of their boisterous pastimes. Wilson precisely realises what Byron describes as Britain's primum mobile, or those who can only cantingly repeat the fashionable tone of the time, and identifies this puritanical hypocrisy as distinctly unBritish. Although Wilson does not draw a direct parallel with political correctness one wonders whether the spirit of the present age does not connive in the writing of a book dedicated to the canting spirit of the pre-Victorian; the figures that Wilson allies with the unabashed individuality of the Byronic are naughty but nice. Byron is aligned with a whole catalogue of social reprobates whose rebellious and lively behaviour offended the virtuous and drew the fire of Georgian moralists. For instance, Wilson regales his reader with the biography of Dr Samuel Solomon, who, by successfully marketing the Balm of Gilead, became one of the richest men in the country. Evidently, Solomon's quite specious A Guide to Health could transform the heartiest into a whinging hypochondriac; naturally the prescribed cure-all for ailments real or imagined was a dosage of the doctor's must-have nostrum. Unfortunately for the sick, the 'primary ingredient was half a pint of brandy, infused with cardamom seeds, lemon peel, tincture of cantharides and perfumed with Sicilian oregano'. Cantharides was the very beetle crushed to make Spanish Fly: in effect the balm enflamed the urethra to such an extent that the ensuing soreness allowed the quack doctor to stake the claim that the balm cured adolescents of the ravages of onanism. As Wilson notes, when the Edinburgh Review devoted an essay to Keats, Byron inquired 'why don't they review and praise "Solomon's Guide to Health"? It is better sense, and as much poetry as Johnny Keats'. The doctor of the noxious nostrum that apparently cured immoral self-pollution in adolescents was eventually unmasked by campaigning journalists. Yet Wilson reveals the canting hypocrisy of journalists too; a striking example being the fate of Kean, who was hounded by the ostensibly cant-hating Thomas Barnes because the actor was an adulterer. Despite the fact that Barnes was living in sin with a certain Dinah Mary Mondet, under his stewardship The Times repeatedly savaged Kean for outraging public decency. Whilst London audiences mostly refused to condemn their darling, after an ill-fated tour of the provinces the broken actor was finally driven to seek refuge in America. Wilson is a breath-taking narrator of the puritanical enmity of the opposition to the sheer exuberance of Regency life. The chapter on the rebuilding of the Theatre Royal at Covent Garden includes the no less startling information that when Kemble ventured on stage 'he was instantly drowned in a...