‘IN THE NEWEST MANNER’: SOCIAL LIFE IN LATE GEORGIAN DEVIZES 11 
enlivened the monotony and strain of working class 
lives, as well as providing occasions for courtship, a 
loosening of social restraints and opportunities for 
crime. 
Reflecting the social mix and unequal income 
distribution of the community, earthy sports and 
boisterous pastimes flourished alongside the civic 
rituals and more sophisticated tastes of wealthy 
traders and _ professionals, accentuating the 
polarisation between cosmopolitan and popular 
culture. Public lighting aided socialising and towns 
became ‘social amphitheatres for the rural and 
urban élite’.!*? Withdrawing from participation in 
traditional culture, they turned to the expanding 
world of fashionable leisure and polite culture. 
Increasing literacy and access to printed books were 
widening men’s intellectual experience and 
fostering the cult of travel, fashion and popular 
science. The élite were redefining themselves in 
cultural terms, conforming to a new set of values- 
sociability, toleration and gentility — in contrast to 
the rustic and sensual interests of the lower orders. 
As John Trusler remarked in 1766 ‘Scarce a town of 
any magnitude but has its Theatre Royal, its 
concerts, its balls, its card parties’.!*! It might be 
thought that only cathedral cities and large towns 
had a way of life comparable to the urban 
experience, but the lifestyle of the bourgeoisie 
shows that Devizes, with a population of 4,747 in 
1801, was by no means philistine or torpid in the 
late eighteenth century. Although no Literary and 
Scientific Institute was founded until 1833, interest 
in these subjects was already widespread. 
Merchants and shopkeepers, doctors, lawyers and 
clergy were buying books, collecting pyints, 
attending plays and concerts. Dr Brabant was a 
friend of poets Tom Moore and Samuel Taylor 
Coleridge, '” and goldsmith Bennet Swayne was the 
first husband of the mother of Poet Laureate 
Thomas Campbell. The range of book-buying, 
musical activity and membership of philanthropic 
and social clubs in Devizes indicate a receptiveness 
to the new Enlightenment and the cultural 
hegemony of the professional and élite classes. As 
Byng wrote, ‘the turnpike roads of the kingdom... 
have imported London manners’.'* 
Undoubtedly influenced by visits to London 
and Bath, and by newspaper descriptions of 
fashions and activities in those cities, the Devizes 
élite were involved in a range of active social and 
cultural pursuits, from science to gardening, from 
dancing to book-collecting and the expansion of 
wealth led to a greater demand for organised leisure 
activities. Nicolai Karamzin claimed that 
‘newspapers and magazines were in everyone’s 
hands in England’ and this greatly assisted the 
dissemination of cultural ideas and the advertising 
of social events such as assemblies and _ balls, 
lectures and sporting contests. Georgian social and 
public life now revolved round the town, rather 
than the church. As a result of growing affluence, 
the late eighteenth century saw the rise of a leisure 
industry, organised on a commercial basis, catering 
for the wealthy bourgeoisie; culture and sport 
ceased to be the aristocracy’s preserve and became 
middle class in character, bridging the divide 
between aristocratic culture and bucolic peasant 
pursuits. The wide availability of printed matter, 
including woodcuts, engravings and music scores, 
brought the arts within the range of people for 
whom art and music had been unobtainable in the 
seventeenth century. Culture became a commodity 
to be bought and sold, and within the purchasing 
power of ‘the middling sort’, who wished to emulate 
the good taste and refinement of their social 
superiors. Bourgeois horizons were widening and a 
fashionable culture was developing, making 
Devizes a social focus in its regional hinterland and 
emphasising the difference between urban and 
rural society. 
J.J.Looney has claimed that gentry centres 
experienced the commercialisation of leisure before 
the industrial towns. Citing the examples of York 
and Leeds, he has shown how the large number of 
‘clubbable’ men, such as attorneys and doctors, 
influenced the development of provincial culture.!*” 
Until the 1820s, when improved transport made 
London, spas and seaside resorts more viable and 
attractive social venues, the town was the centre of 
leisure life for the rural and urban gentry. In the 
acquisition of taste, there was a large element of 
social emulation, a desire to join the cultured set. 
The British Magazine remarked in 1763 that: 
the present rage of imitating the manners of high life 
hath spread itself so far among the gentlefolks of 
lower life that in a few years we shall probably have 
no common folk at all!*° 
Local antiquary Dr Davis satirised this social 
pretentiousness and the quest for fashionable 
elegance: 
You have turn’d the grating of your woolcombs into 
the scraping of Fiddles; the screeking loom into the 
tinckling Harpsichord; and the Thumping Fulling 
mills into the glittering and contentious Organ. 
