Reminiscences of a Literary Life
CHAP. XIV
LORD DOVER
LORD DOVER
In the winter of 1832-33, a few months before his premature and lamented
death, his lordship was staying at Brighton in very bad, and visibly very bad, health. His
house was flanked on either side by a rich, pompous, party-giving citizen and citizeness.
Those new Brighton houses were neither so comfortable nor so substantial as they looked
outside; the partition walls between them were thin and porous to sound. One night, when he
was very ill, his right-hand neighbour gave a grand soirée with a
concert. There was no escaping the noise, and poor Lord
Dover suffered from it. On calling upon him next morning, he said in his
quiet manner: “I have had a bad night of it! I really believe that our next-door
neighbour would give a ball and dance at his house, even if he knew I were in the very
act of dying.” A few nights after this, when his lordship was still worse,
and when that neighbour knew it, the man on his left did give a ball, a crowded and very
noisy one, for it was full season at Brighton, and a Cavalry Regiment was in barracks, and
all the officers who attended the ball waltzed and mazurkaed with their spurs on. I say
that this christianly neighbour knew his lordship’s condition: he had been politely
warned, though not by Lady Dover, or by any of the
family. His answer was that “cards” had been issued, and that invitations could
not be recalled. But who has lived in London, or in any “fashionable” or
“respectable” quarter of it, without being made painfully sensible of the utter
indifference of next-door neighbours? of the total disregard of No. 4 to the misery, agony,
or death that may be passing at ![]()
| CHAP. XIV] | NATIONAL FAULTS | 145 |
![]()
No. 3 on the one
side, or at No. 5 on the other? The lower grades of society are higher in this regard: a
poor tradesman will not have song and supper, romp and clatter, if he knows that there is
death or dangerous sickness in the next house; and I think I have observed that the very
poor, the hard-working classes, are thoughtful and delicate in such occurrences. I take it
that the heartlessness of English society—if we have anything left that can be really
called society—increases in exact proportion to the increase of pretension and love of
display, and that it is in part owing to the insane desire of doing in brick-built street
or terrace houses that which can be done properly only in palaces or detached stone
mansions. If, as a nation, we have much to be proud of, verily we have much of which to be
ashamed! Our pretension, our egotism, our common lack of ease and amiability, will not
recommend us in the eyes of posterity, even though that posterity should be worse than
ourselves—a case, to all appearance, very likely to occur.
George James Welbore Agar- Ellis, first baron Dover (1797-1833)
The son of Henry Welbore Agar-Ellis, second Viscount Clifden; he was MP for Haytersbury
(1818-20), Seaford (1820-26), Ludgershall (1826-30) and Okehampton (1830-31); he was raised
to the peerage in 1831.
Lady Georgiana Ellis [née Howard] (d. 1860)
The daughter of George Howard, sixth Earl of Carlisle; in 1822 she married George James
Welbore Agar-Ellis, first Baron Dover.
