A very big house in the country
On three days each year the Duke of Westminster opens the gardens of Eaton Hall near Chester to the public in aid of charity; this continues a longstanding tradition of the Grosvenor family in welcoming visitors to their country residence. Just as Elizabeth Bennet was able to visit the gardens and the interior of the fictional Pemberley - the country house of Darcy in Pride and Prejudice - so the Grosvenor family would allow visitors to both the interior and gardens in the 19th Century. This article describes the visit of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the American author, to Eaton Hall in August 1854 after which his verdict on the interior and its owner was that, “It must be like a small lobster in a shell much too large for him”.
The Duke of Westminster has opened the gardens of Eaton Hall to visitors on three weekends in 2023, with the last opportunity being on Sunday 27th August. By opening his gardens and some of the outbuildings to the public, the Duke is continuing a long-standing tradition both at Eaton Hall and other stately homes where visiting the country houses of the wealthy was a pastime for the leisured classes.
The most famous fictional visit to a stately home is Elizabeth Bennet’s visit to Pemberley, the home of Mr Darcy in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth and her aunt and uncle decided to visit the stately home as part of their “northern tour’’, which took them no further than Derbyshire. Following her refusal of a proposal of marriage by the apparently proud and arrogant Mr Darcy, the heroine of the novel was relieved to hear the owner was not in residence. As they approached Pemberley in their carriage, Elizabeth was delighted by her first impressions of the property. The tour itself began with the housekeeper showing them around the house’s fine interior:
“The rooms were lofty and handsome, and their furniture suitable to the fortune of its proprietor; but Elizabeth saw, with admiration of his taste, that it was neither gaudy nor uselessly fine…”
On 24th August 1854 Nathaniel Hawthorne, the American author and US consul in Liverpool, his wife Sophia, two daughters and a friend visited Eaton Hall via Chester, arriving by train from their home on the Wirral. While Elizabeth Bennet’s party seem to have been able to just turn up at Pemberley, Hawthorne’s party had to buy a ticket to visit Eaton Hall from a location on Eastgate. It isn’t recorded in his memoirs, but the obvious place to buy a ticket would have been the Grosvenor Hotel, just inside the walls on Eastgate, which had been the property of the family since 1815.
They took what Hawthorne called a “miserable” horse-drawn cab from the centre of Chester to Eaton Hall through the “wooded Park” which was inhabited by a herd of half-domesticated deer. Their cab drew up at the steps of Eaton Hall, and,
“..ascending under the portico, the door swung silently open, and we were received very civilly by two old men,--one, a tall footman in livery; the other, of higher grade, in plain clothes.”
In stark contrast with Elizabeth Bennet’s verdict on the fictious Pemberley, Hawthorne was unimpressed by the interior of Eaton Hall, which had a large entrance hall with niches in which:
“…stood several figures in antique armor, of various dates; some with lances, and others with battle-axes and swords…The plainly dressed old man now led us into a long corridor, which goes, I think, the whole length of the house, about five hundred feet, arched all the way, and lengthened interminably by a looking-glass at the end, in which I saw our own party approaching like a party of strangers. But I have so often seen this effect produced in dry-goods stores and elsewhere that I was not much impressed.”
Much of the house, which had been rebuilt in the Victorian Gothic style in the early 19th Century, had then been renovated to improve the heating and sanitation after 1845 by the 2nd Marquess of Westminster. Hawthorne’s view was that the house felt new and is if it’d never been lived in:
“This brand-newness makes it much less effective than if it had been lived in; and I felt pretty much as if I were strolling through any other renewed house. After all, the utmost force of man can do positively very little towards making grand things or beautiful things…the rooms, as we saw them, did not look by any means their best, the carpets not being down, and the furniture being covered with protective envelopes.”
Hawthorne added that:
“I should think it impossible for the owner of this house to imbue it with his personality to such a degree as to feel it to be his home. It must be like a small lobster in a shell much too large for him…there was undoubtedly great splendor,--for the details of which I refer to the guide-book”.
The tour did improve. Just as Elizabeth Bennet’s party was passed on to the gardener for a tour of the exterior of the property, so the Hawthorne group was given a tour by the “under-gardener I suppose he was” who was “very intelligent as well as kindly, and seemed to take an interest in his business”. The gardens contained “noble conservatories and hot-houses, containing all manner of rare and beautiful flowers, and tropical fruits.” The kindly under-gardener gave his wife “a purple everlasting flower, which will endure a great many years, as a memento of our visit to Eaton Hall.”
Perhaps this generosity coloured his final opinion on the façade of Eaton Hall, which he judged, “very fine, and much more satisfactory than the interior”. This opinion was not shared by others, including Charles Greville, a 19th Century diarist, who condemned it as “a vast pile of mongrel Gothick ... a monument of wealth, ignorance and bad taste”. Eaton Hall was, indeed, to be completely transformed by the 3rd Marquess of Westminster after 1870.