Georgian London: Into the Streets Read online

  Lucy Inglis

  GEORGIAN LONDON

  Into the Streets

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Preface

  Introduction

  1. The City

  2. The Margins

  3. Westminster and St James’s

  4. Bloomsbury, Covent Garden and the Strand

  5. Soho and Charing Cross

  6. Mayfair

  7. Marylebone

  8. The River Thames

  9. Southwark and Lambeth

  10. Spitalfields, Whitechapel and Stepney

  11. Hackney and Bethnal Green

  12. Islington, Hampstead and Highgate

  Afterword

  Plates

  Select Bibliography

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  For Richard, with love

  ‘The web of our Life is of a mingled Yarn’

  List of Illustrations

  Endpapers: Mary Rocque’s map of London, 1766, showing the boundary of the City of London (© Museum of London)

  IN THE TEXT

  St Paul’s Cathedral destroyed by the Great Fire, 1666

  St Paul’s and surrounding area, 1745

  Smithfield Market, 1745

  Smithfield market scene, 1811

  The Bank of England and Royal Exchange, 1745

  Moorfields and the Artillery Ground, 1745

  Holborn, Lincoln’s Inn and Temple, 1790

  The remains of Gibbon’s Tennis Court, 1809

  Westminster, 1827 (Motco Enterprises Ltd)

  ‘Love and Dust’, by Thomas Rowlandson, 1788

  St James’s Square and surrounding streets, 1745

  ‘In Bloomsbury Square’, 1787

  Covent Garden and the Strand, 1745

  The Foundling Hospital, 1745

  The trade card for Mrs Holt’s ‘Italian Warehouse’

  Advertisement for Mozart’s appearance in London, 1765

  The Huguenot Pezé Pilleau’s trade card, 1720

  ‘The Dying Gaul, or Smugglerius’ (Fitzwilliam Museum)

  Mayfair, 1827 (Motco Enterprises Ltd)

  Burlington House gate, 1731

  Cavendish Square, 1771

  Advertisement for the Hindostanee Coffee House, 1811

  Marylebone Pleasure Gardens, 1745

  Old Westminster Bridge, 1754

  Southwark, 1827 (Motco Enterprises Ltd)

  Eleanor Coade’s stone factory, Lambeth, 1784

  Spitalfields and Whitechapel, 1827 (Motco Enterprises Ltd)

  Bethnal Green, 1827 (Motco Enterprises Ltd)

  The Aquatic Theatre, Sadler’s Wells, 1813

  Archway Turnpike, 1825

  PLATES

  Section One – Black and White

  1. William Hogarth, ‘Noon, 1738’, showing a London street scene

  2. St Martin’s Le Grand, the site for the new Post Office

  3. The Jernegan Cistern

  4. Coffee pot made by the silversmith Paul de Lamerie (Christies, London)

  5. ‘A Paraleytic Woman’ by Theodore Gericault (Museum of London)

  6. A view of Marylebone Pleasure Gardens

  7. Dockhead, Bermondsey, showing the notorious slum of Jacob’s Island (London Metropolitan Archives)

  8. Castle’s Shipbreaking Yard (London Metropolitan Archives)

  9. The Yard of the Oxford Arms Inn, Ludgate Hill (London Metropolitan Archives)

  10. Capper’s Farmhouse being slowly consumed by Heal’s, Tottenham Court Road (London Metropolitan Archives)

  11. ‘The Tower of London’, engraving by William Miller after J. M.W. Turner

  12. ‘New London Bridge, with the Lord Mayor’s Procession Passing Under the Unfinish’d Arches’

  13. ‘Southwark Bridge from Bank Side’

  14. ‘Wapping Old Stairs’

  15. ‘The five orders of Perriwigs as they were worn at the late Coronation measured Architectonically’

  16. ‘The Fellow ‘Prentices at their Looms, Representing Industry and Idleness’

  Section Two – Colour

  17. ‘The Frost Fair of the Winter of 1683–4 on the Thames, with Old London Bridge in the Distance’ (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, USA /Bridgeman Art Library)

  18. ‘Mr. Lunardi’s New Balloon, 29 June 1785’ (Science Museum, London, UK / Bridgeman Art Library)

  19. ‘Christie’s Auction Room’

  20. ‘Watch House’: the interior of St James’s Watch House

  21. ‘The Hall and Stair Case of the British Museum’

  22. The Portland Vase (The British Museum, Collection of the Dukes of Portland; purchased with the aid of a bequest from James Rose Vallentin, 1945. Photograph by Marie-Lan Nguyen)

  23. ‘Workhouse’: the interior of St James’s Workhouse

  24. Tokens given by mothers to their children (The Foundling Museum, London/Bridgeman Art Library)

  25. ‘View of St. James’s from Green Park, London’ (London Metropolitan Archives, City of London/Bridgeman Art Library)

  26. A Spitalfields silk waistcoat

  27. ‘The Rhinebeck Panorama’ (Museum of London)

  28. ‘A View of the London Docks, 1808’ (Museum of London)

  29. ‘Entrance to the Thames Tunnel, 1836’ (London Metropolitan Archives, City of London/Bridgeman Art Library)

  30. ‘A View of the Highgate Archway, 1821’ (London Metropolitan Archives, City of London/Bridgeman Art Library)

  Preface

  I do not pretend to give a full account of all things worthy to be known, in this great city, or of its famous citizens … but only the most eminent which have occurred to my reading or observation.

  Thomas de Laune, The Present State of London (1690)

  Fourteen years ago I arrived in London to work for an antiques dealer. The city fascinated me, its history hanging in the air like a salty tang. My days were spent amongst eighteenth-century objects, from milk jugs to gold boxes. Who had made them? Where did they live? What were their lives like? In looking for answers I found tales of men, women, children, wealth, crime, poverty, the erotic, the exotic and the quiet desperation of the mundane.

  Monarchs, politicians and aristocrats grab the historical limelight, but the ordinary people were my quarry: the Londoners who rode the dawn coach to work, opened shops bleary-eyed and hung-over, fell in love, had risky sex, realized the children had head lice again, paid parking fines, cashed in winning lottery tickets, fought for good causes and committed terrible crimes. Behind their stories, I saw modern London emerge between the Restoration of Charles II and the arrival of Queen Victoria on the throne.

  One Sunday, in the summer of 2009, I stood on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral and listened as the bells called to worshippers and tourists alike. People loitered chatting, or climbed the steps and went inside. I imagined this clamour was almost exactly the same as it had been three centuries ago. I recorded it on my telephone and walked home.

  For years I had dragged my husband to churchyards, houses, demolition sites, public monuments and hidden memorials, telling him the stories of people long dead: cabinetmakers, slaves, domestic servants, weavers, chimney sweeps and prostitutes. Back at home I played him the recording, my precious moment of shared experience with Londoners of the past. His dry recommendation was to start blogging the tales I had accumulated and what I believed about Georgian London (perhaps hoping to deflect my endless enthusiasm on to the miasma of the World Wide Web). The blog gained instant traction as it explored relationships, crime, literature, disability, personal hygiene, jobs, sexuality, charity, sport and shopping. This book has sprung from its loins, a tribute to the people of the eighteenth-century
city and testimony to the eternal feeling that if I could just run fast enough through London’s endless archives I will catch them, grasp their coat-tails and make them tell me everything about being a Georgian Londoner.

  Introduction

  Much of this book is concerned with the minutiae of daily life in Georgian London, during the years between 1714 and 1830. It was an extraordinary period in the city’s history, but its foundations lay in the latter half of the seventeenth century, when four defining events shaped the psyche of Londoners. The first was a question of government, followed by a terrifying epidemic and a devastating fire. The last was a matter of religious identity.

  Our story begins in the winter of 1659. The country was poor, and disheartened by civil war. It was the time of the Commonwealth, when England was a republic under Oliver Cromwell’s Rump Parliament, the ‘hind’ or leftovers of government from the war. But now Cromwell was dead. In December, gangs of youths took to the streets of London, pelting soldiers with rocks. These were not street children but the city’s teenage apprentices, feared since medieval times for their propensity to riot when aggrieved. Their protest was put down at sword-and gunpoint, but it was the start of a series of public displays of unrest, where the watermen wore the badges of the old King and urchins made bonfires and burned mock ‘rumps’ in the streets. The republic’s days were numbered.

  Charles Stuart, son of the executed King, had been exiled in The Hague, and was waiting to return to power. He was proclaimed King in his absence on 8 May 1660, and ‘Bow Bells could not be heard for the noise of the people’. The Quaker Daniel Baker reprimanded citizens for their enthusiastic celebrations, calling the city an ‘Impudent Harlot, thou whorish Blood-thirsty Mistress of abomination’. But London’s royalist pamphleteers styled Charles as a phoenix rising from the ashes of the republic. He arrived in London on 29 May, his thirtieth birthday. He was welcomed to the City of London by the Lord Mayor before processing along the Strand to Westminster. Such were the crowds that it took him seven hours to cover the distance, a little under two miles. Accompanying him were ‘above 20000 horse and foot, brandishing their swords, and shouting with inexpressible joy; the ways strewed with flowers, the bells ringing, the streets hung with tapestry, fountains running with wine’. John Evelyn the diarist recalled how he had ‘stood in the Strand and beheld it, and blessed God’.

  The Restoration returned colour and fun to London. The theatres, closed by the Puritans, reopened and were soon full every night. Before the Restoration of Charles II London had lacked the money to grow, or else had been held back by cautious monarchs who prohibited building, fretting that the city might become unmanageable. It remained a medieval city of narrow streets and courts, a jumble of gables crowded too close together to be either comfortable or sanitary. However, Charles did not fear expansion and London soon began to grow. Then came the twin horrors of the Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666. In little over a year, a fifth of London’s population lay below the earth. Above it, four-fifths of the City was ashes.

  The Plague killed approximately 100,000 Londoners over the summer of 1665. Amsterdam had been devastated the year before, and London knew it was only a matter of time before the disease arrived. It began in April, when the first fatality was recorded. The initial outbreak was in St Giles-in-the-Fields, a poor area near Tottenham Court Road. Many who died there went undiagnosed and unrecorded, for no one in London understood that the rod-shaped plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, was carried by London’s black rats. Rats were, after all, part of city life. Plague rapidly made ‘a great impression of fear on the hearts of men’ because of its unpredictability and the devastation it wreaked on the body. There were no set signs, and some died suddenly with no symptoms at all. Others suffered terribly with fever, or large black buboes growing in the lymph nodes of their groin or throat, followed by organ failure and seizures. It was hot and airless in the cramped streets; the numbers of dead rose and no one knew where the sickness would strike next. London was gripped by terror.

  By the summer, anyone who could leave London had gone. Shops and taverns were closed, the streets empty. Priests, doctors and some officials, including Samuel Pepys, remained – as did a few hardy residents. Many of those who stayed behind were servants abandoned by their fleeing employers. The superstitious carried ‘charms, philtres, exorcisms, amulets’ to protect themselves. On 1 July, the Mayor and Aldermen of the City published a more practical set of emergency procedures for each parish to follow. Plagued households were shut up by the watchmen with all the occupants inside. Daniel Defoe recorded that some died simply of fear, watching the sufferings of their family. In the event of a death, a searcher – usually a poor old woman – was sent in to investigate. The watchmen granted them access to the house and they had to diagnose the dead, ‘as near as they can’. Any surviving members of the household had to stay in the house for twenty-eight days, relying on food passed through windows by friends. The friendless starved.

  By September, the death toll had hit 7,000 a week. The Lord Mayor ordered London’s cats and dogs to be exterminated as a misguided precaution against the spread of the disease: ‘they talked of forty thousand dogs, and five times as many cats; few houses being without a cat’. Free from predators, the toxic rat population boomed. Londoners ventured out only when necessary, often returning sick. A clergyman named John Allin and his brother had decided to stay in London. Early in that deadly September, John’s brother went out one morning. When he returned he found a ‘stiffnesse under his eare, where he had a swelling that could not be brought to rise and breake, but choacked him; he dyed Thursday night last’. That week, with the deaths at their peak, Allin wrote of the ‘dolefull and almost universall and continuall ringing and tolling of bells’.

  The ‘dead carts’ rumbled through the empty streets, piled high with bodies. As they approached the drivers tolled a handbell and called, ‘Bring out your dead!’ Few were prepared neatly for the grave. Plague pits were dug, several around Aldgate and Cripplegate, where the dead were to be buried at least six feet deep. Those expectant holes in the ground had a great effect upon the living. John Allin was distressed by the one he could see from his bedroom window, and at the height of the deaths Defoe remembered how ‘people that were infected and near their end, and delirious also, would run to those pits, wrapt in blankets or rugs, and throw themselves in’. The drivers and the ‘buriers’ became hardened to the sufferings around them. One driver, named Buckinham, was whipped and imprisoned for driving through the streets shouting, ‘Faggots, faggots, five for sixpence’ then holding up the corpse of a child by the leg.

  Then, just as Londoners feared extinction, the spread of the disease slowed as autumn cooled the city. It seemed that more victims were surviving. They ‘sweated kindly’, their buboes burst and could be drained. Families still fell sick, but then they recovered, sometimes without the loss of even one life. The worst had passed. By spring 1666, most of those who had left the city returned to their homes, and the King and his court were back in St James’s. The disease would linger on in some slums through another blazing summer, but life returned to normal with remarkable speed. London had survived. Or so it seemed.

  In the early hours of 2 September 1666, in Seething Lane, Samuel Pepys and his wife, Elizabeth, were woken by their maid, Jane, to tell them of a fire she and the other maids had seen in the City. He got up, put on his nightgown and went with Jane to look but, as he recorded in his diary, ‘thought it far enough off; and so went to bed again and to sleep’. He rose again around seven and after getting dressed, ‘Jane comes and tells me that she hears that above 300 houses have been burned down to-night by the fire we saw, and that it is now burning down all Fish-street by London Bridge’. Perturbed, Pepys walked to the Tower of London and watched the progress of the fire. He went down to the river and took a boat to get a perspective from the water. The Steelyard, a four-acre area of light industry, warehouses and housing now covered by Cannon Street Station, was alre
ady burning fiercely and people had begun to evacuate their homes on a large scale. Public order broke down as people looked for someone to blame. London’s foreign population, particularly the French element, were targeted that day. A fourteen-year-old Westminster schoolboy, William Taswell, remembered seeing a blacksmith who met ‘an innocent Frenchman walking along the street, [and] felled him instantly to the ground with an iron bar’. His brother told him he too had seen a Frenchman ‘almost dismembered’ in Moorfields because the mob thought he was carrying firebombs. It was a box of tennis balls.

  Samuel Pepys continued to traverse the city, watching the progress of the flames. The cramped, high buildings were ‘so very thick thereabouts’ that their gables leaned towards each other and allowed the fire to spread across the roofs unchecked. The wind had got up ‘mighty high and [was] driving [the fire] into the City; and every thing, after so long a drought, [was] proving combustible, even the very stones of churches’. Pepys was called to see the King, who told him to go and order the Lord Mayor to pull down the houses in the path of the fire ‘every which way’. The Mayor was found in Canning Street, ‘like a man spent, with a handkercher about his neck’. He had responded too late to stop the fire. Pepys took to the water again. Everywhere people were loading the contents of their homes on to the small Thames cargo boats, known as ‘lighters’. He watched the fire from the river, nearly overwhelmed by smoke, and his face ‘almost burned with a shower of firedrops’. That night, sitting in an alehouse at Three Cranes Wharf, Samuel and his wife saw the flames above the city, ‘an arch of above a mile long: it made me weep to see it’.

  In the morning, Monday, they began to pack up their own house. While Samuel’s household laboured to save their belongings, London’s other famous diarist, John Evelyn, had come up from Deptford to see the ‘Great Fire’. By the time he saw the city, from Southwark, the alehouse Samuel and Elizabeth had sat in the night before was gone. Nor was the Lord Mayor, Thomas Bloodworth, anywhere to be seen. Instead King Charles’s brother, James, the Duke of York, arrived in the City, marshalled groups of firefighters and ordered the demolition of whole streets. The fire continued to spread. The Royal Exchange, the glory of Elizabethan London, burned through the late afternoon.