In Bed with the Georgians

by Rendell, Mike;

  It is no coincidence that their fame occurred at a time when the public were, for the first time, able to see exhibitions of portraits in art galleries. Both the Society of Artists (from 1761) and the Royal Academy (from 1769) held annual summer exhibitions open to the public. The pictures were hung without differentiation as to the rank of sitter, so the harlot might appear next to the royal princess, without any indication which was which (save in the catalogue). Viewers therefore saw the portraits without any preconceptions – they saw them as fashionistas in all their finery, setting trends especially in their choice of clothes, the way they styled their hair, and the ornaments and jewellery they wore to complete their ensemble. Although the original paintings would then disappear from view, passing to whoever commissioned them, the printers swiftly produced mezzotint copies, giving a far wider audience the chance to appreciate the fashion sense of the sitters. These mezzotints – from the Italian mezzo (‘half ’) and tinta (‘tone’) – were particularly good at demonstrating fine detail. The process allowed soft gradations of tone and rich and velvety blacks, and although the plates wore out quickly, the different tones made for very realistic facial representations. The portraits were collected in sets and kept in portfolios. They were also hung separately on the walls of countless homes, bringing ‘pin-ups’ into the domestic arena.

  At the same time, new and more outspoken satirists came to the fore. This coincided to some extent with the ludicrous fashions of the ‘macaronis’, with their high wigs, effeminate manners and elaborate dress – they were easy to satirise. Print shop owners, such as the husband-and-wife team the Darly’s, saw a regular trade in sets of prints, retailing at a couple of pence a copy in monochrome, and perhaps sixpence to a shilling in colour. Mary Darly had produced the first book on caricatures in 1762 with her A Book of Caricaturas and the couple went on to open a number of print shops in The Strand and Fleet Street under the name of ‘The Golden Acorn’.

  Carington Bowles was the most famous of a dynastic family of print publishers operating in London throughout the eighteenth century. He had moved to premises in St Paul’s Courtyard by 1767, and for thirty years had been publishing highly detailed and attractive prints, many focusing on females and fashion. Image 34 is a Carington Bowles print of an elegant gentleman being accosted by two smartly dressed prostitutes, who have already relieved him of his silk handkerchief.

  What was a minor craze became a commercial sensation, with print shops appearing across London, each one churning out a complete range of material from political lampoons to fashion satires. The British Museum catalogue shows some 5,500 prints dated between 1760 and 1800, of which over three hundred were mezzotint satires.

  Chapter Five

  Sex and Satire in Print

  Satire really hit its stride in the eighteenth century. What had started with bawdy ballads making crude comments about randy philanderers, progressed to groundbreaking performances like The Beggar's Opera lampooning the corruption and excesses of the ruling classes. The often general satire (as opposed to personal attacks) of Jonathan Swift gave way to the somewhat intellectual criticisms by people like Pope and Steele and then on to the much more accessible and personally vitriolic attacks of the Grub Street hacks. They in turn helped promote a raucous and outspoken Press which showed a voyeuristic interest in the bed-hopping exploits of the great and the good – but even this paled into insignificance compared with the explosion of satirical caricatures linked to the appearance of the Print Shop on the streets of London, particularly after 1770. Not only was the satire highly personal, it echoed a fascination which the public had developed into the private and not so private lives of the rich and famous. These caricatures brought the ‘celebrities’ into the public domain – their foibles and peccadilloes were now known not just to the educated classes but to the Great British Public. No matter that they may not have been able to read and write – suddenly they knew what the famous people looked like, and they voraciously devoured any salacious and titillating information about them. Crowds jostled around the windows of the Print Shops, eager to see the latest offering from men like Gillray, Newton, Cruikshank and Rowlandson. It was all very different from the prevailing atmosphere at the start of the Georgian era.

  The closing years of Queen Anne’s reign had seen a large growth in periodicals often highly critical of society in general and the government in particular. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele had launched The Spectator in 1711, specialising in poking gentle fun at contemporary mores and foibles. Later came one of the great watersheds in satire, the bursting of the ‘South Sea Bubble’ in 1720. It was the country’s first major stock market crash. The public had been duped into buying shares on the basis of lies, flim-flam and hype. When the crash came it was clear that many people had profited illegally, and corruption went right up to the top of government and to the monarch himself. Worse still, with the economy in ruins, the leader Robert Walpole decided that it was not in the public interest to have a prolonged period of navel-gazing (in other words, he presided over a cover-up which left many of the perpetrators unpunished). It provided William Hogarth with a target for one of the first caricatures he ever published, in 1721, entitled Emblematical Print on the South Sea Scheme.

  It shows the gullible British public on the financial merry-go-round (including a whore and a clergyman) alongside a representation of the Monument. However, the inscription shows not that it commemorated the Great Fire, but the destruction of the City of London in 1720. It was typical of the satire of the time – slightly ponderous, and with little attempt to show identifiable people. It focussed on corruption and greed, themes regularly dealt with by writers such as Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels. Swift was a master of both Horatian and Juvenalian styles of satire (Horatian – named after the Roman writer Horace, who chided and poked fun at human frailties and Juvenalian, named after the Roman Juvenal, who favoured a more contemptuous and critical style). Juvenalian satire was acerbic, harsh and often heavy in sarcasm and irony. Horatian satire was generally more humourous and gentle.

  In 1713 Swift and Alexander Pope had helped form the Scriblerius Club. They were joined by John Arbuthnot, who first introduced the character of John Bull as representing the symbol of Britishness. Another member was the playwright John Gay, and together this quartet doggedly attacked Robert Walpole and corruption in government, as well as making fun of the new acquisitiveness which was beginning to dominate society. Pope’s The Dunciad alienated many other writers of the day by satirising literary hacks. Grub Street really was a street, in London’s Cripplegate Ward. It attracted writers (such as the young Samuel Johnson) who were happy to espouse more-or-less any opinion just so long as they were being paid to express it. Many of the outpourings from Grub Street were thinly veiled attacks on greedy politicians, concentrating on financial improprieties rather than sexual proclivities. When The Grub Street Journal was published in 1731 (it ran under one guise or another until 1737) it lampooned ideas on theology, medicine, the theatre and justice. Although it lampooned lawyers, clerics and actors, by and large it did not make fun of the private lives of the targets.

  It had, however, become common for writers to pepper the text with ‘gutted’ names. ‘Ox….’ instead of ‘Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford’ may have fooled nobody, but gutted names became a hallmark of satirists throughout the century. It was without legal significance – a case in 1713 had established that gutting the name was no defence to a prosecution for libel. The case involved a printer called William Hurt, who had published a piece of political criticism entitled The British Embassadress’s Speach to the French King and contained lewd suggestions about Queen Anne and the Duke and Duchess of Salisbury. Jonathan Swift had described the highly defamatory piece as ‘the Cursedest Libel in Verse … that ever was seen’. At the trial, Lord Chief Justice Parker made it clear that as long as common sense identified the ‘victim’ from the cut-down version of the name, gutting it – or ‘emvowelling’ as it was known at th
e time – was no defence, and Hurt was sentenced to a spell in the prison, pilloried and fined heavily. It did not however diminish the practice of using gutted names – if anything it became even more extensively used. It helped draw in the audience – they felt ‘in on the secret’ and satirists saw it as a necessary and useful badge of their trade. Images 62 and 63 show two drawings which appeared in the Town & Country Magazine, scandalously pairing off those in the public eye who were considered to be having affairs. One of the images uses descriptions (‘A female Pilot’ to describe Nancy Parsons) and the other shows emvowelling, with Lady Waldegrave and the Duke of Gloucester appearing as ‘Lady W’ and Duke of G’.

  In time newspapers became highly skilled at ‘innuendo by juxtaposition’. An innocent and entirely accurate sentence (for example, stating that the Prince of Wales had attended a masquerade the night before) would be followed by a sentence, equally correct, stating that such-and-such an actress was appearing on stage. The sentence immediately following would make a reference to the ‘Cyprian Corps’ or ‘the frail sisterhood’. In the minds of the readers all three sentences would be read together to say: ‘The Prince of Wales has fallen for the charms of this actress and has made her his mistress’.

  Above all, it was a time when gossip emerged as a national pastime. As the playwright Sheridan was to remark: ‘Satires and lampoons on particular people circulate more by giving copies in confidence to the friends of the parties than by printing them’.

  Satirists also used allegorical stories, laced with innuendos, but a case in 1728 proved that this too was no defence to an allegation of seditious libel. The case involved Mist’s Weekly Journal, a publication which had printed an allegorical story which poked fun at the Royal Family. The Attorney General laid down this test: would the generality of readers take it as the obvious and natural meaning that it was directed at the King? If so, the libel had been proved. Similarly, rebus-like devices were often used to identify the person involved. A boot would signify Lord Bute, a picture of a fox Charles James Fox, and a pair of ostrich plumes the Prince of Wales. None of these devices, from gutted names to visual puns, gave protection against prosecution, but in text and in etchings they helped define the satirists work, from Pope to Gillray. In practice the only thing which mattered was whether a judge and jury were convinced that a libel had been made against an identifiable individual. Why were more prosecutions not brought? Because the accusation of libel focused on the fact of defamation – in other words, the court case looked as much at the reputation of the ‘victim’ as at the intention of the accused in the dock. Few people wealthy enough to be able to afford litigation would want to expose their reputation to such minute scrutiny. If you wanted to avoid washing your dirty linen in court, you kept out of the libel arena.

  Increasingly, writers introduced characters who were sexually promiscuous. Daniel Defoe published Moll Flanders in 1722. Partly based on the life of Moll King, mentioned in Chapter Three, Defoe is believed to have befriended Moll when she was in Newgate prison. His book relates the tale of a female who was at various times a con artist, a common thief and a kept woman who journeys through life, eventually triumphing against all odds. In the end, she and her husband repent of their wicked ways. In 1724 Defoe published his final novel, Roxana, the fortunate mistress – a story of the moral and spiritual decline of a high society courtesan. The central character is in many ways a proto-feminist, deploring marriage because it strips women of their legal rights (‘the Marriage Contract is … nothing but giving up Liberty, Estate, Authority, and every-thing, to the Man’). It also shows that women cannot have full sexual freedom on a parity with men, because of the risk of pregnancy. Indeed the central character’s own downfall is largely brought about because one of her offspring tracks her down and decides to expose her. Such repentance as she shows is largely nullified by the fact that she has become extremely wealthy as a result of her having seduced a number of well-heeled (and generous) benefactors. Far from being ‘a tart with a heart’ she is a calculating prostitute who pays the price for abandoning her children.

  1728 saw the premiere of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera – a hugely popular and influential satire (see Image 35). It did not just lampoon the prevailing taste for Italian opera, it ridiculed Robert Walpole (identified in the play as Bob Booty). It railed against corruption and the incompetence and greed of politicians as well as drawing a comparison between the crimes committed by the lower orders with those of their social superiors, but contrasting the different way that the Law dealt with each. It ends with the comment ‘the lower People have their Vices in a Degree as well as the Rich, and are punished for them,’ implying that the rich get away with their vices and are in effect above the law. The Beggar’s Opera, with its sixty-nine popular songs taken from existing folk tunes, ballads and well-known melodies, made a hero out of Macheath (the highwayman) while Lavinia Fenton, who played the first Polly Peachum, became an overnight success. More of her, and the besotted Duke of Bolton, in Chapter Seven.

  When Gay tried to follow up the success with a sequel (Polly) in 1729 the Prime Minister Robert Walpole leant on the Lord Chamberlain to have the play banned because it was even more overtly critical of the government than Beggar’s Opera. It did not appear on stage for another fifty years. The powers of the Lord Chamberlain’s office were strengthened even more after the passing of the Licensing Act in 1737. Not only could the Lord Chamberlain veto any play he did not like, but theatre owners could be prosecuted for putting on a play, or part of a play, unless they had obtained prior approval. This censorship was greatly resented by playwrights, especially as the banning orders were generally used for political purposes i.e. to prevent criticism of the government. The legislation remained on the Statute Book until 1843, when it was replaced by the slightly less draconian Theatres Act.

  In 1732 Jonathan Swift published his poem The Lady’s Dressing Room – a scatalogical but humourous tale of a man sneaking in to look through his lover’s dressing room. In the poem Swift denounces the vanity of women in general, and is highly critical of false beauty aids and cosmetics. He was also poking fun at men – and their unrealistic expectations. But Swift also displays an underlying belief at the time, that women were to blame for corrupting men and leading them astray. It is no different to some of Thomas Rowlandson’s pornographic prints of a century later, showing elderly men being seduced by a naked and glamorous young lady (see Image 22).

  Hogarth published his series of six prints under the heading A Harlot’s Progress in 1732. The first in the series is shown as Image 8 and shows a young girl from the country called Moll (or Mary) Hackabout who comes to London and is lured into prostitution by the notorious bawd Elizabeth Needham. Lord Charteris, known as the Rape-Master General and described further in Chapter Eight, looks on in the background, fondling himself in anticipation.

  Subsequent scenes show Moll’s descent into poverty, disease and an early death, and they also offer a very early instance where the characters are identifiable. One of the prints shows the magistrate Sir John Gonson; another, the medics Dr Richard Rock and Dr Jean Misaubin (both of whom specialised in promoting cures for venereal disease). Satire was becoming personal, and in case the public did not recognise the targets, Hogarth added their names on pieces of paper. He followed up this highly moralising and ever-so-worthy tale with a companion set of eight called A Rake’s Progress (1736) charting the downward spiral into debt and madness of Tom Rakewell. Image 20 shows one of the images in the set. Drink, gambling and whoring lead Tom to being incarcerated in the Fleet Prison, and ultimately, in Bedlam. In 1743 Hogarth followed up his finger-wagging with the six part Marriage à-la-mode in which he lampoons the idea of marrying for money, and again shows the ‘hero’ as he succumbs to whoring, catches venereal disease and ends up being murdered.

  Such was Hogarth’s influence and popularity that he helped get the Engraving Copyright Act onto the statute books in 1734. This gave artists a measure of protection from b
eing ripped off, and cover was extended to other forms of plagiarism in 1775, to prints in 1777, and finally to sculptures in 1814.

  Many of Hogarth’s engravings were only prepared once he had raised sufficient money by subscriptions, but he helped develop a market for popular printed culture. Meanwhile, the lack of effective libel laws, coupled with a return to adversarial twoparty politics at the start of George III’s reign, encouraged a strong and vibrant Press.

  A book that gives an insight into the finance of sex was Chrysal – the adventures of a guinea published in 1760 and running to twenty-four editions by 1800. It follows the life of a gold guinea coin as it is passed around throughout society. On several occasions it is used to buy the services of prostitutes. The guinea is often cited as the ‘coin of choice’ for a woman selling her virtue, and Image 33 shows a whore weighing the gold coin on her scales. It has been clipped and therefore is underweight, and the rake will not have his pleasures tonight.

  Readers of Chrysal would have been able to identify the elderly Field Marshall, who wishes to have sex with a ten year old girl, as being John, Earl Ligonier, Commander of the British forces. The old lecher was notorious for his paedophilia, resulting in the Town & Country Magazine in 1760 remarking that ‘as the Old Soldier increases in years, the age of his mistresses diminish and now he is near eighty, he gives it as his opinion that no woman past fourteen is worth pursuing’. Other identifiable individuals in Chrysal are the Duke of St Albans, Lord Anson and Lord Deloraine, all infamous for their immorality and debauchery.

  A later writer who liked to poke fun at the foibles and pretentiousness of the English aristocracy was Fanny Burney. Her four novels Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla and The Wanderer appeared during the period between 1778 and 1814 and in many respects she paved the way for Jane Austen and her witty observations on sexual politics, the role of women, and the perils of playing fast and loose. Neither writer was commenting on specific individuals, but both helped to ridicule prevailing attitudes in that particular echelon of society. To that extent they were following on from the tradition developed by Richard Brinsley Sheridan in The School for Scandal, mocking society for its hypocrisy and preoccupation with gossip. The play was first performed in London at the Drury Lane Theatre on 8 May 1777, a comedy of manners which lampooned the gossip-mongers.