Georgian London: Into the Streets

by Lucy Inglis

  Some of the old church proved impossible to dismantle, including the vast leaning pillars of the West End. They were eleven feet across and cemented in place by the heat of the fire. Wren had to resort to gunpowder. He made careful calculations as to where the hole should be dug in the north-west corner, where a particularly stubborn pillar would not come down. A pine box of gunpowder was lowered into the hole, trailing a wick which was protected by lengths of cane until it was out of the hole, and then a trail of powder was poured along the ground. Bricklayer Thomas Warren was paid extra to light the trail and run for cover.

  Wren’s calculations had been so careful that not only did Thomas make it safely back, but the 18lbs of gunpowder shifted an estimated 3,000 tons of masonry and saved thousands of man hours. The success of this experiment led his assistant to try it. A pillar exploded, sending a piece of masonry straight across the churchyard and through the upper floor of a bookshop where some women were at work. No one was hurt, but the accounts of St Paul’s list two months’ worth of repairs to the bookshop for the summer of 1672, and Wren was ordered not to have gunpowder used on the site again.

  It took almost eight years of continuous work to prepare the site, dig the new foundations and sort the good stone from the ruined. The first stone of the new cathedral was laid in June, when Wren marked out the centre of the dome and stood upon it. Not wanting to leave his spot to find a marker, he asked one of the workmen to find him a large flat stone. Legend has it that this stone was one of the old tombstones of St Paul’s, engraved with a single word: RESURGAM. The same word (Latin for ‘to rise again’) is now seen over the South Door, beneath the phoenix representing the King, the rebirth of the cathedral and the City itself. The idea of resurrection seems to have been important for Wren, as the main axis of the new cathedral lines up exactly with the sunrise on Easter Sunday 1675, the year the groundwork for the new building was finished.

  Once the foundation stone was laid, the masons moved in. They would work continuously on the cathedral for the next twenty-two years, a remarkably short amount of time to finish such a church. The Portland stone which forms the main building material of St Paul’s arrived by boat from Dorset, before being lifted by cranes on to the wharves south of the cathedral. Sheds for the masons were constructed over the whole site, and a blacksmith was on hand to sharpen or mend any tools which became blunted or broke. Other sheds contained what were known as ‘tracing floors’, where parts of the plans could be carefully drawn out to scale and the cut stone placed on top of the chalk outlines to see if they would fit together correctly before they were lifted into place. During this time, in 1691, it appears that Christopher Wren was inducted into the Masonic Lodge of St Paul’s Churchyard. Freemasonry was slowly moving away from craft-based mutual support groups towards speculative information-sharing and networking for gentlemen. Whilst Wren was no doubt welcomed in as ‘the boss’, there was little of the secrecy which began to enclose the organization only a few decades later. Discussion of religion and politics was strictly forbidden, and the emphasis was on gaining new knowledge. In the 1690s, Masonic lodges were drawing on the rapid advances in scientific and mathematical ideas to apply this new ‘natural philosophy’ to their professions. Lectures were given on ‘true, useful and universal science’ for the education of the members, models were built and experiments carried out in a fraternal environment. Fraternity was one of the long-standing traditions of the City, seen clearly in the parish system and in the medieval trade guilds, the livery companies. As parish officers, freemen of their chosen trade and, increasingly, Masonic brothers, the citizens of London were used to contributing to the community in a number of ways which cemented neighbourhoods, offering both social promotion and protection in times of hardship. Helping others paid dividends.

  Whether all the men working on St Paul’s were Freemasons is impossible to know. They were, however, at the cutting edge of their professions. Wren employed John Longland, a master carpenter, to make sure all went to plan. Huge amounts of timber were used; soft-and hardwoods were soon piling up on the three nearby wharves. The softwoods came from Christiania (Oslo), Dram and Fredrikstad, and the hardwoods came from British forests. A running joke was that the Baltic timber merchants warmed themselves handsomely on the Great Fire. Timber was not only used as scaffolding, but in the construction process. It forms the internal structure of the dome. When viewed from the inside, you are not seeing the interior of the dome visible from the outside, but a dome built below it. In between the two is another cone-shaped dome made of brick, which supports the Golden Gallery right at the top. From the outside what one sees is a dome created from timber and covered in lead sheeting. In 1711, the dome was finished and a 76-year-old Wren was hauled up in a basket to inspect the quality of the work.

  As the church came into being, the interior became a priority. St Paul’s is full of miraculous oddities executed by London artisans. Sir James Thornhill, painter and father-in-law of William Hogarth, painted the famous scenes on the inside of the cupola. John Evelyn looked through the window of a ‘mean’ cottage in Deptford and saw a man carving a wooden model of Tintoretto’s Crucifixion by the light of a candle. That man was Dutch-born carver Grinling Gibbons, skilled in both stone and wood, who would go on to produce most of the work in the choir. French Huguenot Jean Tijou was responsible for the ironwork. The south-west tower holds a brass pineapple at the very top. It was made by iron foundress Jane Brewer in 1708, by which time the cathedral had been conducting services for almost a decade. Brewer was not the only woman to work on the cathedral; the accounts record ‘Sarah Freeman, Plumber’, ‘Widdow Pearce, Painter’ and ‘Anne Brooks, Smith’. They were not labourers but businesswomen, working at the top of their professions.

  The final bill for St Paul’s was £736,752 2s 3¼d, putting over 75 million modern pounds into the pockets of London manufacturers and workmen and women.

  PATERNOSTER ROW: THE LIBRARY OF THE CITY

  Crouched on the north side of St Paul’s churchyard was Paternoster Row. It was the bookselling centre of London from the Middle Ages to the Blitz of 1940–41 when it was bombed out of existence with the loss of more than one million volumes. With only literature and music available for home entertainment, books and publishing were lucrative businesses for those who had an eye for what would sell. Start-up costs were relatively low, and a small efficient business could do well. As literacy spread during the late seventeenth century, and as trade became more international in the eighteenth, the ability to read – if not to write – became far more important.

  Printing shops were family affairs, like most eighteenth-century businesses. Two presses in each shop were standard. Each press took two people to work it. A compositor handled the typesetting, working alongside the master and often his wife, apprentices and servants. A handbook designed to help parents choose a career for their child shows the variety of work available, and also the high standards of language skill required in a ‘youth’ who might do well in the book trade.

  A Youth designed for a Compositor ought to have a tolerable Genius for Letters, an apt Memory to learn the Languages: He must understand Grammar perfectly; and will find great Advantage in the course of his Business if he understands Latin and Greek … The Spirit of Writing that prevails now in England, and the Liberty of the Press, has given Employment to a great Number of Hands in this Branch of Business, which had arrived of late Years to a great Perfection.

  Masons, carpenters and manual labourers were all respected as core workers, but at the beginning of the eighteenth century there was a rapid increase in demand for literate young men of all classes to serve as apprentices. Nor was any of the work in a printing shop too physically demanding for women, provided they had the skill with language. Unlike most of the other London trades, women were not barred from becoming ‘freemen’ of their chosen trade, so they could work within the City walls without prejudice. Elinor James was the widow of printer Thomas James but published a broadside und
er her own name circa 1715, titled Mrs. James’s Advice to All Printers in General and stating, ‘I have been in the element of Printing above forty years, and I have a great love for it.’ During her printing career Elinor published around fifty pamphlets. Some transcripts of speeches she gave, including Mrs. Elinor James’s Speech to the Citizens of London at Guild-Hall (1705), show that she was not only politically active as a publisher, but also as a speaker. She addressed everyone from the King down with what she believed was the correct way to carry on. More than once, Elinor’s efforts would land her in Newgate ‘for dispersing scandalous and reflecting papers’.

  Elinor’s achievements as a polemicist pamphleteer mean that her fame was relatively short-lived, but other City printers are still with us. Thomas Longman, founder of today’s educational publisher Pearson Longman, had a keen eye for new literature, an acute business sense and the ability to handle tricky authors. Born in Bristol, Longman was apprenticed in the City and married his master’s daughter. In 1724, he took up the premises of the Black Swan and the Ship in Paternoster Row, and went into business on his own account. He purchased the stock and buildings of William Taylor, the publisher of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Soon after this, Longman embarked on one of the Enlightenment’s greatest printing endeavours.

  In the intellectual crucible of late seventeenth-century Europe, texts on science, astronomy, philosophy and the natural world proliferated, but many were too specialized for the ordinary reader. In 1704, John Harris produced Lexicon Technicum, but it rambled and lacked an index, rendering it unsearchable. Someone needed to produce a concise guide to this new knowledge. The need to categorize information is a constant modern theme (the Wikipedia experiment is the most recent and certainly the largest attempt in history).

  Ephraim Chambers was born in Kendal in 1680. Gifted but poor, he was apprenticed to a London mechanic, ‘but having formed ideas not at all reconcilable to manual labour he was removed from thence and tried at another business’. This attempt also failed and ‘he was at last sent to Mr Senex, the globe-maker’.

  Senex globes are now prized for their astronomical accuracy (although his maps are equally prized for showing California as a large island). Ephraim Chambers was no ordinary apprentice; Senex, a man from Shropshire turned Royal Society Fellow and Freemason, was only two years older than his charge, making Chambers one of London’s oldest apprentices at the age of about thirty-four. Ephraim spent his time studying, and a friend noted that he left the apprenticeship ‘a very indifferent globe-maker’. Instead, he had decided he was going to write ‘the best Book in the Universe’.

  It was a huge undertaking and, in 1728, his Cyclopaedia appeared. Chambers laid out his considerable aspirations for the book on the title page: ‘Cyclopaedia, or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences’. He died in 1740, still working on another edition. There were rumours of trouble amongst the collection of publishers who had undertaken to produce the massive Cyclopaedia but the only one mentioned specifically after Ephraim’s death is Longman, who ‘in particular used him with the liberality of a prince and the tenderness of a father’. It is surely no coincidence that Longman’s of Paternoster Row would go on to publish Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, in 1775, which did for words what the Cyclopaedia had attempted to do for art and science.

  Society as a whole was becoming more literate, and it was not only aided by the rise of books. In 1680, William Dockra had introduced his ‘New and Useful Invention, commonly term’d the PENNY POST’. A letter brought to the Post Office at 8 a.m. could be delivered across London by 10 a.m., or would be on its way out of town on one of the six Post Roads. Throughout the Georgian period, the Post Office was overseen by the Treasury and comprised a small elite group of supervisors: John Evelyn worked hard to get the country offices in order; Francis Dashwood campaigned to get rid of boys on ponies with messenger bags, replacing them with horses and carts; and William Pitt the Elder recorded the necessity of disinfecting mail coming in from certain foreign locations.

  The eighteenth century saw the emergence of letters as something not only for the elite classes, but for everyone. Writing equipment had become cheap enough for those of even the lowest social classes to obtain, and the Post allowed them to convey their thoughts, ideas and hopes to distant hands and eyes. Ink pigment and quills were hawked about the streets by specialist pedlars. The very poor burned wool and pounded it into a black powder. The best quill was the third feather in from a goose’s wing. Right-handers preferred a quill from the left wing of the goose as they curve more comfortably over the hand. A rare left-hander used the right wing feathers. Most paper was made from bleached rags which had been pressed into sheets: it was durable and provided a decent surface for the scratchy pens. This paper was purchased in ‘quires’ from stationers and bookshops, which would produce, when carefully cut or torn as directed, sheets of a size acceptable to the Post, costing one penny each to send.

  The importance of the postal system, and the literacy it fostered, was an integral part of the business of London itself, increasing the influence of London across the country and the wider world. Londoners could rely upon the rapid dispatch, but also receipt, of information. Far-flung thinkers enjoyed serial literature by post, which encouraged the regular publication of ongoing stories that would reach a peak with Charles Dickens. Serials were snapped up by eager hands in London, but also anticipated by villagers all over the country and serving soldiers across the world. Business letters were travelling between London and China on a regular basis by the 1720s. The barely literate wives of sailors addressed their letters to husbands on ships, with the current guesstimate of which dock they might be in, and a return address on the front if ‘ye ship be gone’.

  From 1760 onwards, the Post Office was also responsible for introducing the rest of the country to the London media, by the franking and distribution of a large amount of the London press. Whilst the government was becoming increasingly aware that it could not control the press, it could – through the Post Office – control its distribution. It franked and sent out the newspapers which were most supportive and least inflammatory to those ‘who keep coffeehouses, that they might be furnished with them gratis’.

  With the expansion of the Post Office, a clerical office culture was born. The compositors of the early eighteenth-century printing houses were educated young men from grammar school backgrounds, but by the mid-eighteenth century orphanages had realized they could find work for literate boys and girls much more quickly than for those with manual skills. In 1784, the Post Office was worth £196,000. Thirty years later, it was worth over a million. In 1829, the Post Office moved to beautiful new buildings, designed by Robert Smirke, and situated in St Martin’s Le Grand, just north of St Paul’s Cathedral. It would remain there for almost a century, the culture of letters becoming ever stronger, but its roots would remain in the busy and ambitious mercantile ‘middling’ community of the eighteenth century.

  LONDON’S ANCIENT MARKETS: SMITHFIELD, BILLINGSGATE, LEADENHALL AND THE FLEET

  Elsewhere in the City, away from the noisy construction site of St Paul’s and the bookish Paternoster Row, basic cash and commodity transactions continued as they had done for centuries. Smithfield Market, bounded on one side by the vast St Bartholomew’s Hospital, is an ancient livestock market and, today, the last surviving wholesale market in the City; Daniel Defoe was convinced it was, ‘without question, the greatest in the world’.

  Smithfield was also the setting for Bartholomew Fair, a four-day spectacle held in September, where Ned Ward watched women compete in handstand races in 1703, although he did note they were wearing men’s breeches underneath their skirts. He and his friend also stopped at a cookshop, fancying some roast meat for which the area was so famous, but:

  Smithfield Market, detail from John Rocque’s map, 1745

  … no sooner had we entered this suffocating kitchen, than a swinging fat fellow, the overseer of the roast to keep the pigs from blistering,
who was standing by the spit in his shirt, rubbed his ears, breast, neck and arm-pits with the same wet-cloth which he applied to his pigs … we defer’d our eating till a cleanlier opportunity.

  William Hone visited in 1825, at the end of the fair’s heyday. He recalled small stalls, selling

  … oysters, fruit, inferior kinds of cheap toys, small wicker baskets and other articles of trifling value … One man occupied upwards of twenty feet of the road lengthwise, with discontinued wood-cut pamphlets, formerly published weekly at twopence, which he spread out on the ground, and sold at a halfpenny each in great quantities.

  There were constant calls to ban the fair, due to the rowdiness; but it was an institution. It was finally suppressed in 1855.

  From all over England, livestock was driven into Smithfield and kept in five acres of pens before being sold either for meat or for breeding. The noise and stench must have been overwhelming. Edward Jay, Essex livestock breeder of the 1750s and 60s was one of the more unusual Smithfield characters: he was ‘no more than three feet and a half high, had not any joint at his knees, and was entirely straight to his hip-bone. He had only one arm and hand with which, however, he could make a pen and buckle his shoes without stooping.’ Livestock breeders trading in and out of Smithfield would often avail themselves of farmers with land on the edges of London and have their stock fattened in purpose-built enclosures. These enclosures, many situated near Islington, had high walls made of earth and stacked cow horns; they were planted with grass, with a narrow gate allowing entrance or exit. The pasture inside became lush and was regularly irrigated. It could then be let out at a high price to cattle dealers, or to innkeepers who kept carriage horses, for resting and fattening up animals. When the livestock was in prime condition, the best price could be had at Smithfield.

  Once purchased, the livestock was driven through the streets towards its final destination, either a backyard or a slaughterhouse. The main areas for butchering animals were near Smithfield, or on Pudding Lane to the east. These areas, which had been centres for wholesale butchering since at least 1300, were specifically set up to receive large quantities of animals. In the middle of the eighteenth century, annual numbers were around 74,000 cattle and over half a million sheep.