Georgian London: Into the Streets

by Lucy Inglis

  Many of the social elite had made dynastic or financially advantageous marriages, which were threatened by this addiction. In other classes of society, cohabitation was becoming relatively common, if not necessarily accepted. In 1776, the Morning Chronicle featured the debate: ‘Is not the cohabitation of an unmarried man and woman, though attended with harmony and fidelity till death, an immoral connection?’ For the aristocracy, their marriages, barring death, were difficult and costly to unravel. The threat to property and lineage meant that even the unhappiest of many landowning couples lived separate lives rather than seek divorce. But the English were coming round to divorce ‘as a remedy for a state of things which is making, and is bound to make, a man wretched for life; nor is he debarred from the joy of living happily with another woman whom he loves’.

  One major cause of trouble both at home and at the gaming tables was immoderate drinking. Consuming alcohol was seen as manly, particularly amongst the ruling elite, and teetotallers were rare. Charles James Fox, William Pitt the Younger and the Prince Regent all qualified as alcoholics for a large part of their lives. Berry Brothers, the wine merchant, which was one of the many shops in the area catering for the rich, still stands on St James’s Street. It was not only a supplier but also a meeting place, and aristocratic visitors used the huge hanging scales to determine their own weights. William Pitt liked to get weighed there, as did Lord Byron. The poet was rakish and glamorous, but with his club foot making exercise difficult he was also aware of his ‘morbid propensity to fatten’ and watched his weight obsessively. He slimmed by fasting and swimming, and his dramatic weight fluctuations were recorded by the Berrys. In 1806, they noted his weight at 13st 12lbs. But by 1811, he had starved himself beneath the 9st mark. His obsession worried his friends, but he would not be dissuaded, telling them, ‘I maintain that more than half our maladies are produced by accustoming ourselves to more sustenance than is required for the support of nature.’ He may have been right, but he was also accustomed to large amounts of alcohol – white wine being his diet drink of choice.

  As the century progressed and wealth increased, the cultivation of taste became a fashionable preoccupation. In 1766, James Christie opened his Great Rooms on Pall Mall and held a sale of ordinary household goods. But his aspirations were much higher, and soon he was specializing in high-quality pictures. Viewing the latest sales became a fashionable pastime. As art became a widespread hobby amongst the rich, there were increased calls for a national gallery. In 1824, the National Gallery crept into existence at 100 Pall Mall, in the home of John Julius Angerstein. Angerstein was a hugely successful Lloyd’s underwriter, his bonds becoming the byword for trust and reliability. Art was his passion. He was painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Sir Thomas Lawrence; he purchased works at auction and supported emerging British artists, such as Turner. When he died, in 1823, the final destination of the collection was a matter of some speculation. During a debate

  … it was remarked that the collection of Mr. Angerstein would be sold in the course of 1824, and if not looked after would very probably go out of the country. Mr. Agar Ellis thereupon announced his intention of moving for a grant for the purchase of this and other collections for the formation of a National Gallery.

  After a very brief residence at 105 Pall Mall, the National Gallery finally got a home of its own in Trafalgar Square, on the site of the Royal Stables.

  In the time it had taken for Angerstein to build his collection, St James’s had changed. The old oil street lights had gone, along with their smelly lamplighters who were

  A set of greasy fellows redolent of Greenland Stock … employed to trim and light these lamps, which they accomplished by the apparatus of a formidable pair of scissors, a flaming flambeau of pitched rope and a rickety ladder, to the annoyance and danger of all passersby.

  These had been replaced by gaslights, which were demonstrated on Pall Mall by lighting pioneer Frederick Albert Winzer, in 1807. They were such a success that the London and Westminster Gas Light and Coke Company was formed; by New Year’s Eve 1813, gaslights had spread through the streets of Westminster and St James’s and over Westminster Bridge.

  ST JAMES’S PARK: ‘MINGLING IN CONFUSION WITH THE VILEST POPULACE’

  St James’s Park was the social centre of the area, bordered to the north by The Mall, where ‘the ladies look’d like undaunted heroes, fit for government or battle, and the gentlemen like a parcel of fawning, flattering fops’. To the south, Birdcage Walk ‘took its name from the cages which were hung in the trees’. To the east stood Horse Guards Parade Ground, where young shoeblacks, the ‘Blackguards’, waited to clean the boots of soldiers for a copper. It wasn’t only the soldiers who benefited from their numbers but also those who liked to be well turned out on their visits to the smart set ‘where the women are so very careful about their clean and white floors’. St James’s Park and Green Park had milk stalls, where the cows were milked to order, a practice that would continue until 1905. The popular nature of the park was commented upon as ‘the public walk of London and open to all, and it’s a strange sight, in fine weather, to see the flower of the nobility and the first ladies of the Court mingling in confusion with the vilest populace’.

  In 1725, George I brought to the park what Jonathan Swift sarcastically termed The Most Wonderful Wonder that ever appeared to the Wonder of the British Nation, more commonly referred to as ‘Peter the Wild Boy’. Peter was found by George I’s huntsmen near Hamelin (the Pied Piper’s sinister little town). He was about fifteen and could ‘not articulate a single syllable’. He was wild and hairy, with long broken fingernails. George sent ‘Peter’ to England as some sort of pet, with ideas of transforming him into the perfect human. He could be seen in the park, walking with his keepers. To César de Saussure, an observer in St James’s Park, Peter’s clothes ‘seemed to hinder his movements’, and he would not keep his hat upon his head, but continually threw it upon the ground. César also confessed, ‘He frightened me.’ For the intellectuals of Georgian London, Peter emerged from the forest into the storm of early eighteenth-century debate about the nature of self. For some, like Daniel Defoe, he was evidence of a man without a soul. For others, he was proof of the blank slate of human nature, reliant wholly upon nurture.

  The likely reality was that Peter had ceased to develop mentally at a young age and was abandoned in the Hamelin forest when puberty and sheer size made him unruly and difficult to care for. For a time, his royal patrons in England hoped he might benefit from an education, but he failed to learn even the rudiments of written or spoken language. Eventually, his tutor, the polymath Dr John Arbuthnot, gave up on him. He was still a celebrity, and William Kent painted him amongst other members of the royal court on the east wall of the staircase of Kensington Palace (where he remains today). In reality, Saussure noted that Peter ‘could not be taught good manners, and he had to be removed’. He was ‘retired’ to a farm near Northchurch, in Hertfordshire, with a Crown pension for his care. He liked music and gin, and was given to absconding when the opportunity arose. After making it to Norwich, he was fitted with a leather collar upon which was embossed: ‘Peter, the Wild Man of Hanover. Whoever will bring him to Mr Fenn, at Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, will be paid for their trouble.’ Peter was cared for by the Fenn family until he died, in his seventies. He saw three Kings occupy England’s throne, living at the expense of each of them. Peter’s main patron was George II’s queen, Caroline of Ansbach. Yet despite her kindness to poor retarded Peter, Caroline loathed the fact that the populace were allowed access to St James’s Park, and she decided it would be better as a private garden for the palace. She inquired of Prime Minister Robert Walpole what this might cost, to which he replied ‘only three crowns’, meaning hers, her husband’s, and their son’s. She decided to leave the park open to the public.

  As the century progressed, the park became the place to be seen. In the 1740s, Robert Skinner, who was 2ft 1in tall, and his wife, Judith, who was an inch tall
er, could be seen in their miniature carriage. It was ‘no larger than a child’s chaise, drawn by two dogs, and driven by a lad of twelve years old, attired in a purple and yellow livery’. They made their money exhibiting themselves throughout Westminster. They were married after Robert saw a newspaper advertising a ‘little woman’ of 2ft 2in tall, to be exhibited in London. He hotfooted it to the capital to propose. Judith accepted, and they were married in St Martin-in-the-Fields Church one week later. They were quite the characters about town, being described as ‘very good-looking, perfectly straight and well made, witty, intelligent and jocose’.

  The park was not always a safe place. In 1790, Ann Porter of St James’s Street was accosted by a man. He was smartly dressed, but spoke to her using ‘gross and obscene language’ and even struck her across the head. As Ann ran back towards her house, he caught up with her and stabbed her through her skirts, giving her ‘a dangerous wound on her right thigh, of the length of nine inches, and the depth of four inches’. Frightened and shocked, Ann didn’t realize the extent of her injury, which was the worst the man had inflicted in what emerged as a two-year spree. The press fixed instantly on the case, and ‘The London Monster’ was born. There were other victims, often sisters and usually beautiful, whom he accosted and spoke to ‘in a shivering sort of voice, expressing some thing that is unintelligible, and when he speaks, speaks a most horrid language to them, talks of drowning them in their blood’. His hunting ground was St James’s and the park. His sexual fixation, known as ‘piquerism’ – stabbing sharp objects into the hips and thighs of women in pretty clothes – meant he was compelled to continue until he was caught.

  In June 1790, Ann was sure she saw her attacker in St James’s Park. Her companion, a Mr Coleman, followed and accosted him. Renwick Williams, aged twenty-three, protested his innocence in the Old Bailey; the trial was a farce, and Williams had to be retried. During the retrial it turned out he had an alibi for one of the attacks, and the witness statements were contradictory, but he was still convicted and served six years. Intriguingly, the attacks stopped when he was off the streets.

  The roughness and bustle of the park were added to by the public sedan chair rank. In 1634, Sir Saunders Duncombe took a fourteen-year licence in Westminster to provide sedan chairs to the public; they would remain popular for the next 150 years. Sedan chairs were legal on both the pavement and the roads, so were used to avoid the traffic wherever it was necessary. The smart set often complained about the public chair rank in the park: it was open to the air, and the leather chairs got soaked through in bad weather, making them smelly and unwholesome. Irishmen dominated the chair business through their size, strength and willingness to labour hard. Carrying a person of around ten stone through the streets, even with a light public chair, worked out at a load of around 100lbs per man. Still, the bearers of London were generally regarded to be the best by continental visitors, as they were agile enough to overcome most obstacles, as well as remarkably rapid. Swiss visitor César de Saussure wrote, in 1725, ‘the bearers [go] so fast that you have some difficulty in keeping up with them on foot. I do not believe that in all Europe better or more dexterous bearers are to be found; all foreigners are surprised at their strength and skill.’ He records being knocked over four times by sedan chairs during his visit to the capital. Bearers were regularly fined for cursing loudly in the street, and they were notorious fighters and Romeos, probably much in demand for their stamina. As the city grew, sedan chairs faded. In 1791, Horace Walpole wrote that ‘the breed of chairs is almost lost, for Hercules and Atlas could not carry anybody from one end of this enormous capital to the other’.

  At the west end of the park, away from the rowdy chair rank, was the house of the Duke of Buckingham, later purchased for George III and Queen Charlotte. The house was desirable for the ‘fine garden and terras, from where there is a prospect of the adjacent country’. The Royal Family eventually relocated to Buckingham House; its refurbishment as a palace did not meet favour with everyone, and by the end of the Georgian period many felt the royal residence and the park had lost their earlier ‘country in the city’ appeal. For a start, Charles II’s Dutch canal was 5ft 1in below the surface of the Thames at high tide, ‘thus the water, once admitted to this ornamental reservoir, cannot again flow out, but stagnates’ and therefore stank in ‘sultry’ weather. If the old landscaping was proving unpopular, so was Edward Blore’s new design for Buckingham House (now Palace) so close to Charles’s canal: ‘the verge of this puddle has been chosen whereon to expend above a million sterling in the erection of a bedlam-like building as a royal residence’.

  THE ‘FASHIONABLE HERB’: TEA AND PHILANTHROPY

  The exclusive residents of St James’s were not only occupied with traditional upper-class pursuits. The growing fashion for tea and all-female tea parties was often used for the benefit of the many private charities springing up in Georgian London.

  Tea had been in London since at least 1659, when ‘theire ware also att this time a Turkish drink to be sould, almost in evry street, called Coffee, and another kind of drink called Tee’. Writing in his diary on 25 September 1660, Samuel Pepys noted that he ‘sent for a cup of Tee (a China drink) of which I had never drunk before’. At that stage, tea was sold in the coffee houses. But it soon became the feminine alternative to coffee, which some women regarded as harsh and unhealthy. The Women’s Petition Against Coffee of 1676 complained that coffee had reduced Englishmen to ‘meer Cock-sparrows’ and claimed that: ‘Never did Men wear greater breeches, or carry less in them of any Mettle whatsoever.’ This the writer attributed to ‘nothing more than the Excessive use of that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE’. Tea, on the other hand, was considered as healthy and refreshing. During the 1680s, tea was regarded as a ritual at court, and a mark of taste and social status amongst courtiers. Soon, other reasons for drinking it besides an overt way of displaying wealth and discernment were found, and a traveller to India in the 1690s found tea ‘very convenient for our Health, and agreeable to the Habits of our Bodies’.

  Samuel Johnson described himself as ‘a hardened and shameless tea-drinker’ who barely let his kettle cool before brewing up again, but he represents one of the few male voices claiming a tea addiction. The association with women did not go down well with tea’s detractors. They did not see non-alcoholic tea as the drink of true Englishmen, asking, ‘Were they the sons of tea-sippers, who won the fields of Cressey and Agincourt, or dyed the Danube’s streams with Gallic blood?’

  Tea was difficult to obtain. It is easily tainted by the smell of other cargo and so must be carefully packed for transportation. One thing that definitely wouldn’t taint the tea were the Chinese porcelain pots in which it was brewed, and so the ships began to pack porcelain too, bringing it back to extremely fashionable homes in London and giving us the generic word ‘china’ for thin porcelain. A ton of tea came along with six tons of porcelain as ballast. As a result, London was inundated with cheap exotic porcelain: in 1712, a 216-piece tea and dinner service cost £5 10s; and in 1723, 5,000 teapots were imported costing only 1½d each.

  Teapots and cups became desirable tableware for the rich and aspirational for the poor, who were seemingly determined to compete ‘with their superiors, and imitating their luxuries, throw away their little earnings upon this fashionable herb’. The cachet of tea-drinking in London’s most elegant drawing rooms was exploited by Josiah Wedgwood with his tea services, which were at once a homage to the purest Chinese porcelain and yet a deliberate attempt to cultivate elite patronage.

  Tea parties were not just for the rich. Women in almost all classes considered them social occasions, but many middle-and upper-class women used them to cultivate charity or encourage debate. One, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (née Pierrepoint), would introduce London to inoculation against smallpox and used tea parties to spread the word. Mary had escaped an arranged marriage with the astonishingly named Clotworthy Skeffington by marrying Edward Wortley Mon
tagu. Mary did not love Edward but she bore him a son, and her time in London was spent mixing in the highest circles. She cultivated literary friendships, and had a stormy love-hate relationship with Alexander Pope. In the winter of 1715, Lady Mary contracted smallpox. She survived, but she was ‘very severely markt’ in both appearance and temperament. Her looks, which had been remarkable, were gone, as were patches of her hair and her eyelashes, ‘which gave a fierceness to her eyes that impaired their beauty’.

  In August 1716, her husband was made Ambassador to Istanbul. The city was something of a shock for Mary, but she took to the climate and the people. Amongst her letters from Turkey is one dated 1 April 1717. It tells of the inoculation of her son against smallpox, using a Turkish method of ‘ripping’ four or five veins with a large needle, applying pus from the sores of a smallpox victim, then covering the site with a ‘hollow bit of shell’ and binding them up. She reported to her husband, ‘The Boy was engrafted last Tuesday, and is at this time singing and playing and very impatient for his supper.’ The success of this operation led her to ‘take pains to bring this usefull invention into fashion in England’.

  On her return to England, she found both smallpox and arguments about its treatment raging. During the epidemic of 1719, which saw many of her friends and acquaintances die of the disease, she was remarkably silent. In the early part of 1721, it was so warm that roses bloomed in January and smallpox went ‘forth like a destroying Angel’. Lady Mary called upon Charles Maitland, an English doctor she had met in Turkey, to inoculate her daughter, Mary, but he hesitated. It was one thing to perform the operation in Turkey, but another to do it in London. He made sure he had two witnesses from the Royal College of Physicians before performing the operation. One was James Keith, who had lost two of his sons to smallpox, in 1717. After seeing the operation, he immediately inoculated his remaining son.