Georgian London: Into the Streets

by Lucy Inglis

  London’s aristocracy began to visit Mary to see if they should engraft their own children. The visitors included Caroline, Princess of Wales, who sanctioned the testing of inoculation on condemned prisoners in Newgate. The experiment was a success, securing royal approval for smallpox inoculation, but the press did not take to it so kindly, or to Lady Mary. She was branded an ‘unnatural mother who had risked the lives of her own children’ and people began to ‘hoot’ at her in the street. Yet, the list of parents taking early action to protect their children is extensively drawn from Lady Mary’s own friends and acquaintances. She exploited the tea party circuit and took her children all over London to show that they had been unharmed by the operation.

  The fact that she was well known and held a high position in society contributed largely to the success of Maitland’s subsequent career in inoculation. Their pioneering work laid the bedrock which would be built upon by Edward Jenner later in the century, when he introduced mass inoculation to England.

  LOCAL HOSPITALS: WESTMINSTER AND THE LOCK

  In 1716, Henry Hoare (the banker), Robert Witham (a vintner), William Wogan (a writer) and the Reverend Patrick Coburn met in St Dunstan’s Coffee House in Fleet Street and established the Charitable Society for the Sick, Poor and Needy. At first, they intended to visit and dispense charity to prisoners in ‘the White Chapple, the Kings Bench, the Clink and the Marshalsea’. The men went themselves, money in hand, and took Mr Savile (an apothecary) and Mrs Sherman (a midwife) with them, when necessary. By that summer, they knew they couldn’t keep up with the demand, and decided to limit themselves to providing a public infirmary for Westminster.

  This was still an ambitious aim, as London’s only public hospitals at the time were St Bartholomew’s, in Smithfield, and St Thomas’s, in Southwark. By 1720, they had taken a house in Petty France, south of St James’s Park, and in May admitted their first patient, a man with inflammation of the joints and scurvy who was discharged almost a month later. The infirmary was soon oversubscribed and, in 1732, the governors acquired Lanesborough House on Hyde Park Corner and created St George’s Hospital, known for its brilliant and sometimes eccentric surgeons. William Cheselden was highly skilled at extracting bladder stones, an operation known as ‘lithotomy’. Samuel Pepys had survived this risky operation decades earlier; he gave thanks every year, and kept the stone as a memento. Many were not so lucky. Cheselden, however, had an excellent record, and could locate the stone, cut it out and start stitching in under one minute. His speed and assurance meant few of his patients died from shock on the table. Another St George’s surgeon was Henry Watson, who carried on teaching there until his death, in 1793, aged ninety-one. He was known less for his surgical skill and more for his old-fashioned outfits of ‘curled wig, a full-cuffed coat with a number of huge buttons, and a cocked hat’, all complemented by a stylish cane. He referred to his medical students as ‘cubs’.

  The most famous of the students at St George’s was Edward Jenner, who arrived as a 21-year-old, in 1770. He lived with John Hunter and his family and studied in Hunter’s menagerie of exotic animals, some of which had come from the Tower. From Hunter he ‘learnt the value of directness and simplicity of conduct and a passionate love of truth’ that would serve him so well in his work against smallpox.

  Nearby, work had already begun against a pox of a different kind: venereal disease. Slightly further out, behind Buckingham House, London’s first Lock Hospital opened on 31 January 1747 exclusively to treat patients suffering from venereal disease. A ‘lock hospital’ was the old name for a lazar house, thought to come from the French word for rags: loques. It was the brainchild of William Bromfield, a Holborn Doctor and Demonstrator of Anatomy at Barber-Surgeons’ Hall and later surgeon to Frederick, Prince of Wales. Bromfield had witnessed the difficulties of housing those infected by the pox: hospital boards had started putting these patients of ‘low character’ in yellow outfits, giving rise to the name ‘canaries’ for street prostitutes. Traditional remedies were poisons – arsenic and mercury – either applied directly to the affected parts, or administered in a number of unappealing ways. Often, it was only the natural remission of the disease between stages that led physicians to declare one third of their patients cured. Bromfield was convinced he could do better; from the beginning, the Lock Hospital sought to make the wealthier classes aware of the realities of venereal diseases through public meetings. On 17 November 1755, The Public Advertiser reported that a ‘Lady of Quality’, after attending one of these meetings, had endowed a new ward for the reception of afflicted married women ‘injured by the Cruelty of bad Husbands’. It also reported that ‘near two Hundred [children] from two to ten years old have been Cured in that Hospital that had fallen Victims to Villains Misguided by a Vulgar Notion that by a Criminal Communication with a healthy Child a certain Cure might be obtained for themselves’. The Lock Hospital also bore the expense of prosecuting at least one man who had tried to cure himself of venereal disease in this fashion. In 1764, the governors paid to prosecute Edmund Thirkell for the rape of five-year-old Mary Amelia Halfpenny, who had been admitted to the hospital suffering with venereal disease. He was tried before Lord Mansfield and convicted, but his fate is unknown.

  Bromfield appointed the Wesleyan Martin Madan as chaplain of the Lock Hospital, and a chapel was constructed at Madan’s expense so that patrons and patients could both attend the service without seeing each other. Madan began to adapt old hymns and create new ones with the chapel’s blind organist, Charles Lockhart. These hymns became hugely popular with the smart congregation, and Madan put them on sale: A Collection of Psalm and Hymn Tunes … To Be Had at the Lock Hospital near Hyde Park Corner. In the 1760s and 1770s, the annual oratorio was a sell-out, and the musical events were consistently popular. Men and women were encouraged to sing together, with gusto, and the sermons sought to raise awareness about the social problems of venereal disease. Then Lockhart left, after an argument, and a rapid decline began. In 1780, the concerts were replaced by evangelical sermons, and Martin Madan published his book Thelyphthora in which he proposed that the problems of prostitution could be solved by polygamy. The matter was debated by the Christian Society and the magazine La Belle Assemblée that winter, but a priest preaching in favour of multiple wives was too much to be borne, and the fashionable patrons melted away.

  The Lock Hospital would continue on, but never with the same level of success. Madan died a shamed recluse, in 1790, by which time a separate hostel for women who did not want to return to prostitution had been established in Knightsbridge. The hospital stayed put until the middle of the nineteenth century, when it was moved to Harrow. Finally, a century later, it was absorbed into the NHS.

  THE ICEMEN OF HYDE PARK

  Like St James’s Park, Hyde Park had long been famous as the promenade of the smart set, particularly at weekends. The Journal of Agriculture noted, in 1831, that during the ‘gay season’, someone had been seen driving their curricle around the park, drawn by a pair of quaggas. Quaggas (the Khoikhoi word for the now extinct variant species of zebra) were popular with fashionable Londoners, as they were more biddable than their wild cousins. Like all London’s parks, it was a public space and provided recreation for all. Charles I had opened the park to the public in 1637, and William III built Rotten Row as his private road to Kensington Palace. But it was Queen Caroline, George II’s wife, who created the park we are familiar with today. In 1730, she ordered the Westbourne River dammed to form the Serpentine Lake, which had previously been eleven ponds, popular with swimmers and skaters. Such sports were not without their dangers, and fatalities were common when swimmers ‘ventured out of their depth’ or when skaters fell through the ice.

  Drowning was a preoccupation among the medical pioneers of London. They knew there was a relationship between the cessation of breathing and the stopping of the heart. John Hunter had conducted gory experiments on a dog by removing the sternum of a living animal to observe what happened to t
he heart when breathing was severely restricted by use of a bellows mechanism. This prompted him to design a machine, again based on a bellows, which would restart the breathing in apparently drowned individuals. His paper, presented to the Royal Society in 1776, was full of good sense: he had observed that cold water often kept people alive for longer than if they were ‘drowned’ in warmer water, and that they should only be warmed up slowly. He did, however, think that blowing air up the anus might also be beneficial for the drowned. A mixed bag.

  Nevertheless, Hunter’s paper coincided with popular interest in resuscitation: ideas of ‘artificial breathing’ aided by bellows, or mouth to mouth, were gaining ground and the rudiments of cardiac massage were emerging.

  For five years before Hunter’s influential paper, an Islington-born doctor, William Hawes, had been agitating for funding and action to be taken for ‘the resuscitation of people apparently dead’. In 1773, in his ‘incessant zeal’ to prove that it was possible to bring back the drowned from the edge of death, he organized and paid for ‘reception houses’ between Westminster and London Bridges where people could be brought ‘within a certain time after the accident’ and attempts would be made to resuscitate them. By summer 1774, he and the other doctors staffing the reception houses had been so successful that they met with a group of philanthropists including playwright Oliver Goldsmith in the Chapter Coffee House in St Paul’s Churchyard and formed the Society for the Recovery of Persons Apparently Drowned.

  The Society provided training in the new rescue techniques. In July of the same year, Thomas Vincent, a waterman, rescued a fourteen-month-old boy from an aqueduct and revived him using the massage techniques. In 1776, the Society changed its name to the Humane Society. Levels of public approval for reanimating those who had previously been thought lost were already high, as reported in the Morning Chronicle in January that year: ‘As proof that the Society for the Recovery of Drowned Persons is well received by the publick, the Debating Society at the Crown Tavern in Bow lane where every subject is fully discussed, have given 5 guineas as a token of their approbation.’

  Hawes and his colleagues continued to refine their methods of reviving the drowned by expelling water from the lungs and beating rhythmically upon the victims’ chests. In the same year, William Henly, a Fellow of the Royal Society, wrote to the Humane Society with a suggestion that electricity be used to shock the heart and brain in ‘cases of Apparent Death from Drowning’. After all, he reasoned, why not use ‘the most potent resource in nature, which can instantly pervade the innermost recesses of the animal frame’? In 1794, the first clear success in using electricity to restart the heart was recorded by what had become the Royal Humane Society. Sophia Greenhill, a young girl, had fallen from a window in Soho and was pronounced dead by a doctor at Middlesex Hospital. Mr Squires, a local member of the Society, made it to the girl in around twenty minutes. Using a friction-type electricity machine, he applied shocks to her body. It seemed ‘in vain’, until he began to shock her thorax. Then he felt a pulse, and the child began to breathe again. She was concussed but went on to make a full recovery, and the Royal Humane Society was finally sure of the importance of electricity in reanimating those in ‘suspended animation’.

  In the same year, George III – who was already a patron of the Society – gave land on the north bank of the Serpentine for a headquarters and principal receiving house to be erected. Lifeguards were stationed there, who were trained in the latest techniques of resuscitation and in using equipment for restoring respiration and pulse. By the early Victorian period, there were eighteen receiving houses in London, and the Illustrated London News estimated some 200,000 people were bathing in the Serpentine each year. In winter, the lifeguards donned greatcoats emblazoned with ‘Iceman’ on the back and patrolled the banks for any skater who might fall through the ice. Icemen operated throughout London at all regular skating grounds.

  The success rate of the Royal Humane Society’s operatives was undeniable. They were required never to drink on the job, and were made aware of the complications in rescuing suicides and working in icy conditions with hypothermic subjects. They couldn’t always win, of course. In 1816, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s wife, Harriet, drowned herself in the Serpentine after he had abandoned her for Mary Godwin.

  At the end of the Georgian period, in 1834, the Serpentine receiving house was given a grand makeover, with the Duke of Wellington laying the foundation stone. The Royal Humane Society had taught resuscitation techniques to many Londoners, and the Society’s receiving houses formed the earliest model for what became Accident and Emergency departments. Lifeguards and icemen had become familiar sights, patrolling the Serpentine. Whereas at the beginning of the century chances of survival for those thought drowned were almost non-existent, by the end of the Georgian period the Society’s operatives had learned to do everything they could because, in the words of their motto, ‘a small spark may perhaps lie hid’.

  For all their grandeur and undoubted importance, Westminster and St James’s retained a variety and humanity which seem removed from them now. Boozing politicians, campaigning ladies, weight-conscious poets and Herculean chairmen mixed in with art, philanthropy and science. These areas also fuelled the luxury goods and entertainment industries which were growing rapidly in nearby Covent Garden and Soho. Next, we will visit some of the less polite attractions of Georgian London.

  4. Bloomsbury, Covent Garden and the Strand

  For a long time, Bloomsbury was part of the parish of St Giles-in-the-Fields. In 1624, Bloomsbury had 136 houses; by 1710, a return was made to Parliament which indicated that St Giles alone contained almost 35,000 inhabitants catered for by one church, three chapels and a Presbyterian Meeting House. The government decided to create a new parish to the north. In 1724, it came into being as St George’s, Bloomsbury. The parish church was designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor, who came in with an estimate of £9,790 and exceeded it by just £3. It was orientated north–south, to fit the plot, and has an oddly stepped steeple with a statue of George I on the top. By the end of the eighteenth century, the parish contained 3,000 houses.

  The changes in Bloomsbury were remarkable and some of the most dramatic in Georgian London: ‘The fields where robberies and murders had been committed, the scene of depravity and wickedness the most hideous for centuries, became … rapidly metamorphosed into splendid squares and spacious streets; receptacles of civil life and polished society.’ Previously, north of Holborn, there had been little other than marshy fields (where gentlemen held ill-advised duels), a few farms and some taverns, such as the Vine Tavern which sat at the bottom of Kingsgate Street on the site of London’s ancient and only vineyard. The nearby Maidenhead Inn, which was probably named sarcastically, flourished as ‘a liquor-shop and public house of the vilest description, and the haunt of beggars and desperate characters’. These were the places that the citizens of Bloomsbury wanted to see fade away.

  In Bloomsbury Place, the seeds of a British institution were sown when Hans Sloane opened his medical practice after a trip to Jamaica. Jamaica had cemented his love of natural history and the exotic, and he began to establish his reputation as a naturalist. His ferocious love of collecting, and the large income from his practice, meant that he soon had the basis for a museum, and he bought a neighbouring house to accommodate his objects. As he aged, he became more disorganized – though he still collected greedily. The young botanist Carl Linnaeus visited and was shocked by Sloane’s lack of order. Upon Sloane’s death, in 1753, his trustees offered the collection to George II, to no avail. Instead, the trustees petitioned Parliament, and the collection was secured for the nation. The nation had also acquired Edward Harley’s library and the Cotton Library, and they too needed a new home. The aging Montagu House, a short distance from Sloane’s old home on Bloomsbury Place, was acquired for the purpose. Renamed the ‘British Museum’, it opened on 15 January 1759. Tickets were by application, and they stated that ‘No Money is to be Given to the Ser
vants’, who had no doubt hoped to make handsome tips showing visitors around.

  Three years after the British Museum was given the royal seal of approval, another temple to education emerged in Bloomsbury: University College. It had long been observed that London had no true university to rival those of Oxford and Cambridge. Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher and legislator, along with Lord Brougham and the poet Thomas Campbell, wanted to create an institution which would deliver a ‘literary and scientific education at a moderate expense’.

  The land for the ‘godless college’ was found in the north of Bloomsbury, previously ‘occupied as a farm by two old maiden sisters named Capper. They wore riding-habits and men’s hats; one rode an old grey mare, and it was her spiteful delight to ride with a pair of shears after the boys who were flying their kites, in order to cut their strings. The other sister’s business was to seize the clothes of the lads who trespassed on their premises to bathe.’

  It was not only boys with kites who ran over the Capper sisters’ dairy farm: some of the New River Company’s conduits came into London over those fields. They were ‘propped up in several parts to the height of six and eight feet, so that persons walked under them to gather watercresses, which grew in great abundance and perfection’.

  All this was within a stone’s throw of Southampton Row, one of Bloomsbury’s oldest streets, and the long-time residence of another Bloomsbury character, Mrs Griggs. Upon her death, in 1792, the Annual Register remembered her as

  … [that] eccentrical lady … at her house, Southampton Row, Bloomsbury, Mrs. Griggs. Her executors found in her house eighty-six living and twenty-eight dead cats. A black servant has been left £150 per annum, for the maintenance of herself and the surviving grimalkins. The lady was single, and died worth £30,000. Mrs. Griggs, on the death of her sister, a short time ago, had an addition to her fortune; she set up her coach, and went out almost every day airing, but suffered no male servant to sleep in her house. Her maids being tired frequently of their attendance on such a numerous household, she was induced at last to take a black woman to attend and feed them. This black woman had lived servant to Mrs. Griggs many years, and had a handsome annuity given her to take care of the cats.