Georgian London: Into the Streets

by Lucy Inglis

  ‘SUCH ABUNDANCE OF CHOICE AS ALMOST TO MAKE ONE GREEDY’: BOND STREET AND OXFORD STREET

  Initially, the leisured classes were drawn east to spend their money in the warehouses of the City, but shops soon spread along the smarter streets of Mayfair. Old Bond Street was established as early as 1696, and building began on the second section twenty years later. The Weekly Journal of 1 June 1717 recorded: ‘The new buildings between Bond Street and Mary-le-bone go on with all possible diligence, and the houses even let and sell before they are built.’ As Old Bond Street met New Bond Street across the open field known as Conduit Mead, the newer part became a haven for shopping and other activities of the fashionable rich.

  The shops and establishments along Bond Street and Oxford Street reflected the sudden variety of pastimes and material goods available to those with money. Along the latter, hackney carriages waited for shoppers. At night the street was brightly lit with lamps, and shops stayed open until midnight. On Bond Street, art galleries, hairdressers, tailors, jewellers, a veterinary surgeon, music shops, an opera ticket shop, hatters, print-and booksellers, as well as a lending library and a bathhouse called Culverwell’s, were all ready to take your money. In addition there were ordinary shops selling clothes, boots, gloves and ribbons. Hotels and eating houses sprang up to cater for those who were weary.

  The rooms above the shops provided cheap lodgings and the perfect place for writers and other artists to be close to their patrons. In 1768, Laurence Sterne – the cheeky Irish priest, author of Tristram Shandy and friend to David Garrick and Elizabeth Montagu – died, aged fifty-four, in his lodgings on the west side above the ‘silk-bag shop’. He was suffering from consumption and had just returned from a tiring journey. ‘In vain did the female attendant, a lodging-house servant, chafe his cold feet, in order to restore his circulation. He complained that the cold came up higher, and he died without a groan.’

  Other lodgers on Bond Street included the extraordinary Thomas Pitt, 2nd Baron Camelford (1775–1804). Born in Boconnoc, Cornwall, to wealthy parents, at six years old he was listed on the books of HMS Tobago as the captain’s servant. Whether HMS Tobago was a threat, a promise, or even whether Thomas truly went to sea at six is unclear. He was certainly at sea in 1790 when, aged fourteen, he helped his commander guide the Guardian into Table Bay, Cape Town, after the ship hit an iceberg and the crew deserted.

  In 1791, Thomas joined HMS Discovery as an able seaman rather than an officer. They were destined for the exploratory Vancouver Expedition to Canada, headed up by Captain George Vancouver. On the journey Thomas was flogged repeatedly for insubordination and general high jinks, but particularly for trying, aged sixteen, to win the favours of a local girl in Tahiti using a piece of broken iron from a barrel. Vancouver had him punished and, in the end, clapped Thomas in irons to try to control the boy. Aboard ship, he was regarded as one of the men. So it came as something of a surprise when, in 1793, his father died and he was called home to take over the helm of the estate. He didn’t rush back, serving instead on a series of ships before finally getting back to London in 1796.

  He had been home only a few days when he caught sight of George Vancouver on Conduit Street. Incensed by old slights dating from their journey, the twenty-year-old Camelford ran across the street and set about the forty-one-year-old Vancouver with a stick. The beating made front-page news, and James Gillray caricatured the row, with Camelford shouting ‘Rascal … Coward!’ at Vancouver as the latter squealed for help. Camelford was bound over to keep the peace and cleared off back to sea. In 1798, he was court-martialled in Martinique for shooting dead an officer who had threatened to mutiny. Later that year, he decided to travel to France, which was illegal at the time as Britain and France were at war. He was arrested and tried by the Privy Council, possibly as a spy, though the Council agreed that he hadn’t done anything wrong – but he could no longer serve in the navy. The newspapers decided that he was crackers but quite liked him anyway. He sounds rather dashing at almost ‘six feet two inches in height, with curly brown hair, bold blue eyes, and a lithe muscular figure’.

  He took lodgings in Bond Street above a grocer’s shop rather than live with his mother in the grand but gloomy mansion, Camelford House, on Park Lane. He had an interesting style of interior decoration: ‘over the fire place in the drawing-room a bludgeon lay horizontally supported by two brass hooks. Above this was placed parallel one of lesser dimensions, until a pyramid of weapons gradually arose, tapering to a horsewhip.’

  Camelford’s anger management issues didn’t lessen with age, and he quarrelled publicly over anything, even including whether to wear a hat or not. In 1801, London staged an illumination to celebrate George III’s return to health. Every house was supposed to have candles in the window, but ‘when all London was lit up with a general illumination on account of “the peace,” [in Europe] no persuasion of friends, or of his landlord, could induce him to suffer a candle to be put in his windows’. The mob attacked the shop and Camelford’s flat above. He ran out with a ‘good stout cudgel, which he laid about him right and left, till at length, overpowered by numbers, he was rolled over and over in the gutter, and glad to beat a retreat indoors, for once in his life crest-fallen’.

  In the winter of the same year, he was caught in Paris, having crept over the Channel with a specially designed pistol, apparently on some cracked mission to assassinate Napoleon. He came home and devoted his time to pugilism and furthering his education, living above the grocer’s in Bond Street with his best friend from his naval days, Robert Barrie. In March 1804, Camelford quarrelled over a woman with his old friend and known marksman Thomas Best. On 7 March, they met at dawn in the wet spring grass of the meadows surrounding Holland House in Kensington. Camelford fired first, and missed. Best aimed, then fired. He didn’t miss. Camelford’s short, riotous life ended at twenty-nine. Too young to die; too diehard to last much longer. He had left a will instructing that he would like to be buried upon an island in the middle of a Swiss lake, ‘where the surrounding scenery may smile upon my remains’, a sentiment Lord Nelson thought admirable. He was instead interred at dawn in the crypt of St Anne’s Church, in Soho, near the de Lamerie family.

  Camelford’s love of pugilism reflected, although in an extreme fashion, the way upper-class men embraced lower-class pursuits. One establishment to make the most of this included Gentleman John Jackson’s boxing school, at 13 New Bond Street. Bond Street and Oxford Street had been, for over fifty years, popular boxing venues. Giants of men, such as James Figg, gave boxing, cudgel and short-sword lessons. Boxing consisted of standing still and exchanging blows until one of the opponents gave in. As boxing developed, showmen like Jackson sold the sport to bored and glamorous young men of the upper classes. Like Henry Angelo’s fencing school next door, boxing offered a gladiatorial form of exercise, previously associated with the cockpit crowd and the Irish. Jackson’s perfectly located school, established in his mid-twenties after he retired from boxing as a champion, meant that upper-class men could legitimately combine rigorous exercise with violence, although many questioned the sport’s propriety. It was even the subject of public debate during 1788, when speakers ‘equally replete with severe irony and strong reasoning … decided against the brutality of the practice’.

  Soon, boxing was so popular amongst the ‘bloods’ that it was an accepted part of the education and physical regimes of well-bred youths. As Lord Byron wrote to a friend in April 1814, ‘I have been boxing, for exercise, with Jackson for this last month daily. I have also been drinking.’

  ‘NOT PAID’: BEAU BRUMMELL

  For those who could afford it, Bond Street was a shrine to the new luxury lifestyle of the eighteenth century. It was both a place to be seen and a place to satisfy every consumer urge. This decadent consumption reached its height in the 1790s, during the first part of the Regency, when George, the Prince of Wales, affectionately-ish known as ‘Prinny’, attracted a coterie of chattering hangers-on. Part of this se
t, embodying the height of Regency style and fashion in his dress and person, was Beau Brummell.

  He was born George Bryan Brummell, in 1778. His grandmother was a washerwoman who is buried in St James’s Churchyard, Piccadilly. Her son, George’s father, is also buried there. He became an aide to an MP and rose to the position of High Sherriff of Berkshire, whilst living at 10 Bury Street, St James’s. This tremendous success involved a kind of social mobility seen both in the eighteenth century and now, but little in the intervening years. The washerwoman’s grandson, George Bryan, was educated at Eton, where ‘his gaiety and good nature to lower boys were felt and acknowledged’. On his father’s death, George inherited £20,000 (a fortune in the region of £2 million today). By this time, he was a soldier in the 10th Light Dragoons with the nickname Beau. He had made a friend of Prinny, who was drawn to his wit and charisma. Brummell’s army career was cut short when he refused to relocate to provincial Manchester, and resigned his commission.

  Fastidious from an early age, Beau worked on a particular personal fashion. His clothes were severely tailored and, in the main, white, buff and blue-black. He changed his linen frequently, and shaved and bathed daily. Many men washed every day, and many changed their linen at the same time, but most shaved only once a week before church on a Sunday, or before a big occasion or date. And Brummell kept his linen immaculately white, disposing of it before it greyed. Most of the claims about him, such as polishing his boots with champagne, are apocryphal. And he never did refer to Prinny as Lord Alvanley’s ‘fat friend’. (Rather, this appears to be a mid-Victorian urban legend, appearing famously in a print of 1861 called ‘The Wits and Beaux of Society’.) He pioneered ‘dandyism’, although the term is now more derogatory than its original meaning. A favourite with society men and women alike, his affectation was ‘principally assumed for the amusement of those around him’ and was delivered in a tone of mischief rather than scorn. It appears a great deal of Beau’s success depended upon his comic timing. Upon riding out one morning, he came across a curly-headed friend driving his curricle, with a pet poodle on the seat beside him. ‘Ah,’ Beau called out, greeting them, ‘a family vehicle, I see!’ After which the poor boy was known as ‘Poodle’.

  Before long, Beau began to live beyond his means. His tailoring costs, his home and general lifestyle, contrary to modern popular opinion, were not extravagant, but his gambling was. As a member of the specialized high-stakes gaming and dining club Watier’s, he played deep and could not control his losses. He fell out of favour with the Prince Regent sometime in 1811, but it took until January of 1816 for his final debt in the ‘book’ of gentlemen’s club White’s to be marked ‘not paid’.

  [At] five o’clock on a fine summer’s morning, in 1813, he was walking … through Berkeley Square … bitterly lamenting his misfortunes at cards, when he suddenly stopped, seeing something glittering in the kennel. He stooped down and picked up a crooked sixpence, saying, ‘Here is an harbinger of good luck.’ He took it home, and before going to bed drilled a hole in it, and fastened it to his watch chain. The spell was good: during more than two years he was a constant winner at play and on the turf, and, I believe, realised nearly £30,000.

  Beau died of syphilis whilst exiled in France, but he assessed his legacy neatly when he summed up his fame – putting men into a clean shirt, trousers and a dark jacket. His home was in Chesterfield Street. Berkeley Square was his route home at dawn after nights at the tables. Bond Street was his haunt, and on his doorstep was the vastly changed Piccadilly. Far from the country road it had been in Burlington’s time, it had become a busy street of mixed fortunes and a place for viewing the stranger side of London life.

  A ‘PARLIAMENT OF MONSTERS’: PICCADILLY’S ENTERTAINMENTS

  In Georgian London there were many ‘freaks’ whose main source of income came from displaying themselves as tall or strong women, tiny people, progeria sufferers and ‘mer-people’. Sexual freaks such as bearded ladies or hermaphrodites were particularly popular. Anything exotic caused queues to form in the street outside the chosen venue of display. All of these factors combined to make the exhibition of Saartjie Baartman, the ‘Hottentot Venus’, one of the sideshows of the age.

  Sara, ‘little Sara’ in Dutch, was of the Khoikhoi people of South Africa. They proved of particular interest to missionaries and early travelling scientists for numerous reasons, not least their distinctive features and their clicking language. However, the greatest attraction for the ‘collectors’ of natural phenomena of the day was the physical appearance of Khoikhoi females, with their large breasts and high, round buttocks. The women of the tribe wore little or no clothing when in their natural environment, making their super-developed genitalia the focus of great curiosity for the white male visitors.

  Sara was ‘acquired’ by Alexander Dunlop, a ship’s surgeon who sourced ‘specimens’ of all kinds for museums from the African Cape. In 1810, he brought Sara to England through Liverpool. There, Dunlop sold Sara to showman Henrik Cezar who brought her to 225 Piccadilly. A flyer was produced advertising her presence, with the invitation to view, at two shillings a go. ‘One gentleman poked her with his cane; one lady employed her parasol to ascertain that all was, as she called it, “nattral”.’ Sara wore an English dress, but her small waist was bounded with African beads and ornaments.

  The exhibition caused an uproar amongst those rushing to see it and amongst the abolitionists, who saw her condition as slavery. A liberal newspaper, the Morning Chronicle, featured a letter on 12 October 1810, declaring, ‘It was contrary to every principle of morality and good order.’ But Cezar soon responded, arguing that it was Sara’s right to exhibit herself and earn her living. The situation prompted a court case, with her would-be protectors stating that she was held against her will and pressing for her repatriation to Africa. The case failed, with the court finding for Cezar. The case soured the exhibition in London. Sara and Cezar moved on to Paris, where she died, in 1815.

  Piccadilly was a place for all sorts of curiosities to be displayed. Almost opposite Burlington House, at 170–173 Piccadilly, a Starbucks coffee shop now sits where William Bullock’s Egyptian Hall once stood. From 1798, when Nelson triumphed at the Battle of the Nile, English interest in the ‘East’ began to soar. While obelisks and other monumental pieces had been leaking out of Egypt for a century, Napoleon’s heavy thieving from Luxor and Karnak made Egyptian objects desirable amongst the European elite. The victory of the Battle of the Nile also coincided with a period in which an extended grand tour took in Turkey or Egypt. The romance of the East rapidly took hold of the English upper-class imagination, with books, prints and Eastern costume all the rage.

  Thomas Hope, a merchant banker resident in Marylebone, was part of the Hope dynasty (later of Hope Diamond fame). With no pressing need to commit to an occupation, he spent much of his young life on a succession of grand tours, taking in much of the known world. He decorated his home in a manner reflecting his travels, and was much taken with Classical and Egyptian themes. His Egyptian Room was open to the public, and this may have been the forerunner to the Egyptian Hall.

  In 1809, Bullock’s Museum arrived in London from Liverpool; in 1812, the Egyptian Hall was ready for occupation. It must have appeared quite surreal to the man on the street. The grand hall of the interior was an extraordinary replica of the avenue at the Karnak Temple complex, near Luxor. By 1819, Bullock was ready to sell his collection of real and spurious objects, and did so in an auction lasting twenty-six days. It was dispersed all over the world. Emptied of its original tenant, the Egyptian Hall received a new and rather more suitable guest: Giovanni Battista Belzoni, known to his English friends as ‘John’.

  John Belzoni was born in 1778, in Padua. He was an actor and a strongman who moved around Europe before arriving in London, in 1803. That year, he married and performed as the ‘Patagonian Samson’ at Sadler’s Wells. But Belzoni had trouble staying in one place; Europe had no sooner quietened down after the Napol
eonic Wars than he was off again, taking his wife, Sarah, with him. In 1815, he reached Egypt where the British Consul, Henry Salt, engaged him to journey to Luxor to retrieve the ‘Younger Memnon’ from the Memnonium. This was the head of Ramesses II in what is now called the Ramesseum near the Valley of the Kings. It was the perfect job for an adventurer like Belzoni. He even went so far as to say the statue of Ramesses II, famously beatific in expression, was ‘apparently smiling on me, at the thought of being taken to England’.

  In 1817, he travelled to the Valley of the Kings and broke into the tomb of Seti I. From Seti’s tomb, Belzoni took a sarcophagus of white alabaster inlaid with blue copper sulphate of great beauty. The retrieval of the sarcophagus, however, was not without peril: the tomb was located in the catacombs, a maze of traps and dead ends, dug to confuse grave robbers. The French interpreter panicked and an Arab assistant broke his hip in a booby trap. Undeterred, Belzoni retrieved the sarcophagus and brought it to England along with the head of the ‘Younger Memnon’. Belzoni suffered constant vomiting and nosebleeds in Egypt, whilst Sarah was unaffected by so much as a case of sunburn – much to his chagrin.

  London eagerly anticipated the imminent arrival of these treasures. Shelley’s famous poem of 1818, ‘Ozymandias’, was written for a newspaper competition held by The Examiner in advance of the arrival of Belzoni’s treasures. The exhibition opened at the Egyptian Hall in May 1821, but a year later the collection was put up for auction. The sale drew two of the greatest collectors of the day: the British Museum and Sir John Soane. The Museum acquired the colossus and Soane the sarcophagus. John Belzoni, financially if not spiritually satisfied, handed in the manuscript of his travels to his publisher, John Murray, and set off for Benin. He died of dysentery one week after arriving there.