by Lucy Inglis
Highgate could not rival Hampstead socially, but it acquired one coup with the arrival of Harriet (née Mellon), the widow of the banker Thomas Coutts, who took a lease on Holly Lodge, on the west side of Highgate Hill, after her first husband died. Her rise from actress to desirable mistress was not unlike that of Coutts’s own ancestor and fellow Highgate resident, Nell Gwynne. Like Nelly, of ‘the ten or twelve ladies who have been raised from the stage to wear coronets, few names stand forth more pleasantly than that of Harriet Mellon’. Her biographer noted, ‘It is not known who was her father, though probably she had one,’ and that she was born on 11 November 1777, behind Lambeth Palace. Her father was later said to be a chimney sweep from Sheffield, or perhaps a soldier in the Madras Infantry.
Harriet made her debut at the Drury Lane Theatre, in 1795, but it wasn’t until 1805 that she met the seventy-year-old Thomas Coutts. She was his mistress until the death of his wife, in 1815, and they married soon after. They had to marry twice, after the first ceremony was mysteriously deemed invalid. Upon her marriage she became one of Britain’s richest women, and she was desperate to become London’s most popular hostess. Her desperation to be liked by the haut ton was often caricatured, but her kind-hearted, flamboyant style and her love for entertaining gradually won them over. Thomas died in 1822, leaving Harriet his fortune and his share in Coutts Bank, much to the annoyance of his daughters from his first marriage. Harriet, however, refused to be cowed and gave them all generous allowances. In 1827, she also brought their wrath and London’s scorn upon herself again when, aged forty-nine, she married William Beauclerk, the 26-year-old Duke of St Albans. The caricatures were even more scathing, but just as her first marriage had been a happy one, it seemed that the new Duchess of St Albans’ cheerfulness and her husband’s easygoing nature meant they were content enough together.
Yet William’s family were very rude to his new wife. Harriet had her fill of unpleasant in-laws, and when she died, in 1837, a clause in her will specified that were any of William’s family to come and stay with him for more than a week at any of the properties she left him, all her bequests to him would cease. The Duchess of St Albans left most of her wealth, the vast sum of £1.8 million, to Thomas Coutts’ granddaughter, Angela. Angela Burdett-Coutts would become Victorian London’s greatest philanthropist until she forfeited the fortune, aged sixty-nine, by also marrying a 26-year-old. It wasn’t the cradle-snatching her step-grandmother’s will objected to, but that he was American: a clause specified that Angela must not marry an ‘alien’. The American husband lived on at Holly Lodge after Angela’s death. When he died, in 1922, the estate was developed as bedsit accommodation for young women who came to London to work after the First World War left the City in dire need of clerks and secretaries. For a long time, the housing remained for women only.
As Harriet Mellon’s transformation began, Highgate was changing too. In 1813, John Nash’s Archway was being built to bridge the hill between Highgate and Holloway and to provide a toll road for traffic which struggled with the steep Highgate Hill. Many images of the picturesque scene of Highgate Hill and the Archway Road were produced, depicting cattle and hay wagons rumbling in and out of London. But The Archway also became a magnet for the suicidal, and high railings were installed to try to prevent further deaths. Then, in the 1830s, Highgate was decided upon as the site of one of London’s new, vast cemeteries. Space for the dead within the city was fast running out, and the Burial Act of 1835 meant that London’s dead would now be laid to rest in one of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ on the edges of the city. Highgate Cemetery now holds approximately 170,000 bodies in 53,000 graves; it was observed upon its opening, in 1839, that Londoners, like the ancient Athenians, ‘bury their dead in the fairest suburb of the City’.
Archway Turnpike, engraving by an unknown artist, 1825
KEATS AND COLERIDGE: THE ROMANTICS OF HAMPSTEAD AND HIGHGATE
The most famous of Hampstead’s residents is John Keats. He and his brothers lodged in Well Walk, next to the Wells Tavern, between 1817 and 1818, when John’s brother Tom was dying of the consumption that had killed their mother. John’s life would end only a few years later.
Keats was a familiar figure in Hampstead. He was not fond of London, finding that everyone there was ‘always at Loggerheads’, but the city was where he was born and raised. His short and painful life began at the Hoop and Swan by Moorgate, where he was the eldest of three boys and a girl. The pub is still there and known now as Keats and the Globe. When Keats was seven, he was sent to a school in Enfield, north London. Nine months after he started at the school, Keats’ father came to visit him and on the way home was thrown from his horse. Thomas Keats’ skull was fractured, and he died hours later. John’s mother died in March 1810, leaving her fourteen-year-old son in the charge of Thomas Hammond, an apothecary.
John shared Hammond’s lodgings, where he developed an interest in medicine that led him to become a student at Guy’s Hospital when he was eighteen. He studied there for five years as a ‘dresser’, attending in theatre and dressing the patients’ wounds after surgery. In 1816, he passed his apothecary exams, and had his first poem published. A collection followed, in 1817, to little acclaim.
During a Scottish summer holiday, in 1818, with his friend Charles Brown, Keats developed a cold so severe that he could not continue the vacation. When he came home, it was to the reality of his brother Tom’s tuberculosis, termed ‘consumption’ at the time. Keats nursed Tom at Well Walk, but he was probably succumbing to the early stages of the disease himself. He had also started to take laudanum, to become ‘drowsed with the fume of poppies’, claiming it eased the tightness in his chest.
John wished to devote himself to poetry, and so had to make some money out of writing. These hopes were almost dashed, in 1818, with the publication of Endymion. It was savaged by the critics, and Keats was heartbroken. He lamented that he would ‘ever be a weaver’s boy to them’. Byron sniped at Keats as a ‘Cockney’ and a ‘dirty little blackguard’.
Tom died in December of that year. Keats moved in with Charles Brown on Hampstead Heath. There they met the elusive Miss Fanny Brawne, who inspired so much of Keats’ work. The Brawne family lived at West End, a hamlet nearby. She was an incorrigible flirt, and not just with John. He wrote her cruel and often spiteful notes, then others full of contrition, but they formed a close relationship which led to an engagement.
In 1820, towards the end of winter, Keats returned from the City to Brown’s house, thoroughly chilled. He was sent to bed by Brown. Keats coughed once, but blood hit the sheet. His surgical training allowed him to recognize it as arterial blood, meaning his lungs were compromised. ‘That drop of blood is my death warrant,’ he told his friend. Brown later remembered the calm with which Keats wiped his chin and remarked, ‘This is unfortunate.’
John consulted three doctors and was bled, starved, fattened and opiated. He fretted for Fanny’s company and began to suffer palpitations. Finally, the doctors recommended a warm climate. Joseph Severn, a promising young artist with an award for travel from the Royal Academy, was singled out as a friend for John, and Rome was settled upon as the place for him to convalesce. Fanny gave John a large marble she used to cool her fingers when sewing. It would rarely leave his reach for the rest of his life.
John Keats and Joseph Severn left England on 17 September 1820. When Keats continued to decline, the doctor confirmed what John already knew: he was dying. Keats became frightened of the dark, so Severn rigged up a system whereby one faltering candle lit the wick of the next, an invention Keats named ‘the fairy lamplighter’.
Keats encouraged Severn in his nursing: ‘Now you must be firm for it will not last long.’ He and Severn sat, hand in hand, for the next seven hours, until John Keats died. Severn wrote to Brown, telling him:
I am broken down from four nights’ watching, and no sleep since, and my poor Keats gone. Three days since, the body was opened; the lungs were completely gone. The Doctors coul
d not conceive by what means he had lived these two months. I followed his poor body to the grave on Monday.
Keats was buried in the Protestant cemetery, as they had agreed. His tombstone bears no name:
This grave
contains all that was Mortal,
of a
YOUNG ENGLISH POET,
Who on his Death Bed,
in the Bitterness of his Heart,
at the Malicious Power of his Enemies,
Desired these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone:
Here lies One
Whose Name was writ in Water.
The news took a month to reach London, where it was published in The Times on 23 March 1821: ‘At Rome on the 23rd of Feb., of a decline, John Keats, the poet, aged 25.’ Fanny married Louis Lindo of Marylebone, in 1833. By this time, the ‘weaver’s boy’ was already hailed as one of the greatest British poets. In 1829, Charles Brown began to write his own history of Keats’ life. He wrote to Fanny and asked her if she had anything to add. Fanny feared she had nothing, for her relationship had been with a man, not a poet, and suggested that ‘the kindest act would be to let him rest for ever in the obscurity to which unhappy circumstances have condemned him’.
If Hampstead belongs to John Keats, then Highgate must belong to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In 1817, Coleridge arrived at Dr Gillman’s house in The Grove, Highgate, to attempt to conquer his opium addiction. He had, over long use, become accustomed to ‘4 & 5 ounces in a day’ – a tremendous dose – and he had been taking it since before he wrote ‘Kubla Khan’, in 1797, a poem inspired by an opiate haze.
He may well have come into contact with opium first through his benefactor, Tom Wedgwood, Josiah’s son. Tom, who was instrumental in the early development of photography, was also an opium addict. He had come to depend upon the drug to alleviate the symptoms of his depression and delicate health, the one probably feeding off the other. Tom was uninterested in the family business, although he had previously been involved in the decoration of the Greek Street premises, and wrote: ‘I mean to exert myself for the good of my fellow creatures.’ At twenty-three, he inherited from his father a sum of money which would allow him to do just that. After having met Coleridge through friends, he heard of the poet’s financial difficulties and wrote to him, enclosing a cheque for £100.
Coleridge was overcome with gratitude, but returned the cheque. The Wedgwoods were moved to then set up an annuity of £150 a year for the poet. Tom died of complications arising from heavy use of opium, in 1805. Coleridge was already on the slippery slope of drug addiction. He would remember the time he first began to take opium: ‘I was seduced into the use of narcotics not secretly, but (such was my ignorance) openly and exultingly, as one who had discovered, and was never weary of recommending, a grand panacea, and saw not the truth till my body had contracted a habit and a necessity.’
Like all drug addicts, Coleridge became ever more divorced from the truth, which – while it may have been necessary for his poetry – was fatal to his marriage and his friendships, knowing that: ‘I have in this one dirty business of Laudanum an hundred times deceived, tricked, nay, actually & consciously LIED.’
Eight days after his arrival in Highgate, Coleridge wrote to John Murray, for whom he was supposed to be translating Goethe’s Faust, with a ‘note for a Porter’ who was to run the errand and then put what he obtained ‘carefully with the Books’. This, of course, was laudanum wrapped up in the Quarterly Review. He believed it kept him ‘tranquil and capable of literary labour’.
The Gillmans built a wing on their house for Coleridge, unaware that their long-term guest was still feeding his habit not only through John Murray’s porter but also through the local apothecary in the High Street, Mr Dunn. A young apprentice called Seymour Teulon Porter worked there. Seymour saw Coleridge as a shifty drug addict; he remembered how, in addition to the Murray supply, Coleridge would come for a pint of laudanum a week, paying once every three months or so, and how he did not speak until the bottle was filled, coming and going by a side door.
It was in these early years that Coleridge, walking with Leigh Hunt in a lane near Hampstead, recalled how a ‘loose, slack, not well-dressed youth met Mr. Green and myself in a lane near Highgate. Green knew him, and spoke. It was Keats.’
In July of 1824, Lord Byron’s remains passed through Highgate and most of the village turned out to watch the funeral procession. Seymour Porter recalled how he was ‘a white-aproned youth of fifteen years of age’ when Coleridge came over to join him and watch the procession, recalling the dead poet’s ‘unhappy youth’ and predicting that ‘Byron’s literary merits would continually rise, while his personal errors, if not denied, or altogether forgotten, would be little noticed’. Coleridge might well have hoped the same for himself.
Yet, on paper, Coleridge managed to maintain some truth; in 1832, he would describe opium as a ‘Poison, which for more than 30 years has been the guilt, debasement, and misery of my Existence’, indicating that he had never conquered his addiction. By the time he was writing this, the Georgian period was over. William IV, the last Hanoverian king, occupied the throne. The political landscape was in the grip of reform. The London that Coleridge saw from Highgate was a modern metropolis. He died in his ‘peculiar room’ at the Gillmans’ two years later, where the view from the window was of the ‘ocean of London, with its domes and steeples definite in the sun, big Paul’s and the many memories attached to it hanging high over all. Nowhere, of its kind, could you see a grander prospect on a bright summer day.’
Afterword
We end where we began, high above the City in the Golden Gallery of St Paul’s Cathedral. The London below us has changed immeasurably. It spreads far into the distance in all directions, although maps are still commonly divided into the City, Westminster and Southwark. The villages, such as Marylebone, Hackney, Bethnal Green, which were outlying satellites are now mere suburbs.
In 1825, Thomas Cubitt’s plans for Pimlico and Belgravia began to cover the ancient gardens and willow beds of the Ebury estate. Greenwich was, and remains, a self-contained river settlement. Chelsea was a pretty village, full of nurseries and gardens towards World’s End. Kensington had the palace and grand retreats, but Notting Hill was known for its unglamorous gravel pits. Fulham was taken up with prosperous market gardens, which relied on the night soil carted down from London’s cesspits to fertilize its beds. When it was developed during the early Victorian period, many of the gardens were sold off to different builders. Small estates went up, with as many dwellings crushed in as possible, and resulting in a mass of ordinary housing with bad transport links.
Clapham came to prominence late in the eighteenth century – not for the place itself, but for its association with the religious group based there, the Clapham Saints, and their abolitionist campaigning. William Wilberforce was their central member. Another William, Cobbett, denounced Herne Hill as nothing but ‘two entire miles of stockjobbers’. Camberwell Grove was built deliberately at the end of a road to nowhere – the key to its survival as one of London’s most beautiful streets.
We are on the threshold of a new era. Victoria will take the throne, and the city will change again, spreading ever outwards, this time in uniform ranks. Within forty years, London will be a vast suburbia of metropolitan works and template housing. It will have an underground railway and the most advanced sewerage system in the world. Solid, wealthy, philanthropic and worthy, it will be a splendid and civilized place. There will be urban poverty and disease on a terrifying scale.
But that is not our remit. Here, our story finishes. London has made an incredible journey in little over a century. It has left behind the medieval and become a modern city: polluted, populous, vibrant and bursting at the seams. Grinding penury and vast wealth remain close neighbours, but science, medicine and industry are innovating at an unparalleled speed. The city is on an artistic and cultural high. Londoners are wealthier, more educated and healthier than ever before. The
y are setting standards of taste and refinement which are still emulated today. Look around you at their many legacies in our streets, hospitals, museums and institutions. Listen. Their voices can still be heard.
1. William Hogarth, ‘Noon, 1738’, showing a London street scene including a Huguenot congregation exiting a church service
2. St Martin’s Le Grand, the site for the new Post Office, engraved by J. Bailey, published 1815
3. The Jernegan Cistern. Goldsmith/banker Henry Jernegan commissioned this monumental cistern from Frederick Kandler in 1734
4. Coffee pot made by the silversmith Paul de Lamerie for fellow Huguenot Sir John Lesquesne, 1738
5. ‘A Paraleytic Woman’ by Théodore Géricault, 1821, produced as a print by Charles Hullmandel, Rodwell & Martin
6. A view of Marylebone Pleasure Gardens, c. 1755
7. Dockhead, Bermondsey, showing the notorious slum of Jacob’s Island, c. 1813
8. Castle’s Shipbreaking Yard opposite Baltic Wharf, Millbank. This collection of naval artefacts was later destroyed in the Blitz.