In the literally rambling novel Humphrey Clinker, which Hume’s compatriot Tobias Smollett started in 1768, the focal character, well-to-do Squire Bramble, says: “I have observed, for some time, that the public papers are become the infamous vehicles of the most cruel and perfidious defamation; every rancorous knave—every desperate incendiary, that can afford to spend half-a-crown or three shillings, may skulk behind the press of a newsmonger, and have a stab at the first character in the kingdom, without running the least hazard of detection or punishment.” And the real-life Horace Walpole, in the postscript to his Memoirs, complained that the daily and evening newspapers “printed every outrageous libel that was sent to them.”
However, the number of press outlets, the freedom of comment, and the avid readership meant that London was the celebrity capital of Europe, leading the way in the culture and practice of instant fame.
FOR THE MOMENT at least, Rousseau was a figure of intense fascination. He was a literary giant, the subject of prurient rumors, the source of idle chatter in the coffeehouses. On Monday, January 13, the day of his arrival in London, the Public Advertiser reported, “All the world are eager to see this man, who by his singularity, has drawn himself into much trouble; he appears abroad but seldom, and dresses like an Armenian, probably on account of an infirmity which has remained with him since the operation he underwent for a retention.”
Knocking on his door at Buckingham Street was a string of admirers. They included General Conway, the Duke of York (Rousseau was out), and the Prince of Wales. George Harcourt, Viscount Nuneham, a fervid follower of Rousseau, called on him, as did George III’s brother-in-law (the hereditary prince of Brunswick) and the Reverend Richard Penneck, keeper of the reading room of the British Library. There were dinners to go to: for instance, an invitation to the British Museum with the underlibrarian Dr. Matthew Maty, who was instrumental in establishing the library’s collection of portraits. (Rousseau’s cousin came to London and also paid him a visit.)
Hume was struck by the extent of the attention. “It is incredible the enthusiasm for him in Paris and the curiosity in London,” he wrote to his brother in February. “I should desire no better fortune than to have the privilege of showing him to all I please.” “Showing him” echoes Hume’s appraisal of his guest as “the most singular man surely in the world,” but the distinction—in Paris, enthusiasm; in London, curiosity—has a spiteful quality. Hume, meanwhile, must have been missing the warm embrace of Paris. Rockingham’s Memoirs record: “[Hume] went to France a plain, unaffected Scotchman. He came back with the airs and feeling of a Frenchman.” He had a habit of launching into encomiums about the French, the Memoirs complain, comparing their loyalty and “their peaceable demeanour with the turbulence of his own countrymen.”
In the same letter to his brother, Hume described the public tumult when, on January 23, he accompanied Rousseau to the royal performance at Drury Lane Theatre.
The British monarch and the king of thespians—George III and David Garrick—both wanted a glimpse of the city’s most distinguished newcomer. Garrick sent an invitation to Rousseau via Hume. It was so spontaneous that Mrs. Garrick was obliged to clear her husband’s private box by putting off earlier guests.
That night the theater was packed. Garrick was a playwright and impresario, as well as an actor. He had taken over the management of the Drury Lane company in 1747, rebuilding the theater and restoring its theatrical and commercial fortunes. The preshow atmosphere was boisterous: many theatergoers had to wait a couple of hours for tickets, and there would be a surge when the doors finally opened. In years gone by, people had died in the crush.
Milling around the theater, the gamut of London social life was on display. Drury Lane was a bottleneck for coaches and chairs; attempts to reduce the anarchy by instituting some kind of one-way system had so far come to nothing. Outside the building, prostitutes plied their trade—inside, too, and not just in the foyer. Several years after Rousseau’s West End experience, The Times declared that the boxes at Drury Lane Theatre were “licensed stews for the abandoned and profligate to meet and pair off from.” Could not theater management at least bar such action from “a less glaring spot?” asked the paper. Pickpockets, normally boys about twelve years old, worked the crowds, and were guaranteed rich pickings from the nightly gathering of the well-to-do, dressed up and preening.
Rousseau almost did not make it. At the very last minute, he flew into a sudden panic: what if Sultan escaped into the streets and lost his bearings while Rousseau was out? There was no Le Vasseur to keep the dog company. Hume, exasperated but ever the rationalist, proposed a solution. Why not lock Sultan up in the bedroom? This they did, though the dog’s howling was almost too much for his master to bear. In a letter to one of his Parisian connections, Hume wrote: “I caught him [Rousseau] in my arms, and told him, that Mrs. Garrick had dismissed another company in order to make room for him; that the king and queen were expecting to see him; and without a better reason than Sultan’s impatience, it would be ridiculous to disappoint them. Partly by these reasons and partly by force, I engaged him to proceed.”
There was much to look forward to. This season (1765–66) had been boosted by Garrick’s return from two years abroad on the grand tour, complete with prints of himself to hand out to admirers. The actor’s mobile features famously enabled him to shift in an instant from emotion to emotion, and he was equally at ease in all dramatic genres—though Reynold’s 1761 painting Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy shows him torn between those two. Garrick himself thought comedy required more skill.
In 1740, a year before his first role, as Richard III, established him as an acting prodigy, Garrick had won a reputation as a playwright with his comedy Lethe. Initially, he performed three of its twelve parts—a poet, a drunk, and a Frenchman. But it was a play he constantly reworked, adding topical material, and in 1756, a new character—Lord Chalkstone (colloquial for kidney stone), a wealthy, amoral, and ludicrous nobleman, whom Garrick was to play forty-eight times in his career and was to play again this Thursday night. The comedy was designed to leave the audience with a warm glow, and it culminated in a jolly musical chorus.
However, it was only ever intended as the frothy, light dessert of a double bill, what was known as the afterpiece. On January 23, the moralistic main course was The Tragedy ofZara, written three decades earlier by Aaron Hill, whom Pope had satirized in his paean to dullness, The Dunciad. Garrick, wearing a long white wig, played an old man, Luzignan, a captured crusader. It was one of his cherished parts. For years he had appeared in the role at least once a season. Zara was played by the well-known actress Mrs. Yates.
Ironically, in the light of Rousseau’s attendance, Zara was an adaptation of a play, Zaire, by his archenemy Voltaire. And in his preface to the play, Hill begged Voltaire’s indulgence for his alterations, the motives for which “are to be found in the turn of our national difference.” In fact, Voltaire had approved the translation. Garrick further amended it to avoid offense to Christians.
The drama is set in thirteenth-century Jerusalem; the background is the Crusades. Zara is a young woman who was captured as a child and brought up in the seraglio of the Sultan, who subsequently falls in love with her. She persuades him to release Luzignan, who is, it transpires, Zara’s natural father. The tragedy lies in Zara’s eventual murder by an incensed Sultan, under the mistaken impression that she is guilty of infidelity.
DESPITE THE PRESENCE of Garrick onstage and the king in the royal box, it was Rousseau who attracted all the attention. He was in his robe, and sporting his distinctive fur bonnet and gold braid. The London Evening Post reported:
Thursday, just as their Majesties came into Drury Lane theatre to see The Tragedy of Zara, the celebrated John James Rousseau made his appearance in the upper box, over the stage box, fronting their Majesties. He was dressed in a foreign dress and accompanied Mr. Hume. The crowd was so great at getting into the theatre that a great number of Gentlemen lost
their hats and wigs, and Ladies their cloaks, &c. There was a great disturbance in the Upper Gallery at the above theatre, which prevented Mrs. Yates and Miss Plym from going on, just as they had opened the piece.
What the commotion was about is unclear. Another notice reported that it began as soon as Garrick emerged to deliver the prologue, whereupon there was “a general clap and a loud huzza,—and there was such a noise from the house being so crowded, very few heard anything of the prologue.—As soon as the play began there was a great disturbance in the gallery, and some called out, Guards Guards!” It was standard practice for two grenadiers carrying muskets to be stationed by the stage door.
Rousseau must have marveled at such rowdiness. Social class dictated who sat where. The boxes went to the rich, the gentlemen were in the pit, the tradesmen took seats in the middle gallery, while the cheap upper gallery was for hoi polloi, who would take in oranges for refreshment and use the dusted, bewigged heads below as targets for the peel. (Sometimes they would throw more dangerous missiles: in 1755, a young lady suffered a serious injury from a sturdy piece of cheese.) Fashionable ladies wore hats, and this season there was an animated debate in the newspapers about their size, with bitter complaints that they obscured vision. Fights and riots frequently erupted among all sections of the audience. Garrick had himself caused two violent mutinies: once on the eve of the Seven Years’ War when he put on a production with French players, and again in 1763, when he stopped half-price seats for latecomers. Boswell always took a cudgel with him to the middle of the pit.
That night, the actors would have had to fight for the audience’s concentration. While Rousseau watched the stage, the king and queen scrutinized Rousseau, and Hume scrutinized the king and queen. “I observed their majestys to look at him more than at the players.” According to Lloyd’s Evening Post, Rousseau was so absorbed in the production that he hung over the front of the box while Mrs. Garrick, anxious that he might go the way of the orange peel, clung to his clothes.
For Drury Lane, the night of January 23 was a triumph, and for Garrick personally the double bill brought critical acclaim. “It is impossible to express how finely he played both characters,” one paper commented. After the performance, “The celebrated Mr. Rousseau,” as he was invariably tagged in the press, went the short distance to Garrick’s town house overlooking the Thames at 5 Adelphi Terrace, where the Garricks hosted a supper. Oliver Goldsmith was among the guests, though no unrestrained admirer of Rousseau: “Rousseau of Geneva: A professed man hater, or more properly speaking, a philosopher enraged with one half of mankind, because they unavoidably make the other half unhappy.”
The thespian had once affirmed that with his performance as Luzignan he aimed to make people cry. He certainly succeeded that night. At supper, according to Lloyd’s Evening Post, Rousseau was effusive: “Sir, you have made me shed tears at your tragedy, and smile at your comedy, though I scarce understand a word of your language.”
His open enjoyment of the show might seem inconsistent with his philosophy. Theater was a form of entertainment that he had condemned. Among his objections, perhaps the most trenchant was his conviction that the theater drags us into an amoral mire. At the theater we cry at the tragedy lived out on the stage, and our emotional response creates a warm glow of self-satisfaction. Then, when we leave, we dry our eyes and carry on as normal; perhaps we even behave worse than before. The stage, thought Rousseau, turns us from agents to witnesses, and the desire to fight inequality and injustice drains out, too, with our tears.
However, Rousseau would not have conceded that his enjoyment of Zara and Lethe was hypocritical, believing that he himself was beyond corruption, whether by theater or by wealth. In any case, it was only in the ideal state, with its ideal citizens, that theater would be superfluous and injurious. In the swarming cities of the world, where human life had already been soiled, pragmatism was the rule: “when it is no longer a question of leading people to do good, one may at least distract them from doing evil.”
WHATEVER HIS DISPLAY in Drury Lane, and although Paris had made plain his (short-term) love of public parade, Rousseau professed he had come to Britain in search of peace and anonymity. Even after the French capital, his first exposure to the dynamic, anarchic city that was London must have given him culture shock. He was never likely to feel at home amid the noise, the bustle, the fervor, the surging life, and the self-regard of the greatest, the richest, the fastest-growing city on earth.
A contemporary map of the capital announced itself as being “A plan of London on the same scale as that of Paris,” before boastfully concluding that London, at 5,455 acres, exceeded Paris by 1,427 acres. Indeed, London was the first trading center of the age, and expanding pell-mell, its population increasing from 300,000 in 1700 to 750,000 when George III ascended the throne in 1760, and approaching a million in 1800.
The capital had become the lodestone for the talented and ambitious, foreign trade producing new wealth and shaking up the class order. In Humphrey Clinker, Squire Bramble paints a picture of plow-boys swarming down to the metropolis to enter liveried service, since every trader and attorney now kept servants. Commerce created bourgeois employment: finance, trade, bureaucracy.
A manic construction boom was under way, ushering in a town-scape of grand and elegant squares. The demand for bricks was such that they were delivered hot from the kiln—in 1766, several carriages carrying them burst into flames. Green fields and orchards clung on north of Tyburn Road (now Oxford Street), but the potential for development possessed their ducal landowners. The government began to bring in the services the town needed. Every month, there appeared better drains, more pavements (the landmark Westminster Paving Act was passed in 1762), more streetlights. Visitors from out of town as well as foreigners raised their eyes to the sky, struck dumb by the brightness.
Rousseau would have been quite unaccustomed to the din and the energy. Up from his country estate, Squire Bramble is assailed by clamor “at all hours of day and night: watchmen calling the hour and thundering at every door.” London was a city on the go—and at all hours. Pierre Jean Grosley’s A Tour to London in 1772 observed how “the English walk very fast; their thoughts being entirely engrossed by business, they are very punctual to their appointments, and those, who happen to be in their way, are sure to be sufferers by it.” Speed’s cousin was discourtesy: there was no time for patience or politeness.
Of course, there was a degree of silence in the squares and the lawyers’ inns of court, and in side streets such as the one off the Strand running down to the river, noted by an eighteenth-century traveler, where there was “so pleasing a calm” that it struck the senses. This could be Buckingham Street. And it would not have been surprising if, for much of the time, Rousseau had closeted himself in his lodgings there.
His was one of four smart streets, each named after a different part of the landowner’s name: George Villiers, duke of Buckingham. (“Of” was an alley.) Hume had procured lodgings for them through Hume’s wine-merchant friend John Stewart, who lived in the same street. Less than a minute’s walk away were the steps leading down to the Thames. A century before the construction of the Victoria embankment, the river was much wider and shallower, and the primary route for the nation’s foreign trade: tea, coffee, sugar, cocoa, rum, rice, tobacco, hemp, and tallow, china, iron, and linen all flowed in a constant stream of shipborne commerce.
In the other direction, also a minute away, was the Strand, which, eastward, merged into Fleet Street. Among its myriad shops were drapers, haberdashers, hatters, and hosiers, jostling for space with tailors, wine merchants, cabinetmakers, pawnbrokers, and booksellers. Rousseau would have seen at least two booksellers stocking his own works, especially Émile and Héloïse. Printing and journalism were already clustering around Fleet Street, as were workshops making precision instruments, such as those used in navigation and astronomy.
It was not a pleasant stroll down the Strand, deep in mud and filth. And there wa
s an ever-present threat of violence. When Rousseau came to London, the capital was still in the grip of a crime epidemic linked to the return of soldiers from the Seven Years’ War. The voice of working people with political, religious, or economic grievances was heard through endemic rioting. The night Rousseau and Hume reached town, there was an altercation on the Strand, close to Rousseau’s temporary home. Imports of French silk had undercut homemade British produce, sparking riots among the silk weavers who worked at home around Spitalfields. Many weavers were emigrating to Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. A march on Parliament in 1765 had won a ban on foreign silk imports. The newspaper recorded the incident:
A gentleman detected a fellow in throwing aqua fortis upon a gentlewoman’s gown, as she passed along the Strand, and a crowd soon gathering, he pleaded in excuse, that he was a poor journeyman weaver, who, with a wife and four children, in this severe season, were almost starving to death, for want of employment, and that the lady’s gown on which he had thrown the aqua fortis was French wrought silk, the wearing of which was contrary to law, he was thereupon suffered to depart without molestation.
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