by Roy Porter
The coffee house served as the prototype of the club, many of which were modelled on the fictional specimen immortalized in the Spectator. Of the 2,000 clubs and other societies said to exist in early Georgian London, some were social (like the Sublime Society of Beefsteaks at the Bedford), some debating (like the Robin Hood Society), and others artistic (like the Society of Dilettanti).57 The Kit-Cat became the rendezvous for Whig grandees and men of letters, while pride of place later went to Dr Johnson's Literary Club, whose gatherings at the Turk's Head in Gerrard Street, Soho, included the politician Edmund Burke, the painter Joshua Reynolds, the playwright Oliver Goldsmith, the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, the musicologist Charles Burney, the theatre men David Garrick, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and George Colman, the historian Edward Gibbon, the orientalist Sir William Jones and the economist Adam Smith. Where else could such a galaxy of talent be habitually found?58
Clubs came in all guises: the Spitalfields Mathematical Society was a self-improvement club for tradesmen; the ‘Society for the Encouragement of Learning’, established in 1731 ‘to institute a republic of letters for promoting the Arts and Sciences’, was probably a masonic lodge.59 Convivial and political clubs abounded, like the Sons of Freedom, or the Antigallicans, who campaigned on behalf of john Wilkes. Self-styled custodians of culture, clubs fulfilled certain of the functions of the Paris salon or the university the capital then lacked: they established circuits of conversation.60
Private in format like the club but public in its façade was that British innovation freemasonry. Modelled as a microcosm of the Commonwealth, with its members divided into the three estates of apprentices, journeymen and masters, the lodge promoted enlightened conduct: brotherhood, benevolence, conviviality, liberty, civilization. The ‘Royal Art’, proclaimed the movement's Constitutions, had been practised by the ‘free born… from the beginning of the world, in the polite nations’.61
Freemasonry achieved phenomenal success. In 1717 the London lodges affiliated to form the Grand Lodge of England, with its own Grand Master. Within eight years, there were fifty-two lodges in Great Britain alone, while by 1768 nearly 300 British lodges had been founded, including eighty-seven in the metropolis. The lodge created a social milieu rejoicing in British constitutionalism and prosperity, and dedicated to virtue and humanity under the Great Architect;62 yet masonry was also riddled with typically British ideological tensions, combining deference to hierarchy with a measure of egalitarianism, acceptance of distinction with social exclusivity and commitment to rationality with a taste for mysteries and ritual.63
Overall, the proliferation of clubs, societies and lodges joined with the expansion of the press and Grub Street to boost culture as a flourishing print-based communications enterprise serving a varied public at large (see chapter 4).
London supported numerous other public platforms for staging modern ideas and values, flaunting political and artistic allegiances and promoting the new. The most prominent of these pulpits of modernity was the theatre. Condemned as threats to godly order, playhouses had been closed down by the Puritans. Re-established in 1660, the theatre initially took its cue from royal and noble patronage, but in time began to pitch for wider audiences and tastes, as auditoria grew ever larger – late eighteenth-century Drury Lane seated a staggering 3,611, and even Norwich's theatre held over a thousand.
Mingling sensation and instruction rather like television today, and regaling audiences with costume drama, great lives, history, satire and moral mazes, theatre broadened outlooks and tastes while also serving as a sounding board for opinion and politics. Taken as a burlesque on Sir Robert Walpole, John Gay's Beggar's Opera (1728) thus proved phenomenally popular, being performed sixty-two times and enjoyed by up to 40,000 people in its first season alone. When in 1763 the aristocratic libertine the Earl of Sandwich welshed on his drinking companion John Wilkes, he quickly became dubbed ‘Jemmy Twitcher’, the thief who betrayed Gay's hero, Macheath, and it proved a sobriquet that stuck.64
Complementing the theatre as fare for the fancy were London's new art galleries. There was the Shakespeare Gallery in Pall Mall, where the art dealer John Boydell specialized in paintings of scenes from the Bard; and the Poets’ Gallery in Fleet Street, which featured works inspired by famous lines of British verse. Founded in 1769, the Royal Academy held annual exhibitions whose appeal was enormous: an amazing 1,680 visitors jammed into Somerset House one Friday in 1769 for the RA show!65
Museums, too, were novelties. Founded by an act of parliament in 1753, the British Museum was the first public museum in Europe intended ‘not only for the inspection and entertainment of the learned and the curious, but for the general use and benefit of the public’.66 Numerous private-venture museums sprang up, too. ‘The birds of paradise, and the humming birds, were I think among the most beautiful,’ wrote Susan Burney, Fanny's sister, returning from a visit to Sir Ashton Lever's museum (or ‘Holophusikon’, in his hifalutin phrase) in Leicester Square. ‘There are several pelicans – flamingoes – peacocks (one quite white) – a penguin. Among the beasts a hippopotamus (sea-horse) of an immense size, an elephant, a tyger from the Tower – a Greenland bear and its cub – a wolf – two or three leopards.’67 Other commercial operations, like ‘eidophysicons’ or magic lanterns, cashed in on novelty and sensation, bringing the wonders of the world to the curious. In 1773 a listing of the sights of London declared, if with a touch of exaggeration, that there were ‘Lions, Tygers, Elephants, &c. in every Street in Town’. Cherokee chiefs taking tea, midgets and giants, stone-eaters and other freaks, ‘philosophical fireworks’, chess-playing automata, lectures on health, sexual rejuvenation or mesmerism – all these, and scores more besides, titivated the fancy, sparked controversy and became part of the cultural baggage of anyone wanting to pass as a somebody.68
Such developments owed much to a new breed of entrepreneur. John Rich, the theatrical manager, decked playhouses out with sophisticated stage machinery and lavish scenery; the opera impresario J. J. Heidegger staged risqué masquerades; Jonathan Tyers, proprietor of Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, patronized artists and composers.69 The swelling metropolitan public could thus share, at modest cost, in a new and refined world of art, letters and performance, becoming better informed, exercising taste and basking in contemporary refinement: ‘there is nothing like a playhouse for fine prospects’, one playgoer reputedly exclaimed, ‘… without fatigue, and trouble, one can see all Europe, well lighted for a shilling’.70
Not to be outdone, provincial cities for their part developed their own sites for news, events and culture. While mirroring the metropolis – ‘we… imitate your fashions, good and evil’, proclaimed a Newcastle writer71 – they also forged distinctive regional identities. In York, Exeter, Bristol, Norwich and elsewhere, political and cultural activity generated venues for recitals, plays and concerts, notably the elegant all-purpose assembly rooms (still highly visible), where local élites gathered for balls, charity fundraisers, music-making and performances. Comfortable coaching inns, shopping parades, parks and stylish squares tempted the gentry to linger in town beyond the calls of business, in a show of urbanity. Meanwhile, Bath and other spas boomed, seductively if implausibly claiming to combine the recovery of health with the pursuit of pleasure.72
The enjoyments quickened and quenched by these new public amenities fed off economic growth at large. England was now a premier ‘trading nation’, ran the cliché, whose natives could take pride in being ‘a polite and commercial people’.73 Colonization, British domination of the slave trade and rapid overseas expansion fed rising consumption at home.74 London, proclaimed Addison, had become ‘a kind of Emporium for the whole Earth’, a view extended to the nation at large by Daniel Defoe's Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–7), that national anthem to progress, agricultural, commercial and industrial.75 The Revd Alexander Catcott, his parish in the Atlantic boom port of Bristol, gloried in Britain's mercantile ascendancy: ‘Our island has put on quite a differe
nt face, since the increase of commerce among us.’76 In defiance of traditional snobberies, trade was held up as a source not just of profit but of civilization:
Commerce gives Arts, as well as Gain;
By Commerce wafted o'er the Main…77
And not only civilization: trade, so the boosters claimed, promoted confidence, harmony and unity, fostering contacts and gathering the ends of the nation into a single circuit. Better post roads, turnpikes and coaching services dramatically abridged time and distance. In 1754 the Newcastle to London trip had taken six days; within thirty years that had been halved. The four and a half days needed to get from Manchester to London at mid-century had been slashed to twenty-eight hours by 1788. Improved roads boosted traffic, serving as socio-economic multipliers; the pace of life quickened and remote areas were sucked into the national economy of consumption, news and fashion. As of 1740, only one stagecoach a day had rattled its way from Birmingham to London; by 1763 there were thirty. Arthur Young – like Defoe, a non-stop proselytizer – gushed at the idea of the nation on the move:
The general impetus given to circulation; new people – new ideas – new exertions – fresh activity to every branch of industry; people residing among good roads, who were never seen with bad ones, and all the animation… and industry, which flow with a full tide… between the capital and the provinces.78
However, not all were of that mind. ‘I am just old enough,’ groused John Byng in 1790, ‘to remember Turnpike roads few, and those bad… But I am of the very few, perhaps alone, who regret the times… now, every abuse, and trickery of London are ready to be play'd off upon you.’79 How impertinent the provinces had grown!
Better roads spelt better post. Traditionally the mail simply followed the axial post roads out of London, but thanks to the development of ‘cross-posts’, a veritable lattice of routes emerged. By 1756 there were daily services – Sundays excepted – from London west to Plymouth and to Bristol, Swansea and Pembroke; the Holyhead post road had a weekday service, with services on to Ireland, while the Great North Road also carried the mail daily. By contrast, most provincial cities in France were receiving the Paris mail only twice a week.80
Such improvements found their most extreme form in the hothouse of London. ‘The new Penny Post Office,’ beamed The Times in 1794,
is likely to prove such a very great accommodation to the public… there will be six deliveries each day in all parts of the town… Persons putting in letters by nine in the morning… may receive answers from London the same afternoon.81
The impact must have been like the coming of e-mail.
Such developments brought a revolution in consciousness. Time was, mused George Colman, when travel had been ‘like the caravan over the deserts of Arabia’; but all that had become a thing of the past thanks to ‘the amendment of the roads… the manners, fashions, amusements, vices, and follies of the metropolis, now make their way to the remotest corners of the land’.82 The result was a ‘global village’ effect, netting within the national culture provincials who ‘scarce half a century ago… were regarded as a species, almost as different from those of the metropolis, as the natives of the Cape of Good Hope’.83 Now, exclaimed the Swiss-American visitor Louis Simond fifty years later, ‘nobody is provincial in this country’.84 And in all this, London remained the prime mover in a nation much taken by its own energies. ‘I look upon your city as the best place of improvement,’ remarked Dr South in the 1690s; ‘from the school we go to the university, but from the universities to London.’85
Small wonder, then, that the British talked themselves up as a singularly free and fortunate race – indeed, one uniquely enlightened. This ‘enveloping haze of patriotic self-congratulation’86 was, of course, fostered by propaganda. ‘We enjoy at this Hour,’ declared the Daily Courant on 13 June 1734,
an uninterrupted Peace, while all the rest of Europe is either actually engaged in War, or is on the very Brink of it. Our Trade is at a greater Heighth than ever, while other Countries have scarce any, thro’ their own Incapacity, or the Nature of their Government. We are free from Religious Disturbances, which distract almost every other Nation. Our liberties and our Properties are perfectly secure.87
Set to verse, such sentiments became the bombast of the Scot James Thomson:
The nations, not so blest as thee,
Must in their turn to tyrants fall;
While thou shalt flourish great and free,
The dread and envy of them all.
‘Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;
Britons never will be slaves.’88
At the drop of a hat, it seems, natives launched into self-congratulation. ‘Hail Britain, happiest of countries! Happy in thy climate, fertility, situation, and commerce; but still happier in the peculiar nature of thy laws and government,’ sang the Irish-born Oliver Goldsmith.89 Charles Churchill hit upon another ‘Hail’:
Hail, LIBERTY! A glorious word,
In other countries scarcely heard…90
Rarely had Britons felt so truculently triumphalist, or puffed themselves up so chauvinistically – witness the engravings of Hogarth, who signed himself ironically ‘Britophil’. Touring Italy in 1729, Lord Hervey – Pope's ‘Sporus’ – came out in couplets:
Throughout all Italy beside,
What does one find, but Want and pride?
Farces of Superstitious folly,
Decay, Distress, and Melancholy:
The Havock of Despotick Power,
A Country rich, its owners poor…91
It had not been so very long previously, it is worth remembering, that Italy had been the very cynosure of the English (if also considered the sink of depravity). A trip to Lisbon in 1775 similarly made Thomas Pelham bubble: ‘with what joy and gratitude must every Englishman reflect on the happiness of his own nation in comparison of any other’.92
The bullish chorus, brilliantly satirized by the ‘Britophil’ Hogarth, did not escape foreigners. The people will tell you, observed the Swiss visitor de Saussure, ‘that there is no country in the world where such perfect freedom may be enjoyed as in England’.93 Doubtless, in their cups, Squire Booby and his drinking companions cursed mercenary placemen and those damn'd dogs the Excise men but, travelling abroad, they pilloried or pitied the natives (while enjoying the paintings and the painted ladies) and plumed themselves upon living in a land ‘great and free’. Enlightenment and patriotism made a heady brew.
Enlightenment was more than talk, however; there was quite literally more light around. ‘Most of the streets are wonderfully well lighted,’ remarked de Saussure, new to London, ‘for in front of each house hangs a lantern or a large globe of glass, inside of which is placed a lamp which burns all night.’94 Some time later, the Prussian Archenholz marvelled: ‘In Oxford-street alone there are more lamps than in all Paris.’95 Pastor Moritz, too, was ‘astonished at the unusually good lighting of the streets, compared with which Berlin makes a pretty poor show’.96 A German princeling, the story ran, thought all the bright lights had been got up specially to honour him.97
Taste and technology each played its part. Leaded casements were replaced by big sash windows;98 interior design à la Adam went in for pale and creamy tints; and, from the 1780s, the new Argand oil lamp made all the difference indoors after dark. Its tubular wick and glass chimney produced a continuous bright and almost smoke- and smell-free light far superior to candles. Birmingham's Lunar Society had been at work on the idea in the 1770s, and when the Swiss Louis Argand patented his version, Matthew Boulton of Birmingham won the exclusive manufacturing rights.99
Nor was gas far behind. Boulton's friend, the engineer William Murdoch, gas-lit his own house in 1792; and ten years later he illuminated Boulton and Watt's factory to celebrate the Peace of Amiens – a ‘luminous spectacle… as novel as it was astounding’, spouted an enthusiast.100
Light has always been a potent symbol. Its creation was God's first act (fiat lux: ‘Let there be light’), while the miracl
e of the final day of Creation was the light of human reason (lumen animae). Isaiah tells us that ‘the men who walked in darkness’ had seen ‘a great light’, while, in the New Testament, St John speaks neo-Platonically of ‘the true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world’. Sinners saw ‘as through a glass, darkly’, but Jesus would be the ‘light of the world’.101 The Vulgate for its part calls the Lord ‘my illumination’ – Dominus illuminatio mea (the Oxford University Press's motto); while Cambridge Platonists, following Psalm 20, spoke of reason as the ‘candle of the Lord’, an illumination divinely implanted in the soul.102 Light bore secular meanings, too. If the metaphor was one to which the Sun King laid claim, Albion later made it her own, because of the conceit that it was an Englishman who had, scientifically speaking, actually discovered light – that is, eludicated its principles: as the peerless Newton explained in his Opticks (1704), light propagates itself through particles and white light comprises a spectrum of the colours and obeys the laws of reflection and refraction.103
Even Light itself, which every thing displays,
Shone undiscover'd, till his brighter mind
Untwisted all the shining robe of day…104
– though James Thomson's lines were plonking by contrast to Pope's sublime: