Johnson's Life of London

by Boris Johnson

Instead of doing him justice, Hooke said, Newton had made a pretence of falling out with him and being offended. It was all to no avail. The argument was lost. Indeed, the argument was probably lost that first evening in the coffeehouse, when Hooke protested his primacy. He had boasted too often, he had claimed credit too freely.

  Whatever insights he may have had into gravity, he lost sympathy by his peevishness. Newton struck his name out of the third book of Principia Mathematica, and in later texts he was downgraded from Clarissimus Hookius (most distinguished Hooke) to plain Hookius.

  The feud only ended with Hooke’s death in 1703. The way was open for Newton to be made President of the Royal Society, a post he occupied for twenty-four years. There are those who think the all-powerful Newton then engaged in an eradication of the memory of the man who had so irritated him. They blame Newton for the fact that we do not have a single demonstrable likeness of Robert Hooke. Whether or not Isaac Newton actively conspired to burn paintings of his critic—and it seems unlikely—Hooke has come down to us as an archetypal sore loser, an also-ran, a hunched and bitter Salieri unable to reconcile himself to the incandescent Mozartian genius of Newton.

  In reality, you might argue, it was Newton who was the loner, the recluse, the weirdo who dabbled in black magic. It is Hooke who emerges from Stephen Inwood’s study as an engaging and basically clubbable man. Yes, his domestic and sexual relations were peculiar, and given that for many years his mistress was his niece Grace, he was lucky to live under the Restoration rather than under the Puritans. But there is a kind of odd sweetness to his nature.

  He had a free-spirited housekeeper named Martha, and sometimes he would take refuge from her impudence with his former housekeeper and mistress Nell Young. It is perhaps a measure of his generosity that he remained on good terms with Nell, even though she ran off and slept with a younger man shortly after Hooke injured his back in the course of )-(. Sometimes he would go off and have “much discourse” and tea and cake, though not )-(, with a Mrs. Moore.

  He would dine with Pepys, who rated him so highly that he said, “he is the most, and promises the least, of any man in the world that I ever saw.” It was a measure of his indefatigable love of science that he continued to give his lectures when no one much could be bothered to come.

  He was a gregarious soul, who was endlessly going for walks with his friends, or just hanging out in coffeehouses with Francis Lodwick or “Lod,” John Hoskins or “Hosk,” Richard Waller or “Wall,” Edmond Halley or “Hall,” Alexander Pitfield or “Pif” and Mr. Currer or “Cur.” He wasn’t always that obsessive about his reputation, in that he happily let Wren and others take the credit for buildings that he had played a major role in designing or constructing. His range of accomplishments was vast.

  Together with his favourite watchmaker, Nicholas Tompion, he effectively launched the London clock and watch industry in Clerkenwell. He seems to have been very near to formulating a theory of evolution, saying that there had obviously been species in the past that no longer existed, and that “it seems very absurd to conclude that from the beginning things have been in the state we now find them.”

  He asked himself whether Ireland and America might have been formerly joined, whether the bottom of the sea might have been dry land and what dry land might have been the sea. He was on to something big, and he knew it.

  He was a scientific optimist, who wanted people to “throw off that lazy and pernicious principle, to know as much as their fathers, grandfathers or great-grandfathers did.” At one stage of their long feud, Newton wrote him what was meant to be a conciliatory letter, in which he made the famous remark that “if I have seen further, it is because I have been standing on the shoulders of giants.” He is not generally thought to have been referring to Hooke. But if he wasn’t, he should have been. Robert Hooke had many triumphs but made two big mistakes.

  Like so many British scientists who have followed him, he failed to draw the full commercial and practical conclusions of his breakthroughs. And he allowed the first draft of his story to be written by those who wanted to put him down.

  * * *

  If you had ascended to the top of the dome of St. Paul’s in 1700, shortly before Hooke died, you would have looked out over a city that was still breathtakingly rural.

  Hyde Park and St. James’s Park were surrounded by farmland or open fields. Inigo Jones’s Covent Garden piazza was part of an island of development; but north of Holborn and west of Charing Cross there was a sea of green. Down Fleet Street and the Strand you could see gardens with rosebushes and lavender. Orchards peeped from behind the city taverns, while Hampstead and Highgate were distant hilltop hamlets. From your eyrie you would have heard the lowing of cattle being herded to market and the hissing of geese as they chased a lady’s sedan chair. You could see boys fishing or swimming in the river by what was still—incredibly—the only bridge across the Thames.

  London Bridge looked increasingly tatty. The Tudor Nonsuch House was in a state of decay, and other shops and houses had been lost to fire, giving a gap-toothed and tumbledown impression. From the top of St. Paul’s you could see that London was still essentially a collection of medieval villages—150 of them—each centred on its own church, inn or marketplace. Every village had its mixture of classes: posh houses and little rows of cottages; and people of all backgrounds would meet in the same churches and hostelries, and cheer the same kind of medieval processions that Dick Whittington had come upon when he arrived in London.

  What you would not have spotted, hundreds of feet up, was the impact of the technical changes proceeding from the brains of men like Robert Hooke: hundreds of inventions that were cumulatively to transform agriculture, manufacturing and trade of all kinds. You would not have guessed, as you listened to the distant bleating and shouting of London, that this was a society on the verge of making the terrifying leap from agrarian to industrial. And yet the world’s first steam-powered pump had just been built in 1698, in London, by Thomas Savery; and though it was a pretty inefficient contraption, it led directly to James Watt’s device of 1776. Jethro Tull was about to produce his revolutionary seed drill of 1701. The furnaces of Coalbrookdale would be alight by 1709.

  And so if you had gone up to look from that dome of St. Paul’s, one hundred years later, you would have found the city changed out of all recognition. As your eye swept the horizon, you would have found it hard to tell where the city ended. People had switched from burning wood to Newcastle coal, and the air was thick with brown smoke. You could see the noble squares that had been laid out after the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713—Grosvenor Square and Mayfair. You could see the masterpieces of Georgian architecture that succeeding generations have tried to emulate: Berkeley Square, Cavendish Square, Portland Place, Fitzroy Square. You could see that the bridge had been rebuilt, with every shop and house knocked down, and the medieval arches completely reclad in stone. Now there was also Westminster Bridge, opened in 1750, with tiny black figures scurrying across, and Blackfriars Bridge, opened in 1769. As your eye swept from east to west, you could see the growing gulf in reputation between the two sides of London: fancy houses in the west, with rows of plane trees and chestnuts in the squares; appalling tenements in the east.

  Stretching as far as you could see were ribbons of houses bounded by brick kilns and gravel workings and rubbish pits burning with Phlegethontean fire. You could see the sweatshops and factories and mills and shipyards where Londoners now worked, men and women, pitifully old and monstrously young, in often degrading conditions. Stables and cowsheds had become dormitories for labourers who had migrated from the countryside, in flight from the enclosures. The roofs of their dwellings fell on their heads; their wages failed to keep pace with the price of bread; they were continually vulnerable to technical advances—the spinning jenny, Arkwright’s rollers—that devalued their labour, and yet they had no union to represent them. Their lives were short, their dis
eases exotic. They were as numerous as locusts and as poor as rats, as one observer put it.

  The technological advances of Hooke and others had exalted the importance of machines; and since machines were expensive, society became ever more divided—between those who toiled at the looms and those who owned or financed the means of production. As the capitalist and industrial revolution took place, London and England became vastly richer in per capita output; and yet some citizens became much richer than others, and many lived in squalor. As London grew, the lives of Londoners became more unequal. There were, as ever, two responses to this problem.

  There was the conservative view, that inequality was an unavoidable part of the human condition, and perhaps even divinely ordained; and then there were radicals, people who put themselves at the head of movements for change, who campaigned for the emancipation of the poor. Two of the very greatest eighteenth-century Londoners can be broadly said to embody these divergent views of the world. There was Samuel Johnson, who has a claim to be called the father of compassionate conservatism; and then there was his foe John Wilkes, the London demagogue and radical he despised and railed against, and with whom he was eventually reconciled.

  The Bow Street Runners

  * * *

  There cannot be many cities in the world where tourists are invited to buy a copy of a policeman’s helmet as a souvenir of their trip. There they are in the kiosks, along with little red telephone boxes, Routemaster buses and pairs of pants saying “I ♥ London.”

  This tells you something important about the way the city is policed, that the wearers of these characteristic blue bonnets are not to be equated with any sinister apparition of state control. They are not there to be directed by interior ministers to break down your door in the night. They are not securitate. They are not even gendarmes or carabinieri.

  They are meant to be part of the street scene: unarmed, friendly and willing to tell you the time. In the much-quoted phrase of the founder of the Metropolitan Police Force, Sir Robert Peel, “The police are the public and the public are the police.” Which means they are not remote from us, they are part of us. British policing is “by consent.”

  This may seem a fine distinction, between British and other “papers please” styles of policing, but it is important. Such has been Londoners’ historic insistence on the liberty of the individual that for many years there was serious and principled resistance to having a police force at all.

  There were constables, like the dim-witted Dogberry in Shakespeare’s Much Ado, with his malapropish use of official-sounding language. There were watchmen paid by the guilds; and as London swelled in the early eighteenth century, and as the slums and the rookeries became havens for thieves, there were people who were paid by magistrates to catch the criminals.

  The trouble with this system of rewards was that the thief catchers actually had a motive to encourage theft. The most mind-boggling of these characters was Jonathan Wild (1682–1725). He posed as the “Thief-taker general of Great Britain and Ireland,” and persuaded the authorities that he was a kind of Batman of law enforcement—while simultaneously organising bands of thieves to take property of all kinds.

  These stolen goods would then be “found,” and Wild would claim his reward, which would be shared with his gang. If any of the thieves wanted to rat, or stop thieving, Wild would denounce them and have them sent to the gallows. To the poor duped public Wild was Robocop, a hero. When in 1720 the Privy Council consulted him on how to control crime, he replied rather brilliantly that more lavish rewards were needed.

  In the end the fraud was exposed and Wild was hanged; and yet Londoners were still reluctant to see a state-backed police force. It was tyrannical, people said. It was foreign. By the end of the eighteenth century the city was relying on the Bow Street Runners, “a set of brave fellows, always ready to set out to any part of the town or kingdom at a quarter of an hour’s notice.”

  This group had originally been established in 1749 by the novelist Henry Fielding (author of Tom Jones). Originally there were only six of them, and they were meant to be human bloodhounds, leal and true, with scarlet waistcoats and stout sticks. Their job was to go urgently at the behest of the Bow Street magistrates (though they disliked the undignified term “runners”) to issue summonses and make arrests; and yet because they were also paid by results, they suffered from the same temptations as the thief catchers. They eventually became involved in massive scams to share rewards between criminals and fences.

  By the early nineteenth century the pressure was growing, in some quarters, for a professional force. In 1811 the public was outraged by the failure of the authorities to do anything about some grisly murders in east London. John William Ward, a future foreign secretary, brushed aside the outcry. “I should rather half a dozen people’s throats should be cut in Ratcliff Highway, every three or four years, than be subject to domiciliary visits, spies and all the rest of Fouché’s contrivances,” he said, referring to the blood-crazed behaviour of Joseph Fouché, Napoleon’s minister of police.

  The pressure grew in the disturbances following the 1821 death of Queen Caroline (a kind of Lady Di figure, who provoked angry and extravagant mourning), though in 1823 the Times was sticking to the line that a centralised police force was “an engine invented by despotism.” Finally in 1829 Peel got his bill through parliament and a professional force was born.

  In deference to public anxiety about the new state-authorised officers, Peel did his best to ensure the civilian nature of the force. He dressed the men in top hats with blue swallow-tail coats and armed them only with a truncheon (or a cutlass on dangerous beats). Though Londoners at first booed the policemen, they became an immense success, championed by Dickens and others. There were spectacular falls in crime in the second half of the nineteenth century, and it stayed low until the 1960s.

  Londoners had got their first demonstration that policing worked. If there was a cost to liberty, it didn’t seem very high—and they decided it was worth paying.

  * * *

  Samuel Johnson

  He gave the world compassionate conservatism

  Say the words Samuel Johnson’s London and we conjure an image of England’s first great age of liberty, and enlightenment, and all-round fun.

  When we close our eyes and think of the eighteenth century, we see coffeehouses, and 3 a.m. revels, and women talking back for the first time in history, and rakes lolling against the bared bosoms of fan-waving beldames, and all around a ferment of science and medicine and literacy and burgeoning democracy.

  So it is a shock to come across an episode that reminds you how much society has changed in a few hundred years and how the British state, in that supposedly enviable period, could do things to its citizens that we find barbaric today.

  Such as the punishment proposed for a peculiar clergyman named William Dodd. At the age of forty-eight he had become one of the most popular preachers in London. His sermons were so packed with nobs and ladies of fashion that queues formed outside the church, and he was so moving on the subject of prostitution that his audience, some of them prostitutes personally rescued by Dodd—would sob and wail as he spoke. He had a long perfumed robe of silk and a diamond ring, and he threw swish parties at a country house adorned with paintings by Titian, Rembrandt and Rubens, and in due course he naturally fell into debt.

  He decided to borrow from the Earl of Chesterfield, one of his former pupils, a man who had been very generous in the past. Except that on this occasion Dodd decided to save time by not telling the Earl, forging his signature on a bond for £4,200 and vaguely assuming that Chesterfield, if he discovered the theft, would allow him to pay it back over time. Alas, the Earl had failed to see the funny side.

  On 26 May 1777, Dodd was sentenced to be hanged to death. In his agony, Dodd knew that his only hope was to appeal to the mercy of the authorities—ultimately, in
those days, the King. And he knew that there was only one man who had the clout, the literary gifts, the force of argument and the sheer moral prestige to make that appeal. In his hour of peril, Dodd reached out to a sixty-eight-year-old lexicographer, poet, biographer and all-round genius, a man accepted throughout the kingdom as England’s principal man of letters, the sole author of the first dictionary of the language and therefore the supreme admiral of the all-conquering fleet of English words that has sailed into every port and up every creek and inlet in the world. That man was Samuel Johnson.

  It is easy to forget how huge a celebrity he was, and by the standards of modern celebrity he looked pretty peculiar. He had a proud Roman conk and prominent lips, and a small ill-fitting wig perched on top of his head. He had scars from infantile scrofula and an operation on the lymph glands in his neck, and he had lost the use of one eye, and when he walked it was with a lurching spasm as though he were in fetters, and he blurted and twitched and dribbled so compulsively that he was turned down for several early teaching jobs on the grounds that he would scare the pupils.

  He ate with fierce concentration, veins bulging and a sheen of sweat appearing on his brow; and yet he had such natural charisma that women sought the right to sit near him at tea, and men of power would attend his shambolic morning levee in the hope that some pearl would fall from those flobbery lips.

  This reverence can seem puzzling. Who reads Rasselas, his allegorical yarn about a prince of Abyssinia? He wrote one play, a tragedy called Irene, in which the heroine was garotted on stage in the final act, provoking such howls of merriment that it folded after nine days. T. S. Eliot argued that he should be ranked among the major English poets, and yet there cannot be an A-level student who studies “London” or “The Vanity of Human Wishes.” His essays were hailed as masterpieces then and ever since, and yet they are exactly the kinds of volumes that council libraries are selling off for 10p or sending to landfill. As for his poems in Latin and Greek, I expect their audience in modern literary London is exactly nil.