Wilkes ordered a proper crackdown in his ward of the City. He closed the pubs, he confiscated weapons, he locked up the ringleaders and was generally hailed as Mr. Law and Order, the man who had got a grip on the situation. Nathaniel Wraxall said he had offered “indelible proofs” of his loyalty to the crown. He had certainly damaged his standing as the all-purpose hero of the London mob, for which he deserves even more credit.
We have seen that Wilkes disliked violence—remember his concern for the safety of his guards, when the crowd tried to liberate him on London Bridge. In the case of the Gordon Riots, he disliked the violence, but mainly he abhorred the cause. He was nauseated by the anti-papism of his colleagues, such as Alderman Frederick Bull, and though he was now marked down as a pro-Catholic he frankly didn’t care.
Dr. Johnson wrote approvingly to his friend Hester Thrale: “Jack Wilkes headed the party that drove them away. Jack, who was always zealous for order and decency, declared that if he be trusted with power, he will not leave one rioter alive.” Johnson was being ironical. Wilkes had not always been a champion of the cause of order and decency, or not in Johnson’s view—and here he was, doing exactly what the doctor would have ordered himself.
Perhaps it is time to accept that there was in fact much in common between these titanic figures of eighteenth-century London. On the face of it, they were polar opposites. Johnson was a Tory, Wilkes a radical. Johnson was a monarchist, Wilkes was relentlessly insubordinate to the very king to whom he formally protested his loyalty.
Johnson was a sexually tormented Christian and possible auto-flagellant; Wilkes was an exuberant libertine. And yet when they met, at one of the great dinner parties of world history, it all went swimmingly.
The venue was the home of Charles Dilly, a publisher, in the Poultry; the date was 15 May 1776, and the idea was Boswell’s. He wanted to see what would happen if he plunged the great man into unexpected company. He decided to prepare him a bit. The doctor might not approve of all his dinner companions, he hinted. Humf, said Johnson, it was up to Dilly to invite whomsoever he chose. What if Dilly’s radical friends were there? “Poh.” What if Wilkes were there? “What is that to me, sir?”
When Johnson and Boswell arrived chez Dilly, it was the first time Wilkes had seen his ideological foe up close. If Wilkes looked odd, Johnson looked bizarre, with his shambling bearlike frame, his scrofulous skin and absurd little wig. At first Johnson’s weak eyes were unable to make out the company. “Who is that gentleman, sir?” Boswell identified Mr. Arthur Lee, the American independence campaigner. “Too, too, too,” muttered Johnson, under his breath, as he often did when disturbed. Then Johnson glimpsed a tall man, fashionably dressed, with a peculiar face. “And who is that gentleman in lace?” “Mr. Wilkes, sir.” Over to Boswell’s Life:
The information confounded him still more; he had some difficulty to restrain himself, and taking up a book, sat upon a window-seat and read. . . . The cheering sound of ‘Dinner is on the table’, dissolved his reverie, and we all sat down without any symptom of ill humour. . . . Mr Wilkes placed himself next to Dr Johnson, and behaved to him with so much attention and politeness that he gained upon him sensibly. No man eat more heartily than Johnson, or loved better what was nice and delicate. Mr Wilkes was very assiduous in helping him to some fine veal. ‘Pray give me leave, Sir:—It is better here—A little of the Brown—Some fat, Sir—A little of the stuffing—Some gravy—Let me have the pleasure of giving you some butter—Allow me to recommend a squeeze of this orange; or the lemon, perhaps, may have more zest’.—‘Sir, Sir, I am obliged to you, Sir’, cried Johnson, bowing and turning his head to him with a look for some time of ‘surly virtue’, but in a short while, of complacency.
Wilkes carried out many seductions, but the buttering up of Samuel Johnson was perhaps the most accomplished of them all. Way back in 1759, when he was a new MP, Wilkes had attempted to appease Johnson’s hostility by doing him a great favour. Frank Barber, Johnson’s black manservant, had been press-ganged into the navy. As we have seen, Johnson was devoted to the former slave, and would make him his heir. He was desperate to secure his release, and after various people had tried and failed, Wilkes stepped in and had a word with the Admiralty.
Like Johnson, he objected to the racism of slavery (and when he was Lord Mayor he was notably kind to at least one destitute former slave). Barber was returned to Johnson; and yet as far as we know, Wilkes received not a word of thanks for his kindness. Now, at dinner almost twenty years later, they were getting on famously.
They seem to have swerved the issue of the hour—America—on which they plainly did not agree, but there were plenty of other safe topics. They talked about Horace and Homer and the Restoration poets, and above all, the two hit it off on the subject of Scotland and its hilarious deficiencies. The boldest thing about Macbeth was the bit where Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane, Wilkes said. You know why? Because Scotland doesn’t have a shrub, let alone a wood. Ha ha ha!
Ho ho ho! rocked the doctor. The following day Johnson wrote to Hester Thrale, brooding on the whirligig of time. “Breaking jokes with Jack Wilkes upon the Scots. Such, madam, are the vicissitudes of things.”
Johnson and Wilkes met up again for dinner in 1781, and Boswell reported that his friend was “very glad to meet Wilkes again.” It looks as though Johnson was starting to revise his opinion about the justice of Wilkes’s expulsion from parliament, and in 1782 parliament finally agreed.
MPs gave in to the umpteenth motion by Wilkes, and it was one of the great moments of his life to watch the clerks of the House standing at the tables and inking out the offending passage in the parliamentary journals. In 1784 Johnson died, and in that year the King renounced the royal prerogatives he had first asserted in the ministry of Bute.
Wilkes had achieved his manifesto, and he spent his declining years as a pillar of the Establishment. He still conducted feline prowlings between the houses of his various mistresses and offspring, but he managed also to be an efficient and well-paid chamberlain of the City while producing editions of Catullus (Latin) and Theophrastus (Greek).
His popularity with the London proletariat had certainly waned since the Gordon Riots, and he made no particular effort to sustain it. When an old woman saw him and called out, in a quavering voice, “Wilkes and Liberty!” he snapped, “Be quiet, you old fool. That’s all over long ago.”
This self-dismissal has led some po-faced historians to conclude that he was somehow not serious, and that the blaspheming womaniser had no real principles. On the contrary, he had spent two decades fighting for liberty. He had secured freedom from arbitrary arrest, the right of voters to decide who shall sit in parliament and the right of the press to report and criticise the doings of the Commons.
He did not initially support the secession of the thirteen colonies, but he inspired Americans with his principles, and by the 1770s he was so disgusted with the North government that he was a de facto American revolutionary. As for his impact on England, it was important that his radicalism was tempered by a basic loyalty to the King, or at least to the system. Wilkes was too well mannered and too ironical to be anything like a revolutionary in the French sense. Of course it helped that we English had chopped our king’s head off a century earlier, but the Wilkite reforms surely helped the country to contain the economic distress and social unrest of the late eighteenth century.
The English had a more gentle programme, conducted with satirical brilliance by a cross-eyed rogue who cheered them all up. They gained freedoms—businesspeople, the working classes, religious minorities—and it was not long before those freedoms were in striking contrast to the totalitarian nightmare of Revolutionary France. A German named Friedrich Wendeborn came to London at the end of the eighteenth century, and he envied the poorest Londoners for the liberty and independence they possessed. “A foreigner will at first hardly be pleased with the manner of living in London,”
he wrote, “but if he has sense enough to perceive and value the freedom of thinking and acting which is to be enjoyed in England, he will soon wish to conclude his days here.” That freedom of thinking and acting was partly obtained by John Wilkes.
If you look for St. George’s Fields today you will find no trace of the prison where he was kept, or the place where thousands of his supporters faced the soldiers of George III. But you can see the nearby obelisk at St. George’s Circus, erected to Brass Crosby, the drunken nightshirted Lord Mayor who refused to allow City printers to be arrested for reporting parliament.
All around are the estates of modern Lambeth and Southwark, the fashionable restaurants, the Borough Market, the thousands of flats of people whose lives have been invisibly influenced by Wilkes and the London he helped to create: vast, nine hundred thousand or even a million strong by 1800, ready to be the metropolis of the greatest empire ever seen—but a city whose self-confidence resided in the freedoms enjoyed by rich and poor alike. And yet I doubt there are that many Southwark residents who have a totally clear idea of what took place all those years ago on St. George’s Fields.
Wilkes enjoyed good health almost to the end of his life, and though his dentition made him sometimes hard to understand, he was always rated excellent company. Towards the end he became rather thin, and by the age of seventy-one he was suffering from marasmus, a disease of malnutrition.
The day after Christmas 1797 he sensed that the end was near and called for a glass of wine. When Polly had produced one, he toasted “my beloved and excellent daughter,” handed back the glass, and after a short time he died.
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You could argue that Wilkes was important not only in inspiring American revolutionaries, but his political successes helped to pave the way for the relative calm and prosperity of nineteenth-century London. From the French Revolution of 1789 to the Russian Revolution of 1917, via the series of European revolutions of 1848, almost every other country in Europe underwent some violent upheaval, frequently involving the murder or expulsion of their monarchs.
Not so in London, where the Wilkes experience had taught governments to compromise, and to move gradually and piecemeal towards parliamentary reform. So Britain acquired the reputation for political stability that has proved so commercially and financially beneficial to this day.
As London grew richer, the population exploded, from about a million in 1800 to 6.6 million by the end of the century. In 1820 William Cobbett had called the city the “Great Wen”—a boil or eruption on the face of England; and if you had gone up St. Paul’s in 1900, you would have seen that the suppurating sore of urbanisation had spread over seventy square miles.
As ever greater numbers arrived from the countryside, they moved into rookeries; they divided old family dwellings into steaming and squalid flats; it became more urgent to find ways of conveying them around the city. London’s fourth, fifth and sixth bridges were built in quick succession: Vauxhall in 1816, Waterloo in 1817 and Southwark in 1819.
The old port in the Pool of London became too small, and from 1801 they started to dig the new purpose-built docks: first at London Dock, in Wapping, and then on the Surrey side and at Canary Wharf. In 1831 a new London Bridge was opened, just a few yards to the west of the old structure—and the old bridge was finally destroyed.
In 1836 there came the first commuter train, arriving at London Bridge station from Greenwich, and the crowds were indescribable. Horse-drawn omnibuses crept across the new bridge, with men sitting perched on the roofs of the carriages like Indian commuters, their machines trying hopelessly to make way against a tide of wagons and other omnibuses moving in the opposite direction, the drivers whipping their poor blinkered beasts in an ecstasy of frustration, and all vehicles surrounded by a human glue of men in stovepipe hats and bonneted women and urchins trying to pick their pockets.
On one day—17 March 1859—the bridge was used by 20,498 vehicles and 107,074 pedestrians. These crowds had arrived at the station thanks to a machine more powerful than human or animal muscle. The steam age had hit London.
Once again the urban poor were afflicted by a new surge of automation. Print workers on the Times were thrown out of work by the 1828 invention of the steam cylinder press; sailmakers lost out to the paddle-steamers, and the smog rose over the city. One Londoner recorded this lurch forwards, and a technological revolution was echoed by a revolution in painting style.
The Bicycle
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In its simple brilliance, the bicycle is one of the most fortunate ideas ever to have emerged from the mind of our species—and so I must be scrupulous and record that the first ancestor of the bicycle was not actually invented in London. I am afraid the honour belongs to a German baron named Karl Drais, a forestry official and physics graduate of Heidelberg University, who can also claim to have invented the first typewriter keyboard.
There seems little doubt that the first people to encounter a two-wheeled leg-propelled velocipede were in Mannheim in 1817, when Drais took his Draisine on a country spin. But in less than a year the idea had been filched and improved upon by a London inventor, Denis Johnson. It was in Long Acre, Covent Garden, that Johnson—who may or may not be a distant relative of the present author—made some crucial modifications. If you look at the first image we have of Drais on his Draisine, you can see that it was a pretty agricultural device. The spokes and felloes of the wheels are plainly of wood, and the whole thing was so heavy and unwieldy that any collision was liable to give the driver a hernia.
Johnson was one of the many expert coach builders of Covent Garden, and he lightened the contraption with a curved metal frame and metal spokes for the wheels. Unlike Drais, he also found a market for his product. London after 1815 was full of young men whose fathers had grown rich on the proceeds of industry and empire. These were the dandies, the followers of Beau Brummel (see sidebar on The Suit). For the dandies, Johnson’s velocipede was not just a convenient way of getting around. It was like their tumbling white shirtfronts and lorgnettes: it was a fashion statement. In an age of parliamentary reform and industrial strife, it was a frivolous and outrageous assertion of elitism. Denis Johnson made and sold about 320 of his “pedestrian curricles”—which also went by the name of hobby-horses, dandy-horses and accelerators, and patented his machine in 1818. He was granted a Royal Letters Patent for a “machine for the purpose of diminishing the labour and fatigue of persons in walking, and enabling them at the same time to use greater speed which said machine he intends calling the Pedestrian Curricle.”
By March 1819 he had opened two “riding schools,” on the Strand and Brewer Street, charging a shilling for admission and £8 for purchase. His son took it on a sales tour of the country, and there are some fine prints of young men learning to ride the dandy-horse and coming a cropper. Alas, the roads were so bumpy that the experience was very hard on the lower abdomen, and when they tried it on the pavement, the dandies (and dandizettes, as female dandies were called) became even more unpopular.
In a year or two the dandy-horse craze was dying out, and the Royal College of Surgeons pronounced them dangerous. But when rotating pedals were added forty years later, it was Johnson’s dandy-horse that served as the basis. The most egalitarian means of transport began as an anti-egalitarian symbol of extravagance, and yet it wasn’t as slow as all that.
In 1819 four “gentlemen” rode Johnson velocipedes over the 60-mile course from London to Brighton in twelve hours. When Mark Cavendish won the Olympic preparation race in August 2011, he covered the 87 miles from London to Box Hill and back in three hours and eighteen minutes—which makes him only about five times faster than the dandies.
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J. M. W. Turner
The Father of Impressionism
I was a good deal entertained with Turner—he is uncouth but has a wonderful range of mind.
JOHN CO
NSTABLE, 1813
People go to art galleries for all sorts of reasons: to edify their souls, to make assignations, to get out of the rain. But it is not often they are rewarded with a thermonuclear bust-up between two of the world’s greatest artists.
The scene was the Royal Academy, then in its former home of Somerset House, in the final bustle of preparations for the summer show of 1831. There was none of the chaste white space of your modern gallery, no learned notes or reverential silence.
From floor to ceiling the walls were crammed with the offerings of the Academicians, each painting shouting to be noticed above its neighbours. To hold the centre space of a wall—that was clearly an accolade. To be excluded was an insult.
Into the principal room of the exhibition stomped a fifty-six-year-old man with a battered stovepipe hat and a shiny black coat. In one hand he held an umbrella-cum-swordstick that he used on his continental travels. He had a powerful conk, a protruding chin, and with an inside leg of only nineteen inches long, he was stumpy even by the standards of the day.
He might have been some Dickensian coachman or innkeeper except for the pigment lodged beneath his fingernails.
He was Joseph Mallord William Turner, a painter so confident of his genius that he had already proclaimed, “I am the great lion of the day.” Now the great lion was seeking whom he might devour.
Once again his eye roamed over the Academy walls. There was no getting round it. His vast pink and gold fantasy of imperial Roman decay—Caligula’s Palace and Bridge—had vanished, to be replaced by some chocolate boxy view of a large grey church. Then Turner’s blazing eyes alighted on the culprit—a man who had not only had the gall to remove Caligula’s Palace, but who had painted the very landscape that now hung in its place.
Johnson's Life of London Page 20