by A. N. Wilson
But more was at stake than the mere analysis of spleen or liver or aorta. Hunter’s lectures, published in the 1790s as Philosophical Transactions, inevitably led some to question the existence of the soul. Hunter, a deist, had clung to the idea that there was a “vital principle,” unseen but at work “in the blood and filth” discovered in the dissecting room. In a later generation, a major row broke out in the Royal College of Surgeons over this: Professor John Abernethy defended the vital principle against the materialistic rationalism of William Lawrence, who in a controversial lecture series in 1816 stated that there was no scientific evidence to suppose that such a principle existed. The blood and filth were all that there were.
Such a fear was merely heightened, not created, by the skills of anatomists. Religion seems to have coexisted with the most abject terror of death, which shudders through the life and writings of eighteenth-century London’s most famous inhabitant, Samuel Johnson.
A penniless hulk of a man, he had “thought of trying his fortune in London” in 1737, when he was twenty-eight years old. He had lodged in the house of a staymaker in Exeter Street, off the Strand. Having earned his living more or less as a schoolmaster in the Midlands, he now set forth to be— what? A writer, a playwright, a Grub Street hack, eventually the celebrated dictionary maker and fount of conversational wisdom. The greatest of his contemporaries to make the change from provincial to metropolitan life, he was also emblematic of the trend that saw thousands do the same. Between 1700 and 1801, the population of the metropolis nearly doubled. It went from having 575,000 inhabitants to just less than a million.
In all its seething overcrowded darkened alleys and houses, hope for better things must have been nurtured—by thousands of Londoners who made it in trades and professions, and by thousands who would probably have been better off staying at home in their dull provincial towns and villages.
All Johnson’s sayings about London, including the most famous, suggest the magnitude and comprehensiveness of what the place had to offer. “The world has nothing new to exhibit,” he told the young Boswell, taking leave of the Scots-man over dinner at the Mitre Tavern in Fleet Street. “No man, fond of letters leaves London without regret.” And “The happiness of London is not to be conceived but by those who have been in it. I will venture to say, there is more learning and science within the circumference of ten miles from where we now sit, than in all the rest of the kingdom.” And “The town is my element.” On September 20, 1777, when aged sixty-eight, he told Boswell: “You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”
Evidence of this life, the life of eighteenth-century London, remains in its surviving architecture, despite the ravages of Victorian builders, German aircraft, and twentieth-century developers and town planners. The first London square, Bloomsbury Square on the estate of Lord Southampton, had been laid out in the 1660s; Lord St. Albans imitated him a little later with the building of St. James’s Square. But it was in the eighteenth century that the London square as a residential unit became so distinctive a feature, with regular terraces of houses enclosing a planted garden. Bedford Square of 1775, designed by Thomas Leverton; Cavendish Square, 1717, by John Prince; Portman Square, 1764; Manchester Square, 1776, are only some of them. Think of the stupendous Fitzroy Square, topped off with a magnificent Adam house in 1790, or of the Adam brothers’ Portland Place, of 1778.
This was the age of some of the greatest London buildings, from Hawksmoor’s (1661–1736) mysteriously original churches to William Kent’s (1684–1748) old Treasury building and frontage to Horse Guards Parade, to Sir William Chambers’s (1726–96) Somerset House, and Albany in Piccadilly, to the varied achievements of George Dance the Younger (1741–1825). Witness the contrast between Dance’s Gothic façade of the Guildhall in the City, of 1789, with the austerity of his (now demolished) Newgate Prison and the chaste simplicity of his terraced houses.
Though Londoners of the period lived cheek by jowl, many of them in abject poverty, none of them looked on anything that was visually ugly. The humblest tavern chair was well turned and chastely designed. The pewter or earthenware pot from which a poor man drank his ale had a simplicity of design that reflected the excellence of the apprentice system, by which craftsmen learnt over many years how to make things that were visually satisfying and physically useful. It was also, for the rich, the great age of furniture and china. Thomas Chippendale set up his workshop in St. Martin’s Lane in 1753, working mainly in mahogany imported from South America; Thomas Sheraton followed in his foot-steps in 1790 as the greatest furniture maker of the late eighteenth century and the Regency; Josiah Wedgwood manufactured his ceramics in Staffordshire but from early days had a London showroom, and Chelsea produced china in its way no less exquisite.
Nearly all the most beautiful silver in England now was made in London during the eighteenth century, many of the most beautiful clocks, the bindings on the most beautiful books. Nor was all this aesthetic achievement limited to the very rich or the privileged. A very distinctive and revealing feature of eighteenth-century life is the garden: not just the large public garden, laid out in the new-built squares, but behind the terraced houses space was reserved for small gardens. In an auction prospectus of March 12, 1802, a house at 53 Guilford Street, Queen Square, is sold on the strength of, among other things, “a large balcony overlooking the gardens of neighbouring dwellings.” This has, ever since the reign of the first three Georges, been a feature of London life—that Londoners have been able to look out on their own back gardens and on the multifarious back gardens of others. “What a merry morning it is!” wrote Fanny Boscawen in May 1795, from her house at 14 South Audley Street. “I set all my windows open, and ’tis well I have some trees, whose leaves wave close by me, and that at once I behold purple lilacs, white lilacs, yellow laburnams [sic] in my own or my neighbour’s garden.” So there is a more than figurative truth in Johnson’s words that “there is in London all that life can afford.”
Consider that vast monument to the pleasures of talk, Boswell’s Life of his hero, and the range and eminence of those with whom he held conversations, from King George III (“It was not for me to bandy civilities with my Sovereign”) to the radical agitator Wilkes. Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon, Oliver Goldsmith, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sheridan, Dr. Burney, Joseph Warton, innumerable bishops and peers all feasted on Johnson’s conversation, as did his more intimate friends, who themselves embody the social mixture of Georgian London: Henry Thrale, the rich Southwark brewer, whose country house in Streatham provided such a refuge for Johnson and whose wife enjoyed an amitié amoureuse with the great wit; Frank Barber, the liberated West Indian slave who was to be Johnson’s heir; Dr. Levett, the poor medic, evidently a drunk and a devoté of whores, who was one of Johnson’s motley crew of lodgers in his various houses off Fleet Street and whose ministrations to the poor were celebrated in one of Johnson’s finest poems. Think, too, of the vast variety of experiences recorded in Boswell, both in his life of Johnson and in his London journal. Eighteenth-century Londoners tended to live in small rooms and overcrowded houses. They took their social pleasures off home territory, as is witnessed by the popularity of pleasure gardens, coffeehouses, taverns, theaters.
By the late 1770s there were more than two hundred pleasure gardens in or around London. The two greatest were the Vauxhall Gardens, on the south bank of the river, and the Ranelagh Gardens (opened 1742), on the north bank in Chelsea. Parks have been an abiding refreshment to Londoners. Hyde Park was used for hunting deer until 1768. Since William III built Kensington Palace in the late seventeenth century, and Queen Caroline took the lease of the Dutch House at Kew in 1728, the parks have doubled as public and royal pleasure grounds. Kew was the place where in 1759 Augusta, Princess of Wales, established the Royal Botanic Gardens under the guidance of Lord Bute and his head gardener, William Aiton. It was emb
ellished by superb temples, an orangery, and a pagoda by Sir William Chambers. (More wonderful buildings, including the hothouses, were designed a generation later by Decimus Burton.) But for the eighteenth century, apart from the horticultural pioneering done at Kew, parks were primarily places of recreation rather than of planting. It was the Victorians who first planted flowers, for example, in Hyde Park.
Roubilliac’s statue of Handel in the Vauxhall Gardens (now preserved in the British Gallery in the Victoria and Albert Museum) is that almost of a minor god or sprite, whose presence provided a prodigious musical accompaniment to Georgian London life. Born in Lower Saxony, Handel was naturalized as an Englishman in 1727 and though his most famous oratorio had its first performance in Dublin (Messiah, April 13, 1742), nearly all the others were first performed in London, as were his numerous operas. His Music for the Royal Fireworks made him an apt genius loci for the pleasure gardens, since these places saw frequent pyrotechnic displays, as well as masques, dances, and theatrical extravaganzas. They were also, notoriously, excellent pick-up places, and casual sex was frequent in the darker walks away from the well-lit avenues.
Handel’s move from composing mostly religious works, to be performed in church, to composing operas reflects the commercial importance of the theater to the London of the period. Some of the oratorios themselves, notably Esther, were actually staged. The Princess Royal wanted Esther to be put on at the King’s Theatre in 1732 with scenery and action, but the Bishop of London intervened to prevent what was deemed a profanity (the acting out of a scriptural book, albeit a book that does not contain the word God).
There was money in theatrical work and Handel, who like most artists had his ups and downs, earned enough from his operas to be able to present the organ to the Foundling Hospital in 1750, with a performance of Messiah to celebrate the donation.
If Handel was well rewarded, then the most famous actor of the day was enriched beyond dreaming by the popularity of the London theater in the mid-eighteenth century. Garrick was primarily a comic actor—he made his first hit in a play called The Lying Valet—but he played most of the great Shakespearean roles and it is a debatable point whether he was a symptom or a cause of the enormous revival of Shakespeare’s popularity at this time. It was as a manager that he enjoyed his greatest financial success. His productions ranged from the lavishly exotic—he thought nothing of hiring the greatest painters of his age, Zoffany and Reynolds, to paint his sets— to the imaginative and charitable. A pupil of Dr. Johnson, he always enjoyed an edgy relationship with his old master ( Johnson resented his success), but one of the most magnanimous gestures ever devised by the two men was a charity performance of Milton’s Comus at the Drury Lane Theatre in 1750, to raise money for Milton’s granddaughter. She was the proprietor of a small greengrocery business in Holloway, and on the strength of the money raised she was able to move to the slightly more genteel suburb of Islington.
Theaters were not necessarily peaceful places. The audiences were often drunk and the price of admission charges was jealously watched. At a performance of Thomas Arne’s opera Artaxerxes on February 24, 1763, it was discovered that the Covent Garden Theatre had charged more for tickets than its rival in Drury Lane. A riot broke out and so much damage was done that the theater had to be closed for several days.
Riot—that symptom of urban overcrowding and unease— was never far beneath the surface of Georgian London. In the 1760s, a petit bourgeoisie—small merchants, manufacturers, master craftsmen, shopkeepers: the very counterparts of those Parisians who would set in train the French Revolution twenty years later—rallied behind John Wilkes, the radical Member of Parliament for Middlesex, who called for their political enfranchisement with his campaign for adult male suffrage. The establishment badly misjudged the situation and the imprisonment of Wilkes for a supposed libel on the King inflamed his supporters. Rioters crying “Wilkes and Liberty!” clashed with the footguards in St. George’s Fields, Southwark, in what was known (a few of them got killed) as the St. George’s Fields Massacre.
Wilkes was in no modern sense left-wing. After his release from prison he became an immensely wealthy City merchant and a successful Lord Mayor in 1774. His immense popularity was not with those (like the Marxist revolutionaries of later periods) who would overthrow property, but rather with those who would see the indissoluble link between personal property and political freedoms. To that extent, the “Wilkes and Liberty!” riots foreshadowed the growth of the British bourgeoisie and the “liberal” economics of the nineteenth century.
But they also showed that London was a tinderbox politically, overcrowded as it was physically. In 1780, the British war against the American colonies was going badly, with depressing effect upon City trading and business generally. England’s traditional old enemies, France and Spain, both joined forces with the Americans. There was nothing very Catholic about America in those early days, but the aggression of the French revived anti-Catholic prejudice in London. Some ill-timed parliamentary legislation, relaxing the outmoded penal laws against Catholics, was enough to spark the biggest riots London had ever seen. Lord George Gordon, leader of the Protestant Association, assembled a rally of sixty thousand supporters in St. George’s Fields, the extensive open space between Southwark and Lambeth (long since built over) which had been the site of the “massacre” of April 1768. They marched across the Thames to present a petition to Parliament and then set to work torching various Catholic sites. The Bavarian embassy chapel in Warwick Street, the Sardinian embassy chapel in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and the mass houses in Moorfields were targets for the Protestant fanatics among the rioters. But, as a study of the rioters and their behavior shows, this was very far from being a simple piece of religious bigotry. Newgate Prison was attacked and set on fire and the prisoners released. Four other prisons were damaged. Lord Chief Justice Mansfield’s house in Bloomsbury Square was attacked. We know a lot about the people who caused these arson attacks and about the people they set out to deliver. Newgate, for example, was successfully besieged by, among others, discontented sailors (cutlasses and marlin spikes were seen in some numbers among the crowds). The mob operated a frank protection racket. A Bishopsgate cheesemonger called Carter Daking was given the choice of paying money or watching his house go up in smoke: “Damn your eyes and limbs, put a shilling into my hat, or by God I have a party that can destroy your house presently.”
This was not political discourse of a very elevated character. The Gordon Riots offered an opportunity for semi-articulated discontented malice to have its few nights of destroying, looting, burning, beating. The poor could show what they thought of the rich. The domestic servant could take it out on the well-established small shopkeeper. The drunken British oaf could show what he thought of the foreigners. Whereas the “Wilkes and Liberty!” riots had had a purpose, the Gordon Riots were more on the order of a primal scream. The attacks on Lord Mansfield’s house, for example, were not merely a protest against the change of law to make life faintly easier for Catholics; they were an expression of loathing for a particularly unpopular Lord Chief Justice, during whose period of office the number of capital offenses was increased. At sessions presided over by Mansfield, 29 were sentenced to branding, 448 were transported, and 102 were hanged. For a man who sat as a judge in the Old Bailey perhaps once a year between 1757 and 1768 that was quite an impressive bag, and those deported, branded, and hanged would have had many friends and relations who would derive, no doubt, some pleasure from watching Mansfield’s furniture and pictures burn while he and his wife slipped out the back door. The government was not going to allow the situation to turn from a riot into a revolution, however, and ten thousand troops were brought in to quell the disturbances. By the end of a week, two hundred had been killed, twenty-five were hanged, and an amazingly few buildings (fifty-odd) were found to have been damaged, giving credence to the idea that the targets were not random but chosen with premeditated care.
Insofar as they were a
protest against the different, the foreign, the various, the Gordon Riots were only an extreme expression of a London phenomenon that repeats itself continually as the city expands and changes. The population growth of Georgian London was not caused by a prodigious increase in the fecundity of women born within the sound of Bow Bells. It was caused largely by those who came to London, as Johnson had done, to try their fortune.
Many came, like Johnson himself, from the provinces. Yet others came as a result of the huge increase of world trade centered upon the port of London—sailors, slaves and ex-slaves, mulattos and quadroons. Many blacks joined in the Gordon Riots: “The voice of our complaint implies a vengeance,” said one who spoke for them, Ottobah Cugoano, famed in his day as a writer.
But the most significant immigrant community during this century was the French. They were almost all Huguenots (Protestants) escaping the religious intolerance of their native country; and though not exclusively responsible for the silk industry, which centered upon the district of Spitalfields, they were preeminent in it.
The great portraits by Thomas Gainsborough (1727–88) seem to be commentaries on the common proverb of the time—“We are all Adam’s children, but silk makes the difference.” The animated English faces of Gainsborough’s women look at us from the top of extravagant festoons of silk, shimmering and cascading across the canvas. Gainsborough usually gives twenty times as much space to the silk dress as he does to the face of his sitter. The expense of silk and the sheer artistry of the dressmaking mark the sitters out from the generality of mankind, clad in wool and worsted. The average wage of a journeyman silk weaver might be five shillings per week. The price of a silk dress would be fifty pounds. It would take a weaver four years, in other words, to earn the price of such a dress. Lesser workers in the industry, winders and spinners, usually boys or women, might earn as little as a shilling a week.