by A. N. Wilson
Huge fortunes were made by the silk manufacturers themselves. By 1777 the bigger merchants, such as Vansommer and Paul of Pall Mall, were insuring their businesses for the prodigious sum of £21,000. By then, what is known as the Industrial Revolution was under way, and London was at its hub.
8
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND THE METROPOLIS OF NASH
Twentieth-century historians of the Industrial Revolution in Britain tended to overlook entirely, or grossly to underestimate, the central importance of London as a manufacturing and industrial base. “Not London, but Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow and innumerable small proletarian towns launched the new era” is a typical assessment, by Fernand Braudel. A study of facts, following the pioneering work by Roy Porter (London: A Social History, 1994) and Martin Daunton (Progress and Poverty, 1995), demonstrates the wrongness of this view.
The sheer size of London compared with the burgeoning industrial cities is the first factor that earlier historians overlooked in their effort to suggest that London’s wealth came from trade and commerce while the rest of the country actually manufactured the goods. If we accept that by 1801 London had a population of 960,000, that makes it over ten times the size of Liverpool (82,000). Nor is it true, as earlier historians believed, that the population of London leveled off or declined. They took their statistics from those actually living within the City. There was huge overspill, with populations filling and urbanizing the villages of London. The population of Marylebone alone was 122,000 in 1831, larger than that of Leeds, whereas the parish of St. Pancras, adjoining it, contained a populace of 103,000, the size of Bristol.
All these people had the ambition, not always fulfilled, of eating on a daily basis. They all wanted, and many were gratified in their want, clothes, shoes, china, table linen, furniture, tobacco, garden shears, coal scuttles, carpets, watches and clocks, scissors, ointments, pills and potions, mattresses, leather pouches, books, baskets, wheelbarrows, candles and candle snuffers, dolls and dollhouses, carriages, wooden legs, spectacles, and the thousand and one objects with which urban people clutter their existence.
Some of these things were manufactured in other parts of the British Isles and purchased by Londoners. But all of them were also manufactured in London or its immediate environs, and the study of trade directories—most prominently the London and Provincial New Commercial Directory printed by Pigot and Company—itemizes 49,000 businesses, of which over 35 percent were engaged in manufacture of some kind. (This excludes bespoke production.)
Water was not something you readily drank in these unhygienic times. Beer was the usual drink for breakfast as well as for dinner, for children as for grown-ups. There were innumerable small brewers in Georgian London, and some very wealthy ones like Dr. Johnson’s friend Henry Thrale. Whitbread’s, Barclay’s, and Truman’s breweries accounted for nearly 36 percent of London’s beer consumption by the early nineteenth century. This involved highly developed steam-operated technology, to provide the gallons of ale required to slake the capital’s thirst.
London was also the national center of gin distilling. (Eight million gallons of gin were consumed annually by the British in 1745, and although this rate declined in the next sixty years, there were still seventy-five gin distillers in London at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.)
Sugar, imported directly from the West Indies into London docks, was refined in the capital; this was the third greatest food or drink manufactory. But until the twentieth century the vast population of London was largely self-sufficient in comestibles, with lard, oil, mustard, vinegar, chocolate, biscuits, and many other such everyday items being factory produced in the capital. Readers of Marx’s Das Kapital will recall his haunting description of the grueling hours worked by bakers, and their average age of death—forty-two.
The industrial basis of London’s wealth and the industrial complexion of Londoners’ working lives are something of which we need to remind ourselves today, since they have all but vanished. In Camden Town, for example, a place where until the early to mid-twentieth century small factories produced pianos, gin, and artificial limbs, these have all been converted for office or domestic use.
In 1824, when he was twelve years old, Charles Dickens lodged in these parts while his father was incarcerated in the Marshalsea prison for debtors in Southwark. Every day the tiny boy walked down from his north London lodgings to a factory just off the Strand, which made paste blacking for boots and fire grates:
The blacking warehouse was the last house on the left-hand side of the way, at Hungerford old-stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally over-run with rats. Its wainscotted rooms and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up stairs at all times, and the dirt, and the decay of the place, rise up visibly before me as if I were there again. The counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal-barges and the river. There was a recess in it, in which I was to sit and work. My work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking; first with a piece of oil-paper; to tie them round with a string; and then to clip the paper close and neat, all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary’s shop. When a certain number of grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label; and then go on again with more pots.
The memory of the blacking warehouse was bitter. Dickens’s friend and biographer John Forster knew nothing of it until he had known the writer well for some years and they happened to meet a Mr. Dilke, who remembered giving Dickens a half-crown when he was the little factory boy.
Dickens’s earliest writings, which came out in the Evening Chronicle, were the Sketches by Boz: snapshots of London and Londoners in the mid-1830s, but drawing on memories which stretched right back to his lonely and frightening childhood when, often abandoned to his own devices or to the drudgery, near slavery, of the warehouse routines, he would wander the streets, taking in their sights, sounds, characters. Boz sees the condemned cell at Newgate, the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, theaters, offices, churches. We see the way that London fed his imagination as an artist, to the extent now that when we think of the early-nineteenth-century capital, we see it through his spectacles: whimsical, comical, pathetic, funny—in a word, Dickensian. Dickens captured London, made it his.
It is sometimes necessary, if we are as spellbound by Dickens as most English readers are, to remind ourselves that in the period between the Napoleonic Wars and the accession of Queen Victoria, London was more than the fog-bound shabby-genteel clerk-infested world of soot-covered muffin men and sneezing beadles depicted by Boz. It was becoming the first major metropolis in the world. Its population was swelling: between the beginning of the nineteenth century and 1840, 865,000 people grew to 1.5 million. But more than mere population growth was taking place. London was not only the biggest city in the world. It was, after the Napoleonic wars, the one which dominated.
Knight’s Cyclopaedia of London, 1851 noted:
Some years ago, in pulling down the French church in Threadneedle Street, there was exposed to view a tessellated [mosaic] pavement, which, at least fourteen centuries ago, had borne the actual tread of Roman feet; and the immediate neighborhood was probably the most opulent part of Roman London. A greater power than the Roman, a power of which the masters of the old world had no conception, now reigns supreme on this very spot.1
Backed by political domination of Europe and of India, by a formidable industrial base in its own metropolis and in Britain as a whole, and by that very system of credit which at the time of the South Sea Bubble had seemed so insubstantial and unsound, the commercial wealth of the City of London was the cornerstone of nineteenth-century London’s wealth. Whereas the French had relied upon direct taxes, often deemed unfair, to raise revenues, the English, since the time of the setting up of the Bank of England and the national debt, had fin
anced loans and investment as the basis of security and prosperity. When it worked, as in good times it did, investors were happy and the populace at large, by a sleight of hand, could go untaxed.
High finance has always had its hazards. The great loan contractors for the British wars against Napoleon were the Goldsmids. Aaron Goldsmid was a Dutch Jew who had settled in London in the mid-eighteenth century. Benjamin and Abraham Goldsmid became bill brokers. They remained in close contact with Amsterdam, still the major European money market. Benjamin, who secured a dowry of £100,000 on his merger with a prosperous East India merchant, Israel Solomons, became one of the great figures of the stock exchange, a financial adviser to William Pitt, and a key figure in the war against Napoleon. Both brothers, Benjamin and Abraham, committed suicide, Benjamin in 1808 and Abraham in 1810, having underwritten loans which could not be repaid as a result of crashes in the market. The family business was rescued by Asher Goldsmid’s son Isaac Lyon Goldsmid, who grew to be one of the greatest financiers in the City, and by an association with the Baring brothers. Francis Baring (1740–1810) was the grandson of a Lutheran minister from Bremen. From the first, the City of London had this cosmopolitan flavoring, and the success of its capital market was in large measure owing to its transcendence of petty national boundaries. None of the money, however, would have been made had there not been actual investments in manufactured or imported commodities that people needed or wanted to buy. The development of the docks and the construction of the enclosed docks in the City by William Jessup and Ralph Walker in the Isle of Dogs and by William Vaughan at Wapping, with separate basins for import and export, were vital in Britain’s commercial success.2
Yet, for all its wealth and size, London, even as it emerged as the preeminent world capital, resisted the overall makeover that, for example, Paris would undergo, first in Napoleonic times, later in the era of Baron Haussmann, in which boulevards and avenues were forced into existence regardless of what houses, shops, or gardens lay in their way. The gentle sweep of John Nash’s Regent Street tells its own story. Sir John Summerson (Georgian London, p. 168) says that “this great thoroughfare is unique in the history of town-planning. Its amazingly successful blend of formality and picturesque opportunism could have happened nowhere and at no time but in England of the period of the picturesque.”
Its placing was determined by the inexpensive, higgledypiggledy margins of Soho property to its easterly side and the expensive estates of Mayfair. Jo Mordaunt Crook complements Sir John Summerson’s vision with his pithy observation that “the sinuous path of Regent Street was not Hogarth’s line of beauty but the developer’s line of maximum profit.” Nash’s original conception, shared with his royal patron the Prince Regent, had been a rebuilding of central London on a Parisian scale, with a grand central, straight boulevard, lined with monuments, stretching from Carlton House, the Prince’s palatial residence on the edge of St. James’s Park, to the newly designed Regent’s Park in the north. New Street (as Regent Street was going to be called) would march on three axes, Piccadilly Circus, Oxford Circus, and Regent Circus, with a piazza and a huge colonnade. The cost would have been prohibitive and Nash and his patron had to wait for the lease to fall vacant on Crown land before constructing the compromise scheme.
At quite a late stage of the plan, All Souls’ Church on Langham Place was designed and incorporated, part place of worship, part eyecatcher. The sweep of Regent Street looking northwards is enhanced by this graceful building with its pencil steeple; and there in the portico is the bust of John Nash, its architect and the overall inspiration of this New London. Many architects and designers helped to reshape Regency London—Smirke, Repton, Decimus Burton—but it is Nash who was the great town planner, and it is largely to Nash that we owe the beautiful creamy stuccoed grandeur of Portland Place, and to the north the rich varieties of architectural fantasy in Regent’s Park, culminating at the top with the Zoological Gardens and his villas in Park Village East and Park Village West.
The London parks in the nineteenth century reflected the dawnings of democracy. As more and more people crowded into the metropolis, they felt ever more keenly the need for the “lungs” provided by parks. As well as places to stroll or hear music, the London parks became the people’s gardens. In 1843, the Gardener’s Chronicle remarked that “naming of trees and shrubs in Kensington Gardens as anticipated, has had a beneficial effect upon the public mind awaking a curiosity and a taste for botanical and horticultural pursuits so much so that gentlemen go straight from the gardens to the nurseries.”3
Regent’s Park, from its beginnings, after the falling in of a lease on farmland in 1811, was a place of horticultural, zoological, and visual delight for the public. When the Zoological Gardens opened in 1828, with buildings by Decimus Burton, they received thirty thousand visitors in the first seven months. The overall shape of the park, however, with its crescents, its inner circle, its shrubberies and walks, its boating lake and its mounds (simply created from the rubble caused by building the surrounding terraces), its refreshing illusions of “country in the town” (rus in urbe), were the inspiration of one man, John Nash.
It is to Nash that we owe the outline of the West End. The Prince Regent’s residence, Carlton House, having had untold riches spent upon its extravagant gilded interiors, was demolished, and Nash rebuilt Buckingham House as a royal residence. The money was always running out for Nash with his grand schemes. His vast Waterloo Memorial never got built, but it was he who laid out Trafalgar Square. In its midst is London’s best-known monument, Nelson’s column, 170 feet of Devon granite, with a seventeen-foot bronze statue of the hero of Trafalgar at its top. The column is by William Railton and the statue by E. H. Baily. It is deeply significant that the British capital has at its emotional and touristic center a monument not to a politician or a dictator or a king, but to a great naval hero—and one, moreover, whose irregular private life hugely added to his popularity. This, says the monument, has never been a capital city ruled over by dictators. It is a mercantile and commercial capital, protected by Britain’s independent island status.
At the top of Trafalgar Square, Nash at first thought to build a terrace of grand houses such as those in Regent’s Park, but then came the brilliant idea of housing the collection of paintings belonging to the Russian merchant John Julius Angerstein, which had been bought for the nation by Sir George Beaumont and King George IV. But the National Gallery by William Wilkins is dull, one of London’s architectural failures, the dome too small, the proportions of the elevation facing the square, and the height, jarringly wrong.
The same could not be said of the British Museum, which had originated in the eighteenth century to house various collections, such as the King’s library, Sir William Hamilton’s collection of antique vases, and Charles Towneley’s collection of antique sculpture. In 1816, Lord Elgin, at great cost and risk to himself, had rescued the marbles from the Parthenon in Athens where the Turkish ruling authorities had allowed them to languish into disrepair. (He ruined himself by the purchase of these friezes, though his name is often libeled by journalists who say that he stole them.) A building worthy of the Athenian masterpieces needed to be constructed; in Robert Smirke they found the perfect architect. The British Museum is as glorious as the National Gallery is undistinguished. (It was not until 1852–57 that the courtyard was converted to the circular reading room beloved of Thomas Carlyle, Karl Marx, and George Bernard Shaw.) The arrival of the Parthenon marbles, at a period of history when no such country as Greece existed, was one of the glory moments of the Greek Revival in London.
St. Pancras Parish Church by H. W. Inwood and W. Inwood, with its imposing caryatids overlooking the porch; Decimus Burton’s Athenaeum Club, adorned with its frieze and its great gilded statue of the goddess Athene over the porch, and his Ionic screen at Hyde Park Corner; Smirke’s Royal Mint; and Philip Hardwick’s great arch at Euston Station (unforgivably demolished by British Rail in 1964)—these were among the great expre
ssions of British Hellenism. When they looked back at Athens, a small city-state in the fourth century B.C., dominated by an oligarchy of bookish, intelligent men and protected by heroic soldiers and sailors, they saw a reflection of how they would like to view themselves. The center of London’s wealth and the symbol of its independent status, the Bank of England itself, was rebuilt by Sir John Soane in his own highly distinctive, not to say eccentric, version of the Greek style, though we know its great interiors, its dome, and caryatids only from photographs since it was vandalistically rebuilt in 1925–39. (Soane’s own house, however, survives as the Sir John Soane’s Museum at Number 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, one of the great monuments to human eccentricity that London can provide. Were I to show a tourist one thing in the capital, it would be this.)
The capital’s first democratically elected mayor, Ken Livingstone, produced a huge plan for London in 2002. It must occupy some of our thoughts at the end of this short book. It offers promises that if London has problems, the mayor will, in one of his favorite verbs, “tackle” them. “Discrimination” and “deprivation” will vanish under democracy’s benignant gaze, as it builds “a London that is more accessible to disabled people.”
The London of John Nash and George IV, of the child Dickens and the old William Blake, was probably highly discriminatory, pitiless to the poor and the disabled, and unwilling or unable to “tackle” their problems. Blake saw its industrial mills as satanic and, wandering through its chartered streets “near where the chartered Thames does flow,” he saw “marks of weakness, marks of woe” in the inhabitants. But it was also a time of magnificence and beauty, when London bubbled not only with riches but also with cleverness and brilliance. When Wordsworth, a year before noting that “earth hath not anything to shew more fair” than Westminster early in the morning, invited Charles Lamb to stay in the Lake District, Lamb replied: