The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only)
Page 57
One of the most popular of all entertainments at fairs were the puppet shows which by the 1760s had become the main attraction at Bartholomew Fair where, in 1790, eight of the thirteen entertainments offered were being given by puppeteers. Shows with glove puppets had been known in England since the fourteenth century; but by the eighteenth the gloves had become marionettes, two or even three feet tall, expertly manipulated by wires. Puppet plays had been allowed to continue after the theatres had been closed in 1642; and after the Restoration they had become extremely popular. Pepys records having seen ‘an Italian puppet play’, the best he ‘ever saw, and great resort of gallants’, ‘within the rayles’ in Covent Garden in May 1662.47 And between then and 1668 he mentions as many as six different puppeteers in his diary, the best of them being Signor Bologna, also known as Policinello or Punchinello, after the chief character in his performances, the hook-nosed, hump-backed character whose name was eventually shortened to Punch. Bologna was given a gold chain and medal by Charles II for a much admired performance at Whitehall where the stage for his marionettes measured twenty feet by eighteen.48
Puppet shows were given in booths at fairs, in hired rooms in inns, and at street corners. Like plays in the theatre, they were announced by pictorial handbills, by drums, flags and banners. Admittance was a penny or twopence, and the show lasted for about half an hour. Some puppeteers were quite incompetent. Ned Ward complained of ‘a senseless dialogue between Punchenello and the Devil’ which was conveyed ‘to the ears of the listening rabble through a tin squeaker’; while Joseph Strutt remembered in his youth having seen wretched displays of
wooden figures, barbarously formed and decorated, without the least degree of taste or propriety. The wires that communicated the motion to them appeared at the tops of their heads, and the manner in which they were made to move evinced the ignorance and inattention of the managers; the dialogues were mere jumbles of absurdity and nonsense, intermixed with low moral discourses passing between Punch and the fiddler, for the orchestra rarely admitted of more than one minstrel; and these flashes of merriment were made offensive to decency by the actions of the puppets.49
Yet the more expert manipulators of marionettes had many admirers until the end of the eighteenth century when suddenly their popularity declined and their place was once more taken by the glove puppeteer who travelled about the streets and in the country with his theatre on his back, giving performances in the open air, or in an empty stable by the light of a few flaming candles stuck in a hoop – as Codlin and Harris do in The Old Curiosity Shop – his wife or an assistant collecting what they could from those who stopped to watch them, thankful to get three shillings for a performance, but giving ten performances or more on a summer’s day, passing the secrets of his craft on to his son so that it remained among a very few families.50
One of the puppeteers, a man named Piccini who was born in 1745, was described by another old showman:
Everyone in London knowed him, Lords, dukes, princes, squires and vagabonds, all used to stop to laugh at his performances, and a funny old fellow he was. He always carried a rum bottle in his pocket, and drunked out of this unbeknown behind the baize afore he went into the frame, so that it should lay in his power to give the audience a most excellent performance … He was past performing when I bought my show off him, and werry poor … He had spent all he had got in drink and in treating friends … At last he reduced himself to want, and died in the workhouse.51
It was an end to which many circus performers also came.
The circus originated with those acrobats, rope-dancers and trainers of animals who had been encountered at fairs for generation after generation. These were brought together in the 1760s by equestrian performers who rented fields in which to exhibit their feats, and offered the public both trick horse-riding and the familiar diversions of the fair. The most celebrated, though not the first, equestrian acrobat to have done so was Philip Astley who, with his wife, performed a comic act of atrocious horsemanship called ‘The Taylor riding to Brentford’ and who in 1773 added to his equestrian turns, the antics of ‘the Sagacious Dog’, the acrobatics of a Veronese family who built themselves into a pyramid, Polish and Spanish gymnasts, Madame Paliasette and her family on the tight-rope, and Madame Margeretta who stood on one leg on a slack wire while balancing thirteen full glasses on a tobacco pipe.52 In 1779 Astley, a large, boorish former cavalryman with a stentorian voice who prided himself on knowing ‘what would catch John Bull’, opened a canvas-covered ring near Westminster Bridge, naming it the Royal Grove, and, after a fire, rebuilding it as the famous Astley’s Amphitheatre. Here he presented dancing horses and fox hunts, fireworks and waterworks, ventriloquists and conjurors, sword fights and melodramas, and Joseph Grimaldi, the great clown, who had first appeared at Drury Lane at the age of two in 1781.
Dear, dear, what a place it looked, that Astleys! [wrote Charles Dickens who went there often when he was a young man and the performances were just as they had been fifty years before]. With all the paint, gilding and looking-glass, the vague smell of horses suggestive of coming wonders, the clean white sawdust down in the circus, the company coming in and taking their places, the fiddlers looking carelessly up at them while they tuned their instruments, as if they didn’t want the play to begin, and knew it all beforehand! What a glow was that which burst upon them all, when that long, clear, brilliant row of lights came slowly up; and what the feverish excitement when the little bell rang and the music began in full earnest … Then the play itself! The horses, the firing … the forlorn lady … the tyrant … the man who sang the song with the lady’s maid and danced the chorus … the pony who reared up on his hind legs when he saw the murderer … the clown who ventured on such familiarities with the military man in boots … the lady who jumped over the nine and twenty ribbons and came down safe upon the horse’s back – everything was delightful, splendid and surprising.53
Modelled on places like Astley’s – and on the Royal Circus and Equestrian Philharmonic Academy, which Charles Dibdin, a former composer at Covent Garden, and the horse showman, Charles Hughes, opened in Blackfriars Road in 1782 – circuses were soon being built all over the country, several of them of imposing size: Ryan’s Amphitheatre in Birmingham held 2000 people, the Amphitheatre in Leeds 3000. Most of them were built of wood and were none too secure. The gallery of the circus at Bristol collapsed in 1799, resulting in many casualties; and a circus at Norwich was later blown down in a gale. But although tents were used at Liverpool in 1788, there is no further record of these until the 1840s when the example of a circus owner, who had seen circus tents in America, was widely copied. By the end of the nineteenth century tents were being made large enough to accommodate 7000 people.
38 Quacks, Diseases and Cures
The mountebank who stands upon the stage in laced hat and embroidered coat in Hogarth’s Southwark Fair is representative of a type of quack encountered everywhere in eighteenth-century England. Assisted by their Merry-Andrews who eagerly endorsed their claims, such charlatans made handsome profits by dispensing to a gullible public a variety of highly coloured pills and medicines whose curative properties were said to be infallible. Travelling through Moorfields in June 1781 Samuel Curwen came across a ‘stage doctor on an elevated scaffold covered with a ragged blanket, discoursing to the more dirty-faced ragged mob; demonstrating to their satisfaction no doubt, the superior excellence of his nostrums to those of the dispensary, and the more safe and secure state of patients under his management than hospitals and common receptacles of sick and wounded poor’.1
Most of these mountebanks claimed to be able to cure all kinds of diseases and complaints from syphilis to corns and toothache. A handbill distributed in London in the middle of the eighteenth century advertised the expertise of one Dr Cerf, ‘lately arrived from France’:
Well-known for curing all kinds of disorders, both internal and external; likewise the secret disease, let it be ever so inveterate, without any hindr
ance of business and in as short a time as the case will admit of. Trusses to be disposed of for all kinds of ruptures.
Any person that cannot attend personally, by sending their morning urine, may be faithfully informed of their complaint, and receive such medicines as are proper for their disorder, on the most reasonable terms. Advice given by a physician every afternoon, from four till six o’clock; and to the poor (gratis) from seven till eight in the morning.
The doctor may be spoke with in all languages; and letters (post paid) will be immediately attended to.
Likewise speedily cures all sorts of corns, without the least pain, so that the patient may walk or jump about again in a few minutes. Chilblains ever so bad cured in a short time. Also cures the most violent tooth-ach in an instant. Draws teeth, preserves those that are decaying, and puts in artificial ones in the most perfect manner.
N. B. A back door with a latch, by which persons may let themselves into the surgery.
Patients may be accommodated with lodgings at the doctor’s house.2
The nostrums prescribed, not only by unqualified practitioners, were quite as bizarre as those recommended in the Middle Ages. Snails mashed with bay salt and mallows were advanced as cures for ague; Venetian soap as well as ‘your own Youren when warm’ and woodlice ground up with sugar and nutmeg were recommended for cancer; the juice of wild cucumber for dropsy; fishes’ eyes for toothache; dung tea, stewed owls and crushed worms for a variety of other complaints. Joanna Stevens, who refused to reveal the secrets of a universal cure until an Act of Parliament was passed providing her with £5000, issued on receipt of this amount from the Treasury various recipes requiring the admixture of powdered snails and Alicante soap, calcined eggshells, wild carrot seeds, hips and haws burned to blackness and stirred up in further amounts of soap and honey.
Advertisements for pills, powders and tinctures filled column after column in the newspapers. At ‘Mr Dunstan’s toy shop at the Rose and Crown, under St Dunstan’s Church, Fleet Street’, so readers of the Spectator were informed, a cure for stuttering which had ‘stupendous effects’ could be purchased for 2s 6d per pot, ‘with directions’. And at ‘Mr Payne’s, at the Angel and Crown in St Paul’s Churchyard’ sufferers from ‘Loss of Memory or Forgetfulness’ could buy for the same price a pot of ‘a grateful electuary’ which would enable them to ‘remember the minutest circumstances of their affairs etc. to a wonder’.
Not all these improbable remedies were ineffective. Having been told that a stye might be cured by rubbing it with the tail of a black cat, James Woodforde determined to ‘make a trial of it’ and soon afterwards felt his ‘eyelid much abated by the swelling’. An acquaintance of Thomas Gray recovered from dropsy after prescribing himself ‘a boiled chicken entire and five quarts of small beer’; while Horace Walpole was a firm believer in Dr James’s Antimonial Fever Powders which he swore he would take if his house caught fire and which, he was firmly convinced, would have saved the life of Oliver Goldsmith who had asked to be given a dose on his deathbed.
These powders, a combination of oxide of antimony and phosphate of lead, were the invention of Dr Robert James who had been at school with Samuel Johnson. He was said to have been drunk every day for twenty years and was damned by Johnson as a rascal after having apologized for taking a whore about with him in a coach by explaining that ‘he always took a swelling in his stones’ if he abstained for too long from sexual intercourse. Yet although undoubtedly a ‘very lewd fellow both verbo and facto’, James was the author of a medical dictionary in three stout volumes and his powders were so highly regarded that they were prescribed for George III. They were but one of numerous supposed sovereign remedies which were swallowed or applied by all kinds of patients, hypochondriacs and valetudinarians. There were Dr Belloste’s pills for rheumatism at a guinea the box, Parke’s pills for the stone at 2s 6d per pill, Velno’s vegetable syrup for venereal disease, Daffy’s Elixir, Godfrey’s Cordial, Scots pills and Indian root. There was, pre-eminently, tar-water whose virtues were extravagantly broadcast by the philosopher and prelate Dr George Berkeley, for several years Bishop of Cloyne. ‘It is impossible to write a letter now without tincturing the ink with tar-water,’ the Archbishop of York was assured in 1744. ‘This is the common topic of discourse both among the rich and poor, high and low, and the Bishop of Cloyne has made it as fashionable as going to Vauxhall or Ranelagh.’3
Some of these cures were harmless and perhaps even, on occasions, efficacious; but others were certainly not: the practice of quietening children with such drugs as Godfrey’s Cordial – which was commonly given to children at the Foundling Hospital – and with other proprietary concoctions consisting largely of laudanum and spirits, resulted in innumerable fatalities. William Buchan maintained in his Domestic Medicine (1769) that as many as half infant mortalities in London were due to the administering of dangerous soporifics.4 Even those doctors who sensibly emphasized the importance of diet in the maintenance of good health often had strange ideas as to what constituted a proper diet. Derek Jarrett cites George Cheyne, author of The Natural Method of Cureing the Diseases of the Body (1742), as an advocate of the consumption of meat in the winter, of fruit and vegetables in the summer, or milk and turnips all the year round for chronic distempers and, for acute distempers, ‘teas made of saponaceous or aromatic seeds’.5
Most quacks, like most doctors, had their favourite cure. Dr John Hancock, chaplain to the Duke of Bedford, advocated cold water and stewed prunes, while Dr John Moore, of Abchurch Lane, warmly recommended his own worm powders, which earned him an apostrophe from Alexander Pope:
O learned friend of Abchurch Lane,
Who sett’st our entrails free,
Vain is thy art, thy powder vain,
Since worms shall eat e’en thee.
Profiting by their patients’ anxiety to believe such claims as that advanced by Dr Benjamin Thornhill – who advertised in the Evening Post his ‘infallible cure for the gout’ and ‘never-failing remedy for the colic’ – many medical practitioners made large fortunes. Thornhill himself, according to Steele, ‘died worth five hundred pounds per annum, though he was not born to a half penny’. William Read, who was knighted as a mark of royal favour, had once been an illiterate tailor and in one of his advertisements asserted that for twenty-five years he had been ‘in the practice of couching cataracts, taking off all sorts of wens, curing wry necks, and hair-lips without blemish though never so deformed’. He gave grand parties at which Swift, once a guest, much admired the punch served ‘in golden vessells’. His contemporary, the self-styled occulist, Roger Grant, was also probably illiterate; he had been a cobbler and a Baptist Preacher and afterwards, ‘putting out eyes with great success’, acquired wealth comparable to Read’s. Joshua Ward, who was once perhaps a footman, having invented the famous ‘drop and pill’ – with which he claimed to be able to cure every human malady – treated Lord Chesterfield, Gibbon and Henry Fielding among many other noble and famous patients. And, although his pill, which contained a large proportion of antimony, was said to have killed as many as it cured, and although, in addition, it was established in a court action that, apart from a nodding acquaintance with pharmacy, Ward was quite destitute of medical knowledge, he was especially exempted by name when in 1748 an Apothecaries Act was introduced into Parliament to restrain unlicensed persons from compounding medicines. After treating the king for a sprained thumb, Ward was accorded the best thanks of the House of Commons and allowed the privilege of driving his carriage through St James’s Park. He died, a very rich man, in 1761.
As invalids of all classes flocked to him, so too they did to Sarah Mapp, the daughter of a bone-setter and a bone-setter herself, who practised her art in London at the Grecian Coffee House in Devereux Court and at Epsom where, according to the London Magazine, ‘’tis reckoned she gets near 20 guineas a day, she executing what she does in a quick manner’. Certainly she attracted so many people to the town that she was offered a hundred guineas
by the local authorities to remain there a year. Equally successful in his way was Dr de Mainauduc, a soi-disant pupil of Mesmer, whose hypnotized patients included ‘one duke, one duchess, one marchioness, two countesses, one earl, one baron, three baronesses, one bishop, five right honourable gentlemen and ladies, two baronets, seven Members of Parliament, one clergyman, two physicians, seven surgeons, besides ninety-two ladies and gentlemen of respectability’. But of all quacks none was more celebrated than James Graham to whose lavishly furnished Temple of Health crowds of people in search of ‘the whole art of enjoying health and vigour of body and mind’ were drawn by handbills delivered from door to door by immensely tall servants in splendid liveries and gold-laced cocked hats. At the Temple of Health, which moved to Schomberg House, Pall Mall, from Adelphi Terrace in 1779, the walls were hung with ‘walking sticks, ear trumpets, visual glasses, crutches etc left as most honourable trophies by deaf, weak, paralytic and emaciated persons, cripples etc who being cured had no longer need of such assistance’. There was also a ‘celestial bed’ for conceiving perfect children ‘as even the barren must do when so powerfully agitated in the delights of love’. This bed, which was hired out at £100 per night, was said by its owner to have cost £60,000, had a dome lined with mirrors, coloured sheets and mattresses ‘filled with strongest, most springy hair, produced at vast expense from the tails of English stallions’. It also played music and, in 1781, was attended, so it was claimed, by Emma Lyon, later Lady Hamilton, posing as the Goddess of Health. Graham died in a lunatic asylum.6