Georgian London: Into the Streets

by Lucy Inglis

  Mrs Ballance was confused by her manic young cousin. She had once called him ‘cousin Tommy’ and was most upset when he had got into a temper and ‘asked her if she had ever heard of a poet being called Tommy’. As insufferable as Thomas was, he had talent. Within two months of arriving in London, his work was published in the Middlesex Journal. He wrote elegies for the dead mayor and kept a tally in the back of his notebook: ‘Am glad he is dead by: £3 3s 6d.’

  He left Shoreditch, taking up residence in the garret of 29 Brooke Street, Holborn. His landlady was Mrs Angel and over the next weeks she would live up to her name, watching out for her young tenant as he grew ever thinner. He wrote like a dervish: short stories, skits, a long poem about indecent exposure and some others on Africa. He received a commission to write a burletta for Marylebone Gardens, and was paid five guineas for a comic piece about marital strife between Juno and Jupiter.

  August fell upon London, and with it the lull of the long vacation. Thomas had not been paid for much of his work. He was also suffering from venereal disease. Mr Cross was the Holborn chemist who passed the time of day with Thomas in the slow afternoons. He pressed Thomas to eat a meal with his family, but the young poet would not, except once taking a share in a barrel of oysters Mr Cross opened on the counter in an attempt to entice him. Mrs Angel, upon realizing that Thomas had not eaten to her knowledge for two to three days, asked him to share her dinner, but again he refused and went up to his garret. On the following morning, 24 August, she found him dead, having taken arsenic in water. He was covered in his own vomit and torn scraps of paper.

  The verdict of the inquest was ‘suicide by reason of insanity’ and he was interred in the burial ground of Shoe Lane workhouse, but the legend of his thwarted genius had already begun. Many thought Horace Walpole instrumental in Thomas’s death. Twelve years later, in 1782, the weight of public pressure had become so great that he felt a guilty need to publish his entire correspondence with the young poet over four issues of The Gentleman’s Magazine. He concluded, ‘all of the house of forgery are relations’.

  Fakery, or falsehood, was a growing preoccupation Throughout the eighteenth century. Fake coin was an ever present problem, but the very notion of what was real became pressing in the collective mind. Chatterton’s work sits on the cusp of the Augustan pursuit of the rational nature of Truth, and the Romantic vision of the Truth of Beauty. He would influence both William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Keats was devoted to him. When Horace Walpole died, he had collected eighteen volumes of scrapbooks of press clippings on Thomas. In an unguarded moment Samuel Johnson admitted that ‘it is wonderful how the whelp has written such things’.

  LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS: BOG-HOUSES AND THE BEGGAR’S OPERA

  Just south of Holborn, Lincoln’s Inn Fields is now occupied by those practising law, but during the eighteenth century it had a more varied set of residents and a dangerous edge. It was built to designs by Inigo Jones and ‘affords in its central enclosure one of the largest and finest public gardens in London, and in point of antiquity is perhaps the oldest’. The square itself sat between Covent Garden and the official border of the City, running down Chancery Lane. It encompassed the spectrum of London life: rich and poor, drama, art and science.

  The original houses in the New Square were grand and imposing, but it had a bad reputation. John Gay, in his poem The Art of Walking the Streets of London warned readers in 1716:

  Where Lincoln’s Inn’s wide space is railed around,

  Cross not with venturous step; there oft is found

  The lurking thief, who, while the daylight shone

  Made the walls echo with his begging tone …

  Beggars, and muggers posing as beggars, had been a problem in the square from the outset, as Londoners made their way to and from the City using the square and garden as a short cut. On the west side, in a stand of trees, was London’s most famous bog-house, a public lavatory and the site of illicit engagements, as well as sexual-encounters-turned-muggings. The paths leading across the open space were where the beggar’s crutch

  … which late compassion mov’d, shall wound

  Thy bleeding head, and fell thee to the ground.

  Beggars were a constant preoccupation in Georgian London, and Lincoln’s Inn Fields was shorthand for a beggar’s haunt. Some of them were real, such as Scarecrow, ‘who disabled himself in his right leg, and asks alms all day to get himself a warm supper and a trull at night’; and some were but beggarly fictions. The gardens were railed early specifically to prevent rough-sleepers. (Even now, centuries later, Lincoln’s Inn Fields is one of the main locations for the feeding of the homeless. After dark, trucks catering to all denominations pull up and dispense food aid to dishevelled characters who flit in and out of the square.)

  It seems more than coincidence that John Gay’s ‘Newgate pastoral’ The Beggar’s Opera premiered at the Lincoln’s Inn Theatre, in 1728. The theatre had previously been a real tennis court, but was then taken over by the Rich family and rebuilt for staging dramas. The success of The Beggar’s Opera, which ran to sixty-two consecutive performances, made ‘Rich gay and Gay rich’. The opera, a comic English version poking fun at the fashion for Italian opera, starred the characters Polly Peachum and her roguish lover, Macheath the highwayman, who would become staples of eighteenth-century literature and popular culture.

  As the century progressed, Lincoln’s Inn Fields continued to be populated by wealthy householders and poor vagrants. The arrival of the architect John Soane and his family, in 1782, when he bought Number 13 signalled that the square was on the up. He went on to buy Number 14 and integrate the two as his wealth and ambition increased. Almost all of John Soane’s major works have been swept away, giving him an almost mythical status amongst the great architects of the eighteenth century. Yet Soane was not universally approved of during his lifetime, and his ruthless pursuit of success and perfectionism made him unpopular.

  The son of a ‘common bricklayer’ from Berkshire with a ‘feverish thirst for fame’, John Soane rose to become one of London’s premier architects and art collectors. His houses, on the north side of the square, were given over to collections of Greek and Roman marbles and funerary urns, as well as Gothic affectations and contemporary pictures, including Hogarth’s ‘Rake’s Progress’. Soane was remarkable in the way he combined all types of architectural styles, some Classical and some contemporary. His fascination with matters funerary was reflected in his favourite room in his home, which was based on a tomb and admits only an eerie crepuscular light. He relied extensively on coloured glass to create odd light effects, and Mrs Soane even dyed their net curtains with turmeric to complete the effect of a house caught in a time warp. Soane was also a pioneer of central heating, which he installed in his home together with hot showers. Such modern thinking and dramatic effects did not always win him friends, one commentator writing in the Morning Post:

  I presume you haven’t lately passed through Lincoln’s Inn Fields, otherwise I think you would have animadverted on a new-fangled projection now erecting on the Holborn side of that fine square. This ridiculous piece of architecture destroys the uniformity of the row and is a palpable eyesore.

  But Soane’s star was in the ascendant, despite his apparent unpopularity and some bad misjudgements. He was appointed Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy, which had decreed that comments or criticisms of living artists were not to be allowed in lectures. Soane couldn’t help himself, and he attacked his young competitor Robert Smirke for the ‘glaring impropriety’ of his designs for the new Covent Garden Theatre. The audience was shocked, and began to hiss. Soane defended himself: ‘It is extremely painful to me to be obliged to refer to modern works.’ The subsequent fallout led him to suspend his lectures.

  Such small matters, however illuminating, were not part of Soane’s grand plan. When his sons disappointed him by not wanting to follow in his footsteps, he conceived the idea to gift his house and collection to the n
ation; in 1833, he obtained an Act of Parliament to do so. A comprehensive guidebook of the house by John Britton stated, in 1827, that it had not been ‘adapted for spectacle and display but constructed from the beginning as an architecture of spectacle and display, a theatre of effects’. By leaving his house as a museum ‘in perpetuity’, Sir John Soane (as he would become) prompted some to ‘wonder what sort of perpetuity he imagined? Was he thinking of a hundred or a thousand, or a hundred thousand years? A hundred would show him a prudent man, a thousand a vain man, and any longer term, a megalomaniac.’ He was probably all three. Sir John Soane’s house is still preserved by that Act of Parliament, and can be visited today.

  TEMPLE AND THE INNS OF COURT: LONDON’S SEAT OF LEARNING

  The variety of residents in Lincoln’s Inn Fields was an exception in an area of London otherwise dominated by the law. It lies just to the west of Chancery Lane, which is the spine of legal London. At the head is Gray’s Inn, on Holborn. At the base nearest the river sit Middle and Inner Temple, inside the City limits. Outer Temple lay outside the City limits and was gradually phased out. Thus, the Inns of Court straddle the City boundaries, but they are a settlement quite apart from both the City and Westminster.

  During the Elizabethan period the Inns flourished, becoming a busy camp of young men all eager to learn the law and to acquire the polish of London life. Law was not only a functioning machine but a web of theory to be moulded in the best way to serve both the people and the state. Each of the Inns had a hall for communal eating, a chapel for worship and a library for reference. Surprisingly, they offered relatively little instruction in the law; boys who wanted to learn it took private tuition. Without a formal structure of education and with no qualifying exam (introduced in 1852), getting called to the Bar was as much about personal charm and intellect as it was about knowledge of the law and ethical soundness.

  During the eighteenth century, two men emerged from the Inns of Court who were utterly different, yet together saw the emergence of the ‘modern’ system of British legal representation. They made important advancements, not only for themselves but for the profession and for the state. They were also both outsiders who made their way up the system through a combination of hard work and intellect.

  Thomas Erskine was the youngest son of the Earl of Buchan. Beautiful and clever, he had gone to sea at fourteen after a basic grammar school education in Scotland. The sea wasn’t to his taste, so he raised enough money to buy a commission in the army. Aged twenty-two, he met James Boswell, who would later record that the young officer ‘talked with a vivacity, fluency and precision so uncommon, that he attracted particular attention’. This fluency and ability led Thomas to consider a legal career. He put his name down at Trinity College, Cambridge; three years later, he obtained a degree without attending lectures. Meanwhile, he installed his young wife in Kentish Town with their growing family, so that his annual allowance of £300 could be eked out, whilst he studied law. By the summer of 1778, Erskine had been called to the Bar and his charm and intelligence brought in the cases thick and fast. He soon gained a reputation as a liberal intellectual who believed in freedom of speech and the press, taking on cases in which he and his clients emerged as the victors owing to his mastery of ‘the art of addressing a jury’. In 1792, he defended Thomas Paine when he was charged with seditious libel after the publication of the Rights of Man. Although he was unsuccessful in this case, Erskine famously lectured barristers on the need to take on even unpopular and risky cases.

  Erskine came to prominence through charm and oration whilst assisting Lloyd Kenyon, who was the opposite of his young protégé. Born in Wales in 1732, he served his term drudging for an attorney, learning the rules of Chancery law. He was called to the Bar young, in 1756, but couldn’t get any work because he was no good as a public speaker and had few contacts. He was appointed Master of the Rolls, which is the right-hand judge serving the premier judge, Lord Chief Justice. In this position, he was in charge of the tedious but important arm of Chancery law, something he was eminently trained for. His work became the benchmark others strove to follow. Four years later, he succeeded the Earl of Mansfield as Lord Chief Justice, a post he held until his death. He was hugely admired as a judge, and played the perfect counterpart to the charming persuader his assistant had become by being patient, full of knowledge and ‘of the most determined integrity’.

  A career in law during the eighteenth century was random and opportunistic, but Erskine and Kenyon represent the best of it – and also the emergence of our modern court systems and the move towards trial by jury.

  Erskine and Kenyon are fine examples of the sort of men the Inns were producing during the eighteenth century, but not all their colleagues were quite so diligent. The area of the Inns was an affluent one, and there were large groups of young, privileged men with time on their hands, who enjoyed all that the area had to offer. The Royal Society had moved here in 1710, when Isaac Newton negotiated the purchase of a small house in Crane Court just north of Fleet Street. Samuel Johnson lived nearby, in a house which is now a museum in his memory; his local pub, The Cheshire Cheese, is still standing. Mrs Salmon’s Wax Works stood near the entrance to Middle Temple, where one might see waxworks of kings and queens, and where an automated waxwork of ‘Old Mother Shipton, the witch, kicked the astonished visitor as he left’. On the south side of the road near Temple Bar was the favourite coffee house of the young men of the Inns, called Nando’s.

  Between 1710 and 1712 a group of young men, mostly in their late teens and early twenties, would use Nando’s as a focus for their violent gangs, called the Mohocks. The Mohocks were active throughout the year, mainly along Holborn and the Strand and in Westminster. They drank heavily, smoked marijuana and tried to act like the savages they took as their namesake.

  Marijuana was in use as a recreational drug in London from the late seventeenth century. Robert Hooke lectured on it at the Royal Society in 1689/90 and noted that it rendered the user

  … unable to speak a Word of Sense; yet is he very merry, and laughs, and sings … yet is he not giddy, or drunk, but walks and dances … after a little Time he falls asleep, and sleepeth very soundly and quietly; and when he wakes, he finds himself mightily refresh’d, and exceeding hungry.

  Hooke obtained his score from a sea captain in a coffee house, no doubt along with many others.

  The Mohocks committed acts of street violence on both men and women, but although their victims appear randomly chosen, the damage inflicted was not. Watchmen were badly beaten and women humiliated. Two women were stabbed through the lower lip, perhaps in a bizarre piercing ritual.

  When caught, the men were all young ‘gentlemen’ and often associated with the Inns of Court. Bail was set at hundreds of pounds. The ringleader of the 1712 violence was thought to be Lord Hinchingbrooke, but his arrest did not stop him becoming a Member of Parliament the following year. Some of those arrested for involvement in the violence were later called to the Bar.

  Students didn’t only learn the law, but also dancing and fencing and various other social skills thought necessary. In 1744, a court case at the Old Bailey recorded the trial of Ann Duck, born in ‘Little White Alley, Chancery-lane, the Daughter of one Duck, a Black, well known to many Gentlemen in our Inns of Court, by teaching them the Use of the Small Sword, of which he was a very good master’. Ann went on to teach young men the use of the small sword too, but as a prostitute.

  As a community of young affluent men, the Inns of Court were a natural magnet for prostitutes of the better sort. The ward of Farringdon Without contained over seventy bawdy houses – more than half the City’s brothels in the early part of the century. There was speculation that educated young women who had fallen on hard times ventured into longer-term agreements with the students, flitting in and out of Temple or Lincoln’s Inn with their faces masked. Common prostitutes also sought keepers amongst the students and barristers, such as the ‘luscious’ Miss Sh—rd:

  �
�� a most pleasing pupil of pleasure, and perfectly competent to the instruction of those who desire to be announced Students of the mysteries of Venus. She is about 20, and a single guinea will content her … [she] has several City friends, and lawyers from Gray’s Inn and Temple.

  And so, even the respectable legal engine of London hosted gangs, drug takers and prostitutes, making many barristers not so far removed from those who sat in the dock.

  At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the margins of the City were little more than a varied combination of hotchpotch urban overspill, but soon the old houses and brothels were swept away in a frenzy of building and rebuilding. Only Temple and the Inns of Court remain almost unchanged since the early eighteenth century, when a new London had already run away westwards along the Strand.

  3. Westminster and St James’s

  Westminster is London’s second city. Since the twelfth century, it has been the seat of government and of the sovereign. By 1700, it was far from the grand administrative centre we know now. It was a small settlement which had grown up around ancient palaces, religious houses and a school. Whitehall Palace, built by Cardinal Wolsey and appropriated by Henry VIII, was the sprawling home of the civil service until it burned down in 1698 after a maid left sheets drying too close to the fire. Inigo Jones’s Banqueting Hall was the only building to remain intact. The opportunity to rebuild to any coherent plan was missed, as John Gwynne, the man whose grand plans for London came to nothing, observed: ‘why so wretched a use has been made of so valuable and desirable an opportunity of displaying taste and elegance in this part of the town is a question that very probably would puzzle the builders themselves to answer’.