Georgian London: Into the Streets

by Lucy Inglis

  The Capper farm had disappeared beneath University College. The sisters’ farmhouse still stood on the east side of Tottenham Court Road, but the land around it was becoming rapidly built up. In 1808, on a small patch of some open ground nearby, Richard Trevithick installed London’s first passenger railway as an advertisement for his locomotive. The ‘Catch Me Who Can’ was situated close to where Euston Station is today, and ran on a circular track, with journeys costing a shilling a ride. It was meant to prove that trains were faster than horses but Trevithick hadn’t laid his tracks well enough, and no one really saw how railways could take off. Ten years later, in 1818, John Harris Heal, a mattress-maker from the West Country, moved into what would become 196 Tottenham Court Road. He took over the old Capper farmhouse as a store and it survived until 1917, when it was demolished. Heal’s still sits on the same site.

  In only a few decades, Bloomsbury went from farmland to a fashionable neighbourhood, exemplified by the elegant Bloomsbury Square. Large-scale developments by James Burton and Thomas Cubitt make up vast swathes of Bloomsbury, and on Great Russell Street, just opposite the British Museum, is the small terrace which represents John Nash’s first foray into domestic architecture. Burton and Nash would go on to be hugely influential in the West End of London with the Regent Street development, whilst Cubitt would develop Pimlico and Belgravia in a very different style. The most important Georgian survival in Bloomsbury is Bedford Square, which was built upon the Cappers’ cow yard, and for which no architect is known.

  ‘In Bloomsbury Square’, engraving by R. Pollard and F. Jukes, 1787

  Relatively close by, to the west of Holborn, was the theatre neighbourhood of Covent Garden, with all its rackety allure. Francis Russell, the 4th Earl of Bedford, had begun developing the estate in 1631, and building progressed remarkably quickly, finishing in 1637. Covent Garden was unusual in that it was self-contained as a community, with the focus on the piazza designed by Inigo Jones. Here sat St Paul’s Church with a small local prison and whipping post. In front of the church the first Punch and Judy show appeared in England, in 1662, when Pietro Gimonde brought his toy theatre to the square.

  Bedford House sat on the north side of the Strand. The gardens stretched all the way up to the piazza, where they were hidden behind a high wall. Against this wall Covent Garden market started, in 1677, when Bedford granted a lease on a market, six days a week, to two local residents for the trading of ‘all manner of Fruites, Flowers, roots, and herbs whatsoever’. The piazza was undeniably beautiful, and retained the feel of the older pre-Restoration age. The sewerage provisions were good, at least until the end of the eighteenth century, so whilst the accommodations might be old-fashioned, they were well ventilated and not uncivilized. Only the noise and the press of people afflicted the piazza of Covent Garden – but to theatre people, what did that matter?

  Covent Garden and the Strand, showing the Exeter Exchange and the area of the Savoy Palace, detail from John Rocque’s map, 1745

  To the south was the Strand, the street connecting Westminster and the City. Roman in origin, its name originated during the Anglo-Saxon period and referred to the Old English word meaning ‘shore’, the road being close to the shallow banks of the Thames. In the Georgian period, the focal point of the Strand was the Exeter Exchange. It stood among taverns, eating houses and milk cellars where cows were led underground and milked for a fortnight before being sent back to local pastures. Between the Strand and the river were a maze of subdivided medieval palaces with slum-like infilling. Numerous steps and narrow sets of stairs led down to the river, where the water slopped and slapped loudly at high tide. Even when William Chambers and the Adam brothers built their fine developments – Somerset House and the Adelphi – the tunnels beneath the Adelphi complex, which were meant to serve the river, almost immediately became the haunt of London’s hookers and homeless. In amongst these narrow infested streets and courts were the most prominent areas of London’s second-hand book trade, together with the sale of pornography. Holywell Street, in particular, became famous for it, with over fifty pornography shops there in 1837.

  It was a bustling, vibrant area of London. But from respectable Bloomsbury, in the north, to the rough thoroughfare of the Strand, there was an underlying theme. Bloomsbury housed the illegitimate offspring of prostitutes and indiscreet girls. Covent Garden was filled with actresses trading on their looks and charm, as did the area’s high proportion of female businesswomen in their shops and market stalls. The Strand was the home of London’s street prostitutes plying their wares, and just to the south were the pornographers operating from shops and stalls manned and frequented by both men and women. The theme, of course, was that sex sells.

  THE FOUNDLING HOSPITAL: ‘BE NOT ASHAMED THAT YOU WERE BRED IN THIS HOSPITAL. OWN IT’

  In 1722, Thomas Coram was fifty-four and had led a hard life at sea. On his return to London, he went to work in the City but chose to live in Rotherhithe, ‘the common Residence of Seafaring People’. Naturally inclined to hard work, he walked to and from the City at dawn and dusk, and was shocked to see so many ‘young Children exposed, sometimes alive, sometimes dead, and sometimes dying’.

  Many of these children were the offspring of street prostitutes who had died, become too sick or too drunk to care for them, or who had simply abandoned them in the street. Coram, a foundling himself, was not a wealthy man and decided to start a charity based on the joint-stock company model: the institution would operate as a legal business, taking care of the children by bringing in donations which would then be overseen by a proper board. But people were still smarting from huge losses after the South Sea Bubble fiasco, and donations were hard to come by. Coram was undeterred and scored his first coup by signing up the Duchess of Somerset as a patron, in 1729. Over the following six years, he managed to convince seven more duchesses, eight countesses and five baronesses to pledge their support. The ‘Ladies Petition’ was key to the success of the project, linking charity with fashion in the way which would do so much good during this century.

  The Foundling Hospital complex, detail from John Rocque’s map, 1745

  This application of pressure paid off: on 14 August 1739, George II signed the charter establishing the Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Young Children. In 1740, thirty-four acres of pasture near Southampton Row were purchased from the Earl of Salisbury, and ‘The Foundling’, as it became known, moved there from its cramped Hatton Garden premises.

  Meanwhile, the governors had drawn up rules for admission. The children were to be less than two months old, free from venereal disease and otherwise healthy. The adult who gave up the child would have to wait while they were examined and take them away if they proved unsuitable. Once admission had been agreed upon, any possessions, birthmarks and scars were logged, with any items placed in a numbered leather bag. The corresponding lead ‘tag’ would be placed on a chain around the child’s neck, and its removal forbidden, thus enabling the child to be reclaimed should the parents wish to take them back at a later stage. The children were then given to wet nurses on the borders of London. When they returned, they would be taught how to read and how to knit, spin and sew. The boys would be destined for manual labour or the sea, and the girls for domestic service.

  The first children were admitted on 25 March 1741. There to supervise their admission were the Duke of Richmond and William Hogarth. A crowd had gathered outside, and the porter struggled to close the door on those wanting to get in. Thirty children were admitted, made up of eighteen boys and twelve girls, and ‘the Expressions of Grief of the Women whose Children could not be admitted were Scarcely more observable than those of some of the Women who parted with their Children, so that a more moving Scene can’t well be imagined’.

  Like Bedlam, The Foundling was not mean accommodation: the children had space and light, and the buildings were handsome. Cows were kept on the estate to supply milk, and the children had their own spring, Powis We
lls. Soon, they were to have their own art gallery, with pictures by ‘four eminent painters - by Hayman, Hogarth, Hymore & Wills’, and charity concerts, including benefit performances by Handel. Handel also donated a new organ, on which he would give many benefit performances of the Messiah in years to come. At the rehearsal for the annual performance of the Messiah in 1759, he suffered a fit and died a week later.

  When the hospital was built, Great Ormond Street marked the northern limit of London, and the hospital sat out in the fields in the fresh air. The governors planned a spartan regime for their charges: they rose at five in the spring and summer, six in September, seven in autumn and winter. They had an hour to wash and put on their brown uniforms, made of a coarse wool called ‘drugget’. These were designed by Hogarth, and the wool was brightened up with a jaunty scarlet trim. His sisters were dressmakers, so perhaps he had called on them for inspiration. Each child had jobs which they went about until eight, when they sat down at long tables for a breakfast consisting of broth, gruel or porridge. After breakfast, the younger children worked at their reading and the older children worked at their jobs. At noon, they had a half-hour break for a lunch made of boiled mutton, beef or pork as well as rice and dumplings. Supper was bread on its own three times a week, bread and milk twice a week, and bread and cheese twice a week.

  The reaction to The Foundling was not altogether favourable. Newspapers speculated that courting couples would be tempted to ‘sin’ by the charity. The association of the area with illicit sex and bastardy was compounded by the opening of The London Lying-In Hospital, in Aldersgate Street, from 1751. One scathing broadside addressed ‘Batchelors and Maids’, and explained how a girl might go to the country ‘to take the Air’ at Aldersgate, give birth and return to London ‘a Maid again’ after the child had been given over as a foundling. In February 1760, Parliament effectively withdrew its financial support after granting The Foundling a large amount of money to be self-supporting. They set a deadline of 25 March for the final admission via their traditional reception method. The last child to be taken in before the deadline was a girl, and the governors named her Kitty Finis.

  Withdrawal of government funding was a setback, but The Foundling became a giant with more than 6,000 children under its care. To bring in more much-needed funds, it began to hire out the older children as cheap day labour. This was one of The Foundling’s least popular actions amongst supporters and the press. Often those who were willing to take on the parish apprentices were ‘so inhuman, as to regard only the pecuniary Consideration; and having once received that, they, by ill Usage and undue Severity, often drive the poor Creatures from them’. Many children ran away, often turning up on the doorstep of their old wet nurse. One boy made it as far as Luton to get back to his foster family. The hospital’s policies were strict, and wet nurses had to take the foundling in as one of their family, rather than on a puppy-farming model. Some wet nurses and their husbands, having seen first steps and heard first words, persuaded The Foundling to allow them to adopt. Others kept in touch with their former charges and visited them whenever possible, which often involved at least a day’s travel each way from the countryside, by foot and wagon.

  Back in London, most of the boys were apprenticed at sea, as gardeners, or to the master sweeps. Master sweeps patrolled the streets of London with their climbing boys, and sometimes climbing girls, waiting to be accosted by housekeepers and footmen. Only small children were agile enough to scramble up and brush the soot down inside the cramped, kinking chimneys. Suffocation, burns and falls were a constant threat.

  In 1817, the story of the death of eight-year-old Thomas Pitts was recounted before a Parliamentary Committee. Thomas’s boss was ‘a chimney sweeper of the name of Griggs [who] attended to sweep a small chimney in the brewhouse of Messrs Calvert and Co.’ The fire was still lit, so Griggs extinguished it and sent the boy down from the top. Inside the chimney was an iron pipe, perhaps carrying hot water. Thomas became lodged against it, and shouted, ‘I cannot come up, master, I must die here.’ The alarm was raised. A bricklayer working nearby came and smashed into the chimney with a sledgehammer, he and Griggs clawing at the bricks. They pulled Thomas from the chimney, but he was dead. The report of the surgeon attending was that most of Thomas’s lower body was badly burned – as were his elbows, down to the bone – where ‘the unhappy sufferer made some attempts to return as soon as the horrors of his situation became apparent’.

  Griggs had not been an inhuman boss. He may have put Thomas in the situation which killed him, but he had done his best to get him out, even forcing himself up the hot, broken chimney to recover the boy. Thomas’s death was just the luck of the draw for chimney sweeps, though luck of any kind had little to do with the lot of the sweep: should these boys survive to adolescence, they were prone to a testicular cancer known as ‘sooty-warts’ – ‘a most noisome, painful, and fatal disease’ brought on by carcinogens in soot. For decades, it was believed to be a venereal disease resulting from sooty lovemaking, because it arrived with the onset of puberty.

  There were a few incidences of climbing girls, but mostly they were put out to do women’s work. This included helping midwives such as Elizabeth Brownrigg, a respected midwife in Fetter Lane. She took girls from The Foundling to help her during births, but all was not what it seemed.

  In 1767, a girl named Mary Clifford turned fifteen. Upon the death of her mother, her father had married another woman, also named Mary. Four years later, he left her. Unable to support a young girl, Mary had left her stepdaughter with The Foundling Hospital and ‘gone into Cambridgeshire’. Young Mary Clifford was put into service with Elizabeth Brownrigg. Clifford had the misfortune to be a bed-wetter, which gave Elizabeth Brownrigg and her teenage son, John, an excuse to shave her head, strip her, make her work naked and beat her while she hung from a hook in this state. They locked her up for whole weekends, without food or water, while they went to their cottage in Hertfordshire.

  After only a few months, Mrs Clifford returned to London in better circumstances and sought out her stepdaughter in Fetter Lane. She was turned from the door, John Brownrigg telling her that Mary did not want to see her. The real reason was that he and his mother had beaten Mary into insensibility.

  William Clipson was an apprentice baker to Mr Deacon next door. He was upstairs in his master’s house and happened to look into the Brownriggs’ yard. There he saw Mary Clifford, lying in the filth with their pig. He crawled out of a skylight and ‘spoke to her two or three times, but could get no answer … I saw her eyes black, and her face very much swelled … I went down and told my mistress what I had seen, and what a shocking condition the girl was in.’ Parish overseers and a constable were called to the house. Mrs Clifford and the neighbours forced their way inside. When they found Mary

  … her face was swelled as big as two, her mouth was so swelled she could not shut it, and she was cut all under her throat, as if it had been with a cane, she could not speak; all her shoulders had sores all in one … cut by whips or sticks … her head was cut, she had a great many wounds upon it, and cuts all about her back and her legs.

  Mary died later that day. Brownrigg was despised by the press as an unnatural mother and a monster. She was found guilty and hanged at Tyburn on the Monday following her trial. James and John Brownrigg spent six months in Newgate and were bound over for seven years. Such was the public hatred for John Brownrigg that when he was released, he shortened his name to Brown and moved further west, near Oxford Circus.

  Despite such shocking cases, the governors of The Foundling did their best for the thousands of children in their care. They did not turn away children of mixed race. They took in children of insane mothers, and they became increasingly aware that The Foundling served a dual purpose: by relieving parents of a child they could no longer care for, the governors noted that there was a chance they could be restored ‘to a course of Industry and Virtue so that almost every Act of the Charity is attended with a Double Benefit,
the preservation of the Child and of the Parent’. One disabled boy, George Grafton, had been admitted aged ten with such severe club feet that he had learned to walk on the outside of his ankles. He underwent a successful surgical repair for the condition, paid for by The Foundling. The hospital also paid for him to be apprenticed to a shoemaker. He returned to the hospital’s employ to ‘furnish shoes for the children’. Blind children were educated for a career in music. One of these, Tom Grenville, became the organist at The Foundling as a grown man, living locally with his wife and family. Some children were too profoundly disabled ever to leave, and were cared for all their lives.

  What became of the children who left? Many returned at some point. Some came for help, some for advice, some for information about their parents. One such child was Sarah Billington who, aged twenty-eight, wrote, ‘desiring to be informed who are her parents; she having laboured for many years under the greatest anxiety of mind, wishing to know them’. The governors could do no more than send her a copy of her admission notes.

  The Foundling continued on the same spot until the 1920s, when the land was sold for development. All that remains of the hospital today are the colonnades, although in recent years The Foundling Hospital Charity has provided a playground for Great Ormond Street Hospital. Thus Thomas Coram’s legacy still attends to the needs of children at a difficult time in their lives. The pride those involved felt in the institution was reflected in the instructions drawn up by the governors, in 1754, for those about to leave: ‘Be not ashamed that you were bred in this Hospital. Own it.’