Georgian London: Into the Streets

by Lucy Inglis

  THE LONDON IRISH OF ST GILES’S AND HOGARTH’S ‘GIN LANE’

  ‘The parish of St. Giles, with its nests of close and narrow alleys and courts inhabited by the lowest class of Irish costermongers, has passed into a byword as the synonym of filth and squalor.’ The Irish presence in London ran through all social classes and occupations, but nowhere was it more visible than in St Giles.

  Since at least the reign of Elizabeth I, Irish workers had travelled to London in May after they had planted their potato crops. They then worked through the summer, mainly on the hay harvest in the fields surrounding London, and returned home in time for their own harvest. They worked in the booming construction industry and monopolized the sedan chair business. Their wives and many children began to accompany them, and this tipped a precarious balance. Single men lodged in boarding houses or slept in barns and bunkhouses, but families needed somewhere to be together.

  St Giles-in-the-Fields had been the haunt of the poor Irish since the sixteenth century. It represented cheaper, older housing with access to open ground north of Oxford Street for the pigs, and also for the bare-knuckle and dog fighting which were so staunchly pursued. The presence of such a persistent poor population meant that St Giles, in 1662, was one of the first places in London to ask for a general workhouse. In the 1690s, Thomas Neale laid out the plans for what became Seven Dials, a ‘great haunt of bird and bird-cage sellers, also of the sellers of rabbits, cats, dogs, &c’. The medieval buildings with their deep window ledges held miniature gardens, adding cheer to a grim and declining area where ancient rural customs were clashing with the increasing restrictions of urban living.

  Keeping a hog to provide meat for the family was an Irish habit, but in Tudor courts and alleys the space available for livestock was limited, making backyards noisome. To keep down costs, a family would inhabit a single room. The filthy broken-timbered buildings, like a group of scruffy nests, led the centre of St Giles’s to be christened ‘The Rookery’, and the word would be used for any poor dwelling well into the late Victorian period. The last was cleared in the great ‘improvements’ of 1904–5.

  As Irish men moved into year-round employment, their presence in London began to grate. In 1736, ever quick to point out the foreign and unwelcome element of competition, workers reacted violently. An explanatory pamphlet was published afterwards, entitled ‘Spittlefields and Shoreditch in an Uproar or the Devil to pay with the English and Irish’.

  The butcher-boy gangs of Clare Market were quick to join in. In 1740, gang violence between rival factions exploded when they burned a ‘Paddy’ effigy on St Patrick’s Day, and Irish youths rampaged through the neighbouring streets. John Fielding wrote to the Secretary of State about what he saw to be an increasingly intolerable situation, pleading: ‘If some restraint could be laid on the importation of the abandoned Irish … it would be another means of preventing many robberies in this country.’ Three things in particular rankled: the Irish habit of sharing their living space with pigs; the habitual overcrowding in their lodgings, because of their innumerable offspring; and the prolonged and unhygienic laying out of corpses.

  Drink caused many of the problems in the Irish community of St Giles’s. The extent of the problem can be seen in a report submitted by a local constable, in 1750, showing that one in every five buildings in St Giles’s sold or made gin. When Hogarth’s print ‘Gin Lane’ appeared, in 1751, it was at the end of a 31-year period in London known as the ‘Gin Craze’. It had been a time of huge social and economic change, as well as altered attitudes towards alcohol. People viewed weak ale as a nourishing form of water; beer was seen as health-giving, as well as mildly intoxicating, but it was strictly controlled by licensing laws, and the price was relatively high. Wine was used as medicine by almost everyone, although not drunk by the very poor. Spirits, such as brandy, were the preserve of the rich. But then, the expansion of trade in the first part of the eighteenth century meant that spirits were being imported in larger quantities. This included gin, which was cheap and popular on the Continent. The government welcomed the increase in tax it brought, and encouraged trade. Strong drink was suddenly available, even to London’s large working-class population.

  Gin was soon being made in London. It was cheap, and could be made from the poor-quality grain that was not wanted by brewers. It was relatively easy to make, and the taste could be varied by the addition of ingredients such as juniper. Gin shops didn’t need a licence, and so they rapidly proliferated in the poorer parishes. Adulteration was common, with dangerously raw batches causing fatalities. The poorest of London’s workers often had time on their hands: dockworkers, laundresses, tailors and all manner of casual labourers were either run off their feet or waiting for work to come in. This, coupled with the sudden availability of cheap drink sold in chandlers’ shops and ordinary houses, meant that men and women could drink together without stigma in places where they felt comfortable. The corresponding rise in casual sex, violence and visible drunkenness shocked London’s emerging middle class.

  By the end of the 1720s, the city was experiencing serious social problems because of gin consumption. There were thought to be at least 1,500 small-scale distilleries operating in London. Many saw the main problem as one of price, for ‘Gin is sold very cheap, so that People may get muddled with it for three half pence and for three pence made quite Drunk even to Madness’. Gin was seen as incapacitating the workforce, raising the rates of illegitimacy, making men unfit for military service, disabling unborn children, as well as making the streets unsafe and unpleasant. It was also destroying the petty credit systems which had kept the urban poor going. Soon consumers were pawning even their clothes and furniture for drink. But the government was in a quandary: by 1730, one quarter of revenue came from taxation of alcohol, and in no small measure this was due to gin.

  Hogarth produced ‘Gin Lane’ and ‘Beer Street’, as well as his ‘Four Stages of Cruelty’, as a response to the destruction of both the economy and the morals of the poor wrought by gin. Popular literature on the Gin Craze introduced the idea of addiction. For a woman it was deemed more dangerous, as addiction would lead not only to the neglect of her marital duties, but also put her family and her sexual health in danger. London was used to drunken men in the streets, but it feared gin-sodden women. Women were also more prominent in the gin trade: almost a quarter of distillers were female, as opposed to around a tenth of wine dealers. This was a frightening new departure.

  The 1751 Gin Act set the licence for traders at £2, and introduced strict controls. Soon, most of those who held the licences were respectable traders under the control of local magistrates. Brewers began to respond to the competition and tied houses appeared, providing slightly cheaper beer. The 1751 Act was given a boost by poor harvests and grain shortages. This led to periodic bans on distilling, which disrupted gin production. Fashion turned against gin, and even the hardened drinkers of St Giles’s chose brandy or punch instead. The Act had caught a lucky break, and the mania for gin petered out – although too late for St Giles’s. The damage to working patterns, social structures and sexual restraint had been done, and drink continued to kill in the parish.

  In 1814, a huge vat of beer at the Meux and Company Brewery broke and crashed into its neighbour, which then toppled others. More than 300,000 gallons of beer flooded through the streets, drowning six women and girls and one three-year-old boy, Thomas Mulvey.

  St Giles’s was a centre of prostitution, poor housing, drink and unemployment well into the late Victorian period. One ex-resident, James Dawson Burn, would recall living there. Burn was a Scottish boy who walked to London with his alcoholic father, a man who would later try to stab him and who subjected both of them to desperate squalor and dangerous situations. Yet it was St Giles’s which stuck in Burn’s mind as a place of ‘huge sufferings, savage lives, and innumerable crimes’.

  ENTERPRISING HEADS AND JOVIAL HEARTS: DAVID GARRICK’S THEATRE ROYAL, DRURY LANE

  Only a st
one’s throw from the hovels of St Giles’s were Drury Lane and the Theatre Royal. Covent Garden was the perfect place for a theatre, situated on the way home for City workers, and close to the shopping area of the Strand. Restoration theatre had been a cheerful and boisterous thing, but during the early Georgian period more highbrow offerings were made, reflected in the Licensing Act of 1737 which meant theatres performing ‘costume plays’ were regulated more leniently than those producing music and comedy. Theatres were also regarded as a place where women of ‘loose morals’ either performed as actresses or attended as prostitutes to pick up clients. As the eighteenth century progressed, the theatre became a legitimate career for women. But it would take time for the stigma to fade.

  Initially, the emphasis of serious theatre was upon the playwright. The actors delivered in a way called ‘declamation’ with little show of emotion or personality. In the late 1730s, Aaron Hill, an influential theatre impresario, began a movement for more expression in theatre. Charles Macklin was in the vanguard with his moving and realistic portrayal of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. Born Cathal McLaughlin to a Roman Catholic family in Ireland, Macklin came to London determined to succeed. He changed his name and acquired polish, adopting an English accent as well as smoothing over the subject of his religion. Shylock was usually portrayed as a ‘comedy’ Jew with red clothes and a large prosthetic nose, but Macklin made him pitiful, sinister and dangerous. The 1741 performance was a turning point in theatre history.

  Macklin lived a dramatic life in more ways than one: in 1735, he killed another actor when he stabbed him through the eye with his cane during an argument about a wig. He escaped with a verdict of manslaughter, and there is no evidence that the sentence – the branding of ‘M’ on to his hand – was ever carried out. At the Theatre Royal Macklin found a protégé, David Garrick, who had come to London with his tutor, Samuel Johnson.

  Macklin and Garrick shared a love of Shakespeare. In 1742, they visited Stratford and sat beneath Shakespeare’s mulberry tree. Garrick was living just off the Strand, in Durham Yard, ‘with three quarts of vinegar in the cellar, calling himself a wine merchant’, according to playwright Samuel Foote, indicating a need to combine acting with another career. That was soon to change. Garrick played many parts over his career, but it was for Shakespeare that he was primarily lauded and remembered. He was sensitive to both his roles and the audience, as well as personally attractive and passionate – despite being only 5ft 4in, and not possessed of a particularly powerful voice.

  In 1749, David Garrick took a lease in Southampton Street, at Number 27, paying five hundred guineas for it, ‘Dirt and all’. He married a dancer and, despite his success, remained down to earth. Samuel Johnson said Garrick was unable to play ‘an easy, and fine-bred gentleman’, and in person was always his Lichfield self. By then he was a partner in the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. The theatre of Georgian London entered a golden era, and Garrick could do little wrong. He was assisted by his brother George, who lived happily in his shadow, appearing in dressing rooms and in the wings with the constant question, ‘Did David want me?’ When he died soon after Garrick, one wag quipped it was because David had wanted him.

  The architecture of purpose-built theatres had developed rapidly during the eighteenth century and soon consisted of a pit, boxes and galleries. This structure allowed for segregation of the crowds and made it much easier for couples to sit in the relatively private boxes together. Yet, theatres weren’t always civilized: on one occasion, the persistent London antipathy towards foreign workers was seen in a riot at the Theatre Royal during Garrick’s tenure, which was provoked when foreign dancers were featured rather than English ones. A Colonel Hardy was backstage and Garrick, in a nervous state, asked him to go on stage and calm the crowd. The Colonel went, saying that he had come to negotiate a treaty.

  A pause ensued for some time: — at last, two or three gentlemen in the pit, who had been attentive some time, asked the Colonel as to the nature of the treaty, and requested to know between whom it was to be established. The Colonel, turning his back to them, took up the skirts of his coat, and clapping his hand … ‘just there,’ replied, in a loud tone of voice, ‘Between you and my ——.’

  Garrick watched his friend’s efforts:

  … with the utmost anxiety … [He] no sooner heard the coarse reply, than he ran out of the theatre to his house in Southampton Street … The mob, after doing very considerable damage to the theatre, proceeded to his dwelling-house, where they demolished his windows … however, after this, the extraordinary business subsided, and the theatre went on as usual.

  The esteem in which actors and actresses were held by the public rose rapidly, as evidenced in Garrick’s farewell to his audience. When he played his final role at the Theatre Royal, in 1776, he suddenly began to cry, falling out of character and telling them, ‘Whatever may be the changes of my future life, the deepest impression of your kindness will always remain here, in my heart, fixed and unalterable.’

  The departure of Garrick left a hole at the Theatre Royal and on the London theatre scene that remained unfilled until John Kemble and his sister, Sarah Siddons, took to the stage. The ‘Garrick period’ was when actresses cemented their position on the London stage, making the transition from charming and theoretically sexually available young women to commanding and talented performers. Sarah Siddons is a prime example. David Garrick had discovered her early in her career, but had dropped her after bad reviews. She did not give up, though, and honed her acting skills in provincial theatres.

  By the time she returned to the Theatre Royal, in 1782, at the invitation of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Siddons’ powers of performance were such that her audiences were in thrall to her. William Hazlitt recalled how ‘she was regarded less with admiration than with wonder, as if a being of superior order had dropped from another sphere … She was not less than a goddess.’

  Although famed for being rather boring, greedy and ungracious in person, Sarah Siddons brought real life to the stage, where before it had often been stilted and contrived. She was a wife and mother, and often performed throughout her pregnancies. In her first dealings with Garrick, in 1775, she was spotted playing Rosalind in breeches in As You Like It whilst more than six months pregnant. A talent scout reported back that she must have a ‘remarkably fine’ figure when not pregnant. Garrick, eager to employ her but with some misgivings wrote back, ‘Your account of the big belly alarms me! - when shall we be in shape again?’ He and the scout continued to refer to Siddons as ‘The Big Belly’ and to discuss her forthcoming employment at Drury Lane until her husband reported to Garrick that Siddons ‘was unexpectedly taken ill when performing on the stage and early the next morning produced me a fine girl’. Her son William performed with her on stage, in 1785. When her children died, it was common knowledge, and audiences empathized with her personal tragedies.

  One of Sarah Siddons’ greatest achievements was to legitimize women on stage. Recognition had already started to come, in the 1760s and 1770s, for popular female playwrights such as Hannah Cowley, Elizabeth Inchbald and Elizabeth Griffith. At the same time, actresses such as Frances Abington and Mary Robinson were enjoying great success. But their private lives were complicated, and the inference that they exchanged sex for money was a constant in the press. Sarah Siddons’ life as a woman of great moral character allowed her to play murderesses and women of dubious morality whilst preserving her own identity, in a curious juxtaposition of celebrity and reality. Her career also saw the ushering in of the ‘new theatre’, where productions, scenery and costumes all formed part of the performance. The theatres grew in size; the rebuilt Theatre Royal would seat 3,600, staging innovative productions. Tickets, ranging from a couple of shillings to over ten shillings for a seat in a box, could be purchased from the box office in the lobby or from various outlets through the city.

  The theatre of late-eighteenth-century London was at its high point as an art form, filled with men and women who
were household names and popular idols. The cult of celebrity had begun. In 1777, the Robin Hood Society posed the question: ‘Whether the love of fame may be truly said to be a universal passion?’ It was carried unanimously ‘in the affirmative’.

  THE BOW STREET BEAKS: HENRY AND JOHN FIELDING

  The Covent Garden magistrate Henry Fielding is now remembered mainly for his novel Tom Jones, but in 1747 he was London’s Chief Magistrate. Fielding, a colossal drinker and seditious playwright, was an odd character to make a magistrate. His assistant was his blind brother, John, who had lost his sight five years before and wore a black band across his eyes. They lived at 4 Bow Court, in the house of Thomas de Veil, the first Bow Street magistrate, and a man who believed in vigorous examination of the accused and the accuser before he committed a case to trial. The Fielding brothers learned much from him.

  The Fieldings came to Bow Court at a time when London’s problems with gin were at their height. Covent Garden was riven with petty theft and prostitution. The city’s underworld was becoming more sophisticated as the trade in luxury goods grew. Fence-shops had been established since at least the 1630s, when Moll Cutpurse operated her thieves’ warehouse from Fleet Street. Cohesive social networks formed in local communities, from the professional beggars at the bottom of the heap to the highwaymen and fences at the top. Thief-takers, who had traditionally brought in criminals in return for a reward, trod a thin line regarding the law. It was a system of pardons, rewards and informers, all of which encouraged dishonesty. Henry Fielding couldn’t stop this, but he knew its evils. He also knew that the deterrent of hanging at Tyburn wasn’t working, writing in the Covent Garden Journal ‘we sacrifice the lives of men, not for their reformation but for the diversion of the population’.

  Fielding was sure that if he could get a group of men who had wages ‘to apply themselves entirely to the Apprehending of Robbers’ then he could really make a difference. The Bow Street Runners were formed in 1749–50, when Henry gathered a group of Westminster constables and had them track down suspected offenders. They were then brought to Bow Street to be examined before him. If the case warranted it, the offender was committed to the criminal courts. In 1754, he was granted £200 from the Secret Service funds to run a permanent team of between six and eight officers. But by this time he was sick, most likely due to long-term alcohol abuse, and departed for Lisbon to rest. He died there two months later, and John rose to the challenge of Bow Street.