Georgian London: Into the Streets

by Lucy Inglis

  Elephants were alien creatures to most people in Britain, and to imagine the sound of cats roaring and an elephant trumpeting over the noise of the horses and people on the Strand is rather exotic. But caged on an upper floor, observers soon noted that the animals were not happy and developed a ‘peculiar movement’ whilst in captivity.

  In 1810, the Lady Astell arrived in the East India Docks, in Blackwall. She belonged to the East India Company, and on board was a young male elephant. He was called Chuneelah, or Chuny for short. Chuny completed a short but successful stint in the Covent Garden Theatre. There, he would arrive on stage and then deviate from the planned scene by interfering with his fellow actors’ clothing, or departing altogether. Edward Cross, the then proprietor of the Exeter Exchange, acquired him immediately. He was a huge hit, but Chuny’s life was far from perfect. Without any exercise at all, he was growing. And growing. He was soon ‘such a size that it was with difficulty he could lay down in his den, which so worried him that he became more mischievous and required additional care’.

  On the morning of 1 March 1826, Chuny could stand no more, and started smashing himself against the bars. His musth had arrived, and his patience was at an end. Edward Cross knew he had to do something. He ran across the road to Somerset House, to ask the soldiers stationed there to come and shoot Chuny. The soldiers came. They shot at Chuny behind the half-demolished grill of his cage. He became enraged by the bullets and had almost broken through his cage, threatening to get out on to the unreinforced portion of the floor. One of the riflemen recalled how, now that their course had been set upon, they had to stop Chuny getting out of his cage at all costs, or ‘through the whole flooring we should have gone together, lions, men, tigers and birds’. The soldiers panicked until an officer ordered them to shoot all at once. After a second wave of bullets, Chuny finally died, collapsing heavily on to the strengthened floor.

  On that Saturday morning, The Times reported how a pulley had been set up on the first floor of the Exeter Exchange. Chuny was suspended and flayed, and his skin was sent to Greenwich for tanning. On Saturday afternoon, during the dissection, a steak was butchered from his rump and cooked on the spot, with several people (including the dissecting surgeon) sampling it. As darkness fell, Chuny’s guts were carried down to the river and thrown off Westminster Bridge.

  Edward Cross did not know what to do next. He had Chuny’s skeleton reassembled and placed back in the cage. Awareness of cruelty to animals was gaining ground rapidly. The papers were full of arguments both for and against captive animals, including one in The Times on Friday 10 March, which was signed from Chuny himself, and told the readers:

  To place an elephant, or any beast, without a mate, in a box bearing no greater proportion to his bulk than a coffin does to a corpse, is inhuman; and there can be no doubt that confinement and the want of a mate caused the frenzy which rendered it necessary to destroy the late stupendous and interesting animal at Exeter Change.

  Chuny’s fate gave many Londoners pause: an animal that had been so amazing to them, that had picked up their coins and handed them back, and held on to their fingers with his trunk, had been reduced to a lump of running gore in an attic room. It furthered the cause for more ‘natural’ habitats. In 1857, one of the shooters involved that day wrote to Francis Trevelyan Buckland, a leading zoologist, to set the record straight about what had really happened. The rifleman remembered how Chuny ‘folded his forelegs under him, adjusted his trunk, and ceased to live, the only peaceful one among us cruel wretches’. Chuny was eventually taken to the Hunterian Museum and stayed there for over a century, until he was blasted to pieces once more during the Blitz.

  SOUTH OF THE STRAND AND ‘A MULTITUDE OF OBSCENE PRINTS’

  To the south of the Strand was a labyrinth of medieval streets. Francis Place remembered how many of the area’s children were ‘infested with vermin’ and ‘used to be combed once a week with a small toothed comb onto the bellows or into a sheet of paper in the lap of the mother’. It was a poor and shabby place, which suited itself well to the sale of second-hand books and prints. In particular, Wych Street and Holywell Street were both full of booksellers specializing in cheap printed works and erotica.

  Continental erotica had been around in England since at least the late sixteenth century, but designed for a small, wealthy market whose pleasures were largely literary. After the Restoration, Charles’s relaxed court brought sexuality into the public sphere, and popular works of both literary and literal pornography began to appear. French pornography was deemed particularly saucy, and many titles included faux French words or phrases. Most English pornography from the same period is dominated by gross obscenity and defilement. Continental versions were more sophisticated and varied. The market for them flourished. Samuel Pepys probably represents the average consumer: he had a copperplate print of a naked Nell Gwynn above his desk at the Admiralty; and in the early part of 1688, he purchased a copy of L’École des Filles from John Martin, his bookseller. On a February Sunday, ‘the Lord’s Day’, as he noted in his diary, he went to the office to do some work and have a little read of his new purchase, ‘which is a mighty lewd book, but yet not amiss for a sober man once to read over to inform himself in the villainy of the world’.

  In 1748, English erotic literature really got going with the publication of John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, or Fanny Hill. This marked a departure into that growing literary form, the novel. Fanny Hill is markedly different to its predecessors. It is narrated by a young woman and tells of her arrival in London and subsequent ‘seduction’ into becoming a prostitute. As she then climbs through the ranks to become a courtesan, Fanny relates the stories of what she sees and gets up to. It contains all the usual themes of English pornography but also features lesbianism, and first editions contained an episode in which Fanny related a male homosexual encounter in detail. This was later cut. Fanny Hill is remarkable in two ways: firstly for its form as a novel, and secondly because of the happy ending Fanny is given, marrying the boy she falls in love with at the beginning of the story.

  Women were not only the stars but also the producers of pornography. Mary Cooper printed and sold Lucina Sine Concubita, in 1750. Lucina featured in The Lady’s Magazine in the first year of its publication, and so could be bought quite legitimately by respectable women. In 1805, Baptisa Bertazzi was sentenced to six months in prison for selling obscene prints in a London girls’ school. George Cannon was a pornographic bookseller who employed hawkers to throw pornography over the walls of girls’ boarding schools.

  Lewd, rackety, bursting with humanity, the Covent Garden and Strand districts were unique. There, women held a special, if earthy, power and managed independent lives in businesses of every kind. Next, we move west to Soho, where the artisans rule – making fortunes with their hands, and art out of death.

  5. Soho and Charing Cross

  In 1600, Soho was little more than fields. Less than a century later, it had become a combination of elegant little squares and a writhing mass of twisting infill. Unlike most of London, the area of Soho – quite literally ‘south of Holborn’ – has no parish boundaries and no defined limits. It encompasses the parish of St Anne’s and the northern part of the parish of St James’s, but its true boundaries are Oxford Street to the north, St Martin’s Lane to the east and Regent Street to the west. The southern boundary is more fluid, and Soho proper traditionally peters out one street south of Leicester Square.

  In 1650, the only significant clusters of buildings were along what was known as Colman Hedge Lane, which became Wardour Street. When the Great Fire displaced tens of thousands of citizens westward, they began to build rapidly on these empty fields. Then, in 1685, Louis XIV evicted Protestants from France, and many thousands of Huguenots arrived in London. Those who dealt in luxury goods, of which there were many, preferred to be near the court. And Soho was also close to their chapel in the abandoned and dilapidated palace of the Savoy.

  Near
where Charing Cross Station now stands were the Golden Cross and the Greyhound, the main coaching inns for those travelling to and from the coast and from the West of England. Local lodgings were filled with visiting dignitaries and foreign tourists whose diaries and letters provide detailed observations on the routine and the oddities of this varied area.

  The inhabitants of Soho and Charing Cross, whether permanent or temporary, relied upon the court and its dependents. Artists and artisans predominated; they created works of art, collections, attractions and interiors. They also crossed paths and tempers, rubbed shoulders and frequented the same coffee shops. Above all, they vied for recognition and financial reward.

  GOLDEN AND SOHO SQUARES

  Building work in Soho got under way in the 1680s, with Golden and Soho Squares. From the beginning, Soho Square was the more successful, probably because, as Charles Dickens wrote, Golden Square ‘is not exactly in anybody’s way to or from anywhere’. William Blake was born near Golden Square; in 1809, there was an exhibition of his work in the upstairs room of his brother’s hosiery shop, on the square itself. It was entitled ‘Poetical and Historical Visions’. The Examiner sent someone along, but their review was less than favourable, saying of Blake ‘the poor man fancies himself a great master, and has painted a few wretched pictures, some of which are unintelligible allegory’.

  Soho Square was the second of the area’s squares and its most successful. It is a pleasant place, and Dickens describes it at the end of the Georgian period.

  There were few buildings then north of the Oxford Road, and forest trees flourished, and wild flowers grew, and the hawthorn blossomed in the now vanished fields. As a consequence, country airs circulated in Soho with a vigorous freedom instead of languishing into the parish like stray paupers without a settlement; and there was many a good south wall not far off on which the peaches ripened in their season.

  Perhaps this country air, as well as access to open space, was one of the things which made the Soho Academy so successful. Founded in 1718 by Martin Clare, it was one of the premier London boarding and day schools of the eighteenth century. The pupils were from families of a more commercial bent than the academics who were at home at Westminster School. The boys were there to be ‘fitted for business’ and ‘taught mathematics, geography, French, drawing, dancing and fencing, and there were weekly lectures on morality, religion and natural and experimental philosophy’. In 1736, the school passed to Cuthbert Barwis, who added ‘theatricals’ to the school’s repertoire, for which it became famous. James Boswell sent his second son to the Soho Academy, noting:

  … he is quite my companion though only eleven in September. He goes in the day to the Academy in Soho Square kept by the Rev. Dr. Barrow, formerly of Queen’s College, Oxford, a coarse north-countryman, but a very good scholar; and there my boy is very well taught.

  The theme of scientific learning in the square continued when Joseph Banks moved there and held the first meeting of the Royal Institution in his drawing room, on 7 March 1799.

  Soho Square may have been perfumed by a countryside breeze, but from the middle of the century more exotic winds were blowing in residents such as Mrs Teresa Cornelys. She had been born Anna Maria Teresa Imer in Venice two years before Giacomo Casanova, and they knew each other as children – both the offspring of theatrical families. By the time she arrived in Soho Square, around 1760, she had her seven-year-old daughter, Sophie, in tow. Casanova was Sophie’s father. Teresa moved into Carlisle House, on the east side of Soho Square, and began to give parties, having determined ‘that the most extensive, most opulent, and most important City in Europe was the only one of note that had not a settled Entertainment for the select reception and amusement of the Nobility and Gentry’. These parties were lavish, and entry was by ticket only. She created an immediate vogue amongst the fashionable set. Often, the parties were masques, adding an air of Venetian glamour. The rooms of Carlisle House were decorated opulently on different themes, and she employed the best musicians available – from Johann Christian Bach to Marylebone’s Stephen Storace.

  Teresa Cornelys was very good at persuading people to pay to attend her parties; to this end, she gave parties for footmen and ladies’ maids, in the hope that they would recommend the establishment to their employers.

  On Saturday last, [18 February 1763] Mrs. Cornelys gave a ball at Carlisle House, to the upper servants of persons of fashion, as a token of the sense she had of her obligations to the nobility and gentry, for their generous subscription to her assembly. The company consisted of 220 persons who made up fourscore couples in country dances and as scarcely anybody was idle on this occasion, the rest sat down to cards.

  The entertainments at the house continued for over a decade, but Teresa was spending more than she was bringing in; spells in debtors’ prison loomed. And by now there were many who disapproved of her parties. Horace Walpole, prolific letter writer and arbiter of taste, was not taken in by Teresa’s crafty ways. When she held an unlicensed opera and tried to pretend that the box office would buy coals for the poor, Walpole remarked, ‘I concluded she would open a bawdy house next for the interests of the Foundling Hospital.’ But he said it wouldn’t happen, as he knew she wouldn’t want the hard work of making so many beds.

  In 1772, Carlisle House closed and the furnishings were sold to help pay Teresa’s debts. She was imprisoned for an outstanding amount and was in and out of custody over the coming years. She even escaped from the King’s Bench Prison during the Gordon Riots but was recaptured in the August, dying in The Fleet of breast cancer, aged seventy-four.

  At the height of Teresa’s success, in 1760, one of Soho and London’s most flamboyant characters was a child in Soho Square. William Beckford was born at Number 22, now known as 1 Greek Street. His father had twice been Lord Mayor of London, and was a good citizen. Wishing to secure the best education for his son, he engaged the nine-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to tutor the five-year-old William during Mozart’s visit to London. Mozart stayed nearby, at 21 Dean Street.

  Mr Beckford died when William was only ten years old, and the boy inherited a fortune of one million pounds in cash, land at Fonthill in Wiltshire, and four plantations in Jamaica. This was unimaginable wealth, comparable with the greatest oil fortunes of modern times. Beckford married at twenty-two; though fond of his wife, he was a frequenter of the Lincoln’s Inn bog-house and the parade grounds, where he looked for sexual diversion. On 18 February 1813, he recorded a memorable daydream in which he was carried off by ‘some great Jock’ of a soldier. His acceptance of his own sexuality, coupled with the insulation provided by his vast wealth, made him complacent. He fell in love with the young William Courtenay but his love letters fell into the hands of Courtenay’s uncle, who chose to publish them in the newspapers from October to December 1784. William had no choice but to take his wife and daughter to the Continent. His wife died in childbirth in Switzerland, in 1786, aged twenty-four. That year he wrote Vathek, one of the great Gothic novels. It was an instant bestseller.

  Mozart’s appearance in London as advertised in the Oxford Journal, 23 February 1765

  On the Continent, Beckford honed the collecting prowess that has won him fame with every generation of antiquarians since. He returned home, a lonely man, and was living like a recluse at Fonthill, which he rebuilt as a vast Gothic pile. The critic William Hazlitt condemned it as ‘a desert of magnificence, a glittering waste of laborious idleness’.

  Yet Beckford’s art collection at Fonthill contained works by Raphael, Lippi, Bellini and Velasquez. He commissioned work by the finest silversmiths of the day, such as Benjamin Smith and Paul Storr, and bought early works from Turner and Blake. Unbelievably, he began to run short of money. In 1822, he put Fonthill and the contents up for sale. Christies printed over 70,000 copies of the catalogue and sold them for a guinea apiece. It was the sale of the century. London went mad for it, and there was not a room at an inn for miles around Fonthill during the sale. Beckford died
in Bath, in 1844, still daydreaming and writing. Fonthill, his ambitious folly, collapsed and his collection is now dispersed amongst many of the great museums and collections of the world. His presence in London was not physical, but his influence upon it through his sexuality, his literature and his taste was remarkable.

  As Beckford left Soho Square, another memorable resident arrived. Thomas De Quincey fled his school in Manchester and came to London, aged seventeen. Homeless, he gained access to an empty house on Greek Street and there found a frightened girl. He thought she might be ‘ten years old; but she seemed hunger-bitten, and sufferings of that sort often make children look older than they are’. The child was elated to have someone to share the dark hours with her, and De Quincey paints a stark picture of what it was like: ‘from the want of furniture, the noise of the rats made a prodigious echoing on the spacious staircase and hall; and amidst the real fleshly ills of cold and, I fear, hunger, the forsaken child had found leisure to suffer still more (it appeared) from the self-created one of ghosts’. At night they slept together, she ‘tolerably warm’ and he in what he called his ‘dog-sleep’, constantly waking up from fear. The girl was a servant for the tenant of the house. He did not live there, but attended in the day to get her to clean his shoes or run errands. His business had failed and he did not dare live at the house full time, yet did not want to take the girl with him to his own lodgings. Perhaps there was not enough room, perhaps he didn’t want to pay her.

  De Quincey left the house shortly afterwards, but the memory of the little girl remained with him: ‘she was neither pretty, nor quick in understanding, nor remarkably pleasing in manners … I loved the child because she was my partner in wretchedness.’ Soon, to quell the pains of his hunger, the seventeen-year-old De Quincey turned to opium, bought from the chemist at 173 Oxford Street. His only companion during this time was Ann, a fifteen-year-old prostitute. They wandered the streets together as she plied her business, or sometimes he ‘rested with her on steps and under the shelter of porticoes’. One day, he collapsed in a doorway in Soho Square. He realized he had to leave London and return to his family. Ann walked with him towards the coach, but in Golden Square they sat ‘not wishing to part in the tumult and blaze of Piccadilly’. He remembered how she