Georgian London: Into the Streets

by Lucy Inglis

  The marbles were smaller pieces of the Arundel Marbles:

  … which had for that purpose been begged from his lordship … On the pulling down of Arundel-house, to make way for the street for that name, these, and several others of the damaged part of the collection, were removed to this place. Numbers were left on the ground, near the riverside, and overwhelmed with the rubbish brought from the foundation of the new church of St Paul’s.

  The main collection is now in the Ashmolean Museum, and it is extraordinary to think of such antiquities lying amongst the rubble of the ancient cathedral.

  Despite such highbrow entertainments and surroundings, Cuper’s was gaining a reputation: it was seedy, though, and old-fashioned. Nearby, Vauxhall Gardens were on the rise. Cuper’s would close in 1760, when the competition simply became too much. From then on, Vauxhall was the dominant London pleasure garden.

  Vauxhall was originally known as New Spring Gardens. Samuel Pepys visited, in 1662, and during the following century the gardens grew larger and more popular. In 1729, the gardens were taken over by Jonathan Tyers, a cultured man with big ideas. He paid for a twenty-year lease and introduced art, architecture and music. There were works by William Hogarth and Francis Hayman, and music by Handel. The Soho-based Huguenot sculptor Louis Roubiliac created the statue of Handel which stood in the gardens for years and is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Frederick, Prince of Wales, was an enthusiastic patron of the gardens and had his own pavilion built there amongst the fake ruins, arches and temples, which were added as the years went on.

  In 1785, the Tyers’ children were managing their father’s gardens. The gardens had become an impressive enterprise:

  … that substantial Brick Dwelling Houses called Spring Garden House, the Tap House and 36 other Dwelling Houses, Coach Houses, Stables, Out houses, Workshops, Sheds, Icehouse, Great Room, Orchestra, Covered Walks, open Walks, Ways, Passages, Pavilions, Boxes and Spring Gardens Yards, Pond and an Aquiduct to supply the said Pond from Vauxhall Creek.

  Much of the food served was grown locally. Borough Market sold both local fruit and vegetables, as well as produce brought in from Kent and Surrey. Southwark was famous for its melon pits and nurseries, where exotic fruit such as pineapples were grown. An article in the London World during 1755 mentions that, ‘Through the use of hothouses … every gardiner that used to pride himself in an early cucumber, can now raise a pineapple.’ Andrew Moffett’s ‘Pinery’ on Grange Road in Southwark, stocked ‘Fruiting and Succession Plants’ of the sweetest sort, guaranteed ‘free of Insects’. By February 1798, any problems with the surrounding environment had clearly been overcome, as Mr William North, at his Nursery near the Asylum in Lambeth, Surrey, was advertising new forms of dwarf broccoli above his pineapple plants in the Morning Chronicle.

  The gardens had been known as ‘Vauxhall’ for years; from 1785 onwards, they were officially renamed as such. The gardens entered an extended heyday which lasted into the Victorian period. They were often

  … splendidly illuminated at night with about 15,000 glass lamps. These being tastefully hung among the trees, which line the walks, produce an impression similar to that which is called up on reading some of the stories in the Arabian Nights Entertainments. On some occasions there have been upwards of 19,000 persons in them, and this … with the illuminated walks, add not a little to the brilliant and astonishing effect of the whole scene.

  Vauxhall Gardens were London’s biggest nightclub. Music and copious amounts of alcohol were served up in glittering surroundings, with just enough dark corners. The fun faded out around 1840, when music halls became popular. The last event was held in 1859, when the fireworks picked out ‘Farewell For Ever’ in the night sky. Only a few years later, the abandoned gardens were eaten up by the expansion of Waterloo Station.

  DEBTORS’ PRISONS AND JACOB’S ISLAND

  Southwark and Lambeth were rural, and the existing infrastructure was largely medieval. As late as the 1780s, the only built-up areas were around the south end of London Bridge and a short way east into Bermondsey. Jacob’s Island was an old slum, sitting on the creek where trendy Shad Thames is now. The houses were, quite literally, rotting. Broken windows were patched with rags and paper, and the street in front was little more than a gutter. Many of the houses had communal lavatories which sat over the creek, making the whole area fetid and deeply unappealing at low tide. Multi-family occupation in each house was the standard, and children roamed barefoot.

  The knife-edge existence of the Jacob’s Island dwellers was compounded by the presence of four of London’s prisons just a stone’s throw away, near Borough High Street. The King’s Bench, the Marshalsea, the County Gaol and the House of Correction all sat on the east side of the street, housing hundreds of prisoners between them. The King’s Bench, connected to the court at Westminster, and the Marshalsea were debtors’ prisons, where men and women were held for periods of time, largely decided by their creditors.

  Before the Bankruptcy Act of 1869, imprisonment for even very small debts was common, and had been since the medieval period. The Marshalsea existed as early as 1294, and the King’s Bench around a century later. In the seventeenth century, attempts were made to stop debtors being imprisoned for small sums. But the attitude to debt amongst the population was severe, and it took until the reign of George III for a minimum threshold of forty shillings to be set. However, as soon as lawyers were involved, the threshold was breached – and then, as soon as the debtor was imprisoned, they lost the ability to repay the debt by earning. For ordinary people, it was a vicious circle.

  The prisons themselves were thriving private enterprises, and life for prisoners was expensive; food, clothing, laundry and even the cells themselves were all charged for at relatively high prices. Without friends, or some sort of charity, debtors could remain in these prisons for many years. Charles Dickens’ father was sent to the Marshalsea for debt, in 1824. The boy had to leave school and enter Warren’s Blacking Factory on the Hungerford Stairs. Dickens was lucky, though, as he was just old enough to work. Many children had to enter the prison with their parents. There, they became an additional burden, requiring food and clothing. Some inmates remained in the prisons all their lives, for owing small sums. Dickens recalled this part of his life through Amy ‘Little’ Dorrit.

  The King’s Bench and the Marshalsea were medieval buildings, ill equipped to deal with a growing number of prisoners. In the Marshalsea, in particular, if a prisoner was unable to afford the fee to dwell in one of the rooms on the Master’s Side of the prison, they were locked up in one of nine rooms on the Common Side, with up to 300 others. Women, if they could afford it, were housed in The Oak, otherwise they were in the Common Side with everyone else.

  In 1728, John Grano was a 34-year-old musician who had been working for Handel. He specialized mainly in music for the flute, but also played the trumpet. As a young man he lost his savings in the South Sea Bubble crash, and since then had struggled to make ends meet. In May 1728, he was imprisoned in the Marshalsea for owing £29 to an assortment of creditors. Inside the prison, he found a bar run by the governor’s wife, and a shop selling everyday essentials. There was a tailor and a barber. Sarah Bradshaw, a prisoner, was running a coffee shop, and there was a chophouse called Titty Doll’s, also run by a prisoner and his wife.

  Doll’s was named after the famous gingerbread seller Tiddy Doll, who patrolled Southwark Fair in the reign of George II. Doll was so well known that he appeared in Hogarth’s ‘Southwark Fair’. He could be found by his hat, with an enormous feather and gold lace banding, and his long sales chant, only two words of which could be made out: ‘Tiddy Doll’. People even dressed up as Tiddy Doll for fancy-dress parties, and James Gillray immortalized him in the cartoon ‘Tiddy-Doll the great French Gingerbread-Baker, drawing out a new Batch of Kings’. Tiddy Doll became a popular name for London eating houses. The last such one, in Shepherd Market, Mayfair, closed in the late 1990s.

  Although Marsh
alsea created a social structure which the prisoners and staff understood, by the mid-eighteenth century – and probably long before – it was always an unhappy place. The practice of ‘garnish’, or paying off prison bullies and the warders, was rife and stripped people already in debt of what little money they had. ‘Chummage’ was the term used for the social and financial hierarchy amongst the prisoners. Through garnish and chummage those on the Master’s Side could construct a tolerable existence for themselves. Life on the Common Side was desperate. In 1729, when John Grano left the Marshalsea, a Parliamentary Committee began to look into the situation in London’s prisons. What they found at the Marshalsea shocked London. Prisoners on the Common Side were routinely starved to death when they couldn’t pay for food. If they became rowdy or difficult, they were tortured with medieval instruments, such as thumbscrews. William Acton, prison governor, was tried for the murder of Thomas Bliss, an inmate, in addition to being suspected of the murder of three other prisoners. But the trial was weighted heavily in his favour, and he was found not guilty. The Parliamentary Committee had made people aware of what was happening, but it was powerless to introduce real change.

  The prison had become so decrepit by the end of the eighteenth century that, in 1811, it had to be rebuilt. The new quarters were still cramped, and many people continued to be imprisoned for very small debts, usually under £20. The same traditions of garnish and chummage carried on, as before. The Marshalsea remained a strange community, removed from daily life by the stigma and reality of debt, yet essentially a London neighbourhood, full of all social classes. In 1842, it was closed by an Act of Parliament, and the prisoners were dispersed throughout London gaols. But it remained a legend in the London consciousness, what Dickens described as ‘this right little, tight little island’.

  ST THOMAS’S AND GUY’S HOSPITALS

  At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Southwark was largely medieval. And yet, close to the rural pleasure gardens and the crumbling medieval prisons, new technologies were being put into practice.

  St Thomas’s Hospital was founded in the twelfth century and soon fell into a gentle cycle of update and disrepair. Writing on 2 December 1664, the diarist John Evelyn noted that part of the building was reserved for ‘such sick and wounded as should from time to time be sent from the [naval] Fleete’. A large-scale refurbishment was completed, in 1732, and from then on the numbers admitted each year rose from a few hundred into the thousands, housed in over ‘twenty wards … each under the care of a sister or female superintendent, and two or three nurses’. These wards included two for the treatment of venereal disease with mercury, also known as ‘salivation’, and the ‘cutting-ward’, as it was called. ‘Here also are the surgery, bathing-rooms, theatre, and dead-house, in which corpses are deposited until the time of interment.’

  Rapid advances were being made in medicine, and the approach was usually holistic, focusing as much on diet and well-being as symptoms. But doctors were becoming more sceptical about ‘alternative’ medicine. When the craze for homeopathy reached London in the early eighteenth century, one doctor, John Hogg, scoffed that to cure a brain fever, one might as well make ‘the patient drink out of the Thames, into which a glass of gin had been thrown an hour previous at London-bridge!’ Homeopathy was, however, very popular with ‘the softer sex’.

  John Birch, a doctor at St Thomas’s, began to experiment with electricity as a cure for various ailments, including nervous complaints. In 1803, he published his book on the subject, An Essay on the Medical Application of Electricity. In the introduction he acknowledged that it was, after all, ‘a bold experiment’, but he felt it was one that he, along with the instrument maker, Mr Banks of the Strand, had made safe enough. Under his guidance, electricity might be ‘with discretion, passed through the tender fabric of the brain’. Using an insulated chair, a Leyden jar and instruments made of brass and wood (one a pointer, one a ball), Birch conducted electricity through the body, ‘to the most exact nicety’. He treated a woman suffering from Bell’s palsy with electricity, a method still used now. Her condition improved dramatically, although it is an affliction which resolves itself spontaneously in most cases. He noted that ‘these cases are not uncommon’.

  Birch recalled how

  In the month of November, 1787, a porter at the India warehouses was sent to me by a lady of great humanity for advice, being in a state of melancholy, induced by the death of one of his children … He was quiet, would suffer his wife to lead him about the house, but he never spoke to her; he sighed frequently, and was inattentive to everything that passed.

  After three treatments with Birch, he became cheerful and returned to work. Encouraged by this apparent success with depression, Birch began to try large electric shocks on patients who were resident in asylums, including one 26-year-old man who was suffering from melancholy. He surprised himself, and the patient, by passing the strongest possible shock through the man’s brain three times. There was no improvement in the condition, and Birch said he had carried the experiment ‘as far as he wished’. He also experimented on reviving a working man who had tried to hang himself with a silk handkerchief, and was successful in reviving him. Birch felt his experiments at St Thomas’s had fallen on deaf ears, and he ended his Essay with this prophetic passage: ‘I own, I do still indulge the hope, that I shall live to see an electrical machine considered among the necessary instruments of every surgeon.’ That day would come, though it didn’t feature in the operating theatre installed in the herb garret of St Thomas’s Church on the hospital grounds, which can still be viewed today.

  Although Birch didn’t believe St Thomas’s took enough risks in adopting new methods, it was a successful and busy hospital. In the 1780s, the peak years of his experiments, St Thomas’s ‘admitted and discharged, of In-patients, 30,717 and Out-patients, 47,099’. The hospital was vast and would have been overburdened, had it not been for the vision of one of the early governors, Thomas Guy. In 1721, Guy decided to establish another hospital just behind St Thomas’s to cater for those who would need continual medical care for the rest of their lives.

  Thomas Guy was a Southwark-born bookseller who never married and lived simply: he ‘dined on his counter, with no other tablecloth than a newspaper’ and didn’t spend money on clothes. ‘At the age of seventy-six, he took a lease, of the governors of the former [Guy’s], of a piece of ground … [and] began to build the hospital which bears his name.’ Thomas Guy left over £200,000 to his new hospital, amassed by ‘his great success in the buying and selling of South Sea Stock, in the memorable year 1720; and also a vast sum by the sale of bibles’. As a contemporary commentator said, ‘He seems to have profited both of GOD and Mammon.’

  As the Georgian period progressed, the hospital expanded dramatically. In 1829, one benefactor, William Hunt, gave enough money for the capacity to be almost doubled. By that stage there were six physicians, two obstetricians, seven surgeons, eye and ear specialists and a dentist. The hospital had new teaching departments, including anatomy, pathology and chemistry, as well as the ‘electrifying-room’. Guy’s hospital continues to be famous for its dentistry, treating over 100,000 patients every year.

  RESURGAM HOMMO: THE LAMBETH BODYSNATCHERS

  London and Edinburgh were twin centres for medical teaching throughout the eighteenth century. Both cities struggled with the moral and practical issues of securing corpses for teaching purposes: ‘Great respect for the body of the dead has characterised mankind in nearly all ages.’ Italy’s medical students had been using human corpses since the fourteenth century. Thus, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, Italy was viewed as the place to study human anatomy, particularly at Padua university. In England, in 1541, Henry VIII handed control of dissection to the Guild of Barber-Surgeons, allowing them four bodies a year from the Tyburn gallows. Charles II increased this to six, in 1663.

  From around 1690, anatomy schools appeared in London, and began proliferating in the first half of the e
ighteenth century. As well as these private schools, the hospitals earned extra money by giving anatomy lessons, often using patients who had died friendless and ‘unclaimed’ on the wards. St Bartholomew’s and St Thomas’s both started early schools. The hospitals had a better chance of meeting their own demand for corpses to study, having wards full of poor people, but the private schools had to be more inventive. From the start of the eighteenth century, bodysnatching became a problem.

  The corpse had no legal status in England; it could not be stolen. But a fresh human corpse had a significant material value to the medical profession. This peak condition was a matter of a few days in winter and much less in the warmer months. In 1752, the medieval stigma that dissection was a form of punishment was reinforced when the statutory law came into place decreeing that all murderers would be subject to dissection, with the words ‘it is thereby become necessary that some further terror and peculiar infamy be added to the punishment of death’.

  Intimate knowledge of the human body, its possible variations from patient to patient, and the courage to act swiftly with a steady hand did not come easily. Natural revulsion at cutting into human flesh was compounded by popular sentiments about the sanctity of the body, particularly in death. Yet the would-be surgeon had to overcome this. In 1811, Fanny Burney recounted in a letter the story of her mastectomy following a diagnosis of breast cancer:

  I began a scream that lasted unintermittingly during the whole time of the incision … when again I felt the instrument - describing a curve - cutting against the grain … then felt the Knife tackling against the breast bone - scraping it!