by Leo Damrosch
Swift was always critical of conventional female timorousness. In A Letter to a Young Lady, on Her Marriage he commented, exactly as the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft later would, “There should seem to be something very capricious, that when women profess their admiration for a colonel or a captain on account of his valour, they should fancy it a very graceful, becoming quality in themselves to be afraid of their own shadows; to scream in a barge when the weather is calmest, or in a coach at the ring; to run from a cow at an hundred yards distance; to fall into fits at the sight of a spider, an earwig, or a frog.” Stella was admirable for being altogether different:
For Stella never learned the art
At proper times to scream and start,
Nor calls up all the house at night,
And swears she saw a thing in white.44
It’s notable that no mention is made in these accounts of trauma or remorse at having killed a man. And indeed in shooting him Stella was entirely within her rights, for as a legal manual stated, “Man’s home or habitation is so far protected by the law that if any person attempts to break open a house in the nighttime, and shall be killed in such attempt, the slayer shall be acquitted and discharged.”45
CHAPTER 6
London
BUILDING BOOM
Swift adored London, with its endless variety and turbulent energy. In 1700 it was the largest city in Europe, with a population of six hundred thousand. That was three times as many people as in Shakespeare’s day, and one-tenth of all the inhabitants of England. The London Shakespeare had known, less than a century earlier, was gone. In the Great Fire of 1666, four-fifths of the city center had been demolished, including the medieval St. Paul’s Cathedral. Its stones, the diarist John Evelyn said, “flew like grenados, the melting lead running down the streets in a stream, and the very pavements glowing with fiery redness.”1
A year later, a poet captured the sense of astounding loss:
The city now is the once-city’s tomb,
A skeleton of fleshless bones become.
Its venerable ruins have the name
Of what it was, but little else the same.2
An immense rebuilding campaign was soon under way, and continued for decades. Sir Christopher Wren’s new St. Paul’s wasn’t finished until 1710, thirty-five years after construction began. Wren and others proposed razing the tortuous old streets and alleys, replacing them with broad avenues on the continental model, but those plans were defeated by legal wrangling over property boundaries. In the end, new houses occupied pretty much the same spaces as the old. To the west of the burned zone, however, there were still empty fields, and development went forward energetically. All the time that Swift was in London, new buildings were going up and elegant squares taking shape.
24. St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1695. The upper sections, including the great dome, are yet to be constructed.
London was divided into three regions. To the west, Westminster was the site of the court, once dominant but now yielding to the financial “City” to the east. In between was the sophisticated “polite” world, commonly referred to as “the Town.”3 Swift lived in various lodgings in that zone.
The 1695 map shown here (figure 25) is full of interest. Some familiar landmarks were already in existence (though not identified on this map), such as the Tower of London and St. Paul’s. Westminster, with its abbey and Houses of Parliament, was separated from the rest of the city by open fields. Names that today identify stations on the Underground—Earls Court, Kensington, Knightsbridge, Paddington, Marylebone, Tottenham Court—appear on the map as isolated villages. Shepherds still tended sheep at Shepherds Bush, and people still gathered nuts on Notting Hill (“Noding Hill” on the map). Hampstead, with its hill and heath, lay far off to the north, and Chelsea, from which Swift would later walk through the fields into London, was a hamlet to the west.
25. Part of Middlesex County, 1695.
The spaces between the outlying towns were being rapidly filled in. “We see several villages,” Defoe wrote in 1724, “formerly standing as it were in the country and at a great distance, now joined to the streets by continued buildings, and more making haste to meet in the like manner.” But the countryside was still close by, and as Macaulay says, “He who then rambled to what is now the gayest and most crowded part of Regent Street found himself in a solitude, and was sometimes so fortunate as to have a shot at a woodcock.”4
London Bridge, lined on both sides with houses and shops, was the only bridge over the Thames. To cross the river elsewhere, people hired watermen with rowboats. Sailing ships came right up to the city, docking below the bridge because the spaces between its piers were low and narrow. Small boats could get through, but that was perilous, since the current narrowed and speeded up. You could drown there. Swift had learned to swim at Kilkenny, but at the time few people knew how.
26. Part of central London, 1720.
Detailed city maps began to be produced, but were often unreliable, and even with a map it was hard to find your way, since houses weren’t numbered and there were no street signs. Even if there had been signs, you would still need local knowledge—there were no fewer than fourteen King Streets scattered all over the city, and you would have to explain that you meant King Street near St. Anne’s Church, or King Street in Covent Garden, or King Street by Bloomsbury Square, or one of the eleven other King Streets. Only hackney coachmen, like taxi drivers today, really knew their way around.5
A 1720 map of St. James’s parish shows a section of London that Swift knew well, and would recognize immediately if he could see it today (figure 26). Covent Garden, Charing Cross, and Scotland Yard are all shown. But there have been plenty of changes as well. There was a market then at Covent Garden, but not the neoclassical arcades that went up in 1830; there was a Piccadilly, but no Piccadilly Circus. And facing St. Martin’s in the Fields were stables called “the Great Mews,” on the site now occupied by the National Gallery and Trafalgar Square.
Street names often embody associations that are now forgotten. Piccadilly was named for Elizabethan ruffs called pickadillies that were once sold there. Rotten Row alongside Hyde Park was more recent, created during Swift’s time by King William III. It was originally known as the Route du Roi, the king’s road. Naturally enough, street names often denoted trades practiced there. Another section of the 1720 map shows a Love Lane, which was a euphemistic revision of the original Gropecunt Lane.6
STREET LIFE
London was alive with bustle and noise. “The full tide of human existence,” Johnson later said, “is at Charing Cross.” On another occasion he could have been speaking for Swift: “You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” In 1729 a writer tried to reduce the teeming goings-on to alphabetical order and came up with thirty-seven entries for just the letter A, including Accidents, Accusations, Adulteries, Affidavits, Affronts, Aggravations, Agonies, Alarms, Allurements, Amours, Animosities, and Assignations.7
If London was exciting, it was also intimidating. Anyone who may feel nostalgic about town houses filled with Queen Anne furniture should note a historian’s description: “There was an edge to life in the eighteenth-century which is hard for us to recapture. In every class there is the same taut neurotic quality—the fantastic gambling and drinking, the riots, brutality and violence, and everywhere and always a constant sense of death.” A recent book provides a needed breath of bad air: Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England, 1600–1770.8
Street life was aggressive. Carts and wagons were dangerous, herds of livestock pushed past pedestrians, and since there were no sidewalks, it was impossible to avoid the traffic and the dirt. That was why bullies went close to the walls of buildings while everyone else had to give way. Johnson recalled his mother’s account of London back in Swift’s day: “There were two sets of people, those who gave the wall and those who took it, th
e peaceable and the quarrelsome. When I returned to Lichfield after having been in London, my mother asked me whether I was one of those who gave the wall, or those who took it.”9
These aspects of experience are captured by the artist Swift called “humorous Hogart” (“Thou, I hear, a pleasant rogue art”).10 Among other things, Hogarth’s engraving The Second Stage of Cruelty is a reminder that the streets were crowded with animals. A horse has stumbled, overturning the coach it was pulling, and a group of lawyers is trying to emerge. Even though the horse’s foreleg is broken, the coachman is flogging it. In the foreground a flock of sheep is being driven to market, and the owner is brutally beating one that has collapsed. Just beyond him, a small boy is being crushed by a heavy wagon whose driver has dozed off, oblivious to the beer gushing from an open barrel. In the middle distance, a donkey is struggling to carry a huge load and two men as well. Further away, a dog is baiting a bull, abetted by an excited crowd, and the bull has just tossed a boy into the air. The only sympathetic figure is the man by the horse’s head, taking down the number of the coach so he can report the abusive coachman.
27. William Hogarth, The Second Stage of Cruelty (1751).
There was a good deal of crime; the city offered anonymity and many places to hide. Forty years after Swift was there, Henry Fielding, writing in his capacity as a magistrate, called London “a vast wood or forest, in which a thief may harbor with as great security as wild beasts do in the deserts of Africa or Arabia.” But it is easy to exaggerate the element of threat. So far as we know Swift was never robbed, and he always went about on foot. He loved walking, and it saved money, since coaches and sedan chairs were expensive (a shilling an hour for an enclosed chair carried by two men).11
Swift was captivated by the human comedy in the streets; he said that a display at Charing Cross “where painted monsters are hung out” held him “fastened by the eyes.” He also had a fine ear for the way people talked. “A mountebank in Leicester Fields had drawn a huge assembly about him. Among the rest, a fat unwieldy fellow, half stifled in the press, would be every fit [repeatedly] crying out, ‘Lord! what a filthy crowd is here! Pray, good people, give way a little. Bless me! what a devil has raked this rabble together? Zounds, what squeezing is this! Honest friend, remove your elbow.’”12
On one occasion Swift was impressed by a diorama on rollers that scrolled through a wide landscape, though he claimed to be ashamed of bothering with it: “I went to see a famous moving picture, and I never saw anything so pretty. You see a sea ten miles wide, a town on t’other end, and ships sailing in the sea and discharging their cannon. You see a great sky with moon and stars etc. I’m a fool.” Buried in Swift’s account books is an entry showing that he paid 1 shilling, 4 pence to view “dwarfs.” Some of these sights perhaps suggested elements of Gulliver’s Travels: in addition to dwarves, there were giants, performing animals, miniature buildings, and clockwork automata. When the giant king of Brobdingnag “saw me walk erect, before I began to speak, [he] conceived I might be a piece of clockwork.”13
All his life Swift had a low threshold of disgust, and despite his fascination with city life, there was plenty to be disgusted by. London stank. A poem by his friend John Gay, Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London, is full of revolting smells. Walking the streets, one might manage to keep one’s feet out of the mud mixed with excrement, but there was no escaping the smell of fat and “train oil” (from whale blubber) being rendered for candles, or rotting meat and fish on open stalls.
Here steams ascend
That, in mixed fumes, the wrinkled nose offend.
Where chandlers cauldrons boil, where fishy prey
Hide the wet stall, long absent from the sea;
And where the cleaver chops the heifer’s spoil,
And where huge hogsheads sweat with trainy oil,
Thy breathing nostril hold.14
Chamber pots were supposed to be emptied into the carts of “night soil men,” but often they were just dumped in the street. A privy was known as the “house of office,” or sometimes the “house of ease,” after the French lieu d’aisance—hence the modern British “loo.” Pepys mentions an unpleasant surprise when he went down to his cellar and “put my foot into a great heap of turds, by which I find that Mr. Turner’s house of office is full and comes into my cellar, which doth trouble me.” Worst of all was the appalling effluent known as Fleet Ditch, an urban river that was effectively an open sewer that flowed into the Thames. Defoe described it as “a nauseous and abominable sink of public nastiness.”15
URBAN ANTI-PASTORAL
During his London years Swift wrote two splendid anti-pastorals. In 1709 he published a little poem called A Description of the Morning, and his friend Richard Steele commented accurately that “he has run into a way perfectly new, and described things exactly as they happen.” The poem is a succession of snapshots of a city waking up:
Now hardly here and there an hackney coach
Appearing, showed the ruddy morn’s approach.
Now Betty from her master’s bed had flown,
And softly stole to discompose her own.
The slipshod prentice from his master’s door
Had pared the dirt, and sprinkled round the floor.
Now Moll had whirled her mop with dext’rous airs,
Prepared to scrub the entry and the stairs.
There’s tongue-in-cheek irony as the housemaid Betty rumples her bed to make it look slept in, an allusion to Aurora, goddess of dawn, who blushes emerging from the sea where she’s been with her lover. Swift is remembering Dryden’s translation of Virgil: “Now rose the ruddy morn from Tithon’s bed.”16
The hackneys were ubiquitous, the equivalent of modern taxis; eight hundred of them plied the narrow streets. Paving stones were bumpy and the coaches had stiff suspensions; a German visitor complained that they “jolt most terribly.” Pepys, forty years earlier, was more explicit, coming home in pain “from my riding a little uneasily tonight (for my testicles) in the coach.”17
There was no provision for street cleaning, so each householder had to clear the area directly in front of his door, moving the dirt out into the traffic. Sprinkling helped to keep the dust down. As daylight broadens, noise increases:
The small-coal man was heard with cadence deep,
Till drowned in shriller notes of “Chimney sweep;”
Duns at his Lordship’s gate began to meet,
And brickdust Moll had screamed through half the street.
Chimney sweeps were shrill because they were young boys, the only people small enough to clamber through narrow, winding chimneys. Hawkers needed to be loud, to be heard over the racket of wheels on cobblestones and pigs grunting and squealing. Pigs were welcome since they devoured street garbage, but they inspired a saying, “He that loves noise must buy a pig.”18
In Swift’s mock pastoral, the hawkers’ cries are an equivalent to rural birdsong. A foreign visitor commented, “The curious tones that they call or sing can be freakishly imitated on the violin.” Joseph Addison wrote a playful essay about their musical qualities—“Nor can I forbear being inspired with a most agreeable melancholy, when I hear that sad and solemn air with which the public is often asked if they have any chairs to mend.”19
28. Mackerel seller. She is slightly better off than the desperately poor, but still living hand to mouth, with shabby clothes that have been mended repeatedly.
Swift didn’t always appreciate the cries. A couple of years after this poem, he wrote to Stella, “Here is a restless dog crying ‘Cabbages’ and ‘Savoys’ plagues me every morning about this time, he is now at it, I wish his largest cabbage was sticking in his throat.” (The Savoy, still eaten today, was a particularly good kind of cabbage.) At other times it amused him to put the cries into verse, extolling, for instance, the aphrodisiac property of oysters:
Charming oysters I cry,
My masters, come buy;
So plump and so fresh,
No Colchester oyster
Is sweeter and moister;
Your stomach they settle,
And rouse up your mettle,
They’ll make you a dad
Of a lass or a lad.20
The “small coal” that Swift mentions in A Description of the Morning, cheap because it came in little scraps, had become the principal fuel in London. A foreign visitor admired St. Paul’s but regretted that only thirteen years after it was inaugurated “it is already so black with coal smoke that it has lost half its elegance.” Decades earlier, John Evelyn was already complaining of “pernicious smoke, superinducing a sooty crust or fur upon all that it lights, and corroding the very iron bars and hardest stone with those piercing and acrimonious spirits which accompany its sulfur.”21 The duns in Swift’s poem are hanging about in hopes of getting a nobleman to pay his debts, notoriously difficult to do. As for what “brickdust Moll” had for sale, no one has been able to figure out what that was for.
The poem ends with three more urban types, described with similar clarity:
The turnkey now his flock returning sees,
Duly let out a-nights to steal for fees.
The watchful bailiffs take their silent stands,
And schoolboys lag with satchels in their hands.22
In the world of pastoral, a shepherd would be sending out his flock to graze; the jailer’s flock is just coming home from a different kind of grazing. The prisoners would pay him for privileges in jail, and he would let them out at night to get hold of the money. The bailiffs know this, of course, and are waiting to intercept them and get a piece of the action. Meanwhile, living in a different time frame, the schoolboys are as reluctant as at any other period in history.
Swift’s London was boisterous and noisy, but he never described the seamier regions, as an irrepressible journalist named Ned Ward did in The London Spy: “By this time we were come to Billingsgate, and in a narrow lane, as dark as a burying-vault, which stunk of stale sprats, piss and sirreverence [excrement], we groped about like a couple of thieves in a coal-hole. . . . At last we stumbled upon the threshold of a gloomy cavern where, at a distance, we saw lights burning like candles in a haunted cave where ghosts and goblins keep their midnight revels.” An inebriated woman asks him to join her for a drink, and when he cheerfully agrees, she exclaims, “Why, then, here’s a health to mine arse, and a fart for those that owe no money!” Ward relished the argot of the streets: a “bumsitter” was a prostitute, a “deadmonger” an undertaker, a “fuddle-cup” a drunk, and a “Posture Moll” a prostitute specializing in flagellation.23
