The Great Frost Fair of 1814
by M.M. Bennetts
Boxing Day, 1813. Like a blanket of lambswool, heavy fog lay over southern England as the temperature plummeted.
That afternoon, piled into two travelling carriages, the Foreign Secretary, Viscount Castlereagh, and his family had drawn away from their house in St. James’s Square, heading for Colchester in Essex on their way to Harwich from which they were to depart for the Continent. As his niece wrote, they left London “in a fog so intense, that the carriages went at a foot’s pace, with men holding flambeaux at the head of the horses.”
Though deep frosts, gales, and deeper snows, blizzards even, had marked the last decade of the old century, the cruel bite of this mini-Ice Age had seemed to lessen in the opening years of the 19th century. Though Boxing Day three years previous had seen such severe temperatures that the Thames had frozen as Londoners huddled inside their houses, trying to keep warm.
A heavy frost began the next day, 27 December 1813, followed by two days of a continuous heavy snowfall—the heaviest recorded snowfall for nearly 300 years. The upper reaches of the Thames froze too.
A day later came a slight thaw, and the ice at Wey Bridge began to break up and to float downstream, only to crash and jam into a jagged and solid mass—like some scene from the Polar icecap—between Blackfriars and London Bridges.
And the frost returned, harder and colder than previously—probably due to the covering of deep snow that coated the land. The fog too still hung heavy over London, stranding travellers, slowing or halting the mails, while great ice floes continued to break off and to drift down the waterway.
By the 30th, the fog had finally cleared—whipped off by a Northerly gale.
But by now, the tidal stretch of the Thames had frozen so solid that people were walking across the river to the other bank. And the watermen, unable to make a living rowing people across the water, demanded a toll of these brave pedestrians.
And still the cold held, gripping the land as the temperatures continued several degrees below freezing. By 4 January 1814, the Great Frost Fair had begun.
Stalls and tents, decorated with “flags of all nations, streamers and signs” began appearing on the ice to create what they called “City Road”, among them kitchens or rapidly constructed “furnaces” selling roasted geese, lamb, rabbits, and sausages to the public. Gin and beer were also on sale.
In the middle of the river, a marooned barge was converted into a “dancing room”.
Contemporary accounts from The Annual Register and Hone’s Every Day Book provide the most vivid and wonderful stories of the winter in London that year and of the Fair itself.
21 January 1814: “In London the great accumulation of snow already heaped on the ground, and condensed by three or four weeks of continued frost, was on Wednesday increased by a fresh fall, to a height hardly known in the memory of the oldest inhabitants. The cold has been intensely severe, the snow during the last fall being accompanied with a sharp wind and a little moisture. In many places, where the houses are old, it became necessary to relieve the roofs, by throwing off the load collected upon them, and by these means the carriage-way in the middle of the streets is made of a depth hardly passable for pedestrians, while carriages with difficulty plough their way through the mass.”
27 January 1814: “Yesterday the wind having veered round to the south-west, the effects of thaw were speedily discernible. The fall of the river at London Bridge has for several days past presented a scene both novel and interesting. At the ebbing of the tide huge fragments of ice were precipitated down the stream with great violence, accompanied by a noise equal to the report of a small piece of artillery. On the return of the tide they were forced back again; but the obstacles opposed to their passage through the arches were so great as apparently to threaten a total stoppage to the navigation of the river.”
1 February 1814: “The Thames between Blackfriars and London Bridges continued to present the novel scene of persons moving on the ice in all directions and in greatly increased numbers. The ice, however, from its roughness and inequalities is totally unfit for amusement, although we observed several booths erected upon it for the sale of small wares, but the publicans and spirit-dealers were most in the receipt of custom.
“The whole of the river opposite Queenhithe was frozen over, and in some parts the ice was several feet thick, while in others it was dangerous to venture upon, notwithstanding which, crowds of foot passengers crossed backwards and forwards throughout the whole of the day. We did not hear of any lives being lost, but many who ventured too far towards Blackfriars Bridge were partially immersed in the water by the ice giving way. Two coopers were with difficulty saved.”
2 February 1814: “The Thames this day presented a complete frost fair. The grand mall or walk extended from Blackfriars to London Bridge. This was named the city road, and was lined on each side by persons of all descriptions. Eight or ten printing-presses were erected, and numerous pieces commemorative of the ‘great frost’ were printed on the ice.”
3 February 1814: “The number of adventurers increased. Swings, book-stalls, dancing in a barge, suttling-booths, playing at skittles, and almost every appendage of a fair on land appeared on the Thames. Thousands flocked to the spectacle. The ice presented a most picturesque appearance. The view of St. Paul’s and of the city, with the white foreground, had a very singular effect; in many parts mountains of ice upheaved, resembled the rude interior of a stone quarry.”
4 February 1814: “Each day brought a fresh accession of pedlars to sell their wares, and the greatest rubbish of all sorts was raked up and sold at double and treble the original cost. The watermen profited exceedingly, for each person paid a toll of twopence or threepence before he was admitted to the fair; and something also was expected for permission to return. Some of them were said to have taken as much as six pounds in a day. Many persons remained on the ice till late at night, and the effect by moonlight was singularly novel and beautiful. The bosom of the Thames seemed to rival the frozen climes of the north.”
Then, finally, on 5 February, an incoming tide brought about a sudden shifting in the mass of ice.
Booths which had only a few hours previously been secure were suddenly floating downstream and several people had to be rescued from the broken-off floes. Further down, the great jagged floes crashed into ships and boats, damaging them.
By 7 February, the sensational event was finished: “The ice between London Bridge and Blackfriars gave way yesterday, in consequence of the high tides. On Saturday, thousands of people walked on the ice from one bridge to the other notwithstanding there were evident signs of its speedy breaking up, and even early yesterday morning some foolhardy persons passed over from Bankside to Queenhithe. About an hour after this the whole mass gave way, and swept with a tremendous range through the noble arches of Blackfriars Bridge, carrying along with it all within its course, including about forty barges.
“The new erections for the Strand bridge impeded its progress and a vast quantity of the ice was there collected, but the strong current on the Somerset House side carried everything before it, and the passage of the river became at last free.”
Quite simply amazing, don’t you think?
Entertainment Tonight: Regency Style
by M.M. Bennetts
Imagine it. Outside the temperature had dropped so low that the Thames was freezing; hoar frost had coated, white and deep, the red-tiled roofs of London’s houses and churches. It was so bitter that even the city’s notorious foists had taken the night off—perhaps their fingers were too stiff with cold for pinching purses?
Yet from the large windows of one building at least—Covent Garden—a mellowed golden light shone out into the night and the sounds of a packed house of some 3000 people, all laughing, rose and fell. For inside, the cold forgot, the atmosphere rich
with the smell of orange peel and burning wax, the crowd were entranced by the new pantomime they’d all come to see—Harlequin Asmodeus or Cupid on Crutches.
Nor was it the first of that evening’s entertainments on Boxing Day 1810.
To begin there had been a performance of Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Then they had been treated to a tragedy, a dismal thing called George Barnwell. (The critic Hazlitt called it “a piece of wretched cant.”) And now, six hours into the evening’s entertainment, now, out came the clown they’d all been waiting for—Grimaldi, known to them all as “Joe”—about to fight a bout of fisticuffs with a pile of animated vegetables...or rather, a pile of vegetables which he had assembled into a kind of person which then, somehow, at the tap of a sword, had come to life.
Magic!
And the night was still young. For after the mock fight which would see Grimaldi chased off the stage by the vegetable man, would come the pantomime, Harlequin Asmodeus, with its traditional story—generally speaking, two lovers kept apart, usually by unspeakable rivals or cruel parents, but who find happiness in each other’s arms after the completion of a quest—and an equally traditional cast—Harlequin and his love, Columbine, and their enemies, the elderly miser, Pantaloon, and his servant, Clown.
It would be explicit, satirical, and energetic, and set against a background that would feature many of the common sights of the metropolis itself, all of which would be transformed by a touch of Harlequin’s wand into something different (by means of ingenious stagecraft)—just like the vegetable man—a sedan chair into a prison, for example.
Welcome to a night out at the theatre, Regency style.
London, during the early years of the 19th century, had three main theatres: Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and Sadler’s Wells in Islington. And during that period perhaps as many as 20,000 Londoners attended the theatre every night.
That number doesn’t include the various concert halls or pleasure gardens such as Vauxhall Gardens either. The Theatre Royal in Drury Lane and Covent Garden confined their “seasons” to the autumn and winter. Sadler’s Wells filled in the gap during the spring and summer.
Long programmes, as described above, especially those with grand, jaw-dropping spectacles—plays starring dogs, elephants, children, the lines between comedy and tragedy blurred—were the order of the day. And ever since war had broken out with France, there’d been a kind of national fervour on which the theatres played.
Reenactments of sea battles were especially popular—this was the day of the great hero, Lord Nelson, and all of England was navy-mad—so Sadler’s Wells staged a recreation of Nelson’s victory at the Nile called Naval Pillars. Later, they put on a recreation of the Franco-Spanish siege of Gibraltar—and for this, the management converted the theatre’s cellars and stage into a vast water-tank and had the replicas made of the fleet of ships, using a one inch to one foot scale, and working miniature cannon.
Nor were grand tableaux all that drew the oohs and ahs of the packed houses, all sitting there amid the atmosphere of orange-peels and smoke, heckling, cat-calling, and flirting, as other play-goers drifted in and out of their boxes or pushed onto the benches of the pit, all chatting and laughing during the long evenings’ performances.
Among the other great draws was William Betty, a thirteen year old boy, also known as Master Betty or the “Child of Nature” (he was very beautiful), who made his debut at Covent Garden on 1 December 1804 in the happily forgotten drama, Barbarossa. (He was paid fifty guineas a performance.)
Tickets for that first performance were sold out in seven minutes, the cavalry were called out to lift fainting women from the crowd in the Piazza and carry them to safety, and in the hours before his first entrance, the audience had been roaring. Then he came on and an absolute hush fell over the auditorium.
Master Betty appeared at both Covent Garden and Drury Lane, went on to play Romeo, then Richard III and even Hamlet, and the audiences were wild for him with women fainting and crying...all of which lasted until his voice broke a couple of years later. (The tragedienne, Sarah Siddons, managed to be out of town or otherwise engaged for most of his London run.)
The downside to all this excitement, of course, was fire.
In the early hours of 20 September 1808, smoke and flame were seen coming from the Theatre Royal at Covent Garden. But by the time the Phoenix Fire Company arrived, the interior was already destroyed. Twenty-three people died in the fire, many of them the firefighters, and the adjacent homes were also destroyed. John Philip Kemble, its owner, had lost everything.
But raising money, Kemble saw the foundation stone for a new Theatre Royal laid by the Prince Regent in December and the theatre reopened on 18 September 1809. To riots.
For Kemble and his financiers had decided that in order to pay for the rebuild, they’d put up the price of seats. Until after two months of riots—where insignias marked with OP for Old Prices were worn by growing numbers of Londoners—they gave way and brought back the lower fees.
But not far away, Drury Lane was levelled by fire on 24 February 1809 while its proprietor, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, watched from the window of the House of Commons. The theatre where Mrs. Siddons had captivated audiences was no more. And because of his own financial instability, Sheridan was unable to raise the funds to rebuild, so it didn’t reopen for another three years....
And theatre itself was in a kind of a revolution, as the stilted declamatory style and tragic poses of 18th century actors gave way to a more natural, more intimate performance, such as that of Edmund Kean, changing old style caricatures into authentic, credible characters. Kean opened his London stage career on 26 January 1814, playing Shylock to a packed house at Drury Lane and doing nothing as it had been done for the past hundred years.
Kean’s Shylock was a human being, a man of genuine emotion—the critics were wowed, the audience stunned. His subsequent performances as Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear transformed performance. Previously, many of these Shakespearean tragedies had only been performed in their Bowdlerised versions—think King Lear with rhyming couplets and a happy ending.
And in between the tragedies featuring Kean, or the comedies which showed off a long-legged Mrs. Jordan in breeches-roles, the entr’acte ballets with their lovely limbed female dancers drew the young men of the pit, all ogling and hoping for more than a glimpse of ankle or perhaps a tryst arranged in the Green Room.
All this, and Grimaldi’s antics too—a walking, tumbling, leaping, bawdy, animated version of a Rowlandson or Gilray cartoon.
Victorian Era (1837-1901)
The Victorian Technological Revolution: Transportation
by Gary Inbinder
The Victorian era (1837-1901) was a period of great technological progress, especially in the industrialized West. Consider the lives of the average Europeans—country folk, townspeople, or city-dwellers—between 1600 and 1800, and the changes won’t seem that dramatic. On the other hand, the difference between 1800 and 1900 was profound.
In the fields of transportation and communication, progress that had plodded along for centuries kicked into high gear in the 19th century, especially following the Napoleonic Wars. Steamships replaced sail, cutting the trans-Atlantic crossing from weeks to days. Railways reduced a day’s journey to hours. The telegraph—and later the telephone and wireless—made communications over long distances instantaneous.
I’m in my early sixties, so I’ve lived through a period roughly equivalent in time to Queen Victoria’s reign, and I’ve seen many changes. Take just one example. I remember our family’s first television, a twelve-inch, black and white console. You had the choice of five channels: the three networks and two local stations. We had a rabbit-ear antenna that, to put it mildly, didn’t produce the best reception, and my father was constantly changing burned out vacuum tubes, fiddling with the controls, and experime
nting with different antennae.
The set lasted a few years before it gave up the ghost and we lived without TV for a couple of years before replacing it. Fast forward, and consider the progress—solid state circuitry, color, ever larger screens, computerization, cable and direct TV, hundreds of channels from which to choose, high definition flat screens, and all the bells and whistles of contemporary home entertainment. That will give you some idea of the sort of technological change the Victorians experienced between the 1830s and the turn of the last century.
The complete story of Victorian technological progress far exceeds the scope of this post; therefore, I’ll limit myself to a brief overview of some major improvements in transportation and communications.
Sail to Steam
Steamboats and steamships first appeared in the early nineteenth century, but their rapid development and dominance is associated with the Victorian era. In 1838 the steamers Great Western and Sirius raced across the Atlantic, establishing the Blue Riband competition for the fastest trans-Atlantic passage by passenger ships. Sirius crossed first, in eighteen days, about twenty-two days better than the average for a sailing packet.
However, Great Western left England four days after Sirius and almost caught her, arriving in New York just one day after her rival. The competition stiffened when Samuel Cunard entered the picture. In 1840 his first ship, the Britannia, crossed the Atlantic from Liverpool to Halifax, Nova Scotia in a record eleven days and four hours. While the increased speed was impressive, Charles Dickens, who crossed the Atlantic on the Britannia, was not enthusiastic about the accommodations:
Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors Page 58
