London: The Biography

by Peter Ackroyd

The London gaming houses were often characterised, too, as places where gentlemen and noblemen would sit down with the “meaner” sort, to use Pepys’s word. The same observation was made in the late twentieth century, in connection with casinos and gaming clubs where the aristocracy and the underworld consorted. The dissipations of London, like the city itself, act as great levellers. Lord Chesterfield, perhaps struck by the egalitarian mood of the city, once remarked that “he preferred playing with a sharper to playing with a gentleman, for though he might not often win of the former, he was sure when he did win to get paid.”

  By the early eighteenth century there were approximately forty gaming houses in the city, known as subscription-houses and slaughter-houses as well as hells. There were “more of these infamous places of resort in London,” according to Timbs’s Curiosities of London, “than in any other city in the world.” They were recognisable by an ornate gas-lamp in front of the entrance and a green or red baize door at the end of the hallway. Gaming rose in frequency and excessiveness throughout the century, a century which by curious chance was the one most marked by financial uncertainty and sudden ruin. Thus in the age of the Bubble, and other panics, whist was perfected by gentlemen who met at the Crown Coffee House in Bedford Row.

  Gaming was declared illegal but, despite nightly raids upon certain selected hells in the city, it continued to flourish. There was always “assembled a mixed crowd of gentlemen, merchants, tradesmen, clerks and sharpers of all degrees and conditions,” ready to play at Hazard, Faro, Basset, Roly-poly and a score of other games involving dice and cards. Into these hells came the puffs, the flashers, the squibs, the dunners, the flash captains with a regiment of spies, porters and runners to give notice of approaching constables. At Almacks, a famous gaming club in Pall Mall, the players “turned their coats inside out for luck”; they put on wristbands of leather to protect their lace ruffles and wore straw hats to guard their eyes from the light and to prevent their hair from tumbling. Sometimes, too, they put on “masks to conceal their emotions.” At Brooks’s, the twenty-first rule stated that there should be “No gaming in the eating room, except tossing up for reckonings, on penalty of paying the whole bill of the members present.” There were other less agreeable occasions for a wager, as recorded in London Souvenirs. A prospective player once dropped down dead at the door of White’s; “the club immediately made bets whether he was dead or only in a fit; and when they were going to bleed him the wagerers for his death interposed, saying it would affect the fairness of the bet.”

  Londoners, according to one foreign observer, “violent in their desires, and who carry all their passions to excess, are altogether extravagant in the article of gaming.” Another visitor offered a similar account. “What will you lay? is the first question frequently asked by high and low, when the smallest disputes arise on subjects of little consequence. Some of the richer class, after dinner over a bottle, feel perhaps an inclination for betting; the one opens a nut with a maggot in it, another does the same, and a third immediately proposes a bet, which of the two worms will crawl first over a given distance.”

  Betting was of course involved in the games of violence-rat-catching, cockfighting, female wrestling-with which London abounded, but natural phenomena also became the subject of speculation. On the morning after violent tremors in the city, bets were laid at White’s “whether it was an earthquake or the blowing up of powder-mills.” It was indeed an earthquake, one of the less predictable hazards of London life.

  A market-worker in Leadenhall “made a bet that he would walk 202 times around Moorfields in twenty seven hours; and did it.” A minister of state, the Earl of Sandwich, “passed four and twenty hours at a public gaming table, so absorbed in play, that, during the whole time, he had no subsistence but a bit of beef, between two slices of toasted bread, which he eat without ever quitting the game. This new dish grew highly in vogue … it was called by the name of the minister who invented it.”

  The traditions of public gaming were continued into the nineteenth century by such places as the Royal Saloon in Piccadilly, the Castle in Holborn, Tom Cribb’s Saloon in Panton Street, the Finish in James Street, the White House in Soho Square, Ossington Castle in Orange Street, and Brydges Street Saloon in Covent Garden otherwise known as “The Hall of Infamy” or “Old Mother Damnable’s.” On the other side of London, in the East End, there were gambling rooms and gambling clubs, to such an extent that one minister working among the poor of the area informed Charles Booth that “gambling presses drink hard as the greatest evil of the day … all gamble more than they drink.” The street urchins gambled with farthings or buttons, in a card game known as Darbs, and betting on boxing or horseracing was carried on through the agency of tobacconists, publicans, newsvendors and barbers. “All must bet,” according to another informant in Charles Booth’s survey of the East End, “Women as well as men … men and boys tumble out in their eagerness to read the latest ‘speshul’ and mark the winner.”

  And then of course there was the lottery. It was first established in London in 1569. The “passion for lucky numbers” has burned for centuries. “Aleph” in London Scenes and London People noted that acquaintances, on a sudden meeting, would talk not about the weather but “the great prize just, or about to be, drawn, and to the fortunate winner, or to the blank you had just drawn, and your confident belief that No. 1,962 would be the £20,000 prize.” There were lottery magazines as well as lottery glovers, hat-makers and tea-dealers who offered a small share on their ticket if you used their services. The winning ticket was chosen in the Guildhall by a blindfolded Bluecoat schoolboy (a London version of blindfolded Fortuna), and around the building were “prostitutes, thieves, dirty workmen, or labourers, almost naked-mere children, pale and anxious, awaiting the announcement of the numbers.” In 1984, George Orwell’s vision of a future London, there is also “the Lottery”: “It was probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant.” Orwell understood London very well, and here he is suggesting some deep connection between the principle of its civilisation and the necessity of the gamble and the cheat. Londoners require the stimulus, and the desperate hope of gain; the chances are infinitesimal but, in so vast and disproportioned a city, that is taken for granted. A wager can be shared with many millions, and still be a wager. The anticipation and anxiety are shared also, so that gambling can be viewed as a sudden spasm of communal attention.

  Today the betting shops and casinos are full in Queensway and Russell Square, in Kilburn and Streatham and Marble Arch, and a hundred other locations. Life, in London, can then be construed as a game which few can win.

  London as Crowd

  An etching by James Gillray, which caricatures Sheridan as Punch blowing theatrical bubbles above the heads of a cheering crowd. London has always been a theatrical city and its mobs were once part of its dramatis personae.

  CHAPTER 43

  Mobocracy

  In a city of rumour and of fluctuating fortune, of excess in every form, the London crowd has over the generations acquired an interesting pathology. The crowd is not a single entity, manifesting itself on particular occasions, but the actual condition of London itself. The city is one vast throng of people. “On looking into the street,” one seventeenth-century observer recalled, “we saw a surging mass of people moving in search of some resting place which a fresh mass of sightseers grouped higgledy piggledy rendered impossible. It was a fine medley: there were old men in their dotage, insolent youths and boys … painted wenches and women of the lower classes carrying their children.” A “medley” suggests a show or spectacle, and in the mid-seventeenth century painters began subtly to examine the London crowd. It was no longer an indistinct mass, seen from a safe distance, but a general group of people whose particular features were differentiated.

  There was always the noise, as well as t
he spectacle. “It was very dark, but we could perceive the street to fill, and the hum of the crowd grew louder and louder … about eight at night we heard a din from below, which came up the street continually increasing till we could perceive a motion.” The loud indistinct hum, rising to a roar and accompanied by strange general motion, is the true sound of London. “Behind this wave there was a vacancy, but it filled apace, till another like wave came up; and so four or five of these waves passed one after another … and throats were opened with hoarse and tremendous noise.” There is something crude, and alarming, about this sound; it is as if the voice of the city were primeval, unearthly. The occasion described here, in Burke’s The Streets of London Through the Centuries, was a late seventeenth-century anti-Catholic procession down Fleet Street, and its air of menace is enlarged by the reference to how “one with a stenterophonic tube sounded ‘Abhorrers! Abhorrers!’ most infernally.” The sound of London can be harsh and discordant. Yet sometimes its collective breath is charged with misery. On the day of the execution of Charles I, 30 January 1649, a great throng was assembled in Whitehall; at the instant of the blow which removed the king’s head, “there was such a Grone by the Thousands then present, as I never heard before amp; desire may never hear again.”

  Yet, for the royalists of the seventeenth century, the throng of London were “the scum of all the profanest rout, the vilest of all men, the outcast of the people … mechanic citizens, and apprentices.” The crowd, in other words, became a tangible threat; it was turning into a mob (the word was coined in the seventeenth century) which might become King Mob.

  The salient fact was that London had grown immeasurably larger in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and so obviously the size of its crowds was enlarged. In an atmosphere of religious and political controversy, too, there was no model of civic polity to restrain them. Pepys records a crowd “bawling and calling in the street for a free Parliament and money” and, in the summer of 1667, “it is said that they did in open streets yesterday, at Westminster, cry ‘A Parliament! a Parliament!,’ and do believe it will cost blood.” In the following year there were riots in Poplar and in Moorfields, and the new prison at Clerkenwell was broken open by the people to rescue those who had been imprisoned for the old London custom of pulling down brothels. “But here it was said how these idle fellows have had the confidence to say that they did ill in contenting themselves in pulling down the little bawdy-houses and did not go and pull down the great bawdy house at Whitehall.” This is the authentic radical and levelling voice of the Londoner, newly become a crowd or throng or mob, in the heart of the city. “And some of them last night had a word among them, and it was ‘Reformations and Reducement.’ This doth make the courtiers ill at ease to see this spirit among the people.”

  So London had become dangerous. “When a mob of chairmen or servants, or a gang of thieves or sharpers, are almost too big for the civil authority,” wrote Henry Fielding, “what must be the case in a seditious tumult or general riot?” The history of the eighteenth-century crowd displays a gradual change of temper which was disturbing to magistrates such as Fielding. The scorn and insults were no longer primarily levelled at strangers or outsiders but, rather, at those of wealth or authority. “A man in court dress cannot walk the streets of London without being pelted with mud by the mob,” Casanova wrote in 1746, “… the Londoners hoot the king and the royal family when they appear in public.” In this “chaos,” as Casanova described it, “the flower of the nobility mingling in confusion with the vilest populace,” the “common people affect to show their independence … the most wretched Porter will dispute the wall with a Lord.” It was similarly reported by Pierre Jean Grosley that “In England no rank or dignity is secure from the insults” and that “no nation is more satirical or quicker at repartee, especially the common people.” A Frenchman made the acute point that “This insolence is considered by many only as the humour and pleasantry of porters and Watermen; but this humour and pleasantry was, in the hands of the long parliament, one of their chief weapons against Charles the First.” “Repartee” and insult can, in other words, have political consequences. In that context it is perhaps worth noting that the street urchins used the statue of Queen Anne, outside St. Paul’s Cathedral, as the target for their practice of throwing stones.

  One of the characteristics of the London mob was its irritability and sudden changes of mood, so that when a spark was struck in its depths it flared up very quickly. When an offender did not arrive at a pillory in Seven Dials, as expected, the crowd erupted in a fury which principally fell upon passing hackney coaches; they were pelted with filth and ordure while the coachmen were forced to cry out “Huzza!” as they went along. At one controversial election meeting in Westminster “in a very few minutes the whole scaffolding, benches and chairs and everything else were completely destroyed.” The rage of the crowd was random and sporadic, fierce and exhilarating in equal measure. One German visitor, after a visit to Ludgate Hill, noted: “Now I know what an English mob is.” He was driving in a coach, at a time of general rejoicing at the release from prison in 1770 of the great London politician, Wilkes, and recalled “half-naked men and women, children, chimney sweeps, tinkers, Moors and men of letters, fish-wives and elegant ladies, each creature intoxicated by his own whims and wild with joy, shouting and laughing.”

  It is as if the very restriction of the city encouraged the sudden appetite for wildness and licence; the restraints imposed by a mercantile culture, ruinous in its effects upon many who comprised the crowd, encouraged rapid volatility of rage and exhilaration. There were also too many people forced into too small a space, and this massive overcrowding in narrow streets engendered strange fevers and excitements. That is why the instinctive fear of the mob, or crowd, had as much to do with its propensity for disease as its prevalence towards violence. It was the fear of touch, of the unhealthy warmth of London as transmitted by its citizens, which went back to the times of fever and of epidemic plague when, in the words of Defoe, “their hands would infect the things they touched, especially if they were warm and sweaty, and they were generally apt to sweat too.”

  The mob can also turn upon itself, or upon one of its number. The cry of “a Pick Pocket!” in Moll Flanders set the crowd alight when “all the loose part of the Crowd ran that way, and the poor Boy was deliver’d up to the Rage of the street, which is a Cruelty I need not describe.” There is an element of sudden horror here, as if a whirlpool of rage manifested itself without warning. A record of the last days of a reputed astrologer and magician, John Lambe, in the middle of June 1628, is printed in “The Life and Death of John Lambe,” by Leva Goldstein in Guildhall Studies in London History. Lambe was recognised by some boys in the Fortune Theatre who waited outside “and followed him when he left.” More people joined them, and Lambe hired some passing sailors to form a protective bodyguard; he walked down Red Cross Street, turned left into Fore Street and then left again to the Horseshoe Tavern in Moor Lane, the crowd growing larger and louder all the time. He dined in the inn, while the sailors “kept the crowd at bay” but, when he left and entered the city by Moorgate, the mob once more pursued him with cries of “Witch” and “Devil.” The situation was now very serious. He walked quickly down Coleman Street, into Lothbury, where he took refuge in an upstairs room of the Windmill Tavern on the corner of Old Jewry. His bodyguards were assaulted, and both entrances to the tavern watched by the eager citizens. He attempted to leave in disguise but was again marked down; he took refuge in a nearby house, belonging to a lawyer who called out four constables of the ward to guard him. “But the rage of the people so much increased … that in the midst of these auxiliaries they struck him down to the ground” and beat him with stones and clubs; he never spoke again, and was carried to the Poultry Compter where he died of his injuries on the following day. This is an accurate report on the actions of a characteristic London crowd.

  · · ·

  If you had any hope of finding
“a community life” in London, “all foreigners” agree that it is as if you searched “for flowers in a vale of sand.” There was no community in London in the eighteenth century, and no sense of communal life, only a number of distinctive and distinguishable crowds. There were crowds of women attacking bawdy houses or dishonest shops, crowds of citizens alerted by a “hue and cry,” crowds of parishioners attacking a local compter, crowds watching a fire, crowds of beggars, and, most ominously, crowds of distressed or unemployed workers. One eminent London historian, Stephen Inwood, has in fact remarked in his A History of London that rioters “could be a form of ‘collective bargaining’ between labourers and masters.” In 1710 there was violent rioting by framework-knitters, which presaged decades of unrest and disorder in the poor urban districts such as Whitechapel and Shoreditch.

  There were riots by silk-weavers and coal-heavers, hat-makers and glass-grinders, and a host of assorted tradesmen whom creeping industrialisation and increased food prices had rendered ever more desperate. Indian calico was a threat to the weavers of Spitalfields, for example, and one woman was attacked by a crowd who “tore, cut, pulled off her gown and petticoat by violence, threatened her with vile language, and left her naked in the fields.” London channelled the energies of its citizens in the crooked shape of its lanes and thoroughfares, rendering them ever more fierce and desperate.

  That is why the process of city life itself was seen as a movement within a crowd. Sometimes it is indifferent and banal, an aspect of “the great metropolis” where exists “the vast unhurried audience that will still gather and stare at any new thing.” Yet on occasions its speed and confusion were decisive, as in Gray’s poem where on the streets of the city the crowd “Tumultuous, bears my Partner from my side.” This is a defining image, well expressed in Moll Flanders: “I took my leave of her in the very Crowd and said to her, as if in hast, dear Lady Betty take care of your little Sister, and so the Crowd did, as it were Thrust me away from her.” The impersonal crowd parts friend from friend, and separates loved one from loved one; those dearest to us are no longer near, borne away by the surging tide in unknown directions. Yet for some there is comfort to be found in this anonymity. “I shall therefore retire to the Town,” wrote Addison in the Spectator of July 1711, “… and get into the Crowd again as fast as I can, in order to be alone.” The crowd encourages solitude, therefore, as well as secrecy and anxiety.