The XVIIIth century in London : an account of its social life and arts

Front matter

THEXVnF«CENTURY | IN LONDON S g EBERESFORD CHANCELLOR

(Qornell Intueraita ffithrarg

BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE

Preface

THE History of the i8th Century so far even as it concerns London would, if treated exclusively, fill many volumes. The aim of the present book is merely to give a general view of the period as reflected in the buildings, the habits, and the customs as they existed in the London of that day. The City's history during the years which elapsed between 1700 and 1800 is fuller than at almost any other time anterior to our own day, and in order to keep the work within its prescribed limits the most drastic elimination has been necessary. Much, therefore, that is familiar to the students of those days necessarily finds itself omitted. It is hoped, however, that what is recorded, whether it be concerning old buildings, forgotten institutions, or memorable people, will be sufficient to give a more or less complete picture of the London of the period. One of the objects aimed at has been to show what architectural remains of the i8th Century still exist in London ; another, to point out how reconstruction and rebuilding have altered the outlines and general appearance of the City.

The book, of course, might have been doubled in size had one attempted to fill it even with a tithe of the anecdotes concerning the great figures who moved and had their being during the full and picturesque years under consideration, but so many of these stories have already been recorded over and over again, that there seemed no point in repeating them.

The selection of the illustrations has been carefully carried out, and except where a building or object remains to-day practically unaltered and is capable of being photographed on the spot, I have in almost every case selected for reproduction drawings or pictures executed by artists who actually lived and worked during the period under consideration. In this way it is hoped that, co-ordinating with the text, they re-create a period which was perhaps the most decorative, as it has generally been allowed to be the most popular, of all the periods of London's history.

VI

PREFACE

I should like to associate myself with the Publishers in expressing my obligations and deep thanks to those who have so kindly permitted me to reproduce pictures and drawings in their possession : —

*To His Most Gracious Majesty The King for permission to reproduce from the Royal Collection (Figs. 63 and 153); * The Most Hon. the Marquis of Sligo (Figs. 67 and 68); * The Right Hon. Earl Brownlow (Fig. 79) ; * The Right Hon. Earl Spencer (Fig. 43) ; * Mary, Countess of Ilchester (Fig. 88); *The Right Hon. Lord Aldenham (Fig. 46); The Right Hon. Lord Leverhulme (Fig. 69) ; * Sir Philip Norman, LL.D. (Fig. 75) ; *Mr. E. C. Grenfell (Fig. 155); * Mr. J. P. Haseltine (Fig. 154); * The Governors of the Bank of England (Fig. 53) : * The Governors of the Foundling Hospital (Fig. 158); Mr. Basil Dighton (Fig. 33); Messrs. James Rimell & Son (Figs. 4, IS, 35, 36, 66, and 78); Messrs. Ellis & Smith (Fig. S); The Corporation of the City of London (Figs. 26, 50, and 157); Mr. Noel Broadbent (Fig. 12); The Architectural Review (Figs. 99 and 100); J. Gale (Fig. 103); Messrs. Bedford Lemere (Figs. 112, 113, 122, 123, 133, and 160); Mr. H. N. King (Figs. 114, 115, and 116).

My thanks are also due to the Committee of the Burlington Fine Arts Club, for the facilities which they gave to my Publishers to photograph in situ certain of those pictures, the owners of which are acknowledged above (marked *), shown in February 1 9 1 9 at the Exhibition of " Early Drawings and Pictures of London " organised by that Club. With regard to the remainder of the Illustrations, with the exception of a certain number from my Publishers' collection, I am indebted to the Authorities of the British Museum, The Victoria and Albert Museum, and the London Museum for permission to reproduce prints and pictures in their custody.

E. BERESFORD CHANCELLOR.

September 1920.

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I. THE SOCIAL LIFE OF THE PERIOD . . . i

II. STREET TOPOGRAPHY . . . -49

Chapter I The Social Life Of The Period

THERE is little doubt that the i8th century is the most fascinating and picturesque of those periods into which the history of our country is divided. Then social life first began to take on itself a markedly individual character, and to link itself up, so to speak, with the historic annals and the industrial activity of the time. To it the preceding centuries were introductory ; and that, by then, the country had become independent of exoteric influence, is proved by the fact that a family, at first alien but in the course of years gradually assimilating itself with the life of the people, ruled the land and yet exercised very little influence, at least during the first halfcentury of its power, over the life and habits of the people. Unlike those earlier times when first the power of the monarch, then that of the great nobles, then again that of the Crown, was predominant, the i8th century represents the people standing by themselves, and was the direct heir of the 17th century when the rights and liberties of the nation were, by a great upheaval, finally fixed and consolidated. The power of the Crown, at its apogee in the i6th century, gradually became less pronounced during the following hundred years, largely in consequence of the disastrous conceptions of sovereignty held by the Stuarts. But this very circumstance helped more largely and more quickly towards the evolution from personal to popular government, than had James I. been another Elizabeth, or had Charles I. been endowed with the great political qualities of Henry VIII.

As it was, from the time when Anne came to the throne to the day when George III. died, government by the people had gradually become an accomplished fact ; Harley was a popular Minister ; Walpole was representative of the great middle classes, with ideas and tastes not very dissimilar from their own ; Chatham, the people's favourite, soon replaced the attempted dictatorship of Bute, and held even George III. with his Bute-inspired ideas of government in check ; and during the later years of George's reign, although there were not wanting phases of retrograde policy, the principle survived, and culminated in the genius of the younger Pitt who represented the popular idea during the latter years of the reign, as his father had done during the earlier. This change in the administration of the country reflected itself both on the classes and the masses, as well as on all kinds of institutions and customs.

During the period which elapsed between 1704 and 1820, the middle classes became more powerful, and more distributed (so to say) along those lines of life from which they had before been rigidly excluded. This was reflected not only in the composition of the Lower House, where men rose to power and position, indifferently with or without the aid of powerful supporters, but in the character of such gatherings as were to be seen at Ranelagh and Vauxhall, at the Pantheon, or in the rooms of Mrs. Cornelys. The germs of our present system of canvassing certainly seem to have been then in existence, for who does not know the story of the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire's unconventional method of securing a vote for Charles James Fox, at that famous Westminster election, of which exciting contest Robert Dighton has left a spirited print (Fig. 2).

The South Sea Scheme (Fig. 4), too, which attracted all classes during the middle of the period, mingled all classes, and Change Alley saw the noble and the cit hob-nobbing in the race for wealth ; the pauper of yesterday becoming the capitalist of to-morrow, and the opulent sinking as quickly into indigence- As nothing levels like money, the South Sea Scheme and its congeners may, in a way, be said to have put the seal on the work inaugurated by the Great Rebellion.

There is a kind of superficial analogy between the two periods, in this country and in France, so far as certain outward formulcB are concerned ; but when examined closely, the resemblance ceases, for the dictatorship of Louis xiv.'s later years was carried on by the autocratic Ministers of his profligate successor, and in France the change, which had altered everything in England in 1648, did not take place till 1793. In this respect, then, France was a century behind this country, although in certain habits and customs, in modes of dress, and forms of recreation, there was a distinct similarity, largely because each country borrowed such things from the other. But the resemblance is still more observable through a certain circumstance which has helped to bring the i8th century, in both countries, vividly before us, and has been the means by which we are able to visualise it in an extraordinarily exact and intimate way. I refer to the wealth of Diaries, Memoirs, and Letters whose records of daily events, of changes in politics and changes in dress, of habits of thought, and methods of amusement, of gossip of the boudoir and scandal of the Court, of intrigues in love and in politics, have made the century a living thing for us with all the particularity of a newspaper, and with more than a newspaper's frankness and daring.

Those conversant with the political and social life of France at this time will recall the names of innumerable chroniclers of this description, from St. Simon and Madame de Sevigne to Barbier and Barras. Here, these do not particularly concern us ; those in this country do ; and in the diaries, memoirs, or letters of Lady Cowper, Bubb-Dodington, Lord and Lady Hervey, Horace Walpole, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the poet Gray and the parson Mason, William Cowper and Mrs. Delany, and hosts of others, we have pictures of the time, so full, so telling, and so illuminative that we seem to

Fig. 2.— Ei.ECiiON' of Chari.es J.\.mes Fox for We.stmin.ster, in 1796.

From print by Robert Dit^'htoji, 1 796.

Fig. 3 — .SouTHWAkK F.\ir.

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CO know the daily life of this period as well as we know that of our own, and events under the Georges are brought as vividly before us as events under Victoria.

Besides this mass of documentary evidence, we have another source whence we can gauge the characteristics of the i8th century, in the records left us by foreigners who visited England and indiscriminately noted our faults and praised our good qualities, from the aspect of independent judgment. From one point of view such obiter dicta are more valuable than the more intimate revelations of our own countrymen. A foreigner, however, unless he makes an alien country his own and lives in it for years, can, after all, gain but a superficial knowledge of the deeper current of things ; but as regards amusements and habits of life, as revealed to any intelligent observer, he can often note matters worthy of record which familiarity passes by. Thus in the observation of such men as Misson, Grosley, De Saussure, Voltaire, Moritz, Kilmansegg, and the rest, we obtain a picture of the time which has some of the particularity of the home-made article, freed generally, and certainly in the cases mentioned, from the almost inevitable bias of native record.

During the larger part of the 1 8th century London was to England something like Paris has always been to France. It is surprising to find how comparatively little provincial centres enter into the scheme of life. One of the obvious reasons was the difficulty of transit from the metropolis to farthrown cities and towns. People had no idea of the ease with which railway travelling enables us to fly from one end of the kingdom to the other, and it took them longer to get to Bath than it takes us now to get to Banff. Then, too, our 18th-century forebears were far more regular in their methods of doing such things ; those who had country houses went to them at stated periods, posting or in their equipages, and the great noble on his way to Longleat or Arundel or Badminton must have been a picturesque sight, with his family coach and postilions and outriders — very different, indeed, from these prosaic days when his man puts him into a first-class railway carriage, and he is wafted to his nearest station before he has finished his papers. When Society required change of air, or an alleviation from London's tedium or the worse tedium of the gout or the megrims, it made an annual expedition to " the Wells " at Tunbridge or Bath. At a later period George III. made Weymouth to some extent fashionable, if, indeed, the Farmer-king could make anything fashionable ; and George, Prince of Wales, gave a fresh lease of life to Brightelmstone, where Dr. Johnson had once stayed. Here and there were cases where people broke fresh ground, but the rule was: London as a standing joint with Tunbridge or Bath as side dishes, if one may be permitted this culinary analogy. The ordinary commercial man not often got more than the joint, except in such small entries (to carry on the metaphor) as excursions into what are now his habitats in the suburbs. Then he lived in the city over his business premises, and took his holiday at, say, Richmond, where he was sure of seeing plenty of the ton, especially on Sundays, or in some equally convenient centre. The masses seldom got away from London at all, save, perhaps, for an occasional jaunt to Bagnigge

Wells or the heights of Hampstead ; and the jaded literary man took up his summer quarters in Canonbury Tower, when his generally exiguous funds admitted even such a mild diversion. For although, as I have said, the 1 8 th century saw the power of the people consolidated, it was rather in essentials than in the agr^mens of life that it was so. As the century progressed, so, of course, did means of transit ; until, at its close, stage coaches made long journeys in very fair time, if it did not happen to be in winter and they ran into a snowdrift. Business men began to have their villas in parts that had, before, seemed remote from London, but which are, to-day, an integral portion of it.

Indeed, one of the chief things to remember in surveying the London of that period is its extraordinary smallness as compared with its present gigantic proportions. When, at the beginning of the 19th century, Cobbett called it " The Wen," it had increased by leaps and bounds ; but half a century earlier it was so relatively diminutive that Knightsbridge was an outlying village. Hackney, Newington, Marylebone, Islington, Chelsea, and Kensington were rural hamlets, Belgravia open fields; and north of Oxford Street alone exhibited the tentative beginnings of that vast congeries of houses and streets which, to-day, stretches to Hampstead in the west and Hackney in the east. Kensington Palace was only reached by well-nigh impassable roads, and Holland House was, in all essentials, a country residence. It is thus the limited size of the city and the extraordinarily indifferent state of its streets that are, perhaps, the two features which most markedly differentiate it from the city of to-day.

The 20th century may not be a picturesque, but it is at least a sanitary, one; the i8th century teems with the former characteristics, in its buildings (the very narrowness of its streets helped to add a touch of this), its dress, its amusements ; but in everything that goes for health and cleanliness it was so far to seek that one can quite understand how Sloane and Sydenham, Baillie and Abernethy, could make vast fortunes; and the marvel is that the human frame could withstand so many assaults with comparative impunity.

In those days London was a red-brick city ; here and there were stone buildings, such as Wren's churches, the Abbey and Westminster Hall, and, towards the close of the period, Somerset House ; but, with the exception of these and a few others (to be mentioned elsewhere), red brick was the predominant note. Buckingham House, Apsley House, Lanesborough House, the lesser houses known as of the Queen Anne and Georgian periods, many of which remain in Westminster and Mayfair, and within the City boundary, in the streets south of the Strand, in Berkeley Square, in the distant Borough, and the farther distant Hampstead (although every day seems to witness fresh demolitions of these), were all erected in this style. Nash was responsible for many changes, and when a wit remarked that he

"Found us all brick, And left us all stucco,"

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A scene in Ijiitcher l\ow lookiii" towards Teniole Bar.

Eiigr. J. June 1770.

Fig. 9.— "The Lady's Disaster."

A scene in the Strand loc iking East. 10

Engi-.J. June 1770.

THE SOCIAL LIFE OF THE PERIOD ii

he indicated, in a large gesture, what really was the effect of his innovations, although they were confined to a relatively limited space in the City's immensity. The area which the London of the i8th century actually embraced is, perhaps, best realised by a study of Rocque's great and important map. That map was issued during the years 1741-45, but was in the making for a considerable time before then. By it we see that, west to east, the city extended some four miles ; and, from south to north, not much more than two. Roughly, all the development of the area north of the Marylebone Road, in the west, and the Euston and City Roads, in the east, is subsequent to that day, and much of it later, even, than the close of the i8th century. During the first half of the period the ground between Oxford Street and the Marylebone Road was but sparsely built over. Everything west of Hyde Park Corner — except the hamlet of Knightsbridge, Kensington Pcilace, emd Holland House — is practically of a later date. What is, to-day, Belgravia was then the Five Fields, the resort of the citizens who went there to eat syllabubs and who, if returning late, were in constant fear of the highwaymen and footpads who haunted it and made it hardly less safe than the notorious Tumham Green or Hounslow.^ The not inappropriately named " Bloody Bridge " spanned the Westbourne, or Ranelagh Stream as it was sometimes called, as it ran by the spot known, now, as Sloane Square, before emptying itself into the river at Chelsea. What is, to-day, a congeries of houses and buildings at Westminster was, in the middle of the i8th century, the open space known as Tothill Fields, whose name is perpetuated by Tothill Street, and nearer the river, the cultivated allotments called Neat House Gardens, which were not developed till about 1831, when a series of streets was projected. To the north, Marylebone was " in the fields " with its gardens as an attraction which lasted for many years ; Tottenham Court Road abutted on the open Lamb's Conduit Fields, on to which looked the contiguous gardens of Montague House and Bedford House. As Bedford House formed the north side of Bloomsbury Square, it will be realised what a vast area was covered by buildings during the century which followed on the making of Rocque's map ! Where King's Cross is now, was originally a small village called Battle Bridge, so described as late as 1791, and probably thus named from some encounter either between Alfred and the Danes, or, as Stukeley thought, between the Romans and Boadicea. Farther east, Hoxton formed then a projecting part of the Metropolis, bounded on the west by Finsbury Fields and on the east by the open country surrounding Bethnal Green and " Agostine," in which we dimly recognise the Haggerston of our times. Although in the east the city stretched tentatively along the river, there was much open land between it and the village of Stepney, and also north of the

' On 30th August 1742, a Mr. Smith, master of an eating-house at Chelsea, was robbed and murdered here ; and, six years later, two highwaymen attacked a coach containing four gentlemen, who, however, proved too much for the would-be depredators. " The World's End," at the north-west comer of what is now Eaton Square, was a resort of the tea-garden type, and, as such, is mentioned by Congreve in his " Love for Love."

Mile End Road, then called Mile End New Town, where dwellings clung desperately to the main thoroughfare or to the so-called Doo Row and Globe Lane, now roughly marked by Cambridge Road and Globe Road.

South of the Thames, the chief collocation of buildings was along the bank of the river. Rotherhithe was practically open fields, here and there interspersed with allotments. Newington was a village separated from the riverside dwellings by St. George's Fields, where the Dog and Duck.^ at St. George's Spa, had its regular Sunday votaries, and the Fields their innumerable gatherings, and where some attempt at development had been made by the laying-out of the Borough Road intersecting the highway leading to Blackfriars Bridge (Fig. 5) at St. George's Circus. Kennington Common was one of the places where malefactors were hanged — a notorious criminal executed here being Jimmy Dawson, for his complicity in the '45 Rebellion — the gallows standing where St. Mark's Church is now. The Common is also associated with the preaching of Whitfield (Fig. 6) and Wesley, whicli drew large and eager crowds to this spot.^

If we seek for the remains of 18th-century buildings in the London of to-day, we find them scattered all over the central portion of the Metropolis ; but hardly any whole district, except perhaps Bloomsbury — and this now in process of great changes — can be said to be representative of even the latest years of that period. The squares were, as such, mostly formed between the years 1700 and 1800, and consequently, as their houses were of a size and distinction generally more marked than those in residential streets, they still contain a residuum dating from this time. Berkeley, Cavendish, Hanover, Grosvenor, and Portman Squares ; the squares of Bloomsbury ; Soho, Golden, and Kensington Squares — all exhibit examples of the easily recognised brickwork, and in some instances stone-work, of that day. In certain streets of Westminster — College Street and Barton Street and others — as well as in much of Mayfair formed by Sir Richard Grosvenor during the earlier half of the period, you will meet with so many examples as to give an idea of the general effect of residential London of the earlier 18th century. Here and there, too, in the City, there exist similar remains, not only in houses (now used as offices), but in the great City Halls and other semi-public and official buildings ; but the rebuilding and redevelopment of whole areas in the time of George IV., and still more so in that of Victoria and at the present time, have obliterated much in localities where we might expect best to find survivals. Thus in Piccadilly one comes across but a few, and these, chiefly, structures which have passed from private to semi-public uses, and have therefore escaped the destruction which, judging from other instances, would inevitably

^ The Springs at this point were found to be excellent cures for " cutaneous foulnesses and scrofulous diseases." Mrs. Thrale was once recommended to try them, and Johnson wrote her a letter of advice, full of his usual common-sense arguments why she should do so.

^ "June 17, 1739. At five I preached on Kennington Common to about fifteen thousand people " ; and — " June 23, 1739. At Kennington I enforced to about twenty thousand that great truth, ' One thing is needful,'" are entries in John Wesley's Journal.

Fig. io. — The Gorbon Riots of yxn June 17S0.

A print li\- (D'Xeil (17S1) sliowing the burning and plundering of Newgate.

Fig. II. — The (Jokuon Riots.

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'4 have overtaken them. Pall Mall is in worse case, for there nothing remains of the exact date (Schomburg House — or its relic — is earlier), and I suppose No. 5 1 , Dodsley's publishing headquarters, now pulled down and rebuilt, was really the last example existing down to recent days.

The net result is that here and there an area of more or less extent ; a relatively few streets ; some isolated houses ; some churches ; and such public buildings as the Bank, the Mansion House, Somerset House, Bethlehem Hospital, The Foundling, and Guy's Hospital, among them, are all we have connecting the London of our own time with a period which is only a little over a hundred years distant.

The appearance which the earlier London presented, however, can be realised from the works of the Italian Canaletto, who lived some years among us, pictorially reproducing its features as he did those of his own Venice, and in those of his follower, Scott, together with a mass of other evidence from the hands of contemporary landscape painters and architectural draughtsmen, as well as in the caricatures of Rowlandson and Gillray, and the painted moralities of Hogarth. We know the Rotunda at Ranelagh as we know our own hand, in Canaletto's masterly drawing (Fig. 85); the London Bridge of the period is equally familiar to us in Scott's famous picture (Fig. 156); and not merely the buildings, but the life of London, looks out on us from those masterpieces which the great Hogarth drew with such intimate knowledge and such consummate truth. Indeed, for the social life of the times, in most of its aspects, we must go to this great moralist, as much as we go to the written descriptions in the Spectators or the Tatlers, the Ramblers or the Daily Courants. In his works we have High Life as lived in Chesterfield House, sordid existence as passed in Grub Street or the Fleet, or the lower strata still where shame and misery cowered in the Seven Dials, or fought and cheated in Blood Bowl Alley. The peer is there in his room of state ; the man of fashion at his ease receives his barber and his fencing-master, his tailor and his pimp, his precious attire and manners coming in for well-merited ridicule (Fig. 8) ; the merchant sits in his counting-house, or in the apotheosis of the Mayoral chair ; the Justice presides in his redoubtable room ; the depredator lives in his filthy jail ; and madness, in all its awful nakedness, raves exposed to curious eyes, within the walls of Bedlam. My lady at her toilet-table, at tea, or at cards, simpering and ogling in her ridiculous and gorgeous farthingale, which even in those more leisurely days would seem to have been curiously inconvenient (Fig. 9) ; the rake at his faro-bank or in his worser haunts ; clubs and coffee-houses ; the ridotto and the play ; cock-fighting and bull-baiting ; all are depicted, and with them something not only of the outward life, but of the very soul of the time, is revealed by the brush of the satirist of Leicester Fields, who saw life steadily and saw it whole, and stamped its living likeness for ever in his works.

Hogarth is pre-eminently didactic ; he is never a mere non-moral observer like Rowlandson or a caricaturing satyr like Gillray. In his work the triumph of virtue is inevitable, indolence and vice never fail to end in the prison or on the gallows ; while industry and temperance rise to affluence and honour (Fig. 7).

The life of the town is reflected, too, in another direction, and in the poems of Pope and Churchill, Gay and Goldsmith and Cowper, as well as in the novels of Richardson and the greater Fielding, and in the works of Swift, the mirror is held up to the art of the times, as well as to nature. Gay's " Trivia " is, of course, a document of special importance in this connection, for in that poem the streets of London and the life which surged within them are noted with an almost photographic clearness and accuracy.

If we consider the importance of the years which elapsed between 1700 and 1800, not only in the changes in manners and customs that took place during their progress, but also in the significance of the events and the fame of the protagonists, and then remember that London was the centre of all this activity, it will not be difficult to realise what the city stood for during that momentous period. First, there was the Augustan age — a settling down of things, so to speak, after the two great upheavals of the preceding century. Anne appears surrounded by a crowd of celebrities curiously alien from her own home-like personality. The famous Duchess and her more famous husband, Harley and Bolingbroke and Sunderland, stand for foreign and domestic politics ; literature is represented by Addison and Steele, Swift and Prior, Congreve and Defoe, Bentley and Farquhar, and how many more whose names added light to that effulgent age. Next we have the days of the first two Georges, with the dominating figure of Sir Robert, and Pulteney and Carteret, and the rest, circling about the rival Courts of St. James's and Leicester House, with their double dower of wit and beauty, learning and intrigue. Finally there is the long reign of George III., during which we pass from the dictatorship of Bute to that of Chatham, and after a period of political mediocrity, the great genius of the younger Pitt glowed like a beacon and faded in a blaze of glory. That was the age which, during its earlier half, was illuminated by the remarkable circle over which Johnson governed, with such satellites as Burke and Reynolds and Goldsmith, Beauclerk and Langton and Percy ; when Horace Walpole still ruled fashionable literature, and Gray was writing letters almost as inimitable as his; and, during its closing years, Selwyn gambled with Fox, and Sheridan outshone Burke, and Brummell dominated London as Nash had at an earlier day dominated Bath.