Georgian London: Into the Streets (30 page)

London eagerly anticipated the imminent arrival of these treasures. Shelley’s famous poem of 1818, ‘Ozymandias’, was written for a newspaper competition held by
The Examiner
in advance of the arrival of Belzoni’s treasures. The exhibition opened at the Egyptian Hall in May 1821, but a year later the collection was put up for auction. The sale drew two of the greatest collectors of the day: the British Museum and Sir John Soane. The Museum acquired the colossus and Soane the sarcophagus. John Belzoni, financially if not spiritually satisfied, handed in the manuscript of his travels to his
publisher, John Murray, and set off for Benin. He died of dysentery one week after arriving there.

Before long, the Egyptian Hall moved on to displaying real-life Laplanders, who gave sleigh rides up and down the central space. It continued on as an exhibition space until redevelopment in 1904, when this extraordinary Georgian flight of fancy was replaced with offices bearing miniature versions of Andrea Palladio’s Venetian windows.

By the end of the Georgian era, the old fields of the May Fair and Shepherd Market had been filled in. The Hay Market had relocated close to the new Regent’s Park, though open fields were still lying to the north. Piccadilly was no longer just a road to the Knight’s Bridge and the outlying village of Chelsea, but was now a busy thoroughfare. At dawn, as the first coaches rattled out towards Bath and Bristol, a constant stream of girls and women could be seen passing Burlington House. They walked in from the distant market gardens of Fulham, heading for Covent Garden, baskets of produce on their heads. As the century went on and Mayfair grew, many looked north towards London’s wetlands and ancient hunting grounds, full of natural pools and ponds, and where the parishes still offered sixpenny rewards for dead polecats: Marylebone.

Like Mayfair, the infilling of the fields of St Mary-le-Bourne began after the Treaty of Utrecht, in 1713. Unlike Mayfair, Marylebone engulfed the small villages of St Mary’s and Paddington, which had been in existence for centuries. Though rural infrastructure was already in place, the patterns and nature of development were markedly different to that of the ‘great estates’ to the south.

During the first half of the eighteenth century, Marylebone retained a village atmosphere, despite the large amounts of development. It had a high street, pleasure gardens and was surrounded by open fields. This changed in 1756, when the New Road running from Paddington to Islington was built to prevent cattle and heavy goods traffic moving up and down Oxford Street, and it formed the northern limit of the original development. (This road is now the A501, the northern limit of the Congestion Charge zone. Beneath the road runs the Metropolitan Line. It is still one of London’s defining borders.)

Marylebone was more bohemian and creative than Mayfair. It was also diverse, housing painters, builders, musicians and aristocrats, as well as London’s largest black population. In this area of London, the core of the collections of the British Library and Kew Gardens were formed. Here, Handel listened to bad renditions of his own music. Gentlemanly pursuits were a theme in Marylebone, and the area played host to hundreds, if not thousands, of the better kind of prostitute, who ‘
live decently
and without being disturbed. They are mistresses in their own house, and if any of the magistrates should think of troubling them, they might shew him the door.’

In the later part of the eighteenth century, Marylebone was transformed, becoming a huge settlement bordered on one side by John Nash’s Regent’s Park. The park contains London’s finest surviving Regency architecture, with ten stuccoed terraces, seven
smaller terraces, a crescent, a barracks, a church and two small residential estates, as well as a serpentine lake and a canal. Nash did not neglect the middle classes, creating for them the unique ranks of individually styled semi-detached villas in St John’s Wood. Built in the second decade of the nineteenth century, they are believed to be the first of their type and were copied on estates all over England in the century that followed. In 1828, the Zoological Society of London opened on the north side of the park, taking in many of the animals from the Tower of London menagerie. The animals were all kept inside, in heated environments, and included the now extinct quaggas and the strange thylacine, or Tasmanian wolf.

Meanwhile, the area which had been the village of Paddington was being swamped by Irish labourers building the new Regent’s Canal. The coming of the canals meant the birth of the Irish ‘navigator’, or ‘navvies’, and their connection to the waterways. They spilled out of St Giles’s to the open space of Tyburnia, bounded on the east by Tottenham Court Road and on the west only by the encroaching, genteel streets of the ‘great city north of Oxford Street’. They kept pigs and held dog fights and bare-knuckle competitions, much to the chagrin of their smarter neighbours. Nearby, the Tyburn scaffold stood (near what is now the Marble Arch roundabout), a constant reminder that the consequences of a life of crime were never far away.

The first hangings at Tyburn date from the late twelfth century. In 1560, the gallows feature on a map of the area; in 1571, the ‘Triple Tree’ was erected, consisting of a triangle of beams from which eight offenders could be hanged.

London’s eight hanging days a year were public holidays, and huge numbers of people attended the executions. The condemned were driven through the streets from Newgate in a wagon, taking pause for alcoholic refreshment along the way. Many arrived at Tyburn
mercifully drunk, but for even the most hardened of criminals the clamour and crush would have been overwhelming.

The hanging was not the final moment in the day’s programme. Bernard Mandeville observed that ‘
the next Entertainment
is a scuffle between the surgeons and the mob’. The hangman received the clothes as a perk, and the bodies were destined to further human understanding through undergoing dissection by surgeons, and sometimes by artists. It was not unusual for the crowd to distract the surgeons whilst the family removed a corpse. The accounts of the Company of Barber-Surgeons record that, in 1720, they ‘paid the hangman for the dead mans clothes which were lost in the scuffle and for his Christmas Box £0.15.0’.

Hangmen themselves were not above the law.
In 1718, John Price
was executed for murdering Elizabeth White, who sold ‘Cakes and Gingerbread about the Streets’. Price was a petty criminal from the ‘fog-end of the suburbs of London, and, like Mercury, became a thief as soon as ever he peeped out of the shell’. He was appointed hangman after a spell in Newgate and excelled at it, having ‘cruelty at his finger-ends’.

In March 1718, Alexander Dufey was on his way home in the dark when he heard a woman groan, and he ‘heard the Man say, D—mn you for a Bitch … if you won’t put it in I’ll rip you up.’ Torn by fear and indecision, Dufey saw another man ahead of him, who also realized what was happening. They went in search of the source, finding Elizabeth White in an appalling state with Price on top of her. She was ‘very Bloody in the Face, and one of her Eyes beat out of her Head’. The two men set upon Price and dragged him to the watch house. Price tried to use his station as hangman to wriggle out of it, but the watchman ‘knew him to be a Thief and a Rogue, and if he did not sit down he would knock him down, or throw him into the Fire’. Price secured, Dufey took the constable out to try to find Elizabeth White, but in the darkness of the fields they couldn’t see her. In the end, only a dog ‘barking about the Body, gave them notice where to find her’.

The picture painted in the courtroom is one of extreme violence on Price’s part:

That when they came they found her lying in a sad Condition, as had been before described; and besides some of her Teeth knock’d out … and one of her Arms broke; that then he got her carried to the Watch-house, and sent for some Women to hold her forwards, for she was choak’d with Clots of Blood in her Mouth and Throat, and could not speak.

The surgeon said he had never seen head injuries like it. Elizabeth was assigned a nurse but died four days later. Price was found guilty, sentenced to death and went to the gallows drunk on gin.

The Price case was clear-cut, but throughout the eighteenth century there were many other Tyburn hangings which left the mob divided. Accounts of hanging days include tales of parents who walked many miles to watch a child hang for petty theft, anxious to protect their body in death as they could not protect them in life. For many of the assembled mob, the highwaymen who were hanged at Tyburn were heroes in the tradition of Robin Hood.

In 1763, James Boswell watched
Paul Lewis hang, convicted as a highwayman, aged twenty-three. Lewis was the son of a gentleman and, although a ‘genteel, and spirited young fellow’, had struggled to live up to family expectations as he had never learned to ‘spell, or write even his own language grammatically’ and had been held back at school for years. On the morning of the execution, Lewis suffered a nervous attack in chapel, mentioning for the first time that he had a wife and children. He recovered ‘and again acted the hero before the spectators’, standing up in the cart, and appearing ‘unconcerned and hardy’.

Boswell watched from one of the ‘Tyburn pews’, wooden grandstands rented out at two shillings a seat. They were privately owned and one key-holder was the memorably named Mammy Douglas. Boswell was haunted by the spectacle, remembering how Lewis had walked ‘firmly, with a good air’. He decided never to return to Tyburn. But Samuel Johnson, Boswell’s great friend, reasoned that if the executions did ‘not draw spectators, they do not answer their purpose … the public was gratified by a procession; the criminal was supported by it’. Yet public opinion was changing, and the Sheriffs of London and Middlesex decided that ‘the final scene’ had ‘lost its
terrors’ for the mob. In 1783, the public executions at Tyburn were stopped and moved to a site at Newgate Prison.

One year after hangman Price presided over Tyburn for the last time, John Prince, self-styled ‘Prince of Builders’ finished designing Cavendish Square for Edward Harley, 2nd Earl of Oxford. He inherited his father’s love of the written word, and bought old and foreign papers and manuscripts with ‘
incessant Assiduity
and at an immense expense’. He even maintained a private book-binding workshop, pouring thousands of pounds into the binding of beautiful books with the Oxford coat of arms on the front. His librarian browsed London’s shops and auctions, spending anything from hundreds of pounds to the two shillings he paid for an Ethiopic manuscript from a bargain bin in a bookshop.

Such abandon in collecting landed Edward in financial trouble. In 1728, he was forced to admit to his wife, Henrietta, that their finances were failing ‘
in very great measure
due to my own Folly and my neglect in looking into them as I ought to have done’.

The Harleys’ financial situation deteriorated and Edward died a melancholy, alcohol-related death, in 1741, swamped by massive debt and an equally colossal library. Many of the manuscripts were housed in a purpose-built warehouse in 35 Marylebone High Street, though it was soon realized that the house was far too small for the purpose. Henrietta sold the printed books to bookseller Thomas Osborne for £13,000 – just less than it had cost Harley to bind them. Only the manuscripts were left behind.

With the future of the library in such disarray, a meeting was called by the trustees at the house in the High Street. Present were the President of the Royal Society, as well as book dealers and a journalist, Samuel Johnson. Johnson had arrived in Marylebone in March 1737, with his pupil and friend David Garrick.
They lodged at
Mrs Crow’s, 6 Castle Street, near Cavendish Square. After the meeting,
Samuel Johnson and Harley’s literary secretary were charged with cataloguing the manuscripts they thought of particular interest.

Samuel Johnson’s time spent with Edward Harley’s library would be of great significance to his later work in producing his
Dictionary
. Here he was exposed to many Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, and the
Dictionary
is notable for its ‘
Saxonic element
’. It was also here that he studied Greek and Latin dictionaries, finding in them much to admire. In the early 1750s, Henrietta and her daughter, Margaret, entered into negotiations to sell the library to the nation. It was eventually purchased for £10,000 by the government, in 1753, and housed in the British Museum along with the collections of Hans Sloane and Robert Bruce Cotton. These three now form the British Library’s core collection of early manuscripts, vindicating in some small way Harley’s ruinous bibliomania.

Margaret Harley, Edward’s daughter, was an avid gardener. Letters from her father to her grandfather describe her as a cheerful little girl with a love of flowers and animals. She married ‘
the handsomest man
in England’, William Bentinck, 2nd Duke of Portland (1709–1762) in June 1734. In her married life, this love of flowers became a career. She sponsored many botanists to travel the world, and was one of the first people to successfully cultivate the American import
Magnolia grandiflora
. Margaret contributed significantly to the core botanic collection of Kew after it was founded, in 1759. William Curtis, the compiler of an early Kew catalogue, makes note of her generosity regarding the ‘
many scarce and valuable
plants, both British and foreign, received by Mr Aiton at Kew’. Thus, in two generations, the Harley family gifted London with the nuclei of two of its great institutions: the British Library and Kew Gardens.

In 1784, Margaret bought a Roman cameo-glass vase, later known as the ‘Portland Vase’. It dates from between 27
BC
and
AD
14, during the reign of the Emperor Augustus, and has been called ‘
the finest piece
of Roman cameo-glass in existence’. First mention of it comes in 1582, when it was discovered in a burial mound near Rome. The vase passed through the hands of various cardinals who displayed it in their palaces, where it was essential viewing for any young man who made it to Italy on his grand tour.

The vase is made from layers of cobalt-blue glass. The exact technique is a mystery, and without light the vase appears black. On top of the blue glass is a layer of opaque white, cut back by gem engravers to form a continuous frieze around the body. This frieze contains two scenes, one on each side. The first is the parents of Achilles, and the second is identified as Paris choosing between Hera, Aphrodite and Athena. Some believe it was made to celebrate a wedding. Others believe it to have been made to celebrate the birth of Rome from the ‘ashes of Troy’ and the success of Augustus.

In 1778, collector William Hamilton acquired it for £1,000. A catalogue of the Hamilton collection reached Josiah Wedgwood, who had just begun to make his ‘Etruscan’ vases. Wedgwood at first overlooked the Portland Vase, and made copies of others. Three years later, the sculptor John Flaxman sent him a letter: ‘
I wish you may soon come
to town to see Wm Hamilton’s Vase, it is the finest production of Art that has been brought to England and seems to be the very apex of perfection to which you are endeavouring to bring your bisque and jasper.’

Margaret paid Hamilton eighteen hundred guineas for the vase, in 1785. She died in the same year, and was remembered by Horace Walpole as ‘
a simple woman
, but perfectly sober, and intoxicated only by empty vases’. Her collection was auctioned to pay her debts, and her son bought the vase back in the sale. He then loaned it to Wedgwood for one year, during which the now famous copy in jasperware was made.