When they were Young

Archelaus, my hero, is 19 in 1720, the year that Pullen is set. The illegitimate child of a nobleman and a theatrical performer, Archie has never met his father, who dies shortly after the novel opens.

As I want him to gradually develop enough feeling for this man he's never known to want to avenge his death, it is important that he gain some sense of him. So in the course of visiting an old friend of his father's, Archie will see a set of miniatures painted in about 1676, when his father would himself have been nineteen - and on the Grand Tour with his friend Ervin.

It was customary for young men to have themselves depicted in full classical antic mode, with ruined columns, rent curtains, toga-type gowns and bits of armour. I wouldn't imagine - no matter what the skill of that year's modish artist - that it was always easy to make a young man look good like this:

(Nicholaes Maes, Portrait of a Young Man, 1676)

But for every ten chaps who looked a bit burkish, there was always one who managed to look cool no matter what get-up he was shown in:

(Unknown artist, John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, c. 1665-75)

Archie, who is not immune to a bit of vanity, will have his first throb of fellow-feeling for his father when he sees how much they are alike.

Tell it to the Bees

It's not often that I descend from the 18thC to the present day, but even I'm willing to make the trip for my friend Fiona's latest novel (her fourth) - Tell it to the Bees (publ. Tindal Street).

Told through the eyes of a young boy, Charlie, growing up in the 1950s, it is the story of the dissolution of a marriage and development of a love. It is subtly and gently told, and utterly gripping. I read it in two sittings.

If you've just finished a book or are looking for a present for someone else, I couldn't recommend it highly enough if it were my own!

Sarah Churchill on the Credit Crunch:

Among those who sold their shares in the South Sea Co. and made a killing before it all went chalk-outline-of-banker-on-the-pavement shaped, was Sarah Churchill (née Jenyns), Duchess of Marlborough.

Her Duke, the victor of Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde and Malplaquet, may, as she reported, have on his return "pleasured her twice in his top boots", but financially she wore the trousers. It was she who built Blenheim palace and its grounds, and amassed a vast and lasting fortune.

Her punditry is as pertinent today as it was in 1720:

"Every mortal that has common sense or that knows anything of figures, sees that 'tis not possible by all the arts and tricks upon earth long to carry £400,000,000 of paper credit with £15,000,000 of specie. This makes me think that this project must burst in a little while and fall to nothing."

Scandal-broth: Tea

Might it be for more than Fashion, that the lovely Mrs. H-- H-- H-- has recently shown herself so taken by her new Turban-Hat, from which neither Sun, Rain nor ingallant Breezes can part her?

We have heard that her Attachment to the outlandish Headgear is due to an unfortunate Circumstance - the lady has lost the Wealth of lustrous Curls for which she was rightly famed. Nature is not to be upgraded for this barbarity, however; but rather Mammon.

Her husband, whose debts to Dame Fortune and the Beauties of the Bagnio have made the name H-- H-- a Byword for bad Credit, deserves some degree of Censure. His Lady found it necessary to offer her Tresses on the open Market in order to have anything to serve their Guests at a forthcoming Party.

Swift on the Credit Crunch:

..."How will the caitiff wretch be scared
When first he finds himself awake
At the last trumpet, unprepared,
And all his grand account to make!

For in that universal call,
Few bankers will to Heav'n be mounters:
They'll cry, 'Ye shops, upon us fall!
Conceal and cover us, ye counters.'"

Jonathan Swift, The Run upon the Bankers (repr. 1720)

St. James's Street

Nip through the Park and do a quick dog-leg by way of Spring Garden (an alley), Cockspur, Warwick Street and Pall Mall, and you would find yourself in St. James's Street.

Here you could enjoy the company of the gentle sex (for a price) at the Bagnio at number 63. Next door were Fenton's Hotel and the Cocoa Tree coffee shop (no. 64) which catered to the Tory MPs. The Whigs used the St. James coffee house just up the road at number 60.

White's Chocolate House at number 28 had a gaming room for gamblers, next door to Mrs. Hannah Humphrey's bookshop at no. 27.

Sedan Chair - part one

A Modern Belle going to the Rooms at Bath

James Gillray (1796)

Perspective

I never saw an ugly thing in my life; for let the form of an object be what it may - light, shade and perspective will always make it beautiful.

John Constable

The Bruiser's Reply

Churchill wrote in reply:

Be wicked as thou wilt; do all that's base;
Proclaim thyself the monster of thy race.
Let Vice and Folly thy black soul divide;
Be proud with meanness, and be mean with pride.

I think it's fair to say that he felt stung.

The Bruiser

THE BRUISER, C. CHURCHILL (once the Rev'd!) in the Character of a Russian Hercules. Regaling himself after having Kill'd the Monster Caricaturea that so sorely Gall'd his Virtuous friend, the Heaven born WILKES!

But he had a Club this Dragon to Drub, or he had ne'er don'it, I warrant ye --- Dragon of Wantley

Designed and Engraved by Wm Hogarth Price 1s 6d n Publish'd according to act of Parliament August 1. 1763

Hogarth - depicting himself here in the foreground, in the character of his own pug-dog - is ridiculing the satirist, critic and poet, Charles Churchill (ally of the radical politician John Wilkes, who Hogarth considered an enemy).

Mr. Johnston's Bear

I called at Drury Lane Playhouse for Mr. Garrick... In the theatre there was a fine large dog chained. "This," said he, "is Johnston the boxkeeper's bear, though I don't know which of 'em is the greatest bear."

Johnson on the Credit Crunch:

"Trade may make a man rich; but riches, without goodness, cannot make us happy."

A child of older parents:

...'leads much the same sort of life as a child's dog; teased like that with fondness through folly, and exhibited like that to every company, through idle and empty vanity.'

[Sam Johnson, who suffered from his parents' attention]

A Proper Spectacle

(Lifted from a Hogarth crowd-scene).

Boswell on the Credit Crunch:

...'I now made a very clear calculation of my expenses for the year, and found that I would be able to save £50 out of my allowance... Not satisfied with saving £50, I went to work still nearer, wishing to save £20 more, and with great thought and assiduity did I compute. In short, I found myself turning very fond of money and ruminating with a kind of transport on the idea of being worth £70 at the year's end. The desire of being esteemed a clever economist was no doubt mixed in with it, but I seriously think that sheer love of coin was my predominant principle...
I have observed in some preceding period of this my journal that making money is one of the greatest pleasures in life, as it is very lasting and is continually increasing. But it must be observed that a great share of anxiety is the constant concomitant of this passion, so that the mind is as much hurt in one way as it is pleased in another... To keep the golden mean between stinginess and prodigality is the point I should aim at.'

James Boswell, 9 February 1763

Coves, Kinchins and Morts

COVE - A man, a fellow, a rogue. The cove was bit: the rogue was outwitted. The cove has bit the cole: the rogue has got the money.

KINCHIN - A little child. Kinchin coes: orphan beggar boys, educated in thieving. Kinchin morts: young girls under the like circumstances and training. Kinchin morts, or coes in slates: beggars' children carried at their mothers' backs in sheets. Kinchin cove: a little man.

MORT - A woman or wench; also a yeoman's daughter. To be taken all a-mort: to be confounded, surprised or motionless through fear.

SLATE - A sheet.

From Francis Grose's dictionary The Vulgar Tongue (1785).


Cant, the argot which Grose catalogues, was the language of street-traders, criminals and itinerants: a language of self-protection for those planning or committing illicit acts, or wishing to have private discourse in public; it also acted as a badge of identity of the marginal or dispossessed.

Dangerous Beauty

Continuing musings on toxic cosmetics...

What is amazing to me, is that the Georgian beauties knew what they were risking in applying ceruse directly onto their skin - and that was just for starters, the white lead 'base coat' - even without a legion of scientists and rodents to guinea-pig for them. Common gossip alleged that a number of women had died from 'addiction' to various dangerous tints: in his correspondence, Horace Walpole mentions Lady Fortrose, ‘killed like Lady Coventry and others by white lead, of which nothing could break her’, even though ceruse was known to be ‘corrosive and pernicious to the skin.’ As late as 1822 The British Perfumer warned of the high toxicity of vermilion, recommending the use of less harmful cochineal papers for applying rouge instead.

But are we any better today? Our Hollywood belles inject poison into their flesh in Botox, which magazines and tube adverts attempt to incite us to also try over a lunch-time sandwich. It's becoming ever-more common for 'ordinary' people to have bits of our faces augmented or our skin stretched tauter, bags of silicone deposited in our bodies, and inches of fat sucked away.

And, again just as today when we collude with artificiality - to some extent indulging ourselves, by persisting in feeling inferior to magazine images which we know are airbrushed - so George Romney, John Hoppner, Richard Westall, Richard Cosway, etc. were all even at the time known to flatter the (already excessively made-up) women who sat for them by further 'improving' their complexions...

Popular Drinks of the Georgian Era...

ii: Hum Cap, or Hum

Very old and strong beer, often made with malt, such as Double Ale, Stout or Pharaoh; also known as STINGO.

Kinchin morts...

... or, coves in slates :--

Beggars' children, carried on their mothers' backs,

bound up in sheets.

Imagination Running Riot:

'If once our carnal appetites are let loose, without those prudent and secure guides [of virtue and religion], there is no excess and disorder which they are not liable to commit, even while they pursure their natural satisfaction; and, which may seem still more strange, there is nothing monstrous and unnatural, which they are not capable of inventing, nothing so brutal and shocking which they have not actually committed.'

Henry Fielding, The Female Husband (1746)

Ingredients:

Among the ingredients in theatrical and everyday make-up were:

white lead - known as 'ceruse' (toxic)
red cinnabar (toxic)
vermilion (toxic)
white chalk
carpenters' blue chalk
India ink
red brickdust
sandalwood red
mouse-skin patches (for creating alluring moles and decorative shapes, but more often for disguising syphilitic boils)

Interestingly, while excessive red in your custom-made complexion was considered tarty to British tastes, in France it was white that was whorish.

Saving Face

'New powdered,

patch'd and paint'd o'er,

The marks of a retailing whore.'

Ned Ward, Hudibras

The Spectator complained, in an article in 1711, that the vogue for make-up had become so excessive that women were in constant danger of 'losing face':-

'A sigh in the languishing lover, if fetched too near, would dissolve a feature; and a kiss snatched by a forward one, might transform the complexion of the mistress to the face of the admirer.'

Bridewell

'From St. Bride's Well, a holy well in London, near which Henry VIII had a 'lodging', given by Edward VI for a hospital, afterwards converted into a house of correction.' [from the O.E.D.]

By association, 'bridewell' came to be a general term for any house of correction for prisoners; a place of forced labour; a gaol, prison. As, for example, in Colse's poem of 1596, Penelope's Complaint:

"Thy giggish tricks, thy queanish trade,

A thousand Bridwel birds hath made."

Most towns had a bridewell: some, like Newport Pagnell, even had two.

In much the same way, 'Tyburn' was the place of execution for Middlesex prisoners; situated at the junction of the present-day Oxford Street, Bayswater Road and Edgeware Road, but in open land some distance from the city when it was first established.

By allusion, however, and presumably because its sheer traffic of trade made it a byword, 'Tyburn' came to be synonymous with 'the gallows.' Therefore: Tyburn blossom, Tyburn check, Tyburn coach, Tyburn collop, Tyburn face, Tyburn jig, Tyburn piccadill, Tyburn saint, Tyburn stretch, Tyburn string, Tyburn tie, Tyburn tiffany, Tyburn ticket, Tyburn tippet, Tyburn tree, Tyburn tribe, Tyburn wright.

And hence also, York's 'Tyburn' - first a gibbet, later a gallows - where Dick Turpin was hanged.

St. James's Park: the Ton saunters...

Thomas Gainsborough, 'The Mall' (1783)

The Female Husband

'A woman marrying a woman according to the rites of the Established Church is something strange and unnatural. Yet did this woman, under the outward garb of a man, marry fourteen of her own sex.' [The Newgate Calendar]

Mary Hamilton, who went by the name 'Charles', was an itinerant quack doctor who had been habitually cross-dressing since trying on her brother's clothes when she was 14. By the time she reached public attention, in 1746 (when she was about 20), she had been living as a man some years; she was put on trial in Taunton for marrying a string of women, under the fraudulent pretence of being a man.

'Charles' had full sexual relationships with her wives (one testified that she 'had entered her Body several times', presumably with a dildo). Nonetheless Mary Price, said by some sources to be the fourteenth victim of this female Bluebeard, became suspicious after several months of marriage. At this point 'Charles' confessed, and was sent to prison. From here she did a roaring trade selling her patent medicines to the visitors who crowded to gawp at her.

'Great Numbers of people flock to see her in Bridwell... [She] appears very bold and impudent. She seems very gay, with Perriwig, Ruffles, and Breeches.' [The Bath Journal]

Her crime was considered as a form of fraud: the court determined that she was 'an uncommon notorious Cheat'. She was punished with six months hard labour, and public whipping in Taunton, Glastonbury, Wells and Shepton Mallet. Henry Fielding, magistrate and author, is the likely author of a fictionalised pamphlet on Mary, titled 'The Female Husband.'

Father of Cryptography

"The labyrinths of Cipher have frm Day to Day grown more difficult."

John Wallis (1616-1703) is considered to be the father of British codebreaking. A brilliant mathemetician of Emmanuel College, Oxford, Wallis preceded Newton in the development of integral and differential calculus, invented the symbol for and concept of 'infinity' ∞, came up with the germ of the binomial theorem and calculated pi by the interpolation of terms in an infinite series. He had a remarkable talent for mental arithmetic, but was also interested in language; writing a book on grammar with an appendix of the formation of speech-sounds, from which he went on to develop a system for teaching the deaf and dumb to talk.

With such an array of linguistic and numerical skills, it's perhaps not surprising to find that he was the Parliamentarian codebreaker who deciphered some of Charles I's letters, among others, and created a new cipher of his own.

Intelligencers

- aka - spies.

By the 18th century, three secret departments had been created within the General Post Office; these were: the Secret Office, the Private Office and the Deciphering Branch. All three departments operated out of the main post office building off Lombard Street (see 17 March post - 'From Horwood's Map.')

While the Secret Office was concerned with intercepting foreign correspondence, the Private Office covered domestic letters from suspects identified by principal parliamentary secretaries, and applied for by warrant. The Deciphering Branch was staffed by codebreakers, who 'can discover a close-stool to signify a privy-council; a flock of geese, a senate; a lame dog, an invader; the plague, a standing army; a buzzard, a prime-minister; the gout, a high priest; a gibbet, a secretary of state; a chamber pot, a committee of grandees' [Jonathan Swift].

Very few people outside government were aware of these departments' existence; at home and abroad, Britain was considered to be the freest country in Europe. Nevertheless, cumulatively they formed a genuine and highly organised espionage agency, used by ministers but with an entirely independent structure and personnel. Robert Walpole, Britain's first Prime Minister, employed a large team of 'intelligencers' - both men and women - drawn from aristocratic, literary and criminal circles. He was strongly suspected of using them to acquire privileged knowledge for his own commercial advantage.

Popular Drinks of the Georgian Era...

i: Bishop

A concoction of port wine mulled with sugar and a roasted orange or lemon: "Spicy bishop; drink divine". [Coleridge, Poems 1801]

'To bishop' is also to file down and tamper with the teeth of a horse, to make him appear younger. Later, it also came to mean 'to kill by drowning', after Bishop the murderer who drowned a boy in Bethnal Green in 1831; in order to sell his body for dissection.

Riding Out

Above: Horse and Rider (anonymous, 18thC Czechoslovakian)

Below: Osmington Chalk Rider (anonymous, 18thC British. This is the only 'white horse' shown with a rider: he is said to be George III).

Inside the coffee-shop:

Could it be Magical?

"The Chevalier Pinetti with his Consort will exhibit most wonderful, stupendous, and absolutely inimitable, mechanical, physical, and philosophical pieces, which his recent deep scrutiny in those sciences, and assiduous exertions have enabled him to invent and construct; among which Chevalier Pinetti will have the special honour and satisfaction of exhibiting various experiments of new discovery, no less curious than seemingly incredible, particularly that of Madame Pinetti being seated in one of the front boxes, with a handkerchief over her eyes, and guessing at everything imagined and proposed to her by any person in the company."

Advertisement, 1784.

Dangers of Writing, ii: Critical Reviews

"[The author affects] contempt of all newspaper strictures; though, at the same time, he is the sorest man alive, and shrinks like scorched parchment from the fiery ordeal of true criticism: yet he is so covetous of popularity, that he had rather be abused than not mentioned at all."

Richard Sheridan, The Critic

Well, Toto, I guess we're not in Starbucks anymore...

Members of the Royal Society (scientists, philosophers and artists, mostly) took their coffee at the Grecian Coffee House, just off the Strand in Devereux Court.

It was within its august walls that Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley once dissected a dolphin.

Try THAT tomorrow with your double-mocha half-fat decaf with extra chocolate sprinkles.

The Latest Thing

In the grounds of Alexander Pope's status-symbol Palladian villa at Twickenham, which he designed himself, were all the latest whims and fancies: a vineyard, orangery, hothouses for pineapples, hives for bees, rare varieties of French pear, and a large kitchen garden.

Beyond the domestic garden lay extensive landscaping: straight avenues, winding interlaced paths, dense woods, many different trees, a grove of cypresses leading to an obelisk, an amphitheatre, quincunxes, groves, arcades, a wilderness, a bowling green, a shell temple, three mounts, a panorama and a camera obscura built within a grotto.

A restless striving quarrel between ingenuity, variety and naturalism, all crammed into a bare five acres of ground - and as good a metaphor for the eighteenth century as you might care to find.

The Devil in the Detail

Diabolus in Musica - a tri-tone formed by C and F sharp played together.

It was long considered as having an ugly, eerie or even evil quality. Its use was forbidden to early ecclesiastical composers, who gave it this name.

St. James Park, daytime view

Not, sadly, showing the pelicans: in 1664, a Russian ambassador presented a pair to the king, a tradition which foreign ambassadors continue to this day.

St. James's Park, after Dark

Much Wine had pass’d, with grave Discourse
Of who fucks who, and who does worse ..

And nightly now, beneath their shade
Are Buggeries, Rapes and Incests made ..
Great Ladies, Chambermaids and Drudges
The Rag-picker and the Heiress trudges.

Carmen, Divines, Great Lords and Taylors
Prentices, Poets, Pimps and Jaylers,
Footmen, fine Fopps do here arrive
And here – promiscuously – they swive ..

James Wilmot, Earl of Rochester: A Ramble in St. James' Park (1672)


My Lord of London, chancing to remark
A noted Dean much busy’d in the Park
‘Proceed’ he cry’d, ‘proceed my Reverend Brother
‘tis Fornicatio Simplex and no other;
Better than lust for Boys, with Pope and Turk
Or other Spouses like my Lord of York’.

Alexander Pope: Imitations (1735)

From Horwood's Map

Showing the proximity of the Bank of England, the stock exchange, and the General Post Office:

Dangers of Writing, i: The Poignant Orange

Prodigious Madness of the writing Race!

Ardent of Fame, yet fearless of Disgrace.

Without a boding Fear, or anxious Sigh,

The Bard obdurate sees his Brother die.

Deaf to the Critick, sullen to the Friend,

Not One takes Warning, by Another's End.

Oft has our Bard in this disastrous Year,

Beheld the Tragic Heroes taught to fear.

Oft has he seen the Poignant Orange fly,

And heard th'ill Omen'd Catcall's direful Cry.

Yet dares to venture on the dangerous Stage,

And weakly hopes to 'scape the Critick's Rage.

Sam. Johnson - Prologue to David Garrick's Lethe (1740)

Courting Controversy

We hear that a certain Mrs. E-- B--, conjugally conjoined with one of Drury Lane Orchestra's finest exponents of the musical arts, has left her spouse to the chilly embraces of his double-bass, while she enjoys a far warmer welcome in the bosom of the Pr-- of W---...

The Rewards of Literature

Then as now, the 18th Century Literary Muse was a harsh mistress, whose amateurs knew little rest and less riches:

"I am every moment threatened to be turned out [of my lodgings] because I have not money to pay for my bed two nights past, which is usually paid beforehand... I hope therefore you will have the humanity to send me half a guinea for support, till I finish your papers in my hands. The ode on the British Nation I hope to have done today and want proof copy of that part of Stowe you'd choose for the present magazine, that it may be compressed as far as possible...

I humbly entreat your answer, having not tasted anything since Tuesday evening I came in here, and my coat will be taken off my back, for the charge of the bed. So that I must go into prison naked, which is too shocking for me to think of."

[Poet Samuel Boyse, written to a printer/publisher Edward Cave]

Boyse wasn't exaggerating his penury. Engaged in an almost constant circuit between his lodgings and the pawn shop, he often had to go shirtless: at which times he would cut paper into strips and bind them round his wrists and neck to resemble the collar and cuffs he was lacking.

As a young man Samuel Johnson, a friend of Boyse, once scrimped enough money to redeem all Boyse's clothes back - only to find that two days later, they'd been pawned once more.

Where I admire the man, is that he never lost a taste for luxury, or a sense that he deserved it. Johnson recalled of him that even when he was ill from hunger:

"And some money was produced to purchase him a dinner, he got a bit of roast beef, but could not eat it without ketchup, and laid out the last half-guinea he possessed in truffles and mushrooms, eating them in bed, too, for want of clothes, or even a shirt to sit up in."