Georgian London: Into the Streets (17 page)

At the west end of the park, away from the rowdy chair rank, was the house of the Duke of Buckingham, later purchased for George III and Queen Charlotte. The house was desirable for the ‘
fine garden and terras
, from where there is a prospect of the adjacent country’. The Royal Family eventually relocated to Buckingham House; its refurbishment as a palace did not meet favour with everyone, and by the end of the Georgian period many felt the royal residence and the park had lost their earlier ‘country in the city’ appeal. For a start, Charles II’s Dutch canal was 5ft 1in below the surface of the Thames at high tide, ‘
thus the water, once admitted to this ornamental reservoir, cannot again flow out, but stagnates’ and therefore stank in ‘sultry’ weather. If the old landscaping was proving unpopular, so was Edward Blore’s new design for Buckingham House (now Palace) so close to Charles’s canal: ‘the verge of this puddle has been chosen whereon to expend above a million sterling in the erection of a bedlam-like building as a royal residence
’.

The exclusive residents of St James’s were not only occupied with traditional upper-class pursuits. The growing fashion for tea and all-female tea parties was often used for the benefit of the many private charities springing up in Georgian London.

Tea had been in London since at least 1659, when ‘
theire ware also
att this time a Turkish drink to be sould, almost in evry street, called Coffee, and another kind of drink called Tee’. Writing in his diary on 25 September 1660, Samuel Pepys noted that he ‘sent for a cup of Tee (a China drink) of which I had never drunk before’. At that stage, tea was sold in the coffee houses. But it soon became the
feminine alternative to coffee, which some women regarded as harsh and unhealthy.
The Women’s Petition Against Coffee
of 1676 complained that coffee had reduced Englishmen to ‘meer Cock-sparrows’ and claimed that: ‘Never did Men wear greater breeches, or carry less in them of any Mettle whatsoever.’ This the writer attributed to ‘nothing more than the Excessive use of that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE’. Tea, on the other hand, was considered as healthy and refreshing. During the 1680s, tea was regarded as a ritual at court, and a mark of taste and social status amongst courtiers. Soon, other reasons for drinking it besides an overt way of displaying wealth and discernment were found, and a traveller to India in the 1690s found tea ‘
very convenient
for our Health, and agreeable to the Habits of our Bodies’.

Samuel Johnson described himself as ‘
a hardened and shameless
tea-drinker’ who barely let his kettle cool before brewing up again, but he represents one of the few male voices claiming a tea addiction. The association with women did not go down well with tea’s detractors. They did not see non-alcoholic tea as the drink of true Englishmen, asking, ‘
Were they the sons
of tea-sippers, who won the fields of Cressey and Agincourt, or dyed the Danube’s streams with Gallic blood?’

Tea was difficult to obtain. It is easily tainted by the smell of other cargo and so must be carefully packed for transportation. One thing that definitely wouldn’t taint the tea were the Chinese porcelain pots in which it was brewed, and so the ships began to pack porcelain too, bringing it back to extremely fashionable homes in London and giving us the generic word ‘china’ for thin porcelain. A ton of tea came along with six tons of porcelain as ballast.
As a result, London was inundated
with cheap exotic porcelain: in 1712, a 216-piece tea and dinner service cost £5 10s; and in 1723, 5,000 teapots were imported costing only 1½d each.

Teapots and cups became desirable tableware for the rich and aspirational for the poor, who were seemingly determined to compete ‘
with their superiors
, and imitating their luxuries, throw away their little earnings upon this fashionable herb’. The cachet of tea-drinking in London’s most elegant drawing rooms was exploited by Josiah
Wedgwood with his tea services, which were at once a homage to the purest Chinese porcelain and yet a deliberate attempt to cultivate elite patronage.

Tea parties were not just for the rich. Women in almost all classes considered them social occasions, but many middle- and upper-class women used them to cultivate charity or encourage debate. One, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (née Pierrepoint), would introduce London to inoculation against smallpox and used tea parties to spread the word. Mary had escaped an arranged marriage with the astonishingly named Clotworthy Skeffington by marrying Edward Wortley Montagu. Mary did not love Edward but she bore him a son, and her time in London was spent mixing in the highest circles. She cultivated literary friendships, and had a stormy love-hate relationship with Alexander Pope. In the winter of 1715, Lady Mary contracted smallpox. She survived, but she was ‘
very severely markt’ in both appearance and temperament. Her looks, which had been remarkable, were gone, as were patches of her hair and her eyelashes, ‘which gave a fierceness to her eyes that impaired their beauty’.

In August 1716, her husband was made Ambassador to Istanbul. The city was something of a shock for Mary, but she took to the climate and the people. Amongst her letters from Turkey is one dated 1 April 1717. It tells of the inoculation of her son against smallpox, using a Turkish method of ‘ripping’ four or five veins with a large needle, applying pus from the sores of a smallpox victim, then covering the site with a ‘hollow bit of shell’ and binding them up. She reported to her husband, ‘The Boy was engrafted last Tuesday, and is at this time singing and playing and very impatient for his supper.’ The success of this operation led her to ‘take pains to bring this usefull invention into fashion in England’.

On her return to England, she found both smallpox and arguments about its treatment raging. During the epidemic of 1719, which saw many of her friends and acquaintances die of the disease, she was remarkably silent. In the early part of 1721, it was so warm that roses bloomed in January and smallpox went ‘forth like a destroying Angel’. Lady Mary called upon Charles Maitland, an English doctor she had met in Turkey, to inoculate her daughter, Mary, but he hesitated. It was one thing to perform the operation in Turkey, but another to do it in London. He made sure he had two witnesses from the Royal College of Physicians before performing the operation. One was James Keith, who had lost two of his sons to smallpox, in 1717. After seeing the operation, he immediately inoculated his remaining son.

London’s aristocracy began to visit Mary to see if they should engraft their own children. The visitors included Caroline, Princess of Wales, who sanctioned the testing of inoculation on condemned prisoners in Newgate. The experiment was a success, securing royal approval for smallpox inoculation, but the press did not take to it so kindly, or to Lady Mary. She was branded an ‘unnatural mother who had risked the lives of her own children
’ and people began to ‘hoot’ at her in the street. Yet, the list of parents taking early action to protect their children is extensively drawn from Lady Mary’s own friends and acquaintances. She exploited the tea party circuit and took her children all over London to show that they had been unharmed by the operation.

The fact that she was well known and held a high position in society contributed largely to the success of Maitland’s subsequent career in inoculation. Their pioneering work laid the bedrock which would be built upon by Edward Jenner later in the century, when he introduced mass inoculation to England.

In 1716, Henry Hoare (the banker), Robert Witham (a vintner), William Wogan (a writer) and the Reverend Patrick Coburn met in St Dunstan’s Coffee House in Fleet Street and established the Charitable Society for the Sick, Poor and Needy. At first, they intended to visit and dispense charity to prisoners in ‘
the White Chapple
, the Kings Bench, the Clink and the Marshalsea’. The men went themselves, money in hand, and took Mr Savile (an apothecary) and Mrs Sherman (a midwife) with them, when necessary. By that summer, they knew they couldn’t keep up with the demand, and decided to limit themselves to providing a public infirmary for Westminster.

This was still an ambitious aim, as London’s only public hospitals at the time were St Bartholomew’s, in Smithfield, and St Thomas’s, in Southwark. By 1720, they had taken a house in Petty France, south of St James’s Park, and in May admitted their first patient, a man with inflammation of the joints and scurvy who was discharged almost a month later. The infirmary was soon oversubscribed and, in 1732, the governors acquired Lanesborough House on Hyde Park Corner and created St George’s Hospital, known for its brilliant and sometimes eccentric surgeons. William Cheselden was highly skilled at extracting bladder stones, an operation known as ‘lithotomy’. Samuel Pepys had survived this risky operation decades earlier; he gave thanks every year, and kept the stone as a memento. Many were not so lucky. Cheselden, however, had an excellent record, and could locate the stone, cut it out and start stitching in under one minute. His speed and assurance meant few of his patients died from shock on the table. Another St George’s surgeon was Henry Watson, who carried on teaching there until his death, in 1793, aged ninety-one. He was known less for his surgical skill and more for his old-fashioned outfits of ‘
curled wig
, a full-cuffed coat with a number of huge buttons, and a cocked hat’, all complemented by a stylish cane. He referred to his medical students as ‘cubs’.

The most famous of the students at St George’s was Edward Jenner, who arrived as a 21-year-old, in 1770. He lived with John Hunter and his family and studied in Hunter’s menagerie of exotic animals, some of which had come from the Tower. From Hunter he ‘
learnt the value of
directness and simplicity of conduct and a passionate love of truth’ that would serve him so well in his work against smallpox.

Nearby, work had already begun against a pox of a different kind: venereal disease. Slightly further out, behind Buckingham House, London’s first Lock Hospital opened on 31 January 1747 exclusively to treat patients suffering from venereal disease. A ‘lock hospital’ was the old name for a lazar house, thought to come from the French word for rags:
loques
. It was the brainchild of William Bromfield, a Holborn Doctor and Demonstrator of Anatomy at Barber-Surgeons’ Hall and later surgeon to Frederick, Prince of Wales. Bromfield had witnessed the difficulties of housing those infected by the pox: hospital boards
had started putting these patients of ‘low character’ in yellow outfits, giving rise to the name ‘canaries’ for street prostitutes. Traditional remedies were poisons – arsenic and mercury – either applied directly to the affected parts, or administered in a number of unappealing ways. Often, it was only the natural remission of the disease between stages that led physicians to declare one third of their patients cured. Bromfield was convinced he could do better; from the beginning, the Lock Hospital sought to make the wealthier classes aware of the realities of venereal diseases through public meetings. On 17 November 1755,
The Public Advertiser
reported that a ‘Lady of Quality’, after attending one of these meetings, had endowed a new ward for the reception of afflicted married women ‘injured by the Cruelty of bad Husbands’. It also reported that ‘near two Hundred [children] from two to ten years old have been Cured in that Hospital that had fallen Victims to Villains Misguided by a Vulgar Notion that by a Criminal Communication with a healthy Child a certain Cure might be obtained for themselves’. The Lock Hospital also bore the expense of prosecuting at least one man who had tried to cure himself of venereal disease in this fashion. In 1764, the governors paid to prosecute Edmund Thirkell for the rape of five-year-old Mary Amelia Halfpenny, who had been admitted to the hospital suffering with venereal disease. He was tried before Lord Mansfield and convicted, but his fate is unknown.

Bromfield appointed the Wesleyan Martin Madan as chaplain of the Lock Hospital, and a chapel was constructed at Madan’s expense so that patrons and patients could both attend the service without seeing each other. Madan began to adapt old hymns and create new ones with the chapel’s blind organist, Charles Lockhart.
These hymns
became hugely popular with the smart congregation, and Madan put them on sale:
A Collection of Psalm and Hymn Tunes … To Be Had at the Lock Hospital near Hyde Park Corner
. In the 1760s and 1770s, the annual oratorio was a sell-out, and the musical events were consistently popular. Men and women were encouraged to sing together, with gusto, and the sermons sought to raise awareness about the social problems of venereal disease. Then Lockhart left, after an argument, and a rapid decline began. In 1780, the concerts were replaced by evangelical sermons, and Martin Madan published his book
Thelyphthora
in
which he proposed that the problems of prostitution could be solved by polygamy.
The matter was debated
by the Christian Society and the magazine
La Belle Assemblée
that winter, but a priest preaching in favour of multiple wives was too much to be borne, and the fashionable patrons melted away.

The Lock Hospital would continue on, but never with the same level of success. Madan died a shamed recluse, in 1790, by which time a separate hostel for women who did not want to return to prostitution had been established in Knightsbridge. The hospital stayed put until the middle of the nineteenth century, when it was moved to Harrow. Finally, a century later, it was absorbed into the NHS.

Like St James’s Park, Hyde Park had long been famous as the promenade of the smart set, particularly at weekends. The
Journal of Agriculture
noted, in 1831, that during the ‘gay season’, someone had been seen driving their curricle around the park, drawn by a pair of quaggas. Quaggas (the Khoikhoi word for the now extinct variant species of zebra) were popular with fashionable Londoners, as they were more biddable than their wild cousins. Like all London’s parks, it was a public space and provided recreation for all. Charles I had opened the park to the public in 1637, and William III built Rotten Row as his private road to Kensington Palace. But it was Queen Caroline, George II’s wife, who created the park we are familiar with today. In 1730, she ordered the Westbourne River dammed to form the Serpentine Lake, which had previously been eleven ponds, popular with swimmers and skaters. Such sports were not without their dangers, and fatalities were common when swimmers ‘
ventured out
of their depth’ or when skaters fell through the ice.