Georgian London: Into the Streets (11 page)

On 8 July 1810, the Bow Street Police raided the pub. Twenty-seven men were arrested on suspicion of sodomy and attempted sodomy. The Swan had been going for less than six months, established by two men, Cook and Yardley, but it already had a considerable following. Cook and Yardley had furnished their establishment for its purpose.

Four beds were provided in one room - another was fitted up for the ladies’ dressing-room, with a toilette, and every appendage of rouge, &c. &c. … The upper part of the house was appropriated to youths who were constantly in waiting for casual customers; who practised all the allurements that are found in a brothel, by the more natural description of prostitutes. Men of rank, and respectable situations in life, might be seen wallowing either in or on beds with wretches of the lowest description.

Amongst the regulars at the White Swan were: Kitty Cambric, a coal merchant; Miss Selina, a runner at a Police Office; Black-eyed Leonora, a drummer; Pretty Harriet, a butcher; Lady Godiva, a waiter; the Duchess of Gloucester, a gentleman’s servant; the Duchess of Devonshire, a blacksmith; and Miss Sweet Lips, a country grocer.

It is a generally received opinion, and a very natural one, that the prevalency of this passion has for its object effeminate delicate beings only: but this seems to be, by Cook’s account, a mistaken notion; and the reverse is so palpable in many instances, that Fanny Murry, Lucy Cooper, and Kitty Fisher, are now personified by an athletic bargeman, an Herculean coal-heaver, and a deaf tyre-smith.

Black-eyed Leonora, the drummer – who stands out amongst this motley crowd – was most likely Thomas White, a sixteen-year-old drummer in the Guards. Thomas was one of the youths who stood and waited in the upper part of the house. He was a great favourite amongst the ‘more exalted’ visitors to the house, ‘being an universal favourite, was very deep in the secrets of the fashionable part of the coterie
’. Poor Thomas, who wasn’t even at the White Swan on the night of the raid, was too quick to confess under pressure and was executed after almost a year in prison. With him died a man called John Hepburn, aged forty-six, who had procured Thomas White’s services. White was prosecuted as the giver, rather than the receiver, which made it almost impossible for the court to avoid the death sentence when the jury found him guilty. White’s execution was a social event: ‘
A vast concourse
of people attended to witness the awful scene. The Duke of Cumberland, Lord Sefton, Lord Yarmouth, and several other noblemen were in the press-yard.’

The Duke of Cumberland had avoided a homosexual scandal by a razor-thin margin in June 1810, when his servant was found with his throat sliced. He had threatened to out his master after catching the Duke and his valet ‘
in an improper
and unnatural situation’. Perhaps Cumberland was one of White’s ‘fashionable’ guests. We will never know. Of the other twenty-five, only six were found guilty and they were pilloried and imprisoned, including Cook the landlord. Yardley seems to have got away with the whole thing. The White Swan affair raised the public ire, and
The Times
reported that the convicted men suffered at the hands of a mob ‘chiefly consisting of women, with tubs of blood, garbage, and ordure from their slaughter-houses, and with this ammunition, plentifully diversified with dead cats, turnips, potatoes, addled eggs, and other missiles, the criminals were incessantly pelted to the last moment’. They ended their hour ‘completely encrusted with filth’ and by the time the cart got them back to Newgate the wagon was ‘so filled with mud and ordure as to completely cover them’.

The death of Thomas White was a sad end to a period of increasing awareness and toleration of homosexuality. Prosecutions had declined and the Enlightenment brought a different way of thinking regarding homosexuality. Sodomy was no longer simply something one ‘did’, but part of the wider picture of being a homosexual. By 1785, in his essay
Offences Against One’s Self
, Jeremy Bentham advocated the
decriminalization of homosexuality, as it ‘might as well be said that the taste a man has for music is unnatural’.

Thomas White’s death at seventeen had a tragic Romanticism which echoed the death of another Holborn seventeen-year-old, also named Thomas. In 1770, Thomas Chatterton took poison in a Holborn garret, gaining in death the reputation as a poet that he had sought in life. ‘
He was a prodigy
almost without equal in the history of literature’, and no other Romantic poet produced work of a comparable quality at such a young age. Yet the best of Chatterton’s poems were fakes. He had written them, but pretended they were the work of Thomas Rowley, a fifteenth-century monk, and that he had discovered them in the church of St Mary Redcliff in Bristol, where he had grown up.

Thomas was apprenticed as an attorney’s clerk at fourteen. His friends described him as slight, fair and scruffy, with large grey eyes. He was regularly caught writing poetry, which was then flung into the fire as punishment. Undeterred, he continued to contribute to the local papers and, despite his youth, acquired the reputation of something of a ladies’ man.

He wrote to Horace Walpole, enclosing some of the work of Thomas Rowley. Ever the avid correspondent, Walpole answered by return, but when he showed Thomas Rowley’s manuscripts to a friend they were denounced as fakes. Walpole felt taken in, having assumed from the assured tone of Thomas’s letters that he was an adult antiquarian and not an apprentice clerk.

Equally, when Thomas Chatterton received Walpole’s letter, he was hugely disappointed in his hero. After all, he had only sent the esteemed author samples of old poetry, making no claims for them. Nor had he asked for money, or advancement, and was bitterly upset by Walpole’s patronizing advice to stick to his day job. Despite this setback, Thomas was soon writing political satire for the London press, gaining contacts and a route to London. Already, he had threatened to commit suicide if he was not able to pursue a career in
writing. Those around him became alarmed by his threats, including his master, who cancelled his apprenticeship indenture and let him go. ‘Farewell Bristolia’s dingy piles of brick,’ Thomas wrote as he left. He went to live with his cousin Mrs Ballance, in Shoreditch. The young boy who lodged with him would remember how ‘not withstanding his pride and haughtiness, it was impossible to help liking him’. He also remembered that Thomas barely ate and rarely slept, sitting at the window all night to read instead.

Mrs Ballance was confused by her manic young cousin. She had once called him ‘cousin Tommy’ and was most upset when he had got into a temper and ‘asked her if she had ever heard of a poet being called Tommy’. As insufferable as Thomas was, he had talent. Within two months of arriving in London, his work was published in the
Middlesex Journal
. He wrote elegies for the dead mayor and kept a tally in the back of his notebook: ‘Am glad he is dead by: £3 3s 6d.’

He left Shoreditch, taking up residence in the garret of 29 Brooke Street, Holborn. His landlady was Mrs Angel and over the next weeks she would live up to her name, watching out for her young tenant as he grew ever thinner. He wrote like a dervish: short stories, skits, a long poem about indecent exposure and some others on Africa. He received a commission to write a
burletta
for Marylebone Gardens, and was paid five guineas for a comic piece about marital strife between Juno and Jupiter.

August fell upon London, and with it the lull of the long vacation. Thomas had not been paid for much of his work. He was also suffering from venereal disease. Mr Cross was the Holborn chemist who passed the time of day with Thomas in the slow afternoons. He pressed Thomas to eat a meal with his family, but the young poet would not, except once taking a share in a barrel of oysters Mr Cross opened on the counter in an attempt to entice him. Mrs Angel, upon realizing that Thomas had not eaten to her knowledge for two to three days, asked him to share her dinner, but again he refused and went up to his garret. On the following morning, 24 August, she found him dead, having taken arsenic in water. He was covered in his own vomit and torn scraps of paper.

The verdict of the inquest was ‘suicide by reason of insanity’ and
he was interred in the burial ground of Shoe Lane workhouse, but the legend of his thwarted genius had already begun. Many thought Horace Walpole instrumental in Thomas’s death. Twelve years later, in 1782, the weight of public pressure had become so great that he felt a guilty need to publish his entire correspondence with the young poet over four issues of
The Gentleman’s Magazine
. He concluded, ‘all of the house of forgery are relations’.

Fakery, or falsehood, was a growing preoccupation Throughout the eighteenth century. Fake coin was an ever present problem, but the very notion of what was real became pressing in the collective mind. Chatterton’s work sits on the cusp of the Augustan pursuit of the rational nature of Truth, and the Romantic vision of the Truth of Beauty. He would influence both William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Keats was devoted to him. When Horace Walpole died, he had collected eighteen volumes of scrapbooks of press clippings on Thomas. In an unguarded moment Samuel Johnson admitted that ‘
it is wonderful
how the whelp has written such things’.

Just south of Holborn, Lincoln’s Inn Fields is now occupied by those practising law, but during the eighteenth century it had a more varied set of residents and a dangerous edge. It was built to designs by Inigo Jones and ‘
affords in its central enclosure
one of the largest and finest public gardens in London, and in point of antiquity is perhaps the oldest’. The square itself sat between Covent Garden and the official border of the City, running down Chancery Lane. It encompassed the spectrum of London life: rich and poor, drama, art and science.

The original houses in the New Square were grand and imposing, but it had a bad reputation. John Gay, in his poem
The Art of Walking the Streets of London
warned readers in 1716:

Where Lincoln’s Inn’s wide space is railed around,

Cross not with venturous step; there oft is found

The lurking thief, who, while the daylight shone

Made the walls echo with his begging tone …

Beggars, and muggers posing as beggars, had been a problem in the square from the outset, as Londoners made their way to and from the City using the square and garden as a short cut. On the west side, in a stand of trees, was London’s most famous bog-house, a public lavatory and the site of illicit engagements, as well as sexual-encounters-turned-muggings. The paths leading across the open space were where the beggar’s crutch

… which late compassion mov’d, shall wound

Thy bleeding head, and fell thee to the ground.

Beggars were a constant preoccupation in Georgian London, and Lincoln’s Inn Fields was shorthand for a beggar’s haunt. Some of them were real, such as Scarecrow, ‘
who disabled himself
in his right leg, and asks alms all day to get himself a warm supper and a trull at night’; and some were but beggarly fictions. The gardens were railed early specifically to prevent rough-sleepers. (Even now, centuries later, Lincoln’s Inn Fields is one of the main locations for the feeding of the homeless. After dark, trucks catering to all denominations pull up and dispense food aid to dishevelled characters who flit in and out of the square.)

It seems more than coincidence that John Gay’s ‘Newgate pastoral’
The Beggar’s Opera
premiered at the Lincoln’s Inn Theatre, in 1728. The theatre had previously been a real tennis court, but was then taken over by the Rich family and rebuilt for staging dramas. The success of
The Beggar’s Opera
, which ran to sixty-two consecutive performances, made ‘
Rich gay
and Gay rich’. The opera, a comic English version poking fun at the fashion for Italian opera, starred the characters Polly Peachum and her roguish lover, Macheath the highwayman, who would become staples of eighteenth-century literature and popular culture.

As the century progressed, Lincoln’s Inn Fields continued to be populated by wealthy householders and poor vagrants. The arrival of the architect John Soane and his family, in 1782, when he bought Number 13 signalled that the square was on the up. He went on to buy Number 14 and integrate the two as his wealth and ambition increased. Almost all of John Soane’s major works have been swept
away, giving him an almost mythical status amongst the great architects of the eighteenth century. Yet Soane was not universally approved of during his lifetime, and his ruthless pursuit of success and perfectionism made him unpopular.

The son of a ‘
common bricklayer’ from Berkshire with a ‘feverish thirst for fame
’, John Soane rose to become one of London’s premier architects and art collectors. His houses, on the north side of the square, were given over to collections of Greek and Roman marbles and funerary urns, as well as Gothic affectations and contemporary pictures, including Hogarth’s ‘Rake’s Progress’. Soane was remarkable in the way he combined all types of architectural styles, some Classical and some contemporary. His fascination with matters funerary was reflected in his favourite room in his home, which was based on a tomb and admits only an eerie crepuscular light. He relied extensively on coloured glass to create odd light effects, and Mrs Soane even dyed their net curtains with turmeric to complete the effect of a house caught in a time warp. Soane was also a pioneer of central heating, which he installed in his home together with hot showers. Such modern thinking and dramatic effects did not always win him friends, one commentator writing in the
Morning Post
: