Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know: The
Extraordinary Exploits of the British and European Aristocracy
by Karl Shaw
The alarming history of the British, and European,
aristocracy - from Argyll to Wellington and from Byron to Tolstoy, stories of
madness, murder, misery, greed and profligacy.
From Regency playhouses, to which young noblemen would go
simply in order to insult someone to provoke a duel that might further their
reputation, to the fashionable gambling clubs or 'hells' which were springing
up around St James's in the mid-eighteenth century, the often bizarre doings of
aristocrats.
An eighteenth-century English gentleman was required to have
what was known as 'bottom', a shipping metaphor that referred to stability.
Taking part in a duel was a bold statement that you had bottom. William Petty,
2nd Earl of Shelburne certainly had bottom, if not a complete set of gonads
following his duel with Colonel Fullarton, MP for Plympton. Both men missed
with their first shots, but the colonel fired again and shot off Shelborne's
right testicle. Despite being hit, Shelborne deliberately discharged his second
shot in the air. When asked how he was, the injured Earl coolly observed his
wound and said, 'I don't think Lady Shelborne will be the worse for it.'
The cast of characters includes imperious, hard-drinking and
highly volatile Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, who is remembered today as much
for his brilliant scientific career as his talent for getting involved in
bizarre mishaps, such as his death as a result of his burst bladder; the
Marquess of Queensberry, a side-whiskered psychopath, who, on a luxury
steamboat in Brazil, in a row with a fellow passenger over the difference
between emus and ostriches, and knocked him out cold; and Thomas, 2nd Baron
Lyttelton, a Georgian rake straight out of central casting, who ran up enormous
gambling debts, fought duels, frequented brothels and succumbed to drug and
alcohol addiction.
Often, such rakes would be swiftly packed off on a Grand
Tour in the hope that travel would bring about maturity. It seldom did.
London in
the eighteenth century was very much a new city, risen from the ashes of the
Great Fire. With thousands of homes and many landmark buildings destroyed, it
had been brought to the brink. But the following century was a period of
vigorous expansion, of scientific and artistic genius, of blossoming reason,
civility, elegance and manners. It was also an age of extremes: of starving
poverty and exquisite fashion, of joy and despair, of sentiment and cruelty.
Society was fractured by geography, politics, religion and history. And
everything was complicated by class. As Daniel Defoe put it, London really was
a 'great and monstrous Thing'.
Jerry
White's tremendous portrait of this turbulent century explores how and to what
extent Londoners negotiated and repaired these open wounds. We see them going
about their business as bankers or beggars, revelling in an enlarging world of
public pleasures, indulging in crimes both great and small - amidst the
tightening sinews of power and regulation, and the hesitant beginnings of London
democracy.
In the
long-awaited finale to his acclaimed history of London over 300 years, Jerry
White introduces us to shopkeepers and prostitutes, men and women of fashion
and genius, street-robbers and thief-takers, as they play out the astonishing drama
of life in eighteenth-century London.
London in the Eighteenth Century: A
Great and Monstrous Thing by Jerry White – review
Jerry White's study of Georgian London depicts a city
teeming with sex and violence
Robert McCrum
Sunday 25 March 2012 00.05 GMT First published on Sunday 25
March 2012 00.05 GMT
Britain and London are virtually synonymous in the eyes of
the world. The eve of the Olympics is a good time to go back to the century
that saw the making of Britannia and the London we walk and live in today.
Jerry White's history of 18th-century London is the culmination of two previous
volumes about London in the 19th and 20th centuries. This new book finds him
inspired by the city that Daniel Defoe identified as "this great and
monstrous Thing called London".
In 1700, it was divided, in separations that linger, into
three: the City (London), the court (Westminster and St James's) and south of
the river (Southwark). The essayist Joseph Addison, in 1712, looked on it as
"an aggregate of various nations distinguished from each other by their
respective customs, manners an interests". In 1700, its population
numbered about half a million, swelling to approximately 750,000 by 1750 and
roughly a million by 1800. By contrast, England's second city, Bristol, had scarcely
30,000 inhabitants.
London was not just staggeringly larger than anywhere else,
it was also a vivid new metropolis, much of it in soft pink brick. The Great
Fire of 1666 had left more than half of the old city in smouldering ruins.
After the union with Scotland, the capital became the outward sign of British
prosperity and self-confidence. And the people most attracted to it, for its
teeming opportunities, were the Scots.
Georgian London became a Scottish city. Its main architect,
James Gibbs, was Scottish. So was the circle that formed around the young
George III. That great Londoner, Samuel Johnson, loved to goad the Scots, but
his amanuensis, James Boswell, was one himself, and so were five of the six assistants
on his famous Dictionary. Scots in the capital often attracted hostility. When
officers in highland dress appeared at Covent Garden, the upper gallery yelled:
"No Scots! No Scots!" and pelted them with apples.
In other ways, Britannia's London was more extreme but not
so different from our own: prey to rioting, seething with sex and violence.
Visitors to London, appalled by the atmosphere, also noted what one described
as "the vast number of harlots" roaming the streets by night. London
was the sex capital of Europe, but hardly uplifting. "She was ugly and
lean," wrote James Boswell of one encounter in the park, "and her
breath smelt of spirits. I never asked her name. When it was done, she slunk
off."
White's account is not exactly new. Much of this book reads
like an animated Hogarth cartoon. But he has uncovered a wealth of evidence to
sustain a portrait of a society revelling in money and pleasure in ways that
recall the excesses of the 1980s.
Contemporaries saw the city as a marketplace for every kind
of trade. In the mixing of vice and fashion, there were remarkable social
consequences at work, too. White argues persuasively that historians have paid
insufficient attention to the role of prostitution in the rise of democracy.
It's a pleasing picture that while the women of the town flirtatiously
dissolved the bonds of deference, London became a democratic crucible.
But there was a dark side. "Crime and criminals,"
says White, "knew no bounds of rank in 18th-century London." Suicide
was common, executions a public spectacle. Violent property crime rose. In
1780, with the outbreak of the Gordon riots, London seemed on the brink of
civil war.
In early June, the mob attacked 10 Downing Street and then
moved on to batter the city's prisons, destroying Newgate. It has been
calculated that these riots destroyed 10 times more property than was destroyed
in Paris during the entire French revolution.
The repression of the 1790s was the response of an establishment
reasserting state control. The French revolution and the wars that followed
loosened the city's devotion to popular democracy and brought merchants and
courtiers from the east and west ends into a loyal alliance behind the throne.
London had become the world capital it remains today.
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