Bottoms Up

Young Europeans now find London a great place to party, while native hedonists no longer need take the first train to the Continent. Barriers have been lowered, traditional British reserve and sang froid have become distant memories, inhibitions have loosened along with stiff upper lips, and Paris no longer seems far naughtier or more exciting.

That is the cheering story we tell ourselves and it is partly true. But although London is far more fun to live in than it used to be, it seldom feels like a city that truly embraces pleasure. So has there ever been a time when London embraced pleasure – and, if so, what went wrong? Vic Gatrell’s book City of Laughter paints a compelling, seductive picture of London in a lost Golden Age – the Golden Age revealed in the hundreds of satirical prints that poured from the presses from about 1770 to 1830. It draws on many literary sources and is illustrated with almost 300 colour images, most from the under-explored archives at the British Museum and Yale (and many never previously reprinted). Vivid, inventive, energetic, savage in puncturing pretension and full of lavatorial and obscene humour, they offer us a fantastic panorama of a libertine London, full of violence, hearty pleasure, uninhibited sex and high spirits. For those who tend to think of the era as ‘decorous’ and ‘polite’, welcome to a notably indecorous and impolite eighteenth century. Here are the young seducers and ageing lechers, absurd fashions and provocatively clad ballet dancers, Irish bumpkins outwitted by city sophisticates, scenes of convivial drunkenness, grotesque missionaries addressing sour-faced crowds, even ‘the famous pig that could count, spell and read’. There were many skilled print-makers, but a few stand out. Thomas Rowlandson brilliantly captured the comic possibilities of rapidly escalating chaos which a traffic jam or a drunken ‘brawling and scratching match’ could bring to the city streets. James Gillray drew on a surreal, sometimes nightmarish imagination when he transformed Pitt into ‘a Toadstool upon a Dunghill’ or celebrated Nelson’s victory at the Battle of the Nile with an image of a British thunderbolt dismembering a bloody, decapitated French colossus. And George Cruikshank savaged the bloated Prince Regent as a monstrous Prince of Whales, flattened beneath the gross Lady Hertford or groping a buxom woman who struggles to carry him to his bathing machine. Professor Gatrell clearly loves these artists, their implicit attitude to life and the London they reveal. His astonishing book is a combination of first-rate exhibition catalogue, landmark work of social history, and compendium of gossip, scandal and very lewd jokes. It is rare to read such a serious, indeed highly academic work which also feels like going to a fiesta. Only the most joyless prude could resist its sheer exuberance. Yet this is by no means all. Gatrell often seems to be spoiling for a fight and starts as he means to go on – with the story of Lady Worsley’s bottom. An impressive Reynolds portrait of her in scarlet military costume hangs in Harewood Hall in Yorkshire. Visitors tend to walk straight past, unmoved by pictures which present a world ‘in which ladies were so genteel, manners so refined, and fashions so extravagant’. Yet this is not the only image of her that survives. She was involved in a notorious divorce case in which her husband accused her of adultery but then turned out to have been complicit – by taking her lover to the local bathhouse and even hoisting him up to get a good view of his naked wife. Both parties were widely ridiculed and the satirical print-makers had a field day. James Gillray depicted the scene in a caricature entitled Sir Richard Worse-than-Sly, Exposing his Wife’s Bottom – O Fye! He also portrayed Lady Worsley in bed with a lover, while another pulls up his trousers and nine more wait their turn on the stairs. Some historians have claimed that ‘politeness’ became increasingly dominant during the eighteenth century, yet this, argues Gatrell with typical pugnacity, fails to ‘allow a place for the carnivalesque belly-laughter and farts-and-bums mockery that many fine people continued to relish, or for the scurrilous prints that undercut Sir Joshua Reynolds’s idealized portraits’. City of Laughter is a provocative, opinionated book and Gatrell has some pretty clear ideas about the Good Life and how we should be living now. He is for a ‘malicious, sardonic and satirical . . . peculiarly English humour . . . that was bawdy, knowing and ironic’. He tends to be indifferent to ‘wit’, ‘politeness’ and much traditional high culture. And he launches plenty of broadsides against the pieties, puritanism and political correctness which have dominated debate on these issues. Something went wrong in the 1820s, he believes, creating a cityscape that was ‘better-washed, better-combed and better-mannered’ – but infinitely duller. We are still living with the consequences. And one of the things we need to recover is the artists’ ‘candour and refusal to put up with bullshit’. Compared to today’s monstrous sprawl, late-eighteenth-century London was astonishingly compact. The artisans’ and tradesmen’s quarters, where many of the print-makers lived, had their heart in Covent Garden, barely a mile from St James. Although their worlds were segregated and the lowborn had little access to an élite culture full of classical allusions, there was much traffic in the other direction. People who were quite capable of refinement in the drawing-room often loved the crude scatological humour of the prints. And pleasure-seeking often led to the crossing of class barriers much more fluid in practice than in theory as gentlemen ganged together in ‘the risqué worlds of gaming dens, cockpits, ringsides and bagnios’. ‘Debauchery prints’ of drunken revelry celebrated a style of manly pleasure common to every class. This was seldom uplifting. Men such as Byron, Boswell and the radical leader Charles James Fox turned ‘raking’ into a philosophy of life, passed round poor girls like commodities and described their bouts of VD ‘with sardonic frankness if not relish’. Fielding mocked the London bucks whose conversation consisted of ‘singing, hollowing, wrangling, drinking, toasting, spewing, smoking’. It was just the same in the country. A clergyman noted that the Cheshire gentry devoted their time to ‘fox-hunting, drinking, bawling out obscene songs and whoring’ – although they also enjoyed ‘farting at passing women’. Many of the prints are marvels of energy and dirty-minded ingenuity, but Gatrell wants us to applaud the way low-life pleasures are seen simply as pleasures, and not as social problems or objects of moral concern. Unlike Hogarth in an earlier age, Rowlandson can present a street enlivened by drunks, pickpockets and gambling urchins, ‘a scene of interesting, cheerful, workaday bustle rather than of deplored licence’. Images of prostitutes could be comic, contemptuous or titillating but were seldom ‘concerned’. As late as 1820–1, a book called Lowest Life in London showed a night of lively entertainment in a gin-cellar patronized by ‘lascars, blacks, jack tars, coal-heavers, dustmen, women of colour, old and young, and a sprinkling of the remnants of once fine girls’. The ‘merry beggar’ is a figure of affectionate interest, even admiration. But then everything goes wrong. This raucous, indecent Golden Age of London gets swept away by the succeeding – and chillingly ‘respectable’ – ‘age of cant’. Gatrell links a number of seemingly unrelated developments – increasing censorship, programmes to ‘improve’ the underclass, new styles of ‘feminized sensibility or impassioned piety’, even the little-noticed fact that ‘No Victorian produced an image of Queen Victoria farting’ – as part of a major and broadly deplorable shift in British life. George Cruikshank stopped savaging the Prince Regent because he was bought off with a pension. (The Royal Family has had a much easier time of it ever since, even today.) Humour was reduced to the anodyne level of the Punch cartoon, where targets were often as trivial as ‘the gaucheries of the nouveaux riches’ or ‘the charming innocence of nice young women’. Impermeable barriers went up between ‘low’ and ‘respectable’ lifestyles, something reflected in London’s geography as Regent Street was deliberately built to cut off the genteel west London of squares and terraces from the turbulent London of Covent Garden and Soho. Something deadening happened to the city and to British culture from which we have only, perhaps, begun to recover since the 1960s. Or so Gatrell would have us believe. A professor risks absurdity when he offers a typology of lavatorial humour or enthuses about images of cheerful brawling or drinking till you throw up. Yet in our politically correct age there are just as many kill-joys around as in the 1820s, and Gatrell is not going to let any of them off the hook. Something of this comes into focus in the chapter on laughter.

I have always thought of laughter as echoing through the streets of eighteenth-century London. I love the episode in Boswell when Dr Johnson has such a fit of the giggles (something to do with a friend’s pompous pride in having made a will) that ‘he appeared to be almost in a convulsion . . . and sent forth peals so loud, that in the silence of the night his voice seemed to resound from Temple-bar to Fleet-ditch.’

Yet other eighteenth-century writers believed that, just as pleasure had to be regulated, so laughter had to be policed. When Lord Chesterfield wrote his letters of advice to his son (published posthumously in 1774), he expressed his disdain for ‘frequent and loud laughter’ as ‘the manner in which the mob express their silly joy at silly things; and they call it being merry’. Sneering at ‘low buffoonery’, he boasted that ‘I am sure that since I have had the full use of my reason, nobody has ever heard me laugh.’ When we hear ‘the tautly mannered voices of Chesterfield, the Pitts and those who thought like them’, comments Gatrell, ‘we think they defined the norm’. In fact, he reassures us, ‘far more people subscribed to an earthier humour than those who respected polite taboos’. City of Laughter is an exhilarating whoop of contempt at ‘tautly mannered voices’ and ‘polite taboos’. The satirists put them firmly in their place at the end of the eighteenth century. Yet puritans, like the poor, are always with us. This is a major work of academic scholarship; but it is also a large raspberry at their expense.