A Great and Monstrous Thing: London in the Eighteenth Century

by Jerry White

Overview

This “magisterial history of London” explores the rapidly changing culture and commerce of the eighteenth century in “a book that hums with vitality” (Times Literary Supplement, UK).

London in the eighteenth century was a new city, risen from the ashes of the Great Fire of 1666. The century that followed was an era of vigorous expansion and rapid change as waves of people were drawn to its wealth, power, and many diversions. Borrowing a phrase from Daniel Defoe, Jerry White calls London “this great and monstrous thing,” the grandeur of its new buildings and the glitter of its high life shadowed by poverty and squalor.

A Great and Monstrous Thing offers a street-level view of eighteenth century London’s public gardens and prisons, its banks, and brothels, its workshops and warehouses. 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 city life. What emerges is a picture of a society fractured by geography, politics, religion, history—and especially by class.

Despite the deep and destructive gulf between rich and poor, Jerry White shows us Londoners going about their business as bankers or beggars, reveling 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.</

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674076402
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	01/18/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	729
Sales rank:	823,601
File size:	9 MB

About the Author

Jerry White is Visiting Professor in History at Birkbeck, University of London.

Read an Excerpt

From Part Two: People

Samuel Johnson’s London

Once immersed in the London swim, Johnson the misfit at last discovered just how congenial the city was to him. There – perhaps only there – he could be himself: ‘The freedom from remark and petty censure, with which life may be passed there, is a circumstance which a man who knows the teasing restraint of a narrow circle must relish highly.’ ‘No place cured a man’s vanity or arrogance so well as London’, he thought, because it gathered to it people whose talents and qualities were at least as good as his own. And for a literary man, involved in the production and dissemination of ideas, and for a curious man, interested in all the vagaries of life, London was ‘a heaven upon earth’.

Among those vagaries, London gave Johnson full opportunity to exercise that charity and humanity which even his detractors acknowledged and respected in him. It came not just from religious conviction but from a deep wellspring of egalitarianism. More than any other famous Londoner of his time, Johnson engaged sympathetically with London’s lowest depths. He encountered homelessness and probably night-cellars and common lodging houses with his friend Richard Savage, even more penniless than Johnson, in the late 1730s. In later and more prosperous years a friend recalled how ‘He frequently gave all the silver in his pocket to the poor who watched him, between the house and the tavern where he dined’, and he urged his friends to do the same. When returning home late at night he squeezed pennies into the hands of homeless children sleeping under shop bulks so they might wake up to a breakfast. Finding a hungry prostitute who had fainted in the street one night, he carried her home on his back, fed her and had his household look after her for some time. His friend Mrs. Thrale summed up Johnson’s humanity: ‘He loved the poor as I never yet saw any one else do, with an earnest desire to make them happy.’

His affection found daily domestic expression in the ménage of misfits that he invited into his household whenever he rented a place stable enough to offer them a home. Frank Barber, the freed slave from Jamaica who became Johnson’s servant, we’ll meet again later. The other three long-standing residents were provincials: Anna Williams, a blind Welsh poet; Robert Levett, a drunken practitioner of physic, born near Hull; and the widowed Mrs Desmoulins, née Swynfen, from Lichfield, whom he took in as housekeeper on a generous allowance with her young daughter. There was also for some time another woman, Poll Carmichael, whose history is obscure. It was not a harmonious arrangement. Mrs Desmoulins hated Williams and Levett with a vengeance. Levett was the oddest of all, attending poor patients for whatever they could give him, often a nip of gin. He had married ‘a woman of the town, who had persuaded him (notwithstanding their place of congress was a small-coal shed in Fetter-lane) that she was nearly related to a man of fortune, but was injuriously kept by him out of large possessions’. The marriage failed, with heated recriminations on both sides. Johnson loved Levett for his charitable physicking of the poor and perhaps because he was even stranger and less of a lover of clean linen than Johnson himself: ‘his external appearance and behavior were such, that he disgusted the rich, and terrified the poor.’

Johnson’s ‘nests’ of provincial Londoners at Gough Square, Johnson’s Court and Bolt Court would not have been uncommon in a city of migrants. For migration was one of the great facts of London life in the eighteenth century. Demographers estimate that 8,000 migrants a year were coming to London in the first half of the century, and certain it is that at any point in time a high proportion of Londoners were born outside the metropolis. Just how high is less certain. In 1781 Dr Richard Bland surveyed some 1,600 married couples who were assisted through childbirth by the Westminster General Dispensary. He found that just one in four individuals was born in London, over half were born elsewhere in England and Wales (including rural Middlesex), 8.6 per cent were Irish, 6.5 per cent Scottish and fifty-three or 1.6 per cent were ‘foreigners’. Of the migrants, 53 per cent were men.

Table of Contents

Contents Illustrations List of Maps Preface Introduction: London 1700–1708 Part One: City The Architect Most in Vogue: James Gibbs ‘A Kind of Monster’: Growing London, 1720–54 Obstructions and Inconveniences: Changing London, 1700–54 ‘A Kind of Revolution’: Robert Adam ‘We Have Done Great Things’: Improving London, 1754–99 The Mad Spirit of Building: London Growing, 1754–99 ‘An Epitome of a Great Nation’: London, 1799 Part Two: People ‘London is Their North-Star’: Provincial Londoners ‘Men Very Fit for Business’: North Britons ‘Within the Sound of Bow Bell’: Cockneys and Citizens ‘A Very Neat First Floor’: Living and Dying ‘Take or Give the Wall’: Getting on Together ‘Our Unfortunate Colour’: Black Londoners ‘Foreign Varlets’: Europeans and Some Others ‘Get Up, You Irish Papist Bitch’: Irish Londoners Part Three: Work ‘That Which Makes London to be London’: Trade ‘Most Infamous Sett of Gamblers’: Money Matters ‘They Swim into the Shops by Shoals’: Retail ‘Clean Your Honour’s Shoes’: Streets ‘Minute Movement and Miraculous Weight’: Made in London Fellowship Porters, Lumpers and Snuffle-Hunters: Moving Things Around High Life Below Stairs: Domestic Service ‘At the Eve of a Civil War’: Masters and Men ‘Purse-Proud Title-Page Mongers’: The Business of Words ‘Overburdened with Practitioners’: Print and the Professions ‘Painting from Beggars’: The Business of Pictures Part Four: Culture ‘High Lords, Deep Statesmen, Dutchesses and Whores’: Carlisle House ‘Down on Your Knees’: The Stage ‘Sights and Monsters’: The Lions of London No Equal in Europe: Pleasure Gardens ‘Too Busy with Madam Geneva’ : Drinking and Socialising ‘This Extravagant Itch of Gaming’ ‘How Do You Do Brother Waterman?’: Prostitutes ‘The Whoring Rage Came Upon Me’: Men and Prostitution ‘Damn Your Twenty Pound Note’: Fashion and Vice The Republic of Thieves: Plebeian Crime Virtue Overborn by Temptation: Genteel Crime ‘Save Me Woody’: Violence Part Five: Power Mr Fielding’s Men: Thief-Takers ‘Pluck Off Your Hat Before the Constable’: The Parish Police ‘Hell in Epitome’: Prison ‘Low Lived, Blackguard Merry-Making’: Public Punishments Fear of God and Proper Subjection: Charity Nurseries of Religion, Virtue and Industry: Governing the Poor ‘To Resest ye World ye Flesh and ye Devell’: Religion ‘No Hanoverian, No Presbyterian’: Religion and Politics, 1700–59 ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’ 1760–68 ‘Life-Blood of the State’: City versus Court, 1768–79 Not a Prison Standing: The Gordon Riots, 1780 ‘I Would Have No King’: Revolution and Democracy, 1780–99 Afterword Acknowledgements Notes Bibliography Index

Editorial Reviews

The titular superlative, courtesy of Daniel Defoe, aptly fits this engrossing history of the city that by 1700 had surpassed Paris to become the largest in Europe. Veteran British historian White (London in the Twentieth Century) delivers a focused, mostly chronological account in 13 chapters, each covering a single aspect of the city and built around a significant, if sometimes obscure, personage—Samuel Johnson (who once remarked that “hen a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”), Henry Fielding, and John Wilkes make appearances. But there is also Ignatius Sanchez—writer, composer, and freed slave whose chapter reveals the city’s rich stew of nations, races, and religions, and Mary Young, hanged after a life of thievery in a city with unimaginably high levels of crime and prostitution. White’s encyclopedic knowledge may, like bustling London, overwhelm some, but this is still a richly satisfying compendium of history, biography, anecdote, and statistics on the great city’s daily life, vibrant culture, and byzantine politics. 13 images, 13 maps. Agent: Robin Straus, Robin Straus Agency. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

[A] brilliant account of the bursting, overflowing city, with its glittering wealth and harrowing poverty.

Financial Times

With this volume, White completes an extraordinary trilogy begun with London in the Nineteenth Century (2007) and London in the Twentieth Century (2001). As in the earlier books, he addresses five broad topics: city, people, work, culture, and power. Differently here, he uses brief biographies of 14 representative figures—such as architect James Woods, impresario Teresa Cornelys, philanthropist Jonas Hanway, and radical John Wilkes—to begin thematic essays involving scores of Londoners. The variety is striking: from the desperate poor in alley and workhouse to the rich and often well-born patrons of Exchange, gaming table, and brothel; from the many victims of Tyburn to the ‘hanging classes’ of magistrate’s bench and beyond; from Wilkite pressure for political justice to sectarian madness in the Gordon Riots… The narrative is superb and richly informed, incisively and sympathetically evoking the city Defoe had thought a ‘great and monstrous thing.’

Choice - G. F. Steckley

[A] magisterial history of London… The book hums with vitality…a gripping story.

Times Literary Supplement - Norma Clarke

If you want a rounded and immensely detailed picture of the ‘Hogarthian’ world, this is the place to go… Scholars will make A Great and Monstrous Thing their first port of call, and anyone with the faintest interest in bygone London will be able to access an immense trove of thick description here.

New Criterion - Pat Rogers

In addition to its appeal to the average interested reader, White’s book will prove to be an invaluable resource to future academics. This work is as close to pure history as a book can be… A Great and Monstrous Thing will likely serve its audience for generations to come.

PopMatters - Jennifer Vega

Together with Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, White is one of our great chroniclers of London and this beautifully written, impeccably researched and incredibly generous book is a necessity for those of us who are not yet tired of life.

The Telegraph - Frances Wilson

Enormously learned and entertaining… We get the great and the mighty, architects and anarchists, Jewish moneylenders and Old Bailey workhorses, foppish aristocrats and beggar-parents who blind their own children to increase their chances at pity-alms. We’re toured through wonders and depravities so energetic it’s almost as though the whole era could somehow feel the Victorian corset of modernity waiting to tighten everything up into the rough shape of the world we know today… It’s largely through the torrential scribblings of those hackney writers that we have such a vivid portrait of 18th century London, and it’s by through consulting such an ungodly amount of those scribblings that White is able to give his readers such a lively and detailed account… Prepare to be instructed, amazed, and most of all amused. This is popular history done on a lavish, irresistible scale… History buffs shouldn’t miss it—and 21st century Londoners will find themselves eerily at home.

Open Letters Monthly - Steve Donoghue

Great urban historians can make the streets a sensory playground. In the best works, like Jerry White’s A Great and Monstrous Thing, the sounds clamor and peal, the smells overwhelm and sicken, the sights tantalize and repulse in equal measure. To read this book is to literally live the mucky, yucky, fascinating, wonderful kaleidoscopic life of eighteenth century London. White’s work isn’t just great and monstrous, but engagingly organized as well. He takes one of London’s most volatile and complex periods, one of the high points of its cultural development, and terrifically frames it. Like the city itself, the book is divided into subsections of city, people, work, culture, and power. Names like Johnson, Haywood, and Fielding abound, yes, but it’s so much more. It wasn’t just the high and mighty or the downtrodden that would be so faithfully recorded by Dickens a century later. White saw the city honestly, and recorded a narrative, which honored, if not outright enjoyed, its complexities.

Bookslut - Josh Zajdman

[A] brilliant account of the bursting, overflowing city, with its glittering wealth and harrowing poverty.

The Financial Times

[A] magisterial history of London… The book hums with vitality…a gripping story.
— Norma Clarke

Times Literary Supplement

Together with Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, White is one of our great chroniclers of London and this beautifully written, impeccably researched and incredibly generous book is a necessity for those of us who are not yet tired of life.
— Frances Wilson

The Telegraph