madeinatlantis LONDON TRAVEL GUIDE LONDON CIRCA 1700 - 1815 " England, bad as she is, is yet a reforming Nation." Defoe, Review, 26th December 1706. The later eighteenth century, according to the more modern school of social historians, is regarded as the beginning of a dark age, in which there was a progressive degradation of the standards of life, under the blight of a growing industrialism, while the earlier part of the century is considered a golden age, one of those periods when English working-class prosperity was at its height. The social history of London obstinately and emphatically refuses to adjust itself to this formula. There is a cleavage, certainly, about the middle of the century, but it is improvement, not deterioration, which can be traced about 1750 and becomes marked between 1780 and 1820. London, it is true, is in a sense exceptional. It underwent a transformation, indeed a revolutionary one, in the course of the century, but the direct results of what is called the industrial revolution were not conspicuous there. Its expansion was not comparable with that of the newer towns of the north, its share of the total population of the country declined, its share of the urban population declined still more. That sense of sudden and unmanageable growth--of invasion by hordes of workers who create new problems--dates for London from the end of the sixteenth century, and never perhaps did London seem so overwhelmingly large as during the following hundred years. In the eighteenth century London was growing more rapidly in bricks and mortar than in population as people left the crowded lanes of the City for the newer parts of the town. The organisation of London trades was moreover surprisingly stable, the small workshop and the domestic system which flourished at the beginning of the century held their own to a remarkable extent. Then again, London was becoming less rather than more industrial. London was a nursing ground for new industries, especially for those which in their early stages were more or less luxury trades, but as communications improved and the home market grew wider, tended to migrate in search of cheaper fuel, cheaper labour and cheaper methods. The process was accompanied by an increase of financial business of all kinds, and by an enormous development of the port of London, both fostered by wars and by the use of convoys for merchant shipping. Wars called into existence whole armies of contractors and clerks, public bodies and charitable institutions were employing an increasing number of paid officials, and private venture schools multiplied. The result must have been a greater relative increase in the number of people employed in distribution (wholesale and retail), in administration and in education rather than in manual labour. Thus, in the eighteenth century, London underwent a similar change to that which took place for the country as a whole during the thirty years or so before 1914. Then as later, it was true that many clerkly incomes were less than those of skilled artisans, as were those of the curate and the garreteer, and schoolmastering, in many cases, was the poorest sort of trade. But the shifting of occupations must have been an incentive to education, an important element in the growth of the middle class and in the opportunities of rising in the world. These changes were accompanied by a lessening of the importance of the ancient City. Industrial London and residential London continued to grow outside her liberties and beyond her control. Her own territories were invaded by new financial interests in which the Corporation had no part, and the great City Companies became progressively less important than the newer corporations of the Bank and the East India Company which had no place in the City structure. The leading figures in the world of business came to be bankers (who were no longer goldsmiths) and stockbrokers and commission agents rather than the Goldsmiths, Drapers and Mercers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Corporation lost ground both relatively and positively--non-freemen were rigidly excluded from retail trade in the City, but not from wholesale trade and finance. Many merchants and bankers preferred not to take up the freedom of the City with its fines for refusing office and its ceremonial which had become antiquated but not yet historically interesting. The interests of the City thus became more and more those of the shop-keepers who were the bulk of its resident freemen and common-councillors. For these and other reasons the administrative changes-the characteristic development of eighteenth-century London --are to be found chiefly in the out-parishes, where the problems of poverty, sanitation and police were greatest and where the simple parish, manorial and county machinery of vestry, court leet and local justices had to adapt itself to an urban population. The improvement which took place however cannot be entirely accounted for by the special circumstances of London, though these undoubtedly had something to do with it. The contrast between the earlier and later eighteenth century is marked from many directions. The test of the change is in the death-rate, which begins to fall after 1750 and falls more rapidly after 1780. In the latter part of the century it was no longer necessary to receive infants indiscriminately at the Foundling Hospital to prevent their exposure and desertion or their wholesale slaughter in workhouses or by parish nurses. The miseries of poor children and parish apprentices began to receive attention about the middle of the century and their position was progressively improved. The parish poor no longer begged and starved on minute doles. London had become healthier; the dangers and uncertainties of life had been lessened, partly by a change of manners, greater cleanliness, less drinking, partly by a better police and by the reform of some gross abuses in poor law administration. Crimes of violence were fewer and different in kind, and there had been a great reduction in the number of prisoners for debt. The traditional violence and brutality of the London populace was gradually diminishing. At the end of the century it is no longer a subject of comment by foreign visitors. Baretti noticed a marked improvement between 1750 and 1760; Sir John Fielding in 1776 thought "the rabble . . . much mended . . . within the last fifty years," though "still very insolent and abusive . . . sometimes . . . without the least appearance of a cause." Francis Place was vividly conscious of a transformation in manners between London as he remembered it in the seventeen-eighties (even then vastly improved since the forties and fifties) and the London of the early nineteenth century: "The progress made in refinement of manners and morals seems to have gone on simultaneously with the improvement in arts, manufactures and commerce. It moved slowly at first, but has been constantly increasing in velocity. Some say we have refined away all our simplicity and have become artificial, hypocritical, and on the whole worse than we were half a century ago. This is a common belief, but it is a false one, we are a much better people than we were then, better instructed, more sincere and kind-hearted, less gross and brutal, and have fewer of the concomitant vices of a less civilised state." And in 1829 he makes an indignant protest against a "Quarterly" article on the departure within the last thirty years "of the whole of our community . . . from the simplicity, foresight and frugality of their forefathers:" "The people are better dressed, better fed, cleanlier, better educated, in each class respectively, much more frugal, and much happier. Money which would have been spent at the tavern, the brothel, the tea-garden, the skittle-ground, the bull-bait, and in numerous other low-lived and degrading pursuits, is now expended in comfort and conveniences, or saved for some useful purpose. . . ."How had this improvement been possible? Throughout the century Londoners lived in a world in which violence, disorder and brutal punishment (though decreasing) were still part of the normal background of life. Newgate, the gallows, the exploits of felons, figured largely in the press and in the current literature of the day. In spite of the bitter irony of Jonathan Wild and the light satire of the Beggars' Opera, both are accurate pictures of the manners of the time, and their more lurid incidents are easily surpassed in the records of the Old Bailey. Romilly tells us in his Memoirs of the painful impression this state of things made on a sensitive child. The immense vogue of Lillo's play, Barnwell, where the apprentice is seduced by a courtesan to rob and then murder his master, and the stories of the apprentices who saw in it a terrifying vision of their own temptations, throw a flood of light on the social atmosphere of London. So do the subjects chosen by Hogarth to impart a moral lesson. An education in brutality was given in the public spectacles at Tyburn and at the pillory, by the constant floggings through the streets, by the methods of press-gangs and crimps. These things were not new in the eighteenth century; how could a people brought up for so many generations in such surroundings be anything but coarse, violent and brutal? How is the improvement to be accounted for? First perhaps, by certain definite improvements in administration and police. One of the chief causes of demoralisation was the trading justice,--a London character well known in the days of Elizabeth--who preyed on the people and exploited their shortcomings. Fielding Justice Thrasher (in Amelia) is not a caricature, it is a portrait (ironic but not exaggerated) of a type. His like is to be found in many formal reports of the Middlesex Sessions to the Lord Chancellor on the scandalous enormities of justices who were bringing the whole Bench into discredit. When we remember the manners of the time, the prevalence of 'tippling in alehouses', gambling, swearing, Sabbath-breaking, together with laws against these and many other offences, put in force by informers and punishable with fines, fees accruing to the magistrates, as they did for commitments and for bailing-out, part of the business of the trading justice is manifest. Other business came from the encouragement of petty litigation amongst a people who were by ancient tradition intensely litigious. The attitude of the better sort of Middlesex magistrate was in general benevolent, but his activities seldom went beyond some attention to parish affairs and attendance at the Sessions which came eight times a year. He left to the trading justice the disagreeable and discredited business of sitting regularly in a pestilential atmosphere to hear complaints and disputes and to commit, discharge or bail out offenders. When the court-justice developed into the police magistrate, and when, as an intermediate stage (which may be dated from Fielding's appointment to Bow Street in 1749 as chief magistrate for Westminster with an official salary), he became disinterested and public-spirited, he also became a social reformer with expert knowledge and the ear of the Government. De Veil, Fielding's predecessor at Bow Street, had been a trading justice whose dissipations demanded a close attention to the profits of office, though he was more instructed and more capable than most of his kind. Fielding made his office a public place for the administration of justice instead of a justice-shop for trafficking in fines and commitments, and set himself to composing instead of inflaming "the quarrels of beggars and porters." He realised the terrible state of the poor and the perversities of the laws with the imaginative sympathy of a great novelist who was also a trained lawyer. Fielding's magistracy marks a turning-point in the social history of London; it coincides with the first effective measure dealing with the horrors of gin-drinking, due partly at least to himself. Part of his code, it is true, was "to bring a rogue to the gallows," a maxim which has now a curious ring, but another part was to save the young and reclaimable from the contaminating influence of prison. He was fully conscious of the seething underworld of London, ready to sack and burn, which might at any moment overwhelm the very scanty forces of law and order. "When a mob of chairmen or servants, or a gang of thieves or sharpers, are almost too big for the civil authority, what," he asks, "must be the case in a seditious tumult or general riot." The spirit of his magistracy can best be gathered from the Covent Garden Journal in which he tried to give the public some of that knowledge of social evils and their causes which he himself learned at Bow Street. For instance, "several wretches being apprehended the night before by Mr. Welch, were brought before Mr. Fielding and Mr. Errington: when one who was in a dreadful condition from the itch was recommended to the overseers; another, who appeared guilty of no crime but poverty, had money given her to enable her to follow her trade in the market. . . ." He used the case of a poor woman, "mother of three small children, charged with the petty larceny of a cap, value threepence" (whom he discharged against the strict rigour of the law, "the evidence not being positive") to denounce the law by which those accused of the most trifling thefts, often on very questionable evidence, were committed for trial at the Sessions. He made repeated protests against the public executions at Tyburn: "we sacrifice the lives of men, not for the reformation but for the diversion of the populace." John Fielding, who succeeded him and ruled at Bow Street from 1754 to 1780, developed his brother's policy. He identified the office with social reform, made it more efficient in dealing with street outrages and laid the foundations of a paid and permanent police. He turned his attention especially to the deserted boys and girls from whom the thieves and prostitutes of London were largely recruited. His plan for sending young offenders and vagrants to sea, not as convicts, but properly equipped and "cured of the various distempers that are the constant companions of poverty and distress" is connected with the foundation of the Marine Society in 1756. His Bow Street experiences led him to propose and carry through in 1758 the establishment of the Orphan Asylum for Deserted Girls. By advertisements and newspaper paragraphs and by his relations with the Secretary of State, he kept Bow Street and his "Plan of Police" constantly before the public and educated it to accept that un-English thing, a paid police openly dependent on the central government. People, especially apprentices and workmen, came from all parts of London to put their grievances before him. The Middlesex Bench (who were inclined to be jealous of Bow Street) in 1763 established a number of "rotation offices" which were the direct precursors of the seven police offices established by the Act of 1792. They were an attempt to eliminate the trading justice--always deeply resented by the Bench as bringing the whole body of magistrates into disrepute--and imitated the methods of the City where two aldermen sat daily in turns at the Guildhall. The rotation office became an accepted feature of London life, and must have curtailed the sphere of the trading justices. These found their occupation almost gone when the Act of 1792 took away judicial business ( Bow Street always excepted) from all but seven public offices, each with three paid magistrates and six paid constables--a direct development out of the rotation offices and the Bow Street system. The business of a court-justice, now called a police magistrate, became more a matter of routine and less an almost single-handed struggle against crime and disorder. An immense local improvement followed the establishment in 1798 of the Thames Police Office, due mainly to Colquhoun, another great London magistrate, a friend of Bentham, who drew the Act of 1800 by which it was put on a permanent footing. Police magistrates carried on the tradition of the Fieldings and discouraged litigation. Such laws as there were for the protection of the poorer sort (and there were more than is often supposed) depended in the first instance on a single magistrate or a court of petty sessions--that is, in London after 1792 (outside the City) upon the police magistrates. In the meantime, the great London parishes had been building up a parochial police and system of local government by means of local Acts. The vestries, first in Westminster, and then in almost all the metropolitan parishes outside the City, obtained Acts enabling them to levy a watch rate and regulate the watch, then to light and clean the streets, and to 'regulate the poor,' by means of watch committees or trusts, boards of all kinds, Governors and Directors and Guardians of the Poor in infinite variety. Paving as a public undertaking began in Westminster (in 1762) under commissioners appointed in the Acts, but the powerful Westminster vestries soon got the business transferred to parochial commissioners and in most of the other parishes paving was a parochial affair from the first. The larger vestries thus acquired something of the powers of a municipal corporation; among their members were justices always ready to do the parish business and thus corresponding to the charter justices of boroughs. With the rapid increase of wealth and population they acquired a large revenue through the rates and were able to borrow on annuities for large undertakings. Local Acts were often elaborate administrative codes and with increasing business vestries developed staffs of paid officers. The Acts aimed at getting rid of the perpetual feasting and jobbery of the uncontrolled vestrymen and parish officers of the early part of the century and in many parishes they did undoubtedly bring a new efficiency and a measure of honesty to parish affairs. Although there was a chaos of authorities there was also a healthy rivalry between district and district and their variety gave opportunities for experiment.		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