Pierce Egan’s Life in London is not where the cat and mouse got the names Tom and Jerry from. I was devastated when I found that out, the names for the cartoon frenemies came from a poll of employees. It might be that those employees felt the names went will together because of a cocktail called a Tom and Jerry which was named after the characters in Life in London. Hopefully a gin cocktail - a daffy one as Egan would have written… hang on Daffy Duck…. No, not him either.
Life in London is sort for fascinating because it’s old, was very successful in its time, was a key part of the genre that birthed Dickens’s Pickwick Papers - and yet is still not a classic. My copy is from a Cambridge University print on demand service for books that serve as useful historical sources, not as classics in themselves. There’s something about Life in London that just isn’t quite ‘it’, it fails to be the ne-plus-ultra, it’s not quite Corinthian.
The book is about a man known as ‘Corinthian’ Tom, because he’s at the top of the pillar. He’s rich, handsome, sufficiently refined but still masculine, and his big desire is to “see life”, especially “Life in London”. The title of the book is used as something of a catch-phrase, with the characters reminding each other that “Life in London” is its own special joy and they are out to sample as much of it as possible.
The Corinthian (as he’s often called) has a best friend, Bob Logic, nominally an Oxford student but he’s far more often seen in London, doing Londony things. He’s more goofy than Tom, we are reminded that he has a funny face quite often. He wears green spectacles, presumably to sooth his eyes from all the reading he doesn’t do. He’s a punster, a prankster and the less refined of the two.
After a while, the late nights of London wear on Tom so he goes into the country. There he meets his cousin Jerry, who he agrees to bring back to London and show him “Life in London”, both the high and the low. The book then follows the pair of cousins, often joined by Logic as they go cockfighting, dog-fighting, to masquerades and high society events, to cheapo coffee houses and gin joints, to Newgate and the Fleet - usually drunk.
The book was written by Egan, but was designed to be a joint production with the Cruickshank brothers illustrations. There are many parts of the book which simply describe one of the prints and the people in it. This is similar to the Doctor Syntax books, which started with the pictures, and was also what The Pickwick Papers was intended to be until Dickens made it his own.
However, it’s also something of a throwback to Ned Ward’s London Spy and Tom Brown’s Amusements, a slang-heavy romp through London in its different lights - and this book is slang heavy, it’s a great wall of slang. Some of the slang surprised me because it’s still pretty relevant. The word ‘snooze’ is presented as slang, as is going on a spree. They eat scran like people in the North-West, one person pulls out a ‘shiv’ and a couple are described as being like ‘Darby and Joan’. I was also pleased to see “a man cannot eat his cake and have it,” a far more sensible version of the phrase.
There was also a lot of slang which has dropped out. The ‘Peep-o-day-boys’ love their ‘daffy’ and ‘blue ruin’, they toddle. Then they may have to give the ‘hambone stop’ with their ‘Morleys’ when they get in a ruckus. Then they may go with a beautiful ‘Cyprian’ or a ‘draggle-tailed Sal’.. and so on, and so on. Egan does write good slang, it feels like insider language the way a group would use it, which makes it less tiresome than it could be, but it’s still fairly tiresome.
As this is from the very furthest stretch of any possible long-eighteenth century (1821), though still ‘Georgian’, it feels like a last hurrah (huzzah?) before the Victorian era dawns. There’s a fascinating attitude towards women, especially prostitutes. Their presence is open and acknowledged, the more well to-do ones are in the all the high places, dressed up fine and wearing jewellery but there is always a reminder that the owner of that jewellery lurks nearby to make sure they don’t abscond with it. There’s an acknowledgement that a prostitute’s life is not a happy one and that those without punters will be beaten when they return home, but there’s also a gleeful pick-and-mix description of them. It’s a pretty common compartmentalisation of an issue, but the compartments seem very flimsy.
I also wondered about Corinthian Kate, Tom’s fancy-bit who is given the name because she’s the only woman who can match him. She’s chosen him because he’s could prove a useful match but it’s never clear whether this is as wife, mistress or fun time girl. What are they to each other? What will they be?
There’s a great comparison in the book between a trip to Allmax, a lowdown gin joint near the docks, and Almack’s, a famous high society club with strict social rules. Allmax seems far more fun, a cosmopilitan crowd drink, dance and chat as they like. In Almack’s, even the preternaturally classy Tom must be reminded to guard everything he says. It’s a little like the two social gatherings in the film Titanic. Another stand-out is a report of Jacco Maccaco, a monkey that is put in a dog-fighting ring where it rips various dogs apart. Animal cruelty is very much seen as sport, with horse-racing, cock-fighting and fox hunting all included - in the hunt party, Tom drinks a beer with the dead fox’s brush in it to add savour. It does seem incredible that such things were seen as sport. Egan started off as a sports writer with a particular speciality in boxing, so there are a few boxes littered throughout the pages.
The book is dedicated to George IV, quite a ‘get’. That such a blokey, slangy book could be dedicated to a monarch seems incongruous, even one such as George IV. The dedication says that although the book is about drunken reprobates, it’s not dedicated to him because he is one, but because he is such a wise king, he knows his people (especially the drunken reprobates).
The book begins with an essay about how great London is. There’s a footnote about Grub Street, how the term is nearly obsolete and there are no writers there any more. It makes all the usual claims of London, that its size and population means that there is a place to be happy for everyone. It’s still the story London tells itself and it’s still sort of true, kind of. The London presented is one where it’s great to have money, which is still definitely true. Life in London does seem to capture something about the place, and feels like a realistic snapshot of life for a certain group of people at a certain time, recorded in their own language.
I suppose for the book to have become a classic, to have stood the test of time and be relevant today, it needed more a narrative hook. Some of the characters are quite engaging, I liked the carefree Bob Logic and was intrigued by Corinthian Kate, and many of the settings and milieus have fed into high and low literature from Dickens to Bridgerton. If there had been a more involved narrative, it might have elevated these strengths into something lasting, but the loose, wandering about structure of it has left it stranded in the time it was written, more useful to be plundered for setting and slang for future writers.
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