Trip - Hogarth: Place and Progress at Sir John Soane's Museum

‘Hogarth: Place and Progress’ is an exhibition running at Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn fields. It’s done well for them, with queues running down the street and timed tickets being picked up in hours. In some ways, the exhibition isn’t offering much, half the paintings are available during a normal visit to the museum and the other half can usually be seen at the National Gallery. It’s not so much what’s on display, but how it’s displayed.

For the first time in my memory, the pictures are at face height. You can get right up to them, peer them in the eyes, read the writing on the various pieces of paper littering the mis-en-scene and catch details you may have heard about but never seen.

There’s a real thrill at getting so close to them and that makes it utterly worthwhile grabbing a (free) ticket for. I saw the tiny details, like a pair of glasses hanging up to suggest the main character’s short-sightedness. Now I can see that music being played in one scene is about the rape of the Sabines (‘Sobbin’ Women) and in the background there’s a woman needlessly setting fire to a world map.

Some of the details are really peculiar, there’s an old woman in the first ‘Rake’s Progress’. She stands by the fireplace but the fireplace can still be seen through her. Is she a second thought? Unfinished? I never knew that the ‘Rake’s Progress’ scene in the gambling house includes a failed attempt at making Icarus wings. Nor did I realise that the gambling den is being burnt down - it’s amazing to catch these peculiar moments in the paintings.

Something I’d never seen before were the aborted attempts at creating woodcuts of the ‘Stages of Cruelty’. There’s something brilliantly stark about the harder lines and I wish they’d completed the sequence.

I am appallingly bad at analysing pictures, there’s not much I can say about the exhibition except to say that’s it’s a wonderfully unique and enjoyable experience and I urge anyone to go.

Review: Pepys' 1665 Diary and Defoe's 'A Journal of the Plague Year'

Having recently read Pepys’ account of the plague of 1665, I thought I’d visit Defoe and see what he had to say about the matter in ‘The Journal of the Plague Year'.

For Pepys, the plague is a nuisance which occasionally scares him (when he runs into diseased bodies at night) but more frequently exasperates him with complications, such as the different bodies of government being split up into various country estates. For him, it is an opportunity to play and to exercise his full sexual wishes. He is far more concerned with the reputation of Lord Sandwich as Admiral, the organisation of Phillip Caterat’s wedding and the possibility of profiting from the Anglo-Dutch War.

For Defoe, it’s an apocalypse - at one point in September he sees London months away from obliteration. Well… technically… not Defoe.  ‘A Journal of the Plague Year’ is an unusual book. For a start, it isn’t actual presented as a journal, more a reflection. It pretends to be the account of ‘HF’, a saddler who stayed in London during the whole of the plague’s ravaging. 

Defoe was five years old in 1665 and was evacuated into the country with his family for the duration of the sickness and so was not drawing on his own memories. It is very possible he drew on the memories of those around him, his uncle was a HF and did stay, it is possible he interviewed him. It is also possible he had access to Pepys diaries, as an acquaintance was a librarian of the Pepys library - if he did, I don’t think he used them much, Pepys’ unique perspective is not much seen in the book. It is clear Defoe also used plague literature and the recently published death lists of the time to help him.

Irrespective of the veracity of the tales told in the ‘Journal’, Defoe creates a feeling of realism and an aura of truth. Defoe plays to his strengths as a writer, describing the processes by which London tried to contain and protect itself from the plague as well as the methods and systems used by the people themselves. In doing so, he manages to create a very moving, dignified telling of a distressing tale.

Pepys on the other hand frequently finds himself remarking on how happy is and how he is experiencing ‘the greatest joy I ever had in my life’. Certainly, his wealth doubles during 1665 (and had grown a hundredfold since 1660). In large part because of his his own hard work. In a very revealing passage on November 1st, he tells a friend how his good fortune has come through luck, a few good contacts and through working hard enough to be essential. The plague is only periphery, the war with the Dutch and the money making opportunities are more relevant. 

This may be because Pepys, as a naval official, finds himself moved out into the country, whereas Defoe stays in London. Defoe conjures up timeless truths that still are true of London today.  When the plague starts, it begins in the West End. Those in the City, East and South of the river consider these sicknesses to only be the West’s problem. There’s sympathy, but an overriding feeling that ‘it won’t come here’. As a result, those places are utterly unprepared when the disease spreads. Were such an illness to occur today, London would treat it in exactly the same manner, it still being a city made of different parishes and ‘ends’, even if those parishes aren’t tied to churches.

After the initial panic and exodus of the city (which Pepys remarks on and is part of), what’s most notable about the Defoe book is the calm, rational way the people left behind organise themselves. Although Defoe has a definite criticism of locking the healthy with the sick, he is very clear that it was at least a response, which isn’t coming from the King or court. The Lord Mayor of London and the officials of the city are highly praised for the way they set up systems of containment and burial, for the appeal and fair handing out of charity and for their dedication to their duty - a dedication not shown by clergy and doctors.

Defoe gives a very fair account of plague nurses, pilloried in other texts for killing off their patients and stealing from them - accounts he reckons to be more a projection of people’s fears than an accurate description of the actions of the nurses themselves. Similarly, he doesn’t castigate the medical profession for being unable to get on top of the plague, seeing it as a problem that no one could control.

There are pictures of people running mad, of plague victims drowning themselves or setting themselves alight in their beds to avoid the painful death and (in September) of bodies dumped in the streets but these are the exceptions. When I think of how London would cope if a mysterious and untreatable disease killed 20% of the population in three months, those hardworking people of the 1600s are a wonder of civil duty and good sense. In modern London, in 2011, there were three days of widespread riots after a protest about a police shooting went out of hand. In 1665 there were none.

Another element that I found very recognisable in Defoe was how, when the plague was at its height and every Londoner had accepted death, they stopped the precautions that had characterised the plague until then. No longer did they walk in the middle of the street and avoid people, nor did they leave payment in vinegar to sanitise it - a fatalism swept the city. Similarly, when the incidence of infection was still high but the death rate lower, they joyfully hugged and touched each other without fear… thus causing the plague to increase a little. This moment gets a little recognition from Pepys but he is too wrapped up in his own life to pay it too much attention.

For a writer who often struggles with atmosphere, ‘A Journal of the Plague Year’ is dripping in it. The close, hot summer of 1665, the voluntary (or involuntary) confinement to houses, the creeping and paranoid fear of infection - they are all simply and clearly evoked.  The joy when the death count goes down, full of delight and release of tension is also communicated to the reader. 

This might be my favourite Defoe book yet. 

Probably the difference in the books is based on the fact that one is a genuine journal of the time and the other purports to be. Certainly, looking at the two of them together it is revealed how much everyone kept an eye on the death lists and the reports of plague - but for Pepys, the man on the ground, there was too much to accomplish to let plague get in the way. I also found it interesting how both Pepys and Defoe fail to describe or mention the now iconic Plague Doctor outfit. Were they not common in London? They seem a more European invention.

This is a fascinating topic and period and I am delighted to discover that William Harrison Ainsworth also wrote a novel about London during the plague and fire called ‘Old Saint Pauls’. I look forward, at some point, to seeing what his particularly technicolour imagination make of the material.

Review: Vic Gatrell, 'The First Bohemians'

I’m a big Vic Gatrell fan, ‘The Hanging Tree’ was a fascinating book about the change of opinion regarding public hanging (useful before I hanged some characters), ‘City of Laughter’ was a funny book about visual satire and now we have ‘The First Bohemians’ about Covent Garden and the art it produced.

One of my favourite elements of his writing is how partisan he is. If he prefers something, he tells it. His delight in the eighteenth century habit of writing  ‘niftily to the point’ as opposed to the nineteenth century’s ‘windy tosh’ is always a delight to me, as I have those same prejudices.

The book is divided into two parts, ‘Covent Garden’ and ‘Artists’. 

The first section took us through the history of how Covent Garden became the place it was in the eighteenth century. It tells us about the types of people who mixed, the kinds of places they lived and the sort of lives and jobs they had - all reflected through different kinds of art. We have architectural art, caricature and satire and the ‘low’, ‘Dutch’ real life art of people like Hogarth.

We then had some chapters about the loose, hand-to-mouth life of artists, the prominently male focus of the art world. This then went into a struggle between Joshua Reynolds and the Royal Academy’s neo-classical focus against the real world focus on people like Hogarth. Next is a chapter on Hogarth’s struggles against his own genius of depicting real people, another re-appraising Rowlandson as an important artist of real life, a chapter about the Gordon riots (which he argues pushed artists out of the area) and a finale about the very Victorian Ruskin’s inability to understand JMW Turner’s upbringing in the Covent Garden Hodge-podge. 

I most enjoyed the first section, it was the fullest and most evocative picture of Covent Garden I have ever read and the pictures helped a lot. I very much enjoyed it, and will use a lot of it when I re-draft my ‘Odes to the Big City’.

 I also enjoyed the chapters that furthered this and focussed on the artists, though I’m still not convinced we can call the people of Covent Garden Bohemian. Even following his definition; ‘an attitude of dissent, from the prevailing attitudes of the middle class’ as most of the people in Covent Garden were the middle class, as he went to pains to explain in the earlier parts of the book. Also, people like Hogarth were desperate to be of a higher social status and the writers wrote for money - I just don’t think there is the anti-middle class element to call them Bohemian.

In my first reaction to the book, I didn’t feel that the later chapters grew very organically out of the earlier ones. It felt a little like one of those books made out of previously published essays that have been lightly re-written and put together. But the more I think about it, the Rowlandson chapter (for example) may have seemed a little removed from the overall Covent Garden subject matter, he served as a case study for how the kind of art that emerged from the mess and mix of the place influenced him. I can’t tell if the book ran out of puff or if I did.

That said, it was a very interesting book, enjoyably written, with a good eye for the telling detail as well as the big picture and I recommend it as a wonderful evocation and celebration of a certain time and place.

Jerry White lecturing on Grub Street at Dr Johnson's

A few months ago, I went to see historian of London Jerry White, (author of London in the Eighteenth Century: A Great and Monstrous Thing) at Samuel Johnson's house for a talk about the notion of Grub Street. I liked his style of presentation, he was very amusing and had a slinking cat-like quality which was more interesting then the slightly stodgy nature of some speakers.

The first part of the talk was to illustrate why it began to be possible for people to make money from words. Although I was aware of the rise of literacy before and during the eighteenth century, Jerry White put it into figures. He estimates that in the 1750s, 60% of all males and 40% of all females in London were literate to some level. He even pointed to parish records of the very poor requesting charity and found at least half the males had the literacy needed to sign their name.

Not that a writer needed literacy to get people hearing their words, newspapers and journals were read out in the coffee houses where old copies were bound in together to be looked in at leisure. There were so many newspapers being published in the capital in a month that publications like 'The Gentleman's Magazine' were published, which had the unique selling point of digesting news that would be interesting and suitable to aspiring gentlemen. 

One of the interesting features of this print explosion was that it was primarily centred in a number of cities, particularly London. Regional newspapers were far, far fewer and tended to recycle stories from the capital. Indeed, it makes sense that the street used to 'house' all these writers in popular imagination was a London one. He talked about how foreign tourists would travel to Grub Street to find the writers and be disappointed that it was full of cobblers.

He then went on to an interesting side note about the dubious veracity of some of these newspapers. I already knew that 'The Grub Street Journal’ (not published on Grub Street) used to run a regular feature in which lying reports were exposed but I wasn't aware that the 'Town and Country Magazine' specialised in sex scandals and may have received a good share of it's income through blackmail. Nor was I aware that 'The Flying Post' was also known as 'The Lying Post.' Finally, I don't ever recall hearing the story of Samuel Johnson putting bad news into his reports just to incense Hester Thrale's Mother-in-Law. Nor am I certain this happened, Johnson had left the journal and magazine world  by the time he met the Thrales and Johnson's morals would never have let him print an outright lie in a public medium. Maybe Jerry White was spinning some of his own tales in the style of 'The Flying Post'.

He then went on to talk a little about books and emphasised how they were popular culture. He talked about Dudley Rider (a diarist) making sure he was reading the books that everyone was talking about so he had a subject when he next met some pretty ladies. He also quoted a bit of Lord Formal, a character in Henry Fielding's 'Love in Several Masques' where the Lord complains that he tried to read but the effort had been very tiresome for his eyes and that he 'lost my direct ogle', a true tragedy for any Lord.

Then Jerry Hall talked about the authors themselves. The fact was that as much as the London printing machine needed copy, there were more writers then could profit from it. He was very amusing about how 'the travails of the hackney writer was always very effectively and evocatively pitied; by the hackney writer.'

For a writer to survive Grub Street or to ascend any higher in the literary world, they had to be versatile. Think of Goldsmith, who did everything from writer comic plays to popular science, novels, essays and poems. Or Samuel Johnson, who’s description on the statue at the end of Fleet Street read; ‘critic, essayist, philologist, biographer, wit, poet, moralist, dramatist, political writer, talker.’ 

Writers came from three main areas; actors, medics and lawyers. They were all part of a middle class but it was possible in the republic of letters to move through the social hierarchy to a surprising degree. There were people like Johnson who were invited to all the best houses; or Pope who managed to overcome is Catholic upbringing, deformity and general grumpiness to be something of a secular saint of letters. Of course it could also go the other way, like Samuel Boyce who frequently pawned all his clothes and turned his blanket into a sort of poncho so he could keep on writing.

Finally, the talk turned to the booksellers, paying particular regard to their charity. I was less convinced by this part of the talk, the stories of Newbery and Christopher Smart still ringing in my ears. 

What I went away with more than anything, was Jerry White’s enthusiasm for the society of the marginalised writers. He delighted in their conviviality, their clubbability and the way in which people of all walks of life seemed to mingle around the Grub Street milieu, whether they were drinking coffee in Paternoster row or something stronger down at Tom’s. He represented the society of Grub Street as a place where people could always share a book, a drink or a bit of gossip, a tradition I’d be more than happy to continue.

A lecture taking us from Grub Street to Fleet Street

This is a one of the Gresham lectures. It is by Bob Clarke who wrote a book called From Grub Street to Fleet Street, he is a little slow to start but once he gets into it he is very entertaining.

Demon Barber of Grub Street

Sweeney Todd was first introduced in the Victorian pulp book 'The String of Pearls' by James Malcolm Rymer. Although a nineteenth century creation, Rymer set the story in 1785 on the junction of Fleet Street and Bell Yard, where a secret passageway linked the barbershop where Sweeney dispatched his victims and the shop where Mrs Lovet turns them into pies.


A pub now stands on that junction called 'The Old Bank of England'. It is a Fuller's pub, selling their ale and also specialising in a certain kind of pub food...

Of course Sweeney Todd was not based on any historical case (as much as the grisly minded may hope) but Fleet Street, as well as any fashionable thoroughfare would have had a number of striped poles indicating barbershops. 

We know that fashionable gentleman like Boswell paid for three shaves a week, as well as minor surgeries and wig maintenance but there was also a growing trend as the century went on for self shaving. By the 1770s a range of companies started to sell a range of scented products for shaving as well as new and more accurate razors. Indeed, the development in metallurgy that fuelled the growing industrial revolution also aided the production of fine razors. A more detailed essay on the subject can be found here.

I bring this all up because I have recently purchased a starter kit for straight razor shaving. It is a whim I have long had but indulged recently with this inexpensive and complete kit from amazon. I have only shaved myself for a second time and already my technique is improving...I have only sliced myself once. When it works, it truly is the nicest, smoothest and least irritating shave I have ever had and where it doesn't work; well, I prefer the feeling of a clean cut to a nagging itch.

So, with this little experiment in eighteenth century living started, I bid you adieu.

Yours with concern.

Grub Street

There is a wonderful free online map of late eighteenth century London here.

In that, is of course grub street, (5 across and 1 down).

Here it is, out of the context of the rest of the map.

I have just read a book on 'The Grub Street Journal' and will be condensing that and picking out some good bits soon, and am now on 2 books about Grub Street itself, so that will be forthcoming.

When I am not knackered after going back from work anyway.

All yours

Welcome to Grub Street

Hello there.


My name is Adam Stevenson and I am the Grub Street Lodger. 

Grub Street was a street in London. Originally it was a street of bowyers and fletchers - makers of bows and arrows for people to use as they practiced on the nearby Moorfields. As archery became a less common hobby, the houses fell in disrepair and were snapped up by gamblers, non-conformist preachers and, worst of all, writers.


It may have been that Foxe's English Martyrs was written on Grub Street, but by the end of the Seventeenth century it was synonymous with hack writers and ephemeral material. This was a time when literacy had exploded in the capital and the coffee shops were insatiable for material to talk about, and the hacks were more than happy to provide - songs, poems, panegyrics, articles, essays all flowed out of Grub Street and into surrounding London, picked up, praised and talked about one day - toilet paper the next.

The Distressed Poet

By the middle of the century, Hogarth is drawing a poor Grub Street hack in his picture The Distressed Poet, Pope is calling it the Parnassus, the very temple, of 'dulness' and Samuel Johnson uses the word 'grubstreet' to describe "any mean production" of letters. 


Grub Street grew into something of a legend; the legend of the antisocial, dishevelled writer, churning out words from his draughty attic roof and quivering at every knock on the door in case it's the bailiffs. Which is where the concept of Grub Street links very well with today.

Me in a ratty garrett.

Because, as well as being a huge fan of the Eighteenth Century, particularly the energetic urban culture that existed in London, I am also attempting to make my way as a writer. This blog attempts to unite those two interests and provide an outlet for anything else that may come along.


So, welcome to the neighbourhood, please pop by again.


Yours