The Age of Voltaire Read online

  II. ASPECTS OF LONDON

  Venturesome statisticians estimate the population of Europe at some 100 millions in 1650, some 140 millions in 1750. Voltaire in 1750 reckoned the population of France at twenty millions, of Germany and Austria at twenty-two, of Great Britain and Ireland at ten, of European Russia at ten, of Spain and Portugal at eight, of Poland at six, and he allotted three millions each to European Turkey, Sweden, Denmark (plus Norway), and the United Provinces.35 A German jurist thought that the increase in northern Europe was largely due to the transfer of monks and nuns from celibacy to parentage by the Protestant Reformation, and urged that “a statue be erected to Luther as the preserver of the species”;36 but we must not exaggerate the continence of medieval monks. The increase in population was probably due to improvements in agriculture and transport augmenting the supply and distribution of food, and advances in sanitation and medical treatment reducing the death rate in infants and adults. England and Wales, which may have had no more than three millions population in 1500, appear to have had four millions in 1600, six in 1700, nine in 1800.37 Nearly all the increase went to the towns, nourishing and nourished by industry and trade. By 1740 London prided itself on some 725,000 inhabitants; it was now the most populous city on the globe; Defoe in 1722 condemned it as “overgrown.”38 Paris came next with 675,000 in 1750; then Amsterdam, Vienna, Naples, Palermo, Rome. London was ten times more populous than Bristol, which was the second-largest English city, and eighteen times more than Norwich, the third-largest. Metropolitan centers were gathering the controls of the nation’s economic life, and were turning the labor and products of fields and mines and shops into the subtle profits of finance.

  London was well situated to grow with English commerce and colonies. Oceangoing vessels could sail up the Thames, and though (till 1794) the docks could not berth them, an army of profane longshoremen, using a swarm of three hundred lighters, was available to transfer goods from ship to shore or other ships; so London became an animated entrepôt for the re-export, to the Continent, of imports from overseas. The riverside was not as tidy as we find it now; it was alive with lusty longshoremen, sex-starved sailors, and women loose in dress and code, foul in person and speech, living in hovels and taverns, and rivaling the seamen in drunkenness and violence.39 The river itself was picturesque with a motley of vessels ranging from fishing smacks to massive men-of-war, while little ferries plied the stream. The King, the Lord Mayor, and some notables maintained elaborate barges, and used them to go up the river to Windsor or other palaces. Till 1750 London Bridge remained the only way of crossing on foot from the northern to the southern side of the city, but in that year Westminster Bridge was completed, and in 1757 London Bridge was freed from its burden of houses and stores. Antonio Canaletto, the Venetian painter who visited London in 1746 and 1751, was impressed by the scenes of vitality on the water, and left some famous pictures to show us the Thames as Pope and Johnson knew and loved it.

  Johnson probably loved the streets of London even more, though they were as yet ill-lighted, ill-paved, and cleaned chiefly by the rains. In 1684 a system of street lighting had been established by setting up a candle lantern at every tenth house, but they were lit only on moonless nights, only till midnight, and only from Michaelmas (September 29) to Lady Day (March 25). In 1736 the city authorities voted to install fifteen thousand oil lamps throughout London, and to keep them lit from the setting to the rising of the sun; this was a gala event in the life of the capital, greatly improving the nocturnal safety of its streets.

  Pavements, since the Great Fire of 1666, were mostly of small, round stones; this remained standard till the nineteenth century. In the middle of each street ran a gutter that received much refuse and sluiced off the rain. There were no curbs, but a line of posts railed off a six-foot pathway for pedestrians. The streets were noisy with carts, pack horses, hackney coaches, and private carriages, all drawn by horses with hoofs clattering against the paving stones; there were also peddlers—many of them women-hawking a hundred kinds of food or clothing; traveling artisans offering repairs, drivers disputing, dogs barking, beggars soliciting, street singers bawling ballads, organs bouncing their melodies from wall to wall. The people complained of but loved these noises, which were the vital medium of their lives. Only the pickpockets and the prostitutes worked silently.

  Houses began to receive street numbers in 1708. By 1750 most of them had running water. Sanitation was improving. Every householder was required by law to keep the street walk clean before his property, and every ward had a scavenger who organized the collection of waste. Toilets were usually outhouses placed and screened off in the garden or yard. Some localities had sewers, but London had no general sewage system till 1865. Chimneys were cleaned by chimneysweeps who climbed them by pressing elbows and knees against the inner walls of brick or stone; this merciless deformation of children continued till 1817.

  A considerable part of the population was packed into slums filthy with garbage and offal, breeding a hundred diseases.40 In the Wapping and Lime-house sections of London nearly every second inhabitant lived from hand to mouth, depending on charity, theft, or prostitution to secure lodging and food. Children ran barefoot, unwashed, and unkempt in the streets, clothed in rags and schooled only in crime. In these slums men and women seldom bothered to marry; sexual relations were a passing incident, a commodity marketable without ceremony or law. There were hardly any churches there, but beer shops and taverns abounded. Here too were the lairs of thieves, pickpockets, highwaymen, and professional murderers. Many of the criminals were organized in gangs. Watchmen who interfered with them had their noses slit. One group, the “Mohocks,” was wont to sally drunk into the streets, prick passers-by with swords, make women stand on their heads, and gouge out the eyes of unaccommodating victims. Less ferocious gangsters contented themselves with breaking the windows of shops and homes. “Thieves and robbers,” Smollett reported in 1730, “were now become more desperate and savage than they had ever appeared since mankind were civilized.”41 In 1744 the Lord Mayor and aldermen of London drew up an address to the King in which they stated that “divers confederacies of great numbers of evil-disposed persons, armed with bludgeons, pistols, cutlasses, and other dangerous weapons, infest not only the private lanes and passages, but likewise the public streets and places of usual concourse, and commit the most dangerous outrages upon the persons of your Majesty’s subjects.”42 Said Horace Walpole in 1752: “One is forced to travel even at noon as if one were going to battle.”43

  The great metropolis, of course, was much more than this pullulation of poverty and crime. It was also the city of Parliament and royal palaces, of a thousand lawyers, merchants, journalists, poets, novelists, artists, musicians, educators, clergymen, courtiers. As we proceed we must add to our vision of eighteenth-century London the mansions, morals, and manners of the literate classes, the worshipers in the churches, the skeptics, scientists, and philosophers, the wits and belles and beaux of “society,” the pleasure gardens of Vauxhall and Ranelagh, the promenaders in the parks and on the Mall, the regattas and festivals and barges on the Thames, the conversations in coffeehouses and clubs, the shops of craftsmen, clothiers, jewelers, the amusements of the home and the sports of the field, the crowds at cockfights, prize fights, puppet shows, theaters, and opera: only then will our perspective of London life be fair and reasonably complete, and allow us to feel history in all its phases pouring through the bodies and souls of two generations and 700,000 men.

  III. SCHOOLS

  In England, as elsewhere in this period, life began with a high percentage of infantile mortality: fifty-nine per cent of all children born in London died before reaching the age of five, sixty-four per cent before reaching ten.44 Many babies were exposed at birth; of these the survivors were put out to nurse at public expense, and then were placed in workhouses. Carelessness of midwives and mothers resulted in a large number of physical deformities.

  If the parents were poor, the ch
ild might receive no schooling whatever. There were “charity schools,” which offered elementary education to both sexes and all classes without charge; but their total enrollment in 1759 was only 28,000, they excluded Dissenters, and they reached only a small fraction of the peasantry and hardly any of the urban poor. “The great majority of Englishmen,” says an English authority, “went unlettered to their graves.”45 In the artisan class apprenticeship was considered the best education. For the middle-class child there were private schools, usually kept by “men broken down, bankrupt, or turned out of some other employment.”46 And there were “dames’ schools,” where humble schoolmistresses taught the three R’s and much religion to boys and girls whose parents could pay. In all schools emphasis was laid upon teaching students to be content with their native rank, and to show proper subordination to the upper classes.

  A small minority graduated into “grammar schools,” where, for a modest fee that taught the teachers their humble place in the social scale, the boys could add a little Latin and Greek to their R’s. Discipline was severe, class hours were long—six to eleven-thirty in the morning, and one to five-thirty in the afternoon. Much better in quality were the “public schools”—chiefly Eton, Westminster, Winchester, Shrewsbury, Harrow, and Rugby—where select youngsters, for some twenty-six pounds per year, could prepare for university, and lay up classical tags for future display. As these public schools admitted only Church of England boys, the Dissenters—Baptists, Presbyterians, Independents, Unitarians, Quakers, Congregationalists, Methodists—established academies for their youth. Here, as befitted a middle-class clientele, less stress was laid upon the ancient classics, more upon modern languages, mathematics, history, geography, and navigation.

  Dissenters were excluded from the universities. Most of the students there were from moneyed families; some poorer lads, however, received scholarships from philanthropic individuals or institutions, and some “servitors” or “sizars,” like Newton, worked their way through the class-conscious halls. Both Oxford and Cambridge suffered stagnation in this period from conservatism in curriculum, methods, and ideas. Cambridge showed more willingness to enlarge scientific studies at the expense of the classics and theology; yet Chesterfield described Cambridge as “sunk into the lowest obscurity.” Oxford clung to the old theology and the fallen Stuart dynasty, and allowed no visit from the crude Hanoverian kings. Adam Smith, a student at Oxford in 1745, said he had learned little there; Edward Gibbon, who studied there in 1752, denounced the dons as ignorant tipplers, and regretted the years he had wasted in the university. Many families preferred to engage private tutors.47

  Girls received rudimentary instruction in village and charity schools—reading, writing, sewing, knitting, spinning, little arithmetic, much religion. Some girls were tutored, and a few, like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, studied the classic languages and literatures surreptitiously. “My sex,” said Lady Mary, “is usually forbid studies of this nature, and folly is reckoned so much our proper sphere we are sooner pardoned any excess of that, than the least pretensions to reading or good sense.… There is hardly a creature in the world … more liable to universal ridicule than a learned woman.” She was inclined to suspect that men kept women ignorant in order the more inexpensively to seduce them.48 If we may judge from the revenues of the King’s mistresses, the women managed quite well without the classics, and needed no Ovid to instruct them in the game of love.

  IV. MORALS

  Premarital relations among women were probably less common then than today (1965), but prostitution flourished to an extent hardly known again till our time. A foreign observer reckoned them at fifty thousand in London. They were found at town taverns, roadside inns, city gardens, public dances, concerts, and theaters; in Exeter Street and the Strand they sat at windows to encourage hesitant trade. In Drury Lane, sang Gay in his Trivia,

  ’Tis she who nightly strolls with saunt’ring pace;

  No stubborn stays her yielding shape embrace;

  Beneath the lamp her tawdry ribbons glare,

  The new scour’d manteau, and the slattern air …

  With flatt’ring sounds she soothes the cred’lous ear:

  “My noble captain! charmer! love! my dear!”49

  The law had no mercy on them. If found soliciting, they were taken to jail, whipped and pilloried. The Grub Street Journal for May 6, 1731, described the fate of one “madame”:

  Yesterday the noted Mother Needham stood in the pillory in Park Place near St. James’s Street, and was severely handled by the populace. She was so very ill that she lay along the pillory, notwithstanding which she was severely pelted, and it is thought she will die in a day or two.50

  But only the most impoverished prostitutes reached the pillory. Usually they evaded the law by bribery, or their landlord bailed them out; and some guardians of the law, perhaps recognizing their former hostesses, felt a degree of sympathy for women whom the statutes punished for the promiscuity of men. Probably not ten males in a London hundred came virginal to the marriage bed. Vice was publicly denounced, virtue was privately scorned. John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749), later known as Fanny Hill, a concatenation of detailed seductions, was (and is) one of the most obscene and popular books of the century.

  Some men banded together for mutual satisfaction. The London Journal for April 23 and 30, 1725, reported the arrest of seven homosexuals; on May 14 it recorded the hanging of three others for “sodomy.” It added: “We learn that they [the police] have discovered twenty houses or clubs where sodomites meet; moreover, they have an eye on nocturnal assemblies where these monsters meet in great number.” On July 7 the Journal noted the conviction of “Robert Whale and York Horner for having maintained in Westminster houses where they received amateurs of this detestable vice.” On July 23 it announced that “Marguerite Clapp, convicted of keeping a house of assignation for the use of sodomites,” had been “condemned to the pillory …, to pay a fine of ninety marks, and to spend two years in prison.”51

  We are told, on good authority, that “a very large proportion of the people [of London] lived in a state of illicit cohabitation without marriage.”52 Love marriages were rising in number, at least in the novels of Richardson and Fielding, but most marriages were still arranged by the parents after careful weighing of the bride’s dowry against the bridegroom’s actual or prospective income. An act of 1753 prohibited persons under twenty-one from marrying without the consent of their parents or guardians. As this law applied to England alone, many English elopers crossed the border into Scotland, where the parsons in the village of Gretna Green followed an easier rule. Further conveniences for eager lovers were provided by acquisitive clergymen who performed clandestine marriages in taverns, brothels, garrets, or other places in or near the Fleet (a street and the debtors’ prison on it). Almost every tavern in that neighborhood had such a dominie ready, for a fee, to marry anyone without questions asked or license required. One such parson was reputed to have married six thousand couples per year. Marriages were entered upon in heat, and broken in thaw; thousands of women were deserted; sailors on shore for a day married, loved, and decamped. To end the evil Parliament decreed (1753) that no marriage in England, except between Quakers or Jews, should be valid unless performed by an Anglican priest in a parish church, after the publication of banns in that church for three successive Sundays; all violators of this statute were liable to deportation to the colonies.

  Divorce was not allowed in England (before 1857) without a special act of Parliament,53 and the cost of such a procedure made it a luxury of the rich. Adultery flourished in all but the middle classes, with Georges I and II giving a royal example. “Everybody in this society,” Congreve had written in 1700, “was born with budding antlers”;54 and it was only less so in 1728, when Gay made Mrs. Peachum, in The Beggar’s Opera, ask her husband about her daughter, “Why must our Polly, forsooth, differ from her sex, and love only her husband? … All men are thieves in love, and like
a woman the better for being another man’s property.”55 By and large, however, the morals of women were higher in England than in France; and in the middle classes, where the Puritan tradition was still strong, purity verged on prudery, and women might be such wives as men dream of—patient, industrious, and faithful. The double standard was imposed and accepted. Nice women heard much coarse speech and read Fielding and Smollett, but they were expected to blush alluringly, and to faint at a moment’s notice.

  In all classes woman was looked upon as naturally and irrevocably inferior to man. Even the proud and rebellious Lady Mary conceded this, though perhaps with her sharp tongue in her cheek:

  I am not now arguing for an equality of the sexes. I do not doubt God and nature have thrown us into an inferior rank; we are a lower part of the creation, we owe obedience and submission to the superior sex, and any woman who suffers her vanity and folly to deny this, rebels against the law of the Creator and indisputable order of nature.56

  The Puritan interlude had brought woman down from her status under Elizabeth. One student judged that “about 1750, women in England had reached a new low level hardly in advance of their position in the twelfth century.”57

  Social, economic, and political morality were at nadir. Gambling, which had been discouraged by Queen Anne, was restored to royal grace by Georges I and II. A special officer, the groom porter, controlled gambling at the court. Cardplaying was the favorite amusement of rich and poor, seldom without stakes, often with cheating. It was not unusual for highborn wastrels to win or lose two hundred guineas at one sitting; the Duke of Devonshire gambled away an estate in one game; and Lord Chesterfield gambled recklessly between lectures to his son. Under George I gambling became a public passion to a degree probably never rivaled since. Gambling casinos were opened at White’s Club, at Charing Cross, in Leicester Fields, in Golden Square, and in Bath. An engraving in Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress shows men and women gambling at White’s, and paying no attention to an announcement that the building is on fire; the game must be fought to a decision.I George II forbade such organized gambling, but sanctioned the government lottery, which had been established in 1569 and which survived till 1826. Lottery tickets were sold to the public by every device of promotion; excitement was worked up to such a pitch that servants robbed their masters, clerks their employees, to get a stake in the game.58