These examples of what we might now term alternative medicine are taken from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but the neighbourhood has never lost its oblique reputation for occultism and strange practice. In succeeding years the Freemasons, the Swedenborg Society, the Theosophical Society and the Order of the Golden Dawn have established themselves in the same parish. A few hundred yards from Monmouth Street is the Atlantis Bookshop, which remains the most celebrated depository of occult literature in England. Here again may be another example of that territorial imperative, or genius loci, which keeps inhabitants and activities in the same small area.
Jack Edwards was a ballad singer as well as a doctor, and the ballads of Seven Dials were as notorious as the events and people whom they commemorated. James Catnach of Monmouth Court was the first begetter and promoter of the broadsides, songs and pamphlets which circulated through the streets of eighteenth-century London. They cost a penny each, hence the term “catchpenny” as a tribute to his marketing skills. He was forced to take the coppers to a bank, however, because no one else would touch them in case of infection springing off the metal. The reputation of Seven Dials was always dark and disturbed, although Catnach himself remedied his own position by boiling the pennies in potash and vinegar so that they became bright once more.
There were five other printers of ballads in the immediate vicinity of St. Giles, publishing street literature with titles such as “Unhappy Lady of Hackney,” “Letter Written by Jesus Christ,” “Last Dying Speech of …” These broadsides were, for the people of London, the real “news” passing from hand to hand; in many instances it was disruptive or polemical news, concerning events which affected the citizens themselves. There was one mid-eighteenth-century ballad, for example, which was issued from Seven Dials and which concerned the local workhouse-“The Workhouse Cruelty, Workhouses turn’d Gaols, and Gaolers Executioners.” The death of “one Mrs. Mary Whistle” in the institution became the subject of popular resentment. There were also ballad complaints about the conditions of paupers and beggars, many left to die in the very same streets from which the ballads were issued. In that sense St. Giles-in-the-Fields, perhaps because of its raging population and its awful mortality, acted as an alternative source of authority. That made it a suitable haven for “coiners” who were in effect issuing another kind of money, in the process helping to disrupt the system of commerce and finance which cast so palpable a shadow over the impoverished inhabitants of this area.
It is appropriate, also, that the parish should be the haunt of prostitutes and a harbour of “night houses.” The courts and lanes adjoining Drury Lane were the most notorious for the trade and it was here, in his London Labour and the London Poor published between 1851 and 1862, that Henry Mayhew recorded the statement of one woman “over forty, shabbily dressed and with a disreputable unprepossessing appearance.” Mayhew’s accounts are a remarkable and affecting source of street life as well as street anecdote. His veracity and accuracy have sometimes been questioned, largely because he was part of a generation of mid-Victorian writers who tended to sensationalise or fictionalise the events and inhabitants of the “great wen.” But the general tenor and candour of Mayhew’s transcriptions can be trusted, as in this unhappy woman’s story: “I lodge in Charles Street, Drury Lane, now. I did live in Nottingham Court once and Earl Street. But, Lord, I’ve lived in a many places you wouldn’t think, and I don’t imagine you’d believe one half. I’m always a-chopping and a-changing like the wind as you may say … I don’t think much of my way of life. You folks as has honour, and character, and feelings, and such, can’t understand how all that’s been beaten out of people like me. I don’t feel. I’m used to it … I don’t suppose I’ll live much longer, and that’s another thing that pleases me. I don’t want to live, and yet I don’t care enough about dying to make away with myself. I arn’t got that amount of feeling that some has, and that’s where it is.” Mayhew declares that “she had become brutal,” but in fact the city had brutalised her.
Her fatalism, however, has not necessarily been shared. D.M. Green, in People of the Rookery, remarked that because of its dreadful conditions St. Giles contained “the seeds of revolution.” It is a curious chance, then, that in 1903, the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party should take place on Tottenham Court Road itself; it was organised by Lenin, and resulted in the separation of Bolsheviks from Mensheviks. As the author of Lenin in London, Lionel Kochahs, has put it, “It is almost true to say that Bolshevism as a political party was actually founded in Tottenham Court Road.” So the parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields did indeed contain those “seeds” of violent social disruption, even if it were a species of instinctive and distant revenge.
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The area around St. Giles was, in the language of the period, a “sore” or “abscess” that might poison the whole body politic, with the unspoken assumption that it must in some way be purged or cauterised. So between the years 1842 and 1847 a great thoroughfare known as New Oxford Street was run through it, leading to wholesale demolition of the worst lanes and courts with an attendant exodus of the poor inhabitants-although most of them moved only a few streets further south. The language of the body was once more used by contemporary moralists who characteristically celebrated the fact that “one huge filthy mass” had been dispersed. Yet the heady atmosphere of the place was by no means removed; the exiled poor simply lived in conditions worse and more overcrowded than before, while the premises and shops of the new street remained unlet for some years. It was still a damp, dismal and “noisome” place to which few new residents could be attracted. And so it stands today. New Oxford Street is one of the least interesting thoroughfares in London, with no character except the somewhat dubious one of being dominated by the high-rise block of Centrepoint. The building towers above the site of the old “cage” and gallows, and may perhaps be considered a fitting successor to them. It is an area now without character or purpose, the home of computer suppliers, an Argos superstore, some indistinguishable and undistinguished office buildings, and shops designed for the trade of passing tourists. There are still the vagrants lingering in the recesses of the area as a token of its past, but where there was once life and suffering there is now a dismal quiet from which St. Giles himself can offer no deliverance.
London as Theatre
“Punch and Judy” arrived early in London and could be seen on the streets until recent times. Street entertainers have haunted the city since the thirteenth century, and perhaps before.
CHAPTER 13. Show! Show! Show! Show! Show!
Show! Show! Show! Show! Show! This was the cry of a seventeenth-century city crowd, as recorded in Ned Ward’s London Spy. There were indeed many shows to be seen on the London streets, but the greatest fair of all was held at Smithfield. It was known as Bartholomew’s Fair.