Johnson’s London Was Mixture of Culture, Wealth and Degradation.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18805, 6 July 1929, Page 19 (Supplement)

Johnson’s London Was Mixture of Culture, Wealth and Degradation.

Some Glimpses of Georgian Days .

Written for the “ Star ’* by

J. K. STONE.

“Why, sir, there is more learning and distinction within ten miles of London than in all the rest of the world put together ! ” —Samuel Johnson. THERE is a statue of Dr Johnson at the east end of the Church of St Clement Danes in the Strand. From there, he looks down Fleet Street —the street along which he walked so often. In one sense Dr Johnson is symbolic of Georgian England of the eighteenth century*. He has been called “a sort of literary John Bull—John Bull with all his insular prejudices and intolerance, yet with all those qualities of heart and head, the learning, the wit and humour, the noble kindliness, and the quiet, enduring heroism which go to make up the character of John Bull.” The period dominated by Johnson was one of increasing wealth and imperial expansion. John Bull, still a well-to-do farming squire, was becoming conscious of his own importance, and proportionately contemptuous of his neighbours—hence the doctor s opinion of London. This intense satisfaction with all things English is further illustrated by the following incident: Dr Johnson was discovered at work on his Dictionary by Dr Adams— Dr Adams: This is a great work, sir. 110 wean you do it in three years? Johnson: I have no doubt that I can do it in three years, sir. Adams: But the French Academy, which consists of forty members, took forty years to complete their dictionary. Johnson: Thus it is. This is the proportion. Let me see; forty times forty* is 1600. As three to 1600, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman. Old London. The Johnsonian circle included Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Gibbon, Adam Smith, James Boswell, poets, historians -—the foremost of the age. But London, then as ever, was a queer mixture of culture, wealth and hopeless degrada tion. There was the “genteel world” of Fanny Burney, living a polite existence, and ignoring as far as possible the fact that the earth was also shared by “the populace.” Then there was the army of footpads and highwaymen who appear to have found this something of a golden age. They were

“drawn like a cordon round London.” Dr Johnson once discoursed on the propriety* of shooting these gentlemen of the road. Boswell says: “He (Johnson) talked of going to Streatham that night. Taylor: ‘You’ll be robbed if you do, or you must shoot a highwayman!’”; and this observation was fol lowed by a philosophic discussion in which these perils of travel were accepted much as a matter of course. . . . London then was not beautiful. Very few buildings with any* pretensions to dignity had been erected since the time

of Sir Christopher Wren, and the ir- ; regular, timbered gables that had made mediaeval and Tudor London at once picturesque and unhealthy, had long since disappeared in the Great Fire, i Lewis Bettany, an authority* on this period of London history, gives the following sketch: i “One hundred and fifty years ago, - Belgravia and Tyburnia had still to be laid out; while Kensington, Brompton and Knightsbridge had scarcely an ) existence. Queen .Square was ‘left open on one side for the sake of the

beautiful landscape formed by the hills of Hampstead and Highgate* . . . Dr Goldsmith could take a country house in the Edgeware Road ‘lor the benefit of the air and the convenience of retirement.’ “ ‘The Town’ then was one from which the houses on old London Bridge were not removed till 1758, and in which the heads of two of the rebels of the ’45 could be seen mouldering on Temple Bar as late as 1760. . . . The King’s palace—settled on Queen Charlotte, and so called the Queen’s House —-was no larger than, and as unpretentious as, any nobleman’s town house. . . . while not a single London street could make any claim to rank with Prince’s Street, Edinburgh, or the High Street, .Oxford, as a noble thoroughfare. The streets, indeed were so roughfare. The streets, indeed, were so inefficiently protected by the watch that an expedition to the City on a rainy day or a visit to the playhouse with your women folk, could only be made in a coach or in chairs.” Apart from about half a dozen theatres, and Gardens such as Vauxhall and Ranelagh, the chief entertainment seems to have been the public executions at Tyburn, and later, outside Newgate Prison Georgian Society. The first two Georges were of little credit to their native Ilanover, or to their adopted kingdoms. But George the Third was a king conscious of his British nationality—pugnacious and pig-headed, far from brilliant—but a British King. In "The Four Georges,” Thackeray gives this glimpse of the Royal home life—a stolid existence, but one that earned for the Royal Familv the nation’s loyalty from 1760 to IS10: “King George’s household was a model of an English gentleman’s household. It was early; it was kindly; it was charitable; it was frugal; it was orderly; it must have been stupid to a degree which I shudder now to contemplate It always rose, rode, dined at stated intervals. Day after day was the same. At the same hour at night the Xing kissed his daughters’ jolly cheeks; the Princesses kissed their mother’s hand; and Madame Thielke brought the royal night cap." The domestic life of the Royal Fam ily was a standing protest against the drunkenness and wholesale gambling fashionable at the time. Fanny Burney’s “Evelina” gives a good idea of j the artificiality of life at this period.

People had time for elegant speech, and made the most of it. For instance, my Lord Orville, with no provocation whatever, gets into one sentence the following: “ 'O, certainly, the lifeless symmetry of architecture, however beautiful the design and propor tion. no man would be so mad as to put in competition with the animated charms of nature: but when, as to-night, the eye may be regaled at the same time, and in one view, with all the excellence of art, and all the perfection of nature, T cannot think that cither suffer by being seen together.' ’’ “Johnson’s London.” “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford.” Dr Johnson was "the first great liter ary figure whose name was to become attached to the London of his period." He was first taken to the city at the age of two, to be "touched” by Queen Anne. lie returned at twenty-eight, he afterwards said, with twoponce-half-penny in his pocket. He died in 1754 So his association with London, cover-

ing a period of about half a century, covers also a considerable portion of the Georgian era. “ Johnson’s London” comprises all the neighbourhood of Fleet Street and St Clement Danes, together with such widely divergent place; as Greenwich. Streatham, Southwark, Grosvenor Square and Soho. He went with Boswell to the Pantheon in Oxford Street, and approved of it. It was this same Pantheon, by the way, to which "Lord Orville” referred in the passage from i ‘‘Evelina” quoted above. It was built ,:n 1772. and "was devoted to concerts, occasional masquerades, and semiscientific entertainments.” Then there were the pleasure grounds at Vauxhall, Ranelagh, and Marylebone Gardens. “When I first entered Ranelagh.” said the Doctor, “it gave an expansion and gay sensation to my mind such as I had never experienced anywhere else.” (Continued on Page 23.> 'X° st *ge director has a monopoly on intelligence.”-—Lionel Barry- - more.