London: The Biography полностью

Rowlandson’s depiction of a public hanging outside Newgate Prison. The rituals of executions provided unrivalled entertainment for the London crowd, and fresh anatomical specimens for the Royal College of Surgeons.

Seventeenth-century firemen at their trade; they were indispensable in a city notorious for fires, and their call of “Hi! Hi! Hi!” was as ubiquitous as the modern siren.

Rowlandson’s depiction of a public hanging outside Newgate Prison. The rituals of executions provided unrivalled entertainment for the London crowd, and fresh anatomical specimens for the Royal College of Surgeons.

Moll Cut-Purse: an engraving of the most notorious of the “roaring girls,” those women who wore masculine costume in order to confront a male-dominated city on its own terms. The animals and birds depicted were part of her own private menagerie.

Newgate Prison showing the windmill which supposedly helped provide air for the inmates. The gaol was the most notorious within the city, commemorated in songs, pamphlets and plays. London writers of all periods have compared the city to a prison, in implicit homage to the pervasive power and presence of that “hell on earth.”

“The Modern Plague of London.” A temperance map: each dot represents a public house. London is so large, and so diverse, that a thousand different maps or topographies have been drawn up in order to describe it. Here is a map of drunkenness in the city always notorious for its drunkards.

A photograph of the Café Monico, on Piccadilly Circus, in a period where horse-drawn vehicles competed with motor cars in the busy streets. Note that the age of advertising is in full swing.

In seventeenth-century London, too, “quacks” or “healers” were in the ascendant and have been duly catalogued in Charles Mackay’s volume of popular delusions and superstitions. When Valentine Greatraks, a “healer,” moved to Lincoln’s Inn Fields in the early 1660s, “Nothing was spoken of in London but his prodigies; and these prodigies were supported by such great authorities, that the bewildered multitude believed them almost without examination.” Thus did another showman succeed in “magnetising the people of London.” “Scurvy quacks” used spoonwart which grew by the banks of the Thames, while more noxious treatments such as “Spirit of Pearl” or “Essence of Gold” were also dispensed. There were “wise-women” and “wise-men” who examined urine (known as practitioners of “piss-pot science”) or pored upon moles to discover the source of illness. The seventh child of a seventh child invariably entered the business, although many claimed that distinction without having attained it.

One William Salmon practised at the very gates of Bartholomew Hospital and claimed to have cured “Ambrose Webb at the Three Compasses in Westbury-street of a great bleeding at Nose; a youth, a son of William Ogben, a Taylor, near the Black Boy in Barnaby-street, of a long and tedious ague and madness … Nicholas Earl at the Cup in Long alley, of dropsy; Joan Ingram near the Bear in Moor Fields of the Gout, and Anthony Geasture at the Cock in Wapping of a consumption.” The circumstantial detail is compelling. The advertisement also serves to elucidate the manner in which Londoners identified each other by citing location in terms of the nearest tavern.

There seems little doubt that William Salmon did indeed effect cures; like a modern psychiatrist, he was particularly effective at dispelling or exorcising that “melancholy” which was a recurring London condition. He was himself a London original, part showman, part sorcerer and part physician. He was born in the summer of 1644 and began life as “an assistant to a mountebank” before establishing his own career as the seller of “Elixir Vitae.” He was also a popular educator, and in 1671 published Synopsis Medicinae, or a Compendium of Astrological, Galenical and Chymical Physick which passed through at least four editions. He wrote several other popular books, upon mathematics and drawing as well as medicine, but his most successful work was his London Almanack in which he prophesied in a manner to be later adopted or stolen by Old Moore. His practice across London can be traced with some accuracy-from Smithfield to Salisbury Court off Fleet Street, from there to the Blue Balcony by the ditch near Holborn Bridge and then on to Mitre Court beside Fleet Street. Like many Londoners he became a radical Dissenter; he joined a sect called the “New Religious Fraternity of Freethinkers” which assembled near the Leather-sellers’ Hall. Then, at a somewhat late age, he began to practise anatomy. On his death in 1714 he left two microscopes and a library of over three thousand volumes.