So London had become dangerous. “When a mob of chairmen or servants, or a gang of thieves or sharpers, are almost too big for the civil authority,” wrote Henry Fielding, “what must be the case in a seditious tumult or general riot?” The history of the eighteenth-century crowd displays a gradual change of temper which was disturbing to magistrates such as Fielding. The scorn and insults were no longer primarily levelled at strangers or outsiders but, rather, at those of wealth or authority. “A man in court dress cannot walk the streets of London without being pelted with mud by the mob,” Casanova wrote in 1746, “… the Londoners hoot the king and the royal family when they appear in public.” In this “chaos,” as Casanova described it, “the flower of the nobility mingling in confusion with the vilest populace,” the “common people affect to show their independence … the most wretched Porter will dispute the wall with a Lord.” It was similarly reported by Pierre Jean Grosley that “In England no rank or dignity is secure from the insults” and that “no nation is more satirical or quicker at repartee, especially the common people.” A Frenchman made the acute point that “This insolence is considered by many only as the humour and pleasantry of porters and Watermen; but this humour and pleasantry was, in the hands of the long parliament, one of their chief weapons against Charles the First.” “Repartee” and insult can, in other words, have political consequences. In that context it is perhaps worth noting that the street urchins used the statue of Queen Anne, outside St. Paul’s Cathedral, as the target for their practice of throwing stones.
One of the characteristics of the London mob was its irritability and sudden changes of mood, so that when a spark was struck in its depths it flared up very quickly. When an offender did not arrive at a pillory in Seven Dials, as expected, the crowd erupted in a fury which principally fell upon passing hackney coaches; they were pelted with filth and ordure while the coachmen were forced to cry out “Huzza!” as they went along. At one controversial election meeting in Westminster “in a very few minutes the whole scaffolding, benches and chairs and everything else were completely destroyed.” The rage of the crowd was random and sporadic, fierce and exhilarating in equal measure. One German visitor, after a visit to Ludgate Hill, noted: “Now I know what an English mob is.” He was driving in a coach, at a time of general rejoicing at the release from prison in 1770 of the great London politician, Wilkes, and recalled “half-naked men and women, children, chimney sweeps, tinkers, Moors and men of letters, fish-wives and elegant ladies, each creature intoxicated by his own whims and wild with joy, shouting and laughing.”
It is as if the very restriction of the city encouraged the sudden appetite for wildness and licence; the restraints imposed by a mercantile culture, ruinous in its effects upon many who comprised the crowd, encouraged rapid volatility of rage and exhilaration. There were also too many people forced into too small a space, and this massive overcrowding in narrow streets engendered strange fevers and excitements. That is why the instinctive fear of the mob, or crowd, had as much to do with its propensity for disease as its prevalence towards violence. It was the fear of touch, of the unhealthy warmth of London as transmitted by its citizens, which went back to the times of fever and of epidemic plague when, in the words of Defoe, “their hands would infect the things they touched, especially if they were warm and sweaty, and they were generally apt to sweat too.”
