The mob can also turn upon itself, or upon one of its number. The cry of “a Pick Pocket!” in Moll Flanders set the crowd alight when “all the loose part of the Crowd ran that way, and the poor Boy was deliver’d up to the Rage of the street, which is a Cruelty I need not describe.” There is an element of sudden horror here, as if a whirlpool of rage manifested itself without warning. A record of the last days of a reputed astrologer and magician, John Lambe, in the middle of June 1628, is printed in “The Life and Death of John Lambe,” by Leva Goldstein in Guildhall Studies in London History. Lambe was recognised by some boys in the Fortune Theatre who waited outside “and followed him when he left.” More people joined them, and Lambe hired some passing sailors to form a protective bodyguard; he walked down Red Cross Street, turned left into Fore Street and then left again to the Horseshoe Tavern in Moor Lane, the crowd growing larger and louder all the time. He dined in the inn, while the sailors “kept the crowd at bay” but, when he left and entered the city by Moorgate, the mob once more pursued him with cries of “Witch” and “Devil.” The situation was now very serious. He walked quickly down Coleman Street, into Lothbury, where he took refuge in an upstairs room of the Windmill Tavern on the corner of Old Jewry. His bodyguards were assaulted, and both entrances to the tavern watched by the eager citizens. He attempted to leave in disguise but was again marked down; he took refuge in a nearby house, belonging to a lawyer who called out four constables of the ward to guard him. “But the rage of the people so much increased … that in the midst of these auxiliaries they struck him down to the ground” and beat him with stones and clubs; he never spoke again, and was carried to the Poultry Compter where he died of his injuries on the following day. This is an accurate report on the actions of a characteristic London crowd.
· · ·
If you had any hope of finding “a community life” in London, “all foreigners” agree that it is as if you searched “for flowers in a vale of sand.” There was no community in London in the eighteenth century, and no sense of communal life, only a number of distinctive and distinguishable crowds. There were crowds of women attacking bawdy houses or dishonest shops, crowds of citizens alerted by a “hue and cry,” crowds of parishioners attacking a local compter, crowds watching a fire, crowds of beggars, and, most ominously, crowds of distressed or unemployed workers. One eminent London historian, Stephen Inwood, has in fact remarked in his A History of London that rioters “could be a form of ‘collective bargaining’ between labourers and masters.” In 1710 there was violent rioting by framework-knitters, which presaged decades of unrest and disorder in the poor urban districts such as Whitechapel and Shoreditch.
There were riots by silk-weavers and coal-heavers, hat-makers and glass-grinders, and a host of assorted tradesmen whom creeping industrialisation and increased food prices had rendered ever more desperate. Indian calico was a threat to the weavers of Spitalfields, for example, and one woman was attacked by a crowd who “tore, cut, pulled off her gown and petticoat by violence, threatened her with vile language, and left her naked in the fields.” London channelled the energies of its citizens in the crooked shape of its lanes and thoroughfares, rendering them ever more fierce and desperate.
That is why the process of city life itself was seen as a movement within a crowd. Sometimes it is indifferent and banal, an aspect of “the great metropolis” where exists “the vast unhurried audience that will still gather and stare at any new thing.” Yet on occasions its speed and confusion were decisive, as in Gray’s poem where on the streets of the city the crowd “Tumultuous, bears my Partner from my side.” This is a defining image, well expressed in Moll Flanders: “I took my leave of her in the very Crowd and said to her, as if in hast, dear Lady Betty take care of your little Sister, and so the Crowd did, as it were Thrust me away from her.” The impersonal crowd parts friend from friend, and separates loved one from loved one; those dearest to us are no longer near, borne away by the surging tide in unknown directions. Yet for some there is comfort to be found in this anonymity. “I shall therefore retire to the Town,” wrote Addison in the Spectator of July 1711, “… and get into the Crowd again as fast as I can, in order to be alone.” The crowd encourages solitude, therefore, as well as secrecy and anxiety.
