London: The Biography полностью

Fights took place off the streets as often as upon them, and the printed records testify to the fact that the “lower” drinking clubs and alehouses were characterised by violence as well as liquor. William Hickey reported upon his visit to a den called Wetherby’s in Little Russell Street off Drury Lane where “the whole room was in an uproar, men and women promiscuously mounted upon chairs, tables, and benches, in order to see a sort of general conflict carrying on upon the floor. Two she-devils, for they scarce had a human appearance, were engaged in a scratching and boxing match, their faces entirely covered with blood, bosoms bare, and the clothes nearly torn from their bodies. For several minutes not a creature interfered between them, or seemed to care a straw what mischief they might do each other, and the contest went on with unabated fury.” Here it is the indifference and callousness of the crowd that are most evident, an indifference which, it can be presumed, was carried over into their general demeanour at work or upon the streets. The phrase “Never mind it” was a frequent one. Another phrase in Hickey’s account, “promiscuously mounted,” also, if no doubt inadvertently, introduces the element of sexual excitement and sexual congress into this account of bloody combat; sex and violence are, in the city, indissolubly connected.

Hickey watched another beating in a corner of Wetherby’s where “an uncommonly athletic young man of about twenty five seemed to be the object of universal attack.” Hickey then experienced, naturally enough, “an eager wish to get away” but was stopped at the door. “No, no, youngster,” he was told, “no tricks upon travellers. No exit here until you have passed muster, my chick”; not until he had paid his “reckoning,” in other words, or had his purse stolen. He was then called a “sucker,” a word which lingered for more than two hundred years. Hickey was literally imprisoned within “this absolute hell upon earth” which then itself became a very emblem of the city as a prison.

no biography of London would be complete without reference to the most violent and widespread riot of its last thousand years. It started as a demonstration against legislation in favour of Roman Catholics, but quickly turned into a general assault upon the institutions of the state and the city.

On 2 June 1780, Lord George Gordon assembled four columns of his supporters in St. George’s Fields, in Lambeth, and led them to Parliament Square in order to protest against the Catholic Relief Act; Gordon himself was a quixotic figure of strange and marginal beliefs, but one who managed to inspire the vengeful imagination of the city for five days. He always protested, in later confinement, that he had never meant to uncork the fury of the mob, but he never properly understood the moods and sudden fevers of the city. His supporters were described as “the better sort of tradesmen,” and Gordon himself had declared that for the march against Parliament they should be decent and “dressed in their sabbath days cloaths.” But no crowd in London remains unmixed for long; soon more violent anti-papist elements, such as the weavers of Spitalfields bred from Huguenot stock, merged with the general crowd.

Charles Dickens, in Barnaby Rudge, has given an account of the riots; the novel is fired by his interest in violence and by his fascination with crowds but it is also conceived after much reading and research. From the Annual Register of 1781, for example, he could have learned that the day was “intensely hot, and the sun striking down his fiercest rays upon the field those who carried heavy banners began to grow faint and weary.” Yet they marched in the heat three abreast, the main column some four miles in length, and when they converged outside Westminster they raised a great yell. The heat now inflamed them, as they invaded the lobbies and passages of Parliament. So great was the crowd that “a boy who had by some means got among the concourse, and was in imminent danger of suffocation, climbed to the shoulders of a man beside him and walked upon the people’s hats and heads into the open street.” Now this great multitude threatened the government itself; their petition was carried into the chamber of the House of Commons while, outside, the crowd screamed and yelled in triumph. They even threatened to invade the chamber but, even as they threw themselves against the doors, a rumour spread that armed soldiers were advancing in readiness to confront them. “Fearful of sustaining a charge in the narrow passages in which they were so closely wedged together, the throng poured out as impetuously as they had flocked in.” In the ensuing flight a body of Horse Guards surrounded some of the rioters and escorted them as prisoners to Newgate; this removal was, as events demonstrated, an unfortunate one.