The rituals of crime have, in London, also taken on a theatrical guise. Jonathan Wild, the master criminal of mid-eighteenth-century London, declared that “The mask is the summum bonum of our age” while the marshalmen, or city police of a slightly later date, were costumed in cocked hats and spangled buttons. There were more subtle disguises available to the detective of the city. One is reminded of Sherlock Holmes, a character who could have existed only in the heart of London. According to his amanuensis, Holmes “had at least five small refuges in different parts of London, in which he was able to change his personality.” The mysteries of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, too, could be conducted only through “the swirling wreaths” of London fog where character and identity may suddenly and dramatically be obscured.
If crime and detection rely upon disguise, so London punishment had its own theatre of judgement and of pain. The Old Bailey itself was designed as a dramatic spectacle, and was indeed compared with “a giant Punch and Judy show” where the judges sat within the open portico of a Sessions House which resembled a theatrical backdrop.
Yet since Punch, who in the end manages to hang the hangman Jack Ketch, is the epitome of disorder it is likely that his spirit would also be found in noisome circumstances. The cellar floor of the Fleet Prison was known as “Bartholomew Fair,” while in the chapel of Newgate there were galleries where spectators were invited to watch the antics of those condemned to die who deliberately entertained their audience with acts of outrageousness or defiance. We read, for example, of one John Riggleton who “made a practice of sneaking up to the Ordinary [prison clergyman] when his eyes were fast shut in prayer and shouting out loud in his ear.” This of course is the role of the pantaloon in pantomime.
The theatre did not end in the prison chapel, but continued upon the little stage where the execution took place. “The upturned faces of the eager spectators,” wrote one contributor to The Chronicles of Newgate, “resembled those of the ‘gods’ at Drury Lane on Boxing Night.” Another witness remarked upon the fact that, just before the execution, there was a roar of “‘Hats off!’ and ‘Down in front!’ as at a theatre.” There was one peculiarly theatrical episode at the execution in 1820 of Thistlewood and his “Cato Street” companions for treason; according to the traditional sentence, they were to be hanged and then beheaded. “When the executioner had come to the last of the heads, he lifted it up, but, by some clumsiness, allowed it to drop. At this the crowd yelled out, ‘Ah, Butter-fingers!’” This small episode manifests the peculiar temperament of the London crowd, combining humour and savagery in equal measure.
The witnesses at executions were not the only inhabitants of London to appreciate the virtues of urban theatre. Inigo Jones’s construction of the Banqueting House in 1622 was, in the words of John Summerson’s Georgian London, “really an extension of his stage work”; the same might be said of his other great urban projects. In a similar spirit, two hundred years later, John Nash disguised a concerted effort at town planning, dividing the poor of the east from the wealthy of the west, by creating streets and squares which represented the principles of “picturesque beauty” by means of scenic effects. George Moore commented that the “circular line” of Regent Street was very much like that of an amphitheatre, and it has been noted that the time of Nash’s “Improvements” was also the period of the great panoramas and dioramas of London. Buckingham Palace, as viewed from the end of the Mall, seems nothing more than an elaborate stage-set while the House of Commons is an exercise in wistful neo-Gothic not unlike the elaborate dramas to be seen in the patent theatres of the period. The latest Pevsner guide notes that the clearing banks of the City of London “were built to impress inside and out,” while much of the architecture of the 1960s “took the expressive potential of concrete to a theatrical extreme.”
That central spirit of London has been divined by artists as well as architects. In the work of Hogarth the streets are delineated in terms of scenic perspective. In many of his prints, perhaps most notably in his delineation of the Fair, the division between performers and spectators is for all practical purposes invisible; the citizens fulfil their roles with even more animation than the stage actors, and there are more genuinely dramatic episodes among the crowd than upon the boards.
