London: The Biography полностью

The voices of the running patterers and the itinerant singers were invariably joined by the often discordant airs of the street musicians. Hector Berlioz, visiting London in the mid-nineteenth century, wrote that “no city in the world” was consumed so much by music; despite his profession, he was concerned less with the melodies of the concert hall than with those of the barrel-organ, the barrel-piano, the bagpipes and the drums which filled the streets. As Charles Booth noted in his survey of the East End, “let a barrel organ strike up a valse at any corner and at once the girls who may be walking past, and the children out of the gutter, begin to foot it merrily. Men join in sometimes, two young men together as likely as not,” while an appreciative crowd watched the dancing.

There were German bands, as well as Indian drummers and blacked-up “Abyssians” who played violin, guitar, tambourine and castanets; there were glee singers, and minstrels (generally a couple) who could be heard crooning “Oh where is my boy tonight?” and “Will you meet me at the Fountain?” In the 1840s there was a blind musician who played the violoncello with his feet, and a crippled trumpeter who drove around in a dog-cart.

The cacophony was immense and yet, in one of those gradual but necessary transitions of London life, most of it has passed away leaving only buskers to entertain cinema queues and inventive players of illegal music in the underpasses of London’s transport system.

An eighteenth-century traveller remarked that “if towns were to be called after the first words which greeted a traveller on arrival, London would be called Damn it!” At the beginning of the twentieth century it would have been called “Bloody” and today “Fuckin’.”

“Fucking” is one of the longest-serving terms of abuse, having been heard on the London streets since the thirteenth century, and it is perhaps no surprise that the prevalent adjective applied to the language of Londoners is “disgusting.” The “disgust” is a response to that undertow of violence and anger which exemplifies life in the city, while such miseries as sexual abuse may have testified to the distaste which Londoners have had for their own fallen and once dirty condition. Contemporary standards of hygiene and more liberal sexual mores have not, however, materially diminished the “fucking” and “cunts” heard in the street. Perhaps modern Londoners are simply mouthing the words which the city itself has bequeathed to them.

In this context the obscene gesture should not be forgotten. In the sixteenth century a biting of the thumb represented aggression; this in turn led to the hat being cocked backwards and, in the late eighteenth century, “by a jerk of the thumb over the left shoulder.” The thumb then moved to the tip of the nose to represent contempt, and by the twentieth century two fingers were raised in the air as a “V” sign. The arm and elbow were then employed in an upward thrust to suggest derision.

The hand gestures of the street could also be free of sexual innuendo. There was once, everywhere, a pointing hand on the palm of which a destination was offered-“please to go this way,” whether to an eating-house or a toyshop. London was a city of signs. In 1762, according to Jenny Uglow’s Hogarth, the “Society of Sign Painters” announced a “Grand Exhibition” of its products, and in some rooms off Bow Street were exhibited “Keys, Bells, Swords, Poles, Sugar-Loaves, Tobacco Rolls, Candles,” all the “ornamental Furniture, carved in Wood.” It was meant as a reproof to the more tasteful productions of the Society of Arts, but its comic variety was also a testimony to an ancient but still living tradition of street art.