A Georgian Cartoonist's Christmas

According to contemporary cartoonists, Georgian Christmas celebrations were not the scenes of pious, orderly behavior and domestic bliss the Victorians liked to portray. Consider this cartoon by Thomas Rowlandson, from 1804, "Christmas Gambols".

Drunken servants party in the kitchen in less than spiritual fashion. What would their masters think? Perhaps they encouraged such conviviality! Party on ! The mistletoe hanging from the ceiling indicates that the servants are acting in accord with an old Christmas tradition -- up to a point. 

"At Home in the Nursery" by George Cruikshank, 1825, portrays a chaotic Christmas party for children at the home of Master and Mrs. Twoshoes. The children are certainly enjoying themselves! Not quite the pious scene Dickens portrayed of the Cratchit household in A Christmas Carol.

Lewis Walpole's, "A Pleasing Pastime, Christmas Quadrille Party," 1826 shows four gentlemen braving ice skating with hilarious results, probably after tippling a bit too much at the local pub.

"Drawing for a Twelfth Night Cake at St. Anne's Hill," was the work of George Cruikshank's father Isaac.  It portrays an all male celebration at the country house of Charles James Fox in 1799. The image emphasizes Fox's sympathy with revolutionary France, then at war with Britain (liberty caps). Twelfth night celebrations were often rather wild affairs. Like most Georgian celebrations, I suppose.

Placid or Chaotic, Enjoy your Holidays. God Bless Us All, Everyone!

St. Mary's Church, Beddington Park, a Little Gem in South London

I have walked by St. Mary's Church in Beddington Park, Surrey many times. The other day the church was open for visiting and I wandered in for a look about. I found an interior of artistic beauty and considerable historical interest. 

There has been a church on the site since Anglo-Saxon times. It was probably a wooden church. It is listed in Domesday Book (1086) a survey of most of England and Wales carried out by orders of England's first Norman king, William the Conqueror. 

Most of the present church dates from the 14th and 15th centuries, including the tower. But just past the tower, on the right of the central aisle, one comes to a Purbeck marble font dating from the 12th century.

The roof of the nave and chancel are wooden and highly decorated. The organ screen was designed and made in the workshop of arts and crafts pioneer William Morris in the late 19th century. It is believed that Morris painted part of the screen. 

View of the organ screen, on left.

To the right of the chancel is the Carew Chapel, which probably dates from the late 15th century. The chapel was dedicated originally to the family that owned Carew Manor next door. Many Carews were commemorated and buried under here.

The chapel contains an impressive tomb, a monument to Richard Carew (d. 1520). On the front of it a man, his wife, and seven children are portrayed. This was Sir Nicholas Throckmorton and his family. Sir Nicholas inherited the estate after the death of a later Carew,  his uncle Francis, and adopted the Carew name. 

  
There is much more to see at St Mary's, which is certainly worth a visit.  

Hunting the Feejee Mermaid: from Charleston to London

I took a trip across London not long ago to visit the Horniman Museum and Gardens. The Horniman contains much of interest in its natural history, ethnography, and botanical collections. I must admit, however, that the star attraction for me was a famous hoax: the Feejee Mermaid. 

I had first stumbled onto the Feejee Mermaid while researching an article on the influence of two pseudo-sciences, mesmerism and phrenology, in antebellum Charleston, South Carolina. The Mermaid had been exhibited there in 1842 by the great American showman of the day, P. T. Barnum. He claimed it had been caught by fishermen in Fiji. A contemporary drawing of it reveals that this was not much like the beautiful, siren-like mermaids of legend. 

The Mermaid proved a big hit despite its grotesque appearance. It also sparked a major controversy among Charleston's intellectuals, with some, Rev. John Bachman, a highly competent naturalist, denouncing it as a crude fake. Others, notably Richard Yeadon, editor of the Charleston Courier, pronouncing it as genuine. 

Disagreement in Charleston over the mermaid's bona fides became quite heated, with both sides accusing the other of violating the Southern code of honor. Bachman and Yeadon traded insults and came close to the dueling field, an outcome only prevented by the intervention of mutual friends. 

I summarized the Charleston mermaid dispute in the article I mentioned above, because the animosities carried over into the debate over mesmerism a few months later. 

But back to the Horniman Museum. I arrived to discover that the ballyhooed Mermaid was not there! In the place where it was supposed to be, there was a placard with a picture of the mangy critter and the words "the following object has been temporarily removed from display." I learned from one of the guides that it was on loan to a museum in the USA. The object that was not there looks like this:



That the main thing I came to see was away on tour was not the only surprise I was in for. The object that was not in the Horniman is called the Feejee "Merman," not the Feejee "Mermaid." Due to its absence, of course, I was unable to verify its sex or gender. I subsequently learned that there was not one mermaid or merman but at least several, perhaps many. 

Learning from Barnum, other circuses and promoters secured (or constructed) their own mermaids or mermen for their sideshows. Some of them were made in Japan, including Barnum's and the one in the Horniman. The Barnum mermaid was exhibited elsewhere, including Cape Town and England for twenty years before a collaborator of Barnum, Moses Kimball, acquired it. Most naturalists denounced it as a fake, but the promoters who exhibited it and others were more interested in the revenue it produced. 

Some accounts say that Barnum's mermaid was destroyed in a fire; others say it survived. The Peabody Museum at Harvard University claims that the object below is the Barnum mermaid, but other "mermaid experts" disagree. They argue it was one of many that were exhibited during the nineteenth century. 

My visit to the Horniman was a failure in that I did not see the Mermaid or Merman. But I learned that the history of the "Feejee Mermaid" was much more complicated and interesting than I had thought. 

Further Reading: 

The Feejee Mermaid; Early Barnum Hoax: Live Science

Kenneth S. Greenberg, "The Nose, the Lie, and the Duel in the Antebellum South," The American Historical Review, Vol. 95, No. 1 (Feb., 1990), pp. 57-74.

Peter McCandless, 'Mesmerism and Phrenology in Antebellum Charleston: Enough of the Marvellous,' The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 58, No. 2 May, 1992, pp. 199-230.

London's Invisible River Fleet

One of London's numerous underground rivers, the River Fleet is perhaps the most famous. The Fleet once ran pure and freely from Highgate and Hampstead down the valley now occupied by New Bridge St., Farringdon St., and Farringdon Rd. before emptying into the Thames.

The Fleet was once called the River of Wells because there were so many wells along its course, some of them holy. It was also surrounded by various religious foundations, monasteries, convents, and friaries. Henry VIII erected Bridewell Palace along its banks, but his son Edward VI gave it to the City of London to serve as a school for boys and a house of correction for women of ill repute. An interesting juxtaposition of functions that. "Bridewell" later became a general house of correction for many types of offenders, and the term became generic for such institutions. 

One reason the royals gave up Bridewell may be the fact that the river had become a foul open sewer, clogged with animal carcasses from nearby Smithfield Market, refuse from tanneries, and the wastes and castoffs of untold numbers of Londoners. 

The noxious miasmas that the Fleet "Ditch" -- as it was often called -- exhaled may be the reason why it was surrounded by prisons, workhouses, and cheap housing. It was a good place for housing if not thinning out the poor and undesirable. Many criminals had their haunts along or near its banks. Dickens placed Fagin's den in nearby Field Lane on Saffron Hill.

The Fleet river/ditch/sewer was gradually covered in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today it is almost forgotten, but you can see evidence of it as it flows into the Thames under Blackfriars Bridge. Or, you can see the water at its source in Highgate and Hampstead Ponds.

Scandal: Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and the British Election of 1784

The Westminster parliamentary election of 1784 produced a major scandal due to the active involvement of Georgiana Spencer Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (1757-1806). 

At the time, British women were unable to vote or run for Parliament. They would not gain those rights for more than a century. Georgiana's scandalous behavior was not to defy the electoral laws but the convention that women, at least "respectable" women, should not actively canvas for votes on behalf of men. [Below: Portrait by Thomas Gainsborough]

Georgiana's marriage to William Cavendish, 5th Duke of Devonshire, was not a happy one. The Duke was unemotional and adulterous. The Duchess sought refuge in society, the theatre, gambling, and visiting pleasure gardens. Gambling became an addiction, and she racked up enormous debts. 

As celebrities do today, she attracted the attention of the media, in press and print. Artist Thomas Rowlandson produced many cartoons in which she was the subject, such as the two below showing her at the gaming table and at Vauxhall (in center of the crowd with her sister). Many other notables are pictured at Vauxhall, including Dr. Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, and James Boswell, seated at the left.

The candidate Georgiana helped was Charles James Fox, leader of the parliamentary Whigs. In 1780 she had stood on the hustings with Fox. In 1784 she went much further. She went about the streets of Westminster, canvassing voters and trying to convince them to cast their vote for Fox. He was not only running to keep his seat as an MP, but hoping that the Whigs he led would gain enough seats to allow him to replace his rival, William Pitt the Younger, as Prime Minister. 

The Westminster electorate was relatively large for the time and included men of the middling and lower ranks. For a duchess to mix and touch -- some claimed even kiss -- such folk seemed scandalous to many contemporaries. Cartoonists had a field day, notably Rowlandson. The image below, "The Devonshire; or Most Approved Method of Securing Votes" shows the Duchess kissing a butcher. 

More licentious, and completely fanciful, "The Poll" shows Georgiana and Albinia, Countess of Buckinghamshire, on a see saw trying to "tip the balance" between the two leading candidates, Fox and Sir Cecil Wray. Albinia openly supported Wray, and met the same criticisms as Georgiana. Both women are shown exposing their breasts, symbolizing their scandalous behavior. Fox is on the right with his hands in the air. The phallic-shaped rocks the seesaw rests on add another level of suggestiveness.

The image below shows Georgiana processing to the hustings with other canvassers, including other women.

Despite all the negative publicity Georgiana received, Fox was reelected as one of the two Westminster MPs. Who knows, her efforts may even have helped him win over voters. His goal of becoming Prime Minister was thwarted, however, because Pitt gained a solid majority of supporters in Parliament.

Georgiana did not enter the political fray again so publicly. She continued for years to mix with and influence Whig leaders like Fox, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and the Prince of Wales, the future George IV. 

She also had an affair with a member of the Whig inner circle, Charles Grey, with whom she had an illegitimate daughter. The affair ended when her husband threatened her with divorce and never seeing her children again. Georgiana, who had strong mothering instincts, chose her children over Grey. He was furious at the rejection, but had some compensation. He later became an earl, Prime Minister, and had a tea named after him. 

The portrait below by Joshua Reynolds, shows the Duchess playing with her daughter, also named Georgiana. 

Cutting up at London's Smithfield Market

Smithfield, the site of London’s ancient meat market, lies just north of the old city walls. It was an open air market for centuries. The image above shows the old open air market just before it closed down to make way for the massive Victorian structure that occupies the site today. That building, part of which is pictured below, opened in the 1860s. Smithfield is the largest meat market in the UK and one of the largest in Europe.

For centuries, cattle, sheep, poultry, swine, and horses have been brought from all across Britain to feed and transport London. The name of a nearby street, Cowcross, proclaims the final path that many a beast took to its place of execution. (Image: Cowcross)

After slaughter, their carcasses were tossed into the nearby Fleet River, or Fleet Ditch as it became known, as the river congealed into a gooey, foul-smelling mass of animal remains and human wastes, an open sewer of ill fame.

The River Fleet was covered over in the 18th and 19th centuries and now runs below ground under Farringdon Rd. and Farringdon St., exiting into the Thames at Blackfiars Bridge.

Smithfield was not only a place for animal slaughter. People were chopped up and otherwise disposed of there as well.  The most famous, thanks to Mel Gibson, was William Wallace, AKA “Braveheart” who was hung, drawn, and quartered at Smithfield for having had the balls to defend his country from the rapacious Edward I. In one of its many errors, the film shows Edward dying at the same as Wallace was being executed. In fact, Edward died two years later. (Below: Memorial to Wallace across from Smithfield, on the outer wall of St, Bartholomew's [Bart's] Hospital) 

In the 1550's, “Bloody Mary” Tudor had several hundred Protestants burned here for their refusal to abandon their "heresy."

In 1381, the leader of the Peasants’ Revolt, Wat Tyler, was treacherously killed here by the mayor of London while parleying over the peasant’s demands. The peasants were aroused by a new tax, a poll (head) tax, to pay for an imperialistic war against France, the so-called Hundred Years War. Although Tyler was killed and the revolt subsided, the government abolished the tax. 

Six hundred years later, Margaret Thatcher, defied history and tried to introduce a poll tax in the UK. As in 1381, the people revolted again, a revolt that helped lead to her ultimate downfall.

The Peterloo Massacre, 1819: British Soldiers Attack Peaceful Protesters

On 16 August 1819, a huge crowd of men, women, and children, estimated at between 60,000 and 80,000, assembled at St. Peter’s Fields near the rapidly growing industrial city of Manchester.

According to historian Joyce Marlow, the meeting is believed to have been the largest to date in British history. The purpose was peaceful, to hear speakers promoting a much-needed reform of Parliamentary representation.

At the time, most men and all women were denied the right to vote or run for Parliament. The legislature and the government were controlled by a tiny fraction of the population, mostly aristocrats and their clients. Since the defeat of Napoleon, the masses had suffered from high unemployment. Food prices had skyrocketed, in part a result of the recently enacted Corn Laws. These acts placed high tariffs on imported grain, in a bid to keep domestic prices up. 

Radicals blamed the dire conditions in the country on a government that represented narrow landed (aristocratic) interests, hence their call for a reform that would make parliamentary representation more democratic. 

A pro-reform organization, the Manchester Patriotic Union, organized the mass demonstration at St. Peter’s Fields. For their headline speaker, they chose a popular radical, Henry Hunt. He had been an outspoken advocate of parliamentary reforms for years, but he favored tactics of mass persuasion rather than violence. His Tory enemies mocked his reputation as a speaker, calling him “Orator” Hunt.  The name stuck.

The clamour for reform, added to the unrest in the country, had long alarmed the authorities. They feared (or claimed to fear) that Britain was headed for a revolution similar to that in France in 1789. Hunt's popularity added to their concern.

On the day of the Manchester meeting, the local militia and regular soldiers were out in force. Hundreds of heavily armed cavalry and infantrymen surrounded the meeting place. Contemporary accounts claim that the crowd was well behaved, and included families dressed in their Sunday clothes.

As Hunt got up on the platform to speak, the crowd erupted with a huge roar of approval. The head of the local magistrates issued a warrant for Hunt’s arrest. 

The man charged with serving the warrant requested military assistance. The upshot was that cavalry charged into the crowd, wielding sabers to clear the way and disperse the crowd. As they became entangled among the mass, more cavalry rode into their rescue. Before the melee finished, they had killed about a dozen people and injured about 700. One of the dead was a two year old boy, Joseph Fildes.

The actions of the soldiers sparked immense outrage throughout the country, especially in the popular press. In pointed, shameful contrast to the victory at Waterloo, it soon became known as Massacre of Peterloo. Among other things, it led to the foundation of the radical Manchester Guardian and inspired Percy Bysshe Shelley to write his oft-quoted poem, The Masque of Anarchy.

Peterloo was the subject of many contemporary prints. The one below was published only a few days after the event and depicts the moment of Hunt's arrest. 

Perhaps the most famous image of Peterloo was that produced by George Cruikshank, who later illustrated some of Dickens' writings.

Peterloo did not have any immediate effect on reform. In fact, the terrified Tory government quickly passed a series of acts designed to repress the radical movement, the infamous Six Acts.

The acts were not rigorously enforced, however, and the reform movement continued to attract popular support in the wake of Peterloo. Fears of popular revolt grew again after another French Revolution deposed King Charles X in 1830, but on this occasion the British government conceded some of the popular demands. 

In 1832 a Whig dominated Parliament passed the Great Reform Act. Ironically, the ministry that drew it up it was the most aristocratic in British history. (The Prime Minister, Earl Grey, later had a bergamot flavored tea named after him.)

Far from democratic, the Great Reform Bill did extend representation to many new voters, mostly from the middle class. It also eliminated many corrupt electoral practices. It was followed by other reform bills in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries that gradually extended political rights to all men and then women. In that sense, Peterloo was stage on Britain's evolution into a democracy.

Further reading: Joyce Marlow, The Peterloo Massacre, 1969.

The Murders on the Ratcliffe Highway: London, December 1811

In December 1811, London was horrified by two murderous attacks on families in Wapping district within twelve days, claiming seven lives. Wapping was then a major port area full of docks and warehouses, businesses catering to the seafaring trade and sailors, full of low taverns, and brothels. It was a derelict and often violent neighbourhood, but it had never experienced anything like what happened in 1811.

The first attack took place on December 7, at 29 Ratcliffe Highway (now known as The Highway). The victims were three members of the Marr family and an apprentice who lived in a flat behind the Marr's linen draper’s shop. 

At sometime around midnight, an intruder entered the home and brutally bludgeoned to death Timothy Marr, his wife Celia, their four weeks old son, and the apprentice, James Gowan. A blood-stained maul (pictured below) found on the premises with the initials JP or IP was assumed to be the murder weapon. The Thames River Police investigated but could discover neither motive nor suspects.

On December 19, a second murderous attack took place nearby at the King’s Arms, a tavern at 81 New Gravel Lane (now Garnet Street). After a constable had heard cries of “Murder!” a crowd gathered at the premises, where they found a lodger, John Turner, descending from an upper floor using a rope of knotted sheets. 

Turner was crying and nearly incoherent. Inside, the crowd discovered the bodies of the owner, John Williamson, his wife Elizabeth, and a servant, Bridget Harrington. Their skulls were crushed and throats cut. In a bedroom upstairs, they found the Williamson’s fourteen-year-old granddaughter fast asleep. Amazingly, she had heard nothing. Turner said he had been awoken by cries of murder. He claimed to have seen a man downstairs before fleeing out the window. The man Turner described was tall and stocky.

Bow Street Runners and constables from other districts joined the investigation after the second attack. (London did not have a centralized, professional police force until 1829). The press and a panicked public were clamouring for a quick arrest of the killer(s). Within a few days, the police arrested three men as suspects. One of them, a sailor named John Williams (or Murphy) was a lodger at a Wapping public house, The Pear Tree. (Image: John Williams, post-mortem sketch).

On December 24, the investigators learned from another lodger that the maul found at Marr’s shop belonged to a third lodger, John Peterson, who was at sea, and that Williams could easily have had access to it. Other discoveries led them to focus on him. Four days later, Williams hanged himself in his cell. The courts quickly ruled him the murderer. But curiously, he did not fit Turner’s description of the man he had seen in the King's Arms. Williams was slender in build and of medium height. All the evidence against him was circumstantial.

Home Secretary Richard Ryder, elated by the “solution” of the case, ordered William’s body to be publicly paraded through the streets of Wapping, and buried at the crossroads of New Road (now Commercial Road) and Cannon Street Road. The aim was to reassure the public that the murderer was indeed dead. On New Year’s Eve, the body was removed from the prison on a cart and followed by a huge procession estimated to be around 180,000 persons. The procession was the subject of many contemporary images.

The marchers stopped before the houses of the victims before proceeding to the intersection named. A stake was driven through William's heart and he was placed in an already dug grave. At the time, suicides could not be buried in consecrated (church) ground and the stake was supposed to prevent his soul from wandering.  

Debate continues today about whether Williams was indeed the killer, or merely the unfortunate scapegoat of authorities eager to appease the public clamor and panic. Other suspects have been considered, but the true identity of the Ratcliffe Highway Murderer remains a mystery, much like the identity of the Whitechapel Murderer, Jack the Ripper.

Further Reading: T.A. Critchley and P. D. James, The Maul and the Pear Tree: The Ratcliffe Highway Murders, 1811. London, 1971.

Bletchley Park, Where the Nazi Enigma Cipher Machine was Cracked.

I visited Bletchley Park recently, the code/cipher breaking center where the Nazi Enigma cipher machines were cracked. The picture above is a replica of Alan Turing's "Bombe" machine that helped crack the ciphers. About 200 of these were built during WWII, but all were destroyed after the war. Fortunately, the blueprints survived and engineers built this one, and it works! One of the staff demonstrated for us how it worked. It did not actually decipher the Enigma machine messages, but provided the key to deciphering them much more quickly than previous methods.

Below: Statue of Alan Turing at Bletchley Park. Nearby is an apology from Gordon Brown, when he was Prime Minister in 2009, for the government's prosecution and chemical castration of Turing under a now repealed sex crime law.

Work on code and cipher cracking began at the mansion at Bletchley Park (below), a Victorian Era structure built by a London stockbroker. His children sold it to the government in 1939 for 7000 pounds (that was a helluva lot more then, but still cheap). 

The initial staff was about 200. That grew to over 8000 during the war, and many other buildings and huts were built on the grounds, some of which can be visited. Some of the scenes in film the "The Imitation Game" were shot in the mansion, including the bar scene, below.

under the Official Secrets Act, personnel at Bletchley were forbidden to speak to anyone about their work there, even after the war. One couple who married after leaving Bletchley had no idea that the other partner had worked there until the 1970s, when both were invited to a reunion of Bletchley workers.

Illustrating Executions in the American Revolution: Major John Andre and Isaac Hayne

The three illustrations below are of two executions that took place during the American War for Independence. The first two are said to record the execution of British Major John Andre, whom the Patriots hanged as a spy at Tappan, New York in October 1780. Andre was captured in civilian clothes after a secret meeting with Benedict Arnold, to arrange Arnold's switch to the British side. 

Oddly, the Patriot officer presiding over Andre's hanging in the first illustration is in a redcoat. In the second, the mistake, if that's what it was, is rectified. He is wearing a blue coat, though a lighter blue than Patriot soldiers normally wore.

The last image is supposed to record the hanging of Colonel Isaac Hayne of South Carolina in Charleston in August 1781. British cavalry captured Hayne attempting to kidnap General Andrew Williamson, sometimes called the southern Benedict Arnold. Williamson was a Patriot officer who had also defected to the British (although later he claimed to have been spying on them). The charge against Hayne was treason. He had taken the loyalty oath to the Crown after Charleston's surrender in 1780 and later rejoined the Patriots. 



The three illustrations are virtually identical, except for changes of uniform colors. Even the flags remain the same. It is likely that neither artist was present at either execution, but the artist of Hayne's hanging surely copied the artist of Andre's. Perhaps it was even the same artist.

Andre himself was a bit of an artist, and was good at working to a deadline (pun intended) The night before his execution he penned the self-portrait below.