Free Georgian London: Into the Streets by Lucy Inglis Page B

his Tory faction asthe first ‘spin doctor’. His big breakthrough came in 1701, with his poem ‘The True-Born Englishman’, which satirized the John Bull ideal of the pure-bred Englishman, harking back to his early days amongst the outsiders and immigrants of Cripplegate.
     
Thus from a mixture of all kinds began,
That het’rogeneous thing, an Englishman …
     
    Grub Street publishers, unlike their Paternoster Row colleagues, specialized in topical publications and, sometimes, smut. Elizabeth Nutt ran a cluster of shops in the Royal Exchange where she sold her more respectable stock, such as Swift’s
Tale of a Tub
. She was also listed as a ‘ Mercury-woman ’, printing cheap and often seditious or salacious ballads in Grub Street; in the 1730s, she was printing pornography there, aided by her daughters.
    In
The Dunciad
, Alexander Pope’s Goddess of Dullness lives ‘near Bedlam’, meaning Moorfields and the Grub Street area, from where she and her agents bring disrepute, vulgarity and imbecility to London. His placement of the seat of Dullness was no mistake. Pope viewed the cheap output of poor literature as one of the chief agents of what he saw as society’s decline.
    This attitude did not change over the course of the Georgian period. It became set in literary history when Samuel Johnson, in his dictionary, defined Grub Street as ‘a street near Moorfields, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems’.
    Delarivier Manley (1672–1724) was one of London’s first writers for a political party, but she wasn’t popular with everyone. Pope slammed her most popular work,
Secret Memoirs and Manners of several Persons of Quality, of Both Sexes, from the New Atalantis, An Island in the Mediterranean
, published in 1709, as a piece of transient scandal. In 1711, Manley decided she was retiring, tired of wading ‘ through Seas of Scurrility’ and ‘the Filth they have incessantly cast at me’. She didn’t retire, of course, and in 1714 – when again she wrote that she might give it all up, as politics was ‘not the business of a Woman ’ – she was also writing her six volumes of political allegories, six political pamphlets and another nine issues of the
Examiner
. Manley was a plain woman, unlucky in love and reclusive, but she carved outa successful career in the masculine realm of political writing as queen of the Grub Street hacks.
CLERKENWELL: CLOCKS, CABINETS AND CONFINEMENT
     
    Close to Grub Street was an unusual building which would house one of perhaps the most famous publications of Georgian London:
The Gentleman’s Magazine
. St John’s Gate, which had been built in 1504 as the house entrance to the Priory of the Knights of St John, is the traditional entrance to Clerkenwell from the south. The gate soon fell into secular use; in the early 1700s, it was Hogarth’s childhood home during the years when his father ran a coffee house there, after which Edward Cave took it on as a house. Cave began
The Gentleman’s Magazine
in 1731, featuring the gatehouse on the front of each issue. The magazine provided Samuel Johnson with his first regular writing job and went on to be one of the most influential ‘human interest’ publications of the eighteenth century. The gate was also where Johnson’s pupil and friend David Garrick gave his first theatrical turn in London.
    For many years during the eighteenth century, part of the gate also served as the local watch house, and Clerkenwell seemed to have more than its fair share of prisons, with the Clerkenwell Bridewell, New Prison and later Coldbath Fields. Land was cheap and the proximity to the Old Bailey meant it was convenient. The space available in Clerkenwell was also attractive to trades such as furniture making, which required workshops as well as storage space. Those who employed large numbers, such as metalworkers, watch- and clockmakers, also found Clerkenwell very suitable for their purposes, and