CULTURE: It was better before Livingstone
London 1753 at the British Museum
How far away is mid-Georgian London? This is the teasing question that runs throughout London 1753, the superbly modest, entirely mesmerising exhibition celebrating the British Museum’s 250 birthday.
On one hand it is easy to argue that those of us who live or work in central London still inhabit a largely Georgian city. It isn’t just that John Rocque’s enormous map of 1747 shows an entirely recognisable scheme of streets, squares and landmark buildings — albeit one that terminates suddenly in open fields, so that Horseferry Road is revealed as a rural lane, Chelsea as a distant rustic village and Marylebone as a developer’s insubstantial dream. It is not just that such a map reminds us of the stabilising effect on the urban landscape of royal parks, aristocratic estates and the ancient, disorderly yet stubbornly persistent armatures of what was for centuries Britain’s financial centre. It isn’t just a question of the overall shape and texture of London, although much of that is indeed a Georgian inheritance.
Rather, the shock lies in the number of places that remain largely unchanged, in function as well as in appearance, over the past 250 years — the places that are still used much as our Georgian predecessors used them. A visitor from 1753, for instance, who suddenly turned up in the Piazza at Covent Garden might be surprised at the lack of sedan-chairs and link-boys, yet would recognise the street-plan, much of the architecture, the pointlessly milling crowds, the buskers and performers, even the petty criminals. If he wandered down to St James’s Park he might regret the disappearance of stags and deer, milk sold warm from the cow, or cheap and plentiful prostitutes, but at the same time he would perhaps welcome the familiar vista across Horse Guards Parade, the waterfowl and the broad swathe of humanity strolling, flirting, scrutinising each other or sitting on the dried-out grass, enjoying the late summer sunshine. And by the same token, he would be interested to learn that there was still a children’s hospital at Great Ormond Street, still a hospital at St Bartholemew’s, still gardens at Kew, still theatre in Drury Lane. He might even be glad to learn that the sort of national museum that Sir Hans Sloane wished to encourage in 1753 still thrives, incorporating not only the Sloane Collection but much else as well, located precisely where it was established in 1759.
London 1753 does a brilliant job of reminding us of these continuities — at the same time as it surprises, amuses, titillates and occasionally shocks us with genuine unfamiliarity. This is more difficult than it might sound. However unlike the present it might have been, most of us probably imagine that we somehow know Georgian London — whether our vision is based on the colourful, turbulent, often ridiculous London of Hogarth and Dr Johnson, or the elegant, coolly classicised London of Canaletto and Robert Adam. These are, needless to say, both lazy versions of London. This doubtlessly accounts for their popularity, and the British Museum is right to shake us free of both versions. For although Hogarth, Dr Johnson, Canaletto and the brothers Adam are all represented, their familiar emanations are set in the context of less familiar images and artefacts, and the London that emerges from these is a richer, more complex, often contradictory place that ‘reminds’ us — this being the nature of curatorial memory — very insistently of our own time, the natural measure of all things.
One of the greatest pleasures of London 1753 is its lack of interest in pretending to be a blockbuster, its unwillingness to manufacture bogus attention-seeking ‘controversy’ and its entirely correct disdain for the trumpeting of new ‘discoveries’. In fact most of the exhibition consists of prints assembled from the Museum’s own permanent collection, spiced up with a few borrowed artefacts from other London institutions, the whole arranged in cases around a long room in an obscure corner of the Bloomsbury site. The resulting air of mild seriousness makes the 'surprises', as it were, all the more surprising. Seekers after curiosities will enjoy the well-preserved pair of sheepskin condoms and the dried ‘merman’ — like Munch’s The Scream but with a tail, too. The collection of ‘foundling tokens’ — small items left with babies entrusted to Coram’s foundling hospital to help identify them — are poignant but also suggestive; an enamelled bottle ticket labelled ‘ale’ seems to tell a different story than, say, a silver heart engraved ‘You have my heart/Tho’ we must part / IW / nat [i.e. born] 6 Sept 1759’. The story of William Ansa Sasraku, whose mezzotint portrait is one of the most attractive in the exhibition, has all the unlikely turns and happy endings of the most satisfying sort of fiction. Finally, the bronze head of Sophocles, dating from 300-100 BC and one of the Museum’s earliest treasures — it was thought at the time to be a bust of Homer, and belonged at one time to that greatest of collectors the 2nd Earl of Arundel — reminds us strikingly of the relationship between our Georgian ancestors and their past, especially the legacy of classical Greece and Rome, and the uses — not just aesthetic ones, either — to which they turned it.
The concentration on prints of various sorts means, however, that it is just as easy to enjoy the exhibition at the level of ‘art’ as to be entertained by it at the level of social history — at least for those who enjoy making distinctions of that sort. Here, too, London 1753 has a lot to offer. There is, for instance, the florid English rococo of the portrait of Lady Elizabeth Keppel, perhaps even more apparent in Edward Fisher’s mezzotint as it was in the painting by Reynolds (now at Woburn Abbey) on which it was based. The austerity of Francis Patton’s etched engraving of Robert Adam’s plan for the Admiralty Screen is dangerously attractive. And of course it is always worth being reminded of Hogarth’s breadth, inventiveness, technical skill, humour and sheer versatility. In these things, as much as in the subjects he chose, Hogarth deserves to be remembered at London’s greatest, most enduring artist.
None of this, however, should detract from the surprise stars of the exhibition: Thomas Sandby (1721-98) and his brother Paul Sandby (1725-1809). Thomas was a draughtsman and architect; Paul was an engraver and painter in watercolours. Together, they produced an astounding series of topographical portraits of London, somehow warmer and more anecdotal than anything produced by Canaletto, but at the same time infused with a cool-eyed informativeness and architectural rigour absent elsewhere in depictions of London at the time. In short, while they are not in any sense ‘photographic’, at the same time they are infinitely pleasing to eyes brought up amidst the expectations generated by photography. To chose but a single example, their drawing of Covent Garden — seen from under the north-east arcade of the Piazza — still looks recognisably ‘real’, a few missing Starbucks and Paper Chase signs apart, but the longer one looks, the more the old lamps, the waiting sedan-chairs and tricorn-hatted passers-by remind one that this is a picture of another time, not our own, and somehow the ambiguity between these two sensations echoes something one feels about all the vanished Londons of the recent and more distant past — the exact tension between familiarity and unfamiliarity, the intimate and the alien. I had seen the Sandbys’ work many times before in reproduction, but never so many examples of real autograph work all in one place. The opportunity to do so would have made the exhibition worthwhile even if there had been nothing else at all to see.
But of course there are many images and items on display — enough to satisfy anyone, I’d have thought, whether that person’s interest was architectural, historical, literary — whether focused on a single neighbourhood, on the theatre, on exiles and immigrants, on costume or the maintenance of public order. Again, it is to the credit of the curators that London 1753 does not try to tell a truth about London, but rather, sets itself the more modest and more honest goal of trying to explain what it was that the print-buying Londoners of 1753 might have considered plausible, interesting or entertaining. Anachronistic whinging about poverty, inequality, the position of women and so forth is kept to an absolute minimum. Meanwhile the exhibition catalogue is not only inexpensive and generously illustrated, but its essays make it a worthwhile reference work in its own right. These include a fine contribution from the late Roy Porter who, whatever one might have thought of his strangely unconsidered left-liberalism, was at the same time one of the most fluent, good-humoured, energetic, generous and decent academics to have graced the present age. It really is very much his sort of exhibition, in which 'accessibility' (grim word) is achieved through intelligent sympathy rather than vulgarity, banality or pointless gimmicks.
Of course the London we inhabit today has changed enormously since in 250 years. London 1753 helps measure that distance. In 1753 London was still the hard-working, demotic City unconfortably cohabiting with courtly Westminster and its growing suburban overflow. The docks and quays still worked along an unembanked Thames — not only at Deptford and beyond, but up by the Palace of Westminster, too. The nation over which London presided was still overwhelmingly agricultural, not industrial. By the same token, the later phases of empire-building had not yet borne the fruit of wealth, commodities, cultural innovation and human migrations that would eventually do so much to tranform London. There were no commuters, no London Underground, no broadcast media, no international brands, no cheap travel. The mental landscape was different, too. The world inhabited by the Londoners of 1753 was essentially local, hierarchical and Christian. Perhaps most importantly, it did not include assumptions that 'progress' was either natural or indeed desirable. In some ways, then, try though we might, it is all but impossible to bridge the gap described by those 250 long years since the British Museum began.
Yet at the same time, it is a measure of the achievement of London 1753 that despite its frankness about these differences, the exhibition sends one back out into our sprawling, untidy, crowded, lively metropolis more alive than ever to the signs of our Georgian inheritance that are all around us. Nor are all of these architectural or topographical. We live, after all, in a London obsessed with novelty and celebrity — a London locked in a love-hate relationship with the royal family — a London shaped around crass and cheerful consumerism, sporadic fears about crime and public disorder, and perhaps most of all, an apparently boundless, alarming yet fascinating complexity. This is our city, but it was their city too. Realising all this, as one does at London 1753, can make Georgian London seem very close to us indeed.
London 1753 runs at the British Museum until 23 November. Admission is free.
Bunny Smedley is ERO’s arts editor.
Bunny Smedley, September 10, 2003 10:28 AM