SCHWITTERS AND JARRY AT THE GABERBOCCHUS PRESS | Randolph Avenue (Maida Vale)

Franciszka Weinles was born on 28 June 1907 in Warsaw, the daughter of the Jewish artist Jakub Weinles. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Art in Warsaw in 1931. Stefan Themerson was born on 25 January 1910 in Plock, Poland (then part of the Russian Empire). His Jewish father was a physician and social reformer. Stefan studied physics and then architecture at Warsaw University, but his real early interest was photography and film making. The two met in 1929 and were married two years later.

Living in Warsaw until 1935, Stefan wrote children book that were illustrated by Franciszka. Together they produced a number of short experimental films. In the winter of 1937/8 the couple moved to Paris joining an international circle of artists and writers. Stefan wrote for various Polish publications in Paris; Franciszka illustrated children’s books for Flammarion. 

With the declaration of war in 1939, both enlisted. Stefan joined the Polish army; Franciszka was seconded as a cartographer to the Polish Government in Exile, first in France and from 1940 in London. With the German invasion and the Allied collapse, Stefan found himself desperately trying to escape from France. Towards the end of 1942 he succeeded to make his way to Lisbon and was transported to Britain by the RAF. 

Having been reunited with his wife, he joined the film unit of the Polish Ministry of Information and Documentation. There he and Franciszka produced Calling Mr Smith, an account of Nazi atrocities in Poland. In 1944 the Themersons moved to the West London district of Maida Vale, where they would stay for the rest of their lives. At the time of their naturalisation on 13 April 1954, the couple lived at no. 49 Randolph Avenue. 

Stefan and Franciszka established the Gaberbocchus Press in 1948. The choice of name was inspired by the Latinised version of Lewis Carroll’s inventive nonsense poem ‘Jabberwocky’ that was included in his 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass.

With Franciszka as artistic director and Stefan as editor, the Press was active until 1979 and published fifty-nine titles. In the typical private press tradition, work began from home by printing their first books on a hand-press using hand-made paper. As the press developed the titles were professionally printed. They kept an office in Formosa Street where, from 1957 to 1959, they also ran the Gaberbocchus Common Room which was a meeting place for artists, scientists, and members of the public to exchange ideas and enjoy readings, music performances, and film screenings. 

A characteristic of all the Press’s publications was the intimate relationship between image and text as an expression of content. The output included works by Apollinaire, Jankel Adler, and Bertrand Russell’s The Good Citizen’s Alphabet. Gaberbocchus also introduced Kurt Schwitters to an English audience. 

Born in June 1887 in Hanover and educated at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Dresden, Schwitters was conscripted into the army between March and June 1917, but was declared unfit for active service. The senseless slaughter of war had shaken his faith in the cultural norms of his generation. He became a prominent figure within the Dada movement, but his status was undermined with the rise of Hitler. 

In 1937, four of his works were included in the notorious Entartete Kunst (‘Degenerate art’) exhibition. Thirteen other works were removed from German museums. Forced to leave Germany he settled at Lysaker, near Oslo. When German forces attacked Norway he fled to Britain, arriving in Edinburgh in 1940. 

Kurt’s Dadaist reputation meant nothing in England. Singled out as an enemy alien, he was interned at Douglas on the Isle of Man. Behind barbed wire, Hutchinson Internment Camp held so many academics and artists that it functioned as a kind of university-in-exile. Kurt Schwitters performed his poems there and painted portraits. 

After obtaining his freedom he returned to London and moved into an attic flat at no. 3 St Stephen Crescent, Paddington. He exhibited in several galleries, but with little success. At his first solo exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery in December 1944, forty works were displayed but only one was sold. An outsider, he remained virtually unknown as an artist. In 1944, he met Edith ‘Wanty’ Thomas. In 1945 they moved to Ambleside in the Lake District. On 7 January 1948 Schwitters received news that he had been granted British citizenship. He died the day after.

Themerson first met Schwitters in 1943 at a London meeting of the PEN Club. Kindred spirits, they became friends. In 1958, the Gaberbocchus Press published Schwitters in England: 1940-1948, the first presentation of the author’s prose and poems in English. In his introduction Stefan praises Kurt’s art of collage as a conscious attempt to ‘make havoc’ of cultural conventions. The presentation of the book was a fitting tribute. Its unorthodox design with multi-coloured papers and striking cover reflects a rejection of established procedures that Schwitters would have appreciated.

Averse of the vulgar commerciality of publishing, a key objective of the Press was to produce ‘best lookers rather than best sellers’. A refusal to conform is best illustrated by the 1951 publication of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi.

Hallmarks of the playwright’s style are absurdity and irreverence, characteristics that inspired the Themerson edition. Printed on yellow paper, Barbara Wright produced her translation by hand on lithographic plates to which Franciszka added the witty drawings that capture the spirit of the play. For its presentation and design, it became the most acclaimed book of the Gaberbocchus Press.

In 1952, Franciszka created masks for a reading of the play at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London; she also designed life-size puppets for s stage performance by the Stockholm’s Marionetteatern in 1964, and finally drew ninety episodes of a comic-strip version of Ubu in 1969. 

At Themerson’s invitation, the Gaberbocchus Press was taken over by De Harmonie publishers in Amsterdam in 1979. Two years later, Stefan delivered the annual Huizinga Lecture at Leiden University and it was through this strong Dutch connection that some of his novels gained recognition in the English-reading world. In 1985, De Bezige Bij in Amsterdam published a translation of an English manuscript which they titled Euclides was een ezel (‘Euclid was an ass’). It motivated Faber & Faber to publish an English version in 1986, now called The Mystery of the Sardine.

Franciszka died in London in June 1988. Stefan passed away in September that same year. Together, they had spent more than four creative decades in exile, underscoring Stefan’s credo that writers carry their culture with them wherever the city of refuge may be. Having to resist threats of patriotic fervour and nationalism, exile – be it externally or self-imposed – is the artist’s natural condition.      

Jaap Harskamp, PhD at Amsterdam University (Comparative Literature), Researcher at European University Institute (Florence), Curator Dutch & Flemish Collections at British Library (retired), Researcher at Cambridge UL. His work has been published by the Wellcome Institute, British Library, and Brill. He writes a weekly blog for the New York Almanack at

www.newyorkalmanack.com/author/jharskamp/

Porn and Pansies – Red Lion Street (London)

During the later nineteenth century middle class society was obsessed with righteousness and ill at ease with modernist art. Whilst the writer depicted the bourgeois as a malicious fool (le père Ubu is the ultimate caricature in a tradition going back as far as Balzac’s César Birotteau), the upright citizen fought back by taking the artist to court and making him pay for his ‘immoralities’. 

Rejecting much of contemporary written and visual art, opponents argued that vicious doctrines vitiate the mind of the young, indecent pictures befoul their imagination, explicit books deprave their character. Goethe had no hesitation in stressing that the young can read without risk, but alarmists disagreed. They warned parents to protect their children against the treacherous power of fine sounding words and alluring imagery. 

The battle between writer and censor has raged for centuries throughout Europe. It was a conflict in which the latter long held the upper hand. The French Revolution acknowledged the communication of ideas as a fundamental human right. Every citizen shall be free to speak, write, or print. The reality of these freedoms was continuously undermined – even in France. Political censorship was not abandoned.

The censor was supposed to uphold the moral fibre of the nation too. In Britain, the Walpole Government passed a law in 1739 which handed the Lord Chamberlain the authority to oversee public performances. Unlicensed productions were punished by closure of the theatre and imprisonment of its actors. 

This power was extended by the 1843 Theatres Act. Works by Dumas and Ibsen were refused licenses, as was Oscar Wilde’s Salome. Even The Mikado had its permit temporarily withdrawn on the occasion of a visit by the Japanese Crown Prince in 1907. Before 1968, theatres were prevented from staging any play that mentioned homosexuality, venereal disease, or birth control. In that year, a new Theatres Act was passed that removed the Lord Chamberlain’s licensing power. Plays were left subject to scrutiny under obscenity laws only.

Sigmund Freud’s thinking on sexuality had a liberating influence upon literature. In parallel with the demand for modernity rose the emancipation movement. In 1928 Radclyffe Hall published The Well of Loneliness. The fact that the novel portrayed lesbianism as ‘natural’ outraged both critics and readers. Although without direct sexual references, a British court judged the novel obscene as it defended ‘unnatural practices between women’. Publicity over the legal battle increased the visibility of lesbians in society. 

Charles [Carl] Lahr was born in 1885 at Bad Nauheim, Rhineland, into a farming family. A political agitator, he fled Germany in 1905 to avoid military service and went to England. In London he encountered the anarchist Guy Aldred, founder of the Bakunin Press. During Kaiser Wilhelm’s state visit to London in 1907, Lahr was bundled out of a restaurant on Leman Street for yelling out that the bastard should be shot. He remained under police suspicion. After the declaration of war in 1914, he spent four years of internment in Alexandra Palace alongside hundreds of other ‘enemy aliens’. 

In 1921 Lahr took over the Progressive Bookshop at no. 68 Red Lion Street, Holborn, which he ran with his wife Esther Archer. Their tiny outlet may have shared the ground floor of an eighteenth-century building with a jumble shop, but it played a cameo role in countless literary memoirs of the twenties and thirties. 

In addition, Charles and Esther set up the Blue Moon Press, publishing small editions of short stories. They taunted the inter-war censor with pamphlets on The Benefits, Moral and Secular, of Assassination, and with James Hanley’s the homo-erotic fiction. The couple also produced a literary magazine named New Coterie (Aldous Huxley and D.H. Lawrence were amongst its contributors). 

Lahr took the risk of distributing the first edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (published in 1928 by the Italian bookseller Pino Orioli). Banned in Britain and America, dispatch of the novel proved difficult, and copies were scarce. This created a vacuum that was filled with pirate editions. 

Lawrence decided to produce a cheap edition of Lady Chatterley to undercut the illicit trade, but he was unable to find a publisher prepared to brave the censor. Victor Gollancz was interested, but would only consider an expurgated manuscript. Lawrence refused. The novelist finally found a publisher in the intriguing figure of Edward William Titus, a Polish-born American who was married to the cosmetics giant Helena Rubinstein and owned the Montparnasse rare bookstore ‘At the Sign of the Black Manikin’ (opened in 1924) and was founder of the Black Manikin Press. Titus brought out a cheap, paper-bound edition of Lady Chatterleyin May 1929. 

In London, Lahr continued as a clandestine distributor of the novel, agreeing to take 200 copies of the paperback. By March 1930 D.H. Lawrence was dead. That year, the first London edition of Lady Chatterley was produced in a basement workshop near Euston Station. There were 500 copies in all, each bearing a false Florentine imprint: ‘the Tipografia Guintina, directed by L. Franceschini’. 

Following the controversy surrounding Lady Chatterley, postal workers acting under instruction from Scotland Yard opened a registered parcel sent by Lawrence from Florence to his literary agent Curtis Brown in London. The package contained two typescripts of Pansies, the last book of poems Lawrence saw published in his lifetime. It was confiscated on grounds of indecency. 

Even though abridged versions were circulated by Martin Secker in London and Alfred A. Knopf in New York (in July and September 1929 respectively), Lawrence promptly produced a fuller version. The typescript was smuggled through English customs by Welsh novelist Rhys Davies. Printed in August 1929 by P.R. Stephenson of no. 41 Museum Street, London, an uncut edition of the book was published privately for an audience of 500 subscribers by Charles Lahr. 

The Obscene Publications Act was passed in 1959. The bill intended to strengthen the law concerning hard-core material and divided such publications into the two categories of pornography and literature. It was left to a jury to decide whether a printed document (as a whole) had sufficient redeeming merit as literature to sanction its preservation. 

The first test of the new Act was the Lady Chatterley trial. The prosecution failed. A less repressive regime was imminent. A mature society would no longer accept random censorship by the authorities. Following the dramatic court case, Penguin won the right to publish the novel in its entirety in October 1960. The first run of 200,000 copies was sold out on the first day of publication.

Exile is a double-edged experience. James Joyce and Ezra Pound stressed the intellectual necessity of being abroad, presenting exile as a vehicle for individuality and liberation. For others, exile was a bitter and frustrating experience. In his career Charles Lahr went through the whole gamut of emotions. He started his career in London as an ‘outsider’ with the courage to take on the authorities as a publisher and bookseller, but his later years were dark. By the 1930s he found himself in financial difficulties. Friends gathered a collection of stories together on his behalf, published in 1933 as Charles Wain, but his problems deepened. 

In 1935, Foyle’s in Charing Cross Road reported theft from its stock. The thieves were caught and they claimed to have sold on the stolen books to the Progressive Bookshop. Lahr was arrested. Threatened with deportation to Germany – a terrifying prospect for a denaturalised citizen with a Jewish wife – he confessed and spent six months in Wandsworth Prison. His bookshop was destroyed in a bombing raid in 1941. He ended up selling books for the Independent Labour Party at King’s Cross. Lahr died in London in 1971 – an immigrant martyr for the freedom of expression.

Jaap Harskamp, PhD at Amsterdam University (Comparative Literature), Researcher at European University Institute (Florence), Curator Dutch & Flemish Collections at British Library (retired), Researcher at Cambridge UL. His work has been published by the Wellcome Institute, British Library, and Brill. He writes a weekly blog for the New York Almanack at

www.newyorkalmanack.com/author/jharskamp/

Beyond the religious divide: Rubens and Mayerne in London St Martin’s Lane (Covent Garden)

By Jaap Harskamp / you can find more articles by his hand here

Peter Paul Rubens was a painter with a Baroque brush. He was admired by his contemporaries as the creator of dramatically charged and sensual scenes. As a person, by contrast, he established a reputation for tact and discretion. His genius opened doors to European monarchs and statesmen. He offered the perfect profile as a covert diplomat, his art providing cover for politically sensitive activities.

In 1629 he was sent to London by Philip IV on a (nearly) ten month mission to pave the way for a peace treaty between Spain and Britain. Charles I took this opportunity to conclude the details of a substantial commission for the ceiling paintings at Banqueting House, Whitehall Palace, in memory of his father James I. The nine canvases were produced at Rubens’s factory-like studio in Antwerp and eventually installed in 1637. For his diplomatic efforts and artistic skills, he was knighted by both monarchs.

Although eager to return to Antwerp, his long stay in London was productive from a creative point of view. Having brought his brushes with him, he accepted a number of commissions, including a three-quarter length painting of Thomas Howard, 2nd Earl of Arundel, whose collection of classical sculpture was accommodated in a mansion on the Strand. 

Another and more intimate work shows the wife (Deborah Kip) and children of Middelburg-born Balthazar Gerbier, probably painted at York House where the latter was employed as keeper of and agent for the outstanding picture collection of George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham. 

Mingling with London’s diplomats, it was inevitable that Catholic painter Rubens would meet Protestant physician and polymath Theodore de Mayerne. It turned out to be a happy meeting of minds – in spite of religious differences. 

On his penultimate day in London, Rubens paid an unauthorised call to the Chelsea residence of Albert Joachimi, Ambassador of the United Provinces in London. During this visit he made an unsuccessful plea for a truce in hostilities between the Netherlands and Spain. It seems likely that this meeting between two opponents was facilitated by Mayerne who, that same year, had married Joachimi’s daughter Elisabeth in Fulham.

Theodore de Mayerne was born at Geneva on 28 September 1573 and was named after his god-father, the reformer Theodore Beza. He studied medicine at Montpellier, before being appointed physician to Henry IV. When his Protestant background barred his career advancement, he moved to London in 1611. 

Having settled at St Martin’s Lane, he was appointed Physician-in-Ordinary to the Stuart court. He kept a record of the many afflictions and final illness of James I (a cadaverous appearance, weak legs, swollen feet, arthritis in the joints, sore lips, and bad breath, the King repelled those close to him by hiccupping and belching). Charles I kept Mayerne in his post requesting a report from him on measures to prevent a plague epidemic. During the turmoil of civil war, Mayerne balanced himself between Parliamentarians and Royalists and he survived Oliver Cromwell’s rule unharmed. 

At a time that the profession of physician in England was barely developed, Mayerne was part of a European medical clerisy, a group of elite practitioners who, writing and conversing in Latin, pushed medicine away from preachers and quacks. Cholera does not attend church, the plague has no pulpit. Disease is the great equaliser.

Mayerne was among the first to apply chemistry to the compounding of medicines. He experimented with drugs that were not recommended in the Pharmacopoeia Londinensis compiled in 1618 by fellows of the Royal College of Physicians. His clinical reputation kept them from taking action against his ‘unorthodox’ approach of prescribing chemical remedies. 

Mayerne’s interest in the structure and properties of substances extended into other domains of activity. He applied scientific methodologies to the study of artistic techniques (and pondered how painting could benefit from the development of chemical knowledge). The British Library holds the splendid ‘Mayerne manuscript’ (MS 2052, acquired by Hans Sloane, and catalogued as Pictoria, sculptoria et quae subalternarum atrium). Dated between 1620 and 1646, the manuscript contains notes on the making of pigments, oils, and varnishes; the preparation of surfaces for painting; and the repair and conservation of works of art. 

Mayerne was in personal contact with Dutch and Flemish artists who had made London their home and involved them in his research. He interviewed Anthony van Dyck and it has been suggested that his research into the properties of pigments helped fellow Swiss immigrant Jean Petitot to reach the perfection of his colouring in enamel. Considering all this, it is not suprising that Mayerne was keen to meet great Rubens during his London mission. The British Museum holds a sketch in black chalk which Rubens later used for his Mayerne portrait (executed in Antwerp in 1631). 

Like a number of medical men in history, Mayerne was also interested in the art of cooking (to the Romans, the word ‘curare’ signified to dress a dinner as well as to cure a disease). Mayerne’s 1658 cookery-book bears title Archimagirus Anglo-Gallicus[The Anglo-French chef].

As he was regularly invited to gatherings organised by the Lord Mayor, he named his first recipe ‘A City of London Pie’. This gastronomic tour de force contains the following ingredients ‘eight marrow bones, eighteen sparrows, one pound of potatoes, a quarter of a pound of eringoes, two ounces of lettuce stalks, forty chestnuts, half a pound of dates, a peck of oysters, a quarter of a pound of preserved citron, three artichokes, twelve eggs, two sliced lemons, a handful of pickled barberries, a quarter of an ounce of whole pepper, half an ounce of sliced nutmeg, half an ounce of whole cinnamon, a quarter of an ounce of whole cloves, half an ounce of mace, and a quarter of a pound of currants. When baked, the pie should be liquored with white wine, butter and sugar’.

It is hardly surprising that, in late life, obesity made him immobile. Ironically, the cause of his death in March 1655 was attributed to consuming bad wine at the Canary House tavern in the Strand.

Lay Down Your Weary Tune : Palace of Westminster (Westminster)

The Renaissance held music in high regard. It played a prominent part in religious, court and civic life. The interchange of ideas in Europe through ever closer economic and political contact brought about the creation of new musical genres, the development of instruments, and the advancement of specialist printing. 

By about 1500, Franco-Flemish composers dominated the domain. Most prominent among them was Josquin des Prez who, like fellow artists at the time, travelled widely between nations. The intensity of international encounters led to stylistic developments that have been appreciated as being truly European. 

By the beginning of the sixteenth century Antwerp had developed into a hub of musical activity. The most important initiatives were undertaken by the church. Antwerp Cathedral employed twelve choristers who lived in a private house where they received instruction from a singing master. At the beginning of the century this office was held by Jacob Obrecht who was famous for his polyphonic compositions. The composer’s prolific output consists of some twenty-six masses, thirty-two motets, and thirty secular pieces, not all texted. Antwerp also employed a company of fiddlers for both secular and ecclesiastical performances. 

Composers from all over Europe chose Antwerp as their home, amongst them a number of English musicians. Peter Philips had moved to the Continent as a Catholic refugee. In 1593, he travelled from the Southern Netherlands to Amsterdam to ‘see and heare an excellent man of his faculties’. The man he referred to was organist and composer JanPietersz Sweelinck, known as the ‘Orpheus of Amsterdam’. The latter had converted to Calvinism in 1578, but he was not unsympathetic to his old faith. Philips was one of many Catholic musicians who had left England. A prolific composer of Latin sacred choral music, he was made organist to the Chapel of Archduke Albrecht in Antwerp. 

Another refugee was Hereford-born John Bull. Appointed chief musician to Prince Henry in 1611, he furtively disappeared to Flanders after the death of his patron in November 1612. Bull later explained his flight because of the accusation of Catholic sympathies made against him. He moved to Brussels where he was briefly employed as one of the organists in the Chapel of Archduke Albrecht VII, sovereign of the Habsburg Netherlands. From September 1615, he held the post of organist of Antwerp Cathedral. In December 1617 he acted as city organist at ‘s Hertogenbosch. Bull’s later reputation rests mainly on his keyboard music. The composition of God Save the Queen has been attributed to him. 

Antwerp acquired a reputation for its printing skills. Originally, all music was notated by hand. Manuscripts were costly and owned exclusively by religious orders, courts, or wealthy households. That all changed in 1501 when Venetian printer Ottaviano Petrucci published Harmonice musices odhecaton, the first significant anthology of (100) polyphonic secular songs. The availability of notation in print boosted the development of instrumental music for both soloists and ensembles, and engendered the creation of new genres. 

In Flanders, Tielman Susato was the first printer to gain esteem for producing music books. Nothing is known about the date or place of his birth – he may have been Dutch or German. Details about his activities begin in 1529 when he was working as a calligrapher for Antwerp Cathedral. He also played the trumpet and was listed as a ‘town player’ in the city. In 1541, he created the first music printing company in the Low Countries which he combined with selling musical instruments from his home. During his prolific publishing career he was responsible for twenty-five books of chansons, three books of masses, and nineteen books of motets. 

The indefatigable Christopher Plantin was also active in printing music and produced some of the finest choir-books of his day. From the 1570s onwards, the Bellerus and Phalesius families were leading printing houses within the domain. The whole contemporary repertoire was made available by Antwerp presses: vernacular song books and psalms as well as polyphonic secular and religious music. Composers from all over Europe had their work printed in this, the most musical of all cities at the time.

Flourishing musical life in Antwerp and Brussels did not go unnoticed at the English court. In fact, a number of outstanding Flemish musicians were invited to cross the Channel. Henry VIII had received a thorough musical education and was a dedicated patron of the arts. He was accomplished at the lute, organ, and virginals and, apparently, could sing as well. Henry recruited the best musicians to join his court. There are a number of Flemish musicians amongst the many Europeans that were attracted to join the music scene in and around London. 

Dyricke Gérarde [Derrick Gerarde] arrived in England in 1544. Little is known of his life, but almost his entire musical output is contained in manuscript in the British Library. These manuscripts constitute one of the largest collections of polyphony by a single composer to have survived from the Elizabethan era. His achievement however was overshadowed by the reputation of a Flemish composer who had arrived in London some two decades previously. 

Lutenist Philip van Wilder was first recorded as a resident in London in 1522. By 1529 he was a member of the Privy Chamber, the select group of musicians who played to the king in private. During the second quarter of the sixteenth century Van Wilder oversaw secular music-making at the court, a position that brought him close to Henry VIII. He taught playing the lute to Princess (later Queen) Mary and subsequently to Prince Edward (later Edward VI). 

At the time of Henry VIII’s death in 1547 Van Wilder was Keeper of the Instruments and effectively head of the instrumental musical establishment at Westminster, a post later known as Master of the King’s Music. The upkeep of the Royal instruments at Westminster was a heavy duty. The scope of that task becomes clear from the inventory of Henry’s possessions at his death, listing thirteen organs, nineteen other keyboard instruments (virginals and clavichords), and several hundred smaller wind and string instruments including viols, lutes, and recorders. 

Van Wilder continued to enjoy Royal favour during the reign of Edward VI. He was granted a coat of arms and crest and, in 1551, authorised to recruit boy singers for the Chapel Royal from anywhere in England. Three years after his death in February 1554 an anonymous tribute was paid to the musician and printed by Richard Tottel in his collection of Songes and Sonettes (1557), commonly known as ‘Tottel’s Miscellany’, containing the following line:

Laye downe your lutes and let your gitterns rest.

Phillips is dead whose like you can not finde,

Of musicke much exceeding all the rest.

Renaissance court and civic life teaches our age the salutary lesson that a nationalist message is one of isolationism. The appeal to nativist emotions conceals the yearning for an ideal world that never was. The cultural strength of a country manifests itself in the openness of its borders, in the assimilation of alien concepts, in the embracing of external influences. It takes a cosmopolitan mind to be a veritable patriot.

FAKE NEWS FROM FORMOSA: Ironmonger Row (Islington)

When in 1737 Samuel Johnson left Lichfield for London to start his career as a writer, he faced years of financial hardship before finally achieving fame in the early 1750s. One of many competing hacks and authors in the jungle that was Grub Street, he would later tell James Boswell that he vividly remembered one immigrant character with whom he spent many hours in pubs and coffeehouses. 

The person who had made such a memorable impression on him was living at the time in Ironmonger Row, Old Street, Islington, and went by the unusual name of George Psalmanazar.

Johnson met Psalmanazar when the latter was preparing his Memoirs of ** **, Commonly Known by the Name of George Psalmanazar. The book was published in 1764, a year after his death. Without ever revealing his real name, the author relates that he was born around 1679 in southern France. Descendant of an ancient but ‘decayed’ family, his father had abandoned wife and child. George was educated at a Franciscan free school, then attended a Jesuit college, and finally studied with Dominicans at an unspecified university. 

As a student he showed a talent for linguistics. He settled in Avignon as a tutor, but left the town under a (sexual) cloud and travelled to Germany and the Netherlands. It was during that time that he started to cultivate multiple identities. He first pretended to be an impoverished Irish Catholic student on pilgrimage to Rome. Fluent in Latin and trained in theology, he tricked both clergymen and lay people into financial support. 

Having refined his skills of deception, he gradually developed the grand ‘fraud’ for which he is remembered to this day. During a spell as a soldier in the Low Countries, he assumed the name of Psalmanazar (derived from the Old Testament Assyrian King Shalmaneser who led his forces into Palestine). 

Having been confronted at school with Jesuit travel accounts from East Asia, he first changed his identity from Irish to Japanese. He subsequently presented himself as a person of Formosan origin (Formosa was the Portuguese name for Taiwan). 

By 1703 he had arrived in London from Rotterdam where he soon became a figure of interest. He claimed to have been abducted from Formosa by a malevolent French Jesuit priest for his refusal to become a Catholic. Psalmanazar declared himself to be a heathen who had been converted to the Anglican Church. 

In 1704 he published An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa. The book was an instant success. It included lurid details of slaughter (the annual sacrifice of 18,000 boys under the age of nine) and cannibalism (the right of a man to eat his unfaithful wife), as well as a description of the Formosan language, a diagram of the alphabet, and translations of the Lord’s Prayer and Ten Commandments. His detailed descriptions of local customs, geography, economy, flora and fauna, were entirely fictitious – but the book made him a celebrity. He lectured at universities and spoke before the Royal Society. The Bishop of London sent him to Christ Church College, Oxford, to teach young students to speak the Formosan language so that they could be sent out as missionaries. 

To the Church of England, the rescue of a heathen alien from the clutches of evil French Jesuits and his subsequent conversion by the Bishop of London was a story of triumph. In enlightened circles, Psalmanazar’s claims were received with suspicion and disbelief (especially his description of Formosa as being under the control of Japan). When confronted by travellers who had visited the island, he argued (correctly) that European explorers had only reached coastal areas. They had never made the effort to push into the mountainous interior to encounter the island’s real culture. 

To the query why he was a blue-eyed European man, he replied that upper class Formosans lived underground developing a different pigment of skin. The Royal Society quickly established that his claims were false, but kept quiet. Members ignored rather than denounced his presence, partly because Psalmanazar had put himself forward as an opponent of rationalist freethinkers (i.e. members of the Society) in defence of those who adhered to revealed religion. The spreader of fake history was siding with the forces of socio-religious orthodoxy. 

It was not until about 1710 that the author was condemned as a fraudster and hoaxer. The ‘Formosan craze’ was over, but the labels stuck doing injustice to a talented writer. The fact that the contents of his book had been taken literally by a majority of (Anglican) readers proved to be a death blow to Psalmanazar’s reputation. Once it was clear that the story was a fabrication, both clergy and critics realised they had been fooled. The literary elite lacked the generosity to acknowledge that his travel account was a fine piece of fiction, the creative product of a fertile and versatile imagination. 

This work set a precedent for Jonathan Swift’s satirical travelogue. It opened up the pathway for an author such as Théophile Gautier who wrote extensively about the Orient without knowing the region (he first visited Egypt three years before his death). 

Psalmanazar convinced many of his readers of the charm of armchair travel. In À rebours, Joris-Karl Huysmans presents us with the character of Jean des Esseintes who dreams up vivid details of a trip to London without ever leaving his Paris apartment. Psalmanazar‘s Memoirs is a literary masterclass. Samuel Johnson recognised and respected that.

Jaap Harskamp, PhD at Amsterdam University (Comparative Literature), Researcher at European University Institute (Florence), Curator Dutch & Flemish Collections at British Library (retired), Researcher at Cambridge UL. His work has been published by the Wellcome Institute, British Library, and Brill. He writes a regular blog for the New York Almanack at www.newyorkalmanack.com/author/jharskamp/

Holbein at the Steelyard: Cannon Street (City of London)

During the high and late Middle Ages the majority of strangers in London were individual members of a multi-national merchant class. In 1303, Edward I had signed the Carta Mercatoria (Charter of the Merchants), an agreement in which rights were granted to foreign merchants in return for dues and levies. Under its terms overseas traders were free to come and go, import and export. They were exempted from tolls and allowed to enforce contracts or settle disputes. Free trading was inevitably accompanied by freedom of movement. 

Although attempts were made to regulate migration, many strangers settled in London and were able to run their enterprises without too many obstacles. In 1334, in exchange for financial assistance, Edward III replaced the general accord of rights to foreign merchants with a charter specifically tailored the needs of the powerful Hanseatic League. In its heyday, some seventy cities were regular members of this trading block (an early European Union) and around one hundred more acted as passive associates without decision-making power. Representatives met on a regular basis to strike trading agreements or resolve issues of common (often political) interest. Many of contemporary notions of commerce, economic association, free trade, were formulated during the League’s existence.

Its London branch occupied a walled area on the north bank of the Thames, just south of London Bridge, now known as Cannon Street. Called the Steelyard or ‘Stalhof’, it was in effect a separate community, independent of the City of London, and governed by its own code of laws. The name referred to either the great steel beam used for weighing goods, or to the extensive courtyard where products were traded from stalls. The yard was not dissolved until the German cities of Lübeck, Bremen, and Hamburg sold their common property in 1853.

Hans Holbein the younger was born in 1497/8 in Augsburg. His father had settled in that city in 1494 and both his sons Ambrosius and Hans were employed in his workshop where he produced large altarpieces. By 1515 Hans and his brother appear to have migrated to Basel. This date is established by the survival of a copy of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, in which the margins are illustrated in pen and ink by the young Holbein. Hans was active in the city not only as a painter of portraits and religious imagery, but also as a designer of woodcuts, engravings, and stained glass. Holbein’s earliest surviving dated paintings are the portraits of Jacob Meyer, ‘burgomeister’ of Basel, and that of his wife, both painted in 1516. He was appointed town painter in 1518/19. He may have painted relatively few portraits at the time, but the images he produced of his friend Desiderius Erasmus in 1523 were prove of his prodigious talent. 

The lure of a lucrative Royal post tempted Holbein to travel to England in 1526. Erasmus had many close contacts there and they helped him to find patronage. His arrival effectively brought Renaissance painting from the Continent to England. He was commissioned to paint a series of portraits, including those of clergyman William Warham (patron of Erasmus), astronomer Nikolaus Kratzer (depicted as an instrument maker surrounded by rulers, compasses, and sundials), and that of his own patron, Thomas More. 

Holbein’s first visit to England lasted only two years. He left London in 1528 for Basel, but the violent upheavals of the Reformation encouraged a swift return to in 1531/2. He stayed in London until his death in 1543. These were turbulent years in England too, both politically and socially. During Holbein’s second spell in England, Thomas More resigned from office. Unable to depend on More’s influence to obtain commissions, he found employment amongst fellow countrymen, the German business community in London. Holbein created eight portraits of Steelyard merchants. 

The first of those was a portrait commissioned by Georg Giese, titled ‘Der Kaufmann Georg Gisze’ (1532). This detailed composition may have been intended as a show piece to elicit further Steelyard commissions. A plaque depicted over the sitter’s head identifies him as a person and states his age. He is holding a letter he had received from his brother, written in Middle Low German. Holbein’s next portrait was probably that of Hans of Antwerp, dated 26 July 1532. This sitter resided in London from 1515 to as late as 1547 and was married to an English woman. He was employed as a jeweller by Thomas Cromwell and associated with the London Steelyard, combining the activities of goldsmith and merchant. 

Holbein’s talent became widely recognised and appreciated. As a dedicated patron of the arts, Henry VIII appoint him as court painter in 1536. Thereafter, he devoted most of his time to Royal commissions. He is known to have been living in the parish of St Andrew Undershaft in Aldgate in 1541 and there is no evidence to suggest that he ever worked at Whitehall Palace. In addition to his role as painter to Henry VIII, Holbein created the portraits of many of the King’s courtiers, as well as those of other prominent figures living in London. A number of painted portraits survive, mostly unsigned. In addition, the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle holds over eighty of preparatory portrait drawings. Holbein’s portraits and drawings provide an unrivalled depiction of the Tudor court and includes a striking image of Henry VIII. 

During Holbein’s stay in London the nature of immigration was changing. The Steelyard community had been a class of powerful merchants, influential but aloof, rich but reclusive. Members were welcomed in high society, but did not mix with Londoners in their day to day business. In the course of the century, immigration moved on from a transient presence of rich merchants to the permanent settlement of an artisan class whose members descended from the Low Countries in particular. This change brought about economic benefits to London and the Southeast, but the presence of a large number of strangers also created tension and outbreaks of anti-alien violence. As far as immigration is concerned, Holbein’s portraits represent an earlier period and a more static state of affairs in the capital.

A Fickle Friend: Lime Street (City of London)

The so-called album amicorum is a book of ‘autographs’ collected by wandering scholars as they roamed between universities. The craze started in the middle of the sixteenth century. A typical album page contains a poem or prose text in Latin or Greek (sometimes in Hebrew) and a formal greeting to the owner of the book. As part of the salutation there may be a heraldic shield or an emblematic picture. The best known example is the album of Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius. He started his collection in 1574 and continued doing so until his death in 1598. More than 130 of his contemporaries are represented. The cosmopolitan list of friends includes William Camden, Gerhard Mercator, Christopher Plantin, Philip Galle, Justus Lipsius, John Dee, Jean Bodin, and many others. The album represents a European community of learned friends.

Geographer and map-maker Abraham Ortelius was born in Antwerp. His ground-breaking Theatrum orbis terrarum first appeared in 1570 and continued to be published until 1612. It is considered the first atlas as we know it: a collection of uniform map sheets with additional text bound together to form a book. Ortelius supplied a useful source list to his work (the ‘Catalogus auctorum’ identifying the names of contemporary cartographers, and an ‘Index tabularum’, or a list of regions and place names). The original 1570 Latin edition consists of seventy maps on fifty-three sheets. The work cemented Ortelius’s reputation as a leading cartographer and made Flanders a centre of map-making activity, replacing Italy. After its initial release, Ortelius regularly expanded the atlas, re-issuing it in various formats until his death in 1598. In 1612, it had been expanded to 167 plans. By then, the accuracy of the work was called into question by more recent atlases produced in Amsterdam by the Blaeu family and Jodocus Hondius. Astonishingly, during four decades, thirty-one editions were printed in seven different languages.

Many signatories to Ortelius’s book of friends were part of the Lime Street community. A minor road leading from Fenchurch Street to Leadenhall Street, Lime Street was already mentioned in the twelfth century. John Stow (who himself resided in the street) suggests that the name was derived from the making or selling of lime in the area (for use in building and construction). The trade of lime-burners was perpetuated in the London district of Limehouse. The street is now best known as home to the insurer Lloyd’s of London. Lime Street however had a scientific reputation before it became a centre of finance and commerce. Since the 1570s it had been the focus of the European Republic Letters from where many local and refugee intellectuals exchanged ideas and information with their counterparts on the Continent.

In 1581, Antwerp-born merchant and historian Emanuel van Meteren was appointed Consul for ‘the Traders of the Low Countries in London’. Emanuel, a nephew of Abraham Ortelius, was an influential figure who was close to William the Silent, Prince of Orange. He was granted personal access to Henry Hudson’s (now lost) journals, charts, and logbooks which he used for his History of the Netherlands, a unique chronicle of the events of his time. Living among refugees from the Low Countries on Lime Street, he handled the correspondence to and from a number of local scientists in spite of politico-religious upheavals, making sure they received letters, books, maps, plant samples, tarantulas, caterpillars, or rhino horns, that were sent to them from colleagues living all over Europe.

Another outstanding member of this intellectual community was Flemish physician and botanist Mathias L’Obel. Better known under the Latinised name of Lobelius, he was court physician to the Prince of Orange in Delft where he served until his patron’s murder in 1584. In 1590 he was employed as superintendent of the well-stocked Hackney garden owned by the diplomat Edward, Lord Zouche, before being appointed in 1607 as ‘botanographer’ (responsible for describing plants) to the court of James I. It has been calculated that the earliest records of more than eighty English wild plants stand to his credit. He probably introduced the tulip to the country.

A major role in the group was played by Antwerp-born silk merchant Jacob Cool, known as Jacobus Colius Ortelianus (he was the nephew of Abraham Ortelius). His parents belonged to the Dutch-Walloon refugee community in London. He followed in his father’s footsteps as a cloth merchant, but his interests in cartography, poetry, numismatics, and botany came to dominate his life. His scientific pursuits formed the basis for his friendships with scholars such as William Camden, Van Meteren, Carolus Clusius, and Mathias de L’Obel (his father-in-law). He was in continuous contact with Abraham Ortelius in Antwerp through occasional visits and a regular correspondence. The latter send parcels of books and maps to his nephew (and sun flower seeds – a trendy urban garden flower at the time). Scientific contacts between London and Antwerp were close and constructive. Abraham himself resided in London for a time around 1576. Ortelius had been a collector of books and maps for his scholarly purposes. Jacob Cool inherited the collection, part of which he later donated to the library of Pembroke College, Cambridge, including the Liber amicorum. His correspondence was kept at the archives of the Dutch Church, Austin Friars. In an act of vandalism, the letters were sold at public auction in 1955. Today, they are spread throughout various libraries (the Royal Library at The Hague holds the largest number: 164 of the total of 376 letters).

Members of the Republic of Letters conducted research within the parameters of an accepted code of conduct in order to promote the flow of information and the acknowledgment of contributions of other researchers to one’s own studies (Ortelius’s Theatrum set a splendid example in that sense). Herbalist John Gerard’s botanical menagerie in Holborn was set outside of Lime Street, but it flourished because of the specimens and knowledge made available to him by the magnanimity of refugees from the Continent. He proved to be a fickle friend. By shamelessly plagiarising their research, and publishing Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes (1597) under his own name, he undermined the conventions of co-operation and dismissed his former scientific allies – most notably Lobelius who had greatly assisted him in his work. Gerard betrayed the spirit of the Lime Street community and abused the intellectual generosity governing relationships within the European Republic of Letters. He was the Boris Johnson of botany (himself an expert in the shape of bananas).

PISSING IN THE WIND: Great Queen Street (Covent Garden)

The Atlantic slave trade began in the mid-1400s and lasted into the nineteenth century. By the 1600s the Dutch contested the English and French for control of the trade, but England emerged as the dominant slave dealing nation. As the Empire expanded, slaves were sent across the seas to work on plantations in the Caribbean or the Americas. Small numbers were ferried into the ports of London, Liverpool, and Bristol. To hire African staff became a status symbol. Samuel Pepys employed a ‘blackmore’ cook, Dr Johnson engaged Jamaica-born manservant Francis Barber, and Royal Academy sculptor Joseph Nollekens recruited a female servant nicknamed Miss Bronze. 

In London, the number of black people increased sharply when slave soldiers who fought on the side of the British in the American Revolutionary War (Black Loyalists) arrived in the capital. These soldiers were deprived of pensions and forced into beggary. The high visibility of deprived black people in London is evidenced by William Hogarth’s 1738 engraving ‘Four Times a Day: Noon’. In 1801 Maria Edgeworth published her second novel Belinda. The story caused controversy as it features the marriage between an Englishwoman and a manumitted Jamaican slave. 

By the end of the eighteenth century the number of baptisms of black people was increasing. After conversion, Africans were given an English Christian name (John Baptist was a popular one). Notices of mixed marriages also grew. In 1773, a correspondent wrote to the LondonChronicle begging the public to save the ‘natural beauty of Britons’ from contamination. Simultaneously, the brutal nature of the slave trade gave rise to the abolitionist movement. The first protests were uttered by members of the Society of Friends. In 1783, a number of Quakers established the London Committee to Abolish the Slave Trade, Britain’s first anti-slavery society. 

Thomas Clarkson was educated at St Paul’s School, City of London, and St John’s, Cambridge. In 1785, he won the College’s annual essay prize on the topic Anne liceat invitos in servitutem dare – is it lawful to enslave those who do not consent? Quaker bookseller James Phillips immediately published a translation of the Latin treatise as An Essay of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African. For Clarkson, it was the start of a lifetime of pamphleteering. The Essay led to the creation of an informal committee to lobby MPs (nine of the original twelve members were Quakers) which succeeded in recruiting William Wilberforce. 

Clarkson was asked to investigate proceedings in the ports of London, Bristol, and Liverpool, and supply abolitionists with factual information concerning the slave trade. His findings formed the substance of the twelve propositions which Wilberforce put to Parliament in his historic speech on 13 May 1789. The push for abolition found public support. William Cowper’s poem ‘The Negro’s Complaint’ (1788) struck a chord and was followed by another poem entitled ‘Pity for Poor Africans’. During the campaign Josiah Wedgwood was commissioned (1790) to create a seal that could be used to spread the message. It had a picture of a kneeling black man in chains with round the edge the words ‘Am I not a Man and a Brother’. The jasperware plaque was turned into a campaigner’s badge. 

The ‘literary’ fight against slavery made an impression upon contemporaries. Olaudah Equiano was a former slave who, by the 1780s, lived as a free man in London where he joined the campaign against the trade. In March 1788 he sent personal letter ‘on behalf of my African brethren’ to Queen Charlotte. In the following year he published The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, his autobiography. It tells of his kidnap in Nigeria, his being sold into slavery, his journey to the West Indies, his life as a slave, and the struggle to buy his freedom. Renamed Gustavus Vassa (the name he used throughout most of his life), he travelled to England in 1754, was converted to Christianity, and baptised at St Margaret’s Church, Westminster. Equiano’s autobiography was a commercial success. Between 1789 and 1794, nine editions were published and the book was translated into many languages. Equiano’s autobiography was almost instantaneously translated into Dutch as Merkwaardige levensgevallen van Olaudah Equiano of Gustavus Vassus, den Afrikaan, published in 1790 by Pieter Holsteyn in Rotterdam (two years before the German translation; a French rendering did not appear until 2002). 

In 1807 the Slave Trade Act was passed prohibiting the practice in the British Empire. William Wordsworth celebrated the event by dedicating a sonnet to Thomas (‘Clarkson! it was an obstinate hill to climb’). A year later, Clarkson published a two-volume History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade. The Act did not abolish slavery itself. In 1823, the Anti-Slavery Society was formed which eventually led to the passing of the Slavery Abolition Act a decade later. Clarkson presided over the opening session of the grand anti-slavery convention in the Freemasons Hall at Great Queen Street on 12 June 1840 (recorded in a painting by Benjamin Haydon). 

[More Dutch advertisements for slaves in the East Indies]

The voice of English abolitionists was heard in the Netherlands. Involvement in slave trafficking had started early and the Dutch were amongst the last to abandon the trade. After Denmark in 1803, Britain in 1834, and France in 1848, slavery was finally made illegal in the East Indies in 1862, and in Surinam and the Antilles a year later. The moral push towards abolition had been made much earlier. In 1822, Amsterdam publisher C.A. Spin simultaneously issued two translations of anti-slavery documents. One is Clarkson’s De kreet der Afrikanen tegen hunne Europeesche verdrukkers; the other title is Aanspraak aan de volken van Europa over den slavenhandel by Josiah Forster, a leading Quaker abolitionist. There was, it seemed, British-inspired pressure in the Netherlands to abolish slavery. Why then took it so long for the Dutch government to act and allow the pro-slavery lobby to protect its economic stake in the practice?

History is made by people. No single person determines the course of development, yet one cannot exclude the ‘subjective factor’ in historical discourse. Individual audacity – or lack of it – is part of the social struggle. Mid-twentieth century historians argued that slave emancipation in England owed little to the efforts of abolitionists. Slavery had become an obsolete economic system which collapsed because it was no longer fit for purpose. This interpretation is untenable. At times of crisis or major socio-economic transformation, strategic leadership is of crucial importance. The campaign by a vocal anti-slavery lobby did have an impact and the relentless efforts made by Clarkson and his Quaker friends paid off. The Dutch movement lacked decisive governance able to assail vested interests. Abolitionism never attracted more than a few hundred activists who were good-willing academics or God-fearing ministers. Crusaders, not enforcers; preachers, not protesters, they were pissing in the wind.

Wedgwood jasperware plaque ‘Am I not a Man and a Brother’ (1790).

Painter, Poet, Pimp | Bow Street (Covent Garden)

The death of Oliver Cromwell and the restoration of Charles II marked the end of a period of state control and repression. The overthrow of the Interregnum unleashed an explosion of energy. London came to life again. Print and ballad sellers, singers, actors, fiddlers, contortionists, and whores, they all returned to their former trades and crafts. They were joined by hawkers who flocked into London to supply its inhabitants with food and necessities. The calamity of the Great Fire had robbed the city of countless shops and half of its public markets. With the Restoration in full swing, the buzzing London streets were mirrored in prints and drawings leading to renewed interest in a traditional pictorial genre.

Pictures of street hawkers, with their trade shouts recorded in captions of poetry or prose, are known as ‘Cries’. They appeared first in print in Paris about 1500. Fifty years later, these images were established as a stylistic category across Europe. The Cries of London is one of the older genres in English art. The first ensembles appeared at the start of the 1600s. The attraction of the genre was not surprising. Between 1520 and 1600, after a period of social unrest and instability, the number of vagabonds had increased sharply. The dissolution of monasteries and the disbanding of armies back from recent wars contributed to the multiplication of homeless people. London was a city of vagrants. Life was lived in the street. Men, women, and children competed with each other to make a living, and sell whatever they could lay their hands on. The ‘Cries’ are an expression of this London.

Around 1660, Marcellus Laroon moved from the Netherlands to Yorkshire. The son of exiled Huguenot painter Marcel Lauron, he was educated and trained at The Hague. After a rich marriage to Elizabeth Keene, a builder’s daughter of Little Sutton near Chiswick, the couple settled at no. 4 Bow Street, Covent Garden. From there, he was able to observe his ‘pittoresque’ subjects as they passed on their way to London’s busiest fruit and vegetable market. Laroon’s The Cryes of the City of London Drawne after the Life was originally published in 1687 by Pierce Tempest, and reprinted in 1688, 1689, and 1709. The seventy-four plates depict the cries and costumes (a ‘grammar’ of contemporary costume) of street peddlers. Below the frame, the hawker’s cry appears in English, French, and Italian, underlining the wide commercial appeal of these prints. Laroon showed his characters exactly as he had seen them (including their deformities), simpletons, charlatans, religious fanatics, industrious workers, drunken drifters, and promiscuous women. Laroon’s ensemble of prints would forever change the genre in British art. Early depictions of hawkers were type characters of men and women representing their trade. Laroon’s vendors are individuals, a class of people with their own energy and spark.

Charles II’s ’merry’ reign witnessed a change from puritanical restraint to uninhibited libertinism. It created an atmosphere in which the business prospects of brothel keepers flourished again. Madam [Mother] Elizabeth Creswell began her career as a prostitute in London during the 1650s. A stunning beauty, and living in grand style, she attracted the company of politicians, courtiers, and celebrities. A decade later, she was established as the prosperous owner of bordellos in Camberwell, Clerkenwell, and Moorfields. Later in life she regretted her sins, dressed soberly, and found religion. Laroon left two images of Madam Creswell (plates 51 and 52) which are linked. They tell a moral tale about harlotry: one plate shows a young woman, attractive, spirited, and well dressed; the other, an aged bawd, wrinkled, and tired of immorality.

London’s first warm bath in the Oriental fashion was built in 1679. Lined and floored with luxurious marble, it was located at Pentecost (Pincock) Lane. John Strype described the facility as being much in use and ‘resorted unto for Sweating, being found very good for aches, etc. and approved by our Physicians’. It proved so popular that the name of the location was changed to (Royal) Bagnio Court, later to Bagnio Street, and then (in 1843) Bath Street. In 1885, for reasons unknown, the street was renamed Roman Bath Street. A dead end road for those researching the history of migration – there is no Roman connection.

The word bagnio originally pointed to a Turkish-style public bathhouse, but in the course of the eighteenth century it acquired a darker connotation as is made clear by William Hogarth in ‘The Bagnio’, the fifth canvas in the series of six satirical paintings known as ‘Marriage-à-la-mode’ (1743/5). The tale is set in the Turk’s Head Bagnio in Bow Street. By then, the bagnio had become the equivalent of a massage parlour or brothel. During the first decades of the eighteenth century Covent Garden had become the capital’s hedonistic heart, an area where life was turned into a carnival. Its main establishments were the Shakespeare’s Head tavern and the Bedford Coffee House where, at some time or another, Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Foote, Tobias Smollett, or Henry Fielding would enjoy a drink or two and meet fellow artists. Covent Garden was an inspiration to them, an incubator of creativity.

Its shadowy side was outlined by Henry Fielding in Jonathan Wild (1743) where he points to ‘eating-houses in Covent Garden, where female flesh is deliciously dressed and served up to the greedy appetites of young gentlemen’. One of those youngsters was James Boswell who liked to pick up young girls (Journal 1762/3) in the area. He paid a heavy penalty. Boswell suffered from at least twenty bouts of the syphilis (which was treated with mercury pills and plaster, camphor liniments, or even some minor surgery), and probably died as a result of it.

There is a remarkable record of Covent Garden’s carnal pleasures which we owe to a Dublin linen draper named Samuel Derrick. In 1751 he decided to give up his profession, move to London, and settle in Covent Garden to commit himself to literature and the stage. A lover of wine and women, he was a mediocre poet, and a poor actor. Debts started to haunt him. Enter Jack Harris (properly known as John Harrison), chief waiter at the Shakespeare’s Head and self-proclaimed ‘Pimp-General of All England’. Harris kept a handwritten and detailed record of over four hundred names of the capital’s ‘votaries of Venus’, giving names and addresses of the women concerned, with physical characteristics, biographical notes, specialised services, and charges. Pimp and (failed) poet agreed on publication. Derrick turned Harris’s ledger into an entertaining chronicle of women walking Covent Garden’s Piazza. Its success was overwhelming.

The annual List of Covent Garden Ladies appeared from 1757 to 1795 and sold over a quarter of a million copies during that period. In 1757, the List was on sale in the Shakespeare’s Head tavern and in the nearby brothel ran by ‘Mother’ Jane Douglas. Later, the list was made more widely available. Such was the public anticipation that its publisher H. Ranger of Temple Bar, Fleet Street, started advertising a full range of Harris’s Lists in the newspapers. As ‘ranger’ was a slang word for philanderer at the time, it was clear that the publisher’s name was a pseudonym. It proved to be a sensible precaution as Jack Harris was arrested in 1758. Derrick continued to edit the List until his death, when he passed the proceeds of his final edition to his former mistress, the courtesan and brothel-keeper, Charlotte Hayes. The authors of the List after 1769 are unknown. The work was discontinued in 1795 after a group of social critics demanded the prosecution of those responsible for its publication. The moral spirit of the age was changing.

Dr Marten’s Poxy Book (Hatton Garden (Camden)

In June 1660, Charles II left the Low Countries, departing from Scheveningen beach. Many Royalists who had been exiled for over a decade made their way back to London, together with the various delegations that had visited the king in the Dutch Republic. Cromwell’s former flagship Naseby, that was sent to transport the king back home, was renamed Royal Charles for the occasion. The days of Royalist despair were over. Their joyful departure was painted by Johannes Lingelbach. Adriaan Vlacq (who had spent part of his career in London) published a richly illustrated folio account of Charles’s stay in the Low Countries in an English, Dutch, and French edition. Charles entered London on 29 May 1660 to reclaim the throne. He was thirty years old. 

Charles gathered an unconventional set of people around him and the subsequent revival of drama showed a marked orientation towards licence. Playwrights such as Buckingham, Rochester, George Etherege, or Charles Sedley were known libertines who, by challenging traditional visions of marriage and family life, fashioned an alternative socio-cultural model. Restoration court culture was both explicit and political. In his play Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery (1684) John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, linked Charles’s sexual debauchery to his absolutist political ambitions: ‘My pintle shall my only sceptre be [and] with my prick I’ll govern all the land’. In poetry traditional standards were under attack too. The unrivalled leader of poetic ribaldry was the Earl of Rochester. In his lyrics he embodied all that the Puritan mind found intolerable. 

In 1678, Dutch author Adrianus van Beverland had anonymously published his Peccatus originale. With quotations taken from the Bible, the author claims that the only sin of Adam and Eve was their ‘conversatio carnalis’. The original sin simply was the erotic stimulus present in every human being. The book infuriated the authorities. When in 1679 a second revised edition appeared with the author’s name on the title page, Van Beverland was banned from the country. He fled to England and lived for years under the patronage of Leiden-born philologist Isaac Vossius who, in 1670, had been invited to Cambridge as protégé of John Pearson, Master of Trinity College. His name remains linked to the publication of ‘scandalous’ books of which the Peccatus remains the most notorious one. 

Van Beverland was the most libertine writer of his era. His presence coincided with a flourishing of erotic literature in the Dutch Republic – part and parcel of the rise of the radical Enlightenment – during (roughly) the last three decades of the seventeenth century. In spite of a reputation for tolerance, the Republic was one of the first nations to issue a separate decree to censure lascivious books. The ban did not stop Dutch erotic literature finding its way to the English market. De Haagsche lichtmis (1679) was translated as The London Bully, or The Prodigal Son (1683); and D’openhertige juffrouw (1680) as The London Jilt, or The Politic Whore (1683; a second corrected edition appeared in 1684). 

Erotic literature was intermixed with other genres and subgenres. Bodies were represented by metaphor or suggestion. Medical treatises vacillated between lectures about venereal disease and lurid tales of sexual behaviour. On one page the author recommends mercury as a cure for syphilis, on the next he points at red-haired women for having ‘dangerous’ passions. The author in this case is surgeon John Marten who, residing in Hatton Garden, Camden, published his first extant work in 1706.  It concerns a ‘translation’ from the Latin of Treatise of the Safe, Internal Use of Cantharides, a study originally published in 1698 by Joannes Groenevelt (a Deventer-born physician who had settled in London in 1675). The latter had made the use of cantharides (or Spanish fly) widely known in England. Martin almost doubled the size of the original by adding numerous tales of a lascivious nature. The work became known as Dr Marten’s ‘poxy book’. 

In 1741 Thomas Stretser, writing under the French-sounding pseudonym Roger Pheuquewell, produced one of the more striking books to emerge from this period of oddities, entitled A New Description of Merryland. Using the scientific language of geography, he compares the female anatomy to a foreign coastline and sexual activity to a journey of discovery. In the same year he shrewdly published a detailed critique of his own work entitled Merryland Displayed in which he explained the origin of the idea. While reading a passage on the Low Countries in Patrick Gordon’s Geographical Grammar, he had been struck by the similarities between the Dutch coastline and the shape of the female anatomy. Those parts of the country that are ‘best inhabited are generally the moistest; and Naturalists tell us, this Moisture contributes much to its Fruitfulness; where it is dry, it seldom proves fruitful, nor agreeable to the Tiller …’.

Between the 1720s and the 1770s a range of risqué pamphlets were published that maintained an appearance of respectability by choosing a Latin word in preference to an English one and a metaphor rather than a bald description such as The Electrical Eel; or, Gymnotus Electricus, and the Torpedo; a Poem (ca. 1777), etc. Such works were published either anonymously or the authors used suggestive pseudonyms (Philogynes Clitorides, Paddy Strong Cock, or Timothy Touchit). During that period the London erotic market was dominated by the activities of a single bookseller and publisher, a man nicknamed the ‘Unspeakable Curll’. 

Edmund Curll had arrived in London from the West of England in 1698/9 and was apprenticed to the bookseller Richard Smith before setting up his own business in the Strand. He soon was in trouble with the authorities for publishing A Treatise of the Use of Flogging in Venereal Affairs (1718), was a translation by George Sewell of a Latin text that had been around since at least 1639. The book had been written for the instruction of physicians, but Curll added a sexually orientated frontispiece, and ensured that the title-page would clarify for the reader what the book’s genre was: ‘Printed for E. Curll, in Fleet-Street …where may be had, The Cases of Impotency; and Eunuchism and Onanism Display’d’. Curll always looked for juicy titles. Books were commodities, the rapping more important than the content. He was quick to discover that a ‘succès de scandale’ can be extremely lucrative. Controversy creates attention and notoriety. In literature, there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Jaap Harskamp is a contributor to the New York History Blog at Jaap Harskamp, Author at The New York History Blog