LOVE, MARRIAGE AND MOTHER’S RUIN
Marriages of the poor had often been common law agreements, but this changed with the Hardwicke Act of 1753, which tried to prevent clandestine marriages by decreeing that from 1754 all marriages had to be conducted in the Church of England (only Quakers and Jews were exempted). This was an attempt to staunch the tide of ‘irregular marriages’ in the early eighteenth century. In London there were dozens of ‘Lawless churches’, most famously the ‘Fleet Prison Rules’. A business grew up around the Fleet prison to deal with clandestine marriages. The free market in marriages led to competition for custom, with people accosted in the streets ‘Madam, you want a parson? . . . Sir, will you be pleased to walk in and be married?’ Some ‘marriers’ would perform the service for two shillings and sixpence and sometimes even rented the ring to the couple. At another venue, the Savoy Chapel, it was estimated that almost 60 per cent of women marrying in the 1750s were pregnant.15 Many women who became pregnant could not marry and found themselves in a desperate situation in the city. Newborn children were left abandoned or neglected by mothers who could not look after them. Thomas Coram set up his foundling hospital in 1741 in response to the number of such babies.
The paintings of Hogarth show perhaps some of the most familiar images of London, with scenes of dereliction and debauchery often as a result of drink. ‘Gin Lane’ was not an exaggeration: from around 1720 to 1750 the excessive consumption of gin gave rise to major social and medical problems, and hence to a series of public outcries followed by attempts at social reform. In the early eighteenth century one in four houses in St Giles Rookery (the setting for Gin Lane) doubled as a gin-shop.16 Distilling of gin was a major enterprise in London, encouraged by the government to deal with several years of over-production of corn. This highly alcoholic but popular drink no doubt served to dull the pain of existence for the poor and to endow them with a temporary sense of exhilaration. However, it destroyed the lives of many people, bringing to the slums an extra hazard and worsening standards of family life and health.
Various Acts of Parliament were passed to address this problem, but partial alleviation was actually a result of pricing it out of the reach of the poor. Reformers like Henry Fielding and Hogarth used their artistic talents to campaign against excessive drinking and its connection with poverty.17 The cleaning up of Gin Lane by no means ended gin’s influence in London; it remained a popular drink in London until well into the second half of the twentieth century, the Gordon’s distillery prominent in pre-gentrified Clerkenwell until the 1970s and the name of ‘mother’s ruin’ still in popular parlance as a reminder of its most notorious effects.
However, if the poor struggled they usually survived. While there was undeniable poverty and often, no doubt, hunger, those in power ensured that the basics were available. There were few bread riots in London since the civic authorities were careful to maintain affordable prices for bread and wheat. In addition there was less threat of riot from the countryside in lean years: ‘England . . . had virtually ceased to be a peasant country, and London was, at its most vulnerable point, cut off from the countryside by the protective shield of the near-urban county of Middlesex.’18 The alternative to living in desperation was the workhouse, although it only achieved its full depths of notoriety a century later following the introduction of the Poor Law in 1834. While the workhouse was in theory a means of looking after the poorest in society, the hideous and punitive conditions which prevailed there ensured that it was viewed by many of the poor as an instrument of coercion.
LAW AND ORDER
How was the government to maintain control of this growing population in such a city, where little was planned and where everyone was left to fend for themselves? The favoured strategy of much of the city’s rich and ruling elite was to clamp down on anyone who might challenge its supremacy, and to turn the very condition of being poor into a crime. There was also a very visible policy of deterrence. London in the eighteenth century was full of prisons: the most famous was Newgate, whose site was by the present Old Bailey, and which was the equivalent in London consciousness (and London memory) of the hated Paris Bastille. But there were also the Fleet, the Clink, the various Bridewells, and other lock-ups scattered across the working-class areas of Clerkenwell, St Giles or Southwark. The history of London in the eighteenth century is repeatedly interwoven with the history of these prisons. In a city as closely packed as London, with no police force until well into the nineteenth century, the prisons were a constant reminder to the poor of the weight of the law and how close they might be to retribution. And many of them were very close.
The number of hanging offences in English law expanded dramatically in the course of the eighteenth century, nearly all of them for crimes against property rather than the person. The Black Act passed in 1723 increased potentially capital offences to more than 200.19 Theft in many cases was a capital offence, and many went to the gallows for stealing bread or a piece of meat. If the poor sometimes ended up as dangerous criminals, this legislation was also part of a process of criminalizing poverty itself. Those who stole from their masters, who left their apprenticeships early, or who were desperate to feed their families could all move very quickly from leading respectable working lives to seeing the inside of the prison walls.
Jack Sheppard was one of the poor who became a criminal. He was a legend in his own very short lifetime. When in 1724, at the age of twenty-two, he went to the gallows at Tyburn Tree he was a popular hero. In the public imagination his remarkable escapes from prison and the cat and mouse game he played with the authorities dwarfed his career as a robber; he remained a hero long after all his contemporaries were dead. He was the inspiration for the highwayman Macheath in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, written four years later, and in which his nemesis Jonathan Wild was the jailer Peachum (to ‘peach’ meant to grass or inform). His story became an instant hit at fairs: Harlequin Sheppard was performed at the Bartholomew Fair in Smithfield, just round the corner from Newgate, only months later.20 More than a century after his death in 1839, the novel Jack Sheppard written by Harrison Ainsworth proved a bestseller. It was also turned into a stage play, and frequently pirated.
Such was the fear of Sheppard’s example influencing the London poor that the Lord Chancellor responded by banning the licencing of any play with the name ‘Jack Sheppard’ in it for forty years.21 His fame spread far outside London: Commissioner Horne, from the Children’s Employment Commission, reported in 1841 that, of children in Wolverhampton, ‘several had never heard the name of the Queen nor other names, such as Nelson, Wellington, Bonaparte; but it was noteworthy that those who had never heard even of St Paul, Moses, or Solomon, were very well instructed as to the life, deeds, and character of Dick Turpin, the street robber, and especially of Jack Sheppard, the thief and gaol-breaker.’22
Sheppard was not from a criminal family. Born in Spitalfields, the industrial silk-weaving area, in 1702, he was left in the Bishopsgate workhouse when his widowed mother went into service in the house of a draper. He was eventually apprenticed to a Covent Garden carpenter to follow the family trade. Indeed, Sheppard first fell foul of the law and was imprisoned for breaking his indentures, the terms of his apprenticeship as a carpenter, by leaving before his time was served. His path from apprentice in a respectable household to notorious criminal was not so distant from the lives of many young people in the city. His good looks, his romancing (his lover was Elizabeth Lyon, known as Edgworth Bess) and his daredevil behaviour all made him a hero in many eyes. Sheppard first escaped from the St Giles roundhouse in April, then from the new Bridewell prison in Clerkenwell in May, then from Newgate in August. Edgworth Bess helped him in a number of these escapes (as he had originally helped her), and his departure from Newgate was carried