Political Dreamings by James Gillray in 1801 – apocalyptic nightmares of the early 19th century

Men weighing 50 stone, a country light on morals

Before puritanical Victorian England, the nation was awash in colonial wealth and collapsing under its own gluttony, writes Illtyd Harrington

Decency & Disorder: The Age of Cant.
By Ben Wilson.
Faber £25. order this book

BEN Wilson is not yet 30, but already he stands out as a witty and significant social historian. He looks closely at an England swollen on the new wealth pouring in from East and West Africa and the West Indies.
His starting point is 1789 – 13 years after the American Declaration of Independence and the ringing cry of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity from the French Revolution.
It ends with the ascendancy of the prim young Victoria in 1837.
A nation on a bender before she began the era of more prosperity and deepening institutional hypocrisy.
There were men weighing 50 stone – bloated by gluttony – and medical charlatans mourning and predicting the doom to come.
The first national census showed 50,000 active prostitutes in London – an indication not just of low morals, but also of plenty of spare cash.
England seemed obsessed with health and nerves. Dr Samuel Solomon sold his Balm of Gilead – a appropriate brand image based like the drug on mythology. It claimed to cure anything from corns to cancer.
Years later, under analysis, the main ingredient of this 50p a bottle of the elixir of life was found to be a half-pint of brandy.
Inevitably, a society for the suppression of vice was formed. But the ruling class opted for charity rather than extending legal control over the poor. No one wanted more police – pubs in central London remained open until 4am.
Pre-marital sex was common and caused scant criticism. The gathering of tree branches for Palm Sunday led to youthful debauchery around the woods of London during early spring. By 1806 the population had risen to 11 million, but poor relief cost the state only £1.5 million, while private charity coughed up to £3.5 million.
Gambling, even a lottery, seized the nation. A man bet his life, lost, and was hanged by the winner from a tree in Hampstead Road.
From the background of this raucous nation the cold voice of Puritanism echoed.
Patrick Colquhoun, a Scot, came to London eagerly marshalling the harsher facts that justified a bigger police force, as did John Bowles, the man from the west of England. Both of these saintly men were exposed later for pocketing public money.
The radical voice of Frances Place, a London tailor and an early champion of civil liberties and workers’ rights, challenged all this. He ended a meal by drinking two bottles of port and often throwing back five bottles of wine after a lengthy dinner.
Beau Brummell set the style and the fashion. Personality cults flourished and the Duke of York’s mistress, one Mary Anne Clarke, sold cash for honours by getting him to commission rich men in the army. Mary, like the Duke, was drowning in debt.
Theatre audiences were less respectable than our own timid theatre-going middle class. They staged full-scale riots for 60 consecutive nights. John Kemble put up the ticket prices in Covent Garden. Eventually he conceded defeat from the Bring Back the Old Prices lobby.
Flushed with enormous international loans from the Napoleonic wars, which ended in 1815, the country was rich. Money was found for four new bridges to cross the Thames.
Of course, a stock-market crash came in 1826 but, the year previously, four-and-a-half million free Bibles arrived. A sign of things to come.
Drink and her sister depravity were under attack.
Even Pierce Egan, whose riotous books, Tom and Jerry, told of a continual party caved in and was redeemed. Tom and Jerry, a stiff American cocktail, lived on – but the fizz had gone flat here.
Later, Lord George Byron – “mad, bad and dangerous to know” – became a social outcast. Our greatest poet, his Don Juan sold phenomenally, but its publisher John Murray was profoundly shaken. He eventually burned Byron’s private papers and manuscripts.
Britain was a young country. Sixty-seven per cent had been born after 1801.
Inexorably came the deeply ingrained, repressive, staid, religiously obsessed, Victorian Age anticipating the strident voice of Margaret Thatcher, 150 years ahead.
It was time for the poor to self-help and stop depending on relief, stop gobbling up lobsters, crabs and fine wines from the groaning tables of the workhouse.
A Vagrancy Act came in to curb them and a treadmill to make prison a little less pleasant.
God, I can hear the grim Scots brogue of former home secretary John Reid.
Ben Wilson almost manages to convey the images of Hogarth. No small achievement. A good holiday read.