Teeming, Disordered and Sexually Charged
Vic Gatrell, The First Bohemians: Life and Art in London's Golden Age
Allen Lane, 512pp, £25.00, ISBN 9781846146770
reviewed by Nell Stevens
In The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), Michel de Certeau ruminates on the significance of footsteps. Gazing down at 1970s Manhattan from the World Trade Center, de Certeau sees how ‘their intertwined paths give their shape to spaces,’ and ‘weave places together.’ It’s an image that returned to my mind as I read Vic Gatrell’s The First Bohemians, an account of 18th-century Covent Garden, where artists, thieves and prostitutes intermingled, created, drank and died. Gatrell’s subjects trod streets and alleys that are familiar to every modern Londoner, but whereas our trajectories from Longacre’s boutiques to Soho’s bars write a story of consumerism, theirs created a space of artistic and sexual freedom.
Gatrell’s project is an exploration of a cultural, artistic moment and how it mapped onto the city. Part One offers a meticulous exploration of the area that includes a narrow, sewage-drenched Strand and a Drury Lane lined with rotting houses that often fell down overnight. We learn the unfamiliar pasts of these familiar streets, and are introduced to others, now long-gone, the names of which — Dirty Lane, Dunghill Mews — suggest reasons for their extinction. Contemporary descriptions of these places are vivid: Bedfordbury, now an unexceptional connecting road, was once, according to the Victorian George Augustus Sala, ‘a devious, slimy little reptile of a place, whose tumble-down tenements and reeking courts spume forth plumes of animated rags.’ The old city comes alive through these first-hand accounts, and Gatrell’s work, having collected them, is simply to let them speak for themselves.
In Part Two, we turn from surveying Covent Garden’s streets to meeting its inhabitants. The ingenuity and debauchery of these figures, Gatrell argues, qualify them as Bohemians. The term itself is not used in this sense until the middle of the following century, but Gatrell claims it for his 18th-century artists, whose louche creativity more than rivals that of their 19th-century counterparts. The cast includes painter George Morland, who wished his epitaph to read, ‘Here lies a drunken dog,’ and kept a donkey in his parlour, and a drunk, naked Sir Charles Sedley, whose obscene performance on a balcony at the Cock Tavern prompted a ‘near riot’ in 1663.
We are presented with a busy, dazzling surface, across which lives, images and anecdotes are liberally strewn. Beneath this lies a work of serious scholarship. The breadth of Gatrell’s investigation is extraordinary and the amount of detail that finds its way onto his pages startling: vibrant, throwaway descriptions and characters brought to life in one line and dropped in the next. Perhaps as a consequence of this abundance of information, the narrative can feel shallow at times. We jump from one end of the century to the other in the space of a few sentences, breezing past countless lives and artworks in the process.
There are hundreds of throwaways that deserve their own chapters, and some that demand them. We would enjoy hearing more about the French court painter, Jean-Baptiste Vanloo, who set out in 1737 on a doomed mission to divert English artists’ attention from the pornographic to the genteel, for example. But by far the most troubling absence here is any serious discussion of women beyond the sexual role they play in male artists’ work. That the chapter on prostitutes falls in Part One, the section dedicated to exploring the place rather than people, is telling: women are part of the backdrop to the main event, confined here, as they were then, to the outskirts. When female figures appear later in the narrative, their stories do not veer far from the familiar trajectory of prostitute to actress to mistress or brothel keeper. Women made up over half of the population of Covent Garden during this period, and yet are accorded a miniscule proportion of the author’s attention. The two-page chapter entitled ‘Lady Artists’ does little to redress the balance, filled as it is with jokes at the expense of women who dared put brush to canvas. The vocabulary itself is troubling: ‘whore,’ ‘harlot,’ ‘bawd,’ ‘lady artist.’ While Gatrell ably assesses the lives of 18th-century men from a sharp and contextualising modern vantage point, he seems unable to view women except through the eyes of his male subjects.
The First Bohemians leads us to believe that amongst Jane Austen’s female peers in Covent Garden there were no artists or writers worthy of our attention. If that really were so, the fact that the majority of its 18th-century residents were entirely devoid of creative merit rather undermines Gatrell’s representation of the neighbourhood as an artistic paradise. This is dealt with somewhat flippantly in the introduction in a sentence that begins, ‘The men we’re interested in (hardly any women)….’ This is the reason, then: it is not that there were no women of interest, simply that ‘we’ are not interested in them.
Fortunately, what does interest Gatrell is meticulously researched and eloquently discussed. He is concerned with the intersection between the artists’ lives and their creative output, and particularly with stories and depictions of sexual exploits. Taken together, the two hundred illustrations included in the study offer a diverse, dynamic portrait of a world where sex and art are almost inseparable: Rowlandson’s ‘Connoisseurs’ depicts a group of men inspecting a painting of a female nude; its companion, ‘Cunnyseurs,’ shows the same figures examining the model’s genitalia. One way to enjoy this book, then, would be as an exercise in curation. The selection, collection and reproduction of these images is a triumph; they punctuate and orient a narrative that is as frenetic, busy, rich, and convoluted as the world it sets out to describe. We are offered an ‘innumerable collection of singularities,’ that, taken together, create a unique place. The dust jacket’s description of Gatrell’s Covent Garden as ‘teeming, disordered and sexually charged,’ is an equally accurate assessment of the book itself.
Gatrell’s project is an exploration of a cultural, artistic moment and how it mapped onto the city. Part One offers a meticulous exploration of the area that includes a narrow, sewage-drenched Strand and a Drury Lane lined with rotting houses that often fell down overnight. We learn the unfamiliar pasts of these familiar streets, and are introduced to others, now long-gone, the names of which — Dirty Lane, Dunghill Mews — suggest reasons for their extinction. Contemporary descriptions of these places are vivid: Bedfordbury, now an unexceptional connecting road, was once, according to the Victorian George Augustus Sala, ‘a devious, slimy little reptile of a place, whose tumble-down tenements and reeking courts spume forth plumes of animated rags.’ The old city comes alive through these first-hand accounts, and Gatrell’s work, having collected them, is simply to let them speak for themselves.
In Part Two, we turn from surveying Covent Garden’s streets to meeting its inhabitants. The ingenuity and debauchery of these figures, Gatrell argues, qualify them as Bohemians. The term itself is not used in this sense until the middle of the following century, but Gatrell claims it for his 18th-century artists, whose louche creativity more than rivals that of their 19th-century counterparts. The cast includes painter George Morland, who wished his epitaph to read, ‘Here lies a drunken dog,’ and kept a donkey in his parlour, and a drunk, naked Sir Charles Sedley, whose obscene performance on a balcony at the Cock Tavern prompted a ‘near riot’ in 1663.
We are presented with a busy, dazzling surface, across which lives, images and anecdotes are liberally strewn. Beneath this lies a work of serious scholarship. The breadth of Gatrell’s investigation is extraordinary and the amount of detail that finds its way onto his pages startling: vibrant, throwaway descriptions and characters brought to life in one line and dropped in the next. Perhaps as a consequence of this abundance of information, the narrative can feel shallow at times. We jump from one end of the century to the other in the space of a few sentences, breezing past countless lives and artworks in the process.
There are hundreds of throwaways that deserve their own chapters, and some that demand them. We would enjoy hearing more about the French court painter, Jean-Baptiste Vanloo, who set out in 1737 on a doomed mission to divert English artists’ attention from the pornographic to the genteel, for example. But by far the most troubling absence here is any serious discussion of women beyond the sexual role they play in male artists’ work. That the chapter on prostitutes falls in Part One, the section dedicated to exploring the place rather than people, is telling: women are part of the backdrop to the main event, confined here, as they were then, to the outskirts. When female figures appear later in the narrative, their stories do not veer far from the familiar trajectory of prostitute to actress to mistress or brothel keeper. Women made up over half of the population of Covent Garden during this period, and yet are accorded a miniscule proportion of the author’s attention. The two-page chapter entitled ‘Lady Artists’ does little to redress the balance, filled as it is with jokes at the expense of women who dared put brush to canvas. The vocabulary itself is troubling: ‘whore,’ ‘harlot,’ ‘bawd,’ ‘lady artist.’ While Gatrell ably assesses the lives of 18th-century men from a sharp and contextualising modern vantage point, he seems unable to view women except through the eyes of his male subjects.
The First Bohemians leads us to believe that amongst Jane Austen’s female peers in Covent Garden there were no artists or writers worthy of our attention. If that really were so, the fact that the majority of its 18th-century residents were entirely devoid of creative merit rather undermines Gatrell’s representation of the neighbourhood as an artistic paradise. This is dealt with somewhat flippantly in the introduction in a sentence that begins, ‘The men we’re interested in (hardly any women)….’ This is the reason, then: it is not that there were no women of interest, simply that ‘we’ are not interested in them.
Fortunately, what does interest Gatrell is meticulously researched and eloquently discussed. He is concerned with the intersection between the artists’ lives and their creative output, and particularly with stories and depictions of sexual exploits. Taken together, the two hundred illustrations included in the study offer a diverse, dynamic portrait of a world where sex and art are almost inseparable: Rowlandson’s ‘Connoisseurs’ depicts a group of men inspecting a painting of a female nude; its companion, ‘Cunnyseurs,’ shows the same figures examining the model’s genitalia. One way to enjoy this book, then, would be as an exercise in curation. The selection, collection and reproduction of these images is a triumph; they punctuate and orient a narrative that is as frenetic, busy, rich, and convoluted as the world it sets out to describe. We are offered an ‘innumerable collection of singularities,’ that, taken together, create a unique place. The dust jacket’s description of Gatrell’s Covent Garden as ‘teeming, disordered and sexually charged,’ is an equally accurate assessment of the book itself.