Transcript: A History Most Satirical, Bawdy, Lewd and Offensive
A not so very short illustrated summary of BBC4's Rude Britannia: A History Most Satirical, Bawdy, Lewd and Offensive. This programme was written by the quite splendidly and very appropriately named Julian Rhind Tutt!
In 1707 a United Kingdom was created. Its capital, London, was dynamic and exciting noisy and smelly, a place where rich and poor collided. During the 100 years of the Georgian age rudeness flourished alongside genteel manners.
William Hogarth
The first chronicler of Georgian rudeness was William Hogarth. Hogarth knew and loved the taverns around Covent Garden; he knew the girls and the bawds and the hustlers. As an artist he had a satirical sense of humour and used to literally draw thumb nail sketches on his finger nails of people he saw in the street.
Hogarth’s painting of the Southwark Fair on the South bank of the Thames is a feats of images there to be read. There is a woman dicing, people looking into a peep show, there is a great sense of excitement and carnival. Mass produced prints of the Southwark Fair were sold to the public. It was a portrait of the public that all Londoners could share and own. All the people in it were real particular people and there was huge pleasure in the delight in identification.
Hogarth made sure his paintings were rude, bawdy and lewd. There are sexy little narratives hidden in the paintings and his attention to detail heightens the pleasure. But Hogarth was careful, and the Harlot’s and the Rakes Progress revealed the tension between the rude and the prude. The voice of the church was still powerful and Hogarth had to sell to respectable merchants. He sold his series as moral tales but what people enjoyed was the wickedness and rudeness before his characters are punished. In the Rake’s Progress the orgy in the tavern in Drury Lane plays on one’s prurient curiosity It’s slightly News of the Worldy, there is an ambivalence to exposing the tavern low life. But these characters come to a sticky end, the rake dies of madness and the harlot of syphilis.
In the art of Hogarth you can hear the city as well, lewd and bawdy songs are the sound track of his prints. There were ballad singers were on every corner and ale house each trying to out do the other in bawdiness. The congregated in any public place; Blackfriars, Covent Garden, the Strand. Some of these ballads are absolutely explicit such as Put in all, which teases men about their sexual anxieties. And not just explicit in words, but in actions. Female ballad singers lifted their skirts as illustration of the kind of content the ballads contained. Ballad singers sold printed broadsheets of their songs to make a living, with common four letter words dashed out as a not towards being polite. Such immorality was a cause of much concern to moral guardians and lawmakers.
John Gay
Hogarth also knew and drew the rude theatres. Theatre drew together every rank of society from the commoner to the aristocracy. People would talk, heckle and walk around. Early 18th century audiences were used to barracking the exotic characters of Italian opera. Then the Beggars Opera appeared, a true piece of British opera. Seeing a beggar on stage in an opera would have been a huge surprise to the audience. Gay’s heroes aren’t kings and queens but beggars and highway men. The songs were biting satires on 18th century life. Gay had the brilliant idea of including all the popular songs of the day so audiences were able to sing or hum along. The lyrics attacked the double standards of Georgian life with one law of the rich and another for the poor and the play lampooned the politicians of the day. Walpole the Prime Minister attended one of the first attendances of the play and appears in many of the characters. Gay suggested the world of politics was corrupt below its veneer of respectability.
Henry Fielding
In the 1730s came further insult from the plays of Henry Fielding and Walpole ordered that rude theatre be restricted. Plays were required to be submitted to a government censor for approval and licensing. This was a pivotal moment in the history of British theatre, a very successful shutting down of the rude in London.
Alexander Pope
East of theatre land was Grub Street a meeting place for writers and a byword for bookish rudeness. It was vicious malign place, as the law allowed literary rudeness to flourish as the license for printing was abolished. Laws only applied to sedition and blasphemy, if writers wanted to be rude to individual people there was nothing to stop them. Alexander Pope employed rudeness as his weapon of choice. His invective is poised and elegant and The Dunciad is his masterwork. He savages both King Georges in his epic of dunces. The rudeness of The Dunciad has an earthy quality that delighted in the bare faced evacuations of daily life. Without sanitation is was natural that scatology should be part of the satirical urge.
Laurence Sterne
Rudeness was also found in the newest literary form; the novel. Bawdy humour was at the heart of the success of Tristram Shandy, written by Sterne, hitherto an obscure pastor from Norfolk. It was new form of satire and Hogarth drew illustrations for the first edition. One of the great scenes of the novel is where Toby offers to show the Widow Wadman his wounded groin.
James Gillray
The world of the lewd print shop was another part of the rude culture of later Georgian life. The print shop window was a colourful theatrical democratic changing space; beggars and lords, all walked past the print shop. Georgian culture was image starved in the way we are not now. People were hungry for images of they way they and their governors lived. The dark master of print was James Gillray. Gillray is and even-handed misanthropist, he disliked everything and attacked everyone. There is no love warmth or generosity in his work. He had the essential attribute of the satirist; the fuck-you-ism! This was the decade of revolution in France, causing unrest in Britain. Gillray portrays Britain as John Bull farting and blowing the fleet back to France and he illustrates the Sans-culottes eating severed heads with gouged out eyes. But Gillray was as ruthless when he turned his gaze on British politics. Pitt became a fungus, a mushroom growing from a crown rooted in a dunghill. Gillray also mocked George, Prince of Wales, skewering the heir with an accumulation of detail; dice, chamber pot, a bottle of pills to cure the pox, a plate of bones and a huge joint of meat.
Thomas Rowlinson
Thomas Rowlinson lived close to Gillray but a world away in ambition. Rowlinson was much more life affirming. He never takes himself too seriously, and he is the first humorist we encounter in the grand scheme of English art. Rowlinson captures the street of London the way Hogarth had 60 years previously. But he is not political, he is interested in life on the street and he celebrates rather than moralises. He liked to drink and illustrated scenes of drunken debauchery in all there excess. And he the celebrated guilt free sex in images such as Rural Felicity or Love in a Chaise.
In 1811 the much ridiculed Prince of Wales became Prince Regent and the mood darkened after the victory of the Napoleonic Wars. There was enormous unemployment, prices were high, and there was unrest in the provincial cities. The war had been won but the pace was being lost. In London radical publishers were commissioning prints to push an agenda of political reform. Cruikshank one of the most powerful, came from a tradition of extreme political rudeness continuing to vilify the Regent in the tradition of Gillroy. The last year of the Regency 1819 was momentous and Cruickshank drew graphics images of the Peterloo massacre in Manchester.
Lord Byron
1819 also saw protest from the devilish Lord Byron, notorious as a libertine in his life time. Form exile in Italy he exposed the lies and hypocrisy of the age. Written at the end of his career Don Juan looks back at where Byron came from and addressed London’s prudishness and cant, it’s moral hypocrisy. His poem is designed to offend almost everyone. Byron names names, such as Wellington the bloody militarist, and doesn’t flinch form the libellous or blasphemous. But he is elegant and playful, subtle and teasing, never explicit. The publication of Don Juan in the year of Peterloo was an event that had everyone up in arms and created a shit storm. The publisher’s and author’s names were missing from the first editions which were so hugely expensive that the lower classes could not buy it. However it was quickly pirated and illustrated and its popularity grew and grew until it had a readership of over 500,000, unheard of for a poem.
In 1820 the Regent finally became King. Cruickshank carried on by portraying George the 4th in drag. Confronted by this ridicule George decided to buy off his greatest critic. And paid him £100 not to portray him in any immoral position ever. That silence Cruickshank which makes one wonder how radical he really was.
Byron continued to write but was afraid of the outcry over Don Juan and in 1824 he died in Greece. Byron was refused burial in Westminster Abbey but crowds lined the street to show their respect for the people’s poet. Byron was great hero for common people when he does but was still reviled by the aristocracy and his funeral represented the passing of an age.
By the time Byron was dead times were changing. The March of Morality had come with political stability and the rise of the evangelicals. At the end of the Georgian age even the map of London was changing as the city was sanitised. Streets are being ordered and widened and more bridges built. London became a fine modernised city with no more space for ballad singers, print shops and the chaos of the previous century.
ETA I forget to mention that this programme had the most bizarre soundtrack. It started off appropriately enough with contemporary folk songs and ballads, bypassed Martin and Eliza Carthy along the way and ended up with Tom Waits, who I think fits the bill nicely as a contemporary satirical balladeer. However in the middle of the programme they played a lot of modern and traditional tango music! Now tango lyrics can be bitingly satirical and very political but what they have to do with Georgian Britain is beyond me! Oh and it's a sin that they didn't play anything by Tiger Lillies who would have been perfect for this ;)
In 1707 a United Kingdom was created. Its capital, London, was dynamic and exciting noisy and smelly, a place where rich and poor collided. During the 100 years of the Georgian age rudeness flourished alongside genteel manners.
William Hogarth
The first chronicler of Georgian rudeness was William Hogarth. Hogarth knew and loved the taverns around Covent Garden; he knew the girls and the bawds and the hustlers. As an artist he had a satirical sense of humour and used to literally draw thumb nail sketches on his finger nails of people he saw in the street.
Hogarth’s painting of the Southwark Fair on the South bank of the Thames is a feats of images there to be read. There is a woman dicing, people looking into a peep show, there is a great sense of excitement and carnival. Mass produced prints of the Southwark Fair were sold to the public. It was a portrait of the public that all Londoners could share and own. All the people in it were real particular people and there was huge pleasure in the delight in identification.
Hogarth made sure his paintings were rude, bawdy and lewd. There are sexy little narratives hidden in the paintings and his attention to detail heightens the pleasure. But Hogarth was careful, and the Harlot’s and the Rakes Progress revealed the tension between the rude and the prude. The voice of the church was still powerful and Hogarth had to sell to respectable merchants. He sold his series as moral tales but what people enjoyed was the wickedness and rudeness before his characters are punished. In the Rake’s Progress the orgy in the tavern in Drury Lane plays on one’s prurient curiosity It’s slightly News of the Worldy, there is an ambivalence to exposing the tavern low life. But these characters come to a sticky end, the rake dies of madness and the harlot of syphilis.
In the art of Hogarth you can hear the city as well, lewd and bawdy songs are the sound track of his prints. There were ballad singers were on every corner and ale house each trying to out do the other in bawdiness. The congregated in any public place; Blackfriars, Covent Garden, the Strand. Some of these ballads are absolutely explicit such as Put in all, which teases men about their sexual anxieties. And not just explicit in words, but in actions. Female ballad singers lifted their skirts as illustration of the kind of content the ballads contained. Ballad singers sold printed broadsheets of their songs to make a living, with common four letter words dashed out as a not towards being polite. Such immorality was a cause of much concern to moral guardians and lawmakers.
John Gay
Hogarth also knew and drew the rude theatres. Theatre drew together every rank of society from the commoner to the aristocracy. People would talk, heckle and walk around. Early 18th century audiences were used to barracking the exotic characters of Italian opera. Then the Beggars Opera appeared, a true piece of British opera. Seeing a beggar on stage in an opera would have been a huge surprise to the audience. Gay’s heroes aren’t kings and queens but beggars and highway men. The songs were biting satires on 18th century life. Gay had the brilliant idea of including all the popular songs of the day so audiences were able to sing or hum along. The lyrics attacked the double standards of Georgian life with one law of the rich and another for the poor and the play lampooned the politicians of the day. Walpole the Prime Minister attended one of the first attendances of the play and appears in many of the characters. Gay suggested the world of politics was corrupt below its veneer of respectability.
Henry Fielding
In the 1730s came further insult from the plays of Henry Fielding and Walpole ordered that rude theatre be restricted. Plays were required to be submitted to a government censor for approval and licensing. This was a pivotal moment in the history of British theatre, a very successful shutting down of the rude in London.
Alexander Pope
East of theatre land was Grub Street a meeting place for writers and a byword for bookish rudeness. It was vicious malign place, as the law allowed literary rudeness to flourish as the license for printing was abolished. Laws only applied to sedition and blasphemy, if writers wanted to be rude to individual people there was nothing to stop them. Alexander Pope employed rudeness as his weapon of choice. His invective is poised and elegant and The Dunciad is his masterwork. He savages both King Georges in his epic of dunces. The rudeness of The Dunciad has an earthy quality that delighted in the bare faced evacuations of daily life. Without sanitation is was natural that scatology should be part of the satirical urge.
Laurence Sterne
Rudeness was also found in the newest literary form; the novel. Bawdy humour was at the heart of the success of Tristram Shandy, written by Sterne, hitherto an obscure pastor from Norfolk. It was new form of satire and Hogarth drew illustrations for the first edition. One of the great scenes of the novel is where Toby offers to show the Widow Wadman his wounded groin.
James Gillray
The world of the lewd print shop was another part of the rude culture of later Georgian life. The print shop window was a colourful theatrical democratic changing space; beggars and lords, all walked past the print shop. Georgian culture was image starved in the way we are not now. People were hungry for images of they way they and their governors lived. The dark master of print was James Gillray. Gillray is and even-handed misanthropist, he disliked everything and attacked everyone. There is no love warmth or generosity in his work. He had the essential attribute of the satirist; the fuck-you-ism! This was the decade of revolution in France, causing unrest in Britain. Gillray portrays Britain as John Bull farting and blowing the fleet back to France and he illustrates the Sans-culottes eating severed heads with gouged out eyes. But Gillray was as ruthless when he turned his gaze on British politics. Pitt became a fungus, a mushroom growing from a crown rooted in a dunghill. Gillray also mocked George, Prince of Wales, skewering the heir with an accumulation of detail; dice, chamber pot, a bottle of pills to cure the pox, a plate of bones and a huge joint of meat.
Thomas Rowlinson
Thomas Rowlinson lived close to Gillray but a world away in ambition. Rowlinson was much more life affirming. He never takes himself too seriously, and he is the first humorist we encounter in the grand scheme of English art. Rowlinson captures the street of London the way Hogarth had 60 years previously. But he is not political, he is interested in life on the street and he celebrates rather than moralises. He liked to drink and illustrated scenes of drunken debauchery in all there excess. And he the celebrated guilt free sex in images such as Rural Felicity or Love in a Chaise.
In 1811 the much ridiculed Prince of Wales became Prince Regent and the mood darkened after the victory of the Napoleonic Wars. There was enormous unemployment, prices were high, and there was unrest in the provincial cities. The war had been won but the pace was being lost. In London radical publishers were commissioning prints to push an agenda of political reform. Cruikshank one of the most powerful, came from a tradition of extreme political rudeness continuing to vilify the Regent in the tradition of Gillroy. The last year of the Regency 1819 was momentous and Cruickshank drew graphics images of the Peterloo massacre in Manchester.
Lord Byron
1819 also saw protest from the devilish Lord Byron, notorious as a libertine in his life time. Form exile in Italy he exposed the lies and hypocrisy of the age. Written at the end of his career Don Juan looks back at where Byron came from and addressed London’s prudishness and cant, it’s moral hypocrisy. His poem is designed to offend almost everyone. Byron names names, such as Wellington the bloody militarist, and doesn’t flinch form the libellous or blasphemous. But he is elegant and playful, subtle and teasing, never explicit. The publication of Don Juan in the year of Peterloo was an event that had everyone up in arms and created a shit storm. The publisher’s and author’s names were missing from the first editions which were so hugely expensive that the lower classes could not buy it. However it was quickly pirated and illustrated and its popularity grew and grew until it had a readership of over 500,000, unheard of for a poem.
In 1820 the Regent finally became King. Cruickshank carried on by portraying George the 4th in drag. Confronted by this ridicule George decided to buy off his greatest critic. And paid him £100 not to portray him in any immoral position ever. That silence Cruickshank which makes one wonder how radical he really was.
Byron continued to write but was afraid of the outcry over Don Juan and in 1824 he died in Greece. Byron was refused burial in Westminster Abbey but crowds lined the street to show their respect for the people’s poet. Byron was great hero for common people when he does but was still reviled by the aristocracy and his funeral represented the passing of an age.
By the time Byron was dead times were changing. The March of Morality had come with political stability and the rise of the evangelicals. At the end of the Georgian age even the map of London was changing as the city was sanitised. Streets are being ordered and widened and more bridges built. London became a fine modernised city with no more space for ballad singers, print shops and the chaos of the previous century.
ETA I forget to mention that this programme had the most bizarre soundtrack. It started off appropriately enough with contemporary folk songs and ballads, bypassed Martin and Eliza Carthy along the way and ended up with Tom Waits, who I think fits the bill nicely as a contemporary satirical balladeer. However in the middle of the programme they played a lot of modern and traditional tango music! Now tango lyrics can be bitingly satirical and very political but what they have to do with Georgian Britain is beyond me! Oh and it's a sin that they didn't play anything by Tiger Lillies who would have been perfect for this ;)