Conclusiones Parciales

What d’ye think of my Meg of Wapping

In 1783, Dr. Johnson talked of the wonderful extent and variety of London observing that men of curious inquiry might see in it such modes of life as very few could ever imagine. Johnson particularly recommended that his friends, William Windham and James Boswell, should explore Wapping.⁸⁹ Wapping and its environs, populated by a heterogeneous community of sailors and migrants, received very little if any direct attention from artists until the later decades of the eighteenth century when, evidence suggests, it became ripe for satirical representation. Hayman’s reference to this notorious maritime neighbourhood in his depiction of The Wapping Landlady (1741-42) [Fig. 43] provides one of the earliest of such artistic references. Certainly during the second half of the century evidence suggests the imagery associated with Wapping tended to be synonymous with the seamier side of the river community. References to Wapping in visual art became shorthand for an environment which accommodated a maritime community of carousing sailors, belligerent watermen, scheming

‘landladies’ and unchecked prostitution. In the visual arts these connotations remained, on the whole, within the provinces of the caricature and satirical print market. The limited number of high art representations of this overpopulated maritime neighbourhood concentrated on portraying the industrious river landscape or the western landmark of the Tower, generally avoiding a closer examination of the more colourful inhabitants and the entertainments of Wapping. For example, an untitled watercolour by Robert Cleveley dated 1791 presents a view of Wapping from the river, looking towards docked boats whose tall masts stretch into the distance on the left.⁹⁰ On the right are buildings which line the riverbank; two men at the oars of a row boat in the foreground provide the only representation of human activity in what is represented as a calm and harmonious river scene.

The version of Wapping represented in satirical prints, especially the notion of a symbiotic relationship between prostitutes and sailors, correlates with contemporary textual commentaries on the area.⁹¹ For example, in the 1788 edition of Harris’s List there is a officers, whom she particularly likes, as they do not stay long at home, and always return fraught with love and presents.⁹²

Harris’ entry for the experienced Mrs Griffin is a reflection of how the Thames and the seafaring neighbourhoods along its banks had a history of association with the London’s sex trade. The maritime areas of Wapping and Rotherhithe especially were notorious for their cheap prostitutes who provided a service for sailors. Contemporary indictments against the proprietors of disorderly houses in Westminster and Middlesex reveal that after Covent Garden and the area around the periphery of the City, a significant percentage of prosecutions referred to houses in the vicinity of Whitechapel and Wapping.⁹³ The Ratcliffe Highway, which ran parallel with the Thames and East from the Tower towards Shadwell and Limehouse, was well stocked with taverns and bawdy-houses, and it was this that provided the East End’s equivalent to Covent Garden and the Strand.⁹⁴ Sailors from ships moored in the Pool of London flocked to this district. They were looking for drink and women, and the brothels and taverns along the Ratcliffe Highway provided for their every need.

The quality of this maritime prostitution was well documented by Francis Place (1771-1854).⁹⁵ Place admits that in the late 1780s, as a young man in the company of ‘other lads’, he frequented cock and hen clubs and ‘spent many evenings at the dirty public houses’ where he and his friends became acquainted with the poor prostitutes who worked in and around St Catherine’s Lane, just east of the Tower. Place noted that ‘drunkenness was common to them

95 Place was a political radical whose autobiography, pamphlets, letters, magazine and newspaper articles provide an insight into the social and economic history of his lifetime.

all and at all times’ as well as fighting ‘among themselves as well as with the men’, so that

‘black eyes might be seen on a great many.’ Place, who clearly knew London well, was so astonished by what he saw here he described the women as if they came not from his own city but from another and alien world: ‘the breasts of many hung down in a most disgusting manner, their hair among the generality was straight and ‘hung in rat tails’ over their eyes and was filled with lice.’⁹⁶ The notion of Wapping as ‘alien’ was almost proverbial. In 1776 John Fielding described it as a place 'chiefly inhabited by sailors, [where] a man would be apt to suspect himself in another country’ because ‘their manner of living, speaking, acting, dressing and behaving, are so very peculiar to themselves'.⁹⁷ Even earlier, Smollett’s novels feature Wapping’s community of seafaring men and tradesmen. In Launcelot Greaves (1760-1), for example, the locality was Captain Crowe’s favourite district, and in Roderick Random the seamen use maritime terminology to make euphemistic reference to prostitutes.⁹⁸ For example, a sea lieutenant who comes to the rescue of Nancy Williams describes the unfortunate woman as ‘a poor galley in distress that has been boarded by a fire-ship’.⁹⁹ The sea lieutenant pays off her debts and assures her ‘you shan’t go to the bilboes this bout’ telling her she ‘had got into the wrong port’ and advising her ‘to seek a more convenient harbour’

where she ‘could be safely hove down’.¹⁰⁰ Robert Dighton used similar metaphorical language in his caricatures of prostitutes and their clients produced in 1781: A English Man of War taking a French Privateer on London Bridge and An English Sloop Engaging a Dutch Man of War in the Piazza, Covent Garden.¹⁰¹ In another example, A Rich Privateer brought safe into Port by Two First Rates (1782), a mezzotint after Dighton published by Carington Bowles, the viewer is presented with a brothel scene where a woman dips her hand into the sailor’s hatful of guineas; another has grabbed his watch and seals while an archetypal Wapping landlady brings up a bowl of punch.¹⁰² This adopted sea-lingo also appears in a version of the traditional sailor’s song, Ratcliffe Highway, thought to date from the turn of the nineteenth century:

There’s funny craft in Wapping, In streaming colours gay, And Pirate ships, and Fireships, In Ratcliffe Highway.¹⁰³

Cindy McCreery observes that ‘images of sailors and their women frequently reflected issues at the centre of national consciousness’. Because, as McCreery identifies, ‘prostitution and the role of the sea in aiding commerce and defence were two of the most visible contemporary preoccupations’ they were regularly linked in caricatures.¹⁰⁴ Like Smollett’s sea lieutenant, caricaturists further emphasised this link by describing the prostitutes operating near ports through a euphemistic vocabulary based around maritime terms, often with explicitly sexual

96 Thale, M. (ed.) (1972), pp. 77-8; See Cruikshank, D. (2010), pp. 178-9.

97 Fielding, J. (1776), p. xiii.

98 Smollett, T. (1760), pp. 62, 161-2; see also Maitland, W. (1756), Vol. 2, p. 1366.

99 Apart from the obvious nautical connotation, the slang meaning of fire-ship was a diseased whore.

100 Smollett, T. (1748), p. 134; a ship was ‘hove down’ on one side, or ‘careened’ in order to remove matter that had adhered itself to the bottom of the vessel.

101 LWL: 781.06.00.01 and 781.06.00.02.

102 BM: 1935,0522.1.182.

103 Repd in Vaughan Williams, R. (2009), p. 83.

104 See McCreery, C. (2000), pp, 135-52.

allusions. For example, Isaac Cruikshank’s 1802 caricature, British Vessels, Described for the use of a Country Gentleman depicts an assortment of seven women each described as a type of ship or boat, including a Billingsgate Smack, a Dutch Dogger, a Fire Ship and a Bum-Boat.¹⁰⁵ The title of the print, which refers to potentially naïve country gentlemen, highlights the popular concept of the port in popular prints as a place of entrapment together with the wily prostitutes which echo Hayman’s devious Wapping Landlady. McCreery notes that the representation of the port as a place for entrapment of gullible males has naval as well as sexual connotations, with the danger of the Royal Navy’s press gangs. Caricatures of press gangs and prostitutes operating in maritime neighbourhoods such as Wapping suggest a contemporary awareness of the lure of the pleasure and the subsequent pain that could ensnare the unsuspecting and gullible recruits.¹⁰⁶

The eighteenth-century sailor ashore at Wapping or in any of the maritime neighbourhoods of the Thames was portrayed as ‘Jolly Jack Tar’, a generic character often shown in the company of prostitutes. The image of Jack Tar appeared mainly in moderately priced single-sheet engraved caricatures, and the wide circulation of these prints suggests Jack Tar became a potent symbol of national courage, his omnipresence a reflection on the sailors’

role in aiding commerce and defence at sea. On shore the sailor and the prostitute are implied to be suited to each other in their mutual and equally immoral pursuit of money and sex.

Whilst this complicates the notion and discourse of patriotism, let alone femininity and politeness, the larger-than-life image of prostitutes suggests another role in boosting sailors’

morale and encouraging them to do their duty. Certainly sailors who had endured months of deprivation at sea would relish their time spent in port and once they received their pay were free to enjoy their time as they chose and that meant alcohol and women. The pubs and brothels of Wapping offered all sorts of services to the visiting seaman, but at a price. At best, seamen could simply blow their hard-earned wages in a drunken binge. At worst, they would be cheated, robbed or even murdered. But the representation of the sailor as Jolly Jack Tar and the prostitute as obliging goodtime girls is thoroughly distinct from Hayman’s preyed upon sailor and calculatingly ruthless landlady [Fig. 43]. These caricatures present an acceptable (albeit humorous), symbiotic relationship between stereotypes who are presented under such comic names as ‘Jack Jolly’ and ‘Meg of Wapping’.

There were several hundred satirical and comic engravings of sailors and prostitutes published in London in the decades before and after the turn of the eighteenth century. The majority of these images depicted scenes located in port environments with many specifically ascribed to Wapping either by direct reference in the title or through the appearance of local landmarks, or other related imagery. For example, take a satirical print from the series of six plates entitled The Modern Harlot’s Progress [Fig. 44]. The series follows the adventures of Harriet Heedless in a modernised imitation of Hogarth's Harlot's Progress (1732). As in Hogarth's series which traces Moll Hackabout’s downfall, The Modern Harlot’s Progress charts the arrival of a country girl in London and her subsequent downfall at the hands of downfall is mitigated by the intervention of a sea lieutenant; see Smollett, T. (1748), chapter XXII.

predecessor, is ‘discarded for her infidelity’ and so she ‘takes lodgings, turns common, is attended by rakes and gamesters, and furnished by the millener [sic], with dresses to continue her prostitution’. The significant difference between this and Hogarth’s original version is that Moll Hackabout was demoted to a dingy garret in the vicinity of Drury Lane near Covent Garden, an area renowned for its brothels, whereas Harriet Heedless has downsized to the Thames-side neighbourhood of Wapping, a location which in 1780 evidently held equally dubious connotations.¹⁰⁸ The location is suggested by the window through which the masts of a ship are clearly visible and additional maritime paraphernalia litters the scene, for example a design for a ship is pinned to the wall and a framed picture of a naval battle hangs above the door. The tradition of depicting prostitutes ensconced in their Wapping quarters can be traced in another satirical print which illustrated a ballad attributed to Charles Dibdin and published by Laurie and Whittle in 1797 under the title Meg of Wapping [Fig. 45]. In this social satire based on a popular song, a woman is shown three times with three different men within the same image. On the wall hangs a picture of shipping at sea. According to the verse, Meg lived

‘at the sign of the ship where tars meet in such jolly parties’. The lyrics to the song appear below the image and the words explain that Meg, a landlady from Wapping, married six sailors each of whom subsequently died in various mysterious manners, including one who was eaten by a crocodile and another who was consumed by cannibals. The seventh outlived her and married his sweetheart and lived off the fortune Meg had amassed through her matrimonial conquests with the sailors of Wapping. Here then again is a representation of the archetypal Wapping landlady who has lined her own pockets by emptying the purses of vulnerable sailors with short life-expectancies whom she charms out of their money and into marriage, tempting them while they are under the influence of her famous ‘flip’ which she is shown serving from a punchbowl in the printed illustration.¹⁰⁹ Meg becomes a siren or a temptress, literally drawing sailors to their doom. What is significant in this representation of sailors and prostitutes is the shift in power that occurs. Ultimately Meg has given her sailor husbands what they wanted and she, through her ‘service’ has made a reasonable living. But it is the sailor community who have the upper hand at the end of the tale when Meg, unable to stop herself from chasing young sailors when she is in her dotage, ‘popp’d off’ leaving her amassed fortune which falls into the hands of a sailor, Honest Tom Trip, and the ‘natural’ social order is ultimately re-established.

Wapping’s reputation as a notorious locale within which characters such as Meg, Harriet Heedless and the unscrupulous Wapping landladies operated also received regular references in popular sailor songs. These traditional verses date from the very early years of the nineteenth century, corresponding with the period during which prints of sailors and the women with whom they cavorted were at their most popular as evidenced by their

109 A sailor’s drink made of ale, brandy and sugar.

In Ratcliffe Highway!¹¹⁰

In another song titled Rolling Down Wapping comes an even the starker caution:

...the wines and the songs will divert you, You’ll think that your mind was deranged And if that you give them a guinea, You may go to the d---l for change.

The same song identifies the familiar character of the Wapping landlady when a sailor pays for a bottle of wine with a guinea and asks for his change:

The old baud she flew into a passion, And plac’d her two hands on her hips,

Saying, young man, you don’t know the fashion, You think you’re on board of a ship.¹¹¹

In the song the sailor exacts his revenge by attacking the landlady (‘O Murder, I’m killed she cried’) and stealing a gold watch, returning to the relative safety of his ship at Deptford with obvious relief. The production of caricatures of sailors and prostitutes in and around Wapping appears to have reached its peak during the first two decades of the nineteenth century, coinciding with Britain’s naval campaigns against France. The proliferation of the image of the jolly sailor as he energetically enjoys the pleasures of Wapping during short bursts of shore leave is indicative of his potency as a symbol of national courage in line with the association with the image of the river Thames itself. The close links between images and songs of sailors and prostitutes, and comic prints of sailors generally were borne out as recurrent subjects in the inexpensive Caricature Magazine sold from 1807 by the publisher Thomas Tegg.¹¹² Amongst the artists who contributed to this publication was Thomas Rowlandson who made a print after Henry William Bunbury for a ballad entitled Black, Brown and Fair (1807) [Fig. 46].

The title recalls a line sung by Macheath, the highwayman with a fondness for prostitutes in John Gay’s play The Beggar’s Opera (1728) :

Thus I stand, like the Turk, with his doxies around;

From all sides their glances his passion confound!

For black, brown, and fair his inconstancy burns, And the different beauties subdue him by turns...¹¹³

Rowlandson takes the exterior of a corner-house inscribed ‘Dock Head’ on the Thames in Wapping as the setting for an alternative verse describing the conquests of a promiscuous male who reassures his lover of his faithfulness despite innumerable amorous conquests:

‘...With Black, Brown, and Fair, I have frolick’d ‘tis true But never lov’d any, dear Mary, but you’. A group of prostitutes, including a black woman, pose in the open window of the Wapping Bagnio attracting the admiring attention of three men identifiable as Chinese, Dutch

110 Repd in Vaughan Williams, R. (2009), p. 83.

111 Anon. (c. 1813-1838).

112 Donald, D. (1996), p. 5. Approximately 30 caricatures of sailors, many with prostitutes, appeared in the five volumes of the Caricature Magazine – see LWL collection.

113 Gay, J. (1997), p. 206.

and French by their individual costumes and attitudes. A black sailor enters the door with his arm around another prostitute and a brown-skinned child, presumably the illegitimate product of such a union, lies on the pavement in a pose reminiscent of a sleeping cupid. Meanwhile on the right hand side of the image, a ship lies against the quay where a sailor and a woman stand, the latter smoking a pipe. On the surface, the caricature treats the mix of races in a bawdy manner in a tradition which appears to have appealed to the crude nature of much contemporary humour reflected in satirical prints.¹¹⁴ However, beneath this veneer of humour lies a more problematic, sinister aspect to the print, centring on the idea of miscegenation associated with the sailor. In another print by William Elmes and published by Thomas Tegg a jovial sailor bestrides a misshapen horse with panniers, a foot in each basket: Jack Jolly steering down Wapping in Ballast trim (1813) [Fig. 47]. In each basket sits a gaudily attired prostitute, each holding one of his arms. Jack grins amorously towards one who is immensely fat and ugly, while the other swigs from a bottle. They are in a wide cobbled street leading to the Thames where the stern of a ship flying an ensign can be glimpsed. In another print, Elmes’ Jack in a white squall, amongst the breakers – on the lee shore of St Catherines (1811) [Fig. 48] a sailor, unable to pay for services rendered, is attacked by prostitutes. Here the sailor’s predicament is represented as a humorous and farcical caper free from any sense of danger or maliciousness. The mutually beneficial relationship between sailors and prostitutes in these and other images is non-threatening and suggests a sporadic existence of tolerance towards their licentious behaviour within the geographical context of the port of London. The problematic concerns with race, promiscuity, transgression and immorality are, to an extent, counteracted by the contribution to the common good represented throughout by a proximity to the Thames in London, the national centre of commerce and naval power. Such prints offer commercial entertainment through humour, but they also operate as an ideologically charged material reflective of contemporary events, for example when sailors mutinied in 1797 their behaviour undermined conventional notions of the Jolly Jack Tar.¹¹⁵ In the same way as visual images of the waterman tended to idealise his character, the stereotype of Jolly Jack Tar,

and French by their individual costumes and attitudes. A black sailor enters the door with his arm around another prostitute and a brown-skinned child, presumably the illegitimate product of such a union, lies on the pavement in a pose reminiscent of a sleeping cupid. Meanwhile on the right hand side of the image, a ship lies against the quay where a sailor and a woman stand, the latter smoking a pipe. On the surface, the caricature treats the mix of races in a bawdy manner in a tradition which appears to have appealed to the crude nature of much contemporary humour reflected in satirical prints.¹¹⁴ However, beneath this veneer of humour lies a more problematic, sinister aspect to the print, centring on the idea of miscegenation associated with the sailor. In another print by William Elmes and published by Thomas Tegg a jovial sailor bestrides a misshapen horse with panniers, a foot in each basket: Jack Jolly steering down Wapping in Ballast trim (1813) [Fig. 47]. In each basket sits a gaudily attired prostitute, each holding one of his arms. Jack grins amorously towards one who is immensely fat and ugly, while the other swigs from a bottle. They are in a wide cobbled street leading to the Thames where the stern of a ship flying an ensign can be glimpsed. In another print, Elmes’ Jack in a white squall, amongst the breakers – on the lee shore of St Catherines (1811) [Fig. 48] a sailor, unable to pay for services rendered, is attacked by prostitutes. Here the sailor’s predicament is represented as a humorous and farcical caper free from any sense of danger or maliciousness. The mutually beneficial relationship between sailors and prostitutes in these and other images is non-threatening and suggests a sporadic existence of tolerance towards their licentious behaviour within the geographical context of the port of London. The problematic concerns with race, promiscuity, transgression and immorality are, to an extent, counteracted by the contribution to the common good represented throughout by a proximity to the Thames in London, the national centre of commerce and naval power. Such prints offer commercial entertainment through humour, but they also operate as an ideologically charged material reflective of contemporary events, for example when sailors mutinied in 1797 their behaviour undermined conventional notions of the Jolly Jack Tar.¹¹⁵ In the same way as visual images of the waterman tended to idealise his character, the stereotype of Jolly Jack Tar,