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When James Boswell and Samuel Johnson travelled by river from Temple Stairs to Greenwich on a morning in July 1763, they ‘were entertained with the immense number and variety of ships that were lying at anchor, and with the beautiful country on each side of the river’.¹⁰ Boswell records that upon arrival in Greenwich he took from his coat-pocket a copy of Johnson’s poem London (1738), and read out aloud the lines:

On Thames’s banks in silent thought we stood:

Where Greenwich smiles upon the silver flood.¹¹

6 Bakhtin, M. (1968), p. 15.

7 See Gatrell, V. (2006), p. 31.

8 Hallett, M. (1999), p. 2.

9 For eighteenth-century Thames-side labouring classes see Rediker, M. (1987), pp. 21-31; Linebaugh, P.

(1991), ch. 4.

10 Boswell, J. (1791), Vol. 1, p. 204.

11 Johnson, S. (1738), pp. 21-22.

Johnson’s London is based on Juvenal's Third Satire in which the narrator’s friend Umbricius is about to leave Rome to live in Cumae and escape from the vices and dangers of the capital city.¹² In Johnson's version the character Thales is the modern equivalent of Umbricius. Thales travels to Cambria (Wales) in order to escape the problems of London. These are identified in London as crime, corruption and the squalor of the poor which disables natural social progress and harmony: ‘Slow rises worth, by poverty depressed’.¹³ Personifications of Malice, Rapine, and Accident ‘conspire’ to attack those who live there and destroy London. It is significant that Boswell recites from this poem because the overall theme of London is at odds with the meaning of the chosen lines. These lines, taken out of context, refer only to a smiling Greenwich and the Thames as a ‘silver flood’; whereas Johnson’s polemic is a rail against the

‘relentless ruffians’ that supposedly populate the city. This suggests that Boswell and Johnson were perfectly aware that the ‘smiling’ image of Greenwich and the Thames was illusory, and were intending the lines to be understood ironically.

Boswell is making a reference to the mythical river: the picturesque river of the eighteenth century that by dint of association and tradition remained the paradigm of the Thames in a period when it was in fact undergoing extensive redevelopments in terms of new bridges and docks. This topographical transformation of the Thames during the eighteenth century and its representation in visual culture will be explored in Chapter 3. In this chapter I will consider the eighteenth century representation of the Thames through the portrayal of those Londoners who were inextricably linked to the river because of where they lived and how they earned a living. The Thames brought them prosperity through trade and communication with what was outside the city, as well as the water which resourced so much industry along its banks. But for others the Thames represented a myriad of fears over the ungovernability of the river, the dangers of pollution and disease and anxieties over what was foreign to the city, whether in the form of immigrants or culture.

Pollution, disease and the anxiety over the character of the maritime communities are the subject of The Alley by Alexander Pope (1688-1744), a six-verse poem written in 1709 and published in 1727. Here Pope provides a piece of low realism which offers a disdainful view of riverside working-class communities at the opposite end of London to his own Twickenham retreat and to other places with pastoral (and Spenserian) associations such as Richmond and Windsor.¹⁴ Pope describes the poor living conditions of families who live in ‘houses low’ in the

‘bad neighbourhood[s]’ of the downriver communities. Pope’s mention of broken pavements, the stench of rotting fish, brandy and tobacco shops, sailors’ jackets hung up to dry, fishing nets and foul language conjure up an image of a poor and degenerate maritime environment.

Contemporary writers described the smell of the riverine environment as spicy with the scent of cargoes: a heady concoction of cinnabar, ginger, teas, sandalwood and hemp underpinned with the whiff of sea-worn ropes and tar, not to mention the pungent stench of copper salts from the ink and dye works at Deptford and the many leather tanneries around Bermondsey, or the choking stink of the whale oil produced at the Greenland Docks.¹⁵ Pope draws the

12 Juvenal. Trans. Rudd, N. and Barr, W. (2008).

13 Bate, W. (1955), p. 18; Johnson, S. (1738), p. 177.

14 See Allen, R. (1998), p. 33-35. Allen notes that ‘Pope employs the Faerie Queen stanzaic form’ which while remote from the Spenserian romance reinforces the contrast with pastoral upriver locations of the

‘silver Thames’.

15 See Stockwin, J. (2012).

reader’s attention to a retired Billingsgate fishwife: ‘There learned she speech from tongues that never cease’ and now ‘‘bitch’ and ‘rogue’ [was] her answer to all’. Pope was offering a generalised description of places such as Deptford, Woolwich and Wapping ‘smelling strong of pitch’ which, in the final lines of his poem, he counterbalances against the ‘grots, statues, urns’

and ‘Vales, spires, meand’ring streams’ which adorn ‘the silver Thames’ providing a satirical subversion of the idea of a concordia discors between the upriver and downriver locations discussed in Chapter 1. The downriver locations like Wapping were represented as squalid and malodorous places rife with disease, dangerous for the unwary with their disorientating mazes of tiny streets and alleys, with intimidating names like Cat’s Hole, Shovel Alley, Harebrain Court, Hog Yard, Black Dog, Black Boy Alleys, the Rookery and Dark Entry. In The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755) Henry Fielding adopts a sardonic tone when he describes being delayed on the Thames in the vicinity of Wapping and Redriffe and ‘tasting a delicious mixture of the air of both these sweet places and enjoying the concord of sweet sounds of seamen, watermen, fish-women, oyster-women, and of all the vociferous inhabitants of both shores’.¹⁶ Wapping is held up as a lawless area, with its dangerous central road of Ratcliffe Highway running through it. The highway was lined with shops, ship’s chandlers, doss-houses, brothels,

‘low’ taverns, tenements, and alleyways and populated by vagrants and impoverished sailors.

Wapping and its inhabitants lay beyond the jurisdiction of the City, but nevertheless the location accommodated Execution Dock where those accused of crimes at sea, particularly piracy, were hanged.¹⁷ Here their bodies, bloated by the river, were displayed in iron gibbets so they were clearly visible from the river as both a form of deterrent and also part of the spectacle of the maritime, lower-class river.

Tobias Smollett’s novel, The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) offers an account based on the author’s firsthand knowledge of life amongst the maritime labourers inhabiting the Thames-side neighbourhoods.¹⁸ The narrative is set in the 1730s and 1740s and recounts the life story of the naïve yet resourceful Roderick "Rory" Random and his companion Hugh Strap. Following a somewhat erratic education, the protagonist embarks on a series of adventures and misadventures, visiting inter alia: London, Bath, France, the West Indies, West Africa and South America. Roderick ends up serving twice on British ships, once on a privateer and once on a warship after being captured by a press gang. Smollett offers a vicious portrayal of the hypocrisy, greed, deceit and snobbery peculiar to the times, especially among London’s upper and middling classes, but particularly he satirises the brutality, incompetence and injustice of the Royal Navy. The life on board ship described by Smollett, himself a navy surgeon’s mate in the 1740s, is one of extreme brutality and corruption exemplified by the sick bay:

Here I saw about fifty miserable distempered wretches, suspended in rows, so huddled upon one another, that not more than fourteen inches of space was allotted for each with his bed and bedding; and deprived of the light of day, as well as of fresh air; breathing nothing but a noisome atmosphere of the morbid steams exhaling from their own excrements and

16 Fielding, H. (1755), pp. 44-5.

17 Ratcliffe Highway now forms route of The Highway which runs between Tower Hill and the Limehouse Link tunnel.

18 Smollett, T. (1748). For further reading see Ennis, D. J. (2002).

diseased bodies, devoured with vermin hatched in the filth that surrounded them, and destitute of every convenience necessary for people in that helpless condition.¹⁹

Johnson’s inference that the ‘smiling’ face of the Thames was illusory, Pope’s thoroughly unattractive simulation of the downriver locations of Deptford, Woolwich and Wapping and Smollett’s description of the appalling conditions on board the ships that populated the port draw attention to an alternative version of lives lived in proximity to the Thames. Whilst these often played on conventional stereotypes of the maritime community, these literary evocations had their visual equivalent in an abundant strain of caricature and social satire produced throughout the city.²⁰

Artists such as James Gillray (1757-1815) and Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827) were part of a growing number of engravers producing graphic satires in the English capital. Their work catered to the many prints-shops where the satires might be hung in windows or pinned to boards standing outside the shop.²¹ Satiric prints were also displayed in the engravers’ own print-shops adjoining their workrooms, or they were supplied to the owners of city-centre coffee-houses and taverns where they were often displayed or made available to be handed around by customers. Via such outlets, satiric prints were on display to the urban public in London, as well as being posted to out-of-town collectors and regional print-shops, and as a product they were a regularly encountered and widely discussed part of urban culture. Mark Hallett suggests that satirical engraving ‘appealed to a public that extended beyond the traditional patrons of the fine arts, the landed gentry and aristocracy, and took in that

‘middling’ class of individuals drawn from the commercial and professional classes’.²² These relatively inexpensive and more widely accessible prints established a cast of recognisable Thames-stereotypes and depicted them variously as menacing press gangs stalking the wharves around the Tower, vulgar watermen plying their trade on the riverbanks, swindling Wapping landladies, naïve sailors and feisty Billingsgate fishwives.