Gatrell - The first Bohemians: life and art in Londons golden age

The chapter heading cited above comes from Henry Fieldings novel Tom Jones, and the fact that it was written in his sisters house in Old Boswell Court, a few minutes walk from Londons Covent Garden, makes it both topical and apt in this book. It also propels us niftily to the point, as no-nonsense eighteenth-century writing was so good at doing. The kind of history that follows concerns the territory around Covent Garden that in the eighteenth century accommodated what may fairly be called the worlds first creative bohemia. It tackles the flowering there of art forms that depicted or commented on real life, and it explores what that art tells us about some of the more significant expressions of Georgian culture, about its artists, and about London itself.

To talk of London as if it were a unity is to forget the intense localism of the lives lived there. Communities and localities have always mattered in Londons history, so that to understand its cultural energies in the eighteenth century one must become intimate with its most creative territory. Its an extraordinary fact that by far the majority of eighteenth-century British painters and engravers, as well as most noted writers, poets, actors and dramatists, lived in the square quarter-mile or so around Covent Gardens Piazza. Victorians liked to say that more people of genius were buried in the Piazzas church of St Pauls than in any other church except Westminster Abbey. This list of Covent Gardens eighteenth-century luminaries, artists, actors and actresses is typical of those that Victorians remembered, and it is far from complete:

Butler, Addison, Sir Richard Steele, Otway, Dryden, Pope, Warburton, Cibber, Fielding, Churchill, Bolingbroke and Dr Samuel Johnson; Rich, Woodward, Booth, Wilkes, Garrick and Macklin; Kitty Clive, Peg

What contemporaries called the Town had developed between the City of London and the City of Westmister in the seventeenth century. With the Piazza at its centre (), it stretched from Soho and Leicester Fields (now Square) to Drury Lane in the east, and from St Giless and Long Acre in the north to Charing Cross and the Strand in the south. It had important outreaches eastwards along Fleet Street and into the booksellers quarter of St Pauls Churchyard, but you could walk across its core in ten or fifteen minutes. Why did so many creative people flock there, and what might that have meant for the making of English art and letters? To find the answer, Part I of the book explores the district closely both its finer streets and its grimmer back alleys and the poor people who lived in them. The district could be as polished a place as any in England, but also as rough. Both qualities influenced the subject-matter of the pictures, books and plays that were produced there.