Behind the white face

Has there ever been a more compelling period in London’s history than the first years of the 19th century?

Has there ever been a more compelling period in London’s history than the first years of the 19th century? There is, I suppose, a case to be made for the London of Shakespeare, but any city that can boast a Byron to look after its poetry, Sheridan its drinking, Hazlitt its journalism, Nash its architecture and Brummell the cut of its coat would certainly edge it for fun.

There was admittedly no Lancelot Andrewes to preach it into sobriety — it would have to make do with Sydney Smith — and no great statesman after the deaths of Fox and Pitt, but this lack of spiritual and political authority only added to the brew. Even at the best of times Georgian London was a notoriously volatile beast, and the ever-present threat of France abroad and a repressive Tory government at home brought a note of tension and danger to these years that was never far beneath the surface.

There are any number of ways into this dazzling, tawdry, elegant and brutal age — the satire of Gillray, the surface brilliance of Lawrence, the diaries of Haydon, the miseries of the Newgate Calendar — but perhaps nothing reflects its turbulent and contradictory character quite like its theatre. It is always tempting to see Regency culture in terms of what ‘the Smith of Smiths’ called the ‘Golden Parallelogram’, but beyond the narrow world of the great Whig hostesses and Albemarle Street lay a vast theatre-going public — anything up to 20,000 a night — of servants, nursery maids, petty crooks, errand boys and prostitutes for whom a Childe Harold or Lara were unknown extras in a cultural landscape over which the great comic creations of Joseph Grimaldi — the finest clown of his or possibly any age — held undisputed imaginative sway.