Lady Mary Wortley Montagu would not only introduce London to innoculation against smallpox, but also her series of ‘Turkish Embassy Letters’ make up the first secular work on the Muslim Orient by a Western woman.  

Her life of adventure began when she escaped an arranged married with the astonishingly named Clotworthy Skeffington by marrying Edward Wortley Montagu.  Mary bore him a son and her time in London was spent mixing in the highest circles, both social and intellectual as befitted the widely-educated daughter of a Duke.  In the winter of 1715 all of this was to change: Lady Mary contracted smallpox.  She survived, but she was ‘very severely markt’ in both appearance and temperament.  Although she did not love Edward, she was was forever grateful that he did not cast aside once her beauty was eradicated.  

In August of 1716, Edward was made Ambassador to Istanbul and they set out on a long journey via land and sea.  In Vienna she was astonished to find that older women were very much in demand.  

‘A Woman till 5 and thirty is look’d upon as a raw Girl and can possibly make no noise in the World till about forty. I cannot help lamenting upon this Occassion the pittifull case of so many good English Ladys long since retir’d to pruderie and rattafia, who, if their stars had luckily conducted them hither, would still shine in the first rank of Beautys’ 

Arriving in Sofia she and Edward went sightseeing, then Lady Mary set out alone on a little mission of her own.  She hired a private coach, known as an araba and set out for a Turkish public bath, recording the experience in a letter to a friend dated 1st of April 1717 which opens, I am now got into a whole new World’.  The world of the bagnio.

It was hard to tell the mistresses from their servants, Lady Mary remarked for they were all ‘in the state of nature, that is, in plain English, stark naked’.  Having observed the conversation and seeing ‘some working, others drinking Coffee or sherbet’ Lady Mary came to the conclusion that, ‘In short, tis the Women’s coffee house, where all the news of the Town is told, Scandal invented etc.‘  Amongst her other letters from Turkey is another, also written on the 1st of April 1717.  It tells of the inoculation of her son against smallpox, using an accepted Turkish method of ‘ripping’ a four or five veins with a large needle, applying pus from the sores of a smallpox victim, then covering the site with a ‘hollow bit of shell’ and binding them up.  She reported to her husband, ‘The Boy was engrafted last Tuesday, and is at this time singing and playing and very impatient for his supper’.  The success of this operation led her to ‘take pains to bring this usefull invention into fashion in England’.  

Yet on her return to England she found both smallpox and arguments about its treatment raging.  During the epidemic of 1719 which saw many of her friends and acquaintances die of the disease, she was remarkably silent.  Then in the early part of 1721 it was so warm that roses bloomed in January and smallpox went ‘forth like a destroying Angel’.   Lady Mary called upon Charles Maitland, an English doctor she had met in Turkey, to inoculate her daughter but he hesitated.  It was one thing to perform the operation in Turkey, but another to do it in London.  He made sure he had two witnesses from the Royal College of Physicians before performing the operation.  One was James Keith, a friend of Maitland who had lost two of his sons to smallpox in 1717.  After seeing the operation he immediately inoculated his remaining son.  

London’s aristocracy began to visit Mary to see if they should engraft their own children.  The visitors included Caroline, Princess of Wales who was then behind the testing of inoculation on condemned prisoners in Newgate.  The experiment was a success, securing royal approval for smallpox inoculation, but the press did not take to it so kindly, or to Lady Mary.  She was branded an ‘unnatural mother who had risked the lives of her own children’ and people began to ‘hoot’ at her in the street.  Yet, the list of parents taking early action to protect their children is extensively drawn from Lady Mary’s own friends and acquaintances and the people who came to visit her children.  She exploited the polite tea party circuit and took her children all over London to show that they had been unharmed by the operation.  

The fact that she was well-known and her position in society contributed largely to the success of Maitland’s subsequent career in inoculation.  Their pioneering work would lay the bedrock built upon by Edward Jenner later in the century.  Jenner brought mass inoculation to England, but Lady Mary’s and Maitland’s early efforts laid the ground work, particularly amongst the charitable rich.

At the turn of the eighteenth century, London was becoming increasingly diverse. International trade meant that foreigners were a common sight on the streets, although not all of them would be obvious, at least not at first.

William Freeman was born on St Kitt’s in the West Indies in 1645. His father was likely to have been a member of the Suffolk militia had gone out to the Caribbean to seek his fortune. William was raised with his brothers and sisters on a plantation with two ‘sugar houses‘ which filled 260 sugar moulds, turning out large, cone-shaped pieces, which were then exported as part of the ‘triangular trade’ with Britain and Africa. They also owned eight horses, two goats, eighteen cattle, three pigs sixty sheep, some chickens and twenty slaves. His father grew mangoes and pimentos to supplement the children’s diets.

At 19 William moved to Nevis where he took his own wharf and warehouse, dealing in tobacco. He then bought a half share in Montserrat, which in hindsight seems ambitious for a young man. He got his big break when he was appointed a ‘factor‘ or agent for the Royal African Company, acting as the eyes and ears of the Company in the islands, seeing who needed how many slaves and when.

He married the sister of a London merchant and came to London, aged 30. They set up home at the western limits of the City as was fashionable for merchants at the time and he and his brother-in-law rented the dilapidated Crosby Hall on Bishopsgate, once the lodgings of Richard III. They used it as a warehouse for the sugar and also as a counting house, working beneath one of the City finest Gothic ceilings. Freeman’s knowledge of how the Caribbean worked meant he was called to Westminster to advise the government on a regular basis. His copybook, which survives, shows in minute detail the trouble he had managing his own Monserrat and Nevis plantations as an absentee landlord. He wanted not only slaves to labour there, but ‘as many lusty men and youth servants’ as he could get hold of, and he even resorted to sifting through London’s prisons to try to find men who would take up the offer of a new life and plantation work.

‘Tradesmen are very scarce’ he would often write, and thus he took up training slaves into the trades he required on the plantations. He bought a man named Valentine to have trained as a cooper (barrel-maker), but on discovering that Valentine worked left-handed, decided that he would never be able to train him up well enough and swapped him with a neighbour for the right-handed Bando. The swap niggled Freeman, who had much preferred Valentine and lamented the fact that he would remain just a ‘plantation negroe’, rather than a master of his trade, all for being left-handed. Freeman was also concerned for the diets of his plantation staff and had salt beef shipped from Ireland to the Caribbean so that they would have meat of what he imagined to be the best quality.

By the age of 38 Freeman was going blind and decided to retire on his profits to the house he had built near Henley, Fawley Court. Crosby Hall was let out during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a tennis court, an indoor football venue, a chapel and then a warehouse until it fell into disrepair before famously being moved brick by brick to the riverside at Chelsea in 1910, where it stands today. Freeman’s legacy in London is hardly a smudge on the fabric of the City’s official records yet he flourished here in his Gothic counting house, a curious English import. He fathered an illegitimate son, his only child, also named William who grew up to be a dealer in antique porcelain on the Gray’s Inn Road and who died in the 1760s. Out in Henley, Freeman continued to be a man of international correspondence and his library held many books printed in Paternoster Row especially for him, books he was no longer able to read. Perhaps they were read to him, beneath the ceiling he had commissioned for his new home, which bears in one corner the figure of a white boy and the other corner a black boy, the rest festooned with exotic fruit reminiscent of the mangoes and pimentos of his youth.

Dr Matthew Green is rather passionate about coffeehouses, and coffee history.  So passionate, in fact he wrote his PhD on the subject.  On Saturday, he'll be leading a very unusual tour of the City seeking out Georgian London's coffeehouses.  It starts at 2.30pm in St Michael's Churchyard, Cornhill and lasts 90 minutes.  I don't think I can reveal much more without giving the game away, but it's 'interactive' and promises to be both interesting and exciting.  It costs £8 and includes at least one shot of coffee brewed in the eighteenth century fashion.  You can hear a sample of the dashing Dr Green warming to his subject here, take a peep at the route here (wrap up warm, for Heaven's sake), read a summary of the tour here, and book here.  Great subject, great host, and something a little bit different from the usual City walking tours.  

The History Press were kind enough to send me A Grim Almanac of Georgian London by Graham Jackson and Cate Ludlow.  Cate's obsession with the darker side of history is evident in the large collection of horrific crimes and painful deaths she and Graham have put together in this excellent book.

Some of these tales were familiar, but there are plenty of new ones and I found myself reaching for a notebook and pen as I went along.  The book is well-produced and illustrated with rare images from the authors' collections.  This is not cosy reading, and the tales of domestic violence, infanticide, beatings, drownings and gory unsolved mysteries means it's best tackled piecemeal, but that is also one of the best things about it.  The authors have also put each case in context, and brought the characters to life as far as the details of the cases allow.  Because it's an almanac, sources are cited only rarely, so it's a 'reading book' not a reference book, but none the worse for that.

From the man who cut out his wife's tongue for 'telling lies' about him to children falling under wagons to pub brawls, the pace is relentless and reflects the authors' enthusiasm for their subject.  I was going to write more about this book, but there really isn't any need to: it's fun (really!), fascinating, and will tell even the most ardent Georgian London enthusiast something new.  I loved it.

That mischievous cartoonist and scribe Ade Teal is featured on pioneering publishing project Unbound at the moment with his most excellent Georgian miscellany The Gin Lane Gazette.  It's all very exciting and today Ade is guest posting on what the Gazette is about and why he's so in love with the Georgians.

In his declining, debt-ridden years, Beau Nash, the Master of Ceremonies at Bath, was looked after by his devoted mistress, the feisty and improbably-named Juliana Popjoy. When he eventually hopped the twig, she was so distraught that she lived for the rest of her days in a hollow tree. And there, in a nutshell, is what I love about the 1700s: everything was done with a great deal of commitment and panache. Today, a C-lister will leave her cage-fighter boyfriend, and inevitably it is splashed across the cover of a glossy rag: ‘So-and-So Tells of Her Pain.’ However much ‘pain’ they claim to be suffering, they don’t often renounce the world and live in a tree. 

The Georgians make today’s hell-raisers look like teetotal milksops. The eighteenth century gave us boozy Prime Ministers and party leaders who settled their political differences with duels in Hyde Park (when they weren’t gambling, or writing essays about farting); peers of the realm who had the unburied corpses of their cherished mistresses sat at their dinner tables; and celebrity courtesans who ate 1,000-guinea banknotes stuffed into sandwiches, simply to make a point. Before it was dashed from their lips by Victorian party-poopers, our Georgian forebears drank deep from the cup of life. 

So, how best to recapture some of the spirit of this gloriously dissipated and star-studded epoch? This question dogged me for some time, after it was suggested to me by John Mitchinson – co-creator of the BBC’s hit panel show, QI, the book spin-offs of which I have supplied with cartoons – that I should write and illustrate an historical tome. A lovely thought, but there is so much to enjoy about the 1700s that tying it all together in an original and exciting format seemed an impossible task.

Then, one day, I was reading a biography of William Cobbett, the Regency-period newspaper editor and author, when it struck me that a journalistic approach would be just the ticket. Why not illustrate and write about these disparate events as if they have just happened? The eighteenth century was both the first great age of newspapers and the golden age of caricature, after all. And books are still the best kind of virtual reality that we have, to my way of thinking. Could I generate virtual Georgian reality with words and pictures? An idea was born.

John was in the process of setting up his crowd-funded publishing venture, Unbound, and given the quirky, esoteric nature of the project I had in mind, it seemed the obvious road down which to push my newspaper cart. An accord was reached, and Unbound is now the book’s kindly and encouraging Fairy Godmother.

The GIN LANE GAZETTE will be a compendium of illustrated highlights from a fictional newspaper of the latter 1700s: a kind of Georgian Heat magazine, if you like. It will contain some of the most sensational headlines and true stories of the period, generated by many familiar figures from history during their more unguarded moments. The presses will be presided over by inky-fingered hack, Mr. Nathaniel Crowquill, the editor and proprietor, whose premises are located in Hogarth’s chaotic Gin Lane, and who has devoted fifty long years to sniffing out bawdy scandal and intrigue with which to titillate his London readership. His drunken acolyte, the rascally Mr. Jakes, supplies merciless caricatures and engravings, which disport themselves across every page. Sports reports, obituaries, fashion news, courtesans of the month, and advertisements for bizarre - and often alarming - goods and services will also feature in a riotous mélange of metropolitan mayhem. 

I have spent fifteen years producing cartoons for clients as diverse as The Sunday Telegraph, Jongleurs, and History Today, and have set out to combine my experience in journalistic caricature with my deep love of history in this – I believe - unique and evocative way. In the process, I hope to give readers an authentic flavour of the exuberance, self-confidence, debauchery, bravery, villainy, inventiveness, and eccentricity which characterize the Georgian world. 

Prithee honour this beguiling Endeavour, apt to adorn any ATHENAEUM of the Annals of Ages, with YOUR WORSHIPS’ most gracious Patronage. Or alternatively, buy it here.

One of the most extravagant conceits ever promulgated in connexion with the healing art, was started by Dr. Samuel Hahnemann, at Leipsick, about fifteen years ago, under the name of HOMEOPATHY.

The acknowledge principle in medicine is - “Contraria contrariis curantur” - that fevers, for instance, require cooling remedies, and that cold and numbness should be met by warm stimulants.  This idea is declared to by Hahnemann to be utterly erroneous; his doctrine is, that every irregularity in the system is a natural effort, and ought to be encouraged; to give effect to his notion, he administers to the invalid such medicines as would induce corresponding symptoms in a healthy individual, in fact, alcohol is the remedy for fever, and ice for ague; he admits that the remedies must be employed very sparingly, that the millionth part of a grain or a drop, is a full dose; that a brain fever at Greenwich (after the fair) might be cured by making the patient drink out of the Thames, into which a glass of gin had been thrown an hour previous at London-bridge!  

Glaring as this absurdity is, it has found some proselytes in London, but they have principally been among the aged of the softer sex.  

‘Every major art exhibition is always the same.  The ticket holders go in with their expensive tickets, and with their guide-books and ear-phone sets, and they look and they stare, and then they shuffle along and look and stare again.’

When the lovely @davidallengreen posted about the dreary didacticism of London's expensive art gallery exhibitions yesterday I read with interest and thought hard.  I am exceptionally lucky: I live in central London and have the opportunity to attend the exhibitions which take my fancy.  Some are better than others, but I go for the ‘Art’ and to see what I think.  
 

When I go to an exhibition I get the audio guide.  Having spent my wallet-stabbing 10-15 Great British Pounds I might as well.  And let’s not beat about the bush: ‘Art’ in the drying brushstroke or the horrifically-expensively-insured-flesh has never been for people who cannot pay to see with either in money or patronage.  Vermeer’s domesticity was not for the people, but his patrons and sometimes his friends. Their viewing of his pictures was influenced by what they knew of his household, and their own comparable set-ups.  They knew about the troublesome wife, the money problems, even down to the exquisite light of Delft’s famously clean and minimalist interiors.  They did not need the caption.
 

Likewise, one of David’s favourite portraits, that of Cecilia Gallerini by Leonardo da Vinci.  Cecilia was the mistress of Ludovico Sforza, one of Leonardo’s patrons and Duke of Milan.  She was educated in law, politics and art and held salons for Italy’s elite with her lover, twenty years her senior.  She was fifteen when Ludovico asked Leonardo to paint this portrait.  She would have to make way for his career and spend much of her life shunted from pillar to post but the ermine represents her purity, her elegant hand art, her face intelligence and a conceived idea of beauty.  It was displayed in her household during her lifetime, long after the affair was over.  This is a picture of a girl, like Elizabeth I at the same age, who understood men of ‘much wit but little judgment’.   It never fails to make my heart ache.

This picture demonstrates why knowledge is the key.  David is a lawyer, steeped in years of learning and experience of what comprises the law but art is no different: talented artists are born but it takes years to become proficient at drawing and painting.  Modern art claims a moment in time caught in swathes of paint which our gut identifies as positive or negative, and one to which we are all entitled.  It is largely conceived by men and women who did not need but wanted art.  This mechanism is notionally selfish and so, as invited voyeurs we might take what we want from it.  But the art of the 'masters' is one which asks for knowledge of who they were and what they hoped to gain from their work.  Smudges of Leonardo's fingerprints have been identified in Cecilia's face and hair.  They cannot be seen by just gazing at the picture, nor can the heartbreak of her life been seen in her fifteen year old face.  Older art tells a story to which we are not entitled, but might catch a glimpse if we are told.  We need the captions. 
 

They might be written by dry, disconnected curators or earnest interns with no idea what we might want to see on the wall.  Often, they are.  The internal workings of museums can make chronic hiatus hernia look like a holiday.  Frequently, the headset drones on with the voice of a twenty-first century patron, dispersing monotone largesse to the grunts who file through in their obedient masses.  

When looked upon as such, these exhibitions and that headset are shit value for money; they are the rich and entitled establishment doing their bit.  But their bit involves liaising with the museums, curators, shippers, insurance companies, banks, trusts, porters, interns, guides and visitors.  It involves people who know the minutiae of what there is to know about Cecilia Gallerani’s life trying to write a caption for people with only the barest understanding of the Renaissance.  That 20 quid, give or take, lets you into another world for the few hours you want it.  Those captions might not provide an instant and visceral connection to the cracked and oil-daubed piece of canvas in front of you but our interior worlds are private and precious, and who is to say what the middle-aged shuffler in front of you gains from Cecilia’s face.

Which in turn leads to my other main bone of contention with David’s article: ‘Any artist who puts any effort whatsoever into writing the caption, or the catalogue or sales "explanation" of their work, has no business calling themselves an artist’.  Total horseshit.  Leonardo had to explain himself to Cesare Borgia and Raphael to the Pope.  On a slightly more recent note I have hugely enjoyed Grayson Perry’s exhibition at the BM, Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman to which he has contributed not only his own art but multi-media ‘captions’.  Artists who do not, or cannot explain themselves are usually of the most mediocre order.  

To decry these exhibitions, and those who pay their money and file around the course is to sneer at anyone who wants to learn, to understand why great art was made and why.  It’s like sneering at the girl who queued up to see the Mona Lisa twenty years ago, heart in her mouth, garbage translation of the Musée du Louvre's catalogue clutched tightly in her hand.