Georgian London: Into the Streets Read Free Page B

feathers. Most paper was made from bleached rags which had been pressed into sheets: it was durable and provided a decent surface for the scratchy pens. This paper was purchased in ‘quires’ from stationers and bookshops, which would produce, when carefully cut or torn as directed, sheets of a size acceptable to the Post, costing one penny each to send.
    The importance of the postal system, and the literacy it fostered, was an integral part of the business of London itself, increasing the influence of London across the country and the wider world. Londoners could rely upon the rapid dispatch, but also receipt, of information. Far-flung thinkers enjoyed serial literature by post, which encouraged the regular publication of ongoing stories that would reach a peak with Charles Dickens. Serials were snapped up by eager hands in London, but also anticipated by villagers all over the country and serving soldiers across the world. Business letters were travelling between London and China on a regular basis by the 1720s. The barely literate wives of sailors addressed their letters to husbands on ships, with the current guesstimate of which dock they might be in, and a return address on the front if ‘ye ship be gone ’.
    From 1760 onwards, the Post Office was also responsible for introducing the rest of the country to the London media, by the franking and distribution of a large amount of the London press. Whilst thegovernment was becoming increasingly aware that it could not control the press, it could – through the Post Office – control its distribution. It franked and sent out the newspapers which were most supportive and least inflammatory to those ‘ who keep coffeehouses , that they might be furnished with them gratis’.
    With the expansion of the Post Office, a clerical office culture was born. The compositors of the early eighteenth-century printing houses were educated young men from grammar school backgrounds, but by the mid-eighteenth century orphanages had realized they could find work for literate boys and girls much more quickly than for those with manual skills. In 1784, the Post Office was worth £196,000. Thirty years later , it was worth over a million. In 1829, the Post Office moved to beautiful new buildings, designed by Robert Smirke, and situated in St Martin’s Le Grand, just north of St Paul’s Cathedral. It would remain there for almost a century, the culture of letters becoming ever stronger, but its roots would remain in the busy and ambitious mercantile ‘middling’ community of the eighteenth century.
LONDON’S ANCIENT MARKETS: SMITHFIELD, BILLINGSGATE, LEADENHALL AND THE FLEET
     
    Elsewhere in the City, away from the noisy construction site of St Paul’s and the bookish Paternoster Row, basic cash and commodity transactions continued as they had done for centuries. Smithfield Market, bounded on one side by the vast St Bartholomew’s Hospital, is an ancient livestock market and, today, the last surviving wholesale market in the City; Daniel Defoe was convinced it was, ‘ without question , the greatest in the world’.
    Smithfield was also the setting for Bartholomew Fair, a four-day spectacle held in September, where Ned Ward watched women compete in handstand races in 1703, although he did note they were wearing men’s breeches underneath their skirts. He and his friend also stopped at a cookshop, fancying some roast meat for which the area was so famous, but:
     

     
    Smithfield Market, detail from John Rocque’s map, 1745
     
     
…  no sooner had we entered this suffocating kitchen, than a swinging fat fellow, the overseer of the roast to keep the pigs from blistering, who was standing by the spit in his shirt, rubbed his ears, breast, neck and arm-pits with the same wet-cloth which he applied to his pigs … we defer’d our eating till a cleanlier opportunity.
     
    William Hone visited in 1825, at the end of the fair’s heyday. He recalled small stalls, selling
     
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