E.P. Thomson Menu People

THE ‘MENE PEUPLE’ AND THE POLITESPECTATOR: THE INDIVIDUAL IN THECROWD AT EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY

LONDON FAIRS*

In an effort to memorialize Bartholomew Fair as it teetered on thebrink of abolition, George Alexander Stevens, the author andactor most famous for his Lecture on Heads, composed a song in1763. For the benefit of posterity he portrayed the fairground as‘crowds against other crowds driving’ in a cacophony of noisefrom shows and rides, amongst a barrage of smells from thefood stalls and the fair-goers.1 Full of attractions, the fair temptedpeople ‘By sound and by show, by trash and by trumpery, / Thefal-lals of fashion, and frenchify’d frumpery’.2 To visit a fair was tobe distracted by gaudy garments on sale in the fairground boothsand worn on the bodies of gentlefolk who ‘strut in their silver andsatins’ alongside ‘poor folks . . . tramping in straw hats and pat-tens’. Venturing into the fair left you at risk of being assailed men-tally, as well as crushed physically.

The disorder of a London fair is vividly described, yet the poetallows the observer to derive order from the chaos. Stevens sep-arates fair-goers into two groups: the gentle and the poor. Thegentle seem to be above the crowds, able to ‘strut’ when thosearound them are left ‘tramping’ and ‘driving’ against each other.Their ‘silver and satins’ stand out when placed next to the ‘strawhats and pattens’ of working Londoners. The fairground crowd asrevealed by Stevens is heterogeneous in its appearance and man-ners, though drawn by the same novelties. Yet many of his gentle-folk would not have presented themselves in this way. While theywould have been pleased that their dress and gait set them apart,they would have contested the assumption that they could be

* I would like to thank Joanna Innes for her comments and suggestions on an earlierdraft of this article.

1 The Beauties of All the Magazines Selected, ed. George Alexander Stevens (London,[1762]–4), 336 (Stevens’s song).

2 OED defines a ‘fal-lal’ as ‘a piece of finery or frippery, a showy adornment indress’.

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distracted by bright clothes, trash, trumpery, fal-lals and frump-ery, as the poor folk were.

Just how people who considered themselves to be ‘gentle’would have presented themselves in relation to the fairgroundcrowd remains unclear. Historians have neglected an unavoidablepart of urban daily life in the eighteenth century: how people dealtwith the challenge of interacting with others in crowded streetsand entertainment venues.3 Fairground crowds were among themost heterogeneous in eighteenth-century London, and theyprovide an excellent opportunity for examining how peoplereacted to the different sorts around them. This has particularlyimportant implications for our understanding of the eighteenth-century concept of politeness, which in some contexts was a toolfor facilitating social interaction between unequal people. As a setof skills that could be adopted or adapted by a wide variety ofpeople, politeness might be employed in a variety of settings bythe elite or the middling sorts to demonstrate their social creden-tials.4 Historians have not worked out the ways in which polite-ness facilitated sociability in everyday contexts, nor have theythought about how it could function in the poorly regulatedspace of the street. Many fairground attractions would not havefitted in with the learned and improving activities generally con-sidered ‘polite’ in the Georgian period. Therefore fair-goers hadto develop strategies for presenting their use of the fair as a politeactivity.

This article explores how accounts left by fair-goers divergefrom Stevens’s description of the experience of attending a fair.These first-hand descriptions demonstrate that some peopleembraced fairs as places of distraction, but that other fair-goersattempted to set themselves apart from the crowd by describingtheir destinations as pre-selected. Thus different sorts of peoplesought to position themselves differently with reference to thecrowd. Social identity was asserted by carefully representingone’s activities in ways that corresponded with (or ignored)polite ideals.

3 A recent exception to this dearth is Susan E. Whyman, ‘Sharing Public Spaces’, inClare Brant and Susan E. Whyman (eds.), Walking the Streets of Eighteenth-CenturyLondon: John Gay’s Trivia (1716) (Oxford, 2007).

4 Lawrence E. Klein, ‘Politeness for Plebes: Consumption and Social Identity inEarly Eighteenth-Century England’, in Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (eds.), TheConsumption of Culture, 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text (London and New York, 1995).

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For all sorts of people, life in eighteenth-century London wasmarked by frequent interaction with crowds. The busy streetsof the metropolis had to be carefully navigated, and the yearwas punctuated with public events that drew large bodies ofpeople. An individual came into close contact with others dur-ing the course of evenings in taverns, coffee-houses and pleasuregardens, or in the audiences at elections, executions, plays, orcivic events such as the Lord Mayor’s Day procession.5 This ofteninvolved much social mixing: even if wearers of stars and gartersdid not exactly rub shoulders with hoi polloi, they still occupiedadjacent spaces and observed the same performances. However,everyone did not come with the same objectives in mind. Thevariety of activities available at a theatre or coffee-house was notunlimited, but it included more than simply watching the show ordrinking coffee while reading the news. By examining the ac-counts of first-person experience that survive for a particularkind of venue — the annual fairs held around the metropolis —it is possible to understand the ways in which individuals at publicgatherings described their own presence within crowded spaces.

Historians have generally had political crowds in mind whenthey developed tools for understanding the experience of crowds.Following on from the work of George Rude, scholars of politicalcrowds have attempted to find meaning in the demographicmake-up and in the forms and symbols used by people gatheredtogether for celebration or protest.6 This historiography has

5 Penelope J. Corfield, ‘Walking the City Streets: The Urban Odyssey inEighteenth-Century England’, Jl Urban Hist., xvi (1990); Susan E. Whyman,‘Introduction’, in Brant and Whyman (eds.), Walking the Streets of Eighteenth-Century London.

6 George Rude, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France andEngland, 1730–1848, new edn (London, 1995); E. P. Thompson, ‘The MoralEconomy of the English Crowd in the 18th Century’, Past and Present, no. 50 (Feb.1971); Mark Harrison, Crowds and History: Mass Phenomena in English Towns, 1790–1835 (Cambridge, 1988), 3–14, 23–30; Paul Griffiths, ‘Politics Made Visible: Order,Residence and Uniformity in Cheapside, 1600–45’, in Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R.Jenner (eds.), Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early ModernLondon (Manchester and New York, 2000); Nicholas Rogers, Crowds, Culture andPolitics in Georgian Britain (Oxford, 1998); Nicholas Rogers, ‘Crowds and PoliticalFestival in Georgian England’, in Tim Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500–1850 (Basingstoke and New York, 2001); Tim Harris, ‘Perceptions of the Crowd inLater Stuart London’, in J. F. Merritt (ed.), Imagining Early Modern London:Perceptions and Portrayals of the City from Stow to Strype, 1598–1720 (Cambridge,2001).

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argued for a unity of purpose among political crowds that has notbeen assumed for crowds at fairs, theatres or other public spacesof diversion. Emma Griffin has argued that social status played asignificant role in shaping recreational interests and experiences.7

Griffin questions the chronological arguments of Peter Burke andothers that the socially elite only gradually withdrew from dem-otic culture between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, bysuggesting that, if a shared culture had ever existed, it was gone by1700.8 But even if a shared culture never did exist as Burke pre-sents it, people from different backgrounds still shared spaces andattended the same events. A completely separate culture for theelite is no more plausible than a culture that attracted everyone.9

Gatherings in recreational settings have been less carefullystudied and are not so easily characterized as political crowds.This article examines how people saw themselves in relation tothose around them: in some cases it was as part of a crowd withsimilar goals and interests; while in others, it was as mentally andsocially separated from the mass of the crowd, though physicallypart of it. The latter perspective is reminiscent of the work byWalter Benjamin on nineteenth- and twentieth-century citystreets:10 for Benjamin the street was made up of individualsmoving about with different objectives in mind. Consequently,therefore, we need new analytical tools for evaluating experiencethat can account for the existence of contrasting understand-ings of the relationship between the individual and the group.

In many recreational contexts, extant sources suggest that thecrowds contained a wide variety of sorts of people.11 Studies of

7 Emma Griffin, England’s Revelry: A History of Popular Sports and Pastimes, 1660–1830 (Oxford, 2005), 80–1; Emma Griffin, ‘Sports and Celebrations in EnglishMarket Towns, 1660–1750’, Hist. Research, lxxv (2002), 205–7.

8 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 1988), 270–81;J. M. Golby and A. W. Purdue, The Civilisation of the Crowd: Popular Culture in England,1750–1900 (Stroud, 1999), 39.

9 A recent sociological study of twenty-first-century England has argued that,while there are people who engage only with popular culture, no one is exclusivelyhighbrow in their tastes: Tak Wing Chan and John H. Goldthorpe, ‘Social Stratifi-cation and Cultural Consumption: Music in England’, European Sociol. Rev., xxiii(2007).

10 Walter Benjamin et al., The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and KevinMcLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 524–5.

11 This also seems to have been true for political crowds: see, for instance, Harris,‘Perceptions of the Crowd in Later Stuart London’, 258–9. Robert Shoemaker alsodiscusses the mixing of different types in London’s streets and public spaces: Robert B.Shoemaker, The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth-Century England


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the crowds at theatres stress the variety of Londoners in theaudiences. In part, this is due to the emphasis placed in literaryand visual representations on the impressive variety of socio-economic groups found at theatres, pleasure gardens or othersocial spaces. Early works on the theatrical audience supportedthis view, though in recent decades scholars have doubted theextent of social mixing.12 Patrons of the middling and lowersorts formed a substantial portion of the crowd, but they wereoutnumbered by their social superiors and often watched fromdifferent areas. In contrast, at pleasure gardens or fairs differentsorts of people circulated more freely and were drawn by lessclearly defined attractions.

Politeness was an attribute of the genteel that has been used toanalyse virtually every aspect of the lives of local and nationalelites of the middle and upper classes in eighteenth-centuryEngland. Historians’ use of politeness as an analytical tool reflectsits ubiquity in contemporary print and manuscript documents.As a term it appears in discussions of form, sociability, improve-ment, worldliness and gentility.13 The sociable and improvingaspects of fairs provide evidence of how people of middling andsocially elite backgrounds presented their participation in crowdsat public events.

Adhering to expectations of polite conduct on the fairgroundrequired the ability to act with ease around different sorts of

(n. 11 cont.)

(London, 2004), 3–4. Jonathan Conlin has reviewed the evidence that Vauxhall was asocially mixed space and seems to support the literary representations of pleasuregardens as spaces where the respectable rubbed shoulders with the disreputable: seeJonathan Conlin, ‘Vauxhall Revisited: The Afterlife of a London Pleasure Garden,1770–1859’, Jl Brit. Studies, xlv (2006), 723–4.

12 Leo Hughes, The Drama’s Patrons: A Study of the Eighteenth-Century LondonAudience (Austin, 1971), 155–64. Recently Mark Dawson has qualified this view ofthe mixed theatrical crowd for the late Stuart period and Robert Hume has questionedthe ability of people of modest means to pay the entry fees. While Dawson demon-strates that the theatre did cater to all sorts of Londoners, he also shows that people ofhigher social standing had a stronger claim to space in the theatre, at the expense ofthe lower sorts. Jane Moody has also argued that social mixing in theatres was notsustained in practice in the early nineteenth century. Mark S. Dawson, Gentility andthe Comic Theatre of Late Stuart London (Cambridge, 2005); Robert D. Hume, ‘TheEconomics of Culture in London, 1660–1740’, Huntington Lib. Quart., lxix (2006),490–7; Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840 (Cambridge, 2000),174.

13 Lawrence E. Klein, ‘Politeness and the Interpretation of the British EighteenthCentury’, Hist. Jl, xlv (2002), 877.


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people at the same time as displaying an awareness of refinedtaste. Politeness sought to facilitate ‘easy’ and ‘natural’ sociabilitybetween people of different sorts, but it remains unclear how thismight have operated in spaces where informal social mixingoccurred.14 Even if people were able to navigate the socializingthat occurred at the fair, how should they have approached theactivities that sat uneasily alongside polite ideals? The disorderlycrowds, the loud and vulgar performances, the heavy drinkingand the presence of prostitutes should all have discouragedpolite attendance. Yet these dangers existed alongside boothsoffering shows and displays that could be interpreted as refinedor improving, and therefore polite. We find a variety of peoplewho presented themselves as polite navigating the fairground.

The idea of polite society was well known in the eighteenthcentury, but pinpointing just who was polite is difficult. Widelydistributed literature describing polite ideals provided both thesocially elite and the middling sort with a set of behaviours toexhibit and vocabulary to use when describing their activities.15

These tools could be called on selectively to facilitate interactionor demonstrate social status. But, just as people could call select-ively on the tools of politeness, so they could also be selectiveabout the activities they called upon at the fair. Thus, in descrip-tions of fairground behaviour and activities we see individualspresenting themselves in ways that did not violate polite idealsand that supported claims to social status and propriety. Actualbehaviour did not always live up to people’s accounts of them-selves, but we can nonetheless gain a better understanding of howpolite ideals were used to describe activities that potentially vio-lated polite codes. The remainder of this article examines therhetorical strategies used by those wishing to present themselvesas respectable as they navigated crowds and witnessed the folliesof the fair, and shows that such polite people attempted to sep-arate themselves mentally from the crowd around them in asituation where they could not create physical separation.

14 Ibid., 879–80. See, for instance, Elizabeth Shackleton’s interactions with trades-people: Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in GeorgianEngland (New Haven and London, 1998), 27–9.

15 Klein, ‘Politeness for Plebes’. This conceptualization of ‘politeness’ borrowsheavily from Chartier’s work on cultural appropriation: Roger Chartier, ‘Culture asAppropriation: Popular Cultural Uses in Early Modern France’, in Steven L. Kaplan(ed.), Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the NineteenthCentury (Berlin and New York, 1984).


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II

Fairgrounds may have been the public space that brought to-gether the largest cross section of London’s population, par-ticularly in the early Hanoverian period when the royal familyventured to Bartholomew Fair almost every year. Fairs owedpart of their attraction to their timing in August and Septemberwhen the theatres were closed for the summer. Bartholomew Fairwas the most important in London; it was held in Smithfield onthe northern edge of the City. Centred on St Bartholomew’s Day,24 August (moved to 3 September when the calendar was re-formed in 1752), it lasted for up to two weeks early in the cen-tury.16 Attempts to regulate the fair focused on shortening itsduration, generally to the three days set out in its charter, andbanning plays and shows; by the early nineteenth century itseems to have stabilized at a length of four days. There was alsoSouthwark Fair, held in early and mid September in the neigh-bourhoods just south of London Bridge, which drew substantialcrowds until its abolition in 1763. Lesser fairs in the metropolitanarea included Tottenham Court Fair, held in mid August in thearea where Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street now meet,Islington Fair, also in August, and fairs at Tothill Fields andGreenwich in April, and at Westminster in May, in the area thatwould become known as Mayfair.

The fairs offered a variety of attractions held within hundreds ofbooths. Bartholomew Fair was located both in the open space infront of the entrance to St Bartholomew’s Hospital and along thelanes to the east and west of the open space of West Smithfield.The ground would have been filled partly with wooden stalls forselling food, drink and goods, and partly with show booths andrides. A substantial amount of open space would have remained,occupied by people standing and by carriages circulating aroundthe attractions. During the fair West Smithfield would have beenconsiderably more crowded with people than usual (normally thesquare was occupied with a meat market that dealt with herdsof cattle and sheep). This was a better place for a fair thanSouthwark, where the booths lined the road at the southern endof London Bridge, creating a traffic nightmare. Because of the

16 The most substantial account of this fair can be found in Henry Morley, Memoirsof Bartholomew Fair (London, 1973).


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way that streets radiated out from Smithfield, avoiding Bartholo-mew Fair would have involved weaving through the narrow andwinding alleys that made up most of the thoroughfares in this partof town. Fairs held on the periphery of the metropolis in SpaFields or at Tottenham Court were held on open ground andwere more easily avoided than the fairs at Southwark andSmithfield.

Reconstructing the fairground and fair-goers involves the care-ful gathering of an eclectic mix of sources. The evidence con-sidered in this article is primarily drawn from newspapers,court cases, and diaries. All three sources must be read with acritical eye and are generally unverifiable. Court cases could pro-vide evidence from multiple sources to verify the accounts, butoften the testimony was one-sided. Stories found in newspaperswere frequently based on hearsay and were sometimes fabricated;and though the regularity of reports of the royal family visitingfairs indicates that those reports are true, descriptions of fair-ground crowds (particularly when they may be puffs planted byentrepreneurs to advertise an attraction) have to be used withcaution. As for diaries, they cannot be considered reliable de-scriptions of behaviour or activities either; they were often readby people other than the author, and diarists certainly attemptedto present themselves in particular (though not always genteel)ways. Yet, while none of these sources gives consistently reliableinsight into what people really got up to at fairs or how they feltabout their behaviour, they do show us how people wanted othersto see their fairground activities. We do not need to verify the truthof the accounts so much as consider why actions were presentedin the ways they were.

The shows staged within the fairs have received most atten-tion from scholars because of the strong documentary evidenceprovided by surviving handbills and newspaper advertisements.Showmen offered farces, boiled-down plays, biblical tales, pup-pet and harlequin shows, human and animal oddities, contor-tionists and acrobats.17 The shows were only a minority of theattractions, however. Food stalls offering pork, sausages and con-fections appear to have been abundant, as were booths offering

17 Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass., 1978); SybilRosenfeld, The Theatre of the London Fairs in the 18th Century (Cambridge, 1960);Susan Chandler Haedicke, ‘ ‘‘From Booths, to Theatre, to Court’’: The TheatricalSignificance of the London Fairs, 1660–1724’ (Univ. of Michigan Ph.D. thesis, 1984).


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drinks and space for dancing. And while London fairs were nolonger significant marts for the wholesale distribution of cloth,they continued to draw retailers selling haberdashery and toys.18

Handkerchiefs, lace and ribbons, as well as small metal goods,featured prominently. There were also rides, in particular theup-and-down, an early form of a big wheel or Ferris wheel.

As in the case of other public spaces in eighteenth-centuryLondon, a comprehensive answer to who made up the fairgroundcrowds is impossible. Social mixing was one of the salient featuresof literary representations of fairs, and authors and poets stressedboth the variety of people and their proximity to each other. Oneauthor described a fairground crowd divided by profession andsocial type thus: ‘Turnkeys . . . and Hackney Scribes’, ‘garter’dKnights’ and shoe-boys, as well as sparks, beaux, apprentices,damsels and whores.19 Unsurprisingly, many descriptions didnot suggest that the proximity of different sorts was admirable.As one particularly splenetic poet, Richard Barton, scribbled:

The populace that croud the Fair,Where Wapping and St. [James’s] unite,Pleas’d with coarse objects of delight:The chambermaid and Countess sitAlike admirers of the wit:The Earl and footman tete-a-teteSit down contented on one Seat.20

Barton here described a union of the court and the labouringpopulation at the fairground. In his depiction, not only do diverseelements come into contact, but they share seats and appreciatethe attractions in the same manner. But, in reality, while vulgarentertainments might be acceptable for chambermaids and foot-men, a countess or earl ought not to enjoy them in the same way

18 The commercial role of fairs has been recently re-examined by Ian Mitchell: seehis ‘The Changing Role of Fairs in the Long Eighteenth Century: Evidence from theNorth Midlands’, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., lx (2007). Fairs were not internationalmarts like Continental fairs, nor should they be considered as markets which providedunprepared food and dry goods. For markets, see Colin Smith, ‘The Wholesale andRetail Markets of London, 1660–1840’, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., lv (2002). Forexamples of spending at Bartholomew Fair, see the account book of John Angell:Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Eng. Misc. D233, pp. 35–7, 78, 122–3.

19 A Walk to Smith-Field: or, A True Discription of the Humours of Bartholomew-Fair,with the Many Comical Intrigues and Frolicks that Are Acted in Every Booth in the Fair, byPersons of All Ages and Sexes, from the Court Gallant to the Countrey Clown . . . ([London],1701), 1; Bartholomew-Fair: or, A Ramble to Smithfield. A Poem in Imitation of Milton(London, 1729), 3–4.

20 Richard Barton, Farrago: or, Miscellanies in Verse and Prose (London, 1739), 49–58.


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as, and side by side with, their servants — hence Barton’s satiricalspleen.21 Such anxiety about the declining standards of culturalleaders echoes Alexander Pope’s complaints from the early part ofthe eighteenth century about Bartholomew Fair’s negative influ-ence on the court.22

While evidence of just who did go to fairs is fragmentary andsparse, it does appear that all London’s classes were represented— from the royal family all the way down to street urchins andthe desperately poor. Fairground entertainments could cater tothe wealthy and refined, but those without money could enjoy thefair as well. Members of the royal family and nobility visitedBartholomew and Southwark fairs every year from 1714 untilthe early 1740s, and newspapers kept readers informed of theirfair-going proclivities.23 Frederick, prince of Wales, was a par-ticularly keen theatre-goer and he extended his patronage to thefairground booths as well. Between 1732 and 1736 he could befound on the fairground each year, and newspapers and boothowners gleefully reported the shows he had seen with his wife orsisters.24 Frederick was also said to have attended Southwark andBartholomew fairs incognito, allegedly even taking his new bridein one instance, though the veracity of the reports is suspect.25

Frederick’s brother, William, duke of Cumberland, also appearedregularly at the fairs, just as nobles such as the duchess of Boltonand the duke of Montague had done: they were spotted at drollsby Dudley Ryder and his friends in the 1710s.26

21 Even more unifying is the message of a song from The Honest Yorkshireman, whichcomplains that, besides ‘Prentice Boys, / And pretty Maids’, ‘The Country, the Court’were also adversely affected by social miscegenation: see Henry Carey, The HonestYorkshireman: A Ballad Farce (London, 1777), 17.

22 For more on Pope’s comments, see Haedicke, ‘ ‘‘From Booths, to Theatre, toCourt’’ ’; Pat Rogers, Literature and Popular Culture in Eighteenth Century England(Brighton, 1985), ch. 3.

23 For an account of each member of the royal family in the context of their theatre-going habits, see Harry William Pedicord, ‘By Their Majesties’ Command’: The House ofHanover at the London Theatres, 1714–1800 (London, 1991).

24 Grub Street Jl, 31 Aug. 1732; 21 Sept. 1732.25 Grub Street Jl, 20 Sept. 1733; 4 Sept. 1735; 2 Sept. 1736.26 The Diary of Dudley Ryder, 1715–1716, ed. William Matthews (London, 1939),

86, 101; Gertrude Savile, Secret Comment: The Diaries of Gertrude Savile, 1721–1757,ed. Alan Saville (Thoroton Soc., Record ser., xli, Nottingham, 1997), 55, 132.Notices of the nobility at fairs have not come to light for the remainder of the eight-eenth century, but one does appear in the early nineteenth century: see MorningChron., 12 Sept. 1806.


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Early in the century the gentry could be found at the fairs, asdemonstrated by visits recorded in the diaries of William Byrd,a Virginia landowner, and of Dudley Ryder, the future judge.27

The presence of merchants and residents of the city can also beconfirmed by court cases and diary evidence. The American ex-patriate Samuel Curwen reported visiting Bartholomew Fairtwice in his diary in the 1780s.28 Two diarists named StephenMonteage, father and son clerks at the Excise Office, repeatedlywent to or passed through fairs between the 1730s and the1760s.29 John Grano, a trumpet player who was patronized bymembers of the nobility, ventured into Southwark Fair whilebeing held in Marshalsea Prison for debt in 1728.30 JosephUnderwood, a victim of an attack by the Black Boy Alley gang,served as keeper of Ludgate and was referred to as a gentlemanout of respect for his post.31 Evidence of other people of respectedand potentially polite status at fairs survives in records of trialsrelated to their servants who accompanied them. In a 1726 rapetrial, for instance, the victim had attended Tottenham Court Fairwith her mistress and the mistress’s children, but became separ-ated from them by the crowd.32 The family lived at the north endof Swallow Street (later entirely destroyed to make way for RegentStreet), near Oxford Street and Hanover Square; while a home in

27 William Byrd, The London Diary, 1717–1721, and Other Writings, ed. Louis B.Wright and Marion Tinling (New York, 1958), 315.

28 The Journal of Samuel Curwen, Loyalist, ed. Andrew Oliver, 2 vols. (Cambridge,Mass., 1972), ii, 663, 783.

29 Guildhall Library, London, MS 205/2, 24–25 Aug. 1738. There is some confu-sion about the authors of these diaries. According to the National Register of Archivesand the Guildhall Library the diaries are all by the same person, born in 1681 (ref. GB/NNAF/P155072). Other volumes of Stephen’s diary are in the Althorp Collection inthe British Library (Add. MSS 75501–10). The finding aid for this collection demon-strates that the volumes from 1757 and later were actually by the son, also calledStephen, baptized in St James’s, Westminster, in 1710.

30 John Grano, Handel’s Trumpeter: The Diary of John Grano, ed. John Ginger(Stuyvesant, NY, 1999), 92–4; Bodleian Lib., Rawlinson MS D34, pp. 95, 108–9,500, 508.

31 Old Bailey Proceedings online (hereafter OBP), 5http://www.oldbaileyonline.org4, Dec. 1744, trial of William Brister, James Page, Theophilus Watson, JamesRoberts, John Potbury, otherwise Jack the Sailor, William Billingsly, otherwise Gugg,Henry Gadd, otherwise Scampey (t17441205-34); John Earle, The World Display’d: or,Mankind Painted in their Proper Colours (London, 1742), 197. He was also an ensign inthe Yellow Regiment of the London militia in 1738. Being called a ‘gentleman’ was nolonger limited to people of gentle status.

32 Select Trials at the Sessions-House in the Old-Bailey, 4 vols. (Dublin, 1742–3), iii,49. The servant encountered a pair of young men, had some sort of sexual liaison withone of them and accused him of rape.


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this location did not guarantee gentility, it suggests that the familywas fairly well off.

As we have just seen, there were servants at the fairs too, and wefind them alongside apprentices and tradesmen. Luxury trades-men were present, as were less prestigious workers. John Parker, ajeweller and goldsmith, was robbed while walking up to a show,and there is evidence indicating widespread attendance at fairs bypeople of more modest means.33 As Sarah Smith respondedduring the trial of her husband’s apprentice William Milner,when asked why she had allowed Milner to attend BartholomewFair: ‘It is customary for boys to go’.34 Enjoying an evening at alocal fair was a standard activity for unmarried people of the mid-dling and lower sorts. As the examples in the remainder of thisarticle show, the fair was a place for men and women, for drovers,apprentices, sailors and dock workers, servants, cork cutters andcalenderers. Though the examples are mainly male, females at-tended as well, both as entrepreneurs (including prostitutes) andas fair-goers.35

The fairground was a mixed and busy space, but entrepreneurssupplied elite entertainments intended to provide opportunitiesto avoid the crowd. Theatrical booths adopted the stratified seat-ing present in theatres, advertising up to four separate sectionsdifferentiated by price. Advertisements from the 1740s first indi-cated that separate seating was available for a higher price, andcontinued broadcasting the amenity until the late 1770s. AtHussey’s Great Theatrical Booth in George Inn Yard at Bartholo-mew Fair in 1747, for example, Tamerlane the Great was beingshown with four levels of seating available: boxes for 2s. 6d., pitseats for 1s. 6d., first-gallery tickets for 1s., and second-gallerytickets for 6d.36 Similarly, advertisements informed potentialvisitors that the booths’ owners had devised ways of entering

33 OBP, Oct. 1786, trial of William Thompson (t17861025-2).34 OBP, Sept. 1768, trial of William Milner (t17680907-71).35 Anne Wohlcke, ‘Wives, Windows, and Singlewomen: Working Women at

London’s Eighteenth-Century Fairs’, Essays in Economic and Business History, xxiv(2006); Savile, Secret Comment, ed. Saville, 55, 132.

36 General Advertiser, 22 Aug. 1747. The ticket prices for watching a performance atHussey’s booth were similar to those advertised in newspapers by other showmen. JonStobart has recently argued that socially elite customers were often mentioned inprovincial advertisements not because entrepreneurs were trying to lure in thegentry, but to demonstrate the fashionability of their goods to middling customers.Jon Stobart, ‘Selling (through) Politeness: Advertising Provincial Shops inEighteenth-Century England’, Cultural and Social Hist., v (2008).


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the shows without being molested by the crowds. Hussey’s ad-vertisement announced that ‘Gentlemen’s COACHES may driveup the Yard’ and others created passages that could be enteredfrom outside the fairground. Coaches could also be hired toescape the crowds. Ned Ward jumped in a coach ‘to escape theDirt and the uneasiness of a Crowd’ as he departed BartholomewFair.37 Set above the pedestrians, a passenger in a coach was thusout of the fray, safe from danger and secure in his or her superiorphysical position.38 Entrepreneurs clearly believed that offeringpatrons the opportunity to demonstrate their separation from thecrowd would attract the quality into their audience.

III

It is not surprising to find the political and social elites settingthemselves apart from the mob when describing their activitiesat fairs. From tradesmen who created luxury goods up to thegentry and nobility, people with pretensions to elite social statusemphasized their refined choices of amusements and in this waydistinguished themselves from the people around them. People ofmiddling, gentry and noble status presented themselves as politein order to justify their presence and behaviour.

The shows of choice for people with claims to politeness weretheatrical and scientific. These had the potential to instruct andimprove their audiences and provided access to the elite attrac-tions normally on display at the patent theatres. Throughout thefirst three-quarters of the century fairground booths and thepatent theatres shared many thespians, particularly comicactors. With Covent Garden and Drury Lane theatres closedduring the summer, it made financial sense for the performersto seek work elsewhere, and many found employment in fairs,both in London and further afield. Fairs also provided oppor-tunities for up-and-coming actors and actresses to establishthemselves as worthy of the more polite settings of Drury Laneand Covent Garden. Mrs Pritchard’s breakout performance inFielding and Hippisley’s booth at Bartholomew Fair in 1733

37 [Edward Ward], The London-Spy Compleat, in Eighteen Parts, 4th edn, 2 vols.(London, 1709), i, 236.

38 For more on the role of the coach as a protected space, see Susan E. Whyman,Sociability and Power in Late-Stuart England: The Cultural Worlds of the Verneys, 1660–1720 (Oxford, 1999), 102.


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created a stir among people writing for periodicals read bythe respectable as well as by their socially aspiring inferiors.39

Pritchard’s particularly popular recital of ‘Sweet, if you love me,smiling turn’ in A Cure for Covetousness attracted so much noticethat poems dedicated to her appeared in the Gentleman’sMagazine.40 A contributor to that magazine celebrated her per-formance and hoped to see her ‘on some nobler stage’ in thefuture. It was thus possible to find performances more suited tothe audiences at Drury Lane and Covent Garden in lowlysettings.

Some diarists tried to leave little doubt that the theatricalbooths were their primary interest. In 1757, diarist StephenMonteage, a single man in his late forties, went to BartholomewFair with two friends; he ‘went to Yates & Shuters Booth fromthence to the Star in Aldersgate Street’.41 Monteage records thathe did his drinking in his usual haunt, not (as many others did) atone of the numerous tents for drinking in the fairground. Theattraction of the fairground for Monteage was clearly the showbooths, something further emphasized by his visit to SouthwarkFair six years later. In that year, he passed through SouthwarkFair, but tells his readers that he did not stay.42 Rather, he sug-gested that the partly abolished fair was no fair at all. Monteage‘went and saw what is call’d Southwark Fair, a very poor one, noshews’. Without shows, a fair was not worth seeing; it was just animpersonation of a fair. He presents himself as attending fairs fora specific, anticipated activity, though in 1763 he had obviouslynot checked on the availability of his preferred form of entertain-ment before visiting. Fairground drinking and gambling held noappeal for Monteage: he had other urban spaces, including tav-erns, pubs and coffee-houses, in which to drink.43 In his accounthe contrasts himself with many other visitors to Southwark Fairwho were content to eat, drink and play games of chance.Monteage continued on his walk.

39 Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (Oxford andNew York, 1989), 65, 91.

40 Gentleman’s Mag. (Mar. 1733), 490.41 Guildhall Lib., MS 205/8, 3 Sept. 1757.42 Guildhall Lib., MS 205/9, 19 Sept. 1763.43 Interestingly, Monteage was a keen walker and always stopped in rural and semi-

rural taverns along the way. In 1758, however, one of his walks did include a stop fordrinking at the fair in Peckham, then a rural hamlet popular as a commuting town forCity merchants.


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Such attention to theatrical booths is found in other diaries.John Grano went to Southwark Fair a couple of times in both1728 and 1729. He walked around the fair, but also visited spe-cific booths. On 17 September 1728 he went with a Mr Adam ‘togo to ye Fair and see the Beggar’s and Quaker’s Opera’. Togetherthey walked ‘all about ye Fair Stopt [in] Fieldings Booth . . . took aTour about ye Mint . . . then went back to Fieldings Booth wherewe saw the conclusion of ye last Act, then went to Lee’s Boothwhere we saw about Half ye Quaker’s Opera’.44 Like Monteage,Grano was specific about the theatrical attractions he viewed andleft out details about the rest of his visit.

Scientific curiosities were also regarded as respectable spaces inthe fairground where improving knowledge could be obtainedfrom unusual specimens brought to the capital by entrepre-neurs.45 For example, an expensive and highbrow volumeof images and descriptions of plants and animals, GeorgeEdwards’s Gleanings of Natural History, discusses the interactionsof various animal species as revealed at fairground shows. Byintroducing a male maimon to a female on display at Bartholo-mew Fair, Edward was able to examine ape sociability.46

Virtuosi were not the only people to suggest that they directedtheir steps specifically towards scientific curiosities in the fair-ground. The goldsmith and jeweller from St Paul’s Churchyard,John Parker, described his actions and motivations on an after-noon in September 1786 thus: ‘I went into Smithfield during thetime of the fair to see a heifer with two heads, with two ladies’.47

By Parker’s account, there is no mistaking what he was up towhen his pocket was picked that day. He was going directly to ashow — a show that could be regarded as a polite space where itwas not inappropriate to take ladies. Curiosity — a word whichin this period had semi-scientific associations — was Parker’smotivation: he had entered the fair with a purpose and a specificdestination.

44 Grano, Handel’s Trumpeter, ed. Ginger, 93–4; Bodleian Lib., Rawlinson MS D34,p. 108. Gertrude Savile wrote similar accounts of going to Bartholomew Fair in 1727and 1728: see her Secret Comment, ed. Saville, 55, 132.

45 Brian Cowan has pointed out how the exotic displays at fairgrounds and coffee-houses operated in similar ways to draw virtuosi: see his The Social Life of Coffee: TheEmergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven and London, 2005), 126–9.

46 A maimon is closely related to the mandrill.47 OBP, Oct. 1786, trial of William Thompson (t17861025-2).


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The spectacle of the crowd and the Lord Mayor’s processionprovided another possible justification for polite people to visitthe fair, though it was essential to avoid becoming part of thecrowd. Each year the Lord Mayor processed from the MansionHouse, under Newgate where he enjoyed a cool tankard with thekeeper, and around the fairground, before reading the regulationsgoverning the fair, proclaiming the fair open, and returning to theMansion House for a ceremonial feast.48 Samuel Curwen twiceattempted to watch the event, but failed both times. In the firstinstance he arrived too late to hear the proclamation, and wasdismissive of the scene before him: the fair was ‘a mere rabblerout . . . relishable only by ‘‘mene peuple’’ [sic]’, and Curwensuggests that he quickly departed.49 Undeterred, he tried againthe following year, 1781. On this occasion, he arrived in time tohear the proclamation, but the noise and confusion of the crowdin the tight space sent the American dashing away without seeingthe Lord Mayor.50 The anxiety of being overwhelmed by thedriving crowds, Curwen pleads, forced him to give up his task.The fairground was no place for a respectable man. Yet he re-turned to Smithfield later in the afternoon to act as an escort andguide for Mrs Snelson, the wife of a friend.51 Curwen broughtMrs Snelson ‘to show her the Fair’ so that she too could see theoverall spectacle. He does not mention going to drink or dance oreven see the shows; the fair itself was the show, a curiosity that he,a constant tourist, wanted to see and show off.

Going through the fair was another way of justifying presencewithin the fairground without suggesting improper behaviour.Several witnesses and victims of fairground crimes reinforcedtheir credibility by claiming that the fair was not their destinationat all, rather it was simply located along their route. George Hunt,who aided Walter Simmons, a victim of theft, at Tottenham CourtFair, declared that ‘On the 18th of August, between 9 and 10 atNight, I was coming through the Fair with two of my Friends, andI saw Simmons have hold of the Prisoner, on the Outside of the

48 See also the mayoral diaries of Richard Clarke and Marshe Dickinson: GuildhallLib., MSS 3385 and 100, respectively.

49 Journal of Samuel Curwen, ed. Oliver, ii, 663.50 The fairground noise must have been tremendous. John Grano was unable to

evaluate the quality of a German flute in his room in a building adjacent to SouthwarkFair: Grano, Handel’s Trumpeter, ed. Ginger, 92; Bodleian Lib., Rawlinson MS D34,p. 95.

51 Journal of Samuel Curwen, ed. Oliver, ii, 783.


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Booth’.52 Hunt presents himself as an uninvolved passer-by,merely on his way from one side of the fair to the other. Simi-larly, victims of assault, battery and robbery described them-selves as victims of unlucky chance rather than as risk takers bydeclaring that they were passing through the fairground. JohnBarnes, for instance, stated to the court that he ‘was going thro’Bartholomew-fair last Monday the 5th of [September], aboutfour in the afternoon’ when he was robbed.53 Such testimonymay well have been true, but the fact that witnesses and victimsmade it so explicit suggests that they believed that it would helptheir case. Walking through the fairground was not considerablydifferent from what many plebeian people did when they went tothe fair, as we shall see shortly.

The highly selective accounts of fairground amusements givenby those hoping to be respectable echo the newspaper reports ofroyal visits to theatre booths. Frederick, prince of Wales, receivedclose attention and the reportage suggested that his visits tookhim to particular theatre booths, not just into the throng to beattracted by whatever took his fancy. In 1736, Frederick and hisbrother the duke of Cumberland ‘went to see Mr. Fawkes’s inim-itable Performances at Bartholomew Fair, with which their RoyalHighnesses seem’d highly delighted’.54 The prose suggests thatFawkes’s show was the destination and that its location just hap-pened to be at Bartholomew Fair. The reports were probablypuffs for the booths whose owners paid the newspapers to adver-tise for them. But not all reports of royals in the fairground werepuffs, and it seems likely that many of the reports were genuine,even though certain aspects of the visits were emphasized to serve

52 Great Britain, Sessions (City of London and County of Middlesex), TheProceedings at the Sessions of Peace, Oyer and Terminer, for the City of London, andCounty of Middlesex ([London], 1739–40), 240–1. See also the testimony of JosephStokes, in Great Britain, Sessions (City of London and County of Middlesex), TheWhole Proceedings on the King’s Commission of the Peace, Oyer and Terminer, and GaolDelivery for the City of London (London, 1799), 72.

53 OBP, Sept. 1768, trial of William Milner (t17680907-71).54 Daily Post, 26 Aug. 1736. See also London Daily Post and General Advertiser, 26

Aug. 1740. The reasons why the royal family stopped attending fairs are obscure. Thechildren of George II may have made their last appearance in this year because theywere reaching adulthood and had less time for fairs once they were married or took onother responsibilities. By the time George III was having children in the 1760s thefairground may have been seen as an inappropriate or immoral place for the royalhousehold.


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more effectively as advertisements. Nor were the royals limited totheatricals, but the evidence suggests that they did not go anylower than scientific displays. ‘The Duke’ and Princess Ameliawent to Bartholomew Fair in 1736 ‘and saw the tall woman’, oneof the human oddities available that year.55 Newspapers ascribeda clear sense of direction to members of the royal family.

Accounts by people presenting themselves as quality might leadus to believe that the fairground contained only a handful of the-atre booths, a couple of freak shows and the odd sleight-of-handexhibition. Yet, as the Pie Powder Court rolls and a survivingaccount book of payments received from booth tenants reveal,Bartholomew Fair contained more then a hundred stalls.56 Thelarge, advertised amusements existed alongside dozens of puppetshows, merry-andrews, stalls selling haberdashery and other dur-able goods, gambling booths, and drinking and dancing tents.This panoply of entertainment options distracted fair-goers —and it is that willingness to be distracted which separates thedescriptions written or related by artisans, apprentices and thelabouring poor from the accounts we have already examined.

For the majority of fair-goers, it was not a single type of attrac-tion or a particular booth that caught their attention. The labour-ing poor went for a variety of reasons, and neither low life nor aparticular activity adequately captures their motivations. Fairswere destinations in themselves, where a variety of activitiescould occur and blend into each other. As a result, people didnot describe themselves as going to particular venues, but ratheras being ‘at the fair’ or ‘in the fair’.57 It is not that people whoclaimed politeness were not easily distracted: we can imagineDudley Ryder wandering through Cheapside browsing in expen-sive shops. Rather, it is the willingness of plebeian fair-goers to bea part of the crowd and be easily distracted at the same time thatsets them apart. Plebeian fair-goers rarely mentioned high-endfairground shows like those that appear in diary accounts or news-paper advertisements. Drunkenness may help explain the lack of

55 Daily Advertiser, quoted in Grub Street Jl, 2 Sept. 1736.56 ‘Piepowder Court Rolls’: Highclere Castle, Newbury, Berkshire, National

Register of Archives (ref. GB/NNAF/C67687); ‘Bartholomew Fair Account Book’:Corporation of London Record Office, COL/SP/05/009.

57 OBP, Oct. 1786, trial of Joseph Perry (t17861025-103); OBP, Sept. 1789, trial ofEdward Steel (t17890909-136); OBP, Feb. 1761, trial of Willy Sutton (t17610225-18).


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specificity about activities found in plebeian accounts. Working-class memories seem to have retained information only aboutgeneral sorts of fairground activities: for example, drinking ina music booth or watching a merry-andrew. Whether this is adifference between high and low fair-goers in actual practicerather than in presentation of practice we shall never know, butevidence of plebeian activities suggests such a difference.

Plebeian fair-goers, of course, did not forget all they didor where they did it. The descriptions of fairground activitiescan be assembled on a continuum based on their levels ofclarity. Descriptions like those recorded by Monteage or Parkercontrast with the narratives offered by Mary Iverson, ThomasNevil and Michael Brown.58 These three testified to ‘going toBartholomew-fair’ on the night of Saturday 6 September. Whenthey were there, they decided to see ‘the little man at the top ofHosier Lane’, and while ‘standing among the mob’ Mary’s coatwas stolen. Significantly, unlike Parker, they did not go to thefair to see the little man, as Parker did for the heifer with twoheads; Iverson and Nevil mention in their first sentences thatthey were going to the fair, and only later did the group’s intentionto visit ‘the little man’ come out. Using the nature of an attractionto stand in for the name of the impresario is a feature of othertestimony as well. On 7 September 1789, William Mumford tookhis son to Bartholomew Fair.59 There, he later told the court atthe Old Bailey, ‘at a quarter after four; I took my little boy on myshoulders, near the wild beasts’. Mumford did not identify whichof the nationally famous collections of live animals he visited atthe fair.60

Others were certainly attracted to the drinking booths, some-times with negative consequences. Walter Simmons and ‘aFellow-Workman . . . went to Tottenham-Court-Fair’ in August1739.61 Simmons’s companion met ‘with Company’ and as aresult Simmons ‘left him, and walked by a Booth, which waskept by one Cummins. The Prisoner Stuart was in the Booth,and asked me to come in and drink; telling me there was as

58 OBP, Oct. 1766, trial of John More (t17661022-17).59 OBP, Sept. 1789, trial of Edward Steel (t17890909-136).60 In both the 1760s and the 1800s several collections of animals were displayed:

Corporation of London Record Office, COL/CC/CLC/01/045, fo. 53.61 Sessions (City of London and County of Middlesex), Proceedings at the Sessions of

Peace, Oyer and Terminer, 240–1.


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good Liquor, as any in the Fair’. As he wandered, Simmons wascalled into a booth by another customer promising good-qualityalcohol. Simmons had no anxiety about his aimless wandering,nor did he express any compunction about seeking out alcoholwhen describing his behaviour in the context of a criminal trial.Without a specific destination, Simmons would go into whateverbooth happened to draw him, in this case a booth with a patronwho sang the praises of its alcohol.

While merchants and people with polite pretensions set them-selves apart from the people around them and expressed anxietyat being a part of the mob, fair-goers with different objectives fortheir testimony did not record experiencing any discomfort incrowded situations. William Cork, a drover from Sevenoaks inKent, was at the corner of Newgate Street with his brother andanother man on 9 September 1798.62 Waiting there ‘to see theLord Mayor’s coach come by, to proclaim Bartholomew Fair’, asthe ‘Lord-Mayor’s coach came up, there was a great throng ofpeople close by [them]’ which parted the brothers. The crowdsurrounded William Cork and pressed him against the side of acarriage where he was robbed by John Taylor and RichardColeman. Not only did Cork have no objection to being in thethrong, but he also allowed himself to be squashed against the sideof the carriage, which meant that he was temporarily helpless andvulnerable. In stark contrast with Samuel Curwen, who wrotethat he was so perturbed by the crowd that he fled the scene toavoid being mobbed, Cork and his companions had accepted thepeople around them and had moved around in order to becomemore comfortable, but not to escape.

A pair of picaresque memoirs take the aimlessness of plebeianwandering in the fairground to a new level. The memoirs of thesailor Peter Drake, which draw attention to his bravado andlawlessness, emphasize his place as part of the crowd at the fair:‘about the latter End of August . . . I took a Turn to BartholomewFair among the Croud [sic]’. Here he found men playing at hazardin the street and he befriended one of them, an Irishman, whoturned out to be a soldier and tried to recruit him into the army.63

62 Sessions (City of London and County of Middlesex), Whole Proceedings on theKing’s Commission of the Peace, Oyer and Terminer, and Gaol Delivery, 543.

63 The Memoirs of Capt. Peter Drake: Containing, an Account of Many Strange andSurprising Events . . . and Several Material Anecdotes, Regarding King William and QueenAnne’s Wars with Lewis XIV. of France (Dublin, 1755), 41–4. See also Peter Drake,


(cont. on p. 151)

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Not only does Drake walk in the crowd without claiming to bementally separated from it, but he finds people there to attachhimself to. Like Walter Simmons, Drake found company in thefairground after wandering without any clear idea about whereto go.

In the other memoirs, Mark Moore described himself arrivingin Bartholomew Fair after wandering aimlessly (and broke)through London.64 As he put it, he was ‘awakened from [his]reverie, by the noise of carts, carriages, mountebanks, &c.’ Todivert himself from his poverty he decided ‘to seek a momentaryrefuge’ by going ‘to see some of the amusements, and chancedirected [him] to where the stone-eater was displaying hisostrich-like appetite, to the astonishment of grinning spectators’.Moore convinced the stone-eater to join him in attempting towin patronage from the court at Windsor. Unlike the carefullydirected aristocrats, gentry and merchants discussed above, thelabouring poor described themselves as simply being at the fair,without any specific destination. They joined strangers whomthey encountered and involved themselves in activities thatcould have happened in many settings around London, diver-sions that were not necessarily organized or advertised and thatoften had no polite, improving credentials.

By employing modes of self-presentation thought to denotefamiliarity with the values of the socially elite for descriptions offairground activities, fair-goers leave the modern reader with theimpression of two fairs occurring simultaneously. One, attendedby the polite and the respectable, was navigated for specific en-tertainments, often advertised in newspapers and consisting oftheatrical booths, contortionists, pseudo-scientific displays of ab-normal humans and exotic animals — specialized entertainmentsavailable in at most a handful of locations. The other was enteredwithout any specific destination and consisted of recreation withunknown companions at anonymous entertainments enteredon the strength of the showmen’s or other fair-goers’ touting.Plebeian crowds almost certainly entered the famous boothsand saw the freak shows, but they probably spent most of their

(n. 63 cont.)

Amiable Renegade: The Memoirs of Capt. Peter Drake, 1671–1753, [ed. Sidney Burrell](Stanford, 1960).

64 The Memoirs and Adventures of Mark Moore, Late an Officer in the British Navy(London, 1795), 190–1.


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time drinking, dancing and shopping for fripperies. The politespectator may well have done the same, but saw reasons to suggestotherwise. For the respectable, the crowd was a source of amuse-ment only by observation; whereas for their inferiors it was pos-sible to have fun as part of the undirected crowd and byinteracting with those around them.

IV

Almost no first-person accounts of fair-going from the seven-teenth century have survived. Samuel Pepys provides the onlyevidence that can be examined in the same way as the later diaries,newspapers and court cases I analysed above. His diary suggeststhat concern about the propriety of attending a fair only becamepronounced during the Georgian period. It must be acknow-ledged that Pepys’s diary was secret in a way that court documentsor the diaries of Samuel Curwen and other eighteenth-centuryfair-goers were not, and therefore he may have felt more comfort-able admitting to inappropriate behaviour. Pepys, of course, waswriting before the emergence of the polite ideals that shaped laterfair-goers’ accounts. Nevertheless, the accounts in Pepys’s diarysuggest that people described their activities at fairs in ways thatdiffered from those of fair-goers fifty years later — and, signifi-cantly, his entries record scenes similar to those in Ben Jonson’splay Bartholomew Fair, which depicts a gathering of men andwomen of different statuses who find social distinctions impos-sible to maintain as the lowly rob and play tricks on the middlingand elite. Pepys’s venture to Bartholomew Fair on 31 August1661 with David Llewellyn, a colleague and friend, for instance,involved his stepping into a tavern at the fairground and beingfondled by a prostitute there.65 Pepys allowed the low life at thefair to act upon him to an extent that later writers would havefound distressing: his visit is not carefully directed, nor does heavoid close contact with low figures. Although reports of cases oftheft show that eighteenth-century fairs continued to be fre-quented by prostitutes, respectable visitors to fairs did notrecord being pursued by them. Pepys visited numerous fairs inand around London, sometimes with friends and other times with

65 The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A New and Complete Transcription, ed. Robert Lathamand William Matthews, 11 vols. (London, 1970–83), ii, 166.


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his wife. His patterns of fair-going are drastically different fromthe accounts that appear after the turn of the century. As decorumbecame more a cause for concern and ideas of polite behaviourspread, descriptions of fairground activities became more care-fully regulated and fair-goers distanced themselves from thosearound them.

Conversely, towards the end of the period covered by this art-icle, the late eighteenth century, we find little evidence of visits tofairs by middling and propertied society. The disappearance ofpeople invoking polite ideals from fairs suggests that fair-going bythis group had finally ended, completing a separation that hadoccurred earlier in the century in modes of self-presentation if notin actual behaviour.66 Until late in the century groups of widelydiffering social standing used the fairground and sat in the sametheatres to watch the same shows. Evidence of changes in atti-tudes to uninhibited social mingling can be found in descriptionsof crowds and in normative and prescriptive texts from the earlyeighteenth century, but they are not reflected in patterns of at-tendance. Changes in behaviour may have been occurring by thelast decade of the century. Only one newspaper mentions a visit bya member of the nobility in the final seventy years of BartholomewFair’s existence, and even merchant and middling diarists madeno mention of Bartholomew Fair after the turn of the nineteenthcentury. James Boswell’s only reference to a London fair is sug-gestive of the change.67 On 3 September 1785 he referred toseeing the Lord Mayor’s ceremonial opening of the fair withjust one word: ‘Parade’. The fair is no longer even worthy ofmention, and Boswell obscures potential engagement with acrowd. Ever jealous of his reputation, Boswell was careful not toallow himself to be in a position where social inferiors might actupon him in a disreputable space. He may have found himself likeCurwen, unable to govern the situation when social inferiorspressed him on all sides. Furthermore, later representations do

66 Miles Ogborn has argued for the creation of mental cells to separate the indivi-dual from the crowd, and the emergence of the crowd made up of individuals asimportant elements of modernity visible in the eighteenth century: see MilesOgborn, Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies, 1680–1780 (New York andLondon, 1998), 68, 110–15.

67 James Boswell, Boswell: The Applause of the Jury, 1782–1785, ed. Irma S. Lustigand Frederick A. Pottle (London, 1982), 339.


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not mention social mixing at the fairground; fair-goers no longerhad to demonstrate mental separation once physical separationwas established. It is not clear that polite people had withdrawncompletely, but the almost total lack of evidence of middling andgentry audiences attending urban fairs seems to indicate that sep-aration had occurred.68

The division is most apparent at the fairs, but other spaces suchas tea and pleasure gardens saw their clienteles become less het-erogeneous during the period as well; in other contexts, particu-larly the theatres, mixed audiences remained through the firstquarter of the nineteenth century.69 It is not possible to create asingle chronology for the separation of high and low culture inLondon; rather, segregation based on social and economic sta-tus occurred at different times in different locations across themetropolis and was also subject to local, particular reversals. Thereasons for the timings are unclear: the appeal of some spaces forpolite society declined before others and it will take more detailedwork on the individual spaces, what they offered and what peoplesaid about them, to clarify the reasons why one space remainedpopular with the social elite while another had ceased to attractthe bon ton.

By carefully describing their behaviour in ways that revealedrestraint, direction and an interest in improvement, fair-goerscould present themselves as politely using a space where manyof the ideals of polite behaviour seemed to be contravened.70 Notall polite goals were easily achieved, however. Diarists and peopletestifying at trials ignore the goal of easy sociability by pretendingthat they were entirely removed from social interaction whilein the fairground. The mental approaches to crowds offered bypoliteness made moving among the people easier when it didoccur even if it did not allow the middling sort, gentry or nobilityto interact comfortably with social inferiors on the street. Easy

68 Fairs in villages near London remained popular among propertied society untilthe first half of the nineteenth century.

69 Conlin, ‘Vauxhall Revisited’; Vic Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire inEighteenth-Century London (London, 2006), ch. 18; Jennifer Hall-Witt, FashionableActs: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780–1880 (Lebanon, NH, 2007), 18, 102–5,118.

70 This contrasts with the impolite use of polite spaces examined by Helen Berry:see her ‘Rethinking Politeness in Eighteenth-Century England: Moll King’s CoffeeHouse and the Significance of ‘‘Flash Talk’’ ’, Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc., 6th ser., xi (2001).


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sociability could only be engendered by politeness in controlledcontexts.

The flexibility of the attributes of politeness is reinforced by thevariety of socio-economic backgrounds of people describing theirbehaviour in ways that aligned them with polite ideals. We can seeeveryone from merchants and a clerk in the excise office to shop-keepers and jewellers attempting to separate themselves from therest of the crowd. By demonstrating awareness of cultural valuesfair-goers had the opportunity to defend their status against sug-gestions of impropriety.71 In the context of a luxury trade this mayhave been about reassuring clients that an elite artisan’s senses oftaste and propriety were sufficiently refined. The facets of fairsinvoked varied from individual to individual, but broadly theyinvolved investigating the world, both the natural world as dis-played in fairground freak shows and the cultural world of themetropolis as displayed by fairground play booths, disorderlycrowds and civic ceremonies. So, when John Parker describedhis itinerary as consisting of only the heifer with two heads, hewas dissociating himself from the other fairground activity. Onlythe semi-polite activity of examining scientific curiosities made itacceptable for him to be seen at the fair. Justifying fair-going inthis way seems to have been preferable to staying away from thefairs entirely. We can speculate that there was something moreattractive about the fairground than improving curiosities.

Politeness does not offer much insight into the reasons why thebulk of the crowd presented themselves in the ways that they did.Tim Hitchcock’s work on begging suggests that the poor mayhave depended on the support of people they did not know onthe streets.72 The willingness of plebeian fair-goers to act on theadvice of strangers and to trust the people who pressed up againstthem reveals significant differences from people with pretensionsto gentility. Plebeian fair-goers could be part of a heterogeneouscrowd and easily distracted by unrefined fairground attractions.Those claiming polite credentials felt more like isolated people inthe street, unable or unwilling to assume that those around themhad similar goals or their best interest in mind.

71 Klein, ‘Politeness for Plebes’, 377.72 Tim Hitchcock, ‘Begging on the Streets of Eighteenth-Century London’, Jl Brit.

Studies, xliv (2005), 482–3.


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Polite ideas encouraged people to describe themselves asseparate from crowds and may have had a psychological im-pact that outlasted the vogue for politeness. We can see hints ofthe nineteenth-century flaneur in some accounts of fair-going.Dudley Ryder suggested the difference between interacting withlow life and simply watching it when he recorded the story ofhis friend Mr Wadsworth seeing nobles at Bartholomew Fair:‘the duchess of Bolton and several other nobility, [had] comethere to entertain themselves with low life’.73 For the politefair-goer of the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century (atleast), the pleasure of the fair was supposed to come from watch-ing the rough masses; amusement should not come from beingpart of the mob. The selective engagement with the fairgroundthat we have seen between 1720 and 1790 may have providedthe mental world out of which the flaneur developed in the nine-teenth century. Like the eighteenth-century polite fair-goer, theVictorian flaneur was at home in the city, but he retained an iden-tity that was autonomous.74 Like the American Samuel Curwen,the flaneur set himself apart from the people he watched. AsRyder’s anecdote about the duchess of Bolton and Curwen’s ac-count of his trip to the fair with Mrs Snelson reveal, however,women too could feel comfortable looking upon the crowd inthe eighteenth century.

Whether the records of fairground activities reflect the way fairswere ever actually experienced is more difficult to say. It seemsunlikely that activities of different socio-economic groups wouldvary as much as the recorded experiences suggest they do, andyet from the 1710s the accounts are remarkably consistent.Fair-goers who sought respectability presented themselves asapart from the crowd, while people in the fair who had no suchanxieties made the crowd something of which everyone was apart. Politeness offers us a tool for analysing some descriptionsof space and activities, but it was only a weak force for allowingpeople to interact with others who they did not believe were

73 Diary of Dudley Ryder, ed. Matthews, 86.74 Simon Gunn, ‘The Public Sphere, Modernity and Consumption: New

Perspectives on the History of the English Middle Class’, in Alan Kidd and DavidNicholls (eds.), Gender, Civic Culture, and Consumerism: Middle-Class Identity inBritain, 1800–1940 (Manchester, 1999), 18; Judith R. Walkowitz, City of DreadfulDelight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago, 1992), 16.


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embracing polite ideals. The values that shaped the behaviourand accounts of most people in the crowd require different ana-lytical tools.

Worcester College, Oxford Benjamin Heller


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