More London notes, these having to do with the drink

Today, as promised, some notes on beer, drink, pubs, and the perils thereof, derived from Hogarth and others while I was in London last week.

1 On our first night in town, our friend Gideon led us through crowds of happy drinkers who were spilling out of pubs into the warm air of a lovely spring evening to Rose Street, a narrow, roofed alley, in the middle of which is a side door to the pub that was our destination. I should have placed the alley myself, but I didn't until Gid pointed it out: in 1679, it was the site of the Rose-alley ambuscade, when John Dryden was set upon and beaten by a group of thugs thought be in the pay of Lord Rochester, who was avenging a literary slight. Like so many literary sites in London, the alley remains, as does the pub where the hired muscle surely secured the necessary measure of Dutch courage. It has, however, changed its name: what is now the Lamb and Flag was, in Rochester's day, the Bucket of Blood.

2 In 1751, Hogarth contributed a pair of engravings to a growing public campaign against gin drinking, a reaction to the Gin Craze, which saw the working classes consuming low-priced, low-quality gin at unfathomable rates. The more immediately arresting of the pair is Gin Lane, in which the evils of gin drinking (and, as Dickens approvingly pointed out, of the ill effects of allowing people to suffer in poverty) are depicted in reliably shocking Hogarthian fashion.


Though it traffics far less in the grotesque, the accompanying engraving, Beer Street, which shows the stalwart British turning to beer, rather than gin, and thus establishing themselves as solid, upright citizens, is worth taking a look at, too. Any Hogarth, after all, contains a wealth of entertaining detail; check out, for example, the trader copping a feel from a female peddler.

And then there's the poem underneath the image, which is enough to win Beer Street a place on this blog:

Beer, happy product of our Isle,
Can Sinew and Strength impart,
And wearied with Fatigue and Toil,
Can chear each manly Heart.

3 Another pub that received some of our custom while we were in London was the Toucan in Soho Square, which pours primarily Guinness. Hanging behind the basement bar is the following letter, which was clearly printed at some point in a newspaper, though I haven't been able to figure out where or when:

I will read with interest Mr Lomax's letter (Viz. this issue) re: lager commercials. I personally am a fan of the clever Guinness adverts, with their challenging visual imagery, their air of illusion, and the maturity and mystique which actor Rutger Hauer provides. If I have one criticism it is that they fail to mention that Guinness turns your shit to treacle.
P. McMurphy, Derby

4 The Toucan also featured the following quotation about alcohol from Ian Paisley behind the bar:

I would be happy to see the devil's buttermilk banned from society.

I knew I didn't like that guy.

5 I'll close this group with a sticker that my friend Jen and I marveled at when we saw it stuck to a wall:

Specified Risk Material

What, Jen and I wondered, could this sticker signify? And how scary is a Specified Risk Material? Less scary, Jen argued, than an Unspecified Risk Material. Perhaps it ought to be affixed to a bottle of fine gin, or my martini shaker.

Tomorrow, I'll close this week of London reading with a couple of brief notes on people and places.

Some notes on what I read while looking at paintings in London last week

1 Dulwich Picture Gallery, which has the distinction of being England's first public art gallery and which adjoins Dulwich College, where both Raymond Chandler and P. G. Wodehouse were educated, features the hands-down best explanatory captions I've come across in any gallery. They're explanatory without being dry, and they frequently employ quotations from outside sources to bring the subjects or creators of particular paintings to life. Accompanying a portrait by
William Hogarth, for example, is a note that Hogarth disliked straight portraiture, dismissing it as "phiz-mongering."

2 The note beside a portrait of poet William Hayley by George Romney reveals both that Hayley wrote a biography of his friend Romney and that English poet laureate Robert Southey once said of Hayley, "Everything about that man is good, except his poetry." Take that for what you will: according to Anthony Powell, Southey also complained about Wordsworth's "entire and intense selfishness," while in Don Juan (1824) Lord Byron commanded

Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope;
Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey;
Because the first is crazed beyond all hope,
The second drunk, the third so quaint and mouthey.

The closing rhyme is so good it makes me doubt its veracity; is it wrong of me to suspect Byron of characterizing Southey in a way more convenient than truthful? He's going to force me to go read some Southey to be sure.

3 A lovely portrait of the Linley sisters by Thomas Gainsborough is annotated with an explanation that work on the portrait was interrupted when the elder sister, Elizabeth, eloped with Richard Brinsley Sheridan. The families must ultimately have reconciled at least a bit, for a few years later Sheridan partnered with Elizabeth's father in the running of the Drury Lane Theatre.

4 Best of all, though, is the note that accompanies a painting of shaggy-haired young William Linley by Sir Thomas Lawrence, which reveals that George III, on being shown the portrait, exclaimed, "Ah! Ah! Why doesn't the blockhead get his hair cut?"

5 Staying on the topic of paintings, at the extensive and wonderful
Hogarth show at the Tate Britain, I saw for the first time the painting Francis Matthew Schultz in his bed, which Hogarth painted in the late 1750s, allegedly at the behest of Schultz's long-suffering wife in the hope of shocking him into leading a less debauched life. According to the Tate Britain's guide to the show, the painting

proved too indecorous in its imagery for Schutz’s Victorian descendants. They hired an artist to paint in a newspaper over the chamber-pot; only a recent programme of restoration returned the painting to its original state.

The show really was marvelous; if you're in London and can get to it before it closes Sunday, it's well worth your time.

Tomorrow, a few notes on beer, drink, and their perils, from Hogarth and others
encountered on the trip.