In October 1731, an anonymous author known only as “Hurlothrumbo” set out into the freezing streets of London. Armed only with a pencil and paper, he was on a most peculiar hunt. His quarry? The graffiti that lined the city’s many surfaces, left behind by its inhabitants.
By the end of that year, The Merry Thought, or, Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany had appeared in print. Priced at an affordable sixpence (about £3 today), and populated with lively and subversive voices – from cuckolded husbands to lovelorn apprentices, weary tavern maids to frustrated scholars – it was an instant bestseller. Today, it gives us a remarkable insight into a society in flux, as well as how it is that we’ve come to view graffiti with such suspicion today.
For our own relationship with graffiti is complex. From government policies on the prosecution of graffitists, to outcries over the decision not to remove spray painted Black Lives Matter slogans from the toppled Edward Colston statue, mark making in public regularly prompts fierce debate. Such acts can warrant heavy fines and even prison time – yet, on the other hand, works by street artists such as Banksy regularly fetch record prices at auction.
But this was not always the case. Such complexity arrived surprisingly late: it was only in the 19th century that legislation against graffitists took hold. In fact, for much of history, the act of leaving one’s mark had been relatively commonplace. We can trace the compulsion from prehistoric cave-paintings to the boasts of Pompeian gladiators to tourist initials cut into the Pyramids. In medieval Europe, carved crosses, hexafoils and other Christian symbols regularly appeared on the walls of churches and homes to repel the Devil. The act of graffitiing was, for many, akin to a spell or prayer, part of an everyday spiritual practice. It offered comfort and safety, could seal business deals and pin hopes. So what happened to make it objectionable to us now?
The answer lies in the world Hurlothrumbo and his contemporaries occupied, one shaped by immense change in which graffiti not only witnessed tumultuous moments and revolutionary ideas, but actively drove them. In the decades of the long 18th century, kings were toppled, else ran mad. Revolution in America and France cast a long shadow over a growing British empire; at home, polarised politics and deepening inequality made for a volatile mix.
In 1730s London, such divisions were writ large. As literacy rates increased, immigration and trade bolstered the population, and new building programmes were begun, there were more people than ever before looking to leave their mark, and more places to do it. Uncensored words soon flooded the urban landscape, many captured by the Bog-House Miscellany.
The resultant book held up a mirror up to Britons. It’s no coincidence that its compiler looked to the city’s most noxious outhouses for inspiration. In such places, words seemed to spew out at an uncontrollable rate. To Hurlothrumbo, all was waste worth wading through in search of kernels of truth – evidence of human nature in all its grimy glory. “Good Lord!” read one graffito on a privy wall, “who could think/That such fine folks should stink?”
But it wasn’t all toilet humour. Across tavern windows, law courts, university quadrangles, cathedral cloisters, the doors of brothels, and the backs of theatre benches, a range of bawdy, drunken, profane and sometimes philosophical messages were cut, carved, chalked, penned and smeared. There were the outlines of ships, guns and buildings sliced into prison cells, pornographic smoke pictures produced by soldiers on barrack ceilings, and scribbled tallies that kept score of coffeehouse card games. There was cultural criticism (“The novelty this crowd invites/’Tis strange, and therefore it delights / For folks things eagerly pursue / Not that they’re good, but that they’re new”); misogyny (“One asked a madman, if a wife he had / A wife! quoth he. – no! – I’m not quite so mad”); and politics (“The poor have little, beggars none / The rich too much / Enough, not one)”.
When it appeared in late 1731, the book met with instant, if controversial, success. While some grumbled about its lack of supposed good taste, a second volume, with the addition of “several curious pieces sent the editor from Oxford and Cambridge”, appeared a month after the release of the first. By the end of the same year, a third was already in print.
Rumours about the identity of its author soon spread. Although it sounds outlandish to modern ears, “Hurlothrumbo” was a name borrowed from a play by Samuel Johnson of Cheshire – so known to distinguish him from his contemporary, the great essayist – a popular comedy that had premiered on the London stage two years earlier. Johnson himself was a favourite candidate for the Bog-House Miscellany, as was the book’s publisher – the jovial and liberally-inclined printer James Roberts. But really, Hurlothrumbo’s charm lay in the not-knowing. He was a mischievous everyman, playfully pulling back the curtain on a nation grappling with its own identity and elevating with equanimity the mundane and profane alike.
For all its raucous urbanity, the Miscellany gave an unflinching portrait of a transactional society. On window panes, lovers negotiated the terms of their relationship, carving poems, secrets and sometimes accusations into the fragile surface:
I must confess, kind Sir, that though this Glass,
Can’t prove me brittle, it proves you an Ass.
Sex proved an ample topic for graffitists, and a point of fascination for Hurlothrumbo’s readers. In an alleyway beside a Chancery Lane brothel, the complaint of one disgruntled customer immortalised in the Miscellany read “Here did I lay my Celia down / I got the P-x, and she got half a Crown”. Elsewhere, we get the lament of a sex worker trapped in her trade by necessity: “I became all Things to all Men to gain some / or I must have starved”.
Graffiti could speak to scandal, and wade in on public debate. When one gentleman wrote on the wall of a Chelsea tavern of his personal losses during the collapse of the South Sea Bubble – an investment frenzy in 1720 that ended in financial disaster and catastrophic national debt – one anonymous customer simply responded beneath with “Ha! Ha! Ha!”
Location added meaning. In the City of London at the Royal Exchange, where heralds read royal decrees and news of Parliament from its steps, one graffitist left a reproach in pencil:
This City is a World that’s full of Streets,
And Death’s the Market-Place where Mankind meets;
If Life were Merchandise, that Men could buy,
The Rich would only live, the Poor must die.
Readers of the Bog-House Miscellany recognised in its pages something of their own darkest desires, prejudices and commonalities. But they were also unsettled. Britain was, according to Hurlothrumbo, literally drawing out the tensions and pleasures that occupied it.
The book, perhaps unwittingly, set a precedent. From journalists to diarists, military commanders to politicians, more people than ever before started taking note of graffiti. They transcribed marks they saw on the streets, printing them in newspapers and depicting them in engravings; William Hogarth, the era’s great interrogator of Georgian low life, was among them. In doing so, Britons attributed a new power to graffiti. Over the decades that followed, leaving one’s mark could challenge power, and bring nuance as well as outrage to public debate. From the Jacobite Risings to populist political campaigns, civil unrest to global conflict, graffiti gave voice to many without a stake in their own society.
Today, thanks to Hurlothrumbo and those he inspired, we have the voices of factory workers, rioters, prisoners of war, sex workers, beggars, highwaymen and children – real people who, in many cases, have slipped from the historical record but whose momentary exclamations of desire and anguish reverberate down to us. For historians, the Bog-House Miscellany is invaluable. But it has modern relevance too. We might trace echoes of many of the sentiments captured by Hurlothrumbo in modern-day graffiti campaigns, like that organised by the Argentine Prostitutes Association calling for sex-workers rights, or the political satire of street-artist Bambi, who in 2016 depicted then-foreign secretary Boris Johnson as Winston Churchill at an Islington bus stop.
If this strange, rude book helps pinpoint a moment in the history of graffiti when we began to view it with animosity, its legacy is surely to invite us to look again, and more closely, at the writing on the wall. There, we might find a litmus test for social change. There’s humour in it, but wisdom too.
Writing on the Wall: Graffiti, Rebellion and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Britain is published by Profile on March 28
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