Georgian art attack: graffiti in 18th-century Britain

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The answer lies in the 18th century. This was the age of revolutions in which graffiti underwent its own radical transformation to become something feared, reviled and legislated against. Over the course of the century, extraordinary ordinary folk – from political prisoners to sex workers, homesick sailors, Romantic poets and the artisans of the industrial revolution – turned to the surfaces around them to record their presence at some of the past’s biggest (and smallest) moments. The results, sliced into dank castle cells and splashed across palace frontages, scratched in alleyways and hidden in plain sight on the windows of country houses, tell the story of Britain and its empire. Taken together, they form a tantalising record of the lives, loves, triumphs and failures of real people who not only witnessed history, but actively shaped it.

Turnpikes and brothels

At the heart of the surge in interest in graffiti across the 18th century was a book. It introduced readers to the street art found across the nation’s many surfaces: from London palaces to the lowliest Covent Garden brothel; from the dusty turnpike taverns to the glittering assembly rooms at Bath.

The authorship of The Merry-Thought; or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany (1731) was something of a mystery. Its anonymous compiler went only by Hurlo Thrumbo, a name borrowed from the lead character in a contemporary comic play. But his, or her, anonymity was rather the point. For the book was a collection of graffiti produced by people from all ranks and creeds, presented together in a bustling, bombastic portrait of early Georgian life. Here was a mirror to a society in flux, displayed in all its grimy, thrilling glory as its inhabitants vied for power and position.

Some entries moralised: “Immodest words admit of no defence; For want of decency is want of sense” (written in a “woman’s hand” in Fleet Street).

Some were less coy, reviewing everything from the stock exchange to sex workers. Of one brothel worker in Covent Garden, a disgruntled customer joked that, despite her outward beauty, the lady’s bad breath and poor hygiene was difficult to overlook:

“Dear Pat, ‘tis vain to patch or paint,
Since still a fragrant Breath you want;
For though well-furnish’d, yet all Folks,
Despise a Room whose Chimney smokes.”

And others emphasised the sheer wordiness of the age as a great equaliser:

“There’s Nothing foul that we commit,
But what we write, and what we shit.”

Graffiti was now deeply embedded in the public consciousness. It wasn’t long before readers began leaving their own marks, hoping to be included in Hurlo Thrumbo’s next edition. The graffiti carved into the wooden walls of Wellclose Gaol, a debtors’ prison at Tower Hill, shines a light on hopes (and fears) of a very different kind.

Each panel – taken from the since-demolished prison and now in the collection of the Museum of London – tells us much about prison life and the stories of those who have otherwise slipped from the historical record. Many of the marks – which include carved pistols, ships’ anchors and sails – hint at the maritime connections of inmates trapped there until they could pay off their debts.

Individual initials, names, dates and messages give personal touches and flashes of emotion. One poem, written low on the wall as though by a prisoner lying down, begs: “All you that on this cast an eye, behold in prison here I lie, pray bestow your charety, or with hunger soon I die.”

Most remarkable of all is a vast diorama of the city beyond the prison walls, made up of all kinds of houses, churches and shops. Each building was carved into the wood in incredible detail at head height, and was possibly the work of many hands whose owners yearned to walk its streets in freedom.

Kill or be killed

But graffiti was not seen merely as the preserve of society’s outcasts. It was a favourite of British sailors, many of whom left their names, the names of their ships and dates of voyages carved into rocks at the furthest points of a growing empire.

It could also play a central role in the fiercest debates of the era. In 1756, at the start of the Seven Years’ War – a global conflict that saw Britain battling France and Spain for colonial dominion – the British admiral John Byng was court-martialled and shot for failing to relieve troops in British-held Minorca during a French attack. Byng’s own account of his actions (which hasn’t survived), carved by him into the window of his captain’s cabin, was afterwards copied and printed in Britain, prompting polarised debate as to his deserved fate. “Treasonable expressions [were] written in chalk on the walls of the Temple and other parts of the city,” noted one onlooker, some of which threatened “his m[ajest]y with death, if Byng was not executed.”

Above all, in an age of revolution, graffiti could represent potent political ideas. It was employed to both uphold power and to undermine it. In the 1770s, soldiers captured during the American War of Independence and installed in Edinburgh Castle left their own markings in rebellion against their British captors. Among those was a gallows and hanged man, bearing the name of Britain’s prime minister, Lord North, and a two-masted ship flying the stars and stripes (which was, incidentally, among the earliest depictions of the flag on the eastern side of the Atlantic).

Such graffiti was common among prisoners of war. In 1796, more than 2,000 French troops captured in the Caribbean arrived on England’s south coast, where they would be incarcerated in Portchester Castle. Among them were previously enslaved men, women and children, some of whom had been offered their freedom in exchange for their fight against the British. Today, the castle’s walls are covered in graffiti left behind by this community. French place names – such as La Rochelle and [Les Sables] d’Ollonne – are inscribed across the site, along with initials of prisoners and the dates of their confinement.

In the same decade, a Polish man named Charles Domery, already notorious for having eaten the mangled limb of a fallen comrade during the capture of his ship, horrified fellow inmates at a Liverpool prison by cutting open his arm with a knife and writing on the wall in blood ‘Vive la République’.

Waves of disorder

Britain, of course, didn’t get its own version of ‘la République’. Revolution never swept George III from power, as it had Louis XVI. But it was a close-run thing. In June 1780, the establishment was rocked by a wave of violent disorder, in which graffiti played a crucial and evolving role. In the course of a week, rioters broke into prisons and stormed the Bank of England. In response, the authorities ordered the army to fire upon civilians. Hundreds would die in the chaos that ensued.

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The Gordon Riots, as they would later be called, started when a peaceful, anti-Catholic march on parliament ignited into violence. Angry Protestants attacked MPs arriving to debate calls to repeal the Papist Act of 1778, aimed at reducing religious discrimination. Within hours, mobs were breaking into Catholic chapels, schools and homes, where they beat servants, looted treasures and piled furniture into bonfires that lit up the city.

Londoners were quick to use graffiti both to drive the mob and misdirect it, adapting existing languages of mark-making as events unfolded. In the first few hours of the riots, messages of ‘No Popery!’ appeared on walls, doors and on the sides of carriages, spreading hate and intolerance through the metropolis. The same would later be chalked or painted by Catholic and Jewish families on their own doors as a disguise.

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Elsewhere in the city, thieves adapted symbols often used by London’s beggars – chalk circles, triangles and other shapes – to mark houses worth robbing amid the chaos, or whose inhabitants were most vulnerable. Most worrying for the authorities, graffiti offered rioters a collective voice, a way of speaking as one directly to those in power. When Newgate prison was attacked, emptied of its prisoners and set alight, some in the crowd painted a battle cry across its crumbling walls: “His Majesty King Mob.”

Across the 18th century, graffiti was used in the white heat of political unrest. Yet it could also appear in calmer, more contemplative settings, too. By the end of the century, it had come to the attention of the Romantics.

In the Lake District – far from the fire and fury of the Gordon Riots – Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William and Dorothy Wordsworth carved their initials into rocks and trees as a symbol of their intellectual bond and relationship to nature. For them, mark-making could be – literally – a shorthand for ideas about individualism, artistry and interior worlds – radical stuff in a society built on an international slave trade and increasingly reliant on industrialised, impersonal capitalism at home.

Distressing act

In 1796, the discovery at a Bristol harbour of an unknown, drowned man – along with a suicide note written across the walls of a nearby abandoned tenement – gripped the nation.

“If these few thoughts should be observed before my body is found,” read the note, “they may instruct the gentlemen of the jury to bring in their verdict felo-de se [suicide], for to deter others, as well, as in strict compliance with the law – It is nothing but distress compels me to this rash act.”

Quite who the mysterious man was, and how he came to be there, confounded local authorities. But, when the parish constable transcribed and published the graffitied note, readers from across Britain wrote to claim his acquaintance. The man, named James Doe, had been a potter, first trained in the delft potteries at Lambeth before embarking on a career in the Staffordshire factory of the globally renowned Josiah Wedgwood. Doe’s specialism was hand painting and, although few knew his name, his work graced the drawing rooms and tea tables of Britons across the world.

From his fragmented, desperate and at times cryptic graffiti, a complex story emerged – one of industrial espionage and factory altercations. Doe had, it seemed, fled Staffordshire and professional disgrace – after sacrificing his reputation to help a close friend – making his way to Bristol and obscurity. His graffiti shone a light, albeit posthumously, on an unseen workforce, one whose products were everywhere but who had, until now, been overlooked.

Above all, Doe’s tragic note captured the essence of graffiti across the 18th century. On the one hand, it was shaped by powerful forces such as industrialisation, religious rage and revolutionary fervour. Yet, on the other – as the desperate souls who left their mark in Wellclose debtors’ prison would attest – it was intensely personal.