Lived Here
B 1729
D 1797
Close by at No. 43 Dryden lived for fourteen years until his death in 1701. Within a few doors on the same side of the way Dickens places the home of Jaggers, the criminal lawyer of "Great Expectations." The street itself takes its name from Gerrard, Earl of Macclesfield, whose mansion stood on the south side facing the present Macclesfield Street. Here in 1694 he died. The house was afterwards occupied by Lord Mohun and his body was brought here after the fatal duel with the Duke of Hamilton.
The Turk's Head Tavern was to be found in Gerrard Street at the Greek Street corner. In the tavern, in 1764, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Dr. Samuel Johnson founded the Literary Club, an association of scholars, authors and statesmen which has been called "the formidable power in the commonwealth of letters." The club met here until 1783. In its early days it was limited to forty members among whom were Boswell, Gibbon, Oliver Goldsmith and George Colman the elder. It was most exclusive in those days and for years David Garrick struggled for admittance but finally became one of them. Many men of note were blackballed, including the Bishop of Chester and Lord Camden.
Just off busy Shaftesbury Avenue in Wardour Street is the square brick church of St. Anne's, seeming for all the world to be passing a contented old age. Well up from the street, behind a wall and an old iron fence, there is about it still a remnant of green sward but hemmed in by asphalt spaces that have engulfed the few tombstones. One tablet tells that William Hazlitt, painter and critic, was buried here in 1830; another how Theodore, King of Corsica, found a last resting place in 1756 beside the church near which the last years of his life had been spent in poverty. On the outer wall of the church the tablet erected by Horace Walpole can yet be deciphered:
Near this place is interred Theodore, King of Corsica, who died in this parish, December 11, 1756, immediately after leaving the King's Bench Prison, by the benefit of the Act of Insolvency, in consequence of which he resigned his kingdom of Corsica for the use of his creditors.
His funeral expenses were paid by an oilman who declared himself willing for once to pay the funeral expenses of a king.
Regent Street was at first part of an elaborate plan to provide a wide and systematic street system for London—a plan that failed and left to time merely a name for this thoroughfare and for Regent's Park in honour of the Prince Regent who afterwards became George IV.