These chairs were kept privately by great people, and often were very richly decorated with brocade and plush; it was not an unusual thing for the footmen or chairmen of the owner to be decoyed into a tavern while the chair was stolen for the sake of its valuable furniture. The chairs opened with a lid at the top to enable the occupant to stand up on entrance, and then were shut down; in the caricatures of the day, these lids are represented as open to admit of the lady’s enormous feather being left on her head.
It was of course quite impossible for a lady to go about alone in the streets of London at this date, and even dangerous sometimes for men. The porters, carriers, chairmen, drunken sailors, etc., ready to make a row, are frequently mentioned by Grosley, and scuffles were of constant occurrence. George Selwyn in 1782 was so “mobbed, daubed, and beset by a crew of wretched little chimney-sweeps” that he had to give them money to go away.
These pests were under no sort of control, as there were no regular police in the streets.
“London has neither troops, patrol, or any sort of regular watch; and it is guarded during the night only by old men chosen from the dregs of the people; who have no other arms but a lanthorn and a pole; who patrole the streets, crying the hour every time the clock strikes; who proclaim good and bad weather in the morning; who come to awake those who have any journey to perform; and whom it is customary with young rakes to beat and use ill, when they come reeling from the taverns where they have spent the night.” (Grosley.)
It is bewildering to find that this sort of thing continued until George the Fourth’s reign, when Sir Robert Peel’s Metropolitan Police Act was passed. And in that lawless rowdy age, one wonders how the town ever got on without police; probably there were numerous deaths from violence. It carries us back almost to the Middle Ages to realise that so late as 1783 the last execution took place at Tyburn; Samuel Rogers recollected as a boy seeing a whole cartful of young girls in dresses of various colours on their way to execution for having been concerned in the burning of a house in the Gordon Riots. Though some of these details belong to an age prior to that when Jane stayed in London, yet they lingered on until the nineteenth century with little change.
CHARING CROSS, 1795
In 1811 gas was just beginning to be used in lighting the streets! The town was in a strange transitional state. Pall Mall was first lighted with a row of gas-lamps in 1807, and on the King’s birthday, June 4, the wall between Pall Mall and St. James’s Park was brilliantly illuminated in the same way, but gas generally was not placed in the thoroughfares until 1812 or 1813, and meantime oil-lamps requiring much care and attention were the only resource.
It was a noisy, rattling, busy, dirty London then, as much distinguished for its fogs as it is at present.