When William Makepeace Thackeray looked back at his youth, he was more than a little bewildered by the ways in which he’d gotten caught up in the single greatest cultural craze of his boyhood: the mania surrounding Pierce Egan’s Life in London; or, the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq., and his Elegant Friend Corinthian Tom, Accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis. Thackeray readily granted that the illustrations which Robert and George Cruikshank had done for the book had not lost their appeal over the intervening decades: “the pictures!—oh! the pictures are noble still!” And he fondly reminisced about “what a funny fellow that actor was who performed Dicky Green in ... the play!” ( “De Juventute” 510). But “on reperusal, Tom and Jerry is not so brilliant as I had supposed it to be... the style of the writing ... was not pleasing to me; I even thought it a little vulgar ... and as a description of the sports and amusements of London in the ancient times,” Life in London now seemed “more curious than amusing” (509-10). Even the typography had grown cryptic: “those inverted commas, those italics, those capitals” must have been “as good as jokes, though you mayn’t quite perceive the point” anymore (511). Indeed, twenty years earlier, Thackeray had been unable to remember “the literary contents of the book” at all: they had “passed sheer away,” even as the “scenes remain[ed] indelibly engraved upon the mind” (rev. of The Tower 13). Yet despite his retrospective bafflement as to the attractions of Egan’s writing, Thackeray was nonetheless firmly convinced that Life in London’s account of the larks of a fashionable young man (Tom), his country cousin (Jerry), and their friend Logic, a witty Oxford student, through the gamut of metropolitan life somehow embodied its age and so, more than any other touchstone from those years, could conjure up “the antediluvian world” before “railways were made,” when there was “an enjoyment of life ... which contrasts strangely with our feelings of 1860,” now that “every London man is weary and blasé” ( “De Juventute,” 505, 503, 510).

And so its popularity would suggest: Egan’s biographer records that “so great was the demand for copies of the numbers [in which Life in London was originally published] that the printers ... could hardly keep pace with it, and whole armies of women and small boys, employed to colour the plates, were worked to exhaustion” (Reid 73). Before the initial serialization was even complete, the earlier parts were reprinted at a higher price, to be followed by at least five other editions before the end of the decade.

Nor was “all London” content to “read it,” they also, as Thackeray recalled, “went to see it in its dramatic shape” (rev. of The Tower 13).

At least ten different metropolitan theaters offered plays based upon Life in London in the 1821-22 and 1822-23 seasons.  Indeed, at several points in the spring and summer of 1822 one could take in up to eight competing productions, the most popular of which—W. T. Moncrieff’s Tom and Jerry—ran for an unprecedented three hundred nights:  “from the highest to the lowest, all classes were alike anxious to witness its representation; Dukes and Dustmen were equally interested in its performance, and Peers might be seen mobbing it with Apprentices to obtain an admission.  Seats were sold for weeks before they could be occupied.... In the furor of its popularity, persons have been known to travel post from the furthest parts of the kingdom to see it; and five guineas have been offered in an evening for a single seat” (Moncrieff 1826, v).

Nor was this an exclusively London phenomenon: over the next few years, performances (usually of Moncrieff’s version) were staged in Birmingham, Bridgnorth, Brighton, Cheltenham, Dublin, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Hull, Lincoln, Liverpool, Newark, Newcastle, Redruth, Shrewsbury, and Southampton, not to mention the even more far flung theaters of Albany, Baltimore, Boston, Charleston, Montreal, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, York, Upper Canada, and even Sydney. Opportunistic booksellers quickly commissioned a range of imitations, including Life in St. George’s Fields, Real Life in London, and Female Life in London (the latter was simply a reprint of Frances Burney’s Evelina). The ballad publisher James Catnach offered several different broadside redactions, while countless cordials, dances, dinners, fans, games, handkerchiefs, porcelain figures, prints, screens, slang dictionaries, snuffboxes, song books, sweetmeats, tea boards, and toy theater sheets were produced for those who wished to include Tom and Jerry in their daily rituals.

Even the clothing trades got in on the act. According to John Camden Hotten, “tailors, bootmakers, and hatters recommended nothing but Corinthian shapes and Tom and Jerry patterns” (10) and at least some of their recommendations carried all the way across the Atlantic: in Richmond, Virginia, the young Edgar Allen Poe singled out a romantic rival’s “Tom and Jerry brim / And dove-tailed coat, obtained at cost” for particular mockery (11). Clearly something about Life in London resonated with a broad cross-section of the reading, theatrical, and consumer publics of the early 1820s.

Yet what that something was seems to have already become semi-incomprehensible by the 1840s and that incomprehensibility only increased as the century wore on until even the foremost chronicler of the craze was forced to confess that “although Life in London ... did make our grandfathers so very—very! merry in the first quarter of the Nineteenth Century, we are constrained to admit; that it is a terrible dull and tedious work to read through in the present day.” Indeed, “the present generation will find in some of the scenes depicted in such glowing colours, many of the fashions, manners, and customs, which prevailed in the reign of King George the Fourth, together with certain landmarks of the past, which no one need regret leaving far behind, and ought to give every encouragement to those who live under the rule of Queen Victoria to maintain a firm faith in the social progress of the age” (Hindley ii-iii, iv). Whatever significance Life in London still had lay in what Hotten termed “its value as a true picture of life fifty years ago”: “the last days of coarse caricatures, of dueling, and of the glorious three-bottle system after dinner” (9).

Most of the extant scholarship on Egan and the Cruikshanks has simply replicated this pattern of being convinced that the success of Life in London was somehow emblematic of its age (the Cruikshank prints have been used to illustrate dozens of books on the Regency and reign of George IV), yet finding it incredibly difficult to specify what its appeal might have been, other than as a vague—and generally unconvincing—adumbration of another, supposedly more readily comprehensible phenomenon like The Pickwick Papers or the flâneur or Bakhtinian heteroglossia. Even the best critics (who recognize that Life in London was “a summation of the passing culture ..., not a foretaste of the new” and so really shouldn’t be folded into the longue durée of Victorianism) seem to be unable to explain the sheer magnitude of the craze: why such “low-life fantasies” should have gone supernova in the first half of the 1820s, rather than simply faded away (Gatrell 552, 555).

Clearly this is a problem for the history of reading and theatergoing and ordinarily I would turn to the letters, diaries, and marginalia of Egan’s contemporaries in order to try to reconstruct how Life in London might actually have been read and watched. Alas, such evidence seems to be more than usually scarce in this case and that which I have found—such as John Clare’s suggestion that Byron’s Don Juan “seems a fit partner for Tom & Jerry” (34) or Harriet Arbuthnot’s dismay at how the audience at a performance of Moncrieff’s version “seemed to enjoy a representation of scenes in which, from their appearance, one might infer they frequently shared” (144)—come off, at least initially, as even more idiosyncratic or blinkered than such traces generally are.

Rather than throw up my hands at the absence of our customary tools, however, I decided to try something of a methodological experiment. Intrigued by Franco Moretti’s assertion that “the most profoundly social aspect of literature is its form” ( “Preface” xii) and suspecting that the difficulty which previous scholars had had in explaining the appeal of Life in London stemmed at least in part from the temporal breadth of their inquiries—the nineteenth-century novel, the eighteenth-century “urban odyssey,” late Georgian urban pleasure, even simply “Regency London” (which still takes in a full decade)—I decided to map out, Moretti-like, Life in London part by monthly part, and then dramatic adaptation by dramatic adaptation, in order to see if those maps could reveal anything more specific to the early 1820s about the appeal of these texts to readers and playgoers. My hope was that by figuring out how these texts unfolded both temporally and spatially and how that unfolding was in turn related to the probable time and place of their reading or viewing, I could discern something about the “social aspect” of their form which was otherwise unavailable for scrutiny. In so doing, I fondly imagined, I might finally be able to devise a way to combine a proper consideration of form with the history of reading and theatergoing—a consummation which I, at least, have long devoutly wished.

So what did I find when I did my mapping? First let me highlight a small, but extremely telling detail, one which can serve as a key to unlock the significance of what the maps reveal: a note headed “SECOND EDITION, JAN. 8, 1821,” which Egan added to retract his playful banter in the first edition with Friedrich Christian Accum, now that the latter had been caught tearing leaves out of a library book at the Royal Institution.

Accum’s misplaced zeal for knowledge (in an age before photocopying, he wanted to take an article on chocolate home with him) doesn’t matter for our purposes. But Egan’s mention of a second edition in early January 1821 is huge, since producing such entailed reprinting and again hand-coloring both the text and the plates for the already extent Parts One through Five of Life in London and raising the price of those reprinted parts and all of the remaining installments from two-and-a-half shillings apiece to three. Bibliographers and collectors of the Cruikshanks have long known of this second edition and would readily concede how unprecedented it was. Quite simply, illustrated books at this price point had never sold so quickly as to necessitate more than a single edition while the original serialization was still underway. Even The Tour of Doctor Syntax, which largely created the market for such books, didn’t go into a second edition until its initial appearance in The Poetical Magazine was complete.

However, no one has apparently ever thought through the significance of what this second edition reveals: namely, that Life in London was astonishingly successful by a few days after the release of Part Five. Yet, if we look at what has happened in the text to that point, we get almost nothing by our usual novelistic standards. Those first five parts are comprised almost exclusively of an extended pitch for the importance of “seeing Life,” along with character sketches of Logic, Tom, and Jerry. The first episode remotely close to actual narrative (certainly the first event which the Cruikshanks deem worthy of illustration) is only half finished by the close of Part Five—just a week before the second edition. Prior to that, nothing happens. Or, to be precise, none of the events which figure in the illustrations or Victorian memory have yet occurred by that point in the text (a good forty-two percent of the way in).

Fig. 1 Robert and George Cruikshank, “Tom Getting the best of a Charley,” Life in London; or, the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq., and his Elegant Friend Corinthian Tom, Accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis (London, 1820-21). Courtesy of The Ohio State University Rare Books and Manuscripts Library.

Fig. 2 Frontispiece to Life in London, or The Adventures of Jerry Hawthorn, Who, from a Chaw-bacon, became a first rate Dandy of the Milling Order; Corinthian Tom, His accomplished London Cousin; and Bob Logic, A Friend of the latter, particularly fond of knocking down the Charlies; Giving a full Account of all their Larks, Sprees, Rows, Rambles, and other frolics; Being a faithful Portraiture of High & Low Life, from Almack’s in the West, to All-Max in the East (London, n.d. [c. 1822]). Courtesy of the University of Cincinnati Library.

Fig. 3 “Wild Game with Lark sauce” from “Savoury Dishes,” Northern Looking Glass 1.17 (1826): 64. Courtesy of The Ohio State University Cartoon Library and Museum.

Unless, of course, getting to the action wasn’t really the point. I’d like to propose that this disparity between the text and plates, far from being either irrelevant or a clumsy bit of throat-clearing on Egan’s part while he figured out what to do, can actually go quite far toward explaining the astonishing appeal of those early parts of Life in London, whose success brought the text to “the tipping point” where it could cross over into a full-scale sensation (after which the usual feedback loops of commercial success and “extraordinary popular delusions” could kick in).

So let’s turn to those early parts and consider how their seemingly mismatched text and plates might actually have worked together.

The first thing to notice is how sustained and (in its own way) systematic a pitch for its own aesthetics we are offered. According to Egan, the grand object of this work is an attempt to portray what is termed ‘SEEING LIFE’ in all its various bearings upon society, from the high-mettled CORINTHIAN of St. James’s, swaddled in luxury, down to the needy FLUE-FAKER of Wapping, born without a shirt, and not a bit of scran in his cup to allay his piteous cravings. ‘LIFE IN LONDON’ is the sport in view, and provided the chase is turned to a good account, ‘seeing Life’ will be found to have its advantages ... whether an evening is spent over a bottle of champaign, at Long’s, or in taking a ‘third of a daffy’ at Tom Belchers’s... Equally so, in waltzing with the angelics at my Lady FUBB’S assembly, at Almack’s, or sporting a toe at Mrs. SNOOK’S hop at St. Kit’s, among the pretty straw damsels and dashing chippers, if a knowledge of ‘Life,’ an acquaintance with character, and the importance of comparison, are the ultimate results. (24)

“Seeing life” thus seems to involve appreciating both the marked social and geographic variety of the metropolis and the underlying similarity of pleasures which yokes such variety together into a coherent, if pointedly not unified vision of “Life in London.” For those able to relish it, “a blow out may likewise be found as savory and as high scented at Mother O’Shaughnessy’s, in the back settlements of the Holy Land, by the hungry cut-away Paddy Mulroony, as the Mulligatawny soup may be swallowed with peculiar goût by one of the fastidious, squeamish, screwed-up descendants of the OGILBY train at Grillion’s hotel” (26-27). Or, to put it differently, as Egan clearly delights in doing, “hundreds of individuals in the Metropolis think it no loss of time, and feel as much interest in matching their tykes at JEM ROLFE’S amphitheatre for a quid or two; or in drawing the badger at HARLEQUIN BILLY’S menagerie, and boasting of the goodness and breed of their dogs, as MY Lord CARE-FOR-NOTHING does in relating the pedigree of his high-mettled cattle, and talking with the touters and jockeys at Newmarket” (34). Once one comprehends “the advantages resulting from the varieties of ‘LIFE’” (29), one can supposedly acquire a sort of universal comfort akin to that of Tom, who “was as much at home in blowing a cloud, listening to a night-row charge at a watch-house, as he proved himself an adept in all the luxuriant, voluptuous movements, when waltzing at Almack’s (42).

Moreover, if readers compared their respective copies of Life in London (as many print collectors were wont to do) they would have noticed variations between the copies that seem far from random. For example, one Ohio State copy of the plate which most struck Thackeray—“An Introduction. Gay moments of Logic, Jerry, Tom, and Corinthian Kate”—showed Jerry’s mistress with her breasts covered (figure 6), while another of our copies left them bare (figure 7), so as to call attention to the fact that Kate and Sue are, after all, “cyprians” and that Jerry’s pose is straight out of the brothel scene in The Rake’s Progress .

Fig. 10 Robert and George Cruikshank, “LIFE IN LONDON. Peep o’day Boys. A street Row, the Author losing his reader, Tom & Jerry “showing fight,” and Logic floored,” Life in London; or, the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq., and his Elegant Friend Corinthian Tom, Accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis (London, 1820-21). Courtesy of The Ohio State University Rare Books and Manuscripts Library.

Fig. 11 Robert and George Cruikshank, “LIFE IN LONDON. Peep o’day Boys. A street Row, the Author losing his reader, Tom & Jerry “showing fight,” and Logic floored,” Life in London; or, the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq., and his Elegant Friend Corinthian Tom, Accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis (London, 1820-21). Courtesy of the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection, The Ohio State University Cartoon Library and Museum.

“Seeing Life” can thus go in two quite different directions: one could wait to “see” the episodes depicted in the plates as they eventually unfolded (in the months after the tipping point of the second edition). Or one could go out into the metropolis in pursuit of what one hoped would be similar adventures. Both solutions seem to have been engaged in. On the one hand, in a note on the wrappers for Part Four, Egan let his “Subscribers” know that “in consequence of several applications having been made to the Publishers respecting the EXPLANATIONS OF THE PLATES, it is necessary to observe, that they are merely given ... to keep the plates alive; but the subjects of them will be more minutely described, in their proper place in the body of the work,” which would suggest a certain readerly impatience for the plates’ promise of narrativity to be fulfilled. On the other hand, though, as Roger Sales has pointed out, readers are “given enough information to plan their own rambles” (161) and over the next few years the press would repeatedly claim that they were doing just that with a vengeance: by one report, there were “nineteen watchmen prostrate with their boxes on their backs” in April 1822 alone ( “Annus Mirabilis!” 23).

Similarly, in December of that year three “dashing young gentlemen” were charged “with making a ‘Tom-Jerry-and-Logic’ row, after midnight, near St. Thomas’s Hospital” in Southwark. Among other things, they were “crying ‘Go it, Jerry!’—‘Go it, Tom!’—‘Go it, Logic!’ &c. One of them said ‘now we’ll floor the d—d Charley.’ They then ran with great force against his watch-box, and endeavoured to upset it, so as to inclose him inside of it.” An alderman said “not a night elapsed but that in some part of the town the peace was broken by young thoughtless fellows apeing ‘Tom, Jerry, and Logic’” (Glasgow Herald, presumably reprinting an item from an unidentified London paper).

Six are in the fashionable West End (Tom’s apartment, the Westminster Pit, Corinthian Kate’s apartment, Rotten Row, Jackson’s rooms in Bond Street, and a game of whist played near St. James’s park). The other nine, however, are in the rather more socially varied area surrounding Covent Garden (Temple Bar, a coffee shop near the Olympic Theatre, a watchhouse near Bow Street, the English Opera House, Covent Garden Theatre, Bow Street itself, a fortune teller’s house near Russell Street, a gin shop near Covent Garden Theatre, and the tavern run by the retired boxing champion, Tom Cribb, near the Haymarket). And even if a reader didn’t know exactly where a specific place was located, the two areas of town are quite visually and thematically distinct from one another and so it would have been easy enough to figure out the approximate neighborhood in question. West of Regent Street we get fine clothing and sports and gambling and high-end courtesans like Corinthian Kate and Sue. East of Regent Street we get larks and their consequences, slumming, masquerade, various sorts of drinking, and a more ordinary species of prostitute. To some extent, of course, such a spatial division of London was nothing new—even if the construction of Regent Street had significantly bolstered it by “damming up Soho” (Summerson 125). But I suspect the division was particularly resonant for the target public for Life in London, which, given the fairly steep price of the book (and its apparent absence from most circulating libraries), probably constituted a good chunk of its actual readership.

In his lengthy invocation, Egan singles out three businesses which he hopes will help make Life in London a success: the bookshops of Henry Colburn and John Murray and the printshop of George Humphrey. Colburn will, Egan wishes, inform “those dashing belles and beaux, whose morning lounge gives thy repository of the mind an air of fashion, that LIFE IN LONDON is worthy of their perusal,” while Murray, whose “splendid threshold” frightens away the “pale, wan, and shabbily clad,” will “take the unsophisticated JERRY HAWTHORN by the hand” and “introduce him to thy numerous acquaintance.” And if Humphrey will allot “only one little pane of glass in thy attractive shop-front ... for the display of CORINTHIAN TOM, ... he may be viewed quite ‘at home’ in St. James’s Street” (8). As these invocations should suggest, these are the most fashionable purveyors of print in the metropolis and, I think tellingly, they’re all located in the neighborhood in which Tom, Jerry, and Logic reside. Obviously this need not mean that all of the early readers of Life in London either patronized those shops or lived in that neighborhood, but it seems probable that if they didn’t, they thought themselves in the minority (i.e., they presumed that most of the other “fire-side heroes and sprightly maidens” being addressed were one and the same with the “dashing belles and beaux” who lounged into Colburn’s).

Thus far I’ve been dwelling upon the very beginnings of the craze for Life in London, what took the phenomenon to the tipping point of an unprecedented second edition and price increase while the initial serialization was still underway. But most of the mania postdates this second edition: the assorted reprints of Life in London as a stand-alone volume, the various theatrical versions, the Catnach broadsides and other opportunistic redactions, the consumer goods ... these are all part of later 1821 or 1822 or 1823. Why spend so much time on the readers of these early parts, whose total numbers must have been dwarfed by those who got swept up in the craze after early January 1821? The answer, I’d like to propose, is that the rest of the phenomenon largely plays out according to the parameters set by these first few parts and their early adopters. This is not to say that nothing changes, of course, but the subsequent parts of Life in London itself, the theatrical versions, and all of the other evidence that I’ve been able to uncover all suggest that they were working within the same aesthetics of “seeing Life” and the same questions of representational adequacy that we’ve been reconstructing.

And yet by the close, he has taken his place with his friends at the very center of not only the frontispiece (figure 17), but, it would seem, the “UPS” and “DOWNS” and “INS” and “OUTS” of life in London more generally, the whole structure of which apparently relies upon not “a shade” being “forgotten in the portraiture” (xiv).

While as a book Life in London was enough of a sensation for its publishers to have allegedly “netted some thousands by it” by 11 March 1822, what turned the phenomenon all the way up to eleven and helped ensure its place in the collective memory of Thackeray’s generation were the assorted theatrical versions, the most successful of which—>W. T. Moncrieff’s Tom and Jerry—supposedly earned “the proprietors of the Adelphi theatre,” where it was staged, twelve thousand pounds by that same point in the spring of 1822 (“London Chit-Chat” 333, 334). Indeed, Moncrieff later estimated that they “cleared” “not ... less, from first to last, than Twenty five Thousand Pounds by it” (Moncrieff 1828, vii).

Like the post-tipping point parts of Life in London, the various plays are all devoted to working out the aesthetics of “seeing Life” and its accompanying questions of representational adequacy. Accordingly, I’d like to suggest, the theatrical versions can help test and confirm the ways in which the forms we’re dealing with were “social” and so are of explanatory value when we’re trying to figure out what drove this craze. Before I sketch out the workings of the most prominent of these plays, however, it’s worth noting that they were all staged at the so-called “illegitimate” or minor theaters, the status and characteristics of which amplified a number of aspects of their form. First of all, for many playgoers, the illegitimate theaters were on the side of liberty and fun and modernity, against the perceived stodginess and perhaps worse of the patent theaters, which “had come to be identified as the cultural synecdoche of a corrupt political state” (Moody 74). Part of that reputation stemmed from the shameless, Polonius-like generic mixture of the plays which they staged (in order to get around the legal prohibition on the minor theaters offering “legitimate”—i.e., primarily spoken—drama, they would add all sorts of spectacle and music to their productions). As evidence of just how far these mixtures could go, consider only the playbills for three of the most popular theatrical versions of Life in London: at Davis’s Royal Amphitheatre, one could take in “an entirely New, Whimsical, Local, Melo-Dramatic, Pantomimical Equestrian Drama,” while Sadler’s Wells offered a “New Pedestrian, Equestrian, and Operatic Extravaganza ... of Gaiety, Frisk, Lark, and Patter” and Moncrieff’s version at the Adelphi was billed as “an entirely new Classic, Comic, Operatic, Didactic, Aristophanic, Localic, Analytic, Panoramic, Camera-Obscura-ic, Extravaganza Burletta of Fun, Frolic, Fashion, and Flash ... Replete with prime Chaunts, rum Glees, and Kiddy Catches” (qtd. in Hindley 4, 85, 8). Another part of the reputation of the minor theaters derived from the sheer “visual magnificence” (Moody 151) of the playhouses themselves, which was often at odds with their somewhat dodgy or unfashionable locations.

Fig. 18

Fig. 19 

Compare, for example, where the various versions of Life in London were staged with where the action of the Cruikshank plates was located. (see figure 18 and figure 19) Close to half of the scenes depicted in Life in London (many of which transferred over to the plays) were set in the West End, while nothing other than our heroes’ outing to Vauxhall involved crossing the Thames. Yet three of the theaters were on the south side of the river and another three were out on the north edge of town (far beyond anywhere Tom and Jerry bother to go). Only the Olympic, the Adelphi, and (as a somewhat special case) the East London were actually in the same neighborhoods as the “rambles and sprees” they were representing. Yet all of their buildings were every bit as opulent, if not more, than the patent theaters of Covent Garden and Drury Lane where Tom and Jerry were shown consorting with prostitutes and actresses showing their legs. Collectively, I’d like to suggest, these different aspects of the “illegitimate” theaters’ reputation helped to further crank up the aesthetics of “seeing Life” by linking that pursuit to the pleasurable disjunctions of minor theatergoing more generally. That is, the questions of representational adequacy which the plays took up from Egan and the Cruikshanks became, if anything, all the more pointed when posed in a setting so clearly devoted to (and renowned for) dramatizing the mimetic gap between life on stage—where people burst into song, cross-dressed, and rode horses indoors—and the more quotidian existence outside the theater, with the pleasure-seeking audience in an opulent and liminal space between the two.

The first of the theatrical versions of Life in London nicely exemplifies the uses to which this gap could be put. On 17 September 1821, William Barrymore’s Tom and Jerry, or, Life in London debuted at Davis’s Royal Amphitheatre (better known to most theater historians as Astley’s) and was their chief offering for at least the next three seasons. As its subtitle suggests, this play took the “popular Production, which has lately engrossed the attention of all London” and turned it into “an entirely new Whimsical, Local, Melo-Dramatic, Pantomimical Equestrian Drama.” There’s nothing all that surprising about such a transformation: equestrian shows were the specialty of the house and so audiences were treated to a “scene of Epsom Races” which “exhibits post-chaises, gigs, tilburys, caravans, hackney-coaches, carts, and four-in-hand barouches, all drawn by real horses ... concluding with a grand race between seven ‘Bits of Blood!’ on extensive platforms taking the whole width” of the theater (The Drama 2: 360).

Fig. 20 George Cruikshank, “TOM, JERRY, AND LOGIC, at the Poney Races, at Sadler’s Wells” (London, n.d. [c. 1822]). Bound into a copy (*EC8 C8885 820e) of Life in London; or, the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq., and his Elegant Friend Corinthian Tom, Accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis (London, 1820-21). Courtesy of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

For a similar scene from Egan’s own theatrical version at Sadler’s Wells, which nicely brings out the sheer oddity of the spectacle, see figure twenty. More tellingly for our purposes, however, the usual sporting or martial or orientalist fare for which Davis’s was known here gets offset by some decidedly metropolitan scenes. For example, there’s what the reviewer just quoted describes as “the exterior of the Opera House, with all the horrors of a rainy night,” which involves Kate and Sue being cheated by one hackney cab driver as they depart for Almack’s and Tom, Jerry, and Logic playing a prank on another (they get in, tell him where they’re going, and get out the other door), as rain begins to fall on stage. Similarly, the scenes in Jackson’s Rooms and Cribb’s Parlour not only had “the Clown prove ... himself a ‘hard hitter,’ by sending Harlequin clean through the wainscot,” but also offered live performances by “Cribb and Spring,” “stripped half naked, boxing each other round the platform” to the supposed offense of “female modesty” (The Drama 4: 306). Such spectacles were, of course, readily witnessed in the metropolis, as were “views of Tattersal’s... and Temple Bar, by moonlight” (The Drama 1: 306). But they were witnessed across the river in rather different parts of town and, for the most part, not by the “genteel people, with their children and servants” who “had long ... frequented” this theater (Moody 171).

Fig. 21

Literally, then, there was a significant spatial divide between the space of seeing and the space of the seen (see figure 21). Audience members were the Westminster or Waterloo bridge away from any of the action being represented. Yet that divide was repeatedly and spectacularly “bridged” by the sight of these different parts of London right there on stage in all their equestrian or pugilistic or simply drenched glory. The result, I’d like to suggest, was a highlighting of the same sort of simultaneous adequacy and inadequacy of representation that we’ve been tracing in Egan and the Cruikshanks. On one hand, what’s on stage is clearly not “Life” of the sort one is supposed to be seeing: the “street row” Tom and Jerry get into after boxing a charley poses absolutely no danger to any of the spectators. Yet on the other hand, there are actual coaches on stage, a “half naked” Cribb is boxing around, and the handsomely dressed dancers in the scene at Almack’s do a quadrille, lancers, and “2 Cast Figures” (28). How much closer to “Life” can one get? And once again this doubleness is encapsulated in the talismanic phrase of the title: when at the close Logic sings “then masquerade it now away, we ne’er shall wish the fun done, / That is, should you be pleased to say, you like our Life in London” (40), does that refer simply to what the audience has just witnessed or more broadly to what the play supposedly stands in for? Either way, it was enough to induce “Mr. Astley to keep his theatre open near a fortnight later than his usual period of closing” and to yield three hundred eighty pounds for Barrymore at his first benefit (“thirty pounds more than upon any previous occasion”), but I suspect that that success stemmed in no small part from how “that reality which ... attach[es] itself to the scenes and incidents” came off as delightfully partial: both mimetic and quite ostentatiously in violation of mimesis.

A rather different configuration of these same elements seems to have driven the next theatrical version to be offered: Charles Dibdin’s Life in London; or, the Larks of Logic, Tom, and Jerry, An Extravaganza ... Founded on Pierce Egan’s Highly Popular Work, which opened at the Olympic Theatre on 12 November 1821 and ran one hundred ninety-one nights. Here, rather than keeping a clear, if bridgeable distance between the theater and the putative location of the action on stage, the play repeatedly threatens to collapse the two. This is particularly evident in a scene set in an unspecified, but Olympic-like theater in which Tom and Jerry check out a “pretty girl” so “new” that even Tom doesn’t “know her” and then briefly debate the ethics of “intrud[ing] upon the Engagement of another gentleman” (i.e., soliciting a prostitute already with a client).

The girl’s accomplices then pick a fight with our heroes and Jerry plunges in: “Oh, there’s a row! I must be in that, because it’s Life in London” (11). As we know from the plate of “Tom & Jerry in the Saloon at Covent Garden” (see again (figure 4), prostitutes routinely worked the lobbies and boxes of the theaters, and pickpockets and conmen would regularly instigate “rows” in order to gain an advantage over their marks. So it might seem as if Dibdin’s play is operating uncomfortably close to home, putting on stage what was probably already being more casually performed in and around the theater.

Fig. 22

And the rest of the geography of the play could support such an impression: the majority of the action and all of the “larks” are set within a five minute walk of the theater, in and around Temple Bar (see figure 22). One can easily imagine that there were some post-theater attempts to steal a charley’s box or to crash a cockney party (as Tom, Jerry, and Logic do). But as with our other texts, that implicit invitation to compare the “Life” on stage with that surrounding it is counterbalanced by various moments which call attention to the patent theatricality (and so presumed difference) of what the actors were doing. Hence the brawl in the lobby turns into a song whose chorus is “sure never row was so monstrously uproarious, / This is Life in London, how d’ye like the go?” (13). Similarly, the chorus of the finale asks the audience “your plaudits of patronage kindly then give, / And let Life in London, in London, long live; / For features of fancy howe’er we pursue, / No fancy’s true fancy not fancied by you” (40). As with Barrymore’s version, this begs the question of what it would mean to “let Life in London, in London, long live.” Simply return frequently to the Olympic for more of this “extravaganza of fun, frolic, and whim” (The Drama 2: 51)? Routinely engage in actual rows? And what would happen if a real-life counterpart to Jerry presumed that a member of “the fancy” wasn’t “true fancy” since he didn’t accord with his own “fancy”? Would he be able to conclude with the stage Jerry that “Life in London’s nothing without adventures” (29)? Again, either way, the play clearly worked and was “repeated every evening to overflowing audiences of the most fashionable description” (The Drama 2: 206), despite, or perhaps because of, what Jane Moody terms the theater’s rather “insalubrious location” (31)—remember only the midnight scene at a nearby coffee shop (see again figure 12).

But the reason why it worked, why “‘Tom, Jerry, and Logic’ still delight with their whimsical ‘sprees and larks’ ” (The Drama 2: 253), has, I’m proposing, a great deal to do with the way in which that whimsy simultaneously promoted and undermined the project of “seeing Life” in the area surrounding the Olympic.

Moncrieff’s cuts become significantly more comprehensible, though, if we consider them in conjunction with the very Egan-like claims of the Adelphi’s early advertising. According to one playbill, this was “an animated picture of every species of Life in London, deprived, through the filtering stone of the Proprietor’s critical care, of all that might disgust or offend even the most fastidious Imagination.” Yet less than twelve weeks later, the play was being offered as “a series of pungent and minutely accurate Representations of HIGH and LOW LIFE.”

Similarly, the whole piece was a ballad opera, with new words to familiar tunes and so was likely to conjure up a quite complicated array of memories of previous theatergoing (to The Beggar’s Opera, to The Benevolent Tar, to Don Giovanni), even as it featured “Twenty New Scenes, Painted from Drawings taken on the spot” and “the Publishers of the various Maps and Guides through London” were rather cheekily, if “respectfully informed, that this Piece does not supersede the Necessity of their various Publications” as they “may still be useful in refreshing the Memory of the Spectators, after the Conclusion of the Adelphi season” (Moncrieff, Songs tp, v).

So, it would seem that, as with Life in London itself, Tom and Jerry is somehow both filtered and minutely accurate, representationally inadequate and yet up to the task. Unlike Egan and the Cruikshanks’ version, however, Moncrieff’s play drew a quite socially—and therefore geographically—varied audience: dukes and dustmen, peers and apprentices, the first member of the royal family ever to visit a minor theater (Frederick, Duke of York) and “the people” whose “appearance” made Harriet Arbuthnot turn up her nose. Indeed, in the closing address to the 1821-22 season, the actor who played Tom called explicit attention to the “overflowing audiences” the Adelphi had attracted, “comprising a galaxy of the brightest stars of the West, and a maximum of the primest natives of the East” (qtd. in The Drama 2: 311). What’s missing in all this socio-geographic language, of course, is the middle, both of the social order—there are apparently no counterparts in the audience to Jemmy Green, the cockney dandy of the play—and of the metropolis itself. This absence, I think, helps reveal the significance of Moncrieff’s geography. Put simply, Covent Garden has been emptied out (except for a few sporting destinations like Cribb’s Parlour, which gets replicated on stage with the exhibition of the champion’s “ORIGINAL CUP” [Moncrieff, Songs iv]) in order to make all these questions of representational adequacy depend upon the origins of the audience, rather than on the location of the theater. That is, by preserving Egan and the Cruikshanks’ spatial distribution (except for the area around the Adelphi) and then soliciting, incredibly successfully, an audience from both West and East, Moncrieff was able to transfer the felt site of viewing from the playhouse in the Strand to wherever the individual audience members came from. Accordingly, “the scene of ‘All Max in the East,’ is well worth seeing by any one who does not mind contemplating filth, and profligacy, and vagabond merriment. The man who performs ‘Dusty Bob’ makes a wonderful fac-simile of a squalid ‘coster-monger,’ a being made up of gin, rags, occasional starvation, and perpetual knavery” (“London Chit-Chat” 334)(see figure 24).

Fig. 24 W. W., “All Max in the East, a Scene in Tom & Jerry, or Life in London” (London, 1822). Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Conversely, “the outline of fashionable life discovers more than is frequently known of London, by those who are its residents from the cradle to the tomb” (“Advertisement”). In each of these passages there’s a clear sense of what is known and what is unknown and so where the play’s representational adequacy can or cannot be easily confirmed. But, of course, the areas which are known are quite different: the writer for Blackwood’s seems to presume that filth and squalor are unusual sights for its readers, while the author of the “Advertisement” in the Albany edition of Moncrieff has apparently never set foot in Almack’s or Burlington Arcade. The different vantage points that these writers exemplify, however, were brought nightly into extremely close contact with one another: “upwards of one hundred nights” into the first season it was “yet an affair of peril to squeeze your way into the pit” (“London Chit-Chat” 333) and the theater was still “collect[ing] overflowing audiences” two seasons later (The Drama 5: 247). Such unavoidable proximity seems like it would almost have to have produced a doubleness of perspective not wholly unlike that of Mrs. Arbuthnot: something like “if I can assess the adequacy of this, but not that, and, judging by his appearance, he can assess the adequacy of that, but not this, and yet here we all are jammed together in ‘a very pretty theatre’ whose surroundings constitute a common ground that is pointedly not being represented on stage, then perhaps the thing to do is simply to ‘attend’ Tom and Jerry’s ‘larks and rambles,’ to ‘witness [their] sprees, and encourage [their] endeavours’ without worrying overmuch about ‘the fidelity of its representation of London manners’.”

If so, then it makes sense that the most “laughable” scenes—“the night row at Temple-bar, and ... the meeting of all the celebrated beggars and ballad singers of the metropolis” (The Drama 2: 207)—were precisely those which most clearly raised the issue of adequacy, only to immediately suspend it: Temple Bar was close enough for all to verify, while the inner recesses of the Holy Land were inaccessible to almost everyone.

Accordingly, one could either sit back and enjoy what the Times termed the play’s “ludicrous and tolerably faithful pictures” of “the characters and customs of the different classes of society” into “which the irregular habits” of Tom, Jerry, Logic, Kate, and Sue’s lives threw them or else one could set out on “nocturnal ‘sprees’ ” of one’s own and it seems telling that the most popular sort of spree—“milling the Charlies”—was precisely that which was least place-specific and so most equally available to all: there were charleys, and reports of pranks against them, all over town ( “London Chit-Chat” 334).

The question that this all begs, of course, is why should Life in London have so taken off when it did, only to then become so retrospectively puzzling as Thackeray’s generation moved into adulthood, given that most of its different components had long been and would continue to be available? Pugilism and other blood sports, “the city representing itself to itself” (During 342), young men from the West End going into Covent Garden or beyond on nighttime “sprees” ... these had all been a part of metropolitan life for decades or even centuries and didn’t magically disappear with the coming of the railways.

What was different in the early 1820s, though, was the status and reputation of London itself. As James Chandler has reminded us, the years leading up to and surrounding the mania for Life in London operated according to a particularly “hot chronology,” their “peculiar eventfulness” making it seem as if things were changing almost day by day (3). In 1819 and the first half of 1820, both the metropolis and the nation more generally seemed poised on the brink of revolution: mass meetings of unprecedented size gathered in almost every town and sometimes, as at “Peterloo,” were met with savage violence on the part of the authorities; the Six Acts rendered the exercise of quite basic traditional rights treasonous; radicals in Cato Street plotted to assassinate the Cabinet and the Prime Minister; Lady Jerningham thought “the Queen’s bold return to England,” despite her husband’s open animosity, had moved the “country ... nearer disaster than it has been since the days of Charles I” (168), as crowds flooded the streets in open defiance of the soon to be crowned George IV. And yet by the time that the first few parts of Life in London were appearing, that had all melted away: Caroline was acquitted in mid-November (or rather, the divorce case against her was abandoned) to widespread rejoicing, “the anger that had sustained ... radical action ... in the regency years virtually evaporated” (Gatrell 420), it was as if the end of the year belonged to a different “epoch” than its beginning.

And this transformation was at its most dramatic in London itself. From the dangerous moment when “tens of thousands” of onlookers “booed and hissed” when the executioner held up the “severed heads” of the Cato Street plotters (Laqueur 423) to November 1820, when The European Magazine could approvingly pronounce that Egan’s subject was “the world’s epitome; London!” (rev. of Life in London 436), was, calendrically, only six months, but phenomenologically and emotionally the two points were  worlds apart.

Fig. 27 Theatrical Reflection. or a Peep at the Looking Glass Curtain at the Royal Coburg Theatre” (London, 1822). Courtesy of the City of London, Metropolitan Archives.

Perhaps the single best emblem of this change was the so-called “Looking Glass Curtain” which debuted at the Royal Coburg Theatre on 26 December 1820 (see figure 27). As its name would suggest, this was a huge mirror (or rather, sixty-three mirrors set together in a giant frame), which “reflected every form and face in that gorgeous house, from the topmost seat in the galleries, to the lowest bench in the pit” (Fitzball v-vi) and which was in itself apparently enough both to “fill all the places” and to arouse the envy of the other minor theaters (Dibdin 20).

The sheer attitudinal shift necessary for the Royal Coburg’s venture to have been a success, the newfound capacity to take pleasure in seeing oneself as part of a socially varied tableau vivant, when only a year previous the denizens of the galleries were thought to be preparing themselves to slaughter many of the habitués of the pit ... this marks the advent of a quite astonishing metropolitan self-regard and one to which much of the rest of the Anglophone world twas apparently willing to accede. A writer in upstate New York, for example, thought that Moncrieff’s play would “convince the ear and the eye that London is the world in miniature, and possesses every thing from the acme of splendor to the ne plus ultra of grossierté” ( “Advertisement” ). Inevitably, however, such buoyant sentiments proved a bubble and “between 1825 and 1837 the mood of self-confidence, the devotion to urban values, and the pride in London all came to an end” (Olsen 21).

Fig. 28 "The PROGRESS of CANT” (London, [1825]). Courtesy of The Trustees of the British Museum.