Notes
* I am grateful to Simon During, Eric Eisner, Jim Epstein, Tom Laqueur, Roxann Wheeler, and, as always, Rebecca Morton for their encouragement and smart questions during the rather protracted gestation of this essay. I owe a particular debt to Franco Moretti, not only for giving me a chance to try out an earlier version of this project as a guest in his seminar on “The Enigma of Victorianism,” but also—and more importantly—for reintroducing me to the profound pleasures of map-making (which had mysteriously slipped out of my life after early adolescence).
The sources of the various prints here reproduced are all given in their respective captions. The background for all the maps is taken from Christopher and John Greenwood, MAP of LONDON FROM AN ACTUAL SURVEY IN THE YEARS 1824, 1825 & 1826 (London, 1830). Courtesy of Motco Enterprises Limited.
1. Cf. his claim a few years earlier that “the pictures and the writing of these queer volumes” lead “you … to suppose that the English aristocracy of 1820 did dance and caper in that way, and box and drink at Tom Cribb’s and knock down watchmen; and the children of to-day, turning to their elders, may say, ‘Grandmamma, did you wear such a dress as that when you danced at Almack’s? There was very little of it, grandmamma. Did grandpapa kill many watchmen when he was a young man, and frequent thieves, gin-shops, cock-fights, and the ring before you married him? Did he use to talk the extraordinary slang and jargon which is printed in this book? He is very much changed. He seems a gentlemanly old boy enough now’” (rev. of Pictures 77, 78).
2. No bibliography exists for Life in London. I base this estimate on a collation of various library catalogs with the newspaper advertisements reproduced in British Fiction.
3. For (not wholly reliable) overviews of the craze, see Hindley, Hotten, and Reid 73-92.
4. Tickets at the Adelphi normally ran one to four shillings, depending on where one sat.
5. For a rather bitter catalog of most of these items, see Egan, Pierce Egan’s Finish 8-12.
6. Cf. the 1860s retitling of Moncrieff’s play as Tom and Jerry; or, Life in London in 1820.
7. For a similar complaint (and a different, but not wholly incompatible, attempt to solve this problem), see Dart.
8. The comparative lack of evidence here may in part be a function of the medium in which the Cruikshanks worked: “diary- or letter-writers referred … seldom to prints” of any sort (Gatrell 213). Cf. Jacky Bratton’s discussion of how “very little unquestionably first-hand evidence” surrounds “entertainment beyond and outside the hegemonic realm of the [patent] theatres” (134).
9. For a similar (and I think kindred) ambition to “unfold a reading” of a set of objects “from within a synchronic analysis of its production and use,” see Lovell 3. As she notes, “sets of objects, by the power of their reiteration, by the formulation and repetition of … cues, tell us about shared expectations, and about … literacies.”
10. Egan, Life in London 2nd ed. 9n. All subsequent quotations from Life in London will be from the first edition.
11. There is no direct evidence of the size of any of the editions of Life in London, though it seems reasonably safe to presume that they were somewhere between the 1,500 copies of the fairly ordinary The Adventures of Johnny Newcombe in the Navy (with sixteen plates by Rowlandson) which were produced in 1818 and the 7,000 copies of the highly sensational Memoirs of Harriette Wilson—with ten plates—which were produced in 1825 (St Clair 561, 657). Even the low end of this spectrum would have allowed the publishers to have “netted some thousands” from Life in London by March of 1822, when the book was in its third or fourth edition (“London Chit-Chat” 333).
12. As my phrasing should suggest, my thinking about the dynamics of cultural markets has been shaped by Gladwell and by the work and conversation of Moretti.
13. The first two sentences in this passage also appeared in the prospectus to potential subscribers put out by Egan’s publishers a few weeks before the appearance of Parts One and Two (Hindley xii).
14. 
In 1840 Thackeray could only remember a scene
“at Bob Logic’s chambers, where, if we mistake
not, ‘Corinthian Kate’ was at a cabinet piano,
singing a song” (rev. of The Tower 13), but
twenty years later—and after he had finally tracked
down a copy—that scene had come to exemplify that
“enjoyment of life … which contrasts
strangely with our feelings of 1860”: (figure 9)
“just look at it now (as I have copied it to the best
of my humble ability), and compare Master Logic’s
countenance and attitude with the splendid elegance of
Tom!” (“De Juventute” 510).
15. The prank of “boxing” or “flooring” “a charley” was not, of course, invented by Egan—Thomas Pitt, Lord Camelford, records such an adventure in 1803—but it supposedly spiked dramatically in the wake of Life in London. For Camelford’s lark, see Tolstoy 160.
16. At two and a half (and then with the second edition, three) shillings a part, Life in London cost a minimum of thirty-three and a half shillings and for readers who didn’t get in on the action before the second edition, the total price for the parts would have been thirty-six shillings. By way of comparison, each of the contemporary Waverley novels sold for thirty-one and a half shillings, as did the authorized editions of the first two cantos of Don Juan. While these prices need not have prevented an eager reader of lesser means from gaining access to Life in London (there’s always borrowing or theft or reading in bookshops), they do suggest a probable demographic: these are luxury goods and so required a disposable income beyond the reach of most Britons. As for circulating libraries, Life in London appears in only one of the dozen catalogs surveyed by British Fiction (and Thackeray reported in 1840 that he had been “to no less than five circulating libraries in quest of the book” without success [rev. of The Tower 12]). Scott’s Kenilworth (another 1821 production), on the other hand, appears in all twelve and even Anna Maria Porter’s The Village of Mariendorpt was in eight of the libraries. I presume Life in London was a bit too raffish in its reputation to be included in what generally tried to position themselves as family-friendly establishments. Certainly that’s what John Bull’s insistence that “we do not know what feelings the generality of fathers of families may have upon such subjects, but for ourselves we would no more suffer a copy of the book … to be seen in our house, than we would a copy of ‘LITTLE’s Poems,’ or ‘PAINE's Age of Reason’” would suggest (9 Dec. 1821).
17. I’m struck by the similarity between how this craze unfolded and the ways in which “the prior path of collective claim-making” by ordinary Britons in this period “constrains its subsequent forms, influencing the very issues, actors, settings, and outcomes of popular struggle.… each shared effort to press claims lays down a settlement among parties to the transaction, a memory of the interaction, new information about the likely outcomes of different sorts of interactions, and a changed web of relations within and among the participating sets of people” (Tilly 37). I certainly wouldn’t want to claim that Tom and Jerry are “political” in any easy or obvious way, but I can’t help wondering if Tilly’s notion of “repertoires of collective action” (42) might help illuminate phenomena well beyond the realm of “popular contention.”
18. The frontispiece, its description, and all the other frontmatter to the volume did not appear until Part Twelve.
19. A rather disapproving Thomas Carlyle noted the previous year that “no play had ever enjoyed such currency on the English Stage as this most classic performance” (314).
20. A playbill for the 21 May 1822 performance trumpeted that the show would include “the whole of the beautiful stud of horses” (qtd. in Saxon 224 n44).
21. A reviewer for The Drama refers to an analogous production at the Royal Coburg as “a very excellent portraiture of ‘things as they are’ on the other side of the water” (2: 306).
22. The Drama 1: 306; Egan, Pierce Egan’s Finish 13n; The Drama 2: 361.
23. Most of these lines do not appear in the published version of the play, but were in the manuscript submitted to the Licenser and so were mostly likely part of the staged version (Larpent ms 2257, qtd. in Bratton 162).
24. Ironically, Didbin’s play was the only theatrical version of Life in London not to feature anything equestrian, yet it was staged in a playhouse which was decorated by “an elaborate line of horses’ heads … along the architrave” (Moody 150).
25. Playbills for 6 December 1821 and 25 February 1822 (qtd. in Bratton 163).
26. For a discussion of the interplay between the new and old words and the music, see Shepherd 181-87.
27. Arbuthnot 144; The Drama 2: 311; an unidentified reviewer of 13 Oct. 1822, qtd. in Moody 156.
28. The same exact scenes were singled out by Henry Crabb Robinson as particularly “pleasant”: “there is a capital row and fight among Watchmen—a meeting of beggars etc etc” (98).
29. For various versions of this longue durée of urban pleasure, see Corfield, During, Gatrell, and Sen.
30. In a speech that March, George Canning had asked, rhetorically, “whether any country, in any two epochs, however distant, of its history, ever presented such a contrast with itself as this country in November, 1819, and this country in February 1820” (7). I suspect that if he had waited until Life in London was being serialized, the distance between 1819 and 1820 would have seemed even greater.
31. Cf. the address spoken at the opening of Sadler’s Wells in April 1822, which tried to distinguish their offerings by insisting that they had “no curtain made of glass, at great expense; / Be ours the task to drive reflection hence” (qtd. in Egan, Songs 7).