The First Bohemians: Life and Art in London's Golden Age

by Vic Gatrell

The colourful, salacious and sumptuously illustrated story of Covent Garden - the creative heart of Georgian London - from Wolfson Prize-winning author Vic Gatrell

In the teeming, disordered, and sexually charged square half-mile centred on London's Covent Garden something extraordinary evolved in the eighteenth century. It was the world's first creative 'Bohemia'. The nation's most significant artists, actors, poets, novelists, and dramatists lived here. From Soho and Leicester Square across Covent Garden's Piazza to Drury Lane, and down from Long Acre to the Strand, they rubbed shoulders with rakes, prostitutes, market people, craftsmen, and shopkeepers. It was an often brutal world full of criminality, poverty and feuds, but also of high spirits, and an intimacy that was as culturally creative as any other in history. Virtually everything that we associate with Georgian culture was produced here.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, London, Art, 18th Century, British Literature, Research

512 pages, Hardcover

First published October 3, 2013

About the author

Vic Gatrell is a social historian of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, and a Life Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

a.k.a. V.A.C. Gatrell

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best history books I ever came across. The author did some brilliant research of the Covent Garden area in London and its artists, writers, etchers, printsellers, shopkeepers and brothels. You meet all the major characters and find superb illustrations you'll never forget. My personal highlight was the chapter on Thomas Rowlandson and what an outstanding genius that enfant terrible was. That chapter alone catapults the books in the highest spheres imaginable. I know the streets around Covent Garden extremely well but with this book you see all those places in a different light. After reading those chapters you want to set out for covent garden and feel the spirit of the Golden Age of Caricature in Britain and beyond. Must read book and cornerstone for understanding English culture.

[Basil Bowdler · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really love how much empathy and passion Gatrell brings to this study of the bohemian underground in eighteenth-century Covent Garden. Fizzing with visceral details; Gatrell relishes in the squalor and seediness of life and the book overspills with sex, shit and venereal disease. This isn't a book that shies away from how disgusting eighteenth-century London was, but not does it reduce the lives of those who lived there to the filthiness of their surroundings. The inhabitants of Gatrell's Covent Garden are never downtrodden or defeated. Instead, he treats them with a humanity that's so often lacking from general works of early modern history. This is already enough to make for a great book, but Gatrell really takes it to another level with his fusion of social history with visual analysis. The interplay between the text and the 200+ prints and illustrations reproduced here is staggering, a work of popular cultural history unlike anything I've ever read. Gatrell never pretends to be impartial: neo-classical/rococo works of 'taste' and 'refinement' are explicitly - and spiritedly - cast aside in favour of art depicting 'real life'. These are as much political as cultural categories here. Workaday painters beat society artists: Hogarth and Turner good, Reynolds and Ruskin bad. At points the reverse snobbery goes a bit too far (at one point Gatrell brings up Hogarth's height of 5'5" to evoke sympathy for his malnourished upbringing only to have a go at Reynolds for being exactly the same height!) and this narrative of class conflict is slightly misleading. But I'm more than prepared to forgive that in such a compelling, inventive and spirited book.

[Eleanor · Rating 5 out of 5]

A totally great, full-to-overflowing study of the Covent Garden art world in the eighteenth century. Hogarth, Rowlandson, Blake, Gillray, and other incredible satirists, landscape painters and engravers burst from the pages. If you're into this sort of thing, you'll really like it. (Gatrell uses the word "whore" a lot, which is mildly discomfiting, but then a lot of the time he's quoting eighteenth-century men, for whom "whore" was merely a noun with no emotional charge...)

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

A charming portrait of 18th century Covent Garden and the people there - the highs and lows, the famous, the infamous and the less known... As is said, somewhere in the book (and I'm paraphrasing), the ordinary people are the ones that are hardest to come close to, for the simple reason that they leave so few traces in the records. But even so, not much is missing in this densely populated book!

[Amy Doolan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author was certainly a Hogarth fan! Might as well been a Hogarth book, but I do enjoy reading about him at least!

[Thom DeLair]

This book focuses the London neighborhood of Covent Garden in the 18th century where some early "Bohemian" artists lived. The first chapters focus on urban and social history while it moves toward art history and biography. While in my own mind, I tend to think of 18th century England as a world of gentlemen in wigs and neoclassical art, this book focuses on the innovative humorists and pedestrian artists that depicted the low brow aspects of life in London that would later be swept under the rug, more or less, during the Victorian age.

[Emg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't remember having read a book that so informatively and intelligently places art in the context of both time and geography. Unfortunately, the reproductions in the edition I read were not clear enough or large enough to see the details; guess that's a good enough reason to go to London and see some of the original.

[Molly Trammell · Rating 4 out of 5]

A compelling take on (and argument for) "bohemianism" in the Covent Garden of Georgian England. The author certainly knows his stuff, but as other reviewers have said his particular admiration of Hogarth is clear and many pages are devoted to the artist. I overall found the first half of the book more engaging than the last half - a colorful history of the location and characters of CG itself versus a handful of "bohemian" (and non-bohemian) artists that populated and/or were inspired by the neighborhood. This was an interesting history, though it may appeal more towards the art historian than the general reader.

[Sarah Maguire · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting, well-researched look into the world of the Covent-Garden-proximate artist in the 18th century. Non-fiction frequently makes my mind wander alarmingly, but this I read with relish.

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable study of London's first bohemia and how it grew out of the commercial art and publishing boom of the 18th century. But not as good as City of Laughter.

[Ash HC · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5
Really fun history! Strong and engaging presentation of research. Feel like the final chapter on Turner felt a little bit extraneous, or that it didn't perfectly mesh with the rest of the book but it was still interesting so I'm not really complaining.

[Mervyn Whyte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gatrell's rip-roaring read draws the highs and lows of life, art and personality in Covent Garden in the Eighteenth Century with all the exuberance and fun of a Thomas Rowlandson sketch. The last four chapters in particular are great fun. And reconfirm the author's reputation as the punk rocker of art history.

[Adam Stevenson · Rating 3 out of 5]

An enjoyable and well-written look at the lively world of the Covent Garden area in the 18th Century.

I very much enjoyed ‘City of Laughter’ and I enjoyed this also - the focus is a little wider, starting off with the environment of Covent Garden, the sort of houses, shops and spaces that were there and how they were depicted before going into a tension between artists who portrayed real life and those (primarily of the Royal Academy) who were making art that was more neo-classical and refined.

Then we had a chapter on Hogarth, one on Rowlandson and one on Turner. These last three chapters, interesting as they were, didn’t seem to contribute much to the Covent Garden theme and seemed more tangental to it.

I definitely liked the first part about Covent Garden as a place most. I also love how his feeling for the 18th Century where the writing is no nonsense and ‘propels us niftily to the point’ as opposed to the 19th Century which is ‘windy tosh’ is exactly my feelings.

I’m still not convinced we called call the people of Covent Garden Bohemian though, even following his definition; ‘an attitude of dissent, from the prevailing attitudes of the middle class’ as most of the people in Covent Garden were the middle class. Also, people like Hogarth were desperate to be of a higher social status and the writers wrote for money - I just don’t think there is the anti-middle class element to call them Bohemian.

[Adrian]

Covent Garden, London in the eighteenth century is the setting and its population of writers and artists are the characters. Johnson, Hogarth, Reynolds, Goldsmith, Turner, Burney, Rowlandson and others are all here. But the book is mostly social history. The sights, sounds and smells (usually bad) that effected what the above wrote and painted are fully detailed. This close knit warren of streets was home to much crime and punishment. It was still a time when locals were encouraged to pelt criminals in the pillory till they died making all the art and literature that came from this time and place all the more remarkable.

[Jeff Howells · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much better than the last history of 18th Century London I read. In the main because it has a much tighter focus - the 'bohemians' who lived in and around Covent Garden...There are pen pictures of some notable figures (like Hogarth) and lots of illustrations. Good overview of the coffee house scene.

[Tracy White]

Good, interesting , full of weird and wonderful facts

[Kodiaksm · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not pleasant and I did not like the author's writing style.