From expressions of religious rage to death threats against the king, Madeleine Pelling reveals how graffiti drove Britain’s revolutionary 18th century
our relationship with graffiti is nothing if not complicated. On the one hand, it is a criminal offence, one that can result in prison time. On the other, works by street artists like Banksy fetch huge sums of money at the world’s most exclusive auction houses.
But it hasn’t always been this way. For much of human history, leaving one’s mark was a common, accepted occurrence. From the boasts of Roman gladiators to the prayer of medieval priests, graffiti was part of the everyday world. So how did we come to view this unruly and hard-to-define media with such mistrust and ambiguity?
The answer lies in the 18th century. This was the age of revolutions in which graffiti underwent its own radical transformation to become something feared, reviled and legislated against. Over the course of the century, extraordinary ordinary folk – from political prisoners to sex workers, homesick sailors, Romantic poets and the artisans of the industrial revolution – turned to the surfaces around them to record their presence at some of the past’s biggest (and smallest) moments. The results, sliced into dank castle cells and splashed across palace frontages, scratched in alleyways and hidden in plain sight on the windows of country houses, tell the story of Britain and its empire. Taken together, they form a tantalising record of the lives, loves, triumphs and failures of real people who not only witnessed history, but actively shaped it.
Turnpikes and brothels
At the heart of the surge in interest in graffiti across the 18th century was a book. It introduced readers to the street art found across the nation’s many surfaces: from London palaces to the lowliest Covent Garden brothel; from the dusty turnpike taverns to the glittering assembly rooms at Bath.
The authorship of The Merry-Thought; or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany (1731) was something of a mystery. Its anonymous compiler went only by Hurlo Thrumbo, a name borrowed from the lead character in a contemporary comic play. But his, or her, anonymity was rather the point. For the book was a collection of graffiti produced by people from all ranks and creeds, presented together in a bustling, bombastic portrait of early Georgian life. Here was a mirror to a society in flux, displayed in all its grimy, thrilling glory as its inhabitants vied for p
