Part 1

A BOOK FOR A RAINY DAY

A BOOK FOR A RAINY DAY

OR RECOLLECTIONS OF THE EVENTS OF THE YEARS 1766-1833

BY JOHN THOMAS SMITH

EDITED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY WILFRED WHITTEN

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM CONTEMPORARY PRINTS

METHUEN & CO. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON

_This Edition was first Published in 1905_

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

The highly flattering manner in which my work, entitled _Nollekens and his Times_, was generally received, induced me to collect numerous scattered biographical papers, which I have considerably augmented with a variety of subjects, arranged chronologically, according to the years of my life.

Some may object to my vanity, in expecting the reader of the following pages to be pleased with so heterogeneous a dish. It is, I own, what ought to be called a salmagundi, or it may be likened to various suits of clothes, made up of remnants of all colours. One promise I can make, that as my pieces are mostly of new cloth, they will last the longer. Dr. Johnson has said:

“All knowledge is of itself of some value. There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable, that I would not rather know, than not.”

Lord Orrery, in a letter to Dr. Birch, dated November, 1741, makes the following observation:

“I look upon anecdotes as debts due to the public, which every man, when he has that kind of cash by him, ought to pay.”

J. T. SMITH.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

JOHN THOMAS SMITH _Frontispiece_ From an Engraving by WILLIAM SKELTON of the Drawing by JOHN JACKSON, R.A.

NANCY DAWSON _Facing page_ 10 From a Contemporary Print.

ROYAL ACADEMICIANS REFLECTING ON THE TRUE LINE OF BEAUTY AT THE LIFE ACADEMY, SOMERSET HOUSE. ” ” 14 From a Drawing by ROBERT CRUIKSHANK.

THE DELIGHTS OF ISLINGTON ” ” 17 From the Engraving by CHARLES BRETHERTON of the Caricature by HENRY WILLIAM BUNBURY.

“SING TANTARARA--VAUXHALL! VAUXHALL!” ” ” 24 From the Drawing by ROWLANDSON (_Microcosm of London_).

GEORGE WHITEFIELD ” ” 32 From a Painting by NATHANIEL HONE, mezzotinted by GRENWOODE.

JOHN RANN ” ” 38 From a Contemporary Print.

LONDON BEGGARS: JOHN MACNALLY ” ” 45 From an Etching by JOHN THOMAS SMITH.

LONDON BEGGARS: A SILVER-HAIRED MAN ” ” 52 From an Etching by JOHN THOMAS SMITH.

LONDON MATCH BOYS ” ” 58 From an Etching by JOHN THOMAS SMITH.

IMAGES ” ” 63 From an Etching by JOHN THOMAS SMITH.

THE ROYAL COCKPIT ” ” 68 From a Drawing by PUGIN and ROWLANDSON.

DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ” ” 78 From the Drawing by THOMAS TROTTER, done from life, and engraved by PRISCOTT.

“PERDITA” ROBINSON ” ” 83 Transcriber’s Note: this picture was omitted from the original book’s list of illustrations, and has here been added.

MRS. SIDDONS ” ” 85 From the Portrait by JOHN KEYSE SHERWIN, engraved by the painter.

BENJAMIN WEST, P.R.A. ” ” 91 From the Painting by GILBERT STUART in the National Portrait Gallery.

CAPTAIN FRANCIS GROSE ” ” 105 From the Drawing by DANCE, engraved by RIDLEY.

COVENT GARDEN ” ” 108 From the Print, “Morning,” by HOGARTH.

UMBRELLAS TO MEND ” ” 115 From an Etching by JOHN THOMAS SMITH.

CHRISTIE’S AUCTION ROOM ” ” 120 From the Drawing by PUGIN and ROWLANDSON (_Microcosm of London_).

AN OLD LONDON WATCH-HOUSE ” ” 126 From the Drawing by PUGIN and ROWLANDSON (_Microcosm of London_).

SIR HARRY DINSDALE AND SIR JEFFERY DUNSTAN ” ” 129 From Contemporary Prints.

ELIZABETH CANNING’S IMPOSTURE ” ” 135 From a Contemporary Print.

RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN ” ” 147 From the Painting by JOHN RUSSELL, R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery.

J. W. M. TURNER, R.A. ” ” 152 From a Water-Colour Drawing by JOHN THOMAS SMITH in the British Museum Print Room.

GEORGE MORLAND ” ” 157 From a Drawing by ROWLANDSON.

THE REV. ROWLAND HILL ” ” 161 From a Drawing by THOMAS CLARK, engraved by WILLIAM BOND.

JAMES BARRY, R.A. ” ” 168 From the Portrait painted by himself, in the National Portrait Gallery.

THE OLD HOUSE OF COMMONS ” ” 173 From the Drawing by PUGIN and ROWLANDSON (_Microcosm of London_).

NEWGATE CHAPEL ON THE EVE OF SEVERAL EXECUTIONS ” ” 178 From the Drawing by PUGIN and ROWLANDSON (_Microcosm of London_).

THOMAS AUGUSTINE ARNE ” ” 181 From a Caricature (based upon a Drawing by BARTOLOZZI) in the National Portrait Gallery.

LADY HAMILTON ” ” 184 After a Painting by ROMNEY.

GIOVANNI BATTISTA BELZONI ” ” 188 From the Painting by WILLIAM BROCKEDON in the National Portrait Gallery.

BARTHOLOMEW FAIR ” ” 193 From the Drawing by PUGIN and ROWLANDSON (_Microcosm of London_).

CHARLES TOWNLEY ” ” 198 From a Painting by JOHANN ZOFFANY, R.A., engraved by WORTHINGTON.

JAMES NORTHCOTE, R.A. ” ” 205 From a Drawing by JAMES LONSDALE.

WILLIAM HUNTINGTON, “S.S.” ” ” 212 From the Painting by DOMENICO PELLEGRINI in the National Portrait Gallery.

MRS. JORDAN IN THE CHARACTER OF THE COUNTRY GIRL ” ” 222 From the Painting by ROMNEY, engraved by JOHN OGBOURNE.

HENRY CONSTANTINE JENNINGS (OR NOEL) ” ” 233 From a Contemporary Print.

DAVID GARRICK AND HIS WIFE ” ” 243 From the Painting by HOGARTH, engraved by H. BOURNE.

DR. OLIVER GOLDSMITH ” ” 257 From the Drawing by HENRY WILLIAM BUNBURY, engraved by BRETHERTON.

THE WIG IN ENGLAND: A MACARONI READY FOR THE PANTHEON ” ” 265 From a Contemporary Print.

MATS TO SELL ” ” 281 From an Etching by JOHN THOMAS SMITH.

CHARLES DIBDEN ” ” 292 From the Painting by THOMAS PHILLIPS, R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery.

A PARTY ON THE RIVER ” ” 298 From a Drawing by ROBERT CRUIKSHANK.

SIR EDMUND BERRY GODFREY ” ” 303 From an Engraving by P. VANDREBANE.

JOHN FLAXMAN, R.A., MODELLING THE BUST OF HAYLEY ” ” 309 From the Painting by ROMNEY in the National Portrait Gallery.

THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH, R.A. ” ” 317 From the Painting by himself in the Royal Academy.

THIS EDITION

The first two editions of _A Book for a Rainy Day_ appeared in 1845, twelve years after John Thomas Smith’s death, and a third appeared in 1861. As these editions do not contain half a dozen notes other than Smith’s own, this may claim to be the first annotated edition. It is also the first in which numerous original misprints have been (as I hope) corrected.

The lapse of seventy years has made many notes necessary. I have endeavoured to write these in the spirit of the book, making them something more than brief categorical answers to questions suggested by Smith’s journal. His own notes were interesting after-thoughts, and for this reason, and to avoid confusion, the great majority are now incorporated in his text. Where any are retained as footnotes, Smith’s authorship is indicated. If my additions to the book seem profuse, I can only plead that the _Rainy Day_ offers to the annotator that abundance of material which has long pleased and bewildered its “Grangerisers.” And our climate has not improved.

I wish to acknowledge the use I have made of the _Dictionary of National Biography_, _Notes and Queries_, Mr. Wheatley’s _London Past and Present_, Mr. George Clinch’s _Bloomsbury and St. Giles’s_, and his _Marylebone and St. Pancras_, Mr. Warwick Wroth’s _London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century_, Mr. Percy Fitzgerald’s _Life of Garrick_, Mr. Austin Dobson’s _Hogarth_, Mr. Laurence Binyon’s _Catalogue of Drawings by British Artists in the Print Department_, the _Gentleman’s Magazine_, the works of Cunningham and Redgrave, and such autobiographies as those of Henry Angelo, Thomas Dibdin, John Taylor, W. H. Pyne, Sir Nathaniel Wraxhall, B. R. Haydon, Madam D’Arblay, Dr. Trusler, and Letitia Hawkins. It is remarkable how John Thomas Smith’s own books supplement each other. His _Nollekens and his Times_ is an inexhaustible budget of facts, and its usefulness has been increased by the index provided in Mr. Gosse’s edition of 1895.

It should be remembered that the year-dates which Smith uses as chapter headings do not represent the times at which the respective chapters were written. I judge that Smith was engaged on the _Rainy Day_ only in the last three years of his life. His chronology is rather happy-go-lucky. For example, it must not be supposed that Dr. Burgess, of Mortimer Street, wore his cocked hat and deep ruffles in 1816, or that in that year Alderman Boydell might have been seen putting his head under the pump in Ironmonger Lane. These men died some years earlier. In accordance with the text of the third edition, Smith’s curious mention of the death of Dr. Johnson will be found under the year 1803.

W. W.

_June 1905._

JOHN THOMAS SMITH

John Thomas, or “Rainy Day,” Smith was born in a London hackney coach, on the evening of the 23rd of June 1766. His mother had spent the evening at the house of her brother, Mr. Edward Tarr, a convivial glass-grinder of Earl Street, Seven Dials, and the coach was conveying her back with necessary haste to her home at No. 7 Great Portland Street. Sixty-seven years later, the man who had entered thus hurriedly into the world left it with almost equal unexpectedness in his house, No. 22 University Street, after holding for seventeen years the post of Keeper of the Prints at the British Museum.

As a writer John Thomas Smith takes no high rank; but he is a delightful gossip, full of his two subjects: London and Art. We know him when he exclaims to a visitor in the Print Room, “What I tell you is the fact, and sit down, and I’ll tell ye the whole story.” Smith’s narrative manner is always that: “Sit down, and I’ll tell ye the whole story.” Such historians are often found in life, mighty recollectors before the Lord, who talk books which no one can inspire them to write. And it is well that when Smith did write he took small pains to be fine or literary. Writing as a man, and not as the scribes, he produced in his _Nollekens and his Times_ one of the most entertaining harum-scarum biographies ever seen, and in his _Book for a Rainy Day, or Recollections of the Events of the Years 1766-1833_, a budget of memories which has perhaps been less read and more quoted than any book of its kind.

Smith’s valuable quality is his interest in the life he lived and saw lived. He was zealous to record those trivial facts of to-day which become piquant to-morrow, a habit that reveals itself in the way he mentions his birth as happening “whilst Maddox was balancing a straw at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, and Marylebone Gardens re-echoed the melodious notes of Tommy Lowe.” In a friend’s album he wrote--

“I can boast of seven events, some of which great men would be proud of:

“I received a kiss when a boy from the beautiful Mrs. Robinson;

“Was patted on the head by Dr. Johnson;

“Have frequently held Sir Joshua Reynolds’s spectacles;

“Partook of a pint of porter with an elephant;

“Saved Lady Hamilton from falling when the melancholy news arrived of Lord Nelson’s death;

“Three times conversed with King George the Third;

“And was shut up in a room with Mr. Kean’s lion.”

These events are more curious than fateful, and, indeed, Smith’s career is little more than a record of plates etched and books published. He is entertaining because he was out and about in London for sixty years, and looked upon anecdotes as “debts due to the public.”

Almost as soon as Mrs. Smith’s hackney coach had brought her to No. 7 Great Portland Street--a house whose site is now covered, as I reckon, by No. 38--Dr. William Hunter, brother of the great John Hunter, arrived from Jermyn Street, and performed his duties with the skill of a Physician-Extraordinary to the Queen. The attendance of such a man proves the material comfort of the Smith family. Nathaniel Smith, the flustered father, was principal assistant to Joseph Nollekens, the sculptor, and he had worked for Joseph Wilton and the great Roubiliac. For Wilton he carved three of the nine masks, representing Ocean and eight British rivers, now seen on the Strand front of Somerset House. He had taken to wife a Miss Tarr, a Quakeress. Their boy’s christening was dictated by family history. He was named John after his grandfather, a Shropshire clothier, whose bust, modelled by Nathaniel Smith, was the first publicly exhibited by the Associated Artists at Spring Gardens; and Thomas after his great-uncle, Admiral Thomas Smith, who had earned in Portsmouth Harbour (more cheaply, perhaps, than Smith would have allowed) the name of “Tom of Ten Thousand.”

Smith early went into training to be a gossiping topographer. Old Nollekens, already a Royal Academician, and the most sought-after sculptor of portrait busts (“Well, sir, I think my friend Joe Nollekens can chop out a head with any of them,” was Dr. Johnson’s tribute to his genius), often took his assistant’s little son for a ramble round the streets. One day he led Thomas to the Oxford Road to see Jack Rann go by on the cart to Tyburn, where he was to be hanged for robbing Dr. William Bell of his watch and eighteenpence. The boy remembered all his life the criminal’s pea-green coat, his nankin small-clothes, and the immense nosegay that had been presented to him at St. Sepulchre’s steps. In another walk, Mr. Nollekens showed him the ruins of the Duke of Monmouth’s house in Soho Square. In a Sunday morning ramble they watched the boys bathing in Marylebone Basin, on the site of Portland Place. And, again, they stood at the top of Rathbone Place, while Nollekens recalled the mill from which Windmill Street was named, and the halfpenny hatch which had admitted people to the miller’s grounds.

In the sculptor’s studio, at No. 9 Mortimer Street, where at the age of twelve he began to help his father, Smith met sundry great people. One day, Mr. Charles Townley, the collector of the Townley marbles, noticed him, and “pouched” him half a guinea to purchase paper and chalk. Dr. Johnson, who was sitting for his bust, once looked at the boy’s drawings, and, laying his hand heavily on his head, croaked, “Very well, very well.” On a February day in 1779, that wag Johnny Taylor, who was to be Smith’s life-long friend, put his head in at the studio door and shouted the news that Garrick’s funeral had just left Adelphi Terrace for Westminster Abbey. Away flew Smith to see the procession, and to record it, in his old age, in the _Rainy Day_.

As a youth, Smith wished to learn engraving under Bartolozzi, but the great Italian declined a pupil, and it was through the influence of Dr. Hinchliffe, Bishop of Peterborough, one of his father’s patrons, that he entered the studio of John Keyse Sherwin, the engraver. Here he received his kiss from the beautiful “Perdita” Robinson; and when Mrs. Siddons sat to Sherwin for her portrait as the Grecian Daughter, he raised and lowered the window curtains to obtain the effect of light desired by his master.

Three years later Smith launched out as young drawing-master, pencil-portrait draughtsman, and topographical engraver. He found a patron in Mr. Richard Wyatt, of Milton Place, Egham. Through this gentleman he obtained commissions as a topographical artist from influential collectors like the Duke of Roxburgh, Lord Leicester, and Horace Walpole. Moreover, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West sometimes engaged him to bid for them at print auctions. At this time he was a frequent visitor to the drawing-room of Mrs. Mathew, in Rathbone Place, where Flaxman was often found, and where William Blake read aloud his early poems.

The small artist, and particularly the topographical artist, had his chance in the second half of the eighteenth century. The productions of Wilson, Reynolds, Romney, and Gainsborough had stirred up the arts of engraving, which allied themselves closely to literature and life. It was the age of portly topographies and county histories, with their ceremonious array of plates; of itinerant portrait and view painting; and of night-sales of books and prints at which sociable collectors sat under eccentric auctioneers, and at which noblemen were as commonly seen as they were at boxing and trotting matches fifty years later. Shops abounded for the sale of new prints, and auctions were frequent for the distribution of old. Human types were produced of which we know little to-day. Smith has drawn some of them with easy and natural touches in his chapter on the print-buyers who attended Langford’s and Hutchins’ sale rooms, in Covent Garden, in 1783. There he was in his element. Not much passed in the art world in the fifty years following that date that Smith did not know.

When twenty-two, he married. The girl of his choice was Anne Maria Pickett, who belonged to a respectable family at Streatham, and who, after forty-five years of married life, was left his widow. They had one son and two daughters. The son died at the Cape in the same year as his father, 1833. One daughter was married to Mr. Smith, a sculptor, and the other to Mr. Paul Fischer, a miniature painter. Soon after his marriage he was invited by Sir James Winter Lake to take up his residence at Edmonton, where he taught drawing to their daughter, and doubtless had other pupils. When he applied (unsuccessfully) for the post of drawing-master to Christ’s Hospital, Sir James and Lady Lake’s testimonial made a point of the fact that he had never touched up their daughter’s work, “a practice too often followed by drawing-masters in general.” At this period Smith practised as an itinerant portrait painter, a branch of art which then had its vogue, and was to number William Hazlitt among its professors. At Edmonton it was that he “_profiled, three-quartered, full-faced_, and _buttoned up_ the retired embroidered weavers, their crummy wives and tight-laced daughters.” At Edmonton, too, he watched the reception of his first book, the _Antiquities of London and its Environs_. Smith’s career for the next thirty years may be conveniently sketched in a list of his residences and the work he accomplished in each.

In 1797 he was at No. 40 Frith Street, Soho, a house which still exists, with its ground floor converted into a French wine shop. There he published his _Remarks on Rural Scenery_, consisting of etching of cottage and village scenes in the neighbourhood of London, with a preliminary essay on drawing.

In 1800 he was living with his father at 18 May’s Buildings, or the “Rembrandt Head,” as it was styled, in St. Martin’s Lane. In this year the discovery of curious paintings during the alterations to St. Stephen’s Chapel for the enlargement of the House of Commons, attracted Smith’s attention, and, after making careful copies of these relics, he projected his _Antiquities of Westminster_.

In February 1806, Smith published an etching of the scene on the Thames when Nelson’s remains were brought from Greenwich to Whitehall. He tells us that on showing it to Lady Hamilton she swooned in his arms. The plate is inscribed: “Published February 15, 1806, by John Thomas Smith, at No. 36 Newman Street.” This house remains unaltered.

In 1807 he issued his _Antiquities of Westminster_, his address appearing in the imprint as 31 Castle Street East, Oxford Street.

In 1810, May’s Buildings reappears in the imprint of his _Antient Topography of London_, but it may be that this address was not residential. The site of this house is merged in Messrs. Harrison’s printing works.

In 1815-17, Smith lived at No. 4 Chandos Street, Covent Garden, whence he issued his _Vagabondiana, or Anecdotes of Mendicant Wanderers through the Streets of London_.