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Making a Night of It
George Cruikshank
1839
Etching on copper
10.7 x 8.4 cm vignetted
"Making a Night of It," for Chapter 11 in "Characters," by Charles Dickens in Sketches by Boz, originally published in Bell's Life in London on 18 October 1835, illustrated by Cruikshank in 1836, and redrafted for the 1839 Chapman and Hall anthology, facing p. 198
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
So they took some coffee, and after paying the bill, — twelve and twopence the dinner, and the odd tenpence for the waiter — thirteen shillings in all — started out on their expedition to manufacture a night.
It was just half-past eight, so they thought they couldn’t do better than go at half-price to the slips at the City Theatre, which they did accordingly. Mr. Robert Smithers, who had become extremely poetical after the settlement of the bill, enlivening the walk by informing Mr. Thomas Potter in confidence that he felt an inward presentiment of approaching dissolution, and subsequently embellishing the theatre, by falling asleep with his head and both arms gracefully drooping over the front of the boxes.
Such was the quiet demeanour of the unassuming Smithers, and such were the happy effects of Scotch whiskey and Havannahs on that interesting person! But Mr. Thomas Potter, whose great aim it was to be considered as a "knowing card," a "fast-goer," and so forth, conducted himself in a very different manner, and commenced going very fast indeed — rather too fast at last, for the patience of the audience to keep pace with him. On his first entry, he contented himself by earnestly calling upon the gentlemen in the gallery to "flare up," accompanying the demand with another request, expressive of his wish that they would instantaneously "form a union," both which requisitions were responded to, in the manner most in vogue on such occasions.
"Give that dog a bone!" cried one gentleman in his shirt-sleeves.
"Where have you been a having half a pint of intermediate beer?" cried a second. "Tailor!" screamed a third. "Barber’s clerk!" shouted a fourth. "Throw him O—VER!" roared a fifth; while numerous voices concurred in desiring Mr. Thomas Potter to "go home to his mother!" All these taunts Mr. Thomas Potter received with supreme contempt, cocking the low-crowned hat a little more on one side, whenever any reference was made to his personal appearance, and, standing up with his arms a-kimbo, expressing defiance melodramatically.
The overture — to which these various sounds had been an ad libitum accompaniment — concluded, the second piece began, and Mr. Thomas Potter, emboldened by impunity, proceeded to behave in a most unprecedented and outrageous manner. First of all, he imitated the shake of the principal female singer; then, groaned at the blue fire; then, affected to be frightened into convulsions of terror at the appearance of the ghost; and, lastly, not only made a running commentary, in an audible voice, upon the dialogue on the stage, but actually awoke Mr. Robert Smithers, who, hearing his companion making a noise, and having a very indistinct notion where he was, or what was required of him, immediately, by way of imitating a good example, set up the most unearthly, unremitting, and appalling howling that ever audience heard. It was too much. "Turn them out!" was the general cry. A noise, as of shuffling of feet, and men being knocked up with violence against wainscoting, was heard: a hurried dialogue of "Come out?" — "I won't!" — "You shall!" — "I shan't!" — "Give me your card, Sir?" — "You’re a scoundrel, Sir!" and so forth, succeeded. A round of applause betokened the approbation of the audience, and Mr. Robert Smithers and Mr. Thomas Potter found themselves shot with astonishing swiftness into the road, without having had the trouble of once putting foot to ground during the whole progress of their rapid descent. — "Characters," Chapter 11, "Making A Night of It," pp. 200-201.
When the cloth was removed, Mr. Thomas Potter ordered the waiter to bring in, two goes of his best Scotch whiskey, with warm water and sugar, and a couple of his "very mildest" Havannahs, which the waiter did. — "Making a Night of It," p. 199.
Originally published as "Scenes and Characters. No. 4" in Bell's Life in London on 18 October 1835, the sketch once again presents a portrait of young, middle-class Londoners breaking the restraints of their boring jobs and stifling lifestyle to behave outrageously — indeed, they are so badly behaved at The City Theatre that even the unruly working-class audience demands that they be ejected.
A young bourgeois's idea of a "night of it" in London of the 1830s on "quarter-day" (that is, the day once every three months on which government clerks such as John Dickens were paid) apparently included a large meal of chops and pickled walnuts, washed down by beakers of Scotch whiskey and followed by a visit to a working-class theatre to interrupt the performance with taunts and derogatory comments, as one sees in Pip's hilarious visit to the theatre to see the former village clerk, Mr. Wopsle, in Hamlet, in Great Expectations, Chapter 30.
The illustration, although oriented on the page very much like Vauxhall Gardens by Day, is a sharp contrast to the respectable, "middle-brown" classical concert, and more closely approximates the animated theatre scene in George Cattermole's The Balcony audience at Astley's Amphitheatre for the 1840 serialisation of The Old Curiosity Shop, whose rowdy, biblulous, ill-kempt theatre-patrons remind one of contemporary images of the sans culottes of the French revolution. The emphasis here, as in the Cattermole wood-engraving, is not on the stage, the actors, and the production in progress, but on the disreputable audience and its unseemly conduct as suggested by Dickens's description of its behaviour, but not improbably "drawn from life." In all likelihood, the venue in which the laurel-decorated box is located is The City Theatre, a disused club in Grub Street converted into a theatre in 1829; it later became The Pantheon, and saw performances by the celebrated Edmund Kean in 1831. Shortly after Dickens wrote this sketch, the theatre closed, and became a warehouse.
Not long before Dickens wrote this sketch, the infamous Grub Street, synonymous with hack (highly commercialised) literature and bad writing in the eighteenth century, was renamed as Milton Street (1830), in memory of a local tradesman who owned the building lease of the street. By the middle of the Victorian period, the street had lost some of its negative connotations as authors were regarded as intellectual and moral leaders of society, although "Grub Street" (as in George Gissing's novel New Grub Street) remained a metaphor for the commercial production of printed matter, regardless of whether such matter actually originated from Grub Street itself. Poet Alexander Pope had immortalized Grub Street in his mock-epic The Dunciad (1728), a satire on "the Grub-street Race" of commercial writers such as Colly Cibber, the favourite of the Goddess of Dulness and dubbed by Pope "King of the Dunces." This working class area outside the city walls known as Cripplegate suffered much from the saturation bombing of London in World War II, but a small portion of the street remains in the Barbican Estate.
The very restrictions that forbade the new theatres to do Shakespeare or other straight plays perhaps partly inspired the brilliant ingenuity and inventiveness of entertainment at this time. Unlicensed premises relied on silent or musically-accompanied action, physical theatre, animals and acrobatics, and thus both melodrama and the Victorian pantomime were developed. Without poetry and declamation, much more was needed from scenery and visual effects, and these were also essential in the major theatres, because lighting and auditorium design, making it easy to see and hear the players, did not keep up with the increasing size of theatres. And audiences, in the first half of the century, were not passive or still: the auditorium was as well-lit as the stage, a place of social meeting and greeting, coming and going; the night was long — up to five hours, with several different pieces on offer — and an extra influx of people who had already been enjoying a night out arrived at about nine, getting in at half price, and needing to be instantly involved in the event. — Jacky Bratton, "Theatre in the 19th c." British Library Newsletter: Discovering Romantics & Victorians.
The young man asleep with his arms hanging down out of the box is Robert Smithers; the man in the small-crowned hat, white waistcoat, and loud checkered trousers, adopting a mock-melodramatic pose, is the principal character of the sketch, the misbehaving clerk Thomas Potter. Ironically it is not alcoholically-inspired Potter's rude comments, but Simpson's howling after suddenly awakening that results in their being ejected into Milton Street, formerly Grub Street. Although five rather rough members of the audience insult Potter in an attempt to silence him, Cruikshank depicts the other people in the box as reasonable, middle-class theatre patrons, including three fashionably dressed young women, and two middle-class males seated, and the two ushers looking alarmed as they open the box (rear), so that the effect of the illustration is somewhat different from that of the bare text. The sketch may have autobiographical origins as Dickens, when a young legal clerk, was accustomed to go to the theatre almost every night with a fellow clerk at Ellis and Blackmore named Potter, who carried his enthusiasm for theatre "so far as to pay to act in a cheap theatre in Catherine Street, off the Strand" (Slater, 28), an experience that Dickens recalls in the sketch entitled "Private Theatres."
He also introduces Potter by name into another, more raffish, sketch involving a theatre, 'Making a Night of It' (Bell's Life in London, 18 Oct. 1835), where Potter features as a city rather than an attorney's clerk, and is distinguished by an 'off hand, dashing, amateur pickpocket sort of manner'. — Michael Slater, "Early Years: London, 1822-1827," p. 28.
The present sketch differs from another in which young men are giving themselves over to misrule, Our Next-door Neighbour written in March 1836, in that the focal character and butt of the joke is the respectable, older landlord whom the younger men, making a night of it, ridicule.
Left: George Cruikshank's far more animated and engaging bacchanal, Greenwich Fair. Centre: Cruikshank's view of the scene of many a debauch, The Gin-shop. Right: Cruikshank's depiction of the street involving wise-cracking, well-dressed youths and the infuriated landlord in Our Next-door Neighbour. [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Above: George Cattermole's caricatural study of an unruly theatre audience in early Victorian London, The Balcony audience at Astley's Amphitheatre. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
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Last modified 3 June 2017