Eighteenth-Century London through Masks: Notes on disguise, authenticity, and libertinage in eighteenth-century London city guides

Markku Kekäläinen

The forging of identity was a highly controversial topic in the eighteenth-century British urban discourse. It was seen as a symptom of moral collapse: a man lost his authentic self in the metropolitan play with masks. Hid behind the masks lay various vices, vanities, and sexual intrigues, and gentlemanly libertinage in its most scandalous form. In the eighteenth-century city guides, or “stranger’s guides”, the fashioning of urban identity was posed as a problem, namely how to keep one’s moral integrity in a social sphere in which one could not recognize the “authentic” identity of a city dweller. This genre belonged to commercial and low-end Grub Street literature. Commercially published and distributed, Grub Street literature belonged to the new “bourgeois” public sphere, like coffee-houses and newspapers. The guides were written, often anonymously, by scribes or literary gentlemen. The first and most famous specimen was Ned Ward’s The London Spy (1698–1700), which presented journeys through the higher and lower spheres of London and, commonly in a satirical tone, described urban characters with all their accompanying vices and vanities. The London Spy also introduced the figure of the innocent and naïve observer from the countryside, a character which would become a protagonist in several city travelogues. The guides also offered advice on how to negotiate the many hazards of the London streets.  The genre flourished through the eighteenth century, and some well-known guides were published even during the Regency period (Ferguson 2008, 53–57; O’Byrne 2014, 57–58; Ogborn 1998, 104–115; Rendell 2002, 25–50).

The social geography of London was dramatically transformed in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century: in a metropolis of more than half a million inhabitants, the new institutions of sociability like coffee-houses, pedestrian parks, theatres and pleasure gardens had become the main scenes of sociability. These anonymous public and semi-public places of encounter demanded new codes of sociability rather than the traditional ones which were based on social hierarchy and familiarity.

Sociologist Richard Sennett has argued that, in early eighteenth-century Paris and London, public life was based on theatrical principles; sociability was recognized as a play with masks without any reference to the performer’s personal qualities. This theatrical attitude based on the ancient theatrum mundi idea made possible spontaneous sociability in the anonymous and heterogeneous social scene of the metropolis. According to Sennett, when the modern individual as a unique “person” entered the stage of public life in the last decades of the eighteenth century, it became necessary to protect one’s “authentic” with conformity at a time when spontaneous sociability was declining (Sennett 1978, 64–82).

However, Sennett does not identify the historic layers of urban sociability and their relation to urban codes of sociability. The theatrical code was mainly based on early modern court culture. In the highly competitive courtly milieu the emphasis on civil courtesy was placed on the exterior, and theatrical dissimulation was justified because outward appearance took precedence over inner life (Peltonen 2003, 29–37). The courtly codes of civility had a strong impact on eighteenth-century urban sociability because, as Anna Bryson has argued, the birth of new fashionable meeting places in London by the 1620s and 1630s anticipated the expansion of the new forms of urbanism after the Restoration, and an important part of this urbanization was the adaptation of the codes of Continental, mostly French and Italian, courtly civility (Bryson 1998, 131, 61). After the Glorious Revolution, the court and especially the Continental forms of courtly sociability became a highly controversial issue in British cultural discussion, and consequently dissimulation in social occasions was found to be a morally ambiguous phenomenon.

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) and Richard Steele’s (1672–1729) extremely influential moral weeklies Tatler (1709–11) and The Spectator 1711–12) transformed the ways in which the city scene was observed. Whereas Ward’s “spy” was naïve and took urban phenomena as they were, Addison and Steele’s “spectators” committed themselves to the improvement of their readers. In their cultural critique, the weeklies had a Whiggish anti-court agenda (O’Byrne 2014, 57–60). The moral weeklies introduced a new code of urban sociability which, besides reciprocal pleasing, was based on honesty, sincerity, and benevolence. Whereas Addison could write sympathetically about London as a theatrum mundi and city dwellers as a fraternity of spectators, the anti-theatrical ethos of moral discussion grew harder later in the eighteenth century when the cult of sentiment injected the requirement of emotional sincerity and attachment to urban sociability and the new nationalistic sentiment valued English plainness and unpolished integrity over Continental sophistication (Cohen 1999, 53–4; Carter 2002, 333–54).  However, the theatrical and extravagant forms of courtly sociability lived, albeit disapproved of, in the eighteenth-century gentlemanly culture, sexual libertinism as its most sensational manifestation.

“At court, they are striving for titles, places and pensions; here prevail, in the highest degree, vanity, pride and dissimulation, nor can the face hardly be considered as the index of mind” (The Midnight Spy, 15), a city-guide crystallized the falsity of courtly life. Dissimulation was the key term: being accepted in the early modern courtly milieu, it had become suspicious in the eighteenth-century urban context. According to another travelogue, the rivalry of the court was a corruptive element, and although the courtly scene offered a dazzling performance, it destroyed sane judgment: “The sumptuous banquets of that bewitching spot take off our relish for the homely fare of our own tables; the splendour of equipage dazzles our eyes…the whole scene collected in one view, sets our brains a madding; and has, in all ages, been the destruction of many.”  Finally, the courtly scene was “nothing more than a dream; and when we are rouzed from the delusive reverie, we discover its folly and fallacy.” (London Unmask’d, 86–9). The court was a pernicious delusion which dispelled solid moral and mental coordinates. This delusion had also contaminated fashionable urban sociability.

“There cannot be a greater instance of folly, than a desire of appearing in disguise, and assuming a part in the drama of life we are not qualified sustain with propriety” (London Unmask’d, 42–3), writes the author of a travelogue. He had met a nightly city dweller, “an unfortunate beau”, who, when coming from masquerades, had damaged his “most fashionable suit”. As originally a Continental courtly amusement, masquerade was a highly popular public enjoyment in the assemblies and pleasure gardens of eighteenth-century London; with its extravagance, gender blending and disguising of identity it was an extremely controversial phenomenon, particularly because in masquerade parties sexually lavish behaviour was very common. When conversing with the unfortunate fop, the writer realized that the night dweller “was one of those gentlemen with which the town and every assembly in it are constantly infested; I mean a gentleman constituted merely by dress, being totally ignorant of every punctilio that marks the man of fashion.” In the real world, “my beau in masquerade was in reality a journeyman barber”. The author contemplated the moral dilemma:

Surely, (said I to myself) the world is one scene of masquerade, and every character appears under covert. Formerly the externals marked rank and degree, but now, if we would form a true estimate, the most probable means seems to be that of reversing appearances. To so notorious a degree of venality is the age arrived, that rank, character, genius, and even probity itself, are but secondary considerations. (London Unmask’d, 13)

In the seventeenth century, satirists had recognized a special eroticized sphere in London geography which was called ‘Erotopolis’ or ‘London separate from London’ (Turner 2002, 3). This was the sphere of sexual libertinism, which was an integral element of the gentlemanly culture of the Restoration aristocracy. In the sixteenth century, the term libertine denoted heterodoxy, freethinking, and atheism, but in the seventeenth and eighteenth century it received the meanings of debauchery, looseness of sexual conduct, and an attempt to construct a self on the basis of the passions; a Puritan writer called the London gallants “epicures”, “atheists” and “libertines” (Bryson 1998, 245–8). In France, the emphasis was on intellectual freethinking, but in England, libertinism indicated more rakish sexual behaviour. On the one hand, libertinage has been recognized as transgressive anti-civil behaviour and rebellion against repressive social norms (Bryson 1998, 246; Turner 2002, 120).  On the other hand, rakish sexuality could be seen as a Rabelaisian carnivalesque, where the social norms turn upside down and fixed identities change into the play with masks (Castle 1986, 38—40).

In the city travelogues, the world of masks and sexual intrigues aroused a fear of moral collapse. According to an anonymous author, a libertine was a figure outside the coordinates of ordinary life and he “may be represented as an earthly fiend, who spreads a general contagion around him, through the force of most corrupt principles and pernicious examples” (London Unmask’d, 51–2). In a city guide, a personage reflected the character of the creatures of the London night: “’tis not common for persons here to assume an appearance thus different from their characters? What! is this London world in a mask? How then are we to judge mankind if persons of such a genteel appearance are capable of such dirty actions, what must we think of those whose very garb denotes infamy?” The street-wise mentor (a common figure in the genre) Urbanus (whose name denotes both urbanity and polished behaviour) answered the author: “What do you think that a bit of lace constitutes dignity, or that merit is centred in brocade? Experience my friend will teach you the contrary […] that knaves here very often appear in embroidery, and the honest man in a thread-bare coat.” (The Midnight Spy, 13–14). The scene of nocturnal metropolis included a carnivalesque mixture of highly heterogeneous elements which “contains a jumble of high and low, rich and poor, honest men and knaves, all pursuing different objects, according to their different dispositions. […] In the city […] the different objects perplex the gazing eye, and ravish the astonished mind” (The Midnight Spy, 14–15). Nothing was as it seemed in nocturnal London; the nightly scene required that disguised appearances be decoded. The carnivalesque world of aristocratic libertinism haunted the eighteenth-century London guides: its dissimulation and hedonism menaced the fixed identities and solid morality of the commercial classes.

In the city travelogues, the questions of moral guidance, self-fashioning and authenticity, familiar from contemporary philosophical discourse and “high-end” literature, were manifested in a highly concrete form and localized in particular urban spaces of London. In the context of urban history and urban humanities, the city guides offer a grass roots perspective on the multiplicity and polyphony of London between the early modern and the modern periods. The travelogues include a diverse selection of urban types, spatial distinctions, and characterizations of urban subcultures, and further research could offer exceptionally rich source material on the social and moral geography of eighteenth-century London. These city guides also provide a privileged view of the mental landscape of the age, where force fields of waning courtly culture, common sense Enlightenment, and rising romantic sensibility meet and clash.



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Anon. (1766). The Midnight Spy, or a View of the Transactions of London and Westminster. London.

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Cohen, Michèle (1999). Manliness, Effeminacy and the French. Gender and the Construction of National Character in Eighteenth-Century England. In Hitchcock, Tim & Michèle Cohen (Eds.): English Masculinities 1660—1800. Longman, London and New York. pp. 44–61.

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O’Byrne, Alison (2014). The Spectator and the Rise of Modern Metropole. In McNamara, Kevin R. (Ed.): The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. pp. 57–67.

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Turner, James Grantham (2002). Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London. Sexuality, Politics, and Literary Culture, 1630–1685. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.



Markku Kekäläinen

PhD, Research Fellow, Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies, University of Helsinki