4 - Urban Cultures

Summary

We saw in Chapter 2 how all my main subjects gravitated to London in pursuit of their careers. This is scarcely surprising, given the increasing importance of the capital city relative to the rest of the country during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For Peter Sterry preaching to the new Cromwellian establishment, just as for David Hartley the ambitious medical practitioner a century later, it was to London that opportunity inevitably led. The city shaped their existence not just simply in terms of career enhancement but by virtue of its distinctive character of life: the variety, extensiveness and content of the day-to-day contacts it enabled. In this chapter I focus on the social and cultural worlds occupied by my protagonists, the kinds of relationship they were able to form within those worlds and the extent to which music and related interests and beliefs played a part in that process. In Chapter 8 I argue that, as well as providing a unique site of potential interaction, London appeared at times as a negative force, a foil for an alternative and contrasting lifestyle privileging rural isolation and its associations with unspoiled Nature and primal wisdom. In the present chapter, though, my focus will be on the practical role of the city in promoting musical and related cultures and thence in stimulating the musical content of my subjects’ worldviews. As well as helping to provide a grounding for the more conceptual content of Part II, the orientation of this material will throw up a few surprising connections and a certain amount of previously unidentified biographical detail on some diverse historical figures.

By 1750, London was a rapidly growing environment. It had reached an estimated population of close on 700,000, its newly developing suburbs fanning out beyond the walls of a still densely packed central city. The capital's population has been estimated to have represented 7 per cent of the country as a whole in 1650, but the figure rose to something like 11 per cent by the end of our time period. The Sterry family, drawn to London from rural England and prospering as merchants in their adopted home, typified the migratory patterns that produced exponential growth in spite of a persistently high urban mortality rate. Occupations were less dependent on agriculture than before, and commercial opportunities were governed to an ever-greater extent by overseas expansion enhanced by colonial trade.