Writing on the Wall
“You pick your way past young men and girls sitting on the steps, you wander bewildered among those austere walls which students’ hands have arabesqued with outsize capital writing and detailed graffiti, just as the cavemen felt the need to decorate the cold walls of their caves to become masters of the tormenting mineral alienness, to make them familiar, empty them into their own inner space, annex them to the physical reality of living.” Italo Calvino
Today’s post is about graffitti and Madeleine Pelling’s book, Writing on the Wall. Pelling is a British cultural historian, writer, podcaster and contributor for TV and radio, and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, who has held research fellowships at the universities of Yale, Edinburgh and Manchester. With her book she transports us back in time, bringing to life the atmosphere of the spaces and historical events she discusses. Personally, reading the book felt a bit like watching a period film or reading extracts from a Charles Dickens’ book. Pelling has managed not only to narrate the history and evolution of graffitti, while situating it in the midst of historical events and architectural spaces, but also to bring to life the grim realities and atmosphere of the periods she is discussing. Finally, towards the end of the book she makes references to events concerning graffitti and contemporary political issues.
Pelling has gone in search mostly of the hidden voices of 18th century Britain, a turbulent and transformative historical period, and a time when anyone with a sharp pointed object or a piece of chalk or charcoal could leave their mark on walls, ceilings, windows, and public monuments. Through marks made by both the poor and the rich, by ordinary people and upper class citizens and parliamentary figures, we get to look into these otherwise invisible stories, and gain insight into a tumultuous time in British history through its graffitti. Pelling tells us that graffiti is one of hundreds of words used over the past few centuries to describe this type of messaging via words, symbols and images, a form of expression and messaging we can find across time from the Ancient Egyptians to the present. She discusses the importance of graffitti in revealing untold stories that would otherwise have been lost in time, and how this form of expression and communication allows us to get a glimpse of what life was like behind the scenes.
The book is organised in three parts, which include three different periods: (1688-1740), (1740-1780), and (1780-1800), focuses on both the content and sites of graffitti, and also includes illustrations, photographs and art work. She begins with William Hogarth’s series of engraved images, The Four Stages of Cruelty. As she describes a scene, at one point she writes: “Alongside this combative encounter between perceived high and low life, royal morality and plebeian baseness, a third man is writing on the wall….” She goes on to provide a brief socioeconomic critique commenting “The scene is cut through with criticism of the inequalities and brutalities Hogarth and his contemporaries witnessed all around them in the eighteenth century.” She poses questions like whether those born to a life of poverty and crime were destined to perpetuate it and what role did writing on the wall play in the debate between the grim realities faced at the time by so many of the nation’s poor with the ideas of Enlightenment that were emerging.
Pelling explains that as literacy increased among the population at large, and as a public sphere [defined by spaces like coffee houses, taverns, drinking venues, brothels, and powered by debate], began to emerge, writing on walls and other surfaces offered a relatively unpoliced and unrestricted way of making oneself heard. The messages on these surfaces had moved away from the religious and domestic settings they occupied in previous centuries to reflect the new more complex world, as towns and cities were rebuilt after the civil war, the plague, and in the case of London, the fire of the previous century, fed on the wealth of an expanding empire. Pelling writes that issues like the justice and penal systems, a variety of inequalities and issues of parliamentarian representation, as well as, the religious character of the nation or where the power of the monarch ended and that of Parliament began, were all debated, and this debate was reflected on walls and other surfaces. This material included anything from political slogans and drawings and sketches, to love letters, satirical poems, notes of displeasure, anger and hatred, resistance and financial ruin, libellous accusations, religious or prophetic warnings, and even reviews of sex workers* (I am a ware of the critique of this term by feminists, but this is the term used in the book).
Through reading the book we understand how leaving a mark, not only on the page, but also on the wall, could change lives, shift public opinion and feelings, and shape political events. This is made excessively clear as we read how political and religious conflict played out in graffiti across the country, as well as, on the battlefield, and how a simple chalk marking triggered events like the arrest and execution of an immigrant, Roman Catholic midwife, which had then contributed to a further deterioration in Catholic–Protestant relations, the dethroning of the Catholic King by William and Mary at the end of 1688, and all the events that followed.
One of Pelling’s sources is a published collection of graffitti found across London’s coffee houses, taverns, streets and privies, titled, The Merry-Thought; or, The Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany, by an anonymous writer in 1731. This work would go on to become a best-seller, probably because the recorded messages resonated with the readers’ unarticulated commonalities, desires, secret thoughts, fears, losses, grievances and prejudices. Pelling notes that the writing on the walls of London served as a visible reminder of the tragic inequality that reigned.and the fragile balance of power. She writes: “London was a city with two faces: a respectable, polite and powdered veneer; and a seamier, pockmarked reality that festered beneath. These worlds did not exist in isolation, but rather side by side, sometimes in the same streets, houses and even rooms.” Meanwhile, in 1720, the collapse of the South Sea Company, which was originally set up to supply enslaved Africans to plantations in America, and which brought a lot of wealth, took place, with a catastrophic fallout, where fortunes were lost, and many went bankrupt.
Those who found their worlds shrunk to the size of a prison cell also left their marks on walls and surfaces. Pelling tells us prisons were microcosms of Georgian society, miniature, enclosed places with their own distinct cultures and economies, where state and subject collided. She writes that at the time the boundaries between social rank, power and morality regularly blurred, and poverty, debt, prejudice, ambition and greed or revenge, could throw “many Britons on the mercy of corruptible justice and penal systems tasked with maintaining order in a fast-changing society.” She adds that the risks of unfair treatment, miscarriages of justice and exploitation were high, the cells dank and squalid, disease was rife in the prisons, bribery proliferated, inmate treatment was subject to the whims and personalities of gaolers, people who had gone bankrupt or owed debts were packed in with convicts who had committed severe crimes, prisoners had few rights or access to healthcare, and were even used as medical guinea pigs. Entrepreneurial gaolers charged visiting fees so that the curious could peer into cells rendering inmates as “curiosities to be gawped at and characters to be reimagined in the minds of the masses.”
Additionally, many of the detained in prisons were on their way to transportation to the colonies, a practice that bolstered the colonial labour force by supplying able bodies to colonies in America and later in Australia. And they were probably some of the lucky ones, since at the time 200 crimes carried the death penalty! Prisoners carved their initials, names, poetry, prayers and confessions, the outlines of objects like guns and gallows, ships, buildings, and even elaborate streets, onto the surface of the prison walls. Pelling writes: “Graffiti was the language of the disenfranchised, and an invaluable means of asserting autonomy and resistance in a system that allowed for little preservation of self.” With a piece of coal or chalk, fire, blood or any sharp implement, inmates told their stories to assert themselves as victims or perpetrators, and their marks reveal a lot about how convicts saw themselves and the society that had denounced them. Today some of these marks have found their way into the works of contemporary artists who are trying to depict these spaces of incarceration blurring the lines between reality and fiction, high art and the perceived primitivism of this material.
In tracing the history of graffitti, the book allows us to visit significant events like the industrial revolution and the changes it brought, the Jacobite risings in Scotland and northern England, conflict with France and Spain, and revolution in the American colonies, Britain’s brush with civic uproar in June 1780 and the fear of a rebellion. Then in 1789 when violent insurrection engulfed Paris, emptying the Bastille of its prisoners and marking the symbolic start of the French Revolution, anxiety across the Channel reached new heights. Pelling writes that Britons would weaponise graffiti to fight their causes and that the role of graffiti cast a long shadow over the final decades of the eighteenth century. She notes that both writing on the wall and an emerging hieroglyphic vocabulary had proved “a formidable tool in the insurrectionist’s arsenal, articulating disenfranchisement, pointing out difference and directing crowds.”
Across the surfaces of Britain and its colonies, graffitti would help ask questions about the nature of freedom and who was and was not entitled to it. In the 18th century Britain’s rural poor, had turned from the fields into urban factories, where most lived in dire circumstances. This led workers’ unions to complain about the mechanisation of previously skilled and specialist work, and to advocate for basic rights and decent wages. Graffiti, once again, offered a relatively uncensored and anonymised mode of complaint against the commodification of human labour and the disappearance of craftsmanship and local community. Meanwhile, during the earliest years of Romanticism artists were exploring new ways of writing, painting and being, free from prior artistic and social convention, and as Pelling notes, mark making was fast becoming a shorthand for intellectual liberation.
Additionally, soldiers, on both sides of the English civil wars, also took to leaving their mark and the names of battles fought. For soldiers and sailors serving across the British Empire graffiti was a tool to mark their existence in a life fraught with dangers and without guarantee of survival. Pelling tells us that among the most prolific graffitists of Britain’s empire were its sailors; however, as new ideas around the value of freedom, dignity and human life emerged, and amidst the increasing calls for abolition of slavery, mark making was also practised by a wide range of individuals across the colonial world, including the oppressed and the enslaved.
Prisoners of war also took to filling up wall spaces. Pelling tells us that in 1815 approximately one-quarter of a million prisoners of war, mostly but not exclusively French, were held in Britain. Among these prisoners were displaced and enslaved men and women from the Carribean, who had been invited to fight in exchange for their freedom. Through the means of writing and drawing on the wall they showed their national and political loyalties from within the oppressive spaces of incarceration like castles, towers and ship gaols. Graffiti, writes Pelling, could track the progress of colonisation on land and sea and document its resistance, provide a remarkable record of human thought, feeling and fight for freedom.
A different set of prisoners in a different era, predominantly in the Tudor and Elizabethan periods, also left their mark on the wall, sometimes with more elaborate graffiti like those at the Tower of London, one of Britain’s most famous historic buildings and still in use as a tool of the state in the 18th century. Graffitti in codes and symbols of condemned queens, martyred servants and rebels were discovered in 1796 by John Brand, for whom, writes Pelling, “the graffiti of the doomed represented not only moments in political history – the courtly machinations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in particular – but also human anguish.” Also, at the time, the execution of the French roayal couple had spread panic among the British patricians, and Brand was aware of the volatile political situation and the fact that, as Pelling comments, crafting history was (and still is) a fraught and complicated business, and there were questions of authenticity and politics to consider because this material from the past could be used to unspool more than one narrative depending on who was telling it.
A story is also included in the book that demonstrates how intertwined personal and socioeconomic contexts are. She tells us the story of a highly respected in his trade ceramic painter, a generous and loved individual, James Doe, who committed suicide in 1979, after leaving a lengthy suicide letter, if one could call it that, which was customary at the time, not on paper but on the wall of the last place he resided. Pelling notes “Doe’s tale was one of ingenuity, art, industrial espionage, inequality and betrayal.” She discusses how a deep personal betrayal by a friend he had supported when imprisoned for industrial espionage, while risking his own reputation and savings, had ultimately lead to loss of his own reputation, employment and money, and how this reality was interconnected with the upheaval that the industrial revolution was causing, as mechanised production was rapidly erasing the human stories behind made things, as well as, traditional types of work, and how it was also leading to a decrease of food production, which in turn led decreased supply of food and hunger. Pelling comments: “the industrial boom was quickly creating a vast and hungry urban workforce supported by a dwindling rural population.”
The association between a message or marking on the wall and suicide in the book brought to my mind the principal and chemistry teacher of the Lyceum I attended, who on the first day of school during assembly and after the prayer was over, welcomed us with a “didactic story.” He pointed to a Nietzsche quote written high up on the wall of a building, taller than the walls of our school, and told us that the student who had written it had committed suicide, and the reason leading to this act was her reading Nietzsche. Of course, it was a lie because a teenage girl being able to write the phrase in such big print so high up would not have been practically possible, requiring a professional scaffolding, at least. But sadly this was his introductory advice to us, perhaps in attempt to erect an unconscious wall of fear to engaging with philosophy or developing critical thinking.
To conclude, according to Pelling, mark making of words, slogans, symbols and images on walls, windows, alleyways, churches, monuments, prisons, ships, rocks and trees, towers and castles, has served lots of purposes and has provided an outlet to emotions and creativity. She writes that graffitti, which had developed its own vocabularies and codes, challenged power and made the grievances, injustices, inequalities and complaints of the invisible visible, allowed Britain to converse and laugh with itself, question the status quo and react to events from the Jacobite risings to Romanticism, unite communities and tear them apart, and spread campaigns of hate and messages of love. It evolved from something everyday and unremarkable to a more effective political tool that was at various points perceived as evidence of criminality or condemned by authorities. It was also used as an act of self-memorialisation and a means to record micro-histories, moments in individual lives. It brought to the foreground the proximity between high art and graffiti, and the delineations of social class that lay therein, and it often became a record of pain, loss and suffering, of physical and creative labour, and a lasting means that has carried messages and memory to the present.