Historian Madeleine Pelling on the emergence of graffiti in 18th century Britain, and how it gave normal people a new and important form of expression

In William Hogarth’s The Four Stages of Cruelty, a series of engraved images narrating the life of the thuggish Tom Nero, we first meet our antihero in a crowded London street filled with some of the city’s poorest. All around, the inhabitants of the metropolis are engaged in vile acts – cock fighting, hanging cats by their tails, burning out the eyes of birds. In the centre of the scene, Tom himself is inserting an arrow into the rectum of a dog. Another boy, a lone, cherubim figure, his face a close likeness of the young George, Prince of Wales (afterwards King George III), attempts to wrestle the beast free.

Alongside this combative encounter between perceived high and low life, royal morality and plebeian baseness, a third man is writing on the wall. Using a piece of coal between his fingers, he completes the name Tom Nero beneath an image of a hanged man, pointing to Tom himself for good measure. The message is clear; Tom’s crimes will only escalate, leading him inevitably to the gallows. And indeed, his story’s ending, depicted in the final image of the series, comes on the surgeon’s table as a dissected cadaver executed for murder.

And yet all is not as it seems. Tom’s tattered coat bears a badge with the letters ‘St. G’, indicating his authorisation as a beggar of the parish of St Giles, an infamous London slum. The figure who, with one hand, tries to rescue the abused dog, offers Tom a pie with the other. Starvation, we are invited to consider, or want of employment, has led him to commit such a horrible act.

The scene is cut through with criticism of the inequalities and brutalities Hogarth and his contemporaries witnessed all around them in the 18th century. Were those born to a life of poverty and crime destined to perpetuate it? Was it possible to reconcile the grim realities faced by so many of the nation’s poor with contemporary, fashionable ideas of Enlightenment rationalism and so-called civilisation that emerged in these early years? And what role did writing on the wall play in this debate?

These were questions that concerned others as well as Hogarth. The hanged man seen in the Four Stages was one of many staple motifs to emerge on the surfaces of the world in which the era’s best-remembered illustrator of ordinary lives lived and worked. Such marks – some hieroglyphic, others poetic, and some distinctly less salubrious compositions – entered public life in the earliest decades of the 18th century with remarkable, though today overlooked, potency. Each was created by rich and poor alike as, while literacy increased among the population at large, their practitioners sought to join in new conversations.

As a public sphere began to emerge, one defined by evolving spaces – coffeehouses, taverns, drinking clubs, brothels – and powered by debate, writing on the wall and other surfaces offered a relatively unpoliced and unrestricted way of making oneself heard amid the clatter of printing presses, the cries of political orators and the chatter of men and women on the street. Political slogans, comic poems, love letters, declarations of disgust and joy, reviews of sex workers, libellous accusations, prophetic claims and terrifying warnings all appeared with an unprecedented regularity, moving from the religious and domestic settings they occupied in previous centuries to a broadening and complex world.

While the heart of early 18th-century Britain was transforming, driven by cultures of borrowing and debt, vast and corruptible justice and penal systems, gender, religious and racial inequality and issues of parliamentarian representation, so too was the nation’s face. Now, anyone able to wield a sharp knife or diamond point, stick of charcoal or chalk, might take to the surfaces around them to express their presence and, crucially, their opinion.

But the story of graffiti’s transformation in Georgian Britain does not begin with Hogarth, nor indeed with the accession of King George I in 1714. Instead, its origins lie almost 30 years earlier, in 1688. In that year, two important events took place, interconnected and both central to the story told here. The first was the so-called Glorious Revolution, in which the Protestant William of Orange and his wife Mary deposed her father, the Catholic King James II and VII of Scotland, and took the English throne.

Although hardly without its own 17th-century context, this moment of constitutional crisis would cast a lasting shadow over the next hundred years or so, looming large in the memories and imaginations of Britons. At its heart were questions about the religious character of the nation and just where the power of the monarch ended and that of Parliament began.

Its legacies were far-reaching and continued to spark fierce and violent argument well into the Georgian age that followed. From exile in Europe, James’ descendants – his son James Edward Francis Stuart and grandson Charles Edward Stuart – would stake their claim to the throne, supported back in Britain by those loyal to the deposed Catholic king and known as Jacobites. The resulting struggle, played out in graffiti across the country as well as on the battlefield, would prove a brutal and costly stain on the century’s earliest decades.

It was in the earliest days of this crisis point of 1688 that the second event to shape the story of graffiti took place, though smaller in scale than the deposing of a king – but in the context of our subject, no less pivotal. Just months before James was outmanoeuvred by his daughter and son-in-law, during which animosity towards Catholics was growing, a piece of graffiti was held up as evidence of a gruesome crime perpetrated, it was alleged, by a Popish midwife. The result was a fevered hunt for a killer and nationwide panic, as stories of regicidal plots and insidious women began to spread.

In this moment, an otherwise innocuous and everyday message, scribbled in chalk on a slum door, was translated from its original surface and transferred to print, reproduced on the page and circulated across the country in a bloody and salacious account of unfolding events. Entering the public conversation with previously unseen potency, graffiti had begun a relationship with print media that would, in many ways, define how we understand it today.

This is an extract from Writing on the Wall: Graffiti, Rebellion and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Britain (Profile) by Madeleine Pelling. Buy a copy here.

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