Of Ships and Spectacles: Maritime Identity and the Politics of Authenticity in Regency London

‘Hearts of oak are our ships, jolly tars are our men’

Of all the later Georgian and Victorian ballad printers of David Garrick's famous lyrics to the William Boyce tune ‘Hearts of Oak’, first performed in their pantomime Harlequin's Invasion (1759), only John Pitts preferred Garrick's original chorus line of: ‘Hearts of oak are our ships, hearts of oak are our men’. In all other editions, as was also common in more expensive songbooks and anthologies, the refrain began as given above: ‘Hearts of oak are our ships, jolly tars are our men’. ¹ The choice at first seems baffling. Why opt for the latter – a revision that, when sung, produces an unnatural stress on the second syllable of ‘jolly’ due to the dotted rhythm, and loses all the rhetorical force of the original repetition? The alteration is poor poetry, undoing an excellent metaphor in favour of the hackneyed, even condescending phrase ‘jolly tars’ – and therein, I think, lies the reason. In the mainstream political environment of the late eighteenth century, and for much of the nineteenth, the ships could be ‘hearts of oak’, but for the sailors to be accorded the same noble status was unacceptably democratic. Sailors were working men, easily radicalised – a fear realised in the mass mutinies of 1797, and most famously dramatised in Douglas Jerrold's melodramas Black-Ey’d Susan (1829) and The Mutiny at the Nore (1830) – and while the Royal Navy formed a chief bulwark of national pride and identity, it sat easier with the status quo if the sailors remained rhetorically subordinated to the ships they manned. Thus the political became the picturesque, and hearts of oak became jolly tars.

I would like to keep this lyrical sleight of hand in the background during what follows, with the bowdlerised chorus to ‘Hearts of Oak’ serving as a sort of leitmotif for the privileged role of ships on the London stage and in London spectacles, a phenomenon most prevalent during the Regency and arguably at its height in the year 1814. Across three interrelated case studies – the first aquatic season at Sadler's Wells in 1804; the Prince Regent's Hyde Park naumachia (mock naval battle) of 1 August 1814; and the launching of HMS Nelson in the same summer – I will keep in mind the question of what it meant to put the ships themselves centre-stage, rather than their sailors, at a time when maritime iconography was central to issues of: identity; credibility, meaning both what was credible and what was creditable; and, above all, authenticity – issues contested by the theatre, the state, and the wider populace.

In the London of the early Romantic, Napoleonic period, authenticity was an increasingly loaded and indeed politicised concept. Drawing from the examples in this article and elsewhere in my work, and upon both sociological and literary scholarship, I would like to think of authenticity as a contested, contingent value that was perceived (by audiences and other interested groups) as inhering in an object, show, or spectacle, rather than as an objective and self-evident quality. ² This value, when successfully claimed, conferred cultural or political capital upon the owner and their endeavour (e.g. a theatre-manager and their current production). Those groups, such as audiences, who considered the conferral of that value within their gift, thereby gained a sense of self-worth and of enfranchisement in the authenticated endeavour. This is because the act of knowingly patronising an ‘authentic’ production was itself creditable and self-affirming, allowing even the humblest theatregoer to exercise their judgement and consider themselves as informed patrons, rather than punters.

Markers of authenticity particular to this historical context, all of which overlapped to some extent, included: faithfulness, in the sense of being an accurate and intentional representation of a specific thing (such as a ship or a battle); creditability – was the individual owner, by virtue of their actions, personal experiences, efforts, or character, worthy of the label; and sincerity – was the endeavour perceived as being carried out for good intentions, was it appropriate? As always in questions of authenticity, the literal truth of these factors was less important than the perceptions of the community holding them to account – a community that, to some extent, constructed itself upon and located its identity in that judgement of authenticity. Bearing in mind recent controversies in twenty-first century Britain and America, entangled with the rise of populism and the claim that people ‘have had enough of experts’, it should also be noted that in this context, expertise was by no means a barrier to authenticity. Rather, in the realm of spectacle and representation, authenticity was likelier to be conferred upon those whose expertise derived from experience (ideally, experience that involved suffering or sacrifice) of the ‘real’ that was being represented.

In their spectacular innovations, the organisers of both the Sadler's Wells shows and the Hyde Park naumachia sought to imitate the real – meaning, in both instances, the ships – while losing sight of the sailors. In so doing, they placed their spectacles on a continuum with the real, epitomised by the launching of HMS Nelson, in which they could not hope to compete: above all because their claims to authenticity were doomed to come off second-best. In a nutshell (for we shall encounter some nutshells before we are done), they failed to pass the vital test of authenticity: who could convincingly claim to possess a heart of oak?

On Real Water

Few phenomena have proved as consistently compelling to theatre historians as the aquatic tank installed by Charles Dibdin the Younger (hereafter ‘Dibdin’) at Sadler's Wells, prior to the theatre's reopening in April 1804. Its details and dimensions have been a source of both fascination and contestation, with the result that they are too well-known to warrant another rehash here. ³ I will essay some rough comparisons, however: here was a minor theatre in semi-rural Islington, the stage of which now boasted a tank longer than most of today's public swimming pools, and somewhat larger than a doubles tennis court, containing around 227 tonnes of water – the equivalent of thirty-eight adult male African elephants – and yet just one tenth of the tonnage drawn by the man-of-war HMS Nelson, whose own statistics will attract comparable interest at a later stage of this article. This tank remains a paradox, its properties and workings so well-known, its literal existence so very hard fully to comprehend, its enigmatic qualities only enhanced by the best-known extant visual record, the 1 June 1809 Rowlandson and Pugin illustration for Ackermann's Microcosm of London – a picturesque rather than precise depiction that moreover appears to represent a scene from the July 1815 production Harlequin Brilliant; or, the Clown's Capers (and identified as such by George Speaight, the editor of Dibdin's memoirs), a spectacle first staged fully six years after the image was published! ⁴ No less confusing are the vessels that floated on this tank, especially as they changed over the years: while 1813 saw a brief experiment with what Dibdin describes as ‘two Ships, as large as our tank would allow the disposal of; and I had riggers from the Dockyard to equip them’, the famous 1815 recreation of the 1798 Battle of the Nile involved the use of out-of-house models created by one M. Turner, far smaller than was usual at Sadler's Wells, remembered by E. L. Blanchard as being ‘about three feet in length’ and by Dibdin as ‘like Children's toys’. ⁵ For most productions, the vessels must therefore have been rather larger than three feet – perhaps averaging out at the size of a large sofa? – and varied enormously in type, from square-rigged ships of the line down to rowing boats and skiffs, these last allowing grown actors to man them, as in scene three of the Siege of Gibraltar (1804) and scene one of The Wild Man, or, Water Pageant (1810), in both of which a pair of actors occupy a rowing boat. ⁶ Dennis Arundell's claim, repeated by Jeffrey Cox, of 117 ‘ships’ three feet in length on a scale of one to twelve, for the Siege of Gibraltar, therefore represents a confusion with the smaller models used in 1815, and the scale is also inaccurate, as such models would equate to real vessels of thirty-six feet – the size of a ship's launch or a small yacht, rather than a man-of-war. ⁷

Evidently, the chief drawback of this fact-checking is that it threatens to entangle us in the morass of statistical minutiae that I had hoped to avoid. Yet questions of scale and, in particular, accuracy, were central to both the marketing and the reception of the Sadler's Wells aqua-dramas as authentic productions, and never more so than for their first outing, the Siege of Gibraltar. Playbills advertised that ‘The ships, gun-boats, floating batteries &c. have been regularly constructed by professional men from His Majesty's dock yards, and float in a receptacle, containing 8,000 cubic feet of REAL WATER’, and that these ships could ‘work down with the wind on their starboard beam, wear and haul the wind on their larboard tacks, to regain their situations’. ⁸ This latter boast could never be put to the test, of course: these were models pushed about by wading boys inside a theatre, not working vessels subject to the wind – indeed, in a wind-free theatre, it is unclear how any sails could appear to be ‘filled’, and Dibdin must have been grateful that real ships customarily went into action with as little canvas unfurled as possible, both to better regulate their movement and to protect the sails from enemy shot. Such details were printed because authenticity clearly attracted audiences, especially at a theatre heavily patronised by sailors. As the US anthropologist Charles Lindholm notes, ‘Authenticity can be ratified by experts who provide provenance and origin’, and Dibdin's invocation of the Woolwich shipwrights responsible for the vessels, whether true or not, makes just such a claim to expert endorsement. ⁹

The Siege of Gibraltar, like the tank itself, has received a good deal of recent attention, and I will limit my analysis to three interdependent questions: what did it look like, why was it staged in 1804, and how was it received? The ‘Grand Naval Spectacle’ was reserved for the fifth and final scene of the piece, during the preparations for which a ‘Grand Drop’ of a curtain designed and painted by R. C. Andrews covered the stage, this drop ‘representing the BRITISH GRAND FLEET going to the RELIEF OF THE GARRISON’, ‘drawn up in battle line, against the combined fleets of France and Spain’. ¹⁰ That is, the first spectacular image of men-of-war was not a fleet of models, but a traditional painting. The action that followed comprised the unsuccessful Spanish assault upon the fortress itself:

With real Ships and Gun Vessels, regularly built and rigged; blowing up the Spanish Floating Batteries, &c. &c. with a real representation of the Humanity of the English in saving their Enemies' drowning Sailors from Destruction, by the exertions of that meritorious Officer Sir ROGER CURTIS! and the curtain drops at the moment of BRITISH VICTORY. ¹¹

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Figure 1.

Ambrose William Warren after Conrad Martin Metz, Sir Roger Curtis gallantly exerting himself in preserving the Spaniards at Gibraltar (London, 1802), etching and engraving, 16.2 × 21.1 cm. British Museum no. 1873,0510.1229. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Crucially, this relatively close-up focus invested the ‘Grand Spectacle’ with a degree of intimacy, allowing both for a legible pantomimic narrative and audience identification with the human drama at its centre – for, as the playtext puts it, the heart of the piece is the ‘Humanity of the English’ in saving their foes, a theme common with many paintings of the siege, and picked up in one of Dibdin's father's most successful and enduring songs, ‘True Courage’ (1798). ¹²

It was at this most human stage of the drama that Dibdin claims that ‘the enthusiasm of the Audience exceeded all bounds’; another account concurs that ‘while the gallant Sir Roger Curtis appears in his boat to save the drowning Spaniards, the British tars for that purpose plunging into the water, the effect [is] such as to produce an unprecedented climax of astonishment and applause’; and the critic for the Lady's Monthly Museum agrees that it was this culmination that elicited by far the most emotional response:

The representation of the Spanish sailors saved from drowning by the humanity of the English sailors, had a very fine effect; and when the British sailors plunged from the boat into the water, it acted as an electric shock upon the audience, and the consequent applause may be easily imagined. ¹³

Recalling the old adage that ‘everyone's a critic’, even the readers of the Lady's Monthly Museum were informed that: ‘The ships, floating batteries, &c. were beautiful models, and perfect, in every respect, to the smallest minutiae’, reinforcing the importance of perceived authenticity in establishing the spectacle's credentials. ¹⁴ This keen interest in naval verisimilitude was of particular import in 1804, and it was no coincidence that Dibdin chose to stage this event as the first production of his remodelled theatre. In his memoirs, the final epithet he applied to the performance was ‘nationally interesting’ – and indeed, a more appropriately topical patriotic piece would be hard to imagine. ¹⁵ As David Stuart notes, the piece debuted during the height of the invasion scare, which lasted from the collapse of the Peace of Amiens in May 1803 until the Battle of Trafalgar in October 1805, during which time much of English loyalist society was in a state of heightened anxiety at the possibility of Napoleon's Army of England crossing the Channel. ¹⁶ In preference to the staging of a simple naval victory – there were many recent instances to choose from, and indeed it was apparently Dibdin's initial intention ‘to produce representations of every remarkable naval victory that may occur’ – the choice of a twenty-two-year-old triumph over, not the French, but the Spanish, was more appropriate than might at first appear, for the 1782 conclusion of the Siege of Gibraltar was an ideal analogy for Britain in 1804: subject to an ongoing ‘siege’ of their own and pitted against an ideological enemy, Britain's loyalist subjects needed reassurance that, like the Rock, they would see off any assault and emerge not just militarily but morally victorious. Even the models matched: central to the iconography of the invasion scare were the small craft – flat-bottomed boats, floating batteries, and gun-boats – that the French were apparently amassing, the subject of endless prints by London's caricaturists, prints that may themselves have owed a debt to images of the 1782 Siege of Gibraltar. ¹⁷ In every respect, then, this was the perfect event to stage in 1804.

Of course, the deal cut both ways. If theatregoers could take solace from the entertainment, and their patriotism be bolstered to the benefit of the state, so too could Dibdin's new theatrical enterprise benefit enormously. The invasion scare made for the perfect audience – excited, susceptible, prone to excesses of emotional display – while the impeccable patriotic credentials of the subject matter served to legitimise and endorse what was, dramatically speaking, a risky innovation. The minor theatres, with their reliance on spectacle and continental influences, had long been subject to condemnation in sections of the press. By appropriating the respectability afforded by this sort of patriotic performance, a venue such as Sadler's Wells could at once secure its own credentials and win the goodwill to innovate. ¹⁸ In this context, it was vital that the vessels were seen to be authentic by an audience more than usually ready to confer that status upon them. Returning to Lindholm: ‘Authenticity gathers people together in collectives that are felt to be real, essential, and vital, providing participants with meaning, unity, and a surpassing sense of belonging.’ ¹⁹ Such a phenomenon was of vital importance, both to the loyalist war effort of 1804, and to the success of Sadler's Wells.

Were the circumstances not so propitious, it is unlikely that the manager of a minor London theatre would have risked such a costly and elaborate spectacle. As Susan Valladares has observed, Dibdin himself believed his fortunes were directly and causally linked to the war effort. ²⁰ Even in the case of the ‘Grand Naval Spectacle’ he had his reservations, attributing its success in spite of certain drawbacks to the audience's topically motivated goodwill:

[T]he feelings of the audience entered with such a lively interest into the gallant benevolence of the British Tars, rescuing their enemies from a watery grave, [that] they never for an instant saw the glaring abandonment of perspective, proportion and scenic propriety[.] ²¹

Both Dibdin and later scholars have put this failure down to the lack of novelty in the Trafalgar entertainment. ²⁵ I would suggest that additional factors were in play. The timing (mid-1806) was unfortunate: too long after Trafalgar to capitalise on a spirit of jubilation itself immediately dampened by mourning for Nelson's death, at a time when support for the war was ebbing fast in the face of Napoleon's total victories, first over the Austro-Russian forces at Austerlitz, and then over the Prussians and Swedes at Jena-Auerstedt, while Trafalgar itself had ended any suggestion of an invasion of England, thereby dissipating the nervous tension that had proven so dramatically effective in 1804. Moreover, the remark ‘People had seen the Ships before’ implies a failure not only of novelty but of authenticity: an audience aware they were seeing ships designed to represent the 1782 Siege of Gibraltar had a harder time buying into those same ships as being authentic representatives of the fleets at Trafalgar. Many of the latter vessels were household names, especially to Sadler's Wells nautical cognoscenti – Victory, Téméraire, Royal Sovereign, Bellerophon and many more on the British side; Formidable, Bucentaure, Santa Ana, and Santisima Trinidad on the Franco-Spanish – of which only two were even built in 1782, and though both were present during the Siege of Gibraltar, neither played an active part. Having made so much capital from the vaunted authenticity of the models’ construction, Sadler's Wells necessarily lost much of it when the same models were entirely repurposed, thereby undermining their credibility as faithful representations. Thereafter, some of the cynical discourse of detached, even wry criticism, so evident in Dibdin's own assessment of his vessels, began to creep into press accounts, such as The Times’ critique of the 1813 spectacular Rokeby Castle; or the Spectre of the Glen:

Two large ships were also brought forward for the first time, and received with great applause. To be sure it would have been better if they had not so often run aground; but this, indeed, was not surprising when a man was able to walk round one of them with the water not higher than his knee; by which means it manifestly appeared, to the great relief of the audience, that even if a shipwreck had been the consequence, there was no imminent danger of drowning. ²⁶

In fact, Dibdin's aqua-dramas were at risk from an ironic critical discourse that had anticipated his innovation by several decades – for as Daniel O’Quinn has observed, Sheridan's The Critic (1779) had already satirised the whole phenomenon. ²⁸ Written and staged during a similar – though lesser – invasion scare to that of 1803–05, Sheridan's production took aim at several contemporary plays that staged national history for topical ends. ²⁹ One of its targets, Thomas King's The Prophecy; or, Queen Elizabeth at Tilbury (1779), itself concluded with ‘a striking spectacle … in which the navy of England appears riding triumphant on the seas, and the fleets of France and Spain [are] broken, dismasted, and vanquished’, heavily advertised in much the same manner as Dibdin's Siege of Gibraltar. ³⁰ Setting aside the detail that King's spectacle relied on a transparency and a ‘moving Perspective View’ rather than scale models, the resemblance is exact. As O’Quinn writes of the attack on this work: ‘In the face of national crisis, Sheridan stage[d] a ruthless critique of nostalgia and of the often-profitable rememorative processes that subtend patriotism’ – accusations again equally applicable to the Siege of Gibraltar. ³¹

Most brilliantly, Sheridan contrived both to have his cake and eat it: The Critic constitutes a form of meta-commentary in which the audience is privy to the off-stage ruminations of a cynical theatre manager (Puff), who stages a Drury Lane play-within-a-play (think Hamlet) of The Spanish Armada, in which the mock-heroine Tilburina and her father (the Governor) send up the dramatic convention of keeping spectacles off-stage:

Tilburina   Then is the crisis of my fate at hand!

       I see the fleets approach – I see—

Puff     Now, pray, gentlemen, mind. This is one of the most useful figures we tragedy writers have, by which a hero or heroine, in consideration of their being often obliged to overlook things that are on the stage, is allowed to hear and see a number of things that are not. …

Tilburina   … I see their decks Are clear'd! – I see the signal made! The line is form'd! – a cable's length asunder! I see the frigates station'd in the rear; And now, I hear the thunder of the guns! …

Governor   Hold, daughter! peace! this love hath turn'd thy brain: The Spanish fleet thou canst not see – because – It is not yet in sight! ³²

Naumachia

O’Quinn highlights a second instance of maritime spectacle from the 1770s, still more heavily criticised: the regatta staged upon the Thames in June 1775. On this occasion, a costly state-sponsored pageant foundered in the face of mass public and press criticism, targeting two key features. First, its inadequacies as a competent production: an unscheduled day of public mourning postponed its staging until 23 June, when adverse tides delayed it until dusk, at which point poor light, combined with the disappointing nature of many of the craft involved and their propensity to run aground, exposed the whole show to ‘ridicule’ on the part of its huge and socially mixed public audience as well as in the press. Second, the regatta was attacked on political and factional grounds, subjected to anti-court rhetoric, its organisers decried for their perceived wastefulness and libertinism. While a mock-heroic poem in the Morning Chronicle dubbed the event a mere ‘raree-show’, the annual boat race of 1 August then known as Doggett's Coat and Badge Race was held up by contrast as an authentic exemplar of plebeian patriotism, worthier by far than the ‘aristocratic’ regatta. ³⁴

If in summarising this debacle I have strayed rather far from the ‘nineteenth-century’ bounds of this journal, I have done so because the circumstances of both the regatta and its criticism were, as with The Critic, eerily prescient of a similar spectacle staged in Hyde Park on 1 August 1814. The General Peace in Europe coincided with the centenary of Britain's Hanoverian dynasty, and as part of the jubilee celebrations the Prince Regent commissioned a naumachia to take place on the Serpentine River in Hyde Park, representing the Battle of the Nile – though some reported it as an ahistorical engagement with an American fleet (the US then being the only nation still at war with Britain, but possessed of no line-of-battle ships with which to fight such an action). While the term ‘naumachia’ acknowledged a classical precedent, modern naumachias, or mock naval engagements, began perhaps in Paris – again in the 1770s – and by 1814 half a dozen English aristocrats, including two of the Regent's ducal relatives, had staged naumachias on their own estates. Even these private persons did not always escape censure: the fifth Lord Byron was denounced by Horace Walpole for his excesses during a time of naval emergency and timber shortages, while Joseph Pocklington's amphibious assaults on Lake Derwentwater were condemned in 1797 by the antiquarian William Gell as ‘folly and childishness’. ³⁵ It comes as little surprise, then, to anyone with a passing knowledge of the Prince Regent, that such a spectacle appealed to him. Nor was the idea new to the capital: a naumachia illustrative of, of all things, the Siege of Gibraltar, had run at Bermondsey Gardens from 1789 until at least 1793 – advertisements once again taking pains to stipulate its precise and authentic accuracy in various details – and Vauxhall Gardens apparently staged its own naumachia in 1814, though neither of these productions could boast ‘real water’ or floating ships. ³⁶ A third ‘dry’ naumachia, this one illustrative of the Battle of the Nile in ‘miniature’, ran for the 1799–1800 season at rooms in Silver Street, advertised in the True Briton as a richly detailed narrative centring on the explosion of the French flagship L’Orient – and it was apparently this naumachia, designed by M. Turner, that was later adapted by Dibdin as a ‘Grand Naumachia’ in 1815. ³⁷ This was the spectacle responsible for the familiar playbill so often referenced uncritically by historians, depicting the explosion of L’Orient and advertising ‘Sadler's Wells. Every Evening. Battle of the Nile on Real Water’ – but owned by Dibdin to be ‘entirely a failure’ that ‘completely disappointed’ the public, in part due to the extreme smallness of its ships, and that was soon closed. ³⁸

Dibdin's 1815 failure cannot, however, be viewed in isolation from the far greater flop of the Regent's 1814 naumachia, a production intrinsically linked to the Sadler's Wells aqua-dramas in the minds of London's theatregoers, as evidenced by one anonymous eyewitness, who wrote of the naumachia ‘that it was about on a par with spectacles of a similar nature, which have been frequently exhibited at the Theatres’. ³⁹ Images produced to commemorate – and capitalise upon – the event mean that we have far more visual evidence for this production than for either Dibdin's or any of the other naumachias, though by their very nature these documents necessarily endorse the spectacle as a visually compelling success. Edward Orme, the Regent's own publisher, sold a decorous aquatint both as a single sheet and as part of Blagdon's Historical Memento, reproduced as Figure 2, in which the Serpentine-as-Nile stages the stately progress of a fleet in battle order. Figure 3, a more vernacular but equally collectible offering from the ballad printer John Pitts, represents the consequence, as ships do battle in the background. Both, in conjunction with further extant images, suggest that the vessels were hauled on ropes presumably drawn by rowers, as none show the ships under sail. OPEN IN VIEWER

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Figure 3.

Jubilee Fair (London, 1814), etching and engraving, 37.4 × 47.1 cm. British Museum no. 1880,1113.1924. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

While these images give an invaluable sense of the spectacle, their positivity is at odds with most written accounts of the entertainment. Of course, much of the press was bound to oppose anything planned by the Regent, and attacks on the naumachia proliferated on a daily basis for a full month before its realisation. ⁴⁰ Indeed, the Champion newspaper reported that ‘Above thirty persons, male and female, were excluded [from court] for having alluded to the Naumachia in a very irreverent way; and a few bad jokes on this worse subject had almost caused the exclusion of the Morning Herald.’ ⁴¹ In the event, even the broadly supportive Gentleman's Magazine conceded that – much like the 1775 regatta – things could have been organised better: many spectators ‘were forced into the water’, while between the two stages of action, ‘An interval of near an hour and a half followed without further movement.’ ⁴² As a less sympathetic observer put it: ‘We were afraid, at one time, whether it would have neither beginning nor end.’ ⁴³ In the year of the last Frost Fair, when the Thames froze over during the winter, even a summer night must have been cold and uncomfortable for the many perplexed spectators – recalling to this author's mind the anticlimactic experience of standing in a Belgian field on 18 June 2015 to witness the Waterloo bicentenary, during a conference held by the University of Leuven.

The naumachia's greatest failure, however, was a matter of authenticity, linked to political credibility, rather than one of logistics. Considering that the published criticism ran to some hundreds of pages across dozens of publications, its tenor is remarkably consistent. A single caricature by George Cruikshank, reproduced as Figure 4, encapsulates the whole. The immediate issue was that of scale, with the Regent's mock fleet dubbed ‘the walnut-shell squadron’, a phrase directly echoed in the press. ⁴⁴ The very notion of the government responsible for the real Royal Navy investing time, care, and money in a miniature version was abhorrent to many: what for a minor theatre might be creditable in boosting a spectacle's authenticity was here unconscionable. Rather than being perceived as a testament to the Navy's renown, the endeavour was taken as an insult, and hostile poetry envisioned Nelson turning in his grave. ⁴⁵ Once again, the timing was all wrong: peace in Europe, but war with the United States, a war in which the Royal Navy had lost several highly publicised single-ship actions and with it, its aura of invincibility. Though HMS Shannon’s capture of the USS Chesapeake had partly restored British naval confidence, the lack of a large scale victory since Trafalgar nearly a decade earlier, itself followed by the controversial and in some eyes illegal seizure of the Danish fleet in 1807, had created a degree of insecurity in the public opinion of the Navy. Literally to diminish it, as the Regent was doing, was therefore a highly inflammatory action. OPEN IN VIEWER

Most sensitive of all was the question of credit. Many objected to the Regent and his current ministers taking credit for victory over Napoleon. In Cruikshank's image, the prince says: ‘D[am]n me, work my lads let them see wee [sic] have not been to Portsmouth for nothing’, while Lord Castlereagh at his left comments: ‘By the powers, Sir, that would suit for the flag ship of another Walchren [sic] Expedition’. Righteous outrage is personified at the window by the irate George III, threatening to horsewhip those whom his illness has left in charge of the nation. Here is the whole issue in – with apologies – a nutshell. The Regent, Cruikshank implies, knows nothing about the sea or the Navy, he is a mere dilettante: he cannot, in short, lay claim to authenticity. Castlereagh's comment meanwhile alludes to an infamous campaign of 1809 in which an ill-led British expeditionary force was struck down by fever, suffering heavy losses. These persons, Cruikshank declares, are unfit to command, they are the worst sort of amateurs, and for them to appropriate the credit for military victory in this manner is to belittle the professionalism, experience, and sacrifice involved in the war effort. There are two major implications here for maritime spectacle, its politics and reception – and both return us to the staging of authenticity, and the question of the real.

On Real Real Water

A second Cruikshank caricature coincident with the date of the naumachia and given as Figure 5 makes a similar argument, albeit spreading its ire wider. While the spectacle itself is envisioned at upper left, the centre foreground is given over to a rendering of Robert Dundas, Second Viscount Melville and at that time First Lord of the Admiralty. As the nominal head of the Navy, he bore the brunt of public criticism for the reduction of its strength and budget that immediately followed the General Peace, and as such, he is here travestied as a laid-off sailor, hawking ballads in the street – in effect, a penurious beggar. The broom at the mast-head of the model ship he pushes indicates that this model, in a neat synecdoche for the Navy itself, is up for sale. ⁴⁶ OPEN IN VIEWER

While the model ship-in-a-barrow is both an obvious reference to the naumachia, and a bitter pun on the ongoing scaling down of the Navy, it also reflects real practice. Sailors commonly constructed miniatures of the vessels on which they served – the National Maritime Museum holds six remarkable examples fashioned from pear- and boxwood by French prisoners of war at this time – and in the years after 1814, some of these sailors did indeed carry or cart their models about the streets on their heads or in barrows, in order to augment their own performances of street theatre: singing, dancing, and begging for alms. ⁴⁷ Their likenesses were captured by artists including the illustrator of Jane Taylor's City Scenes, John Thomas Smith, Thomas Rowlandson, and George Scharf. ⁴⁸ In these instances, the miniature scale of their models enhanced rather than undercut the potential for spectacle, acting as palpable – and accessible – testimony to the craft and expertise of these flesh-witnesses of patriotic maritime endeavour. In Lindholm's terms, these models might attain to the status of the authentic relic, imbued with an almost sacral aura that fascinated and delighted audiences in the street. ⁴⁹ Such microcosmic spectacles thereby gained their authenticity from their direct and corporeal relationship to the real, something wholly lacking from the naumachia.

This becomes clearer if, recalling ‘Hearts of Oak’, we consider the connection between ships and sailors. Dibdin's aqua-dramas privileged the ship but derived emotional affect from the sailors, who were nonetheless largely silenced by the demands of pantomimic spectacle – foreshadowing an observation of Jane Moody's concerning later nautical melodrama: that ‘the stage tar … incorporates certain aspects of the mute tradition’. ⁵⁰ The 1814 naumachia removed the sailors altogether, both literally and figuratively unmanning the ships. On the street, the ships stood in direct and subordinated relation to the sailors who had not only manned but made them. Criticism of the naumachia and sympathy for the begging sailor therefore went hand in hand: credit was due, not to the Regent and his aristocratic ministers, but to the ordinary subjects who had fought and suffered. ⁵¹ The dichotomy boiled down to this: the naumachia, grand folly of a corrupt court, was essentially inauthentic, while authenticity resided in the productions of the real sailor. ⁵²

This failure of authenticity on the part of the naumachia could be extrapolated on a grander scale, sharing with Sadler's Wells in a misguided attempt to compare with the maritime spectacles afforded by the real in which model ships tout court were surpassed by that which they sought to imitate: a lesson in mimetic failure with long-lasting implications for the theatre. In one of two poems satirising the naumachia, Charles Lawler posed the simple question:

If ships please your great lords and dames,

Are there not plenty in the Thames? ⁵³

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Figure 6.

Robert Cleveley, High water in the Pool of London (London, before 1809), pen and watercolour, 14.1 × 22.7 cm. British Museum no. 1948,0214.4. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

This form of quotidian spectacle not only had the potential to inure London audiences to displays such as the naumachia, it reinforced the affinity of even the most lubberly Londoner with shipping and the sea: this was a city deeply sensible of its maritime identity. Again, the phenomenon carried a political undertone. Denied a stake in the state, the unenfranchised took pride in – to quote Lindholm once more – ‘becoming connoisseurs of whatever popular arts and artifacts were available and affordable in the neighbourhood marketplace’. ⁵⁶ As such, any theatrical spectacle that sought to impress such an audience was pitted against assumptions of connoisseurship, ownership, and any other -ship one might care to name, entangling spectacles that might otherwise rely on the suspension of disbelief in a fraught contestation of authenticity. When even the Lady's Monthly Museum, to recall the critic of the Siege of Gibraltar’s opening night, considered itself a maritime aficionado, then the theatrical had not only to transcend but to live up to the real – a challenge that the naumachia of 1814 signally failed to meet.

Ironically, its failure was perhaps sealed by another maritime spectacle, similarly commissioned by the government, that anticipated the 1 August jubilee by less than a month. The launching of a major ship of war was an event that captivated Londoners. Taylor's City Scenes even includes among its noteworthy sights a vessel being prepared for sea:

Now we have a distant view of a man of war (which is a great fighting ship) building at Woolwich. You may see, by the boats in the front, how large it must be; for the further off any thing is, the smaller it looks; and yet it seems larger at this distance, than the boats which are close by. It is like a large floating house, with convenient apartments, sufficient to accommodate 800 people. Numbers of men have been at work on it for seven years; and hundreds of fine oaks, which have been from fifty to a hundred years in growing, have been cut down to build it with: beside all the iron from Sweden, for bolts and nails; and fir trees from Norway, for planks and masts; and copper from Cornwall, to cover its bottom with, to preserve it from being rotted by the sea-water and from other injuries; and the pitch, tar, paint, glue, and I cannot tell how many other things, which must be used before it is fit to swim. ⁵⁷

This was a form of theatre that manifestly fulfilled all the demands of authenticity while offering an unsurpassable spectacle, on a scale that vastly outstripped anything that London's entertainment venues or even the Regent's jubilee could offer. Indeed, Dibdin himself staged imitation ship launches at Sadler's Wells in 1812 and 1815, while Covent Garden sought to recreate the launching of the Queen Charlotte in 1810, both in acknowledgement of the powerful impression the real thing could make on the public. ⁵⁸ Art and life took inspiration from each other, so that the 1814 launching of HMS Nelson was publicised by a broadside that bore an uncanny resemblance to a playbill, given as Figure 7. ⁵⁹ Couched in competitive language, the broadside stated that the Nelson ‘far excels the Queen Charlotte’ – the ship whose 1810 launch was restaged at Covent Garden. And at 126 guns and 2617 tons (remember, ten times the tonnage of the Sadler's Wells tank), the Nelson was indeed a non-pareil: quite the largest, most splendid, most modern thing in the whole world, the star attraction of the summer season. Consequently, the poster advertised the time and day, and the principal performers, setting its hyperbole in bold font, with even its statistics resembling a dramatis personae, or a repertoire of featured songs. OPEN IN VIEWER

Images of the launch underline the event's theatricality. A colour print by the artist John Thomas Serres depicts a foreground crowd scene featuring people and classes from across both Britain itself and the wider empire, ostentatiously costumed, set against the splendour of the ship itself. ⁶⁰ Figure 8, meanwhile, makes clear both the pageantry and the practicalities: the Nelson was launched in a riot of flags and steamers, accompanied by salutes and stately barges, witnessed by an enormous audience largely seated in two tiers of a temporarily erected grandstand. Such an event was in a class of its own in terms of authenticity, audience size, financial backing, and technical construction, making the launch of HMS Nelson the preeminent maritime spectacle of its era. OPEN IN VIEWER

Conclusion

If a dichotomy of the real and the simulated (allowing both to be dramatic) seems rather to miss the entire point of the theatre, then in my defence I would suggest it has been occasioned, not by a wilful misreading of theatrical illusion, but by a perhaps ill-advised attempt on the part of Regency-era theatre makers, especially Dibdin, to strive for verisimilitude in their spectacles as a means of claiming authenticity. This desire, to use technology and artifice to bridge the gap from unreal to real, is far from unique to the period, and prompts inevitable comparisons with the ‘uncanny valley’ problem faced by twenty-first century animators. ⁶¹ The experiment certainly advanced the possibilities of spectacle and, for a time, proved profitable. Yet it might be argued that audience approbation for maritime spectacle in particular was rooted, not in admiration of the ships, but in support of the sailors: ‘Hearts of Oak’ in the original, not the alteration. The largest single taking for a play staged at the patent theatres in the eighteenth century was for a spectacular recreation of the Glorious First of June at Covent Garden, produced by Sheridan himself, and debuting just five weeks after the battle on 2 July 1794 – and yet it was given ‘free of all house charges as a benefit’, the proceeds billed as going to the widows and dependents of British sailors killed or wounded in the action. ⁶² Once more it was the real sailors, not the simulated ships, that were the main draw.

Soon after the Napoleonic Wars' conclusion, Dibdin decommissioned the water tank, and by the 1820s, maritime spectacle had returned to a reliance on large-scale painting, in the form of backdrops and dioramas, in a retreat from authenticity in favour of what the theatre excelled at: illusion and artistry. ⁶³ Yet George Scharf observed sailors begging with the aid of model ships well into the 1840s, and nautical melodramas that valorised the sailor flourished for another generation. ⁶⁴ The tank's dwindling economic viability and eventual removal was testament to a lesson learnt: the theatre could not hope to compete for long with the grand spectacle offered by real ships – backed by far greater resources of capital, time, and labour than the theatre could hope to command – nor with the copper-bottomed authenticity laid claim to by real sailors on the street. Its artificial models and dumb-show battles fell short on both counts. ⁶⁵ On the other hand, the theatre and its associated venues of spectacle and entertainment, such as the panorama, were unrivalled in what they were good at: offering a large part of the public access to large-scale works of painted art, skilfully executed, that never purported to be more than sumptuous backdrops to the human action of, for example, nautical melodrama. As invitations to, rather than substitutes for, the audience's imagination, such devices restored to spectacle the transcendent possibilities of the purely theatrical.

Derek Forbes, noting that George Bernard Shaw scoffed at an 1890s production ‘on real water’, writes of the ‘dramatic ineffectuality of over-doing the “realism” on stage… . It seems necessary not only for the actors but also for the scenery to partake in an act of mimesis.’ ⁶⁶ To his conclusion – ‘real water in the theatre may be fun, but it is not theatre’ – we might add that, even if it was theatre, it was done far better out there, in the streets and on the Thames, with models made by actual sailors and ships launched to actually serve the nation. ⁶⁷ I think I am arguing here for a particular form of engagement, of reception, in the face of spectacle, that was about discernment and self-awareness more than abandonment and credulity: a form of politically informed spectatorship learnt on the London streets and riverbanks that was loth to suspend its disbelief; in which cultural capital derived from authenticity, not showmanship. For many Londoners, the spectacle of their own city, and the heroic narrative of the real, was a mode of theatre that upstaged its own representation.