A Journey to London
John Vanbrugh's last play
To celebrate the tercentenary of John Vanbrugh’s death in March this year, I thought I’d run a new series looking at his career as a playwight. Mostly, I want to test what the theatre scholar Bonamy Dobrée said in his four-volume edition of Vanbrugh’s plays: ‘Since his work is not very difficult or subtle, and conveys no unique outlook, there does not seem to be very much new to say about it’.1
This is a surprising statement, and, I believe, quite wrong. To kick off, I’m going to start with Vanbrugh’s very last play, A Journey to London, which is in many ways a conventional class comedy, but in others, a clever mockery of the sentimentalism which was gaining ground in the early 18th century. Vanbrugh had built his writing career as a kind of enfant terrible, exposing the saccharine excesses of his contemporaries, and we can see from this play that he remained critical of them to the end of his life.
But, firstly, a note on its textual history. To begin with, the unfinished manuscript (A Journey to London) was found in Vanbrugh’s papers after his death; it was passed to his friend, the playwright Colley Cibber, who gave it to J. Watts for printing.2 Cibber then made revisions and published a ‘finished’ version of the play, retitled The Provok’d Husband, or a Journey to London , which was staged on January 10th 1728 at Drury Lane theatre. In his introduction to the printed version, Cibber explained the context:
Yet when I own, that in my last Conversation with [Vanbrugh], (which chiefly turn’d upon what he had done towards a Comedy), he excus’d his not shewing it me, ‘till he had review’d it, confessing the Scenes were yet undigested, too long, and irregular, particularly in the Lower Characters, I have but one Excuse for publishing, what he never design’d should come into the World, as it then was, viz. I had no other way of taking those many Faults to myself, which may be found in my presuming to finish it.3
Cibber’s revised play was a hit and would remain a favourite for the rest of the century.4
Like Vanbrugh’s other original plays, A Journey to London has two plots: a comic plot with low characters, and a plot which revolves around an unhappy marriage between high-born people. The play opens with the low chracters - the Headpiece family - who are coming to London from the country having been suddenly elevated by Sir Francis Headpiece’s election to Parliament. We start with a soliloquy from Uncle Richard (uncle to Sir Francis) and we hear from his servant, James, who narrates their ramshackle journey. This is pure class comedy - by which I mean, mockery of the rural working-classes who were not, usually, the focus of Whig voters like Vanbrugh.5 The whole scene is the verbal equivalent of a Thomas Rowlandson caricature:
James: … they’d have been here last Night, but that the old wheezy-belly Horse tir’d, and the two fore-wheels came crash down at once in Wagonrut-lane. Sir, they were cruelly loaden, as I understand; my Lady herself, she says, laid on four Mail-Trunks, besides the great Deal-box, which fat Tom sate upon behind.6
We then see their arrival at Mrs Motherly’s lodgings, which involves several farcial scenes including the theft of a goose pie and the destruction of their coach (as the servant, John Moody, explains: ‘a great Lugger-headed Cart, with Wheels as thick as a good Brick Wall, layd hawld of the Coach, and has pood it aw to Bits’).7
The second act is devoted to the upper-class plot, which involves the marital disharmony between Lord and Lady Loverule, caused by the wife’s love of gambling and staying out late. Act three returns to the Headpiece family, who are being regularly visited by a rake called Colonel Courtly. In Act four we find Lady Loverule on the morning after a gambling bout, being visited - first by the unsuitable Captain Toupee, and then by the Headpiece family.8
Here the play ends and there is no indication of how Vanbrugh intended to finish it - except for the following remark from Cibber:
All I could gather from [Vanbrugh] of what he intended in the Catastrophe, was, that the Conduct of his Imaginary Fine Lady had so provok’d him, that he designed actually to have made her Husband turn her out of his Doors.9
In Cibber’s reworking, The Provok’d Husband, or a Journey to London opens with the aristocrats, Lord and Lady Townly, who clearly have a very unhappy marriage (they are the equivalent of Vanbrugh’s Lord and Lady Loverule). Unlike Vanbrugh, Cibber clearly did not have much time for either the upper classes or the working classes - he reserves his praise for the middle-classes (which was intentional, given that they were the ones buying most of the theatre tickets).
The journey of the Headpiece family - now renamed the Wrongheads - is narrated by the servant, John Moody, to Lord and Lady Townly, Lord Townly’s sister, Lady Grace, and their friend, Mr Manly. Crucially, the latter is a member of the urbanite middle-classes who has come into some money (in other words, good marriage material for Lady Grace). They call the servant Moody into the room because Lord Townly thinks he will ‘divert’ them. Manly asks him where the Wrongheads are staying (to get the following joke you need to know that, in the 18th century, millinery shops were sometimes used as fronts for brothels):
Manly. … tell me where you lodge.
J. Moody. Just i’th’Street next to where your Worship dwells, the Sign of the Golden Ball - It’s Gold all over; where they sell Ribbands, and Flappits, and other sort of Geer for Gentlewomen.
Manly. A Milliner’s?
J. Moody. Ay, ay, one Mrs Motherly: [Waunds! She has a Couple of clever Girls there a stitching i’th’ Foreroom].
Man. Yes, yes, she’s a Woman of good Business, no doubt on’t …10
So the country bumpkins have somehow booked their accommodation in a brothel (“Mother” was a popular term for a bawd and “Business”, a euphemism for sex. You can see why the women are sewing in the front parlour - probably by a window where they can be seen from the street).
Despite the presence of Manly, who is the sensible middle-class hero, this scene is a bit nastier than Vanbrugh’s version - mainly because they call in John Moody for their own entertainment, whereas in Vanbrugh’s manuscript, the description of the arrival takes place in a conversation between Uncle Richard and his servant. It’s part of Cibber’s distaste for the upper classes that he has them behaving in this way - laughing behind their hands at simple John Moody - and you get the sense that Manly is a little bit reluctant to go along with the mockery.
The other thing about Cibber is that he is a cheerleader for marriage, whereas Vanbrugh had originally intended for the husband to turn the wife out of doors. As well as being a challenging ending for a comedy, this unsentimental attitude was in keeping with Vanbrugh’s earliest plays - however, by the time he wrote A Journey to London, he was married himself, and with every indication of success. As Arthur Husboe put it:
It is pleasant, in the midst of the uncertainty about the play’s resolution, to recall how easily the chain of matromony hung about Vanbrugh himself, how well regulated his married life appears to have been, and how readily even card playing was made a part of his agreeable life.11
Vanbrugh was not, perhaps, an enemy of marriage - simply a realist who acknowledged that it could go badly wrong.12 However, even this position was too subtle for Cibber, who opted to write a soupy conclusion in which Lord and Lady Townly are reconciled:
Lady Town. What I have said, my Lord, is not my Excuse, but my Confession! My Errors (give ‘em if you please, a harder Name) cannot be defended! No! What’s in its Nature Wrong, no Words can Palliate, no Plea can Alter! What then remains in my Condition, but Resignation to your Pleasure?13
Vanbrugh could not have written this sentimental ending. He disliked hypocrisy and thought that comedy’s serious purpose was to correct human failings. In fact, his main theme was human frailty - how we deal with moral dilemmas and why we often fall short of perfection. He was a realist, but he was not without sympathy for his characters’ struggles. Cibber - while superficially sentimental - was a lot less forgiving, but he understood his audience better than Vanbrugh did.
The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (London, 1927-28), vol. i, p. xxiv.
The manuscript seems to have disappeared shortly afterwards.
Colley Cibber, ‘To The Reader’, The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh, Op. cit, vol. iii, p. 179.
Notwithstanding a few attacks by Cibber’s enemies. See A Full and true account of two most horrid, barbarous, and cruel murders one was committed on Wednesday night last, at the Play-house in Drury-Lane, upon the body of a child of Sir John Vanbroog’s {Vanbrugh’s], by the noted Mr. Keyber [Cibber]; shewing how he most barbarously hack’d and mangl’d it in such a manner, that it dy’d on the spot (J. How, 1728?)
Without going too much into the complexity of the politcs: broadly, Whigs were urbanites who wanted to develop trade with Europe whereas Tories were focussed on the country (i.e., landowning) classes who were suspicious of foreign imports.
The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh, Op. cit, vol. iii, pp. 136-37.
Ibid., p. 143.
Toupees - or wigs with the front part combed up into a topknot - were quite new in the 1720s.
Colley Cibber, ‘To The Reader’, Op. cit., p. 179.
The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh, Op. cit, vol. iii, p. 198.
Arthur H. Husboe, Sir John Vanbrugh (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976), p. 141.
In his bitterest marriage play, The Provoked Wife, Constant observes: ‘though marriage be a lottery in which there are wondrous many blanks, yet there is one inestimable lot in which the only heaven on earth is written’.
The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh, Op. cit, vol. iii, p. 253.
I saw ‘The Provoked Wife’ performed by the Riverside Players in Reading many years ago.