It’s an often-repeated idea—almost trite—to anyone who reads the news or listens to Shirley Bassey that “It’s all just a bunch of history repeating,” by which I mean the powers that be are deeply invested in consolidation, in keeping wealth and power itself the hands of very few people. Which creates an exhausting feeling of repetition even if/when it’s not quite true. This process of consolidation is made possible in part by bureaucracy—by the records of religious, medical, legal, scientific precedent that ultimately keep things ticking over smoothly. This process in turn relies in part upon the use of archives and documentary history, materials that only very recently have been repurposed for other, shall we say, more picaresque purposes: scams, countercultures, and revolutionary thought. Materials that only recently have been re-visited and re-interpreted to find the truth of their rebelliousness, by which I mean their non-normative concepts as well as their inherent factual instability, both of which are threatening to reality as we know it. It’s only recently that people like me have been allowed to run amok in the archives, libraries, museums.
The Maraconi satirical portraits published by the Darlys very much drew from a longer tradition of depicting different “types” of people, their occupations as in the 17th century Cries of London, and 18th century playing cards made depicting them:
Or catalogs of national dress, as in the 16th-century works of, most famously, Cesare Vecellio:
These are the kinds of visual arts that foreground later, supposedly anthropological categorisations of human beings that would be described as a science in the 19th century.
I would suggest that these forms of cataloguing and typing individual humans as representative of larger trends, dovetailing with the emergence of scientific nomenclature for plants and animals, is part of a larger narrative of ultimately pseudo-scientific thinking and hierarchizing humanity that haunts & harms us to this day.
Which brings me back to a quote I had up earlier from The Public Ledger, one that warned Macaronis, which it also called TIDDLY-DOLLS, to “Take Warning, therefore, ye smirking group….However secret you may be in your amours, yet in the end you cannot escape detection…” To understand something of the weight of media surveillance—a caricature wasn’t without consequence— we have to step back to the end of the 17th century with the foundation of the SOCIETY FOR THE REFORMATION OF MANNERS in a neighborhood in East London called Tower Hamlets.
The society for the Reformation of Manners was founded, in its own words on the title page of this 1700 pamphlet: to be ZEALOUS and DILIGENT IN PROMOTING THE EXECUTION OF THE LAWS AGAINST PROPHANNESS AND DEBAUCHERY FOR THE EFFECTING OF A NATIONAL REFORMATION.”
To that end they published long BLACK LISTS, like this one from 1706 featured here with 7,995 names, of people they described as “lewd and scandalous,” including those “legally prosecuted and convicted as keepers of houses of bawdry and disorder, or as whores, nightwalkers, etc….” You can call this what you want: naming and shaming, doxing, but it amounts to the same thing: people’s lives were ruined by these convictions, and this strategy of public outing is no different from doxing people on the internet today, or printing the names of men and women caught in raids made on gay bars by the police in the first half of the 20th century.
The Society for the Reformation of Manners was rigidly hierarchical, with eminent professionals like lawyers and judges working at the top, all the way down to different social strata. If 50 years later Macaroni prints would show Macaronis to exist in all professions and places, the Society for the Reformation of Manners definitely tried to achieve the same thing with its membership. Except there was a problem: members kept getting caught engaging in lewd behaviour and then blacklisted! And this was especially true for the earliest members that were appointed to what amounts to the earliest police force in London, to harass sex workers and gender non-conforming people.
They hired men like Charles Hitchen and Jonathan Wild as a “thief takers” to catch those who had stolen merchandise, as well as to capture sodomites and other sexual ne’er do wells…only both of them were, in the 1730s, caught in exactly that position, outed as sodomites, and died after brutal experiences in prison. The Society for the Reformation of Manners disbanded and resurfaced again over the course of the late 18th century, as William Wilberforces Society for the Suppression of Vice in the 1750s, and it was going strong during the height of macaroni fashions in the 1770s.
The Macaronis were not the only beacons of gender-bending debauchery in society at this time: there were two other types of events, drawing other types of sexual dissidents, as well: masquarades, which were extravagent parties that including fancy dress and encouraged crossdressing in public parks like the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens and Ranelegh, where you could see trans women like the Chevalier D’Eon perform fencing demonstrations.
And then there were molly houses, which were like combinations of coffeehouses, taverns, and brothels, allowing for same-sex hookups as well as drag shows that made fun of marriage and childbirth. Rictor Norton has mapped the many, many molly houses known to have existed in 18th century London, which make the case for a very vast and outstanding queer subculture of the time. If you adjusted for population, he argues, it would be the equivalent of London having over 200 expressly gay bars today. But it’s important to say that these were not MERELY the equivalent of a gay bar: there were people here defying concepts of LGBT with their ways of dressing, talking, and most of all, hooking up. In the 1730s the Society for the Reformation of Manners conducted so many Mollyhouse raids—it’s how they caught out Charles Hitchen and Jonathan Wild—and that persecution continued throughout the century.
This heightens a danger implicit in these Macaroni Prints that otherwise might be lost to us: the individuals involved could often be identified as specific people, and to identify someone as a macaroni could threaten their very life.
Here’s just one example: Samuel Drybutter.
Samuel Drybutter, pictured here across several other prints from Matthew Darly’s print shop where he is known as GANYMEDE, and also seen here flirting with the hangman, was according to the scholar Rictor Norton, a jeweller and bookseller, who kept a shop in Westminster Hall. Rictor Norton has tracked Drybutter in and out of the Old Bailey for a number of cases revolving around STOLEN GOODS, jewelry and snuffboxes rather than books, switching roles between defense and prosecution. At the same time, Drybutter appears in the Old Bailey records throughout the 1770s for sodomy. According to Norton:
“Drybutter was in fact a notorious sodomite, and was considered to be the leader of the Macaroni Club in the 1770s. He was first arrested for attempted sodomy on 23 January 1770; he was committed to Tothill Fields Bridewell (Gen. Even. Post, 23-25 Jan. 1770). In September 1770 he was again apprehended soliciting a man in St. James's Park. He was already so notorious that "the populace, especially the women, were so enraged agaisnt him, that guards were sent for to attend the coach, and protect him from their fury" (Oxford Journal, 1 Sept. 1770).”
He seems to have been caught propositioning other men throughout the 1770s, including his own serving boy, his serving boy’s friends, a horse grenadier while he was on active duty patrolling the Horse Guards. There are depictions of Drybutter arguing at a coffeehouse on behalf of others on trial for sodomy and getting attacked by a mob for it. He was arrested almost yearly over the course of the decade for soliciting sex with other men, and severely beaten by the mobs that gathered around him pretty much each time. In 1781 Drybutter was last depicted before he left England for France where he died in 1787. But the 1781 Complete Modern London Spy described him in this last encounter walking along the street with another man: ‘do you observe that man who is now sauntering towards Covent garden? – he is one of those wretches, once almost unknown in England. He subsists by gratifying the unnatural vices of his own sex; in short, he is the companion of an infamous fellow, whose name is Dr–b—r, and who, though well known to be guilty of this horrible crime, has hitherto evaded all attempts to bring him to condign punishment.’ As Norton marvels: “It is hard to appreciate how Samuel Drybutter managed to live as a publicly known homosexual and to set society at defiance for such a long time, but clearly he was one of life’s survivors despite being queer-bashed and despite a long campaign of press vilification.”
What Norton’s referring to in terms of press vilification was in a large part due to the Darly’s printing shop. That Drybutter was a Queer Old Beau and bookseller who was constantly portrayed in popular media as a sodomite links is another early link I have found between the word QUEER and a queer identity that would be recognisable to us today. In the print titled “A Character,” the poem reads:
An Ugly Face & Staring Hat,
A Carcase which has lost its Fat.
An ill shap'd Coat, too bad for shew
Yet Hides the Aukward Legs below.
The Sword a Thing not meant for Harm
And Therefore Hug'd betwixt the Arm.
Whene'er at Court he shews his Face
The Breeding Ladies Quit the Place
Take him in short from Top to Toe
And set him down the Queer Old Beau.
There is a sense in which The Darly’s MACARONI PRINT SHOP embodies the aesthetic and ameliorative possibilities of queer culture that can be cultivated from the past, even those traces that are rooted in oppression. I guess I’m embracing this very queer temporality: as I said at the start, we live in a world where very few media outlets have a vast amount of resources and use their platforms to disproportionately describe the lives of queer and trans people without our input at ALL. So the world is two fold: make our own stuff, and claw back whatever we can from the hateful media and give it a decent burial.
We’re still stuck in the Darly's print shop and the print shop is the size of the whole world more or less. But I think we can use that knowledge to help break out of the stranglehold that the society for the reformation of manners has on us. Where these portrayals seek to harm Macaronis and make money at their expense, they're also being used as a place to see, be seen, to cruise, to meet your macaroni comrades, to get fashion tips. And obviously it’s this exact formation, a bunch of people together responding to unfair criticism and harsh suppression, that has historically been the hardest for police to break up and has created the scenes of our rioting, our resistance, and most of all, our loving and caretaking of one another.
So on that note, I want to conclude by highlighting the significance of this vast body of printed evidence attesting to vibrant queer culture and fashion and fun. A vast body of printed matter for bigot to choke on. A body of printed matter criticizing us for daring to live a life dedicated to beauty and pleasure. The only way out is through, and if we’re still living in this world we can at least take some cues from those who have also lived it. Because the final and perhaps the most important feature of the picaresque is this: THE ROGUE ALWAYS WINS, above all, in the heart and mind of the reader.