London: The Biography

The Underground is also a place of chance meeting and coincidence, but it generates greater fear and anxiety-of strangers, of thieves, and of the mad who haunt its endlessly running trains. Yet it has become familiar. Ford Madox Ford, in The Soul of London, wrote that “I have known a man, dying a long way from London, sigh queerly for a sight of the gush of smoke that, on a platform of the Underground, one may see, escaping in great woolly clots up a circular opening, by a grimy, rusted, iron shield, into the dim upper light.” Here is a true Londoner, wishing on his death-bed once more to see and savour the smoke of the Underground, like a prisoner dreaming once more of his confinement. And still the work goes on. As London expands, so does its buried counterpart grow and stretch beneath it.

If in the last days of the twentieth century you sat in the shadow of the great tower of Canary Wharf, you would have seen hundreds of workmen hurrying around the track of the Jubilee Line extension; the work was endless and noisy, with great arcs of light and gleams of silver fire charging the night air with power in alliance with some unknown future city.

Victorian Megalopolis

Victorian London, as it might be seen from the window of a passing train; in certain areas the view has hardly changed, testimony to the conservatism of Londoners in their love for a house and back garden.

CHAPTER 61. How Many Miles to Babylon?

By the mid-1840s London had become known as the greatest city on the earth, the capital of empire, the centre of international trade and finance, a vast world market into which the world poured. At the beginning of the twentieth century the sanitary historian, Henry Jephson, considered this megalopolis in other terms. “Of that period,” he wrote, “it is to be said that there is none in the history of London in which less regard was shown for the conditions of the great mass of the inhabitants of the metropolis.” Charles Dickens, Henry Mayhew and Friedrich Engels are three of the Victorian city-dwellers who cried “havoc” over the exhaustive and exhausting city. In contemporary photographs and drawings the most striking images are those of labour and suffering. Women sit with their arms folded, hunched over; a beggar family sleep upon stone benches in a recess of a bridge, with the dark shape of St. Paul’s looming behind them. As Blanchard Jerrold put it, “The aged, the orphan, the halt, the blind, of London would fill an ordinary city.” This is a strange conception, a city entirely composed of the maimed and injured. But that is, in part, what London was. The number of children and tramps, too, sitting resignedly in the street, is infinite; infinite also are the street-sellers, generally depicted against a dull background of brick or stone.

The poor interiors of the Victorian city are generally crepuscular and filthy, with rags hanging among reeking tallow lamps; many of the inhabitants seem to have no faces, since they are turned towards the shadows, around them dilapidated wooden beams and staircases in crazed confusion. Many, outdoors and indoors, seem hunched up and small as if the very weight of the city had crushed them down. Yet there is another aspect of the Victorian city that photographs and images evoke: of vast throngs innumerable, the streets filled with teeming and struggling life, the great inspiration for the work of nineteenth-century mythographers such as Marx and Darwin. There are also flashes of feeling-of pity, anger, and tenderness-to be observed upon passing faces. And all around them can be imagined a hard unyielding noise, like an unending shout. This is Victorian London.