London: The Biography

Although the derivation and meaning of the verse are unclear, the image of the city seems to assert itself as a potent beckoning force; in a variant of this song “Bethlehem” takes the place of Babylon, and may point to the madhouse in Moorfields rather than any more remote destination.

In the eighteenth century, too, London was considered “cette Babilone, le seul refuge des infortunés” in which the association of size and power is coloured by the invocation of the “infortunés” or refugees; this indeed is the other connotation of London as Babylon, a city loud with many disparate and unintelligible voices. To name London as Babylon, then, was to allude to its essential multiplicity. So William Cowper, the eighteenth-century poet, spoke of this “increasing London” as more diverse than “Babylon of old.”

Yet the association or resemblance became pressing only in the nineteenth century when London was continually described as “modern Babylon.” Henry James referred to it as “this murky Babylon” and, for Arthur Machen, “London loomed up before me, wonderful, mystical as Assyrian Babylon, as full of unheard-of things and great unveilings.” So Babylon has many associations; it conjures up images of magnitude and darkness, but also intimations of mystery and revelation. In this great conflation, even the gardens of Park Lane became known as the “hanging gardens,” although some echo may be found here of the Tyburn tree which was once located beside them.

By 1870 the sheer quantity of life in the city was overwhelming. Every eight minutes, of every day of every year, someone died in London; every five minutes, someone was born. There were forty thousand costermongers and 100,000 “winter tramps”; there were more Irish living in London than in Dublin, and more Catholics than in Rome. There were 20,000 public houses visited by 500,000 customers. Eight years later there were more than half a million dwellings, “more than sufficient to form one continuous row of buildings round the island of Great Britain.” It is perhaps not surprising that mid-nineteenth-century Londoners were themselves struck with awe, admiration or anxiety at the city which seemed without any apparent warning to have grown to such magnitude and complexity. How could it have happened? Nobody seemed quite sure. Frederick Engels, in his The Condition of the Working Classes in England in 1844 (1845), found his own considerable intellectual faculties to be strained beyond use. “A town such as London,” he wrote, “where a man may wander for hours together without reaching the beginning of the end … is a strange thing.” The strange city is indescribable, and so Engels could only resort to continual images of immensity. He writes of “countless ships,” “endless lines of vehicles,” “hundreds of steamers,” “hundreds of thousands of all classes,” “the immense tangle of streets,” “hundreds and thousands of alleys and courts” together with “nameless misery.” The sheer incalculability of the mass seems to render it also unintelligible, and therefore induces fear.

So great was London that it seemed to contain within itself all previous civilisations. Babylon was then joined with other empires. The naves and transepts of Westminster Abbey were compared to the City of the Dead beyond Cairo, while the railway terminus at Paddington invoked images of the pyramid of Cheops. Nineteenth-century architects, in their fantastic images of London, created pyramids for Trafalgar Square and Shooters Hill while also designing great pyramidal cemeteries beside Primrose Hill. Here we see the power of imperial London creating a cult of death as well as of magnificence.

In Ree’s Cyclopaedia of 1819, the docks once more arouse primitive imagery. The climate and atmosphere of London in turn create “startling hieroglyphics that are written by soot and smoke upon its surface.” So the stones of London became ancient by association. Somehow the spectacle of the metropolis encourages intimations of unfathomable age-“petrified,” to have been turned into stone, may also be covertly introduced into this vision in its contemporary sense of great fear.