London: The Biography

Other pagan associations are intimately linked with the nineteenth-century city. Here the Minotaur made its appearance. In pagan myth the monster in the labyrinth was each year given seven youths and seven maidens, both as food and tribute. So Victorian crusaders against poverty and prostitution were, in the public prints, given the name of Theseus who killed the monster. Yet it did not wholly die. One journalist in the Pall Mall Gazette of July 1885 compared “the nightly sacrifice of virgins in London to the victims of the Athenian tribute to the Minotaur,” and it seemed that the “appetite of the minotaur of London is insatiable.” It was also described as the “London Minotaur … moving about clad as respectably in broad cloth and fine linen as any bishop.” This indeed is a vision of horror, worthy of Poe or De Quincey, but the suggestion of a pagan beast alive and rampant is one curiously aligned to the nineteenth-century perception that the city had indeed become a labyrinth to rival anything upon the Cretan island. In response to these articles on child prostitution in London George Frederic Watts depicted the horned beast, half man and half bull, gazing over a parapet of stone across the city.

In his Remaines of 1686 John Aubrey wrote that “on the south side of Tooley Street, a little westward from Barnaby Street, is a street called the Maes or Maze, eastward from the Borough (another name for labyrinth). I believe we received these mazes from our Danish ancestors.” Less than two hundred years later, however, new labyrinths emerged. Arthur Machen, reaching what he believed to be the outskirts of the city, “would say ‘I am free at last from this mighty and stony wilderness!’ And then suddenly, as I turned a corner the raw red rows of houses would confront me, and I knew that I was still in the labyrinth.” Of the labyrinth as a device the architectural theorist Bernard Tschumi has stated: “One can never see it in totality, nor can one express it. One is condemned to it and cannot go outside and see the whole.” This is London. When De Quincey wrote of searching for the young prostitute Ann whom he had befriended, he described their passing “through the mighty labyrinths of London; perhaps, even within a few feet of each other- a barrier no wider than a London street, often amounting in the end to a separation for eternity!” This is the horror of the city. It is blind to human need and human affection, its topography cruel and almost mindless in its brutality. The fact that the young girl will almost certainly be betrayed into prostitution once more conjures up the beast at its centre.

For De Quincey Oxford Street was made up from “never-ending terraces” and “innumerable groans.” Here the streets tease and bewilder. Of the City it has been written that a “stranger would soon lose his way in such a maze” and in fact the old centre is characterised by its curious serpentine passages, its secluded alleys and its hidden courts. H.G. Wells noted that if it were not for the cabs “in a little while the whole population, so vast and incomprehensible is the intricate complexity of this great city, would be hopelessly lost for ever.” This is curiously suggestive-a population lost in its own city, as if it had been swallowed up by the streets and the stone. A writer at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Robert Southey, had a similar vision with his realisation that “It is impossible ever to become thoroughly acquainted with such an endless labyrinth of streets; and, as you may well suppose, they who live at one end know little or nothing of the other.” The image is of a labyrinth which is constantly expanding, reaching outwards towards infinity. On the maps of England it is seen as a dark patch, or stain, spreading slowly but inexorably outwards.

CHAPTER 63. If It Wasn’t for the ’ouses in Between

In many works of nineteenth-century fiction, characters stand upon an eminence, such as Primrose Hill or Fish Street Hill, and are struck into silence by the vision of the city’s immensity. Macaulay acquired the reputation of having walked through every street in London but by the year of his death, in 1859, it was unlikely that anyone would have been able to reproduce that feat of pedestrianism. Here was a source of anxiety for an indigenous Londoner. He or she would never know all of the city thoroughly; there would always be a secret London in the very act of its growth. It can be mapped, but it can never be fully imagined. It must be taken on faith, not on reason.