London: The Biography

Ordinary human existence seems uninteresting or unimportant in this place where everything is colossal. “No man ever was left to himself for the first time in the streets, as yet unknown, of London,” De Quincey continued, “but he must have been saddened and mortified, perhaps terrified, by the sense of desertion and utter loneliness which belongs to his situation.” Nobody regarded De Quincey; nobody saw or heard him. The people rushing past, bent upon their own secret destinations and contemplating their own hurried business, seemed “like a mask of maniacs” or “a pageant of phantoms.” Against the magnitude of stone, the city dwellers are like wraiths, replacing others and in turn to be replaced. It is a function of London’s size, and of its age, that all of its citizens seem merely its temporary inhabitants. Within the immensity of London any individual becomes insignificant and unnoticed; this is a tiring condition, too, and may also help to explain the weariness and lassitude which mark many London faces. To be perpetually reminded that the single human life is worth very little, that it is reckoned merely as part of the aggregate sum, may induce a sense of futility.

To live in the city is to know the limits of human existence. In many Victorian street-scenes the city dwellers seem lonely and unregarded, trudging along the crowded avenues with their heads lowered, carrying their burdens patiently enough but isolated none the less. This is another paradox of Victorian London. There is an appearance of energy and vitality in the mass, but the characteristic individual mood is one of anxiety or despondency.

“What is the centre of London for any purpose whatever?” De Quincey asked, and of course the city has no centre at all. Or rather, the centre is everywhere. Wherever the houses are built, that is London-Streatham, Highgate, New Cross, all as characteristically and indefinably London as Cheapside or the Strand. They were part of the malodorous, coruscating city, awakened from its grandeur and rising into shabby daylight as a wilderness of roofs and tenements. Not all were stable; not all were noble. This was another aspect of the ever expanding city; there were areas which were only of fragile growth. The various classes, and subdivisions of classes, were broadly segregated in distinct neighbourhoods; the difference between working-class Lambeth and genteel Camberwell, both south of the river, for example, was immense. But there were areas of more uncertain nature, where the chances of going up or down were precariously balanced. Pimlico was one such neighbourhood; it could have become grand or respectable, but was constantly on the verge of shabbiness. This in turn reflected a general anxiety among middle-class city dwellers; it was easy to go under, through drink or unemployment, and the tense respectability of one year might be succeeded by wretchedness in the next. Will this newly built terrace along the Walford Road become the dwellings of ambitious city workers, or will it degenerate into a set of tenements? This was the unspoken question about much of London’s development.

And then there was the immensity registered by its endless crowds. That is why the urban fiction of the nineteenth century is filled with chance encounters and coincidental meetings, with sudden looks and brief asides, with what H.G. Wells called “a great mysterious movement of unaccountable beings.” Travellers were frightened at street-crossings where the sheer number and speed of pedestrians created the effect of a whirlpool. “A Londoner jostles you in the street,” a German journalist observed, “without ever dreaming of asking your pardon; he will run against you, and make you revolve on your own axis, without so much as looking round to see how you feel after the shock.” Workers walked to the City from Islington and Pentonville, but now they came in from Deptford and Bermondsey, Hoxton and Hackney, as well. It has been estimated that, in the 1850s, 200,000 people walked into the City each day. As Roy Porter has put it in London: a Social History, “dislocation and relocation were always occurring-nothing ever stood still, nothing was constant except mobility itself.” To be engaged in a process of perpetual growth and change for their own sake, and to be sure of nothing but uncertainty, may be discomfiting.