London: The Biography

English drama, and the English novel, spring out of the very conditions of London. In Jonson, and Smollett and Fielding, the poetry of the streets finds its fulfilment. Theirs is a visionary imagination as rich as that of Chaucer or of Blake, but it is a peculiarly London vision filled with images of the theatre and the prison-house, of commerce and of crowds, of fullness and rapacity and forgetfulness.

From a London vision springs a distinctive sensibility. All of these writers-and many more are numbered with them-were preoccupied with light and darkness, in a city that is built in the shadows of money and power. All of them were entranced by the scenic and spectacular, in a city that is continually filled with the energetic display of people and institutions. They understood the energy of London, they understood its variety, and they also understood its darkness. So they tended to favour spectacle and melodrama. As city artists they are more concerned with the external life, with the movement of crowds, with the great general drama of the human spirit. They have a sense of energy and splendour, of ritual and display, which may have very little to do with ethical judgement or the exercise of moral consciousness. In part they share the sublime indifference of London, where the multitudes come and go. However hard and theatrical it may seem, it is a true vision of the world. In the famous phrase, London made me. But then it cannot be altogether hard; it reduced Steele and Lamb to tears.

It is appropriate, then, that there should also have been visions of disaster; of London in ruins or choked to death upon its own smoke and dirt. The French writer Mirbeau invoked a city “of the nightmare, of dream, of mystery, of the conflagration, of the furnace, of chaos, of floating gardens, of the invisible, the unreal … this special nature of the prodigious city.” An image of the furnace often emerges in London visions. In Blake’s Jerusalem “Primrose Hill is the mouth of the Furnace amp; of the Iron Door,” and in Arthur Machen’s “When I Was Young in London” there was a moment when, “looking back one could see all the fires of London reflected dimly in the sky, as if far away awful furnace doors were opened.” It has been known as “the Oven,” as if that sense of unnatural heat provokes strange images of its inhabitants being cooked and eaten. Yet it has also been called “a temple of Fire-worshippers,” so perhaps the citizens venerate the agents of their destruction.

A nineteenth-century observer of the fog noticed the sun as a “mysterious and distant gleam which seemed to be trying to penetrate to this immobile world.” This is another true vision of the city, when all its noise and bustle have disappeared; when it lies silent and peaceful, all of its energy momentarily suspended, it seems like some natural force that will outlast all the activity of humankind. It is gigantic, monstrous, and, by the very fact of its enormity, somehow primeval. The poet, Tom Moore, had a refrain:

Go where we may, rest where we will,

Eternal London haunts us still.

Eternity may have many aspects. One is that of eternal recurrence, so that the people of the city will say the same things or use the same gestures upon the same streets. Since no one may watch a corner or a stretch of thoroughfare over hundreds of years, the truth of this will never be discovered. Yet perhaps it has become clear that certain activities seem to belong to certain areas, or neighbourhoods, as if time itself were moved or swayed by some unknown source of power. Yet if this seems too fanciful, there may be another aspect of “Eternal London.” It is permanent. It is unceasing. Of its essence, it is unchanged. It is a condition of the universe. As the author of London Nights has put it, “London is every city that ever was and ever will be.” Thus Wordsworth saw by Ludgate Hill

A visionary scene-a length of street

laid open in its morning quietness,

Deep, hollow, unobstructed, vacant, smooth …

The silence is the silence of permanence. When all the passing generations have sung their songs and departed, the city continues its quiet life. To see London without its inhabitants is indeed a “visionary scene,” because another presence then reveals itself. That is why there have been so many visions of London in ruins. In drawings and in engravings-even in images of film-it resembles some lost continent, or a city lately risen from the sea. These are not the ruins of Babylon or Rome, but of Atlantis or some other mythological landscape. They are emblems of some undying need or aspiration.