London in Literature

Shakespeare’s London was a rapidly-expanding and bustling city. Its populace of roughly 100,000 people included royalty, nobility, merchants, artisans, labourers, actors, beggars, thieves, prostitutes and spies, as well as refugees who had fled from political and religious persecution on the continent. Drawn by England’s budding economy, merchants from the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and even further afield set up shop in London. As a result, Londoners would hear a variety of accents and languages as they strolled about the city – a chorus of voices from across Europe and from all walks of life.

Besides being the location in which many Shakespeare’s plays were written and performed, London also features in his work: explicitly Henry IV Parts I and II, in which Shakespeare paints a particularly vivid portrait of London life, from the ’low’ life of the brothels and taverns to the refined society of the court; implicitly in his Romeo and Juliet, where the noise, bustle and violence of London streets informs his Verona.

The 18th century saw the birth of industrialisation; the growth of radicalism and an increasingly repressive state. In London, extreme luxury sat alongside extreme poverty. The poet and engraver William Blake composed his poem, ‘London’ in the summer of 1792, the same year in which the French Revolution broke out across the channel. The earliest draft of the poem is to be found in this Notebook, held at the British Library.

Blake’s poem illustrates a city of spiritual blindness and a world in turmoil: blood running down palace walls, prostitutes suffering from sexually-transmitted diseases, children forced to become chimney sweeps, and innocent babies born to mothers who couldn’t look after them. The sounds of the city reverberate throughout, from the chimney sweep’s ‘cry’, to the harlot’s ‘curse’ and the soldier’s ‘sigh’. The narrator this poem is the bard, who, we are told in the introduction to Songs of Experience, ‘present, past and future sees’. By opening our ears and our eyes, Blake suggests we may also open our minds.

Though profoundly shocked by the violence of rebellion, a group of poets known as The Romantics were inspired by the ideals of liberty and social justice that had given rise to revolution. William Wordsworth was travelling through London on his way to France when he wrote one of his most famous works, ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802’. The setting and subject matter are uncharacteristic of his work, which normally rejected newly industrialised city life and celebrated the pleasures of country living. This depiction of the city’s serene beauty is a rare glimpse of a Romantic portrayal of London in the early morning, before the working city had woken up.

The diversity and inequality of 1820s London, is captured brilliantly in Pierce Egan’s Life In London one of the popular sensations of its day. The central characters – Tom, Jerry and Logic – were well-heeled young men about town, keen to see ‘a bit of life’ in the poorer districts of London, and the work contrasts the society of the rich and the poor in the metropolis at this time. As well as savouring the conventional masquerades, exhibitions and society events, Tom and Jerry visit boxing matches, cockpits, prisons and bars where the poor entertain themselves. And in an East End pub, they discover a diverse crowd revealing a multiracial society in which those of different social classes can apparently mix with ease. Tom and Jerry’s escapades and misadventures were largely autobiographical, drawn from the lives of Egan himself and his illustrators, George and Robert Cruikshank and Isaac Richard. This somewhat romanticised and sensationalised depiction of London’s urban poor was to pave the way for the works of Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew.

No author is more famous for capturing the darker side of early Victorian London than Charles Dickens. The writer drew inspiration from long walks through the streets of London: ‘I…mean to take a great, London, back-slums kind of walk tonight, seeking adventures in knight errant style’, he wrote to a friend. Dickens’s Oliver Twist tells the story of an orphan who spends his early years in a workhouse and later becomes part of a pickpocket gang, controlled by the manipulative Fagin. A response to the newly passed Poor Law amendments, the novel is as much social commentary as it is entertainment.

It wasn’t just novelists who were interested in the less salubrious side of the capital – the slums, poverty, housing crisis and the plight of the 19th-century urban poor. In one of the first pieces of investigative journalism, in his London Labour and the London Poor (1865), Henry Mayhew conducted interviews with street-sellers, sweepers, rag-pickers and sewer-hunters, in order to share their stories with the reading public. Instead of simply describing the London poor, Mayhew lets them speak in their own voices. Their words jump off the page, opinionated and alive.

Jekyll and Hyde are among the most fearsomely memorable London characters. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel, the famous split personality of the title character is echoed by an equally stark division in the city: the well-lit, wealthy world of Dr Jekyll versus the menacing fog-filled streets of Soho that Hyde inhabits: ‘a dismal quarter…like a district of some city in a nightmare’. The story immediately spawned major theatrical adaptations, the first of which opened shortly before the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888. Newspapers were quick to make associations that persisted in the public consciousness.

Few authors are so closely associated with London as Arthur Conan Doyle – something of an irony, as the Scottish-born author lived there only sporadically, preferring to be based in the countryside while he worked in the city. Nonetheless his famous Sherlock Holmes adventure stories live and breathe the foggy, gas-lit atmosphere of Victorian London, with the detective living in an apartment at 221B Baker Street near Regent’s Park, now a real-life museum. ‘It is a hobby of mine to have an exact knowledge of London,’ the great detective remarks in ‘The Red-Handed League’ (1891), and his search for clues takes him everywhere from the poor neighbourhood of Limehouse in the east to the newly built district of Gloucester Road west of Hyde Park. The fact that you can still visit many of the locations and streets mentioned in the series proves that the author was as knowledgeable about London as his most famous creation.

Virginia Woolf loved London, and her novel Mrs Dalloway famously begins with Clarissa Dalloway walking through the city. A dream-like narrative carries the reader through a crowded capital and into the minds of different isolated individuals. The depiction of the city is distinctly modern – it is a space filled with cars, omnibuses, advertisements and traumatic memories of modern warfare. Clarissa praises city walking: ‘Really it’s better than walking in the country’. However, walking is more than a mere pleasure. It allows ‘street haunters’ to shed their self, and merge with ‘that vast republican army of anonymous trampers’.

Angela Carter’s last book Wise Children celebrates the dizzying linguistic richness, diversity and divisions of 20th century London and its inhabitants. Its opening lines are a riddle: ‘Q. Why is London like Budapest? A. Because it is two cities divided by a river.’ The work reflects on a century of London life, a city ever-changing, and always divided. Carter spent much of her childhood and later life in South London, and her novel is a lament for a lost London of tea shops and music hall entertainment. As her narrator, Dora, observes there is “a time that comes in every century when they reach out for all that they can grab of dear old London, and pull it down. Then they build it up again…but it’s never the same’.