For centuries, literature and London have been practically synonymous with one another...

The finest writers in English have lived and worked in London, and they all have something memorable to say about it. Here are some of their words.

  • Samuel Johnson: "If you wish to have just a notion of the magnitude of this city, you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and squares, but must survey the innumerable little lanes and courts."
  • Charles Dickens: "A day in London sets me up again and starts me."
  • E.M. Forster: "[London's railway termini] are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return. ... he is a chilly Londoner who does not endow his stations with some personality, and extend to them, however, shyly, the emotions of fear and love."
  • Virginia Woolf: "No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner."
  • Joseph Conrad: "This also has been one of the dark places of the earth."
  • Oscar Wilde: "London is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produce the serious people or whether serious people produce the fogs, I don't know."

London isn't just a place where writers write. It is also one of the all-time great literary characters in its own right. Here is a very small selection of works in which London has come to life.

  • Charles Dickens' novels create an unforgettable portrait of London as a dark, dangerous, wonderful, terrible, inspiring, filthy, glamorous place. Dickens is often accused of being poor at characterization. But that tends to be the opinion of those who do not realize that Dickens' main character was never a person, but was always a place.
  • Samuel Johnson's poem "London" (1738) is a classic paean to urban ambivalence.
  • So is Jonathan Swift's poem, "Description of a City Shower" (1712-17).
  • Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) evoked an image of London's underworld so vivid and so disturbing that it helped to convict Wilde of gross indecency in 1895.
  • Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925) is a novel about a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway so carefully mapped out that you can walk it yourself.
  • Ben Jonson's play Bartholomew Fair (1614) makes the rollicking English carnival the scene of a comic meditation on human frailty.

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