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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.
This page was last modified on Saturday, 18-Jan-2003 07:20:28 EST. Site content and design © 2002-2003
Maurice Black and Erin O'Connor
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