London Writing

Merlin Coverley

• Publisher: Pocket Essentials
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781904048480
• eBook ISBN: 9781842439470
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Pocket Essentials is a dynamic series of books that are concise, lively, and easy to read. Packed with facts as well as expert opinions, each book has all the key information you need to know about such popular topics as film, television, cult fiction, history, and more. This book is a guide to the London novel, starting with its origins in the Victorian metropolis and moving through to the present day and the revival of London writing. It includes an examination of the occult tradition, London noir, the disaster novel, and the rise of psychogeography, and features both recognized classics and the work of lost London writers. From Bleak House to Hawksmoor, from Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde to White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, London has continued to generate a series of fantastic visions, and Merlin Coverley traces their genesis and influence in this volume.

The London Canon

‘Then the vision of an enormous town presented itself, of a monstrous town more populous than some continents and in its man-made might as if indifferent to heaven’s frowns and smiles; a cruel devourer of the world’s light. There was room enough there to place any story, depth enough there for any passion, variety enough there for any setting, darkness enough to bury five millions of lives.’ Joseph Conrad, Author’s Note (1920) to The Secret Agent

Much of this Pocket Essential is devoted to the neglected and the overlooked, to those figures and texts that occupy the margins of London’s literary history, and yet residing over and in opposition to this forgotten tradition is the London Canon, the roll-call of those celebrated novels that demand inclusion within any overview of London writing. These novels act as milestones upon a literary journey that begins in the Victorian city and while I have explored the origins of the London novel in my introduction and have clearly demonstrated the primacy of Dickens’ position within the London Canon, there are other novelists whose works have also unmistakeably stood the test of time to become classics. The novels that are included here are not incidentally about London – they are great novels precisely because of their success as great London novels. While the examples I have chosen represent a brief period and are largely the product of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, this remains a particularly fertile period for the London novel, encompassing both the naturalism of the late nineteenth century and the emerging modernism of the early twentieth.

One might certainly make a case for later London novels to be included here, but I have been reluctant to extend the London Canon to include novels whose inclusion might be premature. Penguin might feel able to reissue Martin Amis’ Money (1984) as a modern classic less than 20 years after it was written, but such an example seems to me simply to reinforce the need for caution in ascribing classic status. Furthermore, this is a list that is to be read alongside those writers featured in the following chapters who in pioneering other genres might as easily have warranted inclusion here, amongst them Robert Louis Stevenson and William Morris, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and HG Wells.

Throughout this book I have followed the principle of choosing only one novel to represent the work of one author and nowhere has this rule been more severely tested than in the case of Charles Dickens. Dickens’ entire oeuvre is dominated by his portrayal of London and its inhabitants and there are several notable contenders for his greatest London novel, amongst them Oliver Twist (1838), Little Dorritt (1857), and Our Mutual Friend (1865). In choosing Bleak House (1853), however, I have included a book that best captures the labyrinthine aspect of the city and in whose opening lines we find perhaps the most resonant passage of London prose yet written.

George Gissing is as close an English writer we have to the harsh realism of Zola and his novel New Grub Street (1891) is in many ways the London novelist’s London novel, describing both the joy and the despair, but mainly the despair, of those who have attempted to record the lives of their fellow Londoners.

Joseph Conrad, unlike many of the other figures discussed here, is by no means primarily a London writer, but his sole London novel, The Secret Agent (1907), is one of his finest and uses a real-life terrorist incident to inspire what is one of the earliest fictional accounts of espionage. Conrad is noticeably more modern in his approach than his predecessors, with his tale of betrayal and twisted motives anticipating the moral uncertainties of Graham Greene.

Mrs Dalloway (1925) is the high-water mark for Modernist London fiction and is certainly something of an acquired taste. Her account of a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway is undoubtedly a sophisticated attempt at rendering the varied sights, sounds and impressions of the city as they ebb and flow but is more likely to inspire admiration than affection in its readership.

Finally, Evelyn Waugh, like Woolf, remains firmly bound by the narrow class distinctions of his day, but Vile Bodies (1930) injects some much needed humour into a Canon whose prevailing mood is one of hopeless misery.

In all these novels we can recognise the emergence of new ways of apprehending the city and many of the themes that are explored later in this book are rehearsed here. For the London Canon explores the city in its entirety from the slums of the East End to the power and privilege of the City and records the experiences of its inhabitants as they move from comedy to tragedy, from the outlandish to the everyday.

Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853)

Author and Background: Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth in 1812 and after a happy childhood in Chatham moved to London in 1823. Soon faced with financial disaster, however, Dickens began work in a blacking factory while the remainder of his family were placed in the debtors prison, an experience that was to haunt him for life.

Having received a rudimentary schooling and after a brief stint as a solicitor’s clerk and parliamentary reporter, Dickens produced his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, in 1836–7. Published as a cheap serial publication, the success of the novel made Dickens’ name and many more were to follow, including Oliver Twist (1838) and Nicholas Nickleby (1839). A period of travel in the USA and Europe ensued; by now, Dickens was a publishing phenomenon and in great demand. Writing at a prodigious rate, Dickens completed the novels on which his fame now rests, with the largely autobiographical David Copperfield (1850), followed by Bleak House (1853), Little Dorritt (1857) and Great Expectations (1861). His later years were dogged by ill health and his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, remained unfinished at the time of his death in 1870.

London looms large throughout Dickens’ writing and especially so in novels such as Bleak House (1853) and Our Mutual Friend (1865), in which the sentiment of Dickens’ earlier works gives way to strong social criticism. Dickens’ astonishingly broad vision of the city encompassed almost the entire spectrum of London life, effectively defining the city for future generations.

Plot Summary: More than any other of Dickens’ gargantuan novels, Bleak House resists all attempts at summary. At the heart of this complex web of interwoven stories lies the unresolved lawsuit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, on whose outcome the family inheritance rests. From this protracted case and the law courts of Chancery Lane where the case is periodically heard, a series of events spirals outward affecting those myriad characters whose divergent fortunes are to varying degrees bound up with the arbitrary and absurd processes of the legal system.

Richard Carstone and Ada Clare are Wards of Court and live with their relative John Jarndyce in the family home of Bleak House. Here they are joined by the novel’s heroine and primary narrative voice, the supposed orphan, Esther Summerson. Meanwhile, the aristocratic Lady Dedlock begins the search for her illegitimate child (Esther), a search that leads inexorably to death and disgrace, while elsewhere the mysterious murder of old lawyer Tulkinghorn results in the introduction of Inspector Bucket. Alongside murder and scandal we also witness poverty and degradation in the form of the penniless and illiterate Jo, while love blossoms between Esther and the young Doctor Woodcourt. Needless to say, this love affair does not run smoothly and at one stage Esther is set to marry John Jarndyce before he finally releases her from her engagement. As the novel closes so the lawsuit is finally concluded, only for the inheritance Richard Carstone was expecting to be consumed in legal fees. He dies, but leaves his wife with a son she names Richard. A degree of happiness is finally attained for Esther as she marries Woodcourt, despite having had her beauty marred by the ravages of smallpox.

In-between these episodes are woven numerous other events peopled by a huge cast of minor characters from the comic to the pitiful, and while many of these themes go unresolved and are sometimes inconsistent, Dickens successfully depicts a society that, though appearing outwardly orderly, is in reality chaotic and unpredictable.

Key London Scene: The novel opens with the chapter ‘In Chancery’ and one of the most evocative descriptions of the city ever penned:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Evaluation: Bleak House is not an easy book to complete. The plot, as far as there is one, is fragmentary and full of circuitous paths and sudden digressions. In this sense the book itself allegorises both the interminable and unintelligible legal system at its heart, as well as providing a further allegory for the city itself. Such a book is, like the London it mirrors, is almost impossible to grasp in its entirety, and while its disjointed and unwieldy form may result from the demands of a serialised publication, it is perfectly suited to its portrayal of the city. This city is organic, but it is an organism that is far from healthy and the recurrent motif of the novel is one of decay and corruption. The body of London is diseased, the smallpox and cholera of the day once again allegorical of wider ills, as the legal and business ‘system’ actively impoverishes and represses large sections of society. Written at a time when London was an Imperial city that had confidently celebrated its status in the Great Exhibition of 1851, Dickens was able to reveal the human cost of a system that in elevating a minority to wealth and prestige condemned the masses to misery and despair.

George Gissing, New Grub Street (1891)

Author and Background: Born in Wakefield in 1857, George Gissing was educated at Owens College, Manchester, but was dismissed in 1876 following his theft of money to help the prostitute Nell Harrison, later to become his wife. This unhappy episode was the first of many in a conspicuously miserable life. After serving a month’s hard labour, Gissing spent a year in America before returning to pursue a literary career. Years of poverty were to follow along with the death of his wife in 1888, yet despite these setbacks Gissing produced a series of novels, beginning with the publication of Workers in the Dawn in 1880. The Nether World (1889) attracted some critical attention, but it was with New Grub Street (1891) that Gissing’s reputation was secured. Further novels include Born in Exile (1892), The Odd Women (1893), In the Year of Jubilee (1894) and The Crown of Life (1899). Gissing moved to France in 1899 and died in 1903.

Much of Gissing’s work concerns the plight of the urban poor and in his unsentimental depiction of misery and humiliation, New Grub Street reads as much as a sociological document as a work of fiction. Heavily influenced by ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1: The London Canon
• 2: Occult London
• 3: London in Ruins
• 4: Criminal London
• 5: Lost London Writing
• 6: The London Revival
• 7: The Thirty Essential London Novels
• Further Reading
• Copyright