Vol. 21 No. 3 · 4 February 1999
pages 19-21 | 3364 words
Aldermanic Depression
Andrew Saint
- London: A History by Francis Sheppard
Oxford, 442 pp, £25.00, November 1998, ISBN 0 19 822922 4
- London: More by Fortune than Design by Michael Hebbert
Wiley, 50 pp, £17.99, April 1998, ISBN 0 471 97399 8
A hundred years ago, when London ruled half the world and the snarl-up in front of the Bank of England passed for ‘the hub of the Empire’, only dedicated puffers and slummers plus a smattering of tourists had much good to say about Britain’s capital. Literary folk like James and Conrad slipped into the illusionary language of the dark sublime. London was dismal, blackened, sick, cruel and unplanned, concurred the charitable and the analytic; the sooner the authorities could draw the working population and their smokestacks out to the countryside and lance Cobbett’s ‘wen’, the better.
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Letters
Vol. 21 No. 5 · 4 March 1999
From Adam Thorpe
Andrew Saint's assertion (LRB, 4 February) that a hundred years ago few 'had much good to say about Britain's capital' is an over-simplification. The general approach in belles-lettres of the time (and not much has changed since) was to match London's essentially muddled or aporic nature with the intimate muddle of the human heart; the London one loves is the London one knows. This explains the classic schizophrenia in most writings about the city, summed up by Sam Weller when he described his knowledge of London as 'extensive and peculiar': the 'extensive' is seething, chaotic and unframable, the 'peculiar' is quiet, exclusive, authentic – a small place consisting of the streets one treads familiarly, the rooms one frequents.
Twenties London may have been 'far drabber than it is today' (one person's drab is another's draw, of course), but show me a text in which present-day London is not generally seen as thinner than the thickly-detailed memory of its past. I'm surprised Saint didn't emphasise the role demolition has to play in our nostalgia for a less dingy or frantic time (either antique or recent), and the stuttering attempts to retrieve its resonance in places like Covent Garden. Given the furiously unreliable nature of its hammer-drilling present and the city's unaccommodating monstrousness, no wonder writers have had problems delimiting it without at the same time warping its essential nature. Henry James solved the problem in Portrait of a Lady by apparently emptying the place of its inhabitants: 'the stale September days, in the huge half-empty town, had a charm.' His parallel assertions of vacancy and multitudinousness are bolder than most because he makes no attempt to show the multitude, apart from a couple of slum kids locked out of the silent square.
As for Paris, Wilfred Whitten in A Londoner's London (1913) gives one of the best definitions of the difference between the two rivals: 'The Londoner of today, without the least deflection of his London love, is enamoured of Paris; simply because he finds there a certain relief from the immensity, the inexistence, so to speak, of London. The picture of Paris "comes together" in a way that the picture of London never can. It frames itself.' That lack of frame is what gives London its menacing, joyous indeterminacy – and leads us to erect our own edges to peer over, however reductive or inadequate.
Adam Thorpe
Monoblet, France
