Course description

This course considers the metropolis of London through the writings of its residents, from Charles Dickens in the 1860s to Penelope Lively in the 1990s. It examines how their cityscapes—panoramic or street-side—drive emotion in fiction, the ways urban spaces enable or disable human connections, and how wars, immigration, and technological developments altered Europe’s largest city over the last century and a half.

Required books

Our Mutual Friend, 1894 edition. Illustration: Frederick Barnard Image by © Stapleton Collection/Corbis.

Our Mutual Friend

(1865)
By Charles Dickens

Dickens animated London streetscapes in ways that later British novelists absorbed, and so his last, most modern novel is the foundation of this course. As Our Mutual Friend opens, a man who makes his living scavenging from the polluted Thames is hauling out a drowned corpse while his daughter oars their small boat steady. The scene begins a mystery story that connects East Londoners’ dockland slums with fashionable West End addresses and with households on every rung of the social ladder. Readers experience Dickens’s London at street level; his characters crisscross its bridges, its jostling thoroughfares, and, in the gloom of night, its deserted squares, meeting up by chance or intent, sometimes violently. Two rivals for a woman’s love track one another through the maze; a marriage is proposed in a crumbling cemetery. The plot hangs on the inheritance of a fortune made from “dust”—the collection of refuse for resale—and the novel asks us to think about the human and material discards of a huge city, and about the possibilities, for better or worse, of second lives.

The Nether World

(1865)
By George Gissing

In the late 19th century, London’s large-scale poverty transfixed affluent readers, who focused their fears, philanthropy, and sociological analyses on the city’s East End—”darkest London,” as it was called. Gissing learned city-writing from reading Dickens, but his vision was bleaker: He saw the industrial urban environment as a place of degradation that relentlessly wasted individuals’ talents and ambitions. Unlike Dickens’s characters, who sew together widely separated parts of the city, Gissing’s people live trapped in the working-class precinct of Clerkenwell, a “nether world” where they trudge in and out of menial jobs, move a few streets from one cheap lodging to another, and strive to escape their lot only to end up where they started. Gissing precisely maps the constricted walking routes of his characters, who seek out noisy, crowded streets for private talk or to elude observation. He deplores urban mass culture for encouraging the shallow young men and women who fight among themselves for dominance, likening one exemplar, the exuberantly coarse and amoral Clementina Peckover, to a “rank, evilly-fostered growth.” But the “putrid soil of that nether world yields other forms besides,” he writes: characters who do their best in blighted circumstances, and who lighten their neighbors’ suffering with patient attention and everyday acts of kindness.

The Secret Agent

(1907)
By Joseph Conrad

Conrad’s single London novel is a small masterpiece of urban noir. Ironic, often macabre, occasionally slapstick, it recalls Dickens and Gissing in its re-creation of the late-19th-century city. But this London is entirely “a monstrous town,” says the author, a demonstration of “man-made might . . . indifferent to heaven’s frowns and smiles,” and it is full of characters with secrets. Mr. Verloc, an agent of the Russian Embassy, is ordered to perpetrate a dynamite outrage to scare the London police into cracking down on anarchists. The dynamite is supplied by “the perfect anarchist,” a diminutive intellectual who walks the streets hooked up to a bomb he can detonate at any time by squeezing a rubber ball in his pocket. The collateral victims of Verloc’s plot are his brother-in-law, a mentally disabled young man with a powerful sense of justice, and Verloc’s wife, Winnie, whose principal mission is to protect her brother. As the novel moves from the sordid back streets of Soho to the highest government offices in Whitehall, we discover that every character, from anarchist to chief inspector, is capable of a sudden outburst or act of violence. Conrad’s London is a grim place, wet and murky like “a slimy aquarium from which the water had been run off.”

Mrs. Dalloway

(1925)
Virginia Woolf

“I love walking in London,” exclaims upper-class hostess Clarissa Dalloway as she crosses St. James’s Park on a sunny mid-June morning in 1923. It is nearly five years since the end of the Great War. Woolf celebrates London’s West End parks, squares, and shopping areas, viewed stream of consciousness–style through the eyes of the 52-year-old Clarissa, her old flame Peter Walsh, and a shell-shocked young veteran, Septimus Smith, as each wanders the city on this day. It is a different city for each: Clarissa’s London contains the “whirling young men and laughing girls” of her patrician past; Peter, returned after five years in India, registers the city’s war memorials and freer postwar atmosphere, where a young woman might “powder her nose in front of everyone”; Septimus interprets every sight and sound as an alarm. The chiming of church clocks, a car backfiring, a skywriting plane, the sight of a stranger in a park can momentarily unite individuals. But Clarissa’s summation as she gazes from her window into a neighbor’s home—”Here is one room, there another”—calls up a city inhabited by isolated consciousnesses. It’s not an unhappy realization. “That’s the miracle, that’s the mystery,” she thinks.

Lonely Londoners, 1985 edition.

The Lonely Londoners

(1956)
By Sam Selvon

On June 21, 1948, the Empire Windrush docked in the Thames with 492 West Indians aboard, many of whom had served in the British military during the Second World War. It was a watershed moment, the beginning of the surge of postwar immigration from throughout the Commonwealth and dependencies that would include 25,000 West Indians in 1956 alone. Trinidadian Sam Selvon tells stories about a group of such arrivals, men who move between dead-end jobs and the dole; who dwell in cramped, overpriced Bayswater rooms, rented to blacks in an atmosphere of growing racial tension; who, in lighter moments, pick up women in Hyde Park. Selvon blends West Indian with standard English, giving us a sample of the many Englishes that can be heard in the streets. Walking to Piccadilly Circus dressed to the nines is a thrill for the newcomer Galahad: “This is London, this is life oh lord, to walk like a king with money in your pocket, not a worry in the world.” Moses has been in the city longer and has a darker vision—”he could see the black faces bobbing up and down in the millions of white, strained faces, everybody hustling along the Strand, the spades jostling in the crowd, bewildered, hopeless.” Yet Moses stays on, caught up like his friends in the magnetic pull of (his words) “London, center of the world.”

Offshore

(1979)
By Penelope Fitzgerald

As in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, the tidal Thames is a protagonist in this novella about barge dwellers on the Battersea Reach near Chelsea, in the swinging London of the 1960s. The little community is literally held together by gangplanks that link one fragile boat to another. Yet each character is somehow adrift. Nenna James can’t manage to put her marriage back together; her daughters, Tilda (6) and Martha (12), are competent in the ancient art of river scavenging and connoisseurs of tidal turns. Every six hours, the tide lifts and lowers the rickety barges that house, in addition to the Jameses, an aging marine painter, a trusting male prostitute, a retired businessman, and an upper-class gentleman who can’t leave the war years behind. Amid comic, touching scenes of mishap, the powerful river sinks one boat and then another. Like the counterculture dreams of the Sixties, the “offshore” life is an interlude and a testament to the eccentricities, imagination, and humanity of Londoners.

City of the Mind

(1991)
By Penelope Lively

The ancient river is now a tourist site, and London is caught up in the real estate boom of the 1980s. Matthew Halland, a history-minded young architect, thinks of London as a “kaleidoscope of time and mood”: When he looks at a brick wall he sees the city that was destroyed and rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666 and again after Hitler’s Blitz. Flashbacks—to a 19th-century orphan scavenging in Covent Garden, to a fire warden afoot during an air raid, the city an inferno under “huge incandescent clouds”—blend with the present as Matthew moves among his building projects and takes his daughter to museums and parks. His city is being transformed again: Reflective glass has replaced brick as the building material of choice; houses in old neighborhoods are rehabbed and gentrified for the offices of the newly rich. Even the East End is being reclaimed for the expanding economy, its Bangladeshi immigrant community threatened by a megalomaniac developer. London persists as a “city of the mind,” says Matthew, for people who know how to read its surfaces.

Rosemarie Bodenheimer is a professor of English at Boston College and the author of Knowing Dickens (2007).

Read more by Rosemarie Bodenheimer