So while the London show spoke to my inner antiquarian, its material was, in fact, by the British Museum’s standards, rather recent. The wonderful thing about it, however, was that it did what London, in its history and its variety, has always done—it showed clearly that there is really nothing new under the sun.
That, I think, is one of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned from reading English literature, the kind of unvarying nature both of social problems and personal dramas. There is very little to separate, say, Georgette Heyer’s Regency drama Arabella, about a young woman muddling through her long-awaited London season, from Nancy Mitford’s Radlett girls in The Pursuit of Love, except for the passage of time and the claims of craft. Dances, dresses, men, marriage. The hypochondriacal moneylender Mrs. Islam in Monica Ali’s contemporary novel Brick Lane may be a Bangladeshi immigrant, but she is also a Dickens character in a modern London setting. John Mortimer’s hapless Rumpole, married to She Who Must Be Obeyed and drinking cheap plonk after representing yet another of the Timsons—“A family to breed from, the Timsons. Must almost keep the old Bailey going singlehanded”—owes a bit to Chaucer, a bit to Waugh. And all of the above owe more than a bit to real life; their like can be found in the London papers on any given day, being charged with usury, being indicted for fraud, representing those so indicted.
Most of those peering at the Hogarth engravings and Canaletto paintings in the 1753 show on its first day were aged, and so were the stories the exhibits told. Yet they were also the stories we tell ourselves every day now, to convince ourselves that the golden age is past: raging crime, class warfare, invasive immigrants, light morals, public misbehavior. Always we convince ourselves that the parade of unwelcome and despised is a new phenomenon, which is why the phrase “the good old days” has passed from cliché into self-parody. Joseph Conrad, a Polish émigré writing in English, saw this with the harshest of eyes in The Secret Agent: “a peculiarly London sun” is “at a moderate elevation about Hyde Park Corner with an air of punctual and benign vigilance,” and the man walking beneath it considers the gap between rich and poor, in the fashion of Conrad’s highly political novels, and how “the whole social order favourable to their hygienic idleness had to be protected against the shallow enviousness of unhygienic labour.”
There’s no getting away from the fact that the 1753 exhibit is full of echoes of a more modern London, as well as reflections of an older, perhaps even harsher city. Hogarth’s rendering of “A View of Cheapside, as it appeared on Lord Mayor’s Day Last,” looks fairly similar to Piccadilly Circus on any given Saturday night, except for the Lord Mayor’s coach and the presence of the King and Queen watching from an awninged balcony. The crush at the scene is a testimonial to what was happening then and what is happening again today: That is, that those with money and standing, who in the past had largely lived in the country and visited town only on shopping trips and special occasions, had decided instead that it was important to have a place in London. “To a lover of books the shops and sales in London present irresistible temptations,” wrote Edward Gibbon, who sold his father’s country estate, acquired a lapdog and a parrot, and rented a flat in Cavendish Square, where he wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
There was also, according to the exhibit’s companion guide, the requisite hostility toward immigrants. They were simply different immigrants than today’s Brick Lane Bangladeshis or Brixton Jamaicans. Scots, Jews, Irish, French Huguenots. There was, in the opinion of many native Londoners, something wrong with each of them, and they were certain to lower the tone and sully the streets. Many of them set up shop, but not on Bond Street, where the quality shopped, then as now.
Talk of farthingales and arsenic powder makes us also assume that fashions in dress were completely unlike our own, and indeed the tight trousers and slashed skirts of Soho would shock and amaze any of the ladies of 1753 London. But in the British Museum exhibit, there are a pair of women’s shoes as pretty as any in a Notting Hill boutique now, blue-green silk encrusted with silver lace, with a small curved heel, and alongside the shoes are some bejeweled hair ornaments, gold and silver with garnets. You could sell either in a sec in Harvey Nick’s to one of those girls in tight trousers.
White’s and Boodles in Mayfair were the best clubs then, not the more bohemian hangouts of modern London, the Soho and the Groucho, where, one account has it, the artist Damien Hirst was banned for being too casual about exposing himself. (Of course, literature would create its own clubs, some even more compelling. Sherlock Holmes’s brother Mycroft is a member of the Diogenes Club on Pall Mall, a club in which “no member is permitted to take the least notice of any other one.” And Adam Dalgliesh, the poet who is also P. D. James’s Scotland Yard superintendent, occasionally dines at the Cadaver Club on Tavistock Square, whose members are men “with an interest in murder.”)
For the working man of 1753, one great pleasure was the coffeehouse. There were hundreds of them, all doing a booming business, although to listen to people inveigh against the proliferation of Nero’s decaf take-away latte and the like, you would swear they were purely a modern invention. In the coffeehouses were the newspapers: “All Englishmen are great newsmongers,” one French observer wrote.
Which brings us to the case of Elizabeth Canning. While the London tabloids of our own time were mining the cases of two women accused of infanticide and another who had killed two young boys when she herself was a child, Elizabeth’s case was the tabloid equivalent of three centuries ago, her bad press now encased in glass exhibition cases. The eighteen-year-old scullery maid disappeared on New Year’s Day, 1753, and when she turned up again a month later she said she’d been kidnapped. Two old women were arrested for the crime, and both found guilty: One was branded on the thumb and sentenced to the notorious Newgate prison—“black as a Newgate knocker,” they once said of the lock of hair thieves wore behind one ear—and the other, incredibly, sentenced to death because she had allegedly stolen Elizabeth’s stays, worth about ten shillings.
When an alibi surfaced for one woman and a judge became suspicious of Canning’s claims, the alleged stealer of the stays, a woman named Mary Squires (always described in the press as “the old gypsy”) was pardoned by the king. Broadsides showed plans of the house where Canning was allegedly held, which she was apparently unable to describe accurately although it consisted of little more than two small downstairs rooms and an attic. Her portrait appeared in the papers in profile, in a cap and short cape. Another popular illustration showed Canning, who was herself tried for perjury, in the dock; the publisher exercised a master stroke of economy and, instead of using a new drawing, merely recycled the copperplate of the trial of a highwayman named James Maclaine, erasing Maclaine and having an artist draw the figure of a young woman in his place.
All of London divided into pro- and anti-Canning camps. Some gossiped that she had disappeared to hide a pregnancy and birth; others collected hundreds of pounds for her and invited her to be feted at the fashionable White’s in St. James’s. Her story could be transplanted wholesale into today’s papers or infotainment news shows, except for her eventual punishment: She was exiled to America. Perhaps, like John Lennon, Tina Brown, and a clutch of other famous British subjects, she went on to find happiness there. Or perhaps it was a true execution by inches, as the Anglophile Henry James would have it. Near the end of The Portrait of A Lady, there is an exchange between Isabel and Mrs. Touchett that makes the novelist’s position clear: “Do you still like Serena Merle?” the older woman asks our heroine.
Henry James, 1843-1916
“Not as I once did. But it doesn’t matter, for she’s going to America.”
“To America? She must have done something very bad.”
“Yes—very bad.”
CHAPTER TEN
Envy is a writer’s lot in London, and not only because so many great writers have walked its streets. (And continue to do so—during my first stay at the Groucho Club, I glimpsed Sa
lman Rushdie drinking at the bar. This seemed notable mainly because it was at the height of the very public fatwa against him by conservative Muslim clerics, who had threatened death in return for the purported blasphemy of his novel The Satanic Verses. It was said that Rushdie was in hiding. The bar at the Groucho was quite dark, so perhaps it was as good a place as any to hide.)
There simply could not be a better place in which to set a story. After the Great Fire destroyed so much of the city, Christopher Wren proposed that it should be re-created along a more sensible grid system. This would have made London immeasurably easier to negotiate—when a stranger is lost in London, she is lost indeed—and sensible in a way that it is not now and never has been. Thank God the proposal was considered, and rejected. The city that rose from the ashes rose along the same nonsensical system of country lanes and downhill passages that had defined it before. And so it reasserted itself as a kind of mazelike mystery that is irresistible for the imaginative mind.
It is, perhaps, Dickens who best describes the allure of the architecture when he speaks of Scrooge’s rooms in “a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide and seek with other houses, and forgotten the way out again.” There are countless buildings that seem trapped in the narrow backstreets of the West End or Chelsea, streets designed for one century and trying to make do in another. At Piccadilly there is a warning sign that Jermyn Street, home of the the shirtmakers Turnbull and Asser and the perfumier Floris, is “unsuited for long vehicles.”
For someone used to the tidy, slightly boring numbered streets of upper Manhattan, it is a joy to encounter St. James’s Street, St. James’s Place and Little St. James’s Street. Every street name seems to have a codicil attached, a cartographic family tree; as Thackeray noted, “All the world knows that Lord Steyne’s town palace stands in Gaunt Square, out of which Great Gaunt Street leads.” Nearby, according to the novelist, is New Gaunt Street, and Gaunt Mews. All this would seem like satire if you did not see it all around you in the city itself.
So a lover of language finds herself enamored of geography here. The placenames alone are a gift to a novelist. If there is anywhere in the world that sounds grander than Belgravia, I’d like to know it; Fifth Avenue, by comparison, is just a number. Elephant and Castle, Camberwell, Stepney, Bethnal Green. Bolingbroke Grove, Threadneedle Street, Cadogan Terrace, Lavender Sweep, Leadenhall Market, Half Moon Street, Queen’s Circus, Queen’s Club Gardens, Queen’s Gate Mews. The London A to Z is a tone poem that could easily be arranged as blank verse of a high order. In fact, the Scottish mystery novelist Anne Perry has cribbed from it unashamedly, naming her novels after London locales in which they are set, Southampton Road, Rutland Place, Cardington Crescent, and the like. (London does not rename things; while America is now rife with John F. Kennedy Boulevards, there is no Churchill Street or Princess Diana Avenue.)
Meanwhile the American mystery writer Martha Grimes has chosen to name her books after pubs, a decision that is so sensible, given the richness and variety of public house names, that the only wonder is that it wasn’t done years before. In just a week in London, a tourist making a haphazard list comes up with the Shakespeare, the Samuel Pepys, the Bag O’Nails, the Dog and Duck, the Friend at Hand, the Porcupine, and the Coal Hole. In his magnificent book, London: A Biography, the novelist Peter Ackroyd writes that in 1854 there were seventy King’s Heads, ninety King’s Arms, seventy Crowns, fifty Queen’s Heads, thirty Foxes, and thirty Swans. There were some twenty thousand pubs to chose from in all at the time.
(One Friday evening, wandering through Shepherd Market, we came upon a crush of people in one of the narrow cobbled back alleys laughing and chatting and holding glasses in front of a cattycornered establishment called Ye Grapes and concluded that we were intruding on an office party or some other kind of official gathering. “Probably just an evening out at the local,” said a friend, quite correctly, as it turned out. Reading about public drinking and drunkenness, especially the liberal use of gin, is an essential part of knowing London through books. It turns out that that, too, has changed little, even in a more abstemious time.)
The A to Z was assembled originally by a woman who walked nearly twenty miles a day and covered three thousand miles of streets. Perhaps at the end she felt as if she truly knew London. If so, she might be alone in that. “London is a labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh,” writes Ackroyd in his introduction. “It cannot be conceived in its entirety but can be experienced only as a wilderness of alleys and passages, courts and thoroughfares, in which even the most experienced citizen may lose the way.” Ackroyd’s book, in my worn and spotted paperback edition, is more than eight hundred pages. After walking the streets of London, it does not seem excessive.
And his point about experiencing the city episodically may be the key to why it is such a spectacular starting point for fiction; the episode is, after all, how we novelists do what we do. Virginia Woolf once said in a letter to her sister, “To write a novel in the heart of London is next to an impossibility. I feel as if I were nailing a flag to the top of a mast in a raging gale.” But that’s nonsense, made more nonsensical by how many wonderful things the writer managed to produce while in the midst of the storm of the city. In fact it may be exactly the opposite: The small and quiet spot offers so much less, so many fewer of the telling details that are so critical to a sense of place. These are the details that are right there for the observing in a city so diverse, so polyglot, so hodgepodge.
In a sweetly elegiac memoir entitled Winter in London published more than a half century ago, a writer named Ivor Brown wrote quite correctly, “Great men have lifted their fictions from these pavements; the ghosts of any London lane are infinite.” It is impossible not to feel them peeking over your shoulder and, if so inclined, to find inspiration in their generations. To sink down on a bench with the inscription “From members of hall in memory of the first Earl of Birkenhead” on one of the paths that crisscross Gray’s Inn must speak to even the uninspired. If nothing else it is a perfect aesthetic moment, a balance in absolute equipoise of muted red brick, bright green grass, gravel, and window glass glinting in the sunlight. Trollope captured the atmosphere perfectly and simply in one of his Palliser novels, The Prime Minister, when he described the offices of Mr. Wharton: “He had a large pleasant room in which to sit, looking out from the ground floor of Stone Buildings on to the gardens belonging to the Inn—and here, in the center of the metropolis, but in perfect quiet as far as the outside world was concerned, he had lived and still lived his life.” The gardens were planted by Francis Bacon. The first performance of Comedy of Errors was in the hall. The ghosts are most distinguished.
Or, if you are of a mind to write something more florid and romantic, there is always the Albert Memorial, which all by itself must explode forever the notion of the English as an emotionally distant race. Down the Broad Walk or across the Flower Walk in Kensington Gardens, and suddenly, there it is, like a great bejeweled costume brooch in a case of enameled Asprey cufflinks.
It is a poem, or a short story, or perhaps a comic book all by itself, and a shock to the system: statues and carvings representing the continents and commerce, engineering, agriculture, and manufacturing, yards of gilded fencing, and at the center a vast altarpiece of elaborate mosaics, atop it, not a tabernacle, but “Albert,” as it says on the base, as though there had been no other before or since. He is more than twice life-size, including his famous muttonchop whiskers, and blindingly gold.
Albert Memorial, Kensington Gardens
During the war the statue was darkened so that enemy planes would not use it as a marker to attack Kensington Palace, but a thousand books of gold leaf used in a recent renovation brought Albert back to where he was meant to be: as good an evocation of deranged adoration as exists outside the leap of a widow onto a ceremonial pyre. Victoria built the monument in
memory of her beloved prince; just across the road is the Royal Albert Hall, which was meant to be called the Hall of Arts and Sciences. The widowed Queen shocked everyone when she laid the cornerstone, christened the building, and unexpectedly added the late consort’s name. The shock seems overdone; if the bystanders had only looked across the street at the blinding rococo of the Albert Memorial, they might have wondered when the Queen would rechristen St. Paul’s Cathedral and the British Museum in Albert’s name as well!
Of course it is not only the great monuments that make the London scene rich in inspiration, but the small corners and commonplaces as well. Eaton Square, all abloom between solemn white-columned rows of houses, still bespeaks privilege and a dignified self-possession, that thing the Mitford sisters mocked as U, for Upper class. But it’s for sure people of wealth and accomplishment once thought of as arrivistes are ensconced within some of its homes now. (After all, an Egyptian who can’t get himself British citizenship owns Harrods, and has complemented its almost medieval food court, with its eels and rabbits and quail, with an ill-advised Egyptian hall!) The taxi drivers’ houses scattered around the city, where cabbies can have a cup of tea and a chat (or a grouse) still remain, even if some of the cabbies are Indian or Jamaican. And on Vigo Street a man in full old-fashioned London regalia—balmacaan, waistcoat, suit, tie, and umbrella by his side—sells orchids from a stall. What in the world can his story be? Perhaps I’ll just invent it.
Then again, maybe not. It’s the ghosts that might be inclined to keep writers away from London as well as to draw them. If the sight of full bookshelves sometimes make us wonder whether another book is really the answer to any question, then the streets of London respond resoundingly. No more about Pall Mall! No more about St. James’s! No more about the highhanded doorman or the beggar with his dog. (Is it affirming or dispiriting, to read in Peter Ackroyd’s book on London that historically the dog “has always been the companion of the London outcast,” the beggar’s “only companion in this world of need,” then to walk out to Piccadilly and find a homeless man, with a sand-colored mixed breed, in front of the Pret A Manger sandwich shop with a sign “My Dog Needs Food.”) Being a writer is a continually humbling experience, carrying within it always rejection, by editors and readers, the cognoscenti, and the marketplace. The books of London suggest a deeper, more punishing rejection: the rejection of surfeit. The deed was done long ago, and brilliantly. Being a writer living in London must be like being a chef in Paris, or a priest in Rome—intimidating, and with good reason. V. S. Pritchett once wrote, “ London has the effect of making one feel personally historic.” But his writing has always given me the impression that Pritchett tends to feel personally historic a great deal. For an American writer, London can have the effect of making you feel personally insignificant.