An Anthology of London in Literature, 1558-1914: 'Flower of Cities All' Geoffrey G. Hiller Updated 2025
An Anthology of London in Literature, 1558-1914: 'Flower of Cities All' Geoffrey G. Hiller Updated 2025
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EDITED BY
GEOFFREY G. HILLER, PETER L. GROVES, ALAN F. DILNOT
An Anthology
of London in
Literature
‘Flower of Cities All’
An Anthology of London in Literature, 1558–1914
Geoffrey G. Hiller · Peter L. Groves
Alan F. Dilnot
Editors
An Anthology of
London in Literature,
1558–1914
‘Flower of Cities All’
Editors
Geoffrey G. Hiller (1942–2017) Peter L. Groves
Glen Iris, VIC, Australia Monash University
Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Alan F. Dilnot
Monash University
Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Cover illustration: “Westminster Bridge, with the Lord Mayor’s Procession on the Thames. Yale
Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection”
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
This book is dedicated to the memory of
Geoffrey G. Hiller (1942–2017),
a scholar and a gentleman:
Of studie took he moost cure and moost hede,
And gladly wold he lerne, and gladly teche.
Preface
This anthology brings together extracts from some of the finest writing in
English on the subject of that ancient and fascinating city, chosen from the
period in which the London we now know was mainly created: the three-and-
a-half centuries that separate the accession of Elizabeth I from the onset of
the First World War, which transformed it from a large town still intimately
connected to the neighbouring countryside to the sprawling metropolis
of an empire that covered a quarter of the globe. London has always been
more than a place to live and work: always the cultural heart of England, for
example, and always larger by at least an order of magnitude than any other
city in Britain—indeed, for much of this period the largest city in the world.
But beyond this, London is a city of the mind, an imaginary space haunted
by the great mythopoeic cities of Western culture: Rome, Athens, Babylon,
Jerusalem. This is why it has kindled the imagination of some of the greatest
writers of English, and why it forms the subject of this anthology.
The 142 extracts, which are in all but one case in modernised spelling and
punctuation (though including traditional punctuational aids to scansion),
are annotated (simple one-word glosses are incorporated into the text in
square brackets) and grouped into four sections by historical period, being
numbered within those sections: cross-references will take the form “[2.14]”
or “(see [4.27])”. Each extract has a brief head-note, and references to the
head-note of an extract are indicated by “HN”. References to footnotes will
take the form “(see [2.20], n.107)”.
Each of the four sections is introduced by an Introduction, an account
of the various contexts from which the passages are drawn: historical,
social, cultural, even geographic (London grew by 25 times and developed
beyond recognition throughout the period covered by the anthology).
vii
viii Preface
ix
x Contents
Index 249
About the Editors
Peter L. Groves, Alan F. Dilnot and the late Geoffrey G. Hiller earned
their doctorates at Cambridge and Oxford, and became Senior Lecturers in
English Literature at Monash University, Melbourne, where Groves is still
employed (in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics)
and Dilnot holds an adjunct position. Hiller and Groves have between them
published nine books, including four as co-authors.
xv
General Introduction
1In 1600, for example, there were seventeen times as many people in London as in the next
biggest city, Norwich, and the disproportion has only grown since. It should be remembered,
however, that prior to the first census in 1801, population figures for London can be no more
than estimates and are complicated by the fact that the perimeter of London as an entity was for
the most part not clearly fixed (even now the name can refer to a number of differently defined
geographic and political areas).
xvii
xviii General Introduction
noise, the bustle, the energy of the place. Some of the earliest literature to
capture this stir and hustle, this frenetic (and not always entirely legitimate)
pursuit of money, sex and status is found in Elizabethan satire (see, for exam-
ple, [1.6]) and contemporary accounts of “coney-catching”2 and other scams
(see [1.21–1.23]). Jacobean city comedy continued this representation (see
[1.22–1.23] for extracts) in plays like Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World, My
Masters (1605) and John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan (c. 1604), which
also record some of the moral anxiety that contemporaries felt about the
transformative power of all the money flowing into the city from the huge
expanse in overseas trade in the sixteenth century: the questions raised in The
Merchant of Venice (1596) about the legitimacy of lending money at interest
(the lifeblood of capitalism) had more than a historical interest. As Jonson
remarked in the prologue to The Alchemist (1610), a city comedy in which
everyone is implicated in one mad (or cynical) get-rich-quick scheme or
another:
2A coney-catcher was a confidence trickster (coney means “rabbit”). See Salgādo (1977).
General Introduction xix
Above my head, above the house tops, co-elevate almost with the clouds, I saw
a solemn, orbed mass, dark blue and dim – THE DOME.4 While I looked, my
inner self moved; my spirit shook its always-fettered wings half loose; I had a
sudden feeling as if I, who had never yet truly lived, were at last about to taste
life. […] I went wandering whither chance might lead, in a still ecstasy of free-
dom and enjoyment; and I got – I know not how – I got into the heart of city
life. I saw and felt London at last: I got into the Strand; I went up Cornhill; I
mixed with the life passing along; I dared the perils of crossings. To do this, and
to do it utterly alone, gave me, perhaps an irrational, but a real pleasure. [3.1]
To other new arrivals, like Pip in Great Expectations (1861), the experience
was more oppressive:
while I was scared by the immensity of London, I think I might have had some
faint doubts whether it was not rather ugly, crooked, narrow, and dirty. […] I
came into Smithfield5; and the shameful place, being all asmear with filth and fat
and blood and foam, seemed to stick to me. So, I rubbed it off with all possible
speed by turning into a street where I saw the great black6 dome of Saint Paul’s
bulging at me from behind a grim stone building which a bystander said was
Newgate Prison. (Dickens 1999, ch. 22)
3Wordsworth (1959, 232); for information on The Prelude, see [3.5 HN].
4THE DOME of St Paul’s Cathedral [2.13 HN], the second biggest in the world, topped
by its imposing stone lantern and inspired by Michelangelo’s cupola for St Peter’s in Rome, was
(at 112 feet wide and 278 feet tall) a prominent and impressive landmark: prior to the 1960s St
Paul’s was the largest church in Britain and the tallest building in London.
5Smithfield, a large open area just outside the City walls to the north-west, was (and still is) the
site of the main meat-market for London (from C12th), notorious for its filth and disorder; cattle
were slaughtered there, as were traitors and heretics in protracted gruesome executions (C14th
to C17th). From 1783 to 1868 the public hanging of common criminals took place just to the
south, outside Newgate Prison (see [2.28 HN]).
6black: in reality bluish-grey (leaden), but black then due to the sooty pollution caused by
numberless coal-fires, a problem that persisted in London till the Clean Air Act of 1956.
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