Introduction to Literary London (by Elsie M . Lang; 1906)



There are many vices of large cities; but the worst of their faults is that they refuse to look at themselves; perhaps because the sight would be too disconcerting. The trouble about people living in a big city is not that they do not know anything about the country; it is not that they do not know anything about pigs or about primroses or about the cuckoo. It is that they do not know anything about houses or railings or lamp-posts or pavements. It is that they do not know anything about the great city. People say that the country is more poetical. It is not true. The town would immediately strike us as far more poetical if we happened to know anything at all about the town. If we applied to human traces the same vivid imagination which we apply to the traces of beasts or birds we should find not only the street, but any chance inch of the street, far more romantic than a glade. We say (when in a country lane): "Here is a nest," and we immediately begin to wonder about the bird who made it. But we do not say: "Here is a railing," and then immediately begin to wonder about the man who made it. We regard such things as railings as coming by a kind of fate, quite unlike the almost individual influence which we recognise in the growths of the countryside. We regard eggs as personal creations and mole-hills as personal creations. Such things as railings are the only things that we think impersonal, because they are the only things that are really made by persons. This is the difficulty of the town: that personality is so compressed and packed into it that we cannot realise its presence. The smallest street is too human for any human being to realise. It would require some superhuman creature to understand so much mere humanity. This principle, which is true of the undistinguished in a human street, is true even of the distinguished. So intense and close is the pressure of a million personalities in a great urban centre that even fame is in that asphyxiating atmosphere a feeble flame. Even glory is darkened and doubtful. Even the known are unknown. And it is this fact which renders necessary such a book as that which follows. The chances are a hundred to one that every man of us is living on a historic spot. The chances are a hundred to one that every man of us has almost as much ground for interest in his own neighbourhood as if he had a cottage on the plain of Waterloo or a bungalow erected on Runnymeade. The only way to support such a general assertion is to take what is literally the first case that comes to hand. I am writing these words in Battersea, and a very little way off is the place where, by tradition, the brilliant Bolingbroke lived, and where (as some say) Pope wrote "The Essay on Man." Across the river I can see the square tower of a church in which (it is said) the great Sir Thomas More lies dead. Right opposite me is the house of Catherine of Braganza. I could go on for ever. But these things are obliterated from the mind by their very multiplicity: it is as if twenty battles had been fought at Waterloo or all English political documents written at Runnymeade. A street in London means stratum upon stratum of history, poet upon poet, battlefield upon battlefield. This is partly the reason why we feel London to be unromantic: that it is too romantic to be felt at all; the other reason, which arises from the first, is that it is never so closely and clearly described in the books that we read as is the country. Nearly all our books tell us what to look for in a field: it is the aim of this book to tell us what to look for in a street.

There are one or two definite mistakes to be cleared up. The suburbs, for instance, are commonly referred to as prosaic. That is a matter of taste; personally, I find them intoxicating. But they are also commonly referred to as new. And this is a question of fact, and reveals a very real ignorance of the trend of English history and the nature of English institutions. The suburbs have real faults; but they are not modem. The suburb is not merely what the Germans call a "colonie" (their most successful form of colony)— a group of houses which has really come into being owing to the needs of a central city. Some London suburbs are like this, but not Battersea or any of the best. The proper London suburb is a tiny town that once stood on a clean hillside by itself, but has permitted the surge of growing London to sweep around it These places are annexed, but they are, as it were, annexed nations. They are so far degraded perhaps that the empire of London has destroyed them. But they are not so degraded that the empire of London has created them. I always feel when I pass through Wandsworth or Putney that I may find in the heart of it a wild beast or a memory of patriotism. This point is of enormous importance in connection with the question to which this book is devoted: the question of the tracks of great men across London. For many of those great men (if the Hibernianism is admissible) lived in London when it was not London. Camberwell is now one of the greyest spots in our present area; when Browning lived in it, it may even have been one of the greenest. Certainly he heard two nightingales at once (not one nightingale, to which we still aspire in Battersea)— two nightingales, and that apparently night after night. Let us then at least regard the important suburbs as ancient cities embedded in a tort of boiling lava spouted up by that volcano, the speculative builder. The whole charm and glory of London consists in the fact that it is the most incongruous of cities. Anywhere in London an American bar may be next door to a church built before the Crusades. A man may very well be exasperated with London, as he may be with the universe; but in both cases he has no business to be bored with it

G. K. Chesterton.