London: The Biography полностью

Much has been written about the nature of fear in London. James Boswell arrived in the city in 1762. “I began to be apprehensive that I was taking a nervous fever, a supposition not improbable, as I had one after such an illness when I was last in London. I was quite sunk.” The editor’s commentary upon Laroon’s depiction of street traders emphasises the traces of anxiety upon their faces, in particular “hollow, frightened eyes.” In the poem “London” William Blake’s narrator wanders through the streets by the river, “And mark in every face I meet/Marks of weakness, marks of woe” together with the “Infants cry of fear … Soldiers sigh … Harlots curse … new-born Infants tear.” In the illustration with which he has adorned the right-hand side of the poem, a child is warming itself beside a great fire which may itself be a token of calamity. In his account of the plague of 1664 and 1665, Daniel Defoe depicted the city itself torn by fever and nervous fear. It was said of Thackeray that “it seemed as if London were his disease, and he could not help telling all the symptoms” to which is appended the remark, “that is another sign of a true Londoner.” In a poem by Thomas Hood, the stones of London cry out against a woman careering through the streets upon a horse-“Batter her! shatter her! Kick her brains out! Let her blood spatter her!”

There has always been so much to create anxiety in the city-the noise, the endless rush, the violence of the mob. London has been compared to a prison and to a grave. To the German poet, Heinrich Heine, “this overdriven London oppresses the fancy and tears the heart.” Heckethorn’s London Memories records that when in 1750 one soldier prophesied an earthquake “vast multitudes left London for the country, and the fields around were crowded with fugitives from the threatened catastrophe.” The unfortunate seer was later confined to a madhouse. But the symptoms of fear have never materially diminished. In times of pestilence many citizens simply died of fright, and it has been remarked that in nineteenth-century discourse the word “gloom” emerges frequently. It is related to the fogs or “London particulars” of that century, but it seems also to have possessed an intimate and more unnerving significance. November was the month for London suicides and, when the fog was at its thickest, “people who experienced this phenomenon said it seemed as if the world was coming to an end.” These last words were exactly those used by the inhabitants of Whitechapel Road, when a firework manufactory exploded. The phrase came readily and easily to the lips-as if, perhaps, there was some unconscious wish for this mighty cessation. Dostoevsky noted, after visiting the Great Exhibition in London, “And you feel nervous … a feeling of fear somehow creeps over you. Can this, you think, in fact be the final accomplishment of an ideal state of things? Is this the end, by any chance?”

Death has always been one of London’s devices. “The Dance of Death” was painted on the wall of St. Paul’s Churchyard, so that the people who thronged that church for business or amusement were always aware of their mortality. In June of 1557 the registrar of a parish records the following causes of death within that one month-“a swellynge … ague … consumption … thought [cough] … blody fluxe … poches [pox] … postum which brake … browce [bruise?] … famyne … consumed away.” The bills of mortality in London, published every Thursday, include those who were “planet struck,” or who suffered from “horseshoe head” or “rising of the lights,” the latter now quite uninterpretable; there are entries on those “killed in the pillory” or who “died from want in Newgate.” Even before the plague of 1665 and the Fire of 1666 memento mori motifs were “one speciality of the seventeenth century City churchyards.” “Nobody is healthy in London,” Mr. Woodhouse complains in Emma, “nobody could be.” A character in Smollett’s Humphry Clinker, Matthew Bramble, suffered certain symptoms in London “which warn me to be gone from this centre of infection.” A century later London was described as the “Great Wen” or fleshy excrescence indicative of poor health.

There have always been epidemics and waves of death within the metropolis. The “Black Death” of 1348 killed approximately 40 per cent of London’s population. Many were buried outside the walls in no-man’s-land, otherwise known as Pardon Churchyard or Wilderness Row, now part of the Clerkenwell Road behind the Charterhouse. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries epidemics of the “sweating sickness” fell upon the capital on at least six occasions; that of 1528 “visited London with such violence that it carried off thousands in the space of five or six hours.” The quagmires and open sewers of the city turned it into “a paradise for mosquitoes,” thus causing the “ague” which is now known as malaria.