London: The Biography полностью

In 1690 records show that “73 per cent of those given the freedom of the City by apprenticeship were born outside London”: an astonishing figure. The annual migration to London in the first half of the eighteenth century was approximately ten thousand, and in 1707 it was observed that for any son or daughter of an English family “that exceeds the rest in beauty, or wit, or perhaps courage, or industry, or any other rare quality, London is their North star.” The city is the lodestone, or magnet. By 1750 the capital was home to 10 per cent of the population, prompting Defoe’s remark that “this whole Kingdom, as well as the people, as the land, and even the sea, in every part of it, are employ’d to furnish something, and I may add the best of every thing, to supply the city of London with provisions.” A million people swarmed in the metropolis by the end of the eighteenth century; within fifty years that figure had doubled, and there was no sign of abatement. “Who could wonder,” wrote an observer in 1892, “that men are drawn into such a vortex, even were the penalty heavier than this?” Until the middle of the twentieth century the figures bear in one direction only-ever upward, counting by the millions, until in 1939 eight million are recorded to have inhabited Greater London.

Nearer our time these figures have diminished, yet still the power which De Quincey felt exerts its attraction. A recent survey at the Centrepoint night shelter, only a few hundred yards from the old haven of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, discovered that “Four fifths of young people … were from outside London and most were recent arrivals.”

As Ford Madox Ford has put it, “It never misses, it never can miss anyone. It loves nobody, it needs nobody; it tolerates all the types of mankind.” Yet if London needs nobody in particular, it requires everything to sustain its momentum. It draws in commodities, and markets, and goods. The anonymous author of Letter from Albion (1810-13) was suitably exultant. “It is impossible not to be astonished in seeing these riches displayed. Here the costly shawls from the East Indies, there brocades and silk tissues from China, now a world of gold and silver plate … an ocean of rings, watches, chains, bracelets.” Voracity, repeating itself in endless different ways, is one of the most prominent characteristics of London.

It was said of the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, a somewhat disturbing collection of anatomical specimens, that “the whole earth has been ransacked to enrich its stores.” To ransack is to pillage and to destroy-that, too, is the nature of the city. Addison was worked up into a similar enthusiasm by the spectacle of the Royal Exchange, “making this Metropolis a kind of Emporium for the whole Earth.” Emporium in turn excites Imperium, since the master of trade is the master of the world. The fruits of Portugal are bartered for the silk of Persia, the pottery of China for the drugs of America; tin is converted into gold, and wool into rubies. “I am wonderfully delighted,” Addison wrote in the Spectator of 19 May 1711, “to see such a Body of Men thriving in their own private Fortunes, and at the same time promoting the Public Stock … by bringing into the Country whatever is wanting, and carrying out of it whatever is superfluous.”

Here is an indication that London had become, by the early eighteenth century, the centre of world commerce. It was the age of lotteries and flotations and “bubbles.” Everything was for sale-political office, religious preferment, landed heiresses-and, said Swift, “Power, which according to the old Maxim, was used to follow Land is now gone over to Money.” In The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) John Bunyan had also derided London’s vanity, whereby “houses, lands, trades, places, honours, preferments, titles, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures, and delights of all sorts” all come under the general denomination of “trade.”

By 1700, 76 per cent of England’s commerce with the world passed through London.