London: The Biography полностью

Then the narrator is arrested by one countenance, that of an old man, which displays caution and malice, triumph and avarice, merriment and “extreme despair.” He resolves to learn more about him and, through the night, he follows him. In streets filled with people the old man’s pace is quick and restless but in deserted thoroughfares he shows signs of “uneasiness and vacillation.” He runs down abandoned streets until he finds a crowd leaving the theatre-here, moving among them, “the intense agony of his countenance abated.” He joins a party of gin-drinkers jostling outside the entrance to a public house and “with a half shriek of joy … stalked backward and forward, without apparent object, among the throng.” In the small hours of the night he walks to an area of poverty and crime, where “the abandoned of London” are “reeling to and fro”; then, at daybreak, he returns “with a mad energy” to a principal thoroughfare where “he walked to and fro, and during the day did not pass from out the turmoil of the street.”

Finally the narrator understands who, or what, he has been following. It is the embodiment of the crowd, the nothing which feeds off the turbulent life of the streets. The old man, with a face expressive “of vast mental power … of coolness, of malice,” is the spirit of London.

Others came to the city precisely to experience this new and strange life of the crowd. “Whenever I want to get an idea for painting or writing I always throw myself among the thickest crowds such as Earl’s Court or Shepherd’s Bush,” one nineteenth-century Japanese artist wrote. “Let the crowds push me to and fro-I call it a human bath.” And Mendelssohn could not disguise his delight at being plunged “in a vortex” where among the endless stream of people he could view “shops with signs as huge as a man and stage coaches piled up with people and a row of vehicles left behind by pedestrians … Look at that horse rearing in front of a house where his rider has acquaintances and those men used for carrying advertisements … look at the negroes and those stout John Bulls with their slender, beautiful daughters hanging on their arms.” A description of Londoners, in 1837, quoted in London Bodies, may also be apposite. “The appearance of the people in the streets of London,” John Hogg wrote, “is one of the first things that attracts the notice of strangers. The native inhabitants … are somewhat under middle size, but their limbs and features are generally well formed. They are of spare habit, but rather muscular; they are characterised by firmness of carriage, and an erect, independent air; they move with a measured step, and generally at a very brisk pace. The features are generally very strongly marked, and pointed; the eye in particular presents an openness and fullness that is remarkable. The tout-ensemble of the countenance bears an air of keenness, animation and intelligence, that distinguish the Londoner from his country neighbour.”

The crowd of the nineteenth century was also aware of itself as a new form of human congregation. That great representative of Victorian feeling, W.P. Frith, endlessly depicted crowds in paintings which themselves attracted endless crowds. The London theatres were filled with melodramas in which the transient crowd was the characteristic setting for individual stories of pathos and violence. There is an account by George Gissing of the continuous movement “of millions” on Jubilee Day (1887). “Along the main thoroughfares of mid London where traffic was now suspended; between the houses moved a double current of humanity … a thud of footfalls numberless and the low unvarying sound that suggested some huge beast purring to itself in stupid contentment.” So the crowd becomes a beast, contented and obedient, wandering through the city which has created it. But then its movements may become suddenly alarming. “These big crossings are like whirlpools; you might go round and round, and never get anywhere.” It is easy to see “how perilous such a crowd might be.”