London: The Biography полностью

At the time of Wordsworth’s visit the Fair was gradually being extended until, by 1815, it had spread up along one side of St. John’s Street and, in the other direction, had almost reached the Old Bailey. It had also become a place of danger and lawlessness with gangs of thieves, known as “Lady Holland’s mob,” who “robbed visitors, beat inoffensive passers-by with bludgeons, and pelted harmless persons.” These were no longer the festivities of the eighteenth century, and were certainly not to be endured in the more respectable climate of the mid-nineteenth. Bartholomew Fair could never have lasted long into the Victorian era, and in 1855 it passed away without much sign of public mourning.

Yet Wordsworth had divined, in the spectacle of the Fair, a permanent aspect of London life. He recognised and recoiled from an innate and exuberant theatricality, which was content to manifest sheer contrast and display with no interior or residual meaning. In this book of The Prelude, “Residence in London,” he remarks:

On Strangers of all ages, the quick dance

Of colours, lights and forms, the Babel din

It is the play of difference, characterised by mobility and indeterminacy, which disturbs him. Within a few lines he notes “Shop after Shop, with Symbols, blazon’d Names … fronts of houses, like a title page” as if the city harboured endless forms of representation, not one of which is superior to any other. He records the ballads hanging upon the walls, the huge advertisements, the “London Cries” and the stock urban characters of the “Cripple … the Bachelor … the military Idler,” as if they were all part of some great and endless theatre.

Yet it is at least possible that he did not fully understand the very reality which he so vividly describes-these “shifting pantomimic scenes,” these “dramas of living Men,” this “great Stage” and “public Shows,” the spectacles and the showmen, may indeed represent the true nature of London. Its theatricality therefore leads to “Extravagance in gesture, mien, and dress,” just as in all the streets and lanes the citizens were “living shapes”; even the roadside beggar wears “a written paper” announcing his story. Thus all may be, or seem, unreal. Wordsworth believed that he saw only “parts,” in every sense, and could derive no “feeling of the whole.” He may have been mistaken.

Wordsworth was correct about the essential theatricality of the city, but it may also be considered from another vantage. It may become a cause for celebration. Charles Lamb, that great Londoner, extolled his city as “a pantomime and masquerade … The wonder of these sights, impels me into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much life.” Macaulay wondered at the “dazzling brilliancy of London spectacles,” while James Boswell believed it to comprise “the whole of human life in all its variety”; for Dickens it was the “magic lantern” which filled his imagination with the glimpse of strange dramas and sudden spectacles. For each of these Londoners, whether by birth or adoption, the theatricality of London is its single most important characteristic.

The crowd that gathered to see the inauguration of the first underground railway, in 1863, was compared in newspaper accounts “to the crush at the doors of a theatre on the night of a pantomime,” and Donald J. Olsen, the author of The Growth of Victorian London, has compared the speed and scale of city transport in that period to the “magical transformation of the pantomime continually being translated into life.” That is why London has always been considered to be the home of stock theatrical characters-the “shabby genteel,” the “city slicker,” the “wide boy.” In print-shop windows of the mid-eighteenth century there were caricatures of London “types,” while the more fashionable citizens of the same period dressed up in costume for masques and disguisings.

The most famous pictorial series displaying London characters, Marcellus Laroon’s The Cryes of the City of London Drawne after the Life, published in 1687, reveals many professions and trades where the actual principle was that of acting. Many beggars put on a masquerade for the benefit of their passing audience, but Laroon himself chose a particular female vagrant to exemplify what he called “The London Beggar.” He did not give her name, but in fact she was known as Nan Mills who, according to the most recent editors of his work, was “not only a good physiognomist but an excellent mimic … and could adapt her countenance to every circumstance of distress.” There is no reason to doubt that she was also poor, and conscious of her degradation. Here, too, is part of the mystery of London where suffering and mimicry, penury and drama, are aligned with each other to a degree where they become indistinguishable.