Geoffrey G. Hiller - An Anthology of London in Literature, 1558–1914 - ‘Flower of Cities All’

Cover illustration: Westminster Bridge, with the Lord Mayors Procession on the Thames. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

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This anthology brings together extracts from some of the finest writing in English on the subject of that ancient and fascinating city, chosen from the period in which the London we now know was mainly created: the three-and-a-half centuries that separate the accession of Elizabeth I from the onset of the First World War, which transformed it from a large town still intimately connected to the neighbouring countryside to the sprawling metropolis of an empire that covered a quarter of the globe. London has always been more than a place to live and work: always the cultural heart of England, for example, and always larger by at least an order of magnitude than any other city in Britainindeed, for much of this period the largest city in the world. But beyond this, London is a city of the mind, an imaginary space haunted by the great mythopoeic cities of Western culture: Rome, Athens, Babylon , Jerusalem. This is why it has kindled the imagination of some of the greatest writers of English, and why it forms the subject of this anthology.

The 142 extracts, which are in all but one case in modernised spelling and punctuation (though including traditional punctuational aids to scansion), are annotated (simple one-word glosses are incorporated into the text in square brackets) and grouped into four sections by historical period, being numbered within those sections: cross-references will take the form [ ], n.107).

Each of the four sections is introduced by an Introduction , an account of the various contexts from which the passages are drawn: historical, social, cultural, even geographic (London grew by 25 times and developed beyond recognition throughout the period covered by the anthology). The General Introduction provides a broader context for the extracts as literature, exploring the mythological sources and literary forms and influences that lie behind them.

The General Introduction addresses the unique role of London in English national consciousness and in English literature, given their tendency to represent London as somehow larger than life, as escaping the merely naturalistic and entering the realm of the symbolic or fantastic, with parallels in the great mythopoeic cities of Western cultureRome, Jerusalem, Athens, Babylon , Troy. It looks at the idea of the City in Classical and Christian culture, as well as Londons development, in the nineteenth-century, into that unprecedented phenomenon, a megalopolis (the Great Wen) that had begun not just to astonish visitors with its size and complexity but to seem alien to its own inhabitants.