Writers Negating London 1880-1914

“Polluted with the Diseases and Vices of Centuries”: Writers Negating London, 1880-1914

It is commonly assumed that for most colonial visitors or expatriates late-Victorian London was the most desirable of destinations, especially for anyone with literary or artistic ambitions. After all, a century ago there was but one metropolis in the world. Apart from being the capital of the biggest empire in history, and the most populous of all cities, London was the global centre of wealth and trade, including the trades of publishing and commercial art. Its galleries held the finest and most varied collections of paintings, sculpture, the decorative arts and antiquities anywhere. Metaphorically it was the centre of the human universe; indeed, in a sense it became literally so when the prime meridian, longitude zero, was fixed at Greenwich in 1884.

Such an attitude may have been true for some, perhaps most, expatriates. But many others had a more problematic response to the capital. Henry James, that thoroughly anglicised American, captured a common ambivalence when he reported, of his early days there, ‘it is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent. You can draw up a tremendous list of reasons why it should be insupportable. The fogs, the smoke, the dirt, the darkness, the wet, the distances, the ugliness, the brutal size of the place … [but] it is the biggest aggregation of human life – the most complete compendium of the world’.[1] Like many another writer, James eventually found it more convenient to contemplate the ‘magnificence’ from a distance. He shifted away (but not too far away). Thanks to his private income he was able to spend the last prosperous eighteen years of his life in Rye, on the Sussex coast. A large majority of successful authors in this period, though they were attached to the capital by the umbilical cord of money, emulated him when they could.

Other expatriate writers were much less ambivalent than James about London. They simply hated it, or most aspects of it. The historian Angela Woolacott, using personal memoirs and the files of the weekly British-Australasian, a paper which was published in London for expatriates throughout the period under review, has described some of the powerfully negative reactions to the metropolis of Australian women residents and visitors in the last two decades of the century. Dismayed by the grim realities of London life, they turned that to account by challenging the assumption, dinned into their ears at home, that here was the focus of Empire and the core of the intellectual and literary world. Specifically, they inverted the colonial cringe by constructing a negative vision of the imperial metropolis – dismal, foggy, cold, dirty and riddled with class divisions – through which could be seen a patriotic vision of a young dominion, warm, egalitarian and progressive. For these expatriate women, trying to keep a native houseplant alive in an icy flat, ‘Home’ carried a signification precisely opposite to the usual one in the colonial vocabulary. They redefined the metropole itself as Australia’s antipodes.[2] However, with the possible exception of the novelist Rosa Praed, none of these would-be writers had the literary sophistication to give any very memorable expression to their discontent. We hear little from them but jejune complaints about the bad weather and the worse plumbing, the poverty and the injustices of the class system.

A much more skilled expatriate writer, capable of giving more forcible and memorable expression to his loathing of London, was the Canadian-born Grant Allen (1848-1899). The son of rich, intellectual parents, Allen left Ontario permanently when he was thirteen, and was educated at Dieppe, Birmingham and Oxford. Apart from a spell of teaching in Jamaica, he spent the rest of his rather short life as a freelance writer in England. He became a prodigy of productivity over a twenty-year career, producing over thirty books and millions of words of journalism on a vast variety of subjects, especially Darwinism and natural history. He wrote technical monographs on the British flora and could have worked as a professional botanist: he claimed he could identify 40,000 different plants by eye alone. In addition, he wrote nearly forty novels and collections of stories. He became infamous for his sexual radicalism and espousal of ‘free unions,’ and his feminist, or rather pseudo-feminist, novel The Woman Who Did (1895) remains the best-known of the explicitly New Woman fictions of the 1890s.

Unlike the writers mentioned by Woolacott who constructed an idealised Australia from their negation of London, Grant Allen retained no positive sentiments about Canada. For him it was ‘a Philistine paradise of agricultural wealth and prosperity, where every man eats roast beef and pudding under his own vine and fig-tree, while nobody troubles his head about useless trifles like the picturesque and the beautiful’.[3] He lived in England for so long that he came to regard himself as a British citizen, which in law, of course, he was. Although his metropolitan connections were essential to him – he could not have made his kind of living anywhere else in the world – he hated London and attracted some odium by publicly denouncing its anomie, brutal competition, vice, and unmitigated ugliness. As soon as his freelance writing started to pay he moved from London to deepest Surrey. For Allen the field naturalist, the English countryside was the most varied and beautiful in the world, but he was no pantheist or Romantic. In fact he was an uncompromising atheist and always approached nature from the semi-professional standing of a Darwinian biologist.

Allen’s attitude comprised a bundle of moralistic and aesthetic animosities which are very characteristic of the times. It was the paradoxical sterility and lifelessness of the city which he detested most: what he called its ‘beflagged and macadamized man-made solitude’.[4] Once he dealt with a complaint from an urbanite that the country is boring because nothing ever happens there by taking the same country walk every day for a month, and describing the minute, daily changes heralding the onset of Spring:

I stand aghast with surprise at the foolishness of men that choose rather of deliberate predilection the bare flags of towns, on the singular ground that they see, as they say, ‘more life there’! More life, forsooth! Why, the town is above all things dull, void, and lifeless.[5]

Allen found he had a bone to pick with the metropolitan boosters practically from his first day in the Old Country as a schoolboy. Long afterwards he remembered his ‘first sense of surprise at its unmitigated ugliness’[6] and the capital did not improve on acquaintance. He blamed, in part, the lack of convenient and attractive building materials. He contrasted the materials on which former civilisations had been based – on the Euphrates, mud brick; on the Nile, limestone and granite; in Greece, sea and marble – with ‘the horrid example of our own squalid village,’ which was ‘plumped down in the midst of a basin of brick earth, which has given us the architectural glories of Gower-street and the artistic variety of Mayfair and Belgravia’.[7]

Allen had first used the phrase ‘a squalid village’ earlier, as the title of a short article which gave considerable offence. London, he insisted, is ‘a straggling, sprawling, invertebrate, inchoate, overgrown village. … It is frankly and simply and ostentatiously hideous’. [8] Not only is it condemned ‘to the curse of brick and stucco’ by its site, but it lost all its mediaeval architecture in the Great Fire. ‘What street in London,’ he asked belligerently, ‘can be mentioned in this respect side by side with Commonwealth Avenue or Beacon Street in Boston; with Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio; with the upper end of Fifth Avenue, New York; nay, even with the new Via Roma at Genoa?’[9]

Contrasting London with Cleveland, Ohio was never likely to go down well with the patriotically minded, but Allen refused to give ground. He followed up three months later with a long essay, ‘Beautiful London’. Surprisingly, it was taken by the high-quality Fortnightly Review, probably only because its editor was still the rogue expatriate Frank Harris. This was a tour-de-force of impassioned sarcasm which caused quite a stir. His strategy is to imagine a colonial visitor first arriving in Europe by sea at Venice. Surveying its splendours, the visitor recalls that even in its glory days Venice had hardly more inhabitants than Brighton, and its overseas ‘empire’ never amounted to anything more than Cyprus and the Morea, a fortress in Greece. So, Allen has him saying to himself: ‘What may I not expect from the land which owns India and Australia, Jamaica and Canada, Hong-Kong and Singapore, New Zealand and Cape Town?’ Full of anticipation, he completes his journey by sailing up the Thames from Gravesend to the very centre of the great hive. Here Allen’s gift for sarcasm comes fully into its own:

How every true Englishman’s heart would swell with the pride of world-wide empire as he contrasts in memory the way up from Greenwich to the Tower with the way up from the Lido to the Doges’ palace! What luxury of ornament! What excess of splendour! The exquisite front of the Victualling Yard at Deptford, the storied beauties of Bugsby’s Reach, the charming facades of the Isle of Dogs, the noble and sweet-scented tanneries of Bermondsey! At each bend of the river new and beautiful groups of buildings rise gradually into view, as far surpassing the Piazza and St Mark’s as London surpasses mediaeval Venice in wealth, population, and in artistic spirit. The traveller feels the apologists were indeed quite right, and that a great commercial city is here worthily housed beneath the graceful and appropriate shadow of an iron bridge many dozens times bigger than the boasted Rialto. So he sails on rejoicing, past mud-bank and tavern, till he comes to anchor at last by the British Molo, at the song-inspiring steps of magnificent Wapping.

Well, all right, he imagines his critics saying, perhaps the Pool of London is not that appealing, but there is the South Bank of the Thames: that has its picturesque spots. Allen pretends he hears this plea in Florence, that ‘second-rate and obsolete Italian town,’ and he has to close his eyes to picture the scene from Lambeth Bridge:

Yes, yes; I could picture it in all its glory -- the six exquisitely varied blocks of St Thomas’s Hospital, standing side by side like the ribs of St Lawrence’s gridiron; the charming sky-signs of somebody or other’s soap and the patent pain-killer; the mud that gleams brown by the yellow Thames; the palatial row of warehouses that occupy the background. With a penitent sigh I admitted my error, and dismissed the Arno. I allowed the superior beauty of the silvery stream that glides by lovely Lambeth. I remembered Cleopatra’s Needle and its well-chosen situation, when compared with the Luxor Column in the Place de la Concorde, the great obelisk between Bernini’s Colonnades at St. Peter’s, and the towering monolith in the Piazza del Popolo. I thought of a thousand such points of superiority in our own beloved London, and thanked heaven under my breath that I was born an Englishman, and not a Papist Italian.[10]

Allen’s essay was far from being a uniquely bad-tempered exercise; nor was it, in context, even a particularly eccentric performance. Very similar sentiments were being expressed in other quarters, and not only by visitors from the New World. Of course, it was nothing new for writers – expatriate or native – to criticise London as a sink of poverty, vice and ugliness. Such attacks go back to the Middle Ages. But in the period between about 1880 and the start of the First World War we can distinguish, in the literary denunciations, a new and quite distinctive tone. The attacks become discernibly more aggressive and hysterical, and more despairing. Indeed, they move beyond mere denigration to fantasizing, in fiction and poetry, the annihilation, or at least the natural obliteration, of the capital. Not only Allen himself in his fiction, but several of the best writers of the day, were prepared to consider, even to welcome, Armageddon; so much so that the zeal with which they conjured up their visions of catastrophe and destruction is rather disturbing to modern sensibilities. The classic of this genre is of course H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, where the Martian death-rays devastate a great swathe of the Home Counties, all described with enormous gusto and a surprising ambivalence of tone. Wells’s masterpiece is often thought to mark the arrival of science fiction as a distinct sub-genre; however, it did not appear until 1897, and comes, in one aspect, not as something new, but rather as the culmination of a line of development stretching over the previous forty years.

As early as 1858 the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, in a book review, paused to paint a pen-picture of a future scene of desolation on the Thames, with a visiting New Zealander sketching the ruins of St Paul’s while pausing on a broken arch of London Bridge. Macaulay’s image was nothing more than a throwaway remark, but it was long remembered and took on a peculiar resonance as the century waned. His contemplative New Zealander became the iconic representation of the New World brooding over the future wreckage of the Old; the objective correlative of various anxieties and world-weary attitudes of greater or lesser sincerity. In 1872 the artist Gustave Doré gave the definitive visual expression to Macaulay’s image when he illustrated the journalist Blanchard Jerrold’s documentary text London: A Pilgrimage. (The allusion to Dante’s conducted tour of Hell is deliberate.) Several of Doré’s wood-cut prints for this book were condemned at the time but have since become famous for their gloomy vision, such as the surreal ‘Over London – by Rail’. None is more effective than the valedictory full plate in the book: it bears the simple allusive title ‘The New Zealander’. From the vantage of a piece of broken masonry, all alone, the antipodean visitor bends over his sketchbook. On the skyline is the shattered dome of St Paul’s, and the rest of the crumbling city is sinking into a fetid swamp at the sketcher’s feet. Doré’s picture is both a prophecy and a warning: at some point, possibly in the not very distant future, the baton of civilisation is going to be handed to new, fresh sprinters. His message fell on receptive ears, and some imaginative writers too started to think that, rather than trying to clean the Augean stables, it might be preferable to wash them away altogether: the new Babylon was beyond amelioration.

The first writer with the right mix of skills to give imaginative expression to this final solution, the wholesale obliteration of London, was Richard Jefferies (1848-1887), the countryman, naturalist and journalist. In the early Eighties, he and Grant Allen both wrote natural-history articles for the same newspaper. Jefferies loathed metropolitan life even more than his Canadian colleague, and in his short novel After London; or Wild England (1884), he disposes of it with startling literality. Jefferies chose the style of a natural-history documentary, wasting little time on explaining why most humans have fled the country. He opens with a superb year-by-year description of the reversion of cultivated England to forest as the struggle for existence resumes its sway. As for London itself, within a few centuries it is lost from view and its site returns to marsh. Jefferies takes a gloomy pleasure in detailing the completeness of the obliteration:

It is a vast stagnant swamp, which no man dare enter, since death would be his inevitable fate. There exhales from this oozy mass so fatal a vapour that no animal can endure it. The black water bears a greenish-brown floating scum, which for ever bubbles up from the putrid mud of the bottom. When the wind collects the miasma, and, as it were, presses it together, it becomes visible as a low cloud which hangs over the place. . . .

They say the sun is sometimes hidden by the vapour when it is thickest, but I do not see how any can tell this, since they could not enter the cloud, as to breathe it when collected by the wind is immediately fatal. For all the rottenness of a thousand years and of many hundred millions of human beings is there festering under the stagnant water, which has sunk down into and penetrated the earth, and floated up to the surface the contents of the buried cloacae.[11]

In Jefferies’ vision, the mouldering remains of the human population of London is metaphorically transformed into excrement, a foul ordure which rises from the depths to poison the reborn natural world. After London is not a very good novel, but its descriptions, its tone and its values definitely struck a chord. In it, what is left of the human population has reordered itself into feudalism, and that catered to the very common yearning for the past, or a version of the past, which is found everywhere in Victorian arts and crafts, nowhere more effectively than in the hands of the poet, designer and utopian socialist William Morris (1834-96). ‘Forget six counties overhung with smoke,’ Morris invited his readers to fantasize in The Earthly Paradise (1868):

Forget six counties overhung with smoke,

Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke,

Forget the spreading of the hideous town;

Think rather of the pack-horse on the down,

And dream of London, small and white and clean,

The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green.[12]

In other words, a London of the fourteenth century without serfdom and the Black Death: the city as it never was. ‘Forget,’ ‘think’ and ‘dream’: the verbs are in the imperative mood, but they neutralise the image of a neo-medieval London just as quickly as it forms. More practically, Morris devoted much energy to conservation issues, and twenty years later he participated in a discussion, at the height of the Ripper scare, on ‘Ugly London’ with other writers and social commentators, including the romantic novelist Ouida. Morris commented:

You can stroll with pleasure in Paris; in London you cannot, unless you are a philosopher or a fool; you can only go from one piece of business to another. There is, indeed, as Ouida says, something soul-deadening and discouraging in the ugliness of London; other ugly cities may be rougher and more savage in their brutality, but none are so desperately shabby, so irredeemably vulgar as London.[13]

With attitudes like these, Morris was one of the many who were prepared to contemplate the destruction of London with equanimity. Richard Jefferies’ wild England appealed greatly to him. ‘I rather like it,’ he wrote; ‘absurd hopes curled round my heart as I read it. I rather wish I were thirty years younger: I want to see the game played out’.[14] In the meantime, waiting for the cataclysm, Morris went on to offer, with an odd mixture of hope and despair, his utopian News from Nowhere (1890-1), set in a post-socialist revolution London ‘small and white and clean,’ where the only industry is small-scale handicraft production and relationships are conducted with the emphatic heartiness of a British holiday camp. What has happened to the miles of grimy streets or the labouring millions who lived in them is barely touched on; Morris’s vision is so charming it hardly occurs to one to ask.

The scientific romancers, as the first practitioners of science fiction were called, offered the most carefully circumstantial accounts of how London might be demolished. Writing under the influence of Wells, Grant Allen produced ‘The Thames Valley Catastrophe’ for the popular new Strand magazine in 1897. He takes great delight in burying most of the Home Counties as far as Oxford under the lava of a volcanic eruption. In fact he obliterates the hated capital even more thoroughly than his colleague Jefferies had done. Not even a stinking swamp is allowed to remain. Nothing is left but a featureless sweep of basalt rock:

I saw a fresh and fiercer gush of fire well out from the central gash, and flow still faster than ever down the centre of the valley, over the hardening layer already cooling on its edge by contact with the air and soil. This new outburst fell in a mad cataract over the end or van of the last, and instantly spread like water across the level expanse between the Cliveden hills and the opposite range at Pinkneys. I realized with a throb that it was advancing towards Windsor. Then a wild fear thrilled through me. If Windsor, why not Staines and Chertsey and Hounslow? If Hounslow, why not London?

When I reached the town, I did not strive to rouse the people, partly because my past experience had taught me the futility of the attempt, and partly because I rightly judged that they were safe from the inundation; for as it never quite covered the dome of St. Paul's, part of which still protrudes from the sea of basalt, it did not reach the level of the northern heights of London. …

At Willesden, for the first time, I found to a certainty that London was threatened. Great crowds of people in the profoundest excitement stood watching a dense cloud of smoke and steam that spread rapidly over the direction of Shepherd's Bush and Hammersmith. They were speculating as to its meaning, but laughed incredulously when I told them what it portended. A few minutes later, the smoke spread ominously towards Kensington and Paddington.

Next day, all the world knew the magnitude of the disaster. It can only be summed up in five emphatic words: There was no more London.[15]

Not satisfied with a single assault on the capital, Allen destroyed most of London all over again in another story, ‘Joseph’s Dream’. The story records an ordinary clerk’s dream, being written down for posterity. It is a proleptic vision of famine and riot in London, culminating in the burning of Westminster and politicians’ heads on pikes.[16] It is a reminder that these visions of metropolitan collapse articulate thinly-disguised class anxieties and animosities, which were never far below the surface at a time when the urban working class was becoming a political force to be reckoned with. (There were bread riots, with looting of West End shops, in the harsh winter of early 1886 followed by the Bloody Sunday riots of the unemployed at the end of 1887: together they terrified the bourgeoisie.) The fear of unmentionable ‘things’ surging up from ‘below stairs’ basement kitchens and workrooms into the light was an important element in middle-class fin-de-siècle alarm: witness the Morlocks, the pale, ape-like, cannibal troglodytes who feast on their debased aristocratic ‘superiors’ in the far future of Wells’s The Time Machine (1895). The physical location of Wells’s story is, once again, the site of London returned to one great flowering semi-tropical garden, all the way from Richmond to South Kensington.

The reasons why the topos of metropolitan destruction became such a distinctive feature in fin-de-siècle English culture are difficult to fix exactly, but the root cause is surely the dislocations – moral, aesthetic and of course physical – resulting from the extraordinary growth of London throughout the nineteenth century. Even before Victoria’s long reign started, London’s premier urban status was already thoroughly established. In 1800, even with a population of under one million, it was already the largest city in history, at least as big as imperial Rome had been at its peak. The Romantic poets denounced and ridiculed it and, apart from William Blake, took good care to live elsewhere. ‘Hell is a city much like London,’ according to Shelley in Peter Bell the Third (1819). ‘A mighty mass of brick, and smoke and shipping/Dirty and dusky . . ./ A huge dun cupola, like a foolscap crown/On a fool’s head – and there is London town!’ mocked Byron in Don Juan (1822).

What would Byron have said if he had seen the city at the end of the century? None of the Romantics lived long enough to see their ‘great Wen’ undergo its period of real expansion. Over the next eighty years its population more than quadrupled. No city of this size could have existed at any earlier epoch. Only the brand-new technologies of steam transport, sanitation, food-processing and waste disposal prevented this vast conglomeration from stifling in its own waste or collapsing from outbreaks of cholera or bubonic plague. Even so, London’s slums seemed worse than those in other European capitals like Paris, Berlin or Vienna, not least because the plutocracy flaunted its wealth in the face of deprivation with an ostentation that sickened many visitors. Its cheek-by-jowl glittering opulence and foul deprivation was unmatched anywhere else on earth. The resulting spectacle thrilled and horrified most visitors and many residents in about equal proportions.

There are good objective reasons for believing that London was reaching its nadir of polluted, ugly awfulness as the century closed. The first attempts at slum clearance had hardly started. Every day, a thousand tonnes of horse ordure fell on the unsealed streets. Each year saw a new record in the millions of tons of coal burnt, which made the dank air reek and produced nightmarish fogs and lung disease. The acute French observer, Hippolyte Taine, in Notes on England (1872) thought little of the public architecture, refusing to be impressed (not surprisingly, perhaps for a Frenchman) even by Trafalgar Square: ‘That hideous Nelson, planted upon his column, like a rat impaled on the end of a stick!’[17] But the miseries of a foggy London Sunday nearly did for him altogether:

A thick yellow fog fills the air, sinks, crawls on the very ground; at thirty paces a house or a steam-ship looks like ink-stains on blotting paper. In the Strand, especially, and the rest of the City, after an hour’s walking one is possessed by spleen and can understand suicide. The tall, flat, straight facades are of dark brick; fog and soot have deposited their secretions on these surfaces. Monotony and silence.

For writers, especially those with a patrician disdain for mass society, London stood condemned not for its slums but its endless sprawl. A reading, of, say, Dickens’s Bleak House leaves the impression that London consisted of a seething mass of humanity packed into a few square kilometres. This was far from the case, for London as a whole was a relatively low-density city. Thanks to the British rejection of apartment life, most of the growth in late-Victorian and Edwardian London was in what were then the outer suburbs: endless hectares of cramped houses submerging more and more of the surrounding villages – Hornsey and Fulham, Brompton and St John’s Wood – under an avalanche of bricks and mortar. A passage in George Gissing’s ‘condition of England’ novel In the Year of Jubilee is very characteristic in its scorn of suburban growth:

A year or two ago the site had been an enclosed meadow, portion of the land attached to what was once a country mansion; London, devourer of rural limits, of a sudden made hideous encroachment upon the old estate, now held by a speculative builder; of many streets to be constructed, three or four had already come into being, and others were mapped out, in mud and inchoate masonry, athwart the ravaged field. Great elms, the pride of generations passed away, fell before the speculative axe, or were left standing in mournful isolation to please a speculative architect; bits of wayside hedge still shivered in fog and wind, amid hoardings variegated with placards and scaffolding black against the sky. The very earth had lost its wholesome odour; trampled into mire, fouled with builders' refuse and the noisome drift from adjacent streets, it sent forth, under the sooty rain, a smell of corruption, of all the town's uncleanliness. On this rising locality had been bestowed the title of 'Park.' Mrs Morgan was decided in her choice of a dwelling here by the euphonious address, Merton Avenue, Something-or-other Park.[18]

That was written in 1894, when no end was in sight to the city’s growth, and its tone, a mournful nostalgic growl tinged with aloof despair is characteristic. In fact, at this time the rate of expansion was accelerating. London had taken most of the nineteenth century to grow to 4.5 million; but by 1911 the figure was seven million and rising. Sucking in hopeful migrants from the provinces by the thousands, London had by then twice as many people as Greece, held more Britons than all of Scotland and Wales, was almost bigger than the world’s next three biggest cities put together. Yet it was unique among large European cities for having no central administration, and therefore no means of regulating and planning for growth. Unlike Paris, there was no Baron Hausmann to take autocratic control of urban redevelopment. Everything was left to private initiative. Its buildings were, and are, with the few obvious exceptions, unremarkable. It had few grand vistas, few architectural show-pieces. Its riverine approaches were, apart from parts of the Embankment, generally admitted to be a disgrace, especially downstream of London Bridge.

As they contemplated the unstoppable sprawl, writers struggled to find adequately alarming metaphors for a city that seemed out of control. A primitive ecological consciousness is manifest in these images: London is a metastasizing cancer gobbling up the Home Counties, a fatty cyst or foul ulcer on the face of England, a whirlpool, a fungus. Similarly, when they turned to the social consequences, they competed for titles and treatments with the most shock-horror value: Ragged London (1861), The City of Dreadful Night (1870-4), Low-Life Deeps (1875), The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1885), The Nether World (1889), In Darkest England and the Way Out (1891),Tales of Mean Streets (1894), The People of the Abyss (1903).[19] The most potent combination of all – class fears coupled with sexual panic – was exploited most effectively by W. T. Stead with his morally ambiguous exposé of paedophilia, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ (1885) in the Pall Mall Gazette. Stead turned the respectable Pall Mall into the prototypical tabloid, with tasty cross-headings such as ‘Strapping Girls Down’. The Jack the Ripper murders in Whitechapel in 1888 were greeted with hysteria even in the West End; later Stead’s readers slavered over the sordid details of flowery letters addressed to rent boys and stained bed sheets in posh hotels, all exposed during the Wilde trials of 1895. Then there was the flamboyant street prostitution, which amazed even visitors like Fyodor Dostoyevsky, no shrinking violet, who saw with his own eyes little girls being pimped in the Haymarket by their own mothers.[20] For, in the realm of the private life, this was London of the well-to-do ‘Walter,’ roaming the streets adding more to his total of sexual encounters, all being recorded in minute detail for his memoir My Secret Life (c.1900). Only a little less odd was his contemporary, the diarist and public servant Arthur Munby, who wandered the city stimulating himself with the sight of working women scrubbing floors and heaving coal; he interviewed and photographed them and wrote ecstatic accounts of their lives.[21]

Between them, Stead, ‘Walter’ and Munby supply a road royal into the dark underbelly of London, a place describable, in Judith Walkowitz’ happy phrase, as the ‘city of dreadful delight,’ wherein narratives of sexual exploitation and perversity were played out every day.[22] Here, for those looking for it, was evidence of moral decay. British life had grown soft: was the Empire destined to go the way of Rome, worm-eaten from within? Even those with a sophisticated historical sense, like Grant Allen, were willing to entertain this. Scratch any sexual radical of this period, it is said, and you uncover the conformist just below the surface. Although Allen had a formidable reputation as a sexual renegade, his limits of tolerance were quickly reached. He was never slow to take the moral high ground – quite literally so when he wrote some months after the Wilde trials:

I am writing in my study on a heather-clad hill-top. When I raise my eye from my sheet of foolscap, it falls upon miles and miles of broad open moorland. My window looks out upon unsullied nature. Everything around is fresh and pure and wholesome. Through the open casement, the scent of the pines blows in with the breeze from the neighbouring firwood. Keen airs sigh through the pine-needles. Grasshoppers chirp from deep tangles of bracken. … Up here on the free hills, the sharp air blows in upon us, limpid and clear from a thousand leagues of open ocean; down there in the crowded town, it stagnates and ferments, polluted with the diseases and vices of centuries.[23]

The geographical metaphor had both a personal and a cultural application. It referred to the location of the author’s study at Hindhead, perched high above miles of open moorland, with an invigorating wind blowing into his doubtful lungs; but it was also the coign of vantage from which to detect and denounce moral corruption: ‘below in the valley, as night draws on, a lurid glare reddens the north-eastern horizon. It marks the spot where the great wen of London heaves and festers.’[24]

There is more in play here than the age-old antithesis of rus and urbs. Allen is giving vent to that very distinct air of malaise – economic, moral, social – which is detectable everywhere as Victoria’s long reign drew to a close. Britain’s industrial lead was faltering under competition from Germany and America. There were war fears – a military showdown with Russia, or Prussia, or perhaps both, seemed almost inevitable, and not unwelcome. The Boer War revealed the miserable physique of the army recruits compared to the colonial Dutch farm boys: city life could be blamed for that too. Wilde captured the mood in the aristocracy:

‘Fin de siècle,’ murmured Lord Henry.

‘Fin du globe,’ answered his hostess.

‘I wish it were fin du globe,’ said Dorian with a sigh. ‘Life is a great disappointment.’

‘Ah, my dear,’ cried Lady Narborough, putting on her gloves, ‘don't tell me that you have exhausted life. When a man says that one knows that life has exhausted him.’[25]

Such world-weariness was by no means restricted to the effete aristocracy. Nihilistic or totalitarian attitudes were common, even among those assumed to be spokesmen for liberal humanism. The voicing of even the most drastic solutions to the problem of the flaccidity of the national life, especially urban life, attracted little negative comment. From the Left came calls for ‘scientifically’ managed camps for criminals and the work-shy, plus eugenic programs of compulsory sterilisation, licensed infanticide or even forcible euthanasia, to delete the ‘unfit’. From the Right came calls for a cleansing war against someone – anyone, apparently – to stiffen the nation’s backbone and separate the ‘slag’ from the ‘metal,’ to use a favourite metaphor of the circle around the bellicose critic-editor W. E. Henley.

It is striking how such attitudes cut right across the usual socio-political affiliations, all the way from utopian Socialists, through moderate Fabian left-wingers like Wells and the Webbs, to extreme Imperialists like Kipling. Even the buoyant and affluent William Morris thought the game of ‘civilisation’ (the quotation marks are his) was almost over:

[it] is doomed to destruction, and probably before very long: what a joy it is to think of! and how often it consoles me to think of barbarism once more flooding into the world, and real feelings and passions, however rudimentary, taking the place of our wretched hypocrisies.[26]

A century later, with the benefit of hindsight, this relish for a new barbarism to cleanse and revivify society sounds very sinister. It would not be very long before Tory Romantics like Rupert Brooke would be thanking, on behalf of his generation of young men, the god of battles who had ‘wakened us from sleeping’:

With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,

To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,

Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary. …[27]

It is barely conceivable that anyone could think, late in 1914, that one might leap into the Flanders trenches as though into a river for a refreshing swim. In fact, however, we can see that this desire for a thorough spiritual spring-cleaning, via a righteous war, was merely the final evolution of the appetite for smashing up civilisation, as represented by one of its prime artefacts, the metropolis of London.

‘Joseph’s Dream’ was one of Allen’s last stories, and after his death in 1899 newly emergent Modernism lost interest in apocalyptic fantasy. Generally speaking, the stance of inter-war Modernism was neither anti-London nor even particularly anti-urban. Apart from T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land, Modernist writers tended to celebrate the variety and vitality of the city: Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) are two obvious examples. And when they wrote satire they tended to target individuals or cliques, not the capital (eg. Huxley’s Antic Hay [1923] or Waugh’s Vile Bodies [1930]): after all, satire has itself been pre-eminently an urban mode since the days of Juvenal. By that time slum clearance had started to make real inroads on the most loathsome regions like the Jago and Seven Dials, which appeased liberal consciences, and the immensity of London no longer seemed so striking when several other cities were growing as big or bigger. Besides, the capital had been bombed from the air during the War, and it was commonly believed that another global air war could end Western civilisation. Writers were less eager to predict, and certainly not to welcome, the future annihilation of London.

Another type of ‘after London’ mood returned during the Fifties, at the height of the Cold War. In John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951) nearly everyone is blinded in a single night by flares from some malfunctioning Star Wars weapon, whereupon genetically modified mobile plants with a lethal sting very nearly take over. Wyndham’s description of the slow decay of the abandoned London probably owes something to Jefferies. After Triffids, ever more inventive ways were found of demolishing London over and over again. In Wyndham’s next novel The Kraken Wakes (1953) civilisation is threatened by rising sea levels. In Nevile Shute’s On the Beach (1957), and its many imitators, it is nuclear war. The most destructive fiction in this line was that by John Christopher: he offers global famine in The Death of Grass (1956); a new Ice Age in The World in Winter (1962); a stupendous earthquake in A Wrinkle in the Skin (1965). This kind of popular fiction, or at least its British products, has been christened the ‘cosy catastrophe’ for the way in which the more gruesome horrors are invariably suppressed: millions die quietly off-stage while the hero and his party pursue their adventures in a virtuous atmosphere of public-school decency. They were a product, not only of anti-communist fervour, but of immediately post-war austerity. Between their covers, readers could enjoy the vicarious pleasures of being able to rifle Fortum & Mason’s for cases of caviar, camp out in a Belgravia apartment, play with some fine boys’ toys, and then go on to create a sturdier, healthier, pioneer community of yeomen farmers with the hero appointed mayor.

As the new fin de siècle approached, an article by Laura Spinney in the New Scientist with the evocative title ‘Return to Paradise’ set the tone, as she replayed Richard Jefferies’ future timetable for the natural obliteration of London. She took a remarkably similar neo-Romantic stance to the issue. ‘Could the clock be turned back and London once more be a sylvan paradise?’ she asks, addressing an imaginary reader sweltering in a traffic jam. ‘If you've ever been filled with a secret wish to see the traffic vanish, the buildings tumble down and London's hills and valleys once more filled with flowers and trees and birdsong, you are not alone’. Her answer, after consulting the experts, is that within a single millennium ‘both the oak and the floodplain forests would be mature and the rubble of Canary Wharf would have sunk into the marsh. London is no longer a blot on the landscape,’ she concluded with some satisfaction.[28]

Here we see a clear line of descent from Allen and Wells, Jefferies and Morris, to the visionary productions of a century later such as J. G. Ballard’s apocalyptic fictions The Drowned World, Crash and High Rise, most of which are located in the urban wastelands of Greater London. But the best modern practitioner of the rhetoric of impassioned diatribe is the poet and renegade social commentator Iain Sinclair. In works of rancid documentation like his tramp on foot around the dismal purlieus of the M25 freeway, London Orbital (2002), his powers of denunciation are almost on a par with his great predecessors Blake, Cobbett and Carlyle. The continuities with Jefferies and Allen are even more marked in a passage like this:

The peninsula was where the nightstuff was handled: foul-smelling industries, the manufacture of ordnance, brewing, confectionery, black smoke palls and sickly-sweet perfumes. The cloacal mud of low tide mingled deliriously with sulphurous residues trapped in savage greenery: the bindweed, thorns and dark berries of the riverside path. … The landscape was so strange, so alienated, that you were practically deafened by the noise of J. G. Ballard licking his lips. All the old radicals were clawing their way out of the earth to get at it. Fiction was back on the menu.[29]

What is this alienated landscape, so inviting to Ballard’s imagination? It is nothing less than the site selected for that first folly of the new century, the Millennium Dome. The Dome is the Sorry Meniscus of Sinclair’s book on the project (1999); and the ‘tongue of poisoned land,’ the blighted peninsula, was just as familiar to the Victorian critics of London as to Sinclair and for the same reasons. It figures as ‘the storied beauties of Bugsby’s Reach’ in Grant Allen’s sarcastic indictment of the riverine landscape in his ‘Beautiful London’ essay of 1893. With Sinclair we have returned to our starting point. Indeed, for anyone who subscribes to a cyclic theory of history, it must be ominous that the 1990s saw a return of that disturbing blend of aesthetic outrage, alarmist neo-puritanism and a doom-laden sense of catastrophe so evident a century earlier. Fortunately no new Rupert Brooke has yet risen among us.

[1]The Notebooks of Henry James edited by F. O. Matthiessen & Kenneth B. Murdoch. NY: Oxford UP, 1961, pp.27-8.

[2]Angela Woollacott, ‘The Metropole as Antipodes: Australian Women in London and Constructing National Identity’. In Gilbert, Pamela K. ed. Imagined Londons. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002, pp.85-99. The British-Australasian ran from 2 Oct 1884 to 14 Feb 1924.

[3]J. Arbuthnot Wilson [ie Grant Allen], ‘Among the Thousand Islands,’ Belgravia: A London Magazine, 36 (Oct 1878), 415.

[4]Grant Allen, ‘Preface,’ Science in Arcady. London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1892, p. ix.

[5]Grant Allen, ‘The Epic of April,’ Longman's Magazine, 21 (Apr 1893), 626.

[6]Grant Allen, ‘A Squalid Village’ in Post-prandial Philosophy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1894), p.5. First pub. Westminster Gazette, 1 (8 Apr 1893), 1-2.

[7]Grant Allen, ‘About Raw Material,’ Westminster Gazette, 3 (2 May 1894), 1-2.

[8]Grant Allen, ‘A Squalid Village,’ pp.96-98.

[9] ‘A Squalid Village,’ p.100.

[10] Grant Allen, ‘Beautiful London,’ Fortnightly Review, 60 (July 1893), 42-54. Harris left the next year, but during his editorship he took several of Allen’s most inflammatory articles when no other editor in London would have touched them. He was later infamous as the author of that prime piece of 1920s soft porn, My Life and Loves.

[11] Richard Jefferies, After London; or Wild England. London: J. M. Dent, 1939, p.33.

[12]William Morris, The Earthly Paradise: A Poem. Vol. 1. Prologue: The Wanderers. Argument (1868).

[13]William Morris, ‘Ugly London,’ Pall Mall Gazette (4 Sep 1888), pp. 1-2.

[14]Letter dated 28 Apr 1885 to Georgiana Burne-Jones. Norman Kelvin, ed. The Collected Letters of William Morris. Princeton UP, 1987), II, 426. The influence of Jefferies on Morris is traced in much more detail in J. R. Ebbatson, ‘Visions of Wild England: William Morris and Richard Jefferies,’ Journal of the William Morris Society, 3 (Spring 1977), 2-29.

[15]Grant Allen, ‘The Thames Valley Catastrophe,’ Strand, 14 (Dec 1897), 674-684. Allen’s story was written while Wells’s The War of the Worlds was being serialised in Pearson’s Magazine, Apr-Dec 1897.

[16]Grant Allen, ‘Joseph’s Dream,’ Cosmopolitan, 26 (Jan 1899), 277-287.

[17]Taine’s Notes on England. Translated with an Introduction by Edward Hyams. London: Thames & Hudson, 1957, pp.8-9.

[18]George Gissing, In the Year of Jubilee. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1911, p.218.

[19]These titles are works by John Hollingshead, James Thomson, James Greenwood, Andrew Mearns, George Gissing, William Booth, Arthur Morrison and Jack London respectively.

[20]Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. Translated and Introduced by Kyril FitzLyon. London: Quartet, 1985, p.49. Dostoevsky visited London in June 1862.

[21]Edited by Derek Hudson as Munby: Man of Two Worlds. London: Gambit, 1972.

[22]Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. London: Virago, 1992.

[23]Grant Allen, ‘Introduction’ to The British Barbarians. London/NY: John Lane/Putnam’s, 1895, pp. xvii-xviii.

[24]Grant Allen, ‘Introduction’ to The British Barbarians. John Lane/Putnam’s, 1895, p. xvii.

[25]Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey. London: Oxford UP, OUP ( ) , Ch. 15. Wilde is probably alluding to a ‘future history’ by the French astronomer, Camille Flammarion, La Fin du Monde (1894), which was enjoying a popular success.

[26]Letter dated 13 May 1885 to Georgiana Burne-Jones. Norman Kelvin, ed. The Collected Letters of William Morris. Princeton UP, 1987, II, 436.

[27]Rupert Brooke’s sonnet ‘Peace’ was written in October 1914.

[28]Laura Spinney, ‘Return to Paradise,’ New Scientist, 15 (20 July 1996), 26.

[29]Iain Sinclair, ‘All change. This train is cancelled,’ London Review of Books, 21 (13 May 1999), 10. Sorry Meniscus is an expansion of this article.