Exhibitions
Exhibitions > Literary London 2011
Representations of London in Literature: Green London
This exhibition was produced to support the Literary London 2011 conference, hosted by the Institute of English Studies, 20-22 July 2011. Drawn in particular from the Sterling Library of rare and first editions of English literature, the exhibits cover imagined environmental catastrophes, the relationship between the city and the country, polluted London, the city’s parks and other greenery, and London Zoo.
After London, or, Wild England
Richard Jefferies
London: Cassell, 1885
[S.L.] I [Jefferies – 1885]
The futurist novel After London portrays an England reclaimed by nature and populated by warring tribes of barbarians. The Thames valley has flooded to form an inland sea, and London lies buried beneath a toxic swamp. Jefferies’ earlier work, Nature Near London (1883) examined the richness of wildlife found in the London suburbs.
The Last Man, by the Author of Frankenstein
Mary Shelley
London: H. Colburn, 1826
[S.L.] I [Shelley, M. – 1826]
Set in the twenty-first century, The Last Man is narrated by Lionel Verney, the last person left on earth after a cataclysmic plague. Political in tone and graphic in its depiction of war and death, the work met with scathing reviews when published but is now regarded as Shelley’s second best novel. In this passage, Verney describes how London has been taken over by nature.
Michaelmas Terme
Thomas Middleton
London: T. Harper for R. Meighen, 1630
[D.-L.L.] (XVII) Bc [Middleton]
First performed in 1604, Middleton’s Michaelmas Terme is among the earliest English dramas set in contemporary London, and plays on the relationship between the city and the country. In the prologue the personification of Michaelmas Term changes out of his white country cloak into a city cloak of black (the devil’s colour). In the scene shown here, ‘Countrie-Wenches Father’ laments that his daughter has been enticed to London from the country as a prostitute and curses the ‘man-devouring citie’ that was once his own ruin.
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson
London: Longmans, Green, 1886
[S.L.] I [Stevenson – 1886b]
Stevenson uses the pollution and fog of London’s streets to add a sinister aspect to Mr Utterson’s visit to Mr Hyde’s lodgings. Towards the end of the book, the pleasant surroundings of Regent’s Park, ‘full of winter chirrupings and sweet with spring odours’, serve as the setting for Jekyll’s unwanted transformation into his diabolical alter ego.
Bleak House, with Illustrations by H.K. Browne
Charles Dickens
London: Chapman and Hall, 1870
YN D53H 870
Bleak House opens with a memorable description of polluted London, ‘smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes … fog everywhere’.
Boswell’s London Journal 1762-1763
James Boswell, ed. by Frederick A. Pottle
London: Heinemann, 1951
[S.L.] I [Boswell – 1951]
Boswell’s entry for 23 May 1763 records a walk in Kensington Gardens with the remark, ‘It is a glorious thing for the King to keep such walks so near the Metropolis, open to all his subjects’. His journal also records visits to the gardens of Ranelagh in Chelsea and of Vauxhall.
Discovery of a Treasure near Cheapside
Charles Dickens
Household Words (13 Nov. 1852)
PR Z
Dickens’ story of a man in search of gold begins and ends with the protagonist standing under a tree at the corner of Wood Street, Cheapside: ‘I suppose it has not the least business to be there, but it is pleasant there … I was a little dazed, as the tree itself may be for anything I know, by the roar of traffic in that busy place.’
Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf
London: Hogarth Press, 1925
[S.L.] II [Woolf – 1925]
Mrs Dalloway contains several references to London parks. In St James’s Park are ‘slow-swimming happy ducks’ and ‘pouched birds waddling’. Septimus Warren Smith, a First World War veteran suffering visions of his dead friend Evans, spends the day in Regent’s Park with his Italian wife Rezia.
Poems on Several Occasions
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
[London?: s.n., 1680?]
[S.L.] I [Rochester – 1680]
St James’s Park, the oldest royal park in London, was partially opened to the public during the reign of Charles II. It was here that Charles himself courted his favourite mistress, Nell Gwyn. After sundown, the park, unlit and unguarded, became a favourite haunt of prostitutes and their clients, a fact reflected in Wilmot’s poem ‘A ramble in St James’s Park’.
Zoo
Louis MacNeice
London: M. Joseph, 1938
[S.L.] II [MacNeice, L. – 1938]
Better known for his poetry and plays, MacNeice published this work on London Zoo in 1938, when a lecturer in Greek at Bedford College, London. Described by the author as ‘mainly a series of impressions’, Zoo was illustrated by Nancy Sharp, with whom he had begun an affair in 1937.
