In September 1802, Charles Lamb took Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy to the annual Bartholomew Fair. Smithfleld horrified Wordsworth, but he recognized with time that he had found the subject with which to bring book VII of The Prelude – ‘Residence in London’ – to a close. Although Wordsworth seems to have been reading a certain amount of Jacobean drama at this period, it is impossible to tell whether or not he knew Jonson's play. What does seem clear is that for all their temperamental differences, and their distance from one another in time, the two men responded to Bartholomew Fair itself in a similar way. For both, it represented a challenge to their own art, and to the survival of the creative spirit. Wordsworth found Smithfield almost stupefying, ‘a hell / For eyes and ears,… anarchy and din / Barbarian and infernal’. He was appalled by its formlessness and clamour, its aimless and strident rivalries, by the merging of animal with human exhibits, and the freaks and mechanisms on show: