Stories of London constitute a significant strand within the literature of London, and of urban modernity generally. Their significance has been obscured, however, by a persistent critical fascination with the London novel. There are grounds for such fascination in the fact that the history of London's growth into a world city and the rise of the novel as a literary form are closely intertwined. ‘The English novel itself can be said to have grown out of the streets, stews and rookeries of outcast proletarian and criminal London’, argues Ken Worpole, pointing to a tradition that stretches from Daniel Defoe to Iain Sinclair. Moreover, it is widely assumed that the novel's capaciousness and discursive flexibility make it the most suitable form for depicting the size, diversity and complex social life of the modern metropolis. However, there are limits even to the novel's comprehensiveness. Between 1800 and 1900 the population of London grew rapidly from 1 million to 4.5 million inhabitants, and the immense physical expansion of the city made it increasingly ‘difficult to envisage the whole’. Consequently, one of the most widely noted features of London's cultural image is the city's capacity to overwhelm any attempt to represent it in its totality. In The Soul of London (1905), for instance, Ford Madox Ford remarks upon the impossibility of ‘having an impression, a remembered bird's-eye-view of London as a whole’. The city comes into focus for the observer only through partial glimpses and personal impressions, its larger life registered fleetingly as a ‘background’ that cannot be encompassed. It is in this respect that the short story form, with its limited scope and narrative intensity, has something important to offer the literature of London. For, whilst individual stories may achieve varying degrees of formal resolution, they can powerfully convey the fragmentary, disorienting character of metropolitan experience by isolating particular moments or places within a larger, ungraspable whole. Even where they appear to offer their readers representative images of the city, stories of London implicitly acknowledge its incomprehensibility through their own formal circumscription.