FOREIGN CORRESPONDENTS IN LONDON

The reforming journalist George R. Sims's lavishly illustrated anthology Living London, published in several volumes in 1902–03, provides a fascinating tour of the British capital at the turn of the twentieth century: from high to low and from East to West. Along the way, it takes its readers into the London inhabited by ‘foreigners’: ‘Oriental London’ (‘Oriental’ includes everything from Armenia to Japan), the ‘cosmopolitan’ ‘Babel’ of Soho and ‘Russia in East London’. And it reminds its readers that the immigrant communities that formed such a distinctive part of the London cityscape retained strong links with the outside world, and with their countries of origin especially. There was a constant coming and going, a physical, intellectual and financial flow in both directions. For instance, according to Sims, every year ‘nearly a million’ roubles in remittances were sent ‘by the Ghetto Bank of Whitechapel’ to family and friends in Russia and Poland (1: 27). And winging their way back home were not just roubles, but personal letters and postcards, as well as articles written by resident foreign correspondents for newspapers and periodicals. Each personal letter found just a few isolated readers; the foreign correspondence reached audiences numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Sims does not ask what image of London was being produced by his fellow journalists for consumption beyond Britain's shores. But other countries had their own versions of Living London, and this anthology attempts to reconstruct one such version by shining a light on the city not as Sims's readers saw it, but as it existed in the minds of their contemporaries in Russia.

Newspaper correspondents have received relatively little attention from scholars of Anglo-Russian relations, who have tended to focus on prominent ‘intermediaries’ between the two cultures, such as translators, critics and travel writers. A list of notable Russians who visited or lived in London in the 1900s is indeed long and includes many individuals prolific with the pen. One of them was the internationally acclaimed writer Maxim Gorky, who visited the capital briefly in 1907 and published his impressions in a sketch entitled ‘London’.