Mid-nineteenth-century London acquired its breadth, depth, and density as a fictional space almost entirely through the work of Charles Dickens. Many of his contemporaries set their novels in London, of course, establishing networks of social and economic relationships that depend on the proximities afforded by a capital city. But it was Dickens who discovered how to blend his intimate walking knowledge of the city with fictional techniques that would create London on the page from a variety of perspectives. Although 'Dickens's London' may conjure up immediate images of dense, sooty fog, or labyrinthine courts and alleys, these features take their places in a far wider repertoire of imaginative strategies by which Dickens took hold of a vast, heterogeneous city with an evocative power that continued to influence fictive Londons well into the twentieth century.

The sheer scope of Dickensian London becomes clear when we glance at other mid-Victorian novels set in the metropolis. William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847), for instance, follows standard novelistic procedure in setting up a small number of households in which much of the London action will unfold. These households are class-coded through street names that ‘everyone’ in a middle-class readership could be supposed to recognise: the rich merchant Osborne and the wealthy old lady Miss Crawley live at Park Lane, while the bankrupt adventuress Becky Sharp takes a house nearby in Curzon Street, Mayfair.

For the first two centuries of its existence, the printed book in England was overwhelmingly an artifact of London. With a few relatively specialised exceptions, the university presses of Oxford and Cambridge being the most important, before 1695 printing was restricted by law to the capital city. While the letter of the law was not always decisive - the Marprelate Tracts, for example, came from clandestine operators who moved about the country, and Charles I's army trundled along a royalist press operated by Leonard Lichfield as it marched - for the most part the production of books was a practice in and of the metropolis. In consequence, as the city grew into a great European capital and as print developed into a central element of its everyday life, the character of the one substantially shaped the character of the other. Markets, modes of publishing, genres, audiences, literary sensibilities, reading practices - all these and more came into being as aspects of London life, and in turn London life was transformed by them.

The changing city and the commercial stage, c. 1600

It is a curious fact of London theatre history that around about 1598 playwrights quite suddenly began to write plays that in a sustained way depicted aspects of contemporary London life. London streets and London places began to be mentioned prominently in theatrical dialogue, and those familiar streets and places became the setting for stories about London economic life, the struggles among various social groups for dominance within the city, and the domestic disputes and intrigues that percolated through London households.

While prior to 1598 there had certainly been plays with scenes set in London, such as Richard III, and others, such as The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London (1590), that evoked London as a place to be redeemed from sin, nonetheless, 1598 marked a real change in how and how frequently the city was staged. Dramas such as William Haughton's Englishmen for My Money (1598) and the early comedies of Ben Jonson did not treat London as an abstract landscape populated with allegorical figures, nor did they set the occasional scene within the city; rather, they luxuriated in 'place realism', that is, in the depiction of a particular cityscape and its contemporary inhabitants. Most of these plays were comic in form, and they are generally known as city comedies, or London comedies, in recognition of the fact that they constitute a distinct subgenre of comedy in general.

Over 150 years separate Hogarth's etching and engraving of Gin Lane (see Figure 9.1) from Walter Richard Sickert's painting The Camden Town Murder; or, What Shall We Do about the Rent? (Figure 9.2). However, a particular view of London, one that is geographically and socially specific, as well as morally charged, envelops both of these representations. Gin Lane, normally paired with the more prosperous and cheerful London of Beer Street, was Hogarth's attempt to influence the passage of the Gin Act to regulate the sale of spirits that was driving the London poor to theft, murder, and suicidal despair. His grim satirical engraving, set in the notorious district of St Giles, with Hawksmoor's St George's Church peeping up behind the decrepit scrim of tenements, reduces social life to the pawn shop, the distillers, and the undertakers. The gin-sodden poor gnaw bones with the animals, while the negligent mother at the perspectival heart of the composition commits careless infanticide.

'London, thou art of townes A per se'. So, around 1500, an unknown Scots poet - the poem was long confidently ascribed to William Dunbar - begins his encomium to the greatest town he knew. The poem continues in the laudatory vein struck in its opening line for seven 'Monk's stanzas'; each ends with a refrain emphasising a superlativeness not just urban, but imperial: 'London, thou art the flour of Cities all.' 'Monk's stanza' is one of those forms invented in English by medieval London's greatest poet, Geoffrey Chaucer. But the most important thing, I suspect, about this quite detailed poem is its belatedness; only at the end of the Middle Ages was it possible actually to see England's greatest City in a literary context or directly as a literary subject. Before that date, London was indeed, in David Wallace's phrase, an 'absent city', not simply for Chaucer (Wallace's subject) but nearly every literary figure.

The detail of ‘London, thou art’ deserves attentive examination. A great deal of this might be described as thoroughly traditional. The City is identified by two names, not simply its modern title, of which more in a moment, but ‘Troynovaunt’ or ‘New Troy’ as well (lines 9, 10, 19). This name alludes to the powerful historical myth of both local and national foundation, largely an invention of Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia regum Britanniae (1130s).

A novel or a play has to have a setting, but the same is not quite true of a poem. In a poem, the 'setting' may be little more than an implicit extrapolation from content. Where, for instance, is the speaker in Hopkins's anguished sonnet 'No worst, there is none'? We know that he wrote it in Dublin, but it contains no identifiable reference to the city, so it is not in any meaningful sense a 'Dublin' poem. At the opposite extreme are intensely localised poems, like Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey', Coleridge's 'Frost at Midnight', and Arnold's 'Rugby Chapel', which vicariously situate the reader in the precise locale in which the poetic meditation purports to be happening. A poem thus 'localised' is in every sense a 'London' (or wherever) poem. Between these two extremes are poems in which places in London are mentioned explicitly, but in a less sustained or interiorised way. This gives us a 'London' spectrum that runs from the implicit, through the explicit, to the fully 'localised'. The present chapter leaves aside the first category and focuses on the second and third.

In an article published in the Guardian in 2004, the West Indian-born, British-raised novelist Caryl Phillips remarked on the curious absence in 1950s British literature of a phenomenon that was visibly transforming the nation throughout that decade. Immigration from the far-flung possessions of an empire that had begun decolonising in earnest after the war burgeoned in the 1950s, with the West Indies and Africa especially supplying hundreds of thousands of new residents to Britain (and to London in particular). Yet despite what Phillips calls 'the daily presence of these new people on the streets, on the buses, and working in hospitals and factories all over the country' at the time, leading British-born writers such as Kingsley Amis and John Osborne displayed a general - and perhaps, Phillips suggests, even a wilful - blindness to the nation's emerging multiracial and multicultural reality. The key exception, he notes, was Colin MacInnes, who was born in London in 1914, grew up in Australia, eventually moved back to London, and, in the late 1950s, wrote three important novels that feature multiracial groups of protagonists and vividly depict a city in flux. Of the three, Phillips gives pride of place to MacInnes's first, City of Spades, published in 1957.

In 1635, the poet Edmund Waller wrote in celebration of the new, albeit highly incongruous, porticoed west front added by Inigo Jones to 'Old' St Paul's Cathedral. In Waller's poem 'Upon His Majesties Repairing of Pauls', Charles I is credited with completing his father's vision of improving the Cathedral's dilapidated state. The steeple was never repaired after being toppled by the violent thunderstorm in June 1561, and the extensive damage to the roof was inadequately addressed: Waller could justly call the old Cathedral 'Our Nations glory, and our Nations crime'. The poem is a canny performance. Waller's task is to celebrate a not altogether satisfactory piece of restoration in a context where others were calling for an entirely new building - a proposal that carried divisive political overtones. Eschewing 'Ambition' that would 'affect the fame / Of some new structure; to have born her name' (lines 27-8), the king displays both the modesty and greatness of his mind 'to frame no new Church, but the old refine' (line 36). In tacit response to Puritan attacks on Laudian reform, Waller presents Charles as a moderate whose innovations are of a piece with the original architecture of the church.

Noting that 'the literature of London ... to a large extent ... also represents the literature of England' and that 'English drama and the English novel spring out of the very conditions of London', Peter Ackroyd states a maximal case for the pervasive influence of London on English literature. A correspondingly maximal case for the influence of English literature on the experience of London was offered by John Buchan, author of The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), when he said that 'every street corner' of London was 'peopled by ghosts from literature and history'. In keeping with these claims for the reciprocal influence of London and literature, it is the premise of this volume that to study the representation of London in English literature is to explore not only variations on a compelling and pervasive topic but a defining element in what has been called the 'topography' or the 'atlas' of English literature. Just as, for reasons explained below and discussed throughout this volume, 'the idea of London is central to the self-image of the British people', and just as the idea of London 'deeply penetrates the rest of the world's view of British life', so, through manifold instances, the imaginative representation of London has helped to shape British literature and, to a significant extent, world literature in English.

Having completed five books of city exploration in the 1920s, each with 'London' in the title, the journalist H. V. Morton went out In Search of England (1927). He started from the capital again - but now with a realisation: 'no man living has seen London'. This was because there was no single vantage-point over the modern metropolis, but also - implicitly and more interestingly - because the city was a myriad of conflicting impressions that could not be unified. Ford Madox Ford had made a similar point in his The Soul of London (1905). His introduction carries a disavowal of the systematic: 'I have tried to make it anything rather than encyclopaedic, topographical, or archaeological'; his tour of London proceeds instead through impressionistic detail. The accretion of textured observations and anecdote is set against the fear of entropic anonymity, of modern London as unknowable: 'how little of a town, how much of an abstraction'. This tendency in both writers – one a blunt, bestselling populist, one a key force in British literary experimentation – is characteristic of many others across genres; it also marks the fault line between twentieth-century London writing and its predecessors, for while Victorian London could be infinitely rich, bewildering, and despair-inducing it was, ultimately, knowable through texts. This was not the case for the literature of modernity; it rather faced simultaneously acknowledging the importance and apparent impossibility of depicting, and thus understanding, modern London.

London was where I grew up, and I lived half my adult life there.

It is almost twenty years since I moved away from the city, and a dozen years since I left England for Australia. As I started work on this chapter, despite that long separation, I found that the place still has a hold on me. My attempts to shape an argument about London kept being interrupted by unbidden recollections and apparently random associations. Then I got it. These distractions were bringing into focus the question I want to address. That is, where, and how, does London exist?

The premise of the present volume is that, as well as being a physical city in the bottom right-hand corner of England, 'London' also has an existence of some sort 'in literature' and, beyond literature, in a variety of other cultural forms. It exists as an archive-city, an immaterial London, built of words, images, and stories.

This other, archival London is the London constructed in literary texts from Chaucer, through Dickens, to Iain Sinclair and Zadie Smith, and the London that I watch in movies. It is the London depicted in the images of Canaletto in the eighteenth century, Gustave Doré in the nineteenth century, or Christopher Nevinson and Gilbert and George at different ends of the twentieth century. It is the London reported daily on worldwide television news, or London as the dramatic backdrop for television fictions. It is also the London, observed and analysed, that I read about in academic monographs, sociological theorising, and government investigations.

London is in fact at the centre of many, many literary works of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, not just as a setting or backdrop but as a shaping force - of plot, character, and narrative itself. Narrators describe the city, inhabit the city, walk the city, write the city. The circuits Defoe as traveller- narrator takes in his epistolary documentary A Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-7) begin and end in London, and London is its centrepiece, expanding as we read: 'We see several Villages, formerly standing, as it were, in the Country, and at a great Distance, now joyn'd to the Streets by continued Buildings, and more making haste to meet in the like Manner.' And he draws – or rather, follows – a ‘Line of Measurement’ about the city, a line that actively ‘runs’ and ‘passes’ and ‘crosses’ and ‘turns’ and ‘goes away’ and ‘comes to’:

In 1673, an anonymous writer warned a young country gentleman headed for London that he would surely see himself lampooned on the stage:

During the Restoration and eighteenth century, London grew at an unprecedented rate, attracting men and women in search of pleasure, work, entertainment, marriage, opportunity, and adventure. Mr Spectator celebrated the multicultural bustle of the Royal Exchange; James Boswell hoped London would polish his manners; Samuel Johnson declared those tired of London to be tired of life. But not everyone recommended the trip. Critics decried the city's immorality and dissolution; they warned against whores, gamesters, and thieves. Visitors from the country, they declared, would fall victim to the 'tricks of the town' as well as to contemptuous ridicule from smug libertines. Further, they would confront these ills immediately, for any visitor's first stop in London would be the theatre.

On the evening of Wednesday 6 July 2005, when London was celebrating the news announced that day that the city had won the bid for the 2012 Olympic Games, a fledgling novelist, Chris Cleave, attended the launch party of his first novel, Incendiary, which was to be published the following morning. His book was resolutely concerned with life in London in the shadow of the atrocities of 9/11, the US-led invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, the bombings of trains in Madrid on 11 March 2004, and the infamous events at Abu Ghraib prison. As Cleave subsequently explained, 'The airwaves were filled with body counts and brutish ideologies, and I needed to write something to remind myself of the simple human cost of this folly. And I think I wanted my son, when he was older, to understand something of the febrile nature of the times he was born into.' In the novel, Cleave depicted London struggling to cope in the wake of a genocidal terrorist attack on a Premier League soccer match attended by thousands of fans between two major clubs, Arsenal and Chelsea, at which the unnamed narrator loses her husband and son amidst the carnage. Penned as an extended letter from the narrator to Osama Bin Laden, Cleave's ambitious and often remarkable debut novel explored the imagined social and psychological consequences of a city lost to terror. Incendiary was toasted long into the night of 6 July.

In the nineteenth century London became the greatest city in the world; it also became largely invisible - at least for poets. The 'Minute Particulars' that for Blake enabled vision had been buried under a grimy blizzard of soot, smoke, and damp known as 'a London particular', a dense fog whose persistence grew along with the city's population and pollution. While the sun never set on the British empire, it sometimes never rose on its capital - for a week at a time, as Ruskin noted in The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884). Like Blake and many of his contemporaries, Ruskin placed a premium on vision: ‘To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, – all in one’, he memorably asserted in Modern Painters (1843).But what to do when circumstances – both cultural and climatic – hinder your taking a good look at your subject? This essay suggests that Romantics and Victorians struggled to represent the city for two interconnected reasons: a figurative, ‘mind-forg’d’ aversion and a literally obscured perspective.For not only was the city in its obstreperous plenitude and ceaseless mobility resistant to efforts to view it poetically, it was also quite simply hard to see, thanks to fog, smoke, and darkness.

Between 1973 and 1994, a succession of protests and rebellions transfigured South African political life. These eruptions assumed different forms and supplied different leaders and followers within different groups, but increasingly they converged strategically. Together, they embodied a challenge to authority without precedent in its scale, its resilience and in its depth of organisation. Early stages of this resistance engendered significant shifts in government policies. These policy shifts themselves in turn both facilitated and provoked fresh waves of revolt. Whilst opening up new opportunities for organised resistance, a combination of liberal reforms and militarised repression succeeded in containing or at least defining limits to popular insurgency. The relative success of these state policies helps to explain why the political settlement of 1994 left intact much of the structure of an extremely inequitable society.