by Paul Bailey
First published 1996
London has drawn writers like no other city across the centuries. Paul Bailey gathers their voices in this comprehensive anthology spanning eight hundred years of literary observation. The collection opens with a medieval monk cataloguing the capital's pleasures around 1180 and travels through time to the present day. Bailey includes the famous alongside the forgotten: Dickens painting fog-shrouded Victorian streets, Wordsworth celebrating the view from Westminster Bridge, Shaw creating Cockney flower seller Eliza Doolittle, and Ben Jonson skewering street life in 1616. The anthology captures both monumental events and daily existence. Defoe chronicles plague while Pepys and Evelyn record the Great Fire. Foreign visitors express bewilderment at London customs. Writers document everything from aristocratic salons to workhouse misery, from Underground journeys to suburban sprawl. Bailey weaves together poetry and prose, famous set pieces and intimate observations, creating a literary map of how London grew from medieval settlement to modern metropolis.
Genres: literary-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, british-literature, 21st-century, cities
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family
Setting: London, Westminster Bridge, Underground
Period: 1180, 1616, Victorian, Medieval, Modern
396 pages · Hardcover · Oxford University Press