Literary London

A glance over the back pages of mid-nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals published in London reveals that Wellington Street stands out among imprint addresses. Between 1843 and 1853, Household Words, Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper, the Examiner, Punch, the Athenaeum, the Spectator, the Morning Post, and the serial edition of London Labour and the London Poor, to name a few, were all published from this short street off the Strand. Mary L. Shannon identifies, for the first time, the close proximity of the offices of Charles Dickens, G.W.M. Reynolds, and Henry Mayhew, examining the ramifications for the individual authors and for nineteenth-century publishing. What are the implications of Charles Dickens, his arch-competitor the radical publisher G.W.M. Reynolds, and Henry Mayhew being such close neighbours? Given that London was capital of more than Britain alone, what connections does Wellington Street reveal between London print networks and the print culture and networks of the wider empire? How might the editors’ experiences make us rethink the ways in which they and others addressed their anonymous readers as ‘friends’, as if they were part of their immediate social network? As Shannon shows, readers in the London of the 1840s and '50s, despite advances in literacy, print technology, and communications, were not simply an ‘imagined community’ of individuals who read in silent privacy, but active members of an imagined network that punctured the anonymity of the teeming city and even the empire.

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Writings on the metropolis generally foreground illimitability, stressing thereby that the urban ultimately remains both illegible and unintelligible. Instead, the purpose of this interdisciplinary study is to demonstrate that mentality as a tool offers orientation in the urban realm. Nora Pleßke develops a model of urban mentality to be employed for cities worldwide. Against the background of the Spatial Turn, she identifies dominant urban-specific structures of London mentality in contemporary London novels, such as Monica Ali's »Brick Lane«, J.G. Ballard's »Millennium People«, Nick Hornby's »A Long Way Down«, and Ian McEwan's »Saturday«.

The past few years have seen a resurgence in scholarly and popular interest in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) in honour of the bicentenary of the first edition of Frankenstein (1818) and more recently due to the resonances of its plague narrative with the Covid-19 pandemic. The role of cities in The Last Man has been considered in recent scholarship, particularly in debates around the orientalist attitudes of the novel and its treatment of imperialism, but its urban poetics have yet to take central stage as the primary subject matter of an article or chapter. This conference paper will begin to address this gap, arguing that The Last Man presents a sustained meditation on the interconnectedness of cities at a time of heightened international relations and cultural exchange between Britain and Southern Europe. This paper will further explore the ways in which this interconnectedness fed into what Stephen Prickett has identified as a new cultural appreciation for the fantastic as an act of creation rather than idle daydreaming. It will examine the ways in which the fantastical mode of future history allowed Shelley to imaginatively recreate the cities in which she had experienced love and loss as both familiar and strange, starkly different and yet inextricably bound.

The symposium brings together literary scholars and researchers from UCL's Department of English Language and Literature to discuss the rich and fluctuating relationship between literature and the city.  Topics will include Gissing's working-class London, the Los Angeles police novel, Charles Olson’s poetic rendition of Gloucester, Massachusetts, the allegorical city in Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies, and public toilets and fire hydrants in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.

Drawing on the only surviving record of Peake's express acknowledgement of Dickens, published in this article for the first time, this piece offers an extended analysis of Dickens's influence on Peake. It examines parallels in the authors' writing styles, artistic convictions, thematic explorations of class, and representations of the city,
while taking care not to elide the differences between them. I also compare Peake with J. R. R. Tolkien, in order to further tease out the affiliations between Peake and Dickens by way of contrast with a third figure. Finally, the article suggests that Peake forged a vital link between Dickensian fiction and a new generation of urban fantasy authors.

Hailed as the father of science fiction, H. G. Wells has had a seminal impact on popular culture. Nowhere more so than on London-based science fiction and dystopian fantasy, from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, to China Miéville’s The Tain. Yet Wells himself expressed a profound ambivalence towards London, celebrating it on one occasion as ‘the great Mother of Cities’ and denouncing it on another as ‘a witless old giantess of a town’. Drawing on archival material from the H. G. Wells papers in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, this research seminar examines Wells’s changing attitudes towards London. It additionally showcases some piquant findings from the archive that have proven tangential to my research but make for a good story, including Wells’s stroppy annotations to the letters of American science-fiction giant Hugo Gernsback and his ill-fated courtship with the daughter of Edith Nesbit.

Sizing a vertical cut or peeling back the surface of London, the multi-layered and widely spread system of Underground London is revealed. Next to basement flats and wine cellars this sphere encompasses the arteries that sustain the urban body, like water supply ducts, sewers, electricity and communication cables, gas pipes, channelled rivers, streams and tributaries. Most prominently the stations and tunnels of the oldest Underground railway in the world spread through the city – the London Tube with its cross-passages, ventilation tunnels, escalators, lifts and stairways, exits and entrances. The three-dimensional labyrinth of the urban subterranean system moreover covers archaeological remains of Roman temples, crypts, plague pits, cemetery catacombs, as well as deep-level shelters and various caves (Pleßke 2009: 185–6; Pleßke 2014: 225; Trench/Hillman 1985: 7–22) . A replica of the metropolis above, the Underground mirrors the maze of London’s streets, alleys and lanes. But, owing to its enclosed and...

This article examines Wells’s reliance upon urban topography, epistemological estrangement, and city walking to construct his fantastical London fictions. By exploring these narrative strategies, the article will suggest that Wells fused fantastical plot and hyperrealist detail in order to challenge the mental inertia that had taken hold of late-Victorian and Edwardian London life. Wells thus utilised the fantastic as an elastic literary mode whose very impossibility opened up new opportunities for reimagining urban space.

Writing as much in the spirit of wish-fulfilment as of prophecy, H. G. Wells declared in his futurist treatise Anticipations (1902) that the ‘giant cities’ of his time ‘are destined to such a process of dissection and diffusion as to amount almost to obliteration'.  At the dawn of the new century, Wells’s idea of a utopia was a world in which Edwardian urban life would be abolished along with the suffering it engendered, where the ‘coming cities will not be, in the old sense, cities at all' (p. 40).
In this vein, Wells harnessed his scientific romances to criticisms of the social ills that he recognised as endemic to his contemporary London. In The War of the Worlds (1898; WoW), middle-class Londoners are complicit in their fate, as the routine of city life keeps them complacent and thus leads to mass-hysteria at the eleventh hour when the Martians are nearly upon them. Similarly, in When the Sleeper Wakes (1899; WSW), the city’s oligarchical oppression of the lower classes, which mirrors the exploitation of the urban workers in Wells’s day, leads to perpetual revolutions and concomitant destruction and loss of life.
Yet, Wells also knew moments of tenderness towards the metropolis. 'London is my own particular city', he remarks in a discussion of the prowess of London cab drivers.  In his fiction likewise, his characters experience moments of epiphany in the metropolis. WoW’s first-person narrator remarks that 'Those who have only seen London in her sombre robes of smoke can scarcely imagine the naked clearness and beauty of the silent wilderness of houses',  and WSW’s Graham finds himself awash in 'the luminous expanse' of London that shines all the more splendidly 'in comparison with the areas of disturbance'.   
This paper shall further explore Wells’s complex love-hate relationship with London, as reflected and refracted in his pre-WWI fiction. Adding Tono-Bungay (1909) to its primary case studies, the paper will posit that Wells developed a vision of London as a master-commodity whose glitzy veneer conceals a more brutally violent and yet more viscerally ‘real’ metropolis, where humanity may be purged and born again in the 'main drains', 'cellars, vaults, stores’, ‘railway tunnels and subways'  of Wells’s ‘own particular city'.

"This paper examines China Miéville's apocalyptic visions of London in three of his urban fantasy novels: King Rat (1998), The Tain (2002), and Kraken (2010). The research suggests that these novels rewrite London's major historical crises into fantastic conceptualisations of the city's future.
King Rat reimagines the Great Plague of London, which was spread by rodents carrying fleas, as an epidemic of genocidal sanitisation initiated by a modern-day Pied Piper of Hamelin intent upon purging the city of its physical and metaphorical 'pests'. The novel's protagonists are accordingly marginalised Londoners, struggling artists hailing from a variety of different backgrounds, as well as the city's local populace of intelligent rats, spiders, and birds, who redeem London even as they are hunted by its metropolitan bourgeoisie. In this subversion of the Great Plague, the novel celebrates the interstitial construction of personal identity and the patchwork composition of cutting-edge art, embracing diversity and fluidity as the qualities that carry London through its moments of weakness and disease.
The Tain reconfigures the Blitz as an aerial strike during a fictional war between Londoners and 'imagos', the latter being reflections that have escaped their mirrors. Clearly evoking the Blitz, the imagos' merciless bombardment of London reshapes the city with punctured bridges, building rubble, and pillars of smoke. In a diametric inversion of the Allies' victory in WWII, however, the novel concludes with London's unconditional surrender. This defeat is blamed on Londoners' self-absorption, as a human who joined the imagos' ranks reflects: 'Your world was a world of silvered glass. It became mirrored' (p. 244). Hence, The Tain contrasts its fictional Londoners' defeat with the extraordinary resolve of the Londoners during the Blitz, to warn against the callous atomisation fostered by the postmodern metropolis.
Kraken goes back to the Great Fire of London, recounting its protagonists' efforts to avert a prophecy that foretells London's destruction in an all-consuming conflagration. Playing upon the fact that the Great Fire of London was caused by an accident, the more the protagonists strive to expose the malicious intent behind the prophecy, the closer they come to its fulfilment. They finally discover the culprit to be a religious fundamentalist who cannot suffer the idea that evolution proceeds via contingency, and therefore attempts to burn down the Darwin exhibition in the Natural History Museum with a special 'memory fire' that erases the consumed object from history (p. 420). Kraken thereby cautions against reductive determinism that flattens out the infinitely complex vicissitudes of the city into a teleological narrative that allows for no form of urban chance encounter.
Miéville's urban fantasy novels are thus forged in a kind of 'memory fire' that acknowledges the impact of history upon the future, but insists on the open-endedness of London's horizons. By constructing his protagonists as deeply compassionate urbanites that face up to difficult decisions, Miéville asserts that Londoners are the ultimate arbiters of their city's fate. This paper shall further explore the intricate dynamics of history, apocalypse, and free choice in Miéville's metropolitan fantasies."