London Stories

London has the greatest literary tradition of any city in the world. Its roll call of storytellers includes cultural giants like Shakespeare, Defoe, and Dickens, and an innumerable host of writers of all sorts who sought to capture the essence of the place.

Acclaimed historian Jerry White has collected some twenty-six stories to illustrate the extraordinary diversity of both London life and writing over the past four centuries, from Shakespeare’s day to the present. These are stories of fact and fiction and occasionally something in between, some from well-known voices and others practically unknown. Here are dramatic views of such iconic events as the plague, the Great Fire of London, and the Blitz, but also William Thackeray’s account of going to see a man hanged, Thomas De Quincey’s friendship with a teenaged prostitute, and Doris Lessing’s defense of the Underground. This literary London encompasses the famous Baker Street residence of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and the bombed-out moonscape of Elizabeth Bowen’s wartime streets, Charles Dicken’s treacherous River Thames and Frederick Treves’s tragic Elephant Man. Graham Greene, Jean Rhys, Muriel Spark, and Hanif Kureishi are among the many great writers who give us their varied Londons here, revealing a city of boundless wealth and ragged squalor, of moving tragedy and riotous joy.

Jerry White is Visiting Professor in History at Birkbeck, University of London, and a leading social historian of modern London. He is the author of the critically acclaimed trilogy London in the Eighteenth Century: A Great and Monstrous Thing; London in the Nineteenth Century; and London in the Twentieth Century: A City and Its People.

Preface
 
Thomas Dekker
“London, lying sicke of the Plague” (1603)
 
John Evelyn
“The Great Fire of London” (1666)
 
Daniel Defoe
“A Ragged Boyhood” (1722)
 
Samuel Whyte
“A Visit to Charlotte Cibber” (1795)  
 
James Lackington
“Love Among the Methodists” (1792)
 
Thomas de Quincey
“Ann of Oxford Street” (1822)
 
William Makepeace Thackeray
“Going to see a Man Hanged” (1840)
 
Henry Mayhew
“Watercress Girl” (1851)
 
Charles Dickens
“Down with the Tide” (1853)
 
C. Maurice Davies
“The Walworth Jumpers” (1876)
 
Eliza Lynn Linton
“My First Soiree” (1891)
 
Arthur Conan Doyle
“The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle (1892)
 
George Gissing
“Christopherson” (1906)
 
R. Andom
“The Fetching of Susan” (1912)
 
Frederick Treves
“The Elephant Man” (1923)
 
John Galsworthy
“A Forsyte Encounters the People” (1917)
 
Graham Greene
“A Little Place off the Edgware Road” (1939)
 
Mollie Panter-Downes
“Good Evening, Mrs Craven” (1942)
 
William Sansom
“The Wall” (1944)
 
Elizabeth Bowen
“Mysterious Kor” (1945)
 
J. B. Priestley
“Coming to London” (1957)
 
Jean Rhys
“Tigers are Better-Looking” (1964)
 
Muriel Spark
“Daisy Overend” (1967)
 
Doris Lessing
“In Defence of the Underground” (1992)
 
Irma Kurtz
“Islington” (1997)
 
Hanif Kureishi
“The Umbrella” (1999)