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London Through the Ages
This month Clare Clark takes us on a literary tour of her favourite London novels to uncover the seedy squalor so often overlooked at the heart of England's mighty metropolis.
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Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self by Clare Tomalin
Claire Tomalin's biography shows us Pepys and his London in a way that captures the paradoxes of both. Pepys is brilliantly drawn as both an extraordinary man and a very ordinary one, with his all-too-human foibles and weaknesses. Beside him, London is brought to life in a wealth of wonderful detail as a city as much savage as cultured, as bawdy as it is brilliant, a stinking, swarming metropolis to which the great diarist provides the perfect tour guide.
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London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew
In order to obtain the extraordinary interviews collected here, Mayhew, a one-time lawyer and founder of Punch magazine, ventured into some of Victorian London's most dismal and dangerous slums. He talked to prostitutes, rat catchers, sewer hunters, flower girls - all of those who, through poverty and deprivation had become invisible and dispossessed - and allowed them to speak truthfully about their lives, without alteration or judgement. The result is possibly the finest oral history of this period.
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Bleak House by Charles Dickens
It is little more than cliché to observe Dickens' unparalleled ability to bring the London of his period to life. But in this, perhaps his most complex and ambitious novel, he not only tells a compelling story that, through its vast cast of characters, presents the reader with the broadest possible representation of London's occupants and their values, but also, through descriptive prose of exceptional poetry and precision, presents us with an unforgettable picture of the city itself.
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Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith
A satire as affectionate as it is sharp, this fictional diary details in all their mundane glory the triumphs, ambitions and vanities of Charles Pooter, a middle-aged clerk living in Holloway at the close of the nineteenth century. Pooter is a wonderful creation, a man for whom, despite his conitinuous and blissful absurdity, we cannot help but feel both affection and a quiet kind of admiration, while the diaries are equally brilliant at capturing the straining mundanity of respectable, impecunious suburban London.
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Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton
A bleak and heart-breaking portrait of a grey and grimy London on the brink of war, through the eyes of a man who is a drifter and a drunk but with whom, becuase of his simple goodness, we come to share a terrible and ultimately hopeless sympathy. The gas-meter lodging house world of Earls Court is brilliantly evoked here in all its dreary, penny-pinching impermanence.
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The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
A study of obsessive love set in Clapham in south London, close where I now live. Both the London of the war years, blacked-out and turbulent, and the damaged city of the war's immediate aftermath provide the perfect backdrop for a study of the nature of love and the damage wrought by jealousy.
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Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild
I first read this book aged eight and was never again able to walk up Exhibition Road or visit the V & A without thinking of the three adopted sisters, raised by their Great Uncle in straightened circumstances at the far end of the Cromwell Road, all set upon fame and fortune on the stage. A children's classic.
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The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter
Angela Carter's dizzying fable is a bold and uncoventional coming of age tale. Her gift for language captures the agony and magic of adolescence, while the London seen through the eyes of her heroine is both corrupting and redemptive. Her descriptions of the city, from the streets of the shabby shops to the park torn up for development, are unforgettable.
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Author interviews
