Imagined London - Anna Quindlen [16]
CHAPTER SEVEN
Not too far from Fleet Street, in that part of Bloomsbury near to Gray’s Inn, there is a street without the feeling of insulation and isolation the Forsytes must have had in Montpelier Square. Even its name takes it down a peg from Pall Mall or nearby Mecklenburgh Square: Doughty Street. History tells us that there were once porter’s lodges at either end, and gates that were closed and locked at night, creating an oasis within the bustle of the area. But there is none of that now. Rows of identical houses peer at one another from across a fairly busy avenue. None stands out from the others except that there is one that has a sandwich board on the sidewalk inviting passersby inside.
Of all the writers who have made London their palette, their paint, their turf and their home, Charles Dickens is the gargantua. Inside the Doughty Street house it is clear that it has always been so, although this was where he lived before his assumed greatness became monumental and his public readings became as popular as public hangings had once been. The memorabilia that has been assembled by The Dickens Fellowships, whose members around the world take Dickens as seriously as the Archbishop of Canterbury takes Jesus, cover the full range of a career that spanned thirty-five years and included, among other works, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Bleak House, and A Tale of Two Cities. (A rabid Dickensian—and is there any other kind?—I cannot bear to leave it at that. There is also Little Dorrit, Dombey and Son, Nicholas Nickleby, and A Christmas Carol.)
Until the publication of the Harry Potter books, Dickens may well have been the British writer most often read by American schoolchildren, usually because his work was assigned to them. He is also largely responsible for a kind of back-alley view of London that prevails to the present day. Although literary critics tend to treat him a little like a happy fantabulist and a talented hack—“Dickens could never have written such a passage,” Oxford professor John Carey writes dismissively, quoting Thackeray approvingly in an introduction to an edition of Vanity Fair—his view of London, if not its people, is often astonishingly dark.
Along with some of the more florid detective novelists and the song “A Foggy Day In London Town,” written by the American George Gershwin, Dickens may be singlehandedly responsible for the common perception that the weather may frequently render London’s streets so impassable as to be impossible. In the very beginning of Bleak House, after introducing mud so deep that prehistoric creatures might still be expected to be crawling out of the ooze, he continues, with the lack of restraint that is his hallmark, “Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.” And so on and on in a paragraph that contains the word “fog” thirteen times, as well as five semicolons.
I may have been blessed in terms of timing, but I haven’t encountered the kind of weather that has become the ruling London cliché. Instead, I’ve always been charmed by the light, which seems to me to have a silver-gilt quality that renders the atmosphere serious and expectant. I love that golden, almost edible light in Italy and the French Riviera, but it seems to me the meteorological opposite number of deep thoughts. London weather—the chill spring, the light rain, the dove-gray sky—telegraphs moments of moment and the tramp-tramp of real life. And I have never encountered much of an English fog, and certainly not the sort of pernicious blanket of