Imagined London - Anna Quindlen [23]
So while the London show spoke to my inner antiquarian, its material was, in fact, by the British Museum’s standards, rather recent. The wonderful thing about it, however, was that it did what London, in its history and its variety, has always done—it showed clearly that there is really nothing new under the sun.
That, I think, is one of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned from reading English literature, the kind of unvarying nature both of social problems and personal dramas. There is very little to separate, say, Georgette Heyer’s Regency drama Arabella, about a young woman muddling through her long-awaited London season, from Nancy Mitford’s Radlett girls in The Pursuit of Love, except for the passage of time and the claims of craft. Dances, dresses, men, marriage. The hypochondriacal moneylender Mrs. Islam in Monica Ali’s contemporary novel Brick Lane may be a Bangladeshi immigrant, but she is also a Dickens character in a modern London setting. John Mortimer’s hapless Rumpole, married to She Who Must Be Obeyed and drinking cheap plonk after representing yet another of the Timsons—“A family to breed from, the Timsons. Must almost keep the old Bailey going singlehanded”—owes a bit to Chaucer, a bit to Waugh. And all of the above owe more than a bit to real life; their like can be found in the London papers on any given day, being charged with usury, being indicted for fraud, representing those so indicted.
Most of those peering at the Hogarth engravings and Canaletto paintings in the 1753 show on its first day were aged, and so were the stories the exhibits told. Yet they were also the stories we tell ourselves every day now, to convince ourselves that the golden age is past: raging crime, class warfare, invasive immigrants, light morals, public misbehavior. Always we convince ourselves that the parade of unwelcome and despised is a new phenomenon, which is why the phrase “the good old days” has passed from cliché into self-parody. Joseph Conrad, a Polish émigré writing in English, saw this with the harshest of eyes in The Secret Agent: “a peculiarly London sun” is “at a moderate elevation about Hyde Park Corner with an air of punctual and benign vigilance,” and the man walking beneath it considers the gap between rich and poor, in the fashion of Conrad’s highly political novels, and how “the whole social order favourable to their hygienic idleness had to be protected against the shallow enviousness of unhygienic labour.”
There’s no getting away from the fact that the 1753 exhibit is full of echoes of a more modern London, as well as reflections of an older, perhaps even harsher city. Hogarth’s rendering of “A View of Cheapside, as it appeared on Lord Mayor’s Day Last,” looks fairly similar to Piccadilly Circus on any given Saturday night, except for the Lord Mayor’s coach and the presence of the King and Queen watching from an awninged balcony. The crush at the scene is a testimonial to what was happening then and what is happening again today: That is, that those with money and standing, who in the past had largely lived in the country and visited town only on shopping trips and special occasions, had decided instead that it was important to have a place in London. “To a lover of books the shops and sales in London present irresistible temptations,” wrote Edward Gibbon, who sold his father’s country estate, acquired a lapdog and a parrot, and rented a flat in Cavendish Square, where he wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
There was also, according to the exhibit’s companion guide, the requisite hostility toward immigrants. They were simply different immigrants than today’s Brick Lane Bangladeshis or Brixton Jamaicans. Scots, Jews, Irish, French Huguenots.