Imagined London - Anna Quindlen [34]
Yet all the stories seemed to have one plot twist in common, and that was that London was the prize. When Catherine of Aragon, past her childbearing years, was discarded by her now-aged boy king, she was sent from the city. When Elizabeth was displaced by the disgrace of her mother and the birth of her brother, she was sent away as well, out to the English countryside. In rural beauty, becalmed, she awaited the summons back. To be restored to London was to be restored to the place where her mother Anne had reached the zenith of her short career: arrived at the Tower while the Thames teamed with gaudily decorated boats, rode through the streets in a litter of cloth of gold dressed in ermine and jewels, was crowned in Westminster Abbey while all the lords and ladies of the court looked on. To return to London was to return to life—a life of color, confusion, intrigue, crosscurrents, but a life fully lived.
Of course, not everyone felt that way, then and now. English literature, and English life, are filled with those who are overwhelmed, exhausted, and repelled by life in the cheek-by-jowl metropolis, not the least of them reigning monarchs. Prince Charles is said to be more at home in his gardens at Highgrove, his country estate, than he is in the palatial quarters he occupies in central London. His mother the Queen looks most herself in photographs when she is pictured in the country, a scarf tied over her hair, Wellington boots on her feet, and a pack of dogs eddying around her. In fact, many of the pleasures of English life we foreigners have learned about through books tend to be country pleasures: dogs, horses, especially gardening.
This is clear in many of the most beloved English novels. Agatha Christie would much prefer to be in St. Mary Mead with Miss Marple or even on a cruise with Hercule Poirot then set down in the center of Chelsea. Austen is famously unequivocal in Emma when the hypochondriacal Mr. Woodhouse says stoutly, “The truth is, that in London it is always sickly season. Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be.” (This sentiment stands in opposition to the oft-quoted—too oft-quoted, actually—sentiment of Samuel Johnson that “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.”)
In her memoirs Jessica Mitford recalled her father’s trips: “On very rare occasions he lumbered into his London clothes and with much heavy breathing prepared for the trip—always considered a tremendously arduous journey, although it was actually only eighty miles—to sit in the House of Lords.” By contrast to the exile of the Elizabethans, in any number of English novels the good folks of the shires travel to the capital, or “to town,” as it is so often described, only under duress, and when they return to the villages and estates which they consider their proper homes a reader can almost feel them take in a lungful of good clean air.
Initially, of course, this was for simple sanitary reasons. The streets of long ago London were punctuated by enormous garbage piles; one afternoon, as I watched a man with a begrimed face pick through a trash basket in Regent’s Park, I realized that I’d met his like before, in Dickens and in the diaries of Samuel Pepys, in the person of the trash pickers and vendors who made their living off the refuse.
But the garbage was not the worst of it. Even a sheltered young reader could, sooner or later, figure out what was inside a “slops jar” and what would be the net effect of throwing its contents out an upstairs window in what, half a millennium ago, was the most populous city in Europe. Disease ran rampant in London because sewage did. London Bridge had a public toilet, the contents of which went directly into the Thames. It is one thing to stand in the grand semicircle of Trafalgar Square and admire how the terrain slopes gently down to Big Ben and from there to the river, quite another to consider how important that was during the era when raw sewage ran through the gutters directly into the water. Even