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to a whole raft of wits. Such is the quip about America and England being two countries divided by a common language. Churchill, I was told definitively by one student of modern history. Shaw, said an inveterate reader. But a quotations dictionary has it as Oscar Wilde (“We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.”) and another Bertrand Russell (“It is a misfortune for Anglo-American friendship that the two countries are supposed to have a common language.”) I feel quite chuffed about being able to speak English English until I actually do it. Then I find myself in Southwark, pronouncing (or mispronouncing) the w, and find myself thinking of Wilde. Or Russell. Or Churchill. Or whomever it may have been.

Oscar Wilde during his tour of the United States and Canada in 1882

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The idea of a Literary London alongside the literal city is not a new one. There are courses on the subject for everyone from tourist groups to university students and even a scholarly journal with papers on such subjects as “Theatrical Spectacles and the Spectators’ Positions in Wordsworth’s London.” The English are not above playing the literary card; at one hotel in Mayfair, the apartment suites are named after great writers, the Fielding, the Austen. In the window of Rule’s, purportedly London’s oldest restaurant, the stuffed pheasants in the window vie for attention with information about past diners, Dickens and Thackeray among them. And why not? If America confers luster on a home by saying “Washington slept here,” how can anyone be expected to resist the temptation to say “Shakespeare wrote here.” Not only wrote, but wrote triumphantly of his surroundings:

This royal throne of Kings, this scept’red isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress built by Nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war,

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house,

Against the envy of less happier lands,

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm,

this England.

No country needs more than that. And yet there is so much more in the syllabus for the Literary London courses and tours that abound. There’s Chaucer and a trip to the Guildhall, Shakespeare and the roughhewn replica of the Globe on the South Bank of the Thames, Poet’s Corner and Chelsea, and, of course, the Dickens House. The books and places most of the courses use and cite don’t change much. Fashions in literature do, of course. Galsworthy out, Bowen out and then in again, Woolf in only for modernists of a certain stripe until, that is, the movies took her up. My old clothbound History of English Literature, circa 1885, declares: “There are two distinguished authors, who divide the honour of being called ‘First novelist of the day.’ Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray stand side by side on that proud eminence, each with his multitude of admirers.” But the on-line reading list for Kingston University today states flatly, “The great figure of nineteenth-century literary London is Charles Dickens.” Poor Thackeray.

Each of the reading lists for these Literary London surveys tends to end with the same modern writers. But those “modern” writers are often those who wrote seventy or eighty years ago, Woolf, Bowen, along with slightly more contemporary names: Julian Barnes, Hanif Kureishi, Jeanette Winterson. Much is made of Martin Amis’s novel London Fields.

But London Fields is not a novel that is particularly evocative of London in any way, nor are most of its counterparts. The literary novels of London have become less about place and more about psychology, less about class per se and more about ethnicity. And modern London, like most other great capitals, has become more like everywhere else in a way that makes specificity in writing about it both less possible and less useful.

It may seem a frivolous example, but I’m frequently struck by how