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By Root 173 0

of cities. For that you must come down to Earth and wander aimlessly. Maybe just off Sloane Square, or in Cheval Place, or on Burnsall Street, or Elgin Crescent. Maybe in Notting Hill or South Kensington or Bloomsbury. Finally you will reach it: a house with a bay window or a fanlight over a door, a house with a handsome gate or a small garden.

Around it, a street or two away, swirls the clamor of one of the busiest cities on Earth. Inside is—what? Did a debutante once wait there for her car? Did a maid slip out to meet her lover? Did street peddlers sell ribbons here, or fruit and flowers? Does it stand on the ruins of an older house, or a cow pasture, or even a Roman fort? Did the bombs shake its foundation and the modern real estate boom triple its value?

Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life.

And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

By the time I had finished Imagined London, I had built a large castle around me. It was constructed completely of books. Whenever I left my desk, I would have to find my way through a passage I’d engineered between travel guides and literary criticism. In the process I broke the binding on a perfectly good Fodor’s, ruined two paperback editions of Dickens I left out in the rain, and dog-eared and underlined some of the greatest classics ever written.

I also had the time of my life, some of it spent in a small hotel in Mayfair sharing a suite—and several endless televised cricket matches—with Quindlen Krovatin, the writer and reader who is also my son.

First and foremost I must thank him for all the work he did on this book, and for the pleasure of his company. I couldn’t have been habitually lost in London with anyone more interesting.

I acquired Peter Ackroyd’s remarkable history of London only after I had begun work on this book. I ripped through it in two days, despite its massive size, because it is so intelligent and entertaining. It is probably impossible to write about London without owning a copy.

I could not imagine living life without the writers mentioned in these pages. In a world that seems increasingly senseless and graceless, they bring intelligence to bear on the human condition.