ABSTRACT
The Moving Pageant is the first annotated anthology of writings on London street life. It comprises nearly one hundred extracts from over two centuries of literary life, including pieces by:
* Alexander Pope
* Jonathan Swift
* Daniel Defoe
* Samuel Johnson
* Eliza Haywood
* Horace Walpole
* William Hazlitt
* William Wordsworth
* Charles Dickens
* Flora Tristan
* Edgar Allen Poe
* Charlotte Bronte
* Fyodor Dostoyevsky
* Octavia Hill
* Beatrice Potter
* Henry James
* Oscar Wilde
* Arnold Bennett
* Joseph Conrad
* H.G. Wells
The volume assembles a rich and varied selection of this abundance of writing, showing London as truly unique in its immensity, and, ultimately, supremely representative of our modern urban world in the making.
The Moving Pageant comes complete with a superb editor's introduction, illustrations, and biographical and critical commentaries on each of the writers' entries. It also displays many genres and styles of writing, and includes street-ballads, music-hall songs, excerpts from novels, epic poems, and documentary accounts of riots and executions, as well as descriptions of state pageants and processions.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter |24 pages
Introduction
part 1|54 pages
‘Amusements Serious and Comical’
chapter 2|3 pages
Edward Ward, From The London SPY (1700), PTS 12, 13
chapter 3|3 pages
Alexander Pope, ‘Spenser: The Alley’ (Written by 1709, PUB. 1727)
chapter 4|3 pages
Jonathan Swift, ‘A Description of a City Shower’ (1710)
chapter 8|3 pages
Dudley Ryder, from Diary (1715– 16)
chapter 12|2 pages
Horace Walpole, from Letter to Sir Horace Mann (July 1742)
chapter 13|2 pages
Samuel Johnson, from Life of Savage (1744, 1781)
chapter 16|5 pages
William Whitehead, ‘The Sweepers’ (1754)
chapter 17|2 pages
James Boswell, from London Journal (1763)
chapter 18|2 pages
Pierre Jean Grosley, from a Tour to London (Written 1766–7)
chapter 19|2 pages
Horace Walpole, from Letter to sir Horace Mann (1 April 1768)
part 2|43 pages
‘A Mask of Maniacs’
chapter 20|3 pages
Tobias Smollett, from The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771)
chapter 21|2 pages
George Crabbe, from ‘The Poet's Journal’ (1780)
chapter 22|2 pages
Sophie van la Roche, from Diary (1786)
chapter 23|2 pages
William Blake, ‘London’, Songs of Experience (1794)
chapter 24|2 pages
Charles Lamb, from ‘a Londoner’, Morning Post (1 February 1802)
chapter 25|6 pages
William Wordsworth, from The Prelude, Book VII (1805)
chapter 26|3 pages
[Robert Southey], From Letters from England (1807)
chapter 28|3 pages
Pierce Egan the Elder, from Life in London (1821)
chapter 29|3 pages
Thomas de Quincey, from Confessions of an Opium-Eater (1821)
chapter 31|3 pages
Robert Mudie, from Babylon the Great (1825)
chapter 32|2 pages
Heinrich Heine, from English Fragments (1828)
chapter 34|3 pages
Francis Place, ‘The Street Charing Cross’, Autobiography (1835)
part III|78 pages
‘The Attraction of Repulsion’
chapter 35|2 pages
Charles Dickens, from Nicholas Nickleby (1839), Chapter 32
chapter 36|3 pages
Flora Tristan, from London Journal (1840), Chapters 8 and 10
chapter 38|2 pages
Charles Dickens, from Master Humphrey's Clock (1841)
chapter 40|3 pages
Edgar Allan Poe, from ‘A Man of the Crowd’ (1840, Revised 1845)
chapter 42|2 pages
Charles Dickens, from Dombey and son (1848), Chapter 6
chapter 46|2 pages
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in Memoriam VII (1850)
chapter 47|2 pages
Charlotte BrontË, from Villette (1853), Chapter 6
chapter 48|3 pages
Charles Dickens, from Bleak House (1853), Chapter 11
chapter 52|2 pages
Nathaniel Hawthorne, from The English Notebooks (6 and 8 December 1857)
chapter 53|3 pages
‘Another Unfortunate’, from Letter to The Times (24 February 1858)
chapter 54|3 pages
George Augustus Sala, from Twice Round The Clock (1859)
chapter 55|2 pages
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, from Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863)
chapter 56|5 pages
A.J. Munby, from ‘Diaries’ (1863–4)
chapter 57|4 pages
Robert Buchanan, from ‘Nell’ (1866)
chapter 58|1 pages
Matthew Arnold, ‘West London’ (1867)
chapter 59|8 pages
Anon., Three ‘Broadsides’, Curiosities of Street Literature (1871)
chapter 60|4 pages
Hippolyte Taine, from Notes on England (1872), Chapters 2 and 3
part IV|87 pages
‘In Darkest England and Some Ways Out’