ABSTRACT
This chapter address the way in which, apart from providing an original guided tour of London and conveying the throbbing modernity of the metropolis, Virginia Woolf's six lively essays further offer reflections on several art forms while they are themselves informed by them. It shows how the essays combine the art of description and a photographic method. The chapter explores Woolf's art of description in the Good Housekeeping essays, what the editor of the magazine called 'a gallery of scenes made vividly alive by the brilliant pen of Woolf', what could also be called a series of hypotyposes. It argues that in 'The Docks of London', hypotyposis is foregrounded, practiced with great skill and concomitantly theorised. In a humble essay commissioned by a middlebrow magazine, Woolf turns theorist, and her humble essay turns into what can be called a humble form of theory.
