London sublime

A few weeks back Michael Leddy at Orange Crate Art posted a passage from Henry Mayhew's The Great World of London in which Mayhew described looking down at London from the basket of a hot-air balloon, and did so in a style that struck me as surprisingly lyrical and "literary" from an author who is usually associated with the meticulous (though not colorless) oral histories collected in London Labour and the London Poor.

As it turns out, though, the passage wasn't without precedent. I came across a similar bird's-eye view description in a 1971 volume entitled The Unknown Mayhew, which was edited by Eileen Yeo and E. P. Thompson, and which presented selections from rarely reprinted newspaper articles that Mayhew contributed to the Morning Chronicle in 1849-50. The whole extraordinary passage, a kind of overture to Mayhew's journalistic project, is too long to quote here, but it begins with a climb inside the dome of St. Paul's for a survey of the city and continues with a visit to the Custom House for a perspective of the docks and ships along the Thames. Then Mayhew considers the city at night, in a long paragraph that could have been plucked out of Our Mutual Friend or Bleak House.

Those who have only seen London in the day-time, with its flood of life pouring through its arteries to its restless heart, know it not in its grandest aspect. It is not in the noise and roar of the cataract of commerce pouring through its streets, nor in its forest of ships, nor in its vast docks and warehouses, that its true solemity is to be seen. To behold it in its greatest sublimity, it must be contemplated by night, afar off, from an eminence. The noblest prospect in the world, it has been well said, is London viewed from the suburbs on a clear winter's evening. The stars are shining in the heavens, but there is another firmament spread out below, with its millions of bright lights glittering at our feet. Line after line sparkles, like the trails left by meteors, cutting and crossing one another till they are lost in the haze of the distance. Over the whole there hangs a lurid cloud, bright as if the monster city were in flames, and looking afar off like the sea by night, made phosphorescent by the million creatures dwelling within it.

Mayhew was clearly a gifted writer, in addition to his accomplishments as a "social investigator" (a term Yeo and Thompson employ), but lest we think that he was guilty of merely aestheticizing the panorama of London with no regard for the conditions of the inhabitants of the great metropolis, here is the very human continuation of the passage quoted above:

At night it is that the strange anomalies of London are best seen. Then, as the hum of life ceases and the shops darken, and the gaudy gin palaces thrust out their ragged and squalid crowds, to pace the streets, London puts on its most solemn look of all. On the benches of the parks, in the nitches of the bridges, and in the litter of the markets, are huddled together the homeless and the destitute. The only living things that haunt the streets are the poor wretches who stand shivering in their finery, waiting to catch the drunkard as he goes shouting homewards. Here on a doorstep crouches some shoeless child, whose day's begging has not brought it enough to purchase it even the twopenny bed that its young companions in beggary have gone to. There, where the stones are taken up and piled high in the road, and the gas streams from a tall pipe in the centre of the street in a flag of flame –– there, round the red glowing coke fire, are grouped a ragged crowd smoking or dozing through the night beside it. Then, as the streets grow blue with the coming light, and the church spires and chimney tops stand out against the sky with a sharpness of outline that is seen only in London before its million fires cover the town with their pall of smoke –– then come sauntering forth the unwashed poor, some with greasy wallets on their back, to hunt over each dirt heap, and eke out life by seeking refuse bones or stray rags and pieces of old iron. Others, on their way to their work, gathered at the corner of the street round the breakfast stall, and blowing saucers of steaming coffee drawn from tall tin cans, with the fire shining crimson through the holes beneath; whilst already the little slattern girl, with her basket slung before her, screams watercresses through the sleeping streets.

The publication history of the Morning Chronicle articles and of London Labour and the London Poor (which grew from them) is convoluted, but Janice Schroeder has a useful summary at Branch. One interesting point that she makes is that a scholarly bias in favor of versions of texts that have been bound in book form has obscured the importance of Mayhew's original periodical work, which some critics argue is his best.

Update: Information on Christopher Anderson's fine recent biography of Mayhew is available here.

Logbook: Porcupines (2)

When I was out walking yesterday morning in one of my regular haunts, keeping an eye out for the deer and rabbits I often see if I arrive first before someone else has spooked them, I heard a rustling just off the trail and spotted a large porcupine with a beautiful dark coat. I was having camera trouble, and while I was fumbling with the zoom lens, trying to get it to co-operate, I figured the creature would note my presence and get itself out of sight. But porcupines have their own agendas, and also aren't very perceptive — they don't really need to be — and soon this one ambled out of the brush directly in front of me and went for a stroll down the middle of the trail for several hundred feet while I followed a few yards back. It only quickened its pace when it came under some hickory trees where some squirrels were chewing up husks and raining the remnants onto anyone or anything passing by.

Eventually it diverged from the trail but stopped for a moment, perhaps to register my presence before resuming its travels.

Little impalpable worlds

Nathaniel Hawthorne:

One afternoon, he was seized with an irresistible desire to blow soap-bubbles; an amusement, as Hepzibah told Phoebe apart, that had been a favorite one with her brother, when they were both children. Behold him, therefore, at the arched window, with an earthen pipe in his mouth! Behold him, with his gray hair, and a wan, unreal smile over his countenance, where still hovered a beautiful grace, which his worst enemy must have acknowledged to be spiritual and immortal, since it had survived so long! Behold him, scattering airy spheres abroad, from the window into the street! Little impalpable worlds were those soap-bubbles, with the big world depicted, in hues bright as imagination, or the nothing of their surface. It was curious to see how the passers-by regarded these brilliant fantasies, as they came floating down, and made the dull atmosphere imaginative about them. Some stopped to gaze, and, perhaps, carried a pleasant recollection of the bubbles onward as far as the street-corner; some looked angrily upward, as if poor Clifford wronged them, by setting an image of beauty afloat so near their dusty pathway. A great many put out their fingers or their walking-sticks, to touch, withal; and were perversely gratified, no doubt, when the bubble, with all its pictured earth and sky scene, vanished as if it had never been.

The House of Seven Gables

Image: Joseph Cornell, Soap Bubble Set (1949-1950), one of a number of works the artist devoted to the theme.

Islander

Amy Liptrot:

I never saw myself as, and resist becoming, the wholesome ‘outdoors’ type. But the things I experience keep dragging me in. There are moments that thrill and glow: the few seconds a silver male hen harrier flies beside my car one afternoon; the porpoise surfacing around our small boat; the wonderful sight of a herd of cattle let out on grass after a winter indoors, skipping and jumping, tails straight up to the sky with joy.

I am free-falling but grabbing these things as I plunge. Maybe this is what happens. I've given up drugs, don't believe in God and love has gone wrong, so now I find my happiness and flight in the world around me.

I came upon Amy Liptrot's memoir "by accident," by way of the film adaptation starring Saoirse Ronan. But what constitutes an accident? Most of The Outrun takes place in Orkney, a place that has long interested me because of its geography and long history of human occupation, and if it had been set elsewhere I might never have been aware of it.

Liptrot was raised in Orkney (of English parents) but as a teenager couldn't wait to get away from it. She spent a decade in London going to clubs, finding and losing jobs, and — most of all — drinking. She tried and failed to get off the bottle various times, but finally succeeded, with the help of a treatment program, when it became clear that she was facing a choice of either life or booze. She retreated to Orkney, got a summer job with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds counting elusive corncrakes, then rented a cottage on the tiny, treeless island of Papay (population less than one hundred).

The memoir and the film adaptation both have merits, but they're different merits. The movie is darker and more intense (and occasionally frustratingly non-linear); it focuses more on Liptrot's hellish and frenetic London years; the book is retrospective and meditative, following Liptrot as she retunes herself to the rhythms of the islands. Overall the film is faithful, and Ronan's high-energy performance is wonderful.

There is, of course, a movie tie-in edition with Saoirse Ronan on the cover, but I opted for this earlier Canongate paperback edition with cover art by an artist who works under the name Kai and Sunny.