Review: London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd

 You know when you can just tell that someone loves something or someone so fucking much by the way they talk about it? I've rarely read anything that conveys love as strongly as Peter Ackroyd's "biography" of London does for that city. I also have never cried over a non-fiction book before. This is easily the most impassioned, poetic, fascinating history of anything I have ever read. I have for some time been searching for a decent history of England or London, but have gotten bored a few pages into every book I found. When I stumbled across this book at a random shop, I was immediately intrigued. This is not at all a chronological, ordered history, but a collection of quotes, research, and observations about various aspects of life in London during the last two thousand years. I'm still searching for that absorbing history of England/London that is going to lay out the rulers, wars, uprisings, laws, etc (recommendations, anyone?) but until then, this is the book to crown all history books that I've yet encountered.

The book is divided into chapters on various subjects, each one discussed chronologically. The subjects range from the expected (the building of the city, the influence of the river) to the utterly unusual (the fogs of London, the food, the problem of waste matter). The very colour of the London skies is thoroughly explored. The smells, the sounds, the atmosphere of every age are conveyed so well that the book is basically next door to stepping into a time machine. The majority of the chapters deal with cultural subjects and their evolution throughout the history of the city; such as drinking, superstition, entertainment, speech, etc. Ackroyd uses multiple quotations from many of London's most famous citizens, such as Wordsworth, Charles Dickens (inescapable in London), Samuel Johnson, and Virginia Woolf. Not least in the many descriptions of the city is Ackroyd's own evocative prose. He traces parallels and patterns with enchanting observations; for instance, he talks about how workmen laying telephone cables underground had to go through the buried ruins of a Roman villa so that the conversations of the current citizens pass through the ancient rooms where a different language was spoken thousands of years ago by citizens of quite a different London. He also collected an astonishing array of comments, correspondences, and observations about London from people throughout history who are either unknown or anonymous. How he managed to assemble this I cannot even imagine. It feels like Ackroyd has read every word that has ever been written on the subject since the city was founded, and even some that weren't.

Punch or May Day by Benjamin Haydon, used by Ackroyd to illustrate the riotous life and entertainment of the London streets in the early nineteenth century.

 
Ackroyd is very interested in tracing the continuities of the city. He stresses that London can never really be known fully, there will always be street unexplored, places unseen, secrets hidden, as the city continuously renews itself, parts of it vanishing and reappearing in endless cycles. He is traces how certain locales have had the same sort of activities associated with them and people living in them; a long history of radicals in Clerkenwell, theaters around Blackfriars, etc. but seems to get a little too carried away in speculation about whether or not it is something about the areas themselves that encourages these continuities. His enthusiasm does seem to border on excessive at times, for instance it's hard to tell whether or not he is actually serious in his speculations about the influences of magic, pagan worship, etc on the history of London, or he is merely observing and noting superstitions. Of course it is most probably the latter, but I found his earnestness at times too overwhelming.

London from Southwark, ca. 1630. Ackroyd pays a great deal of attention to the architectural similarities and differences between the ancient, medieval, and modern cities.

The amount of fascinating anecdotal information is enormous. If I tried to talk about even half of it, I would probably break the internet. But here are a couple of really great things I learned. Apparently, the "foggy London" of Victorian times was not at all what we see now. The nineteenth century, especially from the middle to the end of the century, had a most peculiar, dense fog that is incomparable to the present-day fairly benign occurrence. The fog could be any of a variety of shades (yellow, brown, black), blocked out daylight, and was the cause of a great number of traffic accidents. It was partially caused by the excessive use of coal, but was partially a natural phenomenon. There is a plane tree at the corner of Wood Street and Cheapside that has existed longer than living memory, no one knows its age and it continues to flourish today. In medieval times, when the Thames froze over, fairs used to spring up on the frozen river, with sometimes disastrous results when the thaws started (before reading this book I thought Virginia Woolf had invented this in Orlando).

The tree at the corner of Wood Street that has been flourishing for hundreds of years.

Ackroyd's love for the city is passionate and unflinching. He looks at all aspects of the city; from the glorious to the horrible, from the eternal to the fleeting, and embraces them all. He presents the desperate poverty of the slums and the cruelty of the prisons alongside the tales of stoical, almost celebratory communal spirit during the Blitz. He treats London as a living being, one that not only has not a history but a biography, and one that he loves while knowing the worst of it as well as the best. Perhaps he romanticizes London at times, but as someone who has lived there, there are few impulses I sympathize with more strongly. London, of all cities, is worthy of being romanticized. I really cannot praise this book highly enough, its combination of well-ordered, fascinatingly presented information and passionate, poetic writing is truly unique in my experience.