previous | next

Like all his contemporaries (perhaps with the honourable exception of arch-towny Samuel Johnson, who once grudgingly conceded that a particular mountain was a "considerable protuberance") landscape-speak came glibly to him. The rest of his journey passes without landscape comment until he reaches Highgate Hill; "…when I had a view of London I was all life and joy". At which point I leaned eagerly over my copy of the diary hungry to know what London actually looked like then; after all he had been able to say the 'right thing' about Arthur's Seat back home; so what about the view of London from Highgate Hill? Nothing. The aesthetic was just not there.

Fair enough; Boswell is a hustler, not an aesthete; he is after fame, preferment, women. But he is in line with his contemporaries, even his contemporary aesthetes; there is simply very little description of London at the time. London life in abundance, yes; but (compared to Dickens seventy or eighty years later) no real sense of the city as "townscape", a way of looking at and describing cities.

The aesthetic discovery of the city lay in wait. Intimations do appear. Defoe in his Tour (1724 - 26) asks "Whither will this monstrous city extend?" Monstrous City: a premonitory hint of excitement here (as well as disapproval). But was not until the nineteenth century that we get a set of aesthetic responses to the city at all as deep as they had been to the countryside. Forget Wordsworth's poem On Westminster Bridge:

Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie.
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air..
Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still"

Wordsworth is describing a sleeping city. He wasn't as happy to find himself crammed into a bus with Londoners.

Byron's description is better, properly urban and unsentimental: no smokeless air here:

previous | next