Chapter 28 - London

Summary

CI′TY. n.s. [cité, French, civitas, Latin.]

1. A large collection of houses and inhabitants.

Men seek their safety from number better united, and from walls and other fortifications; the use whereof is to make the few a match for the many, and this is the original of cities. Temple.

“For who would leave, unbrib’d, Hibernia’s Land, / Or change the Rocks of Scotland for the Strand?” asks the speaker in Samuel Johnson’s first major poem, London. As this work was published by Richard Dodsley and printed by Edward Cave at Tully’s Head in Pall Mall in 1738, when Johnson was twenty-nine, it marks his first literary entry into London. Famously, the author of this poem would later answer the rhetorical question flatly: “No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford” (Boswell, Life, 3:178).

Johnson’s first use of the Strand is a fitting emblem of the city itself. “In former Times it was an Highway leading from London to Westminster,” writes John Strype in 1720 in his survey of London, curving along the Thames between Charing Cross and the Inns of Court. In the eighteenth century it remained the most direct connection between the City (the old medieval center, and still the financial center) and the Court (Westminster, parks and palaces, Piccadilly and Pall Mall), passing through the Town (theatre and law, fashion and dissolution). The borough of Southwark lies south of the River Thames, a sort of suburb of town houses and retreats of more dubious sorts. To understand eighteenth-century London, one must understand these regions, their relations, and their associations.