London: A Literary Anthology

“There’s nowhere like London really you know,” says Ginger in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies. From the innumerable books written about London or set in the city, it would seem countless other writers agree. This anthology features a broad collection of poems and scenes from novels that stretch from the fifteenth century to the present day. They range from Daniel Defoe extolling it as “the greatest, the finest, the richest city in the world,” and Rudyard Kipling declaring impatiently, “I am sick of London town,” to William Makepeace Thackeray moving among “the very greatest circles of the London fashion,” and Charles Dickens venturing into an “infernal gulf.”

Illustrated with evocative prints, drawings, and full-color artwork from British Library collections, the book explores London as never before. They will experience London for the first time with Lord Byron’s Don Juan and James Berry in his Caribbean gear “beginning in the city.” They will plunge into the multiracial whirlpool described in William Wordsworth’s Prelude, Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album, and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, and see the ever-changing city through the eyes of Tobias Smollett, John Galsworthy, and Angela Carter. From well-known texts to others that are less familiar, London: A Literary Anthology brings London to life through the words of many of the greatest writers in the English language.

Authors featured: Peter Ackroyd, Matthew Arnold, Arnold Bennett, E. F. Benson, James Berry, Laurence Binyon, William Blake, James Boswell, James Bramston, Robert Bridges, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Buchan, Lord Byron, Angela Carter, G. K. Chesterton, Joseph Conrad, Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, Alfred Douglas, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Dryden, William Dunbar, George Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, John Galsworthy, John Gay, George VI, George Gissing, W. S. Graham, Thomas Hardy, G. A. Henty, Robert Herrick, Henry James, Richard Jefferies, Ben Jonson, Rudyard Kipling, Hanif Kureishi, D. H. Lawrence, Doris Lessing, Penelope Lively, John Lydgate, Rose Macaulay, Colin MacInnes, Herman Melville, Arthur Morrison, Thomas Nashe, Mervyn Peake, Egan Pierce, Mary Robinson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Samuel Selvon, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Zadie Smith, Tobias Smollett, Robert Southey, Edmund Spenser, Jonathan Swift, William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, Hugh Walpole, Evelyn Waugh, H. G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, William Wordsworth, Israel Zangwill, and Benjamin Zephaniah