It would be the merest commonplace to note that the citizens, all dressed alike and walking through the zoo with well proportioned steps, are themselves imprisoned in the city. It was a trite comment even in the nineteenth century, when Gustave Doré depicted the Londoners by the monkey cage or in the parrots’ walk as equivalent to the animals-animals which in turn seem to be observing them. Yet there is a resonance between the zoo and the city, in terms of noise and in terms of madness. The confused or shrill sound of the crowd was often compared with the sound of animals, while the deranged at Bedlam were in 1857 said by the Quarterly Review to resemble the “fiercer carnivores at the Zoological Gardens.” The comparison is obvious enough. The mad were kept in cages where they were visited by curious observers for the sake of entertainment. Said to sound like “ravens, screech-owls, bulls, and bears,” the deranged were as “ravenous and unsatiable as wolves” or as “drenched by compulsion as horses.” The deranged Londoner, in other words, is an animal; this definition spills over into descriptions of the crowd or mob as a “Beast.” The city itself becomes a vast zoo in which all of the cages have been unlocked.
CHAPTER 46
Weather Reports
When Boswell and Johnson were tasting all the delights of rural life in Greenwich Park, the following conversation ensued.
J.: “Is this not very fine?”
B.: “Yes, Sir; but not equal to Fleet Street.”
J.: “You are right, sir.”
Robert Herrick celebrated his return to London from Devon in 1640, and declared that
London my home is: though by hard fate sent
Into a long and irksome banishment.
To live in the country is a form of melancholy exile. “If these are comforting for a wife,” a sixteenth-century poem suggests, “Defend, defend me from a country life.” When a young West Indian boy from Notting Hill of the 1960s was given a week’s holiday in a Wiltshire village, he was asked how he had enjoyed the change. “I like it,” he replied, “but you can’t play in the streets as you can in London.” “I love walking in London,” Mrs. Dalloway remarks in Virginia Woolf’s novel (1925). “Really it’s better than walking in the country.” To the city dweller the country may not come as a revelation, but as a restriction. It is “dreadful slow,” one nineteenth-century Cockney girl is reported as saying, “no swings, no rahndabarts, nor origins [oranges?], no shops, no nothink-jest a great bare field only.”
The city is more beautiful than the country because it is rich in human history. Milton, in his blindness, remarked sadly that he was destined never more to look upon the sights “of this fair city.” Here he anticipated Wordsworth’s famous reflection upon London, from the vantage of Westminster Bridge in 1802: “Earth has not any thing to shew more fair.” The great poet of the nineteenth-century natural world wonders upon “the beauty of the morning” as it irradiates “Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples”:
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendor valley, rock, or hill.
It is a vivid, urban testimony from one whose poetic vision is always associated with landscape. The London suburbs, too, “can be so beautiful,” Vincent van Gogh wrote in the 1880s, “When the sun is setting red in the thin evening mist.”
The beauty and symmetry of the city are manifest in another sphere, also, as exemplified by Aristotle’s remark that “a man that is by nature and not merely by fortune citiless is either low in the scale of humanity or above it,” which is to say that humankind belongs to the city as much as fish belong to water. The city is the natural element for all those people who feel a compulsion to look upon the earth for contemporaries and companions. If the city is not “natural” then let us say, with Henry James, that it has recreated nature. “As the great city makes everything,” he wrote, “it makes its own system of weather and its own optical laws.”
The city is hotter, and dryer, than other parts of the country because the pollution that it creates has the effect of trapping warmth within the streets and buildings while, paradoxically, at the same time obscuring the sun’s rays. Many dark buildings retain their heat, and the vertical surfaces of the rising city are also better equipped to catch the low-lying sun; the materials of which London is made also retain the circumambient warmth.
Yet another explanation for the perceptible increase of heat in the capital may be found in the sheer congregation of people within so relatively small an area. The body heat of the citizens pushes up the temperature so that, on modern satellite maps, the city is a pale island among the brown and the green. Two hundred and fifty years ago a seventeenth-century observer made the same point. “The torrent of men, women and children, carts, carriages and horses from the Strand to the Exchange is so strong that it is said that in winter there are two degrees of Fahrenheit difference between this long line of street, and that of the west end.”
London’s weather shows other variations. Much of Westminster and the adjacent areas are built upon primeval swamps, and in these quarters the exhalation of damp and mist seems more palpable than elsewhere; Cornhill, built upon a summit, seems crisper and drier.
In the sixteenth century the London climate impressed itself upon the scholar and alchemist Giordano Bruno as “more temperate than anywhere else beyond and on this side of the equinoctial, snow and heat being banished from the subjacent earth as well as the excessive heat of the sun, which the perpetually green flowery ground witnesses, and so enjoys a perpetual spring.” There is an alchemical, or magical, tendency within his vocabulary which points to the image of London as embodying a mild chemical flame.
But then there was the rain.
Now in contiguous drops the flood comes down
Threatening with deluge this devoted Town.
Thus Jonathan Swift celebrates a “city shower” in the autumn of 1710. Annual amounts of rainfall were calculated from 1696, and they demonstrate that London’s showers and deluges declined in frequency towards the end of the eighteenth century only to rise again in the period from 1815 to 1844. Even in 1765, however, a French traveller noted the humidity of the city climate, which required fires to be lit “when it might be most easy to do without one”; he noted that as late as May all the apartments of the British Museum had fires within them “to preserve from damps and humidity the books, the manuscripts, the maps.”
But there have also been great floods. In 1090 London Bridge was carried away by a tumultuous river, and in 1236 the waters rose so high that boats could be rowed in the middle of Westminster Hall; there, too, in 1579, “a number of fish were left stranded after a flood.” The Walbrook became a rushing torrent in the autumn of 1547, sweeping away a young man attempting to cross it, and in 1762 the waters of the Thames were so raised “that the like had never been known in the memory of man.” “In less than five hours,” the contemporary report goes, “the water rose twelve feet in vertical height” and “people were lost in the high roads.” Even at the beginning of the twentieth century Lambeth was so inundated by the waters of the Thames that the houses of the area had to be visited by boats. So the air of London has always been laden with vapours and rains.