So great was London that it seemed to contain within itself all previous civilisations. Babylon was then joined with other empires. The naves and transepts of Westminster Abbey were compared to the City of the Dead beyond Cairo, while the railway terminus at Paddington invoked images of the pyramid of Cheops. Nineteenth-century architects, in their fantastic images of London, created pyramids for Trafalgar Square and Shooters Hill while also designing great pyramidal cemeteries beside Primrose Hill. Here we see the power of imperial London creating a cult of death as well as of magnificence.
In Ree’s Cyclopaedia of 1819, the docks once more arouse primitive imagery. The climate and atmosphere of London in turn create “startling hieroglyphics that are written by soot and smoke upon its surface.” So the stones of London became ancient by association. Somehow the spectacle of the metropolis encourages intimations of unfathomable age-“petrified,” to have been turned into stone, may also be covertly introduced into this vision in its contemporary sense of great fear.
And beyond Egypt there was Rome. The subterranean vaults beneath the Adelphi reminded one architectural historian of “old Roman works” while the sewer system of Joseph Bazalgette was often compared with the Roman aqueducts. It was the sense of magnificence, combined with the triumphalism of empire, which most notably impressed these observers of the nineteenth-century city. When Hippolyte Taine ventured into the Thames Tunnel, itself compared with the greatest feats of Roman engineering, he described it “as enormous and dismal as the gut of some Babel.” Then the association of ideas and civilisations became too strong for him. “I am always discovering that London resembles ancient Rome … How heavy this modern Rome, as did the ancient one, bear down upon the backs of the working classes. For every monstrous agglomeration of building, Babylon, Egypt, the Rome of the Caesars, represents an accumulation of effort, an excess of fatigue.” Then he described “the Roman machine” which made slaves of those who toiled for it. This was another truth, then, about London as Rome: it turned its citizens into the slaves of the machine.
As a model for the archway leading to the Bullion Yard of the Bank of England, Sir John Soane chose the Roman triumphal arch; the walls of Lothbury Court beside it were inscribed with allegorical figures taken from Roman mythology. The massive corner of the Bank, between Lothbury and Princes Street, was based upon the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli. The interiors, as well as the exterior, of the Bank had Roman antecedents. Many halls and offices constructed within, like the Dividend Office and the Bank Stock Office, were designed from models of the Roman baths; in addition the chief cashier’s office, forty-five feet by thirty, was built in homage to the Temple of the Sun and Moon at Rome. Here then, in direct form, is the worship of money based upon Roman originals; when the association is made with that ancient city, it is essentially one of barbaric triumphalism.
But there were other associations. Verlaine suggested that it was “a Biblical city” ready for the “fire of heaven” to strike it. Carlyle described it in 1824 as an “enormous Babel … and the flood of human effort rolls out of it and into it with a violence that almost appals one’s very sense.” So in one context it is compared with the greatest civilisations of the past, with Rome or Egypt, and yet in another it is quickly broken down into a violent wilderness, a savage place, without pity or restraint of any kind. When Carlyle adds that London is also “like the heart of all the universe,” there is a suggestion that London is an emblem of all that is darkest, and most extreme, within existence itself. Is it the heart of empire, or the heart of darkness? Or is one so inseparable from the other that human effort and labour become no more than the expression of rage and the appetite for power?
In one sense London has always been known as a wilderness or jungle, a desert or primeval forest. “Whoever considers the Cities of London and Westminster, with the late vast increases of their suburbs,” Henry Fielding wrote in 1751, “the great irregularity of their buildings, the immense number of lanes, alleys, courts and bye-places, must think that had they been intended for the very purpose of concealment, they could not have been better contrived. Upon such a view the whole appears as a vast wood or forest in which the thief may harbour with as great security as wild beasts do in the deserts of Arabia and Africa.” He described another aspect of this wilderness in Tom Jones, where he dwelled upon the difficulties of London life, “for as you are not put out of countenance, so neither are you cloathed or fed by those who do not know you. And a man may be as easily starved in Leadenhall Market as in the deserts of Arabia.”
Fielding’s contemporary Tobias Smollett had the same vision. London “being an immense wilderness, in which there is neither watch nor ward of any signification, nor any order or police” affords thieves and other criminals “lurking places as well as prey.” The images of jungle and desert are used as if they were alike precisely because they both suggest the “wilderness” of untamed and uncharted human nature; London represents some primeval force or habitat in which the natural instincts of humankind are allowed free expression.
In the nineteenth century the connotations of wilderness changed from unconstrained and uncurtailed life to one of barren desolation. The city is what Mayhew called “a bricken wilderness,” and the image of dense cover is replaced by one of hard stone with “its profuse rank undergrowth of low, mean houses spreading in all directions.” This is the nineteenth-century desert, far larger and far more desolate than that of the eighteenth century. It is what James Thomson, in “The Doom of a City” published in 1857, described as the “desert streets” within “a buried City’s maze of stone.” The endlessness of the city streets, so well evoked by Engels, is here associated with the coldness and hardness of stone itself; it represents not the wilderness of burgeoning life but the wilderness of death without sorrow or pity. “Wilderness! Yes, it is, it is,” a character says in Nicholas Nickleby. “It is a wilderness,” says the old man with such animation. “It was a wilderness to me once. I came here barefoot-I have never forgotten it.” And Little Dorrit cries out, “And London looks so large, so barren and so wild.”
So in turn London has recalled Pompeii, another wilderness of stone. After the bombardments of the Second World War, for example, it was remarked that London already looked “as ancient as Herculaneum.” But London has not been buried or overwhelmed by the lava-flow of time. All the constituents of its life return. An Italian visitor, perhaps more astute than those who preferred the conventional analogies, described London as “the Land of the Cyclops.” In a survey of late twentieth-century Docklands we find a great “Cyclops Wharf.” There is a photograph of South Quay in the same vicinity, where the tower of South Quay Waterside is surmounted by a pyramid. The great tower of Canary Wharf is adorned with a pyramid in similar fashion, suggesting that the associations with that empire have never really faded. Even the pumping station for storm water in the Docklands has been constructed, like some guardian of the waters, in the image of an Egyptian monument.