A celebrated American of the nineteenth century, James Russell Lowell, has written: “I confess that I never think of London, which I love, without thinking of that palace which David built for Bathsheba, sitting in hearing of one hundred streams-streams of thought, of intelligence, of activity. One other thing about London impresses me beyond any other sound I have ever heard, and that is the low, unceasing roar one hears always in the air; it is not a mere accident, like a tempest or a cataract, but it is impressive, because it always indicates human will, and impulse, and conscious movement; and I confess that when I hear it I almost feel as if I were listening to the roaring loom of time.”
Here, then, is a further sense of the numinous. London becomes the image of time itself. The great “streams” of thought and intelligence never cease; to change the metaphor, they resemble cosmic winds. But is the sound of the city also the sound of time itself? The noise would then be striated by the shuttling of the future into the past, that instantaneous and irremediable process that takes place in a “present” moment that can never really be glimpsed or known. The sound is then one of vast loss, the “howl” of which Shelley writes. In the phrase of T.S. Eliot, a poet whose vision of time and eternity sprang directly from his experience of London, “All time is unredeemable.” London is unredeemable, too, and we may also think of its noise as comprising a vast mass of subjective private times continually retreating into non-existence.
Even in the middle of that maelstrom, however, it was possible to pick out and to remember specific London sounds which belonged to that place and to no other in the nineteenth century. There were the notes of the “German band,” with their horn and trombone and clarionet; there was the lament of the barrel organ and the barrel piano; there was the cry of “Lucifers” from an old man bearing a tray of matches. There was the rumble of the scavenger’s cart drawn by great horses “adorned with tiaras of tinkling bells.” There was the incessant clatter of horses’ hooves which, when they departed, left London bereft. “I shall miss the ‘orses’ feet at night, somethin’ shockin’,” one Cockney lady put it, “they was sech comp’ny like.” There was of course the continual noise of wheels, endlessly turning with their own resistless momentum. “To the stranger’s ear,” a journalist wrote in 1837, “the loud and everlasting rattle of the countless vehicles which ply the streets of London is an intolerable annoyance. Conversation with a friend whom one chances to meet in midday is out of the question … one cannot hear a word the other says.” Jane Carlyle, having settled in London with her husband Thomas, asked a correspondent in 1843: “Is it not strange that I should have an everlasting sound in my ears, of men, women, children, omnibuses, carriages, glass coaches, street coaches, wagons, carts, dog-carts, steeple bells, door-bells, gentlemen-raps, twopenny post-raps, footmen-showers-of-raps, of the whole devil to pay.” It is as if the whole world had broken in upon her. That same sense emerges in a book entitled Memories of London in the 1840s where the constant roar of traffic was described “as if all the noises of all the wheels of all the carriages in creation were mingled and ground together into one subdued, hoarse, moaning hum.”
Wooden paving was laid upon many of the main thoroughfares in the 1830s-Oxford Street and the Strand being two particular examples-but nothing could really withstand the encroaching noise of the city. In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) R. L. Stevenson writes of “the low growl of London from all round.” In a life of Tennyson it is remarked that the poet “always delighted in the ‘central roar’ of London.” “This is the mind,” he told his son, “that is a mood of it.” Charlotte Brontë heard that “roar” and was deeply excited by it. In each instance the presence of a living thing is being registered, perhaps with some disquiet; it is one great life comprising the sum of individual lives so that, at the end of Little Dorrit, the little heroine and her husband “went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted and chafed, and made their usual uproar.” Those who are “blessed” are silent, like strangers in the city, but the “eager” and the restless maintain their uproar. Or, rather, the sound of London is transmitted through them.
It has changed during the course of the twentieth century. Those at the beginning recall the noise of horse-driven vans and the apoplectic roar of the omnibuses mingled with the strangely peaceful and satisfying sound of horses’ hooves. It is perhaps not surprising that the writers who dwelled in the city in the first decades of the twentieth century, should instil an enchantment in those noises; it is as if they were aware of their imminent destruction.
In 1929, according to the Journal of the London Society, a deputation from the British Medical Association had visited the Ministry of Health to suggest that “city noise” was “a menace to public health.” Instead of the sound of London being celebrated as a token of life itself, or at least of the energy of the city, it was now being construed as injurious and unwelcome. It had become more uniform and monotonous so that, two years later, a report noted that “people are beginning to rebel against this disturbing, wearying factor in their lives.” It had also become more impersonal and, in response to its dehumanising potential, the measurement of the “decibel” was introduced. Various sources of what was now considered a nuisance were reported. It offers an odd contrast with Hogarth’s print of The Enraged Musician, surrounded by human sources of sound, to note that the new disturbers of the peace in the 1930s included the pneumatic street drill, the motor horn, building construction, and the railway steam-whistle described as “harsh and grating.” Much attention was paid to the “unnatural” quality of London noise-“a riveter is equal to 112 decibels, whereas thunder can register only 70”-thus reintroducing the old notion of a city intrinsically opposed to natural laws of growth and development. It was also suggested that the sound of London had a wholly deleterious effect upon “the brain and nervous system,” creating fatigue, inattention and general weariness.
D.H. Lawrence had a peculiar intuition of this change in the city’s noise. He had considered it, in the first decade of the twentieth century, as an expression of “the vast and roaring heart of all adventure” with the emphasis upon “roar” or “uproar” as a token of exhilaration; but then the traffic had become “too heavy.” This was also the gist of official reports, so that the novelist can be presumed to have touched upon an authentic alteration. “The traffic of London used to roar with the mystery of man’s adventure on the seas of life” but now “it booms like monotonous, far-off guns, in a monotony of crushing something, crushing the earth, crushing out life, crushing everything dead.”
The reiterated note of monotony is entirely characteristic of descriptions of modern London sound. Virginia Woolf described the noise of traffic as “churned into one sound, steel blue, circular” which adequately conveys the artificiality or impersonality of the circumambient noise. In recent years, too, there have been reports of a low humming sound which can be discerned everywhere. It is an accompaniment of fluorescent light, perhaps, or of the vast electronic systems working continuously beneath the surface of the city; it is now the low-level “background” noise which masks other sounds. The noise of cars and cooling systems has changed the air of London in every sense, principally by dulling down the variety and heterogeneity of sound. The great roar of nineteenth-century London is today diminished in intensity but more widespread in its effects; from a distance it might be recognised as an incessant grinding sound. The image would no longer be that of a sea but, rather, of a machine. The beating “heart” of London can no longer be credited with human or natural attributes.