ntil the Carnaby Street of
the 1960s and, alongside
images and experiences
provided by war and
royal occasions, the iconic
images of London have frequently
been Victorian. Charles Dickens and
Jack the Ripper helped give the capital
a reputation for squalor and danger that,
despite being just one aspect of London,
was an aspect that gripped the popular
imagination thanks to the printing press.
The same can be said of Arthur Conan
Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. These
accounts circulated not only within the
Anglosphere but also throughout the
wider world, further enhancing London’s
somewhat grisly reputation.
As well as being the capital of the
largest empire in the world it was
the centre of many spheres of
informal influence. Alongside
the physical communications
structure, notably the docks
and railway stations, were
the postal service and
telegraphy that moved
around ideas and literature.
London became a world
city in the 19th century,
dramatically so with the
Great Exhibition of 1851,thanks to the growth of the empire and
the metropolis itself, with its political,
commercial and cultural power. This was
further marked in London by triumphant
monuments to its military heroes,
notably in Trafalgar Square but also
across central London. National greatness
was also on display in new street names,
although Dickens could be sceptical
about this trend, as shown in his
discussion of the Circumlocution Office
in Little Dorrit and about both economic
liberalism and reforming ‘Chadwickism’
in Hard Times. Dickens was also sardonic
about MPs, as in Nicholas Nickleby with
Gregsbury and his “tolerable command
of sentences with no meaning in them...
whether I look merely at home, or...
contemplate the boundless prospect of
conquest and possession – achieved by
British perseverance and British valour –
which is outspread before me, I clasp my
hands, and turning my eyes to the broad
expanse above my head, exclaim, ‘Thank
Heaven, I am a Briton!’.”Industrial hub
London in Dickens’ lifetime was a centre
of technological development, not least
in manufacturing, although not on the
scale of Coketown in Hard Times. Steam
transformed many industries, includingLondon’s fog became one
of the city’s famous traits,
but it was also deadly©^ AlamyBY JEREMY BLACK
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