London: The Biography

886 Pages·2000·8.96 MB·English

by  Ackroyd Peter

Acclaim for Peter Ackroyd’s
London: The Biography
“The book requires a leisurely pace; anything quicker would endanger the
pleasure to be had from the variety on offer…. There is nothing quite like
it.”
—The Boston Globe
“Ackroyd gives London a gift, the likes of which more callow cities can
only hope, one day, to get.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Invariably exciting and immensely enjoyable…. Ackroyd coruscates with
ideas and fancies…. The total effect is spectacular and vastly stimulating.
‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.’ The same could be said
with equal justice of any reader who finds no pleasure or instruction in
Ackroyd’s books.”
—The Spectator
“Ackroyd writes in a wonderfully graphic style that carries the reader
through historical byways effortlessly.”
—The Denver Post
“A tour de force by a writer of immense skill…. A treasure of information
and anecdote about one of the world’s great cities, a book to be taken up
again and again for the pleasures that lie within.”
—The Seattle Times
“Ackroyd deserves great praise for writing a book equal to its gargantuan
subject…. [It] succeeds on the most expansive and most intimate levels.”
— The Orlando Sentinel
“Packed with strange delights and bizarre occurrences…. Ackroyd is a
writer of memorable, eccentrically rhythmic sentences that one wants to
quote at length.”
—Newsday
“Enthralling…. Witty and imaginative.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred)
“Wonderful and weighty…. Ackroyd has created a rich celebration of a
unique city.”
—The Wall Street Journal
B
y the same author
FICTION
The Great Fire of London
The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
Hawksmoor
Chatterton
First Light
English Music
The House of Doctor Dee
Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem
Milton in America
The Plato Papers
BIOGRAPHY
T. S. Eliot
Dickens
Blake
The Life of Thomas More
POETRY
The Diversions of Purley
CRITICISM
Notes for a New Culture
Peter Ackroyd
London
Peter Ackroyd is a bestselling writer of both fiction and nonfiction. His most recent
books include the biographies Dickens, Blake, and Thomas More and the novels The Trial
of Elizabeth Cree, Milton in America, and The Plato Papers. He has won the Whitbread
Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature’s William Heinemann Award (jointly),
the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and The Guardian fiction prize. He lives in London.

For Jain Johnston
and
Frederick Nicholas Robertson
Contents
List of Illustrations
Chronology
Acknowledgements
The City as Body
From Prehistory to 1066
1 The Sea!
2 The Stones
3 Holy! Holy! Holy!
The Early Middle Ages
4 You Be All Law Worthy
London Contrasts
5 Loud and Everlasting
6 Silence Is Golden
The Late Medieval City
7 This Companye
Onward and Upward
8 Rather Dark and Narrow
9 Packed to Blackness
10 Maps and Antiquarians
Trading Streets and Trading Parishes
11 Where Is the Cheese of Thames Street?
A London Neighbourhood
12 The Crossroads
London as Theatre
13 Show! Show! Show! Show! Show!
14 He Shuld Neuer Trobell the Parish No More
15 Theatrical City
16 Violent Delights
17 Music, Please
18 Signs of the Times
19 All of Them Citizens
Pestilence and Flame
20 A Plague Upon You
21 Painting the Town Red
After the Fire
22 A London Address
23 To Build Anew
Crime and Punishment
24 A Newgate Ballad
25 A Note on Suicide
26 A Penitential History
27 A Rogues Gallery
28 Horrible Murder
29 London’s Opera
30 Raw Lobsters and Others
31 Thereby Hangs a Tale
Voracious London
32 Into the Vortex
33 A Cookery Lesson
34 Eat In or Take Away
35 Market Time
36 Waste Matter
37 A Little Drink or Two
38 Clubbing
39 A Note on Tobacco
40 A Bad Odour
41 You Sexy Thing
42 A Turn of the Dice
London as Crowd
43 Mobocracy
44 What’s New?
The Natural History of London
45 Give the Lydy a Flower
46 Weather Reports
47 A Foggy Day
Night and Day
48 Let There Be Light
49 Night in the City
50 A City Morning