Moving Pageant

During the period covered by this book - from the beginning of the 18th century to World War I - London was unique in its immensity, and supremely representative of the modern urban world in the making. Its overall size, its rate of growth, and the increasingly dense and diverse crowds that flowed through its streets, were paralleled in the vast contemporary outpouring of writing about this great city. The varied selection of this abundance of writing presented in this volume incorporates work by Daniel Defoe, James Boswell, Horace Walpole, Flora Tristan, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, H.G. Wells, and many others. Public and private, documentary and imaginative, the writings evoke the physical and social atmosphere and the cultural life of London's streets and other sites of ceremony and popular assembly. They represent many genres and styles of writing, including street-ballads and music-hall songs, excerpts from novels, epic and mock-epic poems, and accounts of riots, executions, sword-and-buckler fights, and state pageants and processions. The book includes an editor's introduction, illustrations, and biographical and critical commentaries on each o

'Rick Allen teaches English literature and his snipping scissors have picked out page after page of metaphors and rhetorical devices that capture in few words the noise, contrasts, night and day rhythms, and altogether stupendous quantitative sum of London's streets. His selection would be at home on the bookshelf in the spare room or downstairs loo, but must be intended mainly for student reading lists.' - Michael Hebbert, London Journal'This excellent book combines fact and fiction, the indispensable with the unusual, to reveal responses to [London] as varied as the metropolis itself. Superior to the familiar literary anthology, The Moving Pageant provides a systematic and thoughtfully organized perspective on London's history.' - Roy Porter'This superb compilation, while aimed at the academic reader, will be appreciated by anyone interested in the history, not only of London but of England.' - Contemporary Review, September, 1998'A fascinating collection of factual and fictional accounts ... Excellent.' - Sunday Times'An impressive collection of extracts and contemporary illustrations from the period in question This book creates an invaluable short-cut for students of social history and can be recommended without reservation.' - Joan Walpole Reilly, The Lecturer

Rick Allen is Principal Lecturer in English at Anglia Polytechnic University in Cambridge.