The 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