Why I want to love London. But just don’t.

I felt a profound connection with someone a few weekends ago. One of those deep rooted, epiphany type moments when you realise, with a jolt, that some truly ‘gets’ you. It happens oh so rarely and, if or when it does, it never fails to astound me. I was overcome with emotion, a feeling of desperate love and relief and a hope that I am not, after all, alone. And the person that I experienced this moment with? This heart wrenching, tear inducing, knee quivering, all-consuming, gratitude-laden moment? (Hyperbolic? Me?) That wonderful soul has, in fact been dead a good while. That soul was none other than Charles Dickens. And this tender moment of understanding occurred in a room full of other English teachers during a lecture on ‘The Geography of the Gothic’.

I mentioned in a previous blog post that everyone I know is sneaking off to London at an alarming speed. I understand why this is- the job opportunities, avoiding a soul-sucking commute, the chance to move out and experience that distinctly ‘London’ lifestyle. The drinks after work, the unusual exhibitions/events/pop ups, the impromptu nights out that don’t involve an extortionate taxi fare and/or a journey home time that takes well over an hour.  But I could still think of nothing I’d rather do less than live there.

I want to love the place. I have an almost romanticised notion of what it would be like living there (almost akin to my notion of a life spent meandering the streets of Paris in a flowing gown, eating pastries and drinking coffee). I like the idea of being able to have so many opportunities on my doorstep. I think of the brunch rendezvous catching up with friends over eggs Benedict; the cocktails consumed in venues with obscure decor; the classes in pottery or life drawing; the writing workshops I could attend; and the local shops and hidden treasures I would come to know, the ones that only a resident would know about. I even enjoy myself to some extent on day trips there. This Saturday I went to the Christmas market outside the Tate, had a drink in a quaint pub and had a mooch around Borough market. I admired the twinkling lights and pretended to ignore the crowds. But, after a few hours, when my feet begin to ache and my cheeks became pink with cold, I started to look forward to getting home. I find myself getting agitated with the swarms of faceless people; the cacophony of abrasive sounds becomes too jarring; I begin to feel inconsequential, claustrophobic and smothered, surrounded by towering monsters of grey concrete. I enjoy watching the blurred view from the train window become leafier. And when I step off at my stop, I feel like I can breathe deeply again.

At times I feel like there is something a bit off about me for not wanting to cast off the country bumpkin skin and join everyone there. I know I should probably want to take full advantage of the city while I am young and with few ties. It just isn’t me though and I’ve slowly come to realise that.

 Hence my profound affinity with Dickens. During this lecture on the Gothic (part of a course that I have been sent on by my school- a course that is so interesting but does involved giving up several Saturdays- and takes place in London, ironically), the lecturer drew our attention to quotes 5 and 6 on our handout. I won’t go into the Gothic context of these quotations but, when we read them, I knew that Dickens must have seen the aspects of London that I can see. A London so different to ours now, but one that must have shared the same unsettling qualities; the unnaturalness, the sinister undercurrent of nameless crowds, the impersonality of it, the stagnation and the corporate, empty current always pushing the people on, rushing and exhausted. I haven’t found my feelings on the city expressed by anyone else in such a way, so I will finish this post and leave you with his words. And despite being years and years apart, I know that Dickens probably would have ‘got’ me to some extent. 

 

“She often looked without compassion, at such a time, upon the stragglers who came wandering into London, by the great highway hard by, and who, footsore and weary, gazing fearfully at the huge crowd before them, as if foreboding that their misery would be but as a drop of water in the sea, or as a grain of sea-sand on the shore, went shrinking on, cowering before the angry weather, and looking as if the very elements rejected them. Day after day such travellers crept past, but always in one direction- always towards the town. Swallowed up in one phrase or other of its immensity, towards which they seemed impelled by a desperate fascination, they never returned. Food for the hospitals, the churchyards, the prisons, the river, fever, madness, vice and death,- they passed on to the monster, roaring in the distance and were lost.”

Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, (1846-8), Chapter 33 

“It was a Sunday evening in London, gloomy, close and stale. Maddening church bells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp and flat, cracked and clear, fast and slow, made the brick-and-mortar echoes hideous. Melancholy streets, in a penitential garb of soot, steeped the souls of the people who were condemned to look at them out of windows, in dire despondency. In every thoroughfare, up almost every alley, and down almost every turning, some doleful bell was throbbing, jerking, tolling, as if the Plague were in the city and the dead-carts were going round. Everything was bolted and barred that could by possibility furnish relief to an overworked people. No pictures, no unfamiliar animals, no rare plants or flowers, no natural or artificial wonders of the ancient world- all TABOO with that enlightened strictness, that the ugly South Sea gods in the British Museum might have supposed themselves at home again. Nothing to see but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to breathe but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to change the brooding mind, or raise it up.”

Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (1857), Chapter 3