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London Stories

Part of Everyman's Library Pocket Classics Series

Edited by Jerry White

Hardcover

$24.00 US

Knopf | Everyman's Library

4.86"W x 7.44"H x 1.17"D | 16 oz | 24 per carton

On sale May 06, 2014 | 432 Pages | 9780375712463

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London has the greatest literary tradition of any city in the world. Its roll call of storytellers includes cultural giants like Shakespeare, Defoe, and Dickens, and an innumerable host of writers of all sorts who sought to capture the essence of the place.

Acclaimed historian Jerry White has collected some twenty-six stories to illustrate the extraordinary diversity of both London life and writing over the past four centuries, from Shakespeare’s day to the present. These are stories of fact and fiction and occasionally something in between, some from well-known voices and others practically unknown. Here are dramatic views of such iconic events as the plague, the Great Fire of London, and the Blitz, but also William Thackeray’s account of going to see a man hanged, Thomas De Quincey’s friendship with a teenaged prostitute, and Doris Lessing’s defense of the Underground. This literary London encompasses the famous Baker Street residence of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and the bombed-out moonscape of Elizabeth Bowen’s wartime streets, Charles Dicken’s treacherous River Thames and Frederick Treves’s tragic Elephant Man. Graham Greene, Jean Rhys, Muriel Spark, and Hanif Kureishi are among the many great writers who give us their varied Londons here, revealing a city of boundless wealth and ragged squalor, of moving tragedy and riotous joy.

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Preface

Thomas Dekker
“London, lying sicke of the Plague” (1603)

John Evelyn
“The Great Fire of London” (1666)

Daniel Defoe
“A Ragged Boyhood” (1722)

Samuel Whyte
“A Visit to Charlotte Cibber” (1795)

James Lackington
“Love Among the Methodists” (1792)

Thomas de Quincey
“Ann of Oxford Street” (1822)

William Makepeace Thackeray
“Going to see a Man Hanged” (1840)

Henry Mayhew
“Watercress Girl” (1851)

Charles Dickens
“Down with the Tide” (1853)

C. Maurice Davies
“The Walworth Jumpers” (1876)

Eliza Lynn Linton
“My First Soiree” (1891)

Arthur Conan Doyle
“The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle (1892)

George Gissing
“Christopherson” (1906)

R. Andom
“The Fetching of Susan” (1912)

Frederick Treves
“The Elephant Man” (1923)

John Galsworthy
“A Forsyte Encounters the People” (1917)

Graham Greene
“A Little Place off the Edgware Road” (1939)

Mollie Panter-Downes
“Good Evening, Mrs Craven” (1942)

William Sansom
“The Wall” (1944)

Elizabeth Bowen
“Mysterious Kor” (1945)

J. B. Priestley
“Coming to London” (1957)

Jean Rhys
“Tigers are Better-Looking” (1964)

Muriel Spark
“Daisy Overend” (1967)

Doris Lessing
“In Defence of the Underground” (1992)

Irma Kurtz
“Islington” (1997)

Hanif Kureishi
“The Umbrella” (1999)

Preface

London has the greatest literary tradition of any city in the world. Its roll-call of story-tellers includes cultural giants who changed the way that people thought about writing, like Shakespeare, Defoe and Dickens. But there has also been an innumerable host of writers who have sought to capture the essence of London and what it meant for the people who lived there or were merely passing through. They found a city of boundless wealth and ragged squalor, of moving tragedy and riotous joy; and they faithfully transcribed what they saw and felt in the stories they told of London town.

There have been many previous collections of London short stories, both from a single author and from many hands. This collection is distinctively different in two ways. First, and reflecting the long heritage of London writing, the stories here span four centuries from around 1600 to the pre- sent day. Such a long chronological scope gives an insight into the changing preoccupations of Londoners and London writers over that time; and into some of the continuities – trauma both public and private, the never-ending struggle against adversity in the giant city, and the ceaseless stimulation of its delights. Second, I have selected stories that are both fictional and factual. That again reflects the diversity of London writing and the need for the city’s writers to live by their pens in a range of media, with short stories, novels and journalism prominent among them.

In exploring this terrain I’ve constructed a mix of the familiar and the unusual. Even where authors are expectedly present, notably Dickens, say, or Thackeray, I have presented them in a guise that will be unfamiliar to many – as metropolitan journalists. There will be some, like ‘R. Andom’ (Alfred Walter Barrett), a witty chronicler of London sub- urban life, who deserve to be better known and others, like Arthur Conan Doyle, whose names have long been known the whole world over. And there will be others still whose names have been lost to us but whose stories have seized the imagination of subsequent generations, like Sir Frederick Treves who ‘rescued’ the Elephant Man from a fairground freak-show and recalled the moment with extraordinary vividness many years after.

A similarly contrasting list of writers and stories might have been effortlessly devised to fill many more volumes than this, so rich has London’s literary canon grown over the centuries. But while having to make some difficult choices I hope to have devised a collection that will prove as diverse and stimulating as the city that gave these stories their inspiration.

JERRY WHITE

"In London Stories, the city's sprawling historical and literary landscape is served up in a tidy collection of 26 short works that span four centuries. . . . Jerry White doesn't stint on delivering the goods on London's dark side, which, of course, will delight true London devotees. . . . For the literary-minded traveler, the book is a gold mine." --The New York Times

"The latest of the covetable Everyman Pocket Classics. . . . London Stories boasts 432 rewarding pages. . . . [White] has mixed up these London stories very inventively." --Evening Standard (London)

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