Regency London, or the ‘Romantic Metropolis’, has come to be known in recent scholarship as a site of dramatic social and technological transformation. With a population exceeding one million by 1800, a figure that doubled by 1850, no European city compared to its scale or cosmopolitan scope. Describing the radical impact of this social transformation, with its attendant ‘gross and violent stimulants’, Wordsworth wrote:

Networked as never before by new systems of information, dwelling in increasingly confined urban spaces, distracted by novel entertainments that fed off immediate sensation, Wordsworth's Londoners are passive instruments of an insatiable undiscriminating media machine.

Nor was this an atypical response to the sheer density and disorientating accelerations of this new urban life. One of the defining characteristics of London during the Napoleonic wars, as Daniel Headrick observes, was the technological transformation of information systems, such as the telegraphic communication of news, heightening the sense of porous boundaries between nations, as well as minds, as Wordsworth's anxious reflections on the state of modern poetry suggest.