Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on the Text
- Introduction
- 1 Consuming the Periodical Text: Hunt, Hazlitt and the Anxiety of Cockneyism
- 2 Domesticating the Flâneur: Coleridge, De Quincey and the Forms of Metropolitanism
- 3 The Great Wen and the Rural Gothic
- 4 Utility and Pity: Wordsworth, Blake and Egan, and the Act of Charity
- 5 Lamb, Theatricality and the Fool
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
3 - The Great Wen and the Rural Gothic
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on the Text
- Introduction
- 1 Consuming the Periodical Text: Hunt, Hazlitt and the Anxiety of Cockneyism
- 2 Domesticating the Flâneur: Coleridge, De Quincey and the Forms of Metropolitanism
- 3 The Great Wen and the Rural Gothic
- 4 Utility and Pity: Wordsworth, Blake and Egan, and the Act of Charity
- 5 Lamb, Theatricality and the Fool
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
It should seem to me, from my (trivial) observations, that noblemen and gentlemen have almost abandon'd the country … and that dowagers have gone away … and that as that encreasing Wen, the metropolis, must be fed the body will gradually decay … Many landowners, especially among the politically active magnates, spend only a modest amount of time on their estates, and in this respect were much more urban in character … than is commonly allowed.
John Byng, Torrington Diaries (1789)The MP John Byng's reference to the metropolis as ‘that encreasing Wen’ occurs over thirty years before the more famous ‘Great Wen’ of Cobbett's Political Register essays of 1822–6, which were collected as Rural Rides in 1830. This chronology reminds us that writers of Lamb's generation grew up and lived at a time of intense debate over London's growing socio-economic and cultural influence, over the country as a whole and rural life in particular. Raymond Williams traces usage of the term ‘wen’ for describing London's phenomenal growth as far back as 1783, and, moreover, proposes that it was a politically expedient term, rather than an accurate reflection of the capital's relationship to the country. Williams argues that, far from being aberrant,
what the expansion of London actually indicated was the true condition and development of the country as a whole. If it was seen as monstrous, or as a diseased growth, this had logically to be traced back to the whole social order. But of course it was easier to denounce the consequences and ignore, or go on idealizing, the general condition.
Nevertheless, at the end of the nineteenth century the fact of London's accelerated expansion in the early decades could still be imaged in terms of monstrosity, as Conan Doyle's novel Beyond the City indicates: ‘When the Metropolis was still quite a distant thing … in the days when the century was young’, recalls the narrator, there were cottages scattered amongst ‘rolling country-side’ before ‘the City had thrown out a long brick-feeler here and there, curving, extending, and coalescing, until at last the little cottages had been gripped round by these red tentacles, and had been absorbed …’.
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- Information
- Charles Lamb, Elia and the London MagazineMetropolitan Muse, pp. 87 - 120Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014