London Stories

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