London Stories

by Jerry White

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 the world 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.
They are stories of fact and fiction and occasionally something in between. Some voices will be familiar to many readers and others practically unknown. But all give us insights into these writers’ very varied Londons; and all tell their stories gratifyingly well.

Authors include John Evelyn, Thomas de Quincey, W. M. Thackeray, Henry Mayhew, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, George Gissing, J. B. Priestley, Jean Rhys, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Maeve Binchy, Doris Lessing, Hanif Kureishi and Shena Mackay.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, London, British Literature, Essays, Classics, Collections

400 pages, Hardcover

First published March 27, 2013

About the author

Professor of London history

Reviews

[J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very dark night it was, and bitter cold; the east wind blowing bleak, and bringing with it stinging particles from marsh, and moor, and fen -- from the Great Desert and Old Egypt, may be. Some of the component parts of the sharp-edged vapour that came flying up the Thames at London might be mummy-dust, dry atoms from the Temple at Jerusalem, camels' foot-prints, crocodiles' hatching places, loosened grains of expression from the visages of blunt-nosed sphynxes, waifs and strays from caravans of turbaned merchants, vegetations from jungles, frozen snow from Himalayas. Oh, it was very dark upon the Thames, and it was bitter bitter cold.

Or perhaps not. Dickens in 1853 was keenly aware of the fact that London was the center of the Victorian world, drawing in artifact and influence from all the far corners of the globe. The short stories that comprise London Stories are nearly the exact opposite of that, and attempt not to find a diaspora but a unity in the voices it presents to the reader.

Reaching back to the golden eras we get something from Defoe, from De Quincey and Thackeray, from Dickens and a nicely atmospheric Conan Doyle, {The Adventure Of The Blue Carbuncle}. Interspersed are some less likely suspects, all called as first person witnesses to this enigmatic city, this prosaic businesslike city. Moving along, the 2oth century is acutely observed by Mollie Painter-Downes, Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen, all of whom bring the focus, and the wit, to 'razor sharp'.

Newer voices are heard, and by this point in the collection it occurred to me: This compilation succeeds not because it gathers disparate voices, but because it works on the principle that London itself has a voice, and it is the sum of the speakers. As much as they tell their own story, what we are listening for here is the voice of London itself. And it's there, threaded through Dickens' scrambled artifacts, as well as the Hanif Kureishi that closes the cover at the end.

But there is one last thing, in the double-edged tradition of the city, before it's all over:

Paris is a city famed for charm yet practically uncharmable by anything outside its own invention. New York is dazzled by novelty, but competitive and frenetically on the hop, with too much to do to hang around for as long as it takes to be spellbound. London, on the other hand, though it has been battered past being easily impressed, is nevertheless very easily, almost childishly, charmed. It will stop in its tracks for a Canadian circus, say, or an Australian stand-up comic, or an enthusiastic American evangelist, or any other import with the power to beguile. Generally, London behaves very like a man, and, as any woman who has been around will agree, this means that like a man, London prefers being seduced to being seductive. Irma Kurtz, 1997.

Well, then. So much for the valentine treatment.
Recommended.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everyman's Pocket Classics, my beloved!

This collection was a bit of a mixed bag overall. Older entries had a much stronger showing, with writers like Thackeray, Gissing and Dickins all creating a London both vibrant and lived-in. In contrast, some of the modern installments were almost laughably self-involved. Kurtz's 'Islington' reads like a long-form essay on the dangers of gentrification, while Kureishi's 'The Umbrella' features a husband's disturbing preoccupation with pulverising his wife.

My personal favourite remains 'The Fetching of Susan' by Alfred Walter Barrett. The story primarily deals with two men trying to transport an emu out of London, and is every bit as funny as the premise suggests. Something about a side-street being described as a little 'cut-throaty' in 1912 literature had me in bits. I particularly loved the part where the emu ate someone's hat. A+, top marks, no notes on that one.

All in all, these books are a joy. Here's to collecting more of them!

[Hannah Peters · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strange selection of stories. Nothing special.

[Stuart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another hugely enjoyable entry in this wonderful series. This one benefited, I think, from the inclusion of prose pieces as well as short stories. On such a subject as London there are so many pieces to choose from that there are bound to be omissions that each reader thinks should have been in: for instance, no Betjemen, Nairn, Wodehouse, etc, etc, etc … My only caveat was the inclusion of the Sherlock Holmes story "The Blue Carbuncle" - this has already been in the Christmas stories collection of this series, there are enough stories about London not to duplicate, I do feel a bit cheated. However, this was made up for by the inclusion of the story about transporting a frisky emu from the docks to the suburbs!

[Grady · Rating 3 out of 5]

Part of the Everyman Pocket Classics line, this is a collection of essays and short stories set in London. The criteria guiding the editors picks are unclear, and there’s no editor’s preface to explain. Several of the authors are well known: Daniel Dafoe, Thomas De Quincey, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark; others were new to me, at least. Some of the pieces, at least from the 1800s on, convey London’s cosmopolitan character; others focus on poor or eccentric residents. But overall, it’s quite a mishmash, and while most were interesting, only a couple made me want to read other writing by these authors: Mollie Panter-Downes, ‘Good Evening, Mrs. Craven’, and William Sansom, ‘The Wall’. The latter, about firefighters in the blitz when a wall falls on them, is fiction, but was based on a real-life experience that nearly killed the author.

[Annso · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this collection. While I - as it seems natural - liked some stories better and disliked others more, I found that they offer a great outlook on and glimpse into the life in London through the ages, through society, through the different areas. There are happy stories in here and sad stories, stories that are truly focused on London and others that are focused on the city's inhabitants or an event in time. The collection offers snapshots of London that are truly enjoyable and change the way one walks the city's streets.

[Kristopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jerry White did well with this — just really well collected — standouts for me would be Thomas Quincey’s “Ann of Oxford Street” (1822), George Gissing’s “Christopherson” (1906), R. Andom’s (hah?) “The Fetching of Susan” (1922) which is truly one of the funniest things I’ve ever read, John Galsworthy’s “A Forsyte Encounters the People, 1917” (1930), Graham Greene’s “A Little Place Off the Edgeware Road” (1939), Mollie Painter-Downes’ “Good Evening, Mrs. Craven” (1942), Elizabeth Bowen’s “Mysterious Kôr” (1945), and Doris Lessing’s “In Defence of the Underground” (1992).

[Martin Pilkington · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was first published in 2014 but feels like an older book.

For a book which contains material by such a wide variety of authors i would have liked to have had a few words about each author, and maybe a longer preface/introduction. Even using the preface to talk about the authors?

It’s a collection that feels a bit patchy in terms of content, to me. There’s fiction and non fiction, the readers task is to decide which it’s which. At least that’s how it felt to me.

The concept could have lead to a really good book, the reality left me a little disappointed.

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this collection, probably more than most would, both because I am a British expatriate and because London is my favorite city in the world. It includes both first person descriptions of important events such as the plague and the Great Fire of London, some short stories and some memoirs of life in London. Over all an interesting and enjoyable collection.

[Alison Pilkington · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is very unlikely that you are going to enjoy every short story within any collection, especially one such as this with such spread of time and type. There were several that I really liked, and quite a few of some interest but also some that I could have happily not bothered with. But overall worth reading and you can make up your own mind.

[Sapna Kumar · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little difficult to get into - but picks up the pace as we enter the later 19th century works to 1999. I really felt like I was being transported through different eras in London's history, simply with short stories that travel through the city's history.

[Elisabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

As always with short story collections there are stories in this I really liked and stories that I did not care for at all. It pretty much evens out as a three-star-read.

[Minna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I rarely like short story collections, but this one was a hit. Excellent binding and choice of collection. The contemporary ones were a miss for me, but that's just preference.

[Gilbert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice bunch of stories.

[Yooperprof · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'd give it two and a half stars if I could. Other books I feel the same way about, especially anthologies which are a mix and match of genres and approaches. Some of the pieces in this collection are "spot on" and classic examples of "Londoniana." Others had me scratching my head thinking, "well I hope that the Everyman Library didn't have to pay on royalties on THAT one."

Surely there are better London anthologies than this one.

[Jill · Rating 4 out of 5]

An sometimes eclectic collection of excerpts and short stories in chronological order that gives glimpses in to various aspects of London life over the past 400 years.

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent collection of short stories about London. I now have a long list of authors to read! I especially enjoyed John Galsworthy, Doris Lessing, and Mollie Panter-Downes.