Imagining London: Romantic Literature and Urban Space

Abstract

The city of London at the turn of the nineteenth century was a uniquely complex space, expanding at an unprecedented rate in the face of burgeoning modernity. Romantic writers contended with such complexities through imaginative practices, often denouncing the city as commercial or alienating. This thesis aims to reconsider these imaginative practices at play in London. It engages with recent Historicist research that has explored in much greater depth the political, architectural, and sociological realities of Romantic readings of London. I combine this work with theory drawn from the spatial humanities, reconsidering the relation between Romantic literature and the urban. Rather than focusing either on writing that imaginatively escapes the city, or on writing that offers documentary realism, I explore modes of writing that diffuse these two impulses in an unsteady combination of the imaginative and the real. I will concentrate on the works of William Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb. All of these writers explore the city, are in dialogue with each other’s work, and adopt this specific type of reflective, speculative, and inherently Romantic engagement with London. I seek to argue that a Wordsworthian mode of Romantic thought animates the writing of these figures. More specifically, I am interested in how the writers’ minds interact with this complex space, and how this in turn is reflected in their poetry and prose. Through these London writings there is a productive struggle between the pressing, moving, reality of London and the desire to imaginatively transform place by constructing a mode of reading the urban that grapples with, and balances, these opposing forces.

Date of Award	27 Feb 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Northumbria University
Supervisor	David Stewart (Supervisor) & David Fallon (Supervisor)