Spike Magazine

Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
can be explored from a multitude of entry points.
The book is arranged into themes such as London
as theatre, crime and punishment, London as crowd,
London’s radicals, and for every main thoroughfare of
London: The Biography there are scores of delightful
or macabre side streets to wander down. Take the following
list of synonyms for prostitutes, which reads
like a bizarre incantation: “…smuts, cracks, mawkes,
trulls, trugmoldies, bunters, does, punchable nuns,
molls, Mother Midnights, blowzes, buttered buns,
squirrels…”
Within each theme we have Ackroyd’s compendious
learning tripping the switches between past and
present. He is no Eric Hobsbawm or Asa Briggs, he is
neither ideologue nor pedagogue, instead it is through
anecdote and vivid description that we are led through
labyrinthine London.
Of course, any thesis that London, as it were, imprints
itself on its citizens is going to occasionally sound
BUY Peter Ackroyd books online from and
overblown: “London drives some of its citizens mad. A
psychiatric survey in the 70s revealed that cases of depressive
illness were three times higher in the East End
than in the rest of the country”. But these criticisms,
like pointing out lacunae, miss the point, for in a very
real sense, as he himself says at one point, there are 7
million versions of London being written everyday.
This is very much the book that Ackroyd has been
building up to, or even the one that he was born to
write, prefiguring it in his biographies (Blake, Dickens)
and fiction (The Great Fire of London, Hawksmoor).
London: The Biography doesn’t just have sources,
it has an essay on sources, and at over 800 pages you
might be forgiven for buying the audio version read by
Simon Callow (who is also, incidentally, appearing as
Dickens in Ackroyd’s The Mystery of Charles Dickens).
Ackroyd has put in a heroic amount of research, and it
would be churlish indeed to disabuse his book of its
definite article. �
013
More
Spike
email
RSS
Facebook
Twitter
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z