Spanning public and private, documentary and the imaginative, the writings collected here evoke the physical and social atmosphere and the cultural life of London's streets and other sites of ceremony and popular assembly.
The Moving Pageant is the first annotated anthology of writings on London street life. It comprises nearly one hundred extracts from over two centuries of literary life, including pieces by:
* Alexander Pope
* Jonathan Swift
* Daniel Defoe
* Samuel Johnson
* Eliza Haywood
* Horace Walpole
* William Hazlitt
* William Wordsworth
* Charles Dickens
* Flora Tristan
* Edgar Allen Poe
* Charlotte Bronte
* Fyodor Dostoyevsky
* Octavia Hill
* Beatrice Potter
* Henry James
* Oscar Wilde
* Arnold Bennett
* Joseph Conrad
* H.G. Wells
The volume assembles a rich and varied selection of this abundance of writing, showing London as truly unique in its immensity, and, ultimately, supremely representative of our modern urban world in the making.
The Moving Pageant comes complete with a superb editor's introduction, illustrations, and biographical and critical commentaries on each of the writers' entries. It also displays many genres and styles of writing, and includes street-ballads, music-hall songs, excerpts from novels, epic poems, and documentary accounts of riots and executions, as well as descriptions of state pageants and processions.
'Rick Allen teaches English literature and his snipping scissors have picked out page after page of metaphors and rhetorical devices that capture in few words the noise, contrasts, night and day rhythms, and altogether stupendous quantitative sum of London's streets. His selection would be at home on the bookshelf in the spare room or downstairs loo, but must be intended mainly for student reading lists.' - Michael Hebbert, London Journal'This excellent book combines fact and fiction, the indispensable with the unusual, to reveal responses to [London] as varied as the metropolis itself. Superior to the familiar literary anthology, The Moving Pageant provides a systematic and thoughtfully organized perspective on London's history.' - Roy Porter'This superb compilation, while aimed at the academic reader, will be appreciated by anyone interested in the history, not only of London but of England.' - Contemporary Review, September, 1998'A fascinating collection of factual and fictional accounts ... Excellent.' - Sunday Times'An impressive collection of extracts and contemporary illustrations from the period in question This book creates an invaluable short-cut for students of social history and can be recommended without reservation.' - Joan Walpole Reilly, The Lecturer
