Customer Reviews

London: The Biography

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Everyone can tell stories about their hometown and anecdotes about the place they grew up, some of which are true, some of which are dubious, and some of which are outright fabrications. I can tell you stories about my small hometown in Massachusetts which can alternately put you to sleep or amuse you.

Imagine someone telling you stories about London; stories which over 2000 years have been embellished and polished to the point where they might be considered mythology. Consider these stories ranging over the whole course of the city's life, and you have some idea of what this book is like. It is a breathtaking book, where anecdotes of Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, The Victorian Era, and today are all seamlessly mixed in a wonderful stew. I cannot imagine the amount of scholarship that went into this work; I rather think that Mr. Ackroyd is some type of immortal who has experienced these stories and anecdotes of London firsthand.

This is a truly wonderful book to give to any Anglophile friends you may have; it is history at its compelling best, long on anecdote and short on drudgery. It is also written extremely well; there is never a jarring turn of phrase in the book. Well worth the hardbound price, this is the perfect Christmas present to anyone you know who has lived in London, been to London, or who loves history.

As evidenced by its 779 narrative pages and its 13 pages of sources, LONDON: THE BIOGRAPHY is a prodigious accomplishment by author and city resident Peter Ackroyd. And it did take me five weeks to read it.

Since I'd rather be in London than anywhere else, especially the Southern California I'm in, I began this volume with giddy anticipation. In his narrative of the city from pre-Roman times to the present, Ackroyd touches on the history of many of its diverse aspects: rivers, commerce, architecture, transport, theaters, street ballads, parks, food, weather, maps, neighborhoods, nationalities, fires, fog, pestilences, the effects of the Blitz, public lighting, law enforcement, sanitation and clubs. He also doesn't neglect London's unsavory side: alcoholism, gambling, blood sports, prisons, crime, the homeless, poverty, beggars, mob violence, racism, child labor, prostitution, overcrowding, the insane, slums, air and water pollution, and general squalor and filth. Because the author seemed (to me) so preoccupied with the latter dreary group, I suspect he's a closet social reformer.

LONDON isn't a riveting read. Surprisingly, I could put it down for such jolly pursuits as taking out the trash and cleaning the cats' litter box. Perhaps it's because the author's style, never leavened by any humor, becomes at times almost ponderous. For instance, in the chapter "How Many Miles to Babylon?", he comments:

"Yet there is one more salient aspect to this continual analogy of London with ancient civilisations: it is the fear, or hope, or expectation that this great imperial capital will in its turn fall into ruin. That is precisely the reason for London's association with pre-Christian cities; it, too, will revert to chaos and old night so that the condition of the 'primeval' past will also be that of the remote future. It represents the longing for oblivion... The vision is of a city unpeopled, and therefore free to be itself; stone endures, and, in this imagined future stone becomes a kind of god. Essentially it is a vision of the city as death. But it also represents the horror of London, and of its teeming life; it is a cry against its supposed unnaturalness, which can only be repudiated by a giant act of nature such as a deluge."

Good heavens, man! Get a grip!

I assume that the author loves his city, or he wouldn't have expended such enormous effort to tell its story. However, his affection is ofttimes difficult to infer, as when he writes:

"This is the horror of the city. It is blind to human need and human affection, its topography cruel and almost mindless in its brutality... The image is of a labyrinth which is constantly expanding, reaching outwards towards infinity. On the maps of England it is seen as a dark patch, or stain, spreading slowly but inexorably outwards."

LONDON provides a magnificent tapestry of information, and is a colossal achievement. However, until the last twenty-five or so pages, the author failed both to convince me that he derived any personal joy from residence in the city or to remind me why I love this place so much. Ackroyd's references to a city brutalizing, oppressing and dehumanizing its inhabitants are numerous to the point of being tiresome. Therefore, I finished the book admiring it much more than feeling good about it. Indeed, it wasn't until page 772 that I came across a statement (by Boswell) that struck a very personal emotional chord:

"I was full of rich imagination of London ... such as I could not explain to most people, but which I strongly feel and am ravished with. My blood glows and my mind is agitated with felicity."

As far as I am concerned, you can have Paris in the springtime. Give me London in the rain.

Ackroyd's book shares many characteristics with its namesake - it is crowded, organic, chaotic, and full of life. It also shares many of the City's faults - it's hard sometimes to find what you are looking for, and you can look in vain for any reason behind the juxtapositions of different cultural artifacts. Nevertheless, anyone who has spent more than the obligatory few days in the obligatory tourist sites will recognize the city from Ackroyd's prose.

One may complain that Ackroyd lingers too much on London's history of crime, social unrest, and dirt. Well, what do you expect of a city that boasts having had the "Great Stink" of 1858? Casual travelers, people who are looking for a simplistic history to read while in line for Madame Tussaud's, and anyone who desires a Disney-fied, Mary Poppins fantasy will be unhappy with this book.

But if you want to know what London _feels_ like, this book comes closer than anything else I have read to making me feel like I do when I am there. There is no city better for aimless wandering, stumbling through alleys, exploring the Underground, and observing the small details. It is a world-city grown pell-mell by greed, lust and need, with beauty in unexpected places and quiet rarer than gold, and more precious. In short, it is life. And, as Samuel Johnson famously said, "when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."

Impressive in its scope, astonishing in its erudition, overwhelming in its detail, "London" contains a smorgasbord of information from an awe-inspiring number of sources. Unlike most histories (much less biographies), most of the material in "London" is organized by theme; only three "events"--the Great Plague of 1665, the Great Fire of 1666, and the Blitz--are examined in depth. Chapters detail architecture, neighborhoods, markets, work, entertainment, food, drink, smells, crime, punishment, madness, sickness, and more. Critics have noted that the reader will find few aristocrats or statesmen among the pages of this book; Ackroyd's focus is on the streets, the habitats, the commoners, and the everyday life of London. Civil war and uprisings, kings and queens, mayors and parliaments are mentioned only in passing.

Yet this is certainly no treatise inspired the Annales school. Instead, "London" is a social history written by a novelist and literary historian, one who is more likely to quote Pepys, Boswell, Dickens, or Orwell than to invoke Cromwell, Pitt, Disraeli, or Churchill. The author favors fiction, diaries, essays, and similar remnants of the literati over court documents, tax records, and other types of evidence examined by English social historians such as Lawrence Stone or E. P. Thompson.

While Ackroyd excels in compilation, he neglects any attempt at true synthesis. The book's overwhelming erudition, while admirable, is sometimes oppressive, and there seems to be little thought given to the structure of the book. One could toss most of its 79 chapters into the air and read them in the order in which they fall to the ground, with little loss in comprehension. This encyclopedic doorstop is truly a book to dip into, not to read in several sittings. (In spite of how absorbing I found much of its content, it still took me six months to finish it.) The overall effect is a sequence of well-written, thematically ordered index cards flaunting the research assembled by a polymathic mind.

The lack of synthesis is further displayed by an annoying tic: Ackroyd often follows a quote or anecdote with a generalized sentiment that begins "So..." or "Here..." A few of the many examples from his otherwise fascinating chapter on children: "Here the idea of innocence, in a corrupt and corrupting city, is powerfully effective." "So the singing child is alluding to a dreadful destiny within the city." "So London children were, from the beginning, at a disadvantage." "So for at least two centuries London children have been associated with, or identified by, gambling." "So the city hardened its street children in every sense." The problem with these sentences is not simply their lazy, hypnotic construction; rather, their vacuousness and vagueness add no insight to the quotes they are meant to illuminate. And, more often than not, their fuzzy universalities could apply to Detroit as much as to London.

Nevertheless, in spite of its imperfections, one is hard pressed to discount entirely the wealth contained in these pages. I'm sure I'll spend the next few years hauling this tome off the bookshelf to look up a quote or revisit a London neighborhood. But I'm equally sure that I'll never again read through the entire book.

Yes, this biography of London describes historical events, but most engrossing to me was the way Peter Ackroyd gives what is virtually a sensory history of this immense, ungraspable city. He discusses the sights of course, but also the sounds (the vendors characteristic cries, the modes of transportation), the smells ( garbage and sewage were a perpetual problem), and London's fog takes on a tactile character.

I could have done without the constant emphasis on a couple pet similes--London as body, London as theatre--which are repeated way too often. My other criticism is the way Ackroyd writes about the vast disparity between rich and poor. While the plight of the poverty-stricken is movingly described, he does not make clear why London in particular had such a huge population of homeless compared to other European capitols. He does describe the shock of French and Italians when faced with this poverty, but does not explain why there is such a difference. I was left wondering whether this was the result of social Darwinish or somethin else.I felt squeemish reading his broad conclusion that London "needs" its poor, meant,I am sure, in a philosophical sense, but still...

If you are looking for a "history" of London, this book is not it. If you are looking for an explanation of major events that occurred in London over the last 3000 years, again, this book is not it. Instead, Ackroyd provides the reader with a series of loosely connected statements and facts. These are somewhat organized around various themes. The statements are intentionally not in chronological order, are sometimes vague and occasionally contradictory. As Ackroyd would say, "just like London."

For the first chapter or two, this is an interesting way to present London's biography. After that, it starts getting old and I had to force myself to continue reading after about page 200. There are interesting tidbits throughout the book, so reading all the way through is not a complete waste of one's time. Still, if what you want is an impression of what London was like at a certain point in time, then you could probably do better with a good historical fiction. If it is factual history you want, then a book that actually talks about what happened when (and hopefully why) would be a better choice.

Ackroyd's London is not history in terms of names and dates, Important People and their Parliamentary Acts, or hard statistics. It is primarily a series of vivid descriptions of human activities in the city, a history of London from the bottom up -- but not very far up. Overall I thought it was a treat to read, filled with engrossing lore and occasionally extraordinary writing.

But when the prose fails, its pomposity is disastrous. Most difficult to take are the grandiose statements which end far too many of his paragraphs. Fascinating anecdotes are followed by gratuitously solemn and pretentious conclusions about how "The city's topography is a palimpsest within which all the most magnificent or monstrous cities of the world can be discerned" or overwrought metaphorical nonsense in the same vein. I enjoy this sort of thing when it is done with restraint, but Mr Ackroyd is frequently out of control.

The book is also entirely devoid of any sense of humor, but then no one reads Ackroyd for his sharp wit.

What a wonderful and magical book. It isn't the normal left-to-right chronological history. It is a series of chapters that each examine a different aspect of London's character. That is why it is aptly called a biography. Rather than a sequential history we get a study of the character of this magnificent city. I have grown to love London through a series of business trips that led to a few personal trips. It would be very satisfying to be able to live in London for some period of time, I think. But...

You don't need to have been to London or know much about it to get a great deal from this book. But if you can bring some experience and background to reading it you will find the rewards for reading so much greater.

As background material Stephen Inwood's wonderful "A History of London", now in paperback, provides a splendid chronology of London's history. I recommend it highly and you can read my comments on it on Amazon.com. My personal taste is to read the Inwood and then read the Ackroyd. But the point is to have both. Together they tell more about London than either does separately. They are complementary rather than competitive. Simplistically, you can say the Inwood book gives you the breadth and the Ackroyd book provides the depth.

Also, you will get more out of this book if you have a good map of London at your side. The book does have some maps, but if you want a good feel for how all of this fits into the London of today you might want to have a London A-Z with you as a reference. A standard one has the ISBN: 0850397529.

Also, another magnificent companion to this book is "The History of London in Maps" its ISBN# is:1558594957 although it has limited availability.

London is an easy city to love and I think Ackroyd says it so well on page 93: "The History of London is a palimpsest of different realities and lingering truths." And in the books last two sentences: "It is illimitable. It is infinite London." Glorious!

I read this on Michael Moorcock's recommendation. Moorcock is the acknowledged father of the London antimodernists (a kind of 21st century PreRaphaelite literary movement associated with a fascination for ancient stories, popular culture and literary experiment). He has frequently praised Mr Ackroyd's biographies. Dickens, one of Ackroyd's first biographies, was a revelation to me and his Blake was the most remarkable exercise of its kind. While Ackroyd lacks the reputation for experiment shared by his colleagues Iain Sinclair (of Downriver and Lights Out For The City) and Michael Moorcock (King of the City, London Bone and Mother London) he is actually a rather clever subversive, presenting a highly idiosyncratic image of his native city which, like the images of Dickens and Conan Doyle, takes us over. Ackroyd's vision of London becomes more real than the reality.
It is certainly more valid than most realities tourists experience on their brief skim across this ancient, beautiful, ugly, cruel, humane city where so much of our history begins. This is an outstanding book. It has warmth, enthusiasm. It informs on more than one level. I have fallen in love with it!

This book has been criticized for its informal style, its anecdotal quality, and its lack of chronology; yet the title tells us up front that it's not a "history," but a "biography." It treats London as a person best understood through a kind of case history or genealogy. The author has done his homework, but he also goes well beyond the mere facts and dates to listen carefully into the images, motifs, and themes of London's past and present, and this makes the book immensely valuable as a deeper-than-usual resource into the "soul" of a place the author obviously loves despite its shadows and ugly spots.