A taste of the past
London is one of those cities where the pounding of footsteps on the cobblestones and the beauty of the monuments never cease to take the visitor back to ancient times. The capital, birthplace of one of the fathers of English literature, Geoffrey Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales, which he began to imagine in 1387, also witnessed the incredible adventure of the Globe Theatre, where Shakespeare wrote his finest plays. Initially itinerant, as was often the case in the 16th century, this mythical venue was quietly dismantled one Christmas night to escape the clutches of a disgruntled landlord. Rebuilt on the other side of the Thames, in the Southwark district, it was inaugurated in 1599, bearing its Latin epigraph: "Totus mundus agit histrionem" (The whole world is a theater). Unfortunately, a fire, followed by Puritan vindictiveness, took its toll on the establishment, which was nevertheless restored to its original state in 1997, a few hundred meters further on. A rendezvous for Shakespeare lovers, who will not forget that London was also the birthplace centuries later of another talented playwright, Harold Pinter, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, the Globe Theatre is one of the symbols of the 17th century, an era that we also discover through the writings of Samuel Pepys. This famous diarist, born in 1633 and a high-ranking official of the Admiralty, described in his Diary the events he witnessed from 1660 to 1669, dwelling humorously on the frivolous social outings and fashionable dress of the time, but also recounting the terrible plague of 1665 and the fire that ravaged London, putting an end to the epidemic the following year.
In 1720, Daniel Defoë also evoked these tragedies in Journal de l'Année de la Peste, but it was his Robinson Crusoe that was most remembered. This adventure novel, written in the first person, recounts how a castaway survived twenty-eight years on an island with only a repentant cannibal, Vendredi, for companionship. More than a century later, this tale would enthrall a young Scotsman born in 1860. Now an adult, but still slender in appearance, James Matthew Barrie imagined a character just like himself for the children he met in London's Kensington Park: Peter Pan. It's a story reminiscent of Lewis Caroll's Alice in Wonderland, inspired by the young Liddell, whom he photographed in 1856. While the little girl's adventures still haunt children's libraries, those of a young boy have been stirring emotion and compassion ever since his first appearance in Bentley's Miscellany in 1837.
A political recipe
Oliver Twist is a little orphan who suffers the abuse of charitable institutions before being recruited by a gang of pickpockets. He is certainly one of the most famous heroes of English literature, and the one who gave his letters of nobility to the greatest novelist of the Victorian era: Charles Dickens. This writer, who had to work in a shoe-shine factory at the age of 12 to pay off his father's debts, was sensitive to societal concerns throughout his life. American cartoonist Will Eisner nevertheless felt that Dickens had been unfair to the gang leader who teaches children to steal, and took it upon himself to rehabilitate this protagonist in his 2003 comic strip Fagin the Jew. It's another cartoon character who amuses readers of the Victorian satirical magazine Judy. Ally Sloper, "The friend of man", is a vagabond always on the lookout for a dirty trick. The brainchild of Charles Henry Ross and his companion Marie Duval, he was later taken up by William G. Baxter and then by W. Fletcher Thomas. A long epic that earned him posterity.
In 1903, another tramp took up the torch of denouncing poverty. Disguised as a tramp, Jack London set out to visit London's underworld, and in Le Peuple d'en bas (The People Below ), he delivered an uncompromising account of grinding poverty, disease, alcoholism and violence. The capital is a sordid place, far removed from the upmarket neighborhoods in which Virginia Woolf would develop her heroine, Mrs Dalloway, twenty years later. In this novel, published in 1925, the reader follows an elegant Londoner over the course of a day as she orchestrates the bourgeois ceremony she is hosting that evening. But this interior monologue reveals another side of Clarissa, far from her role as hostess, as she ponders her life and her loves. This ethereal, melancholy tale is also a plunge into the stifling atmosphere of London's streets, where the banging of Big Ben echoes tirelessly. In 1933, Eric Arthur Blair's writings once again reveal the depths and precariousness of his life, as he recounts his slow descent into hell(Dans la dèche à Paris et à Londres). The young man, born in 1903 in Motihari, India, still under the yoke of British colonial rule, would become famous under another name: George Orwell.
A pinch of fantasy
With its 1984, a single date evokes the world's most popular dystopia. In this futuristic novel, a dictatorship reigns, ruled with an iron fist by an invisible but omniscient leader, Big Brother. Winston Smith, the main character, is assigned to serve the Ministry of Truth and rewrite the newspapers, and thus history. When love, then doubt, overtakes him, he will sign his doom.
It may be that London's atmosphere stirs the imagination, and two writers who were not born there have chosen it as the setting for their fantastic tales. In 1886, the Scotsman Robert Louis Stevenson finally published The Curious Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, after his wife had destroyed his first manuscript, which she had deemed to be full of "nonsense". Four years later, Irishman Oscar Wilde published The Portrait of Dorian Gray. In these two fantastic stories, the question of the monstrous double is omnipresent, an interrogation of identity that we had already discovered in Londoner Mary Shelley's famous Frankenstein (1818), and which we find again in Herbert Georges Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau. He died in London on August 13, 1946, and is often honored as the world's foremost science-fiction writer, best known for The Time Machine, The Invisible Man and War of the Worlds. In the course of his life, he crossed paths with Aldous Huxley, whose Brave New World has also become a classic of the genre. Closer to home, the unclassifiable J. G. Ballard remains an icon of the new wave of British science fiction. His strange Crash! in which the protagonists develop a sexual perversion around car accidents, inspired David Cronenberg to make a film of the same name, which won him the Special Jury Prize at the 49th Cannes Film Festival in 1996.
A year later, with Harry Potter at Philosopher's Stone, Rowling wrote the first volume of a saga that has become cult. Hogwarts, Voldemort, the Crossroads - these are all names that have become familiar to us, and which are scattered throughout the myriad guided tours of this work offered by London today.
A touch of humor
Around the same time, another heroine appeared on the big screen. Bridget Jones is a dashing thirty-something romantic devilishly in search of true love. Hesitating between her womanizing boss, Daniel Cleaver, and the shady Marc Darcy, who doesn't want to commit, the Londoner keeps a diary that will delight readers the world over. Helen Fielding makes no secret of the fact that she drew much of her inspiration from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, a great classic set partly in the English capital.
Love and humor: a recipe that would not have displeased the prolific Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, author of seventy novels and over two hundred short stories, including a number of vaudevilles and other comedies of manners. Acclaimed for his plots as much as for his language, which cleverly blends Edwardian slang and flawless grammar, the man died in New York in 1975, certainly with a smile on his face. For laughter is as much a religion in Britain as soccer, even if it is sometimes acerbic, notwithstanding Martin Amis, whose London Trilogy never ceases to rattle a few teeth. The three books can be read separately, with the first volume - Money, Money - featuring a greedy advertising executive as a symbol of the Thatcher years, London Fields (1989) an odd trio, an assassination and an apocalypse, and finally L'Information (1995) a satire of the literary world. His contemporary, Julian Barnes, also lent himself to societal criticism in England, England, which features Jack Pitman, an eccentric billionaire who decides to create a rather unusual amusement park on the Isle of Wight. The British author began his career under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh, publishing crime novels.
A touch of suspense
The city also inspires dark stories, as Paul Féval's famous Mystères de Londres seems to have confirmed as early as 1840. First published in serial form in newspapers under the pseudonym Sir Francis Trolopp, this work - commissioned after the success of Eugène Sue's equally famous Mystères de Paris - is now available in its entirety in paperback, under the author's real name. Complots and assassinations follow one another at an infernal pace, and are echoed in the writings of Féval's English contemporary and friend of Dickens, Wilkie Collins, whose "sensational" novels marked the beginning of detective fiction. Thus, the most famous of English detectives, Sherlock Holmes, appeared a few years later under the pen of Arthur Conan Doyle. In A Study in Red, published in 1887, a complex character emerges who becomes so mythical that his house at 221B Baker Street can still be visited today. The hero continues to inspire, as evidenced by the success of the comic strip The Four of Baker Street, scripted by Jean-Blaise Djian and Olivier Legrand and drawn by David Etien, featuring three children from London's 19th-century East End who sometimes play spy for the famous detective. in 1888, reality takes precedence over fiction, and the Whitechapel district is struck by the sordid murders of prostitutes. While Jack the Ripper fueled the wildest rumors, he also fed the imagination of writers. To name but one, Anne Perry, also born in London, imagines the serial killer's return in Pentecost Alley. Another unmissable female author is Phyllis Dorothy James, known as P. D. James, whose adventures as "gentleman detective" Adam Dalgliesh continue to seduce fans of the genre. Her many books follow in the footsteps of the mystery novels of Agatha Christie, who, although not a Londoner, has had the honor of seeing one of her plots, The Mousetrap, performed continuously for decades at St Martin's Theater in West Street, London.
