VIRGINIA WOOLF was a Londoner who wrote and thought and walked about the city all her life. It is a subject and setting for many of her novels, especially Night and Day, Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway, The Waves and The Years. As a child growing up in Kensington, she watched the city with excitement and fear. As a young woman in the 1900s, recovering from breakdown and starting to write, solitary ‘street-haunting’ in Bloomsbury was a symbol to her of the new century’s freedoms. When she and Leonard Woolf got married in 1912, they lived for a while just off Fleet Street, under the shadow of St Paul’s, relishing the noise and energy of City life. When, in 1924, she returned to London, after several years of illness and quiet retirement in Richmond, to the house in Tavistock Square where the Woolfs would live and work until the war, she was ecstatic: ‘London thou art a jewel of jewels…music, talk, friendship, city views, books, publishing, something central & inexplicable, all this is now within my reach’.(1)Her excitement filled the novel she was writing, Mrs Dalloway – a celebration of ‘life, London, this moment in June’, and of the glittering shimmer of post-war party-going, but in a city haunted by the war and its dead.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, reading evolutionary science, criticising the gender politics and inequalities of her society, London became to her a symbol of the thin veneer and savage undergrowth of civilisation, her ‘heart of darkness’. But it was also, still, her playground and her past. When the city – and their house – was wrecked by the Blitz, in the last years of her life, she continued to celebrate London’s gallantry, its character, and its unquenchable energy. ‘I feel London majestic’, she wrote a few months before her death. ‘When I see a great smash like a crushed match-box where an old house stood I wave my hand to London.’(2)
These six essays were written late in 1931, and published, when she was fifty, between December 1931 and December 1932. They were commissioned by Good Housekeeping, an unliterary magazine with a general readership, so they take an anecdotal, conversational tone. These were minor works of hers, not thought worth republishing as a collection until long after her death.(3)But, though light in tone, the essays express some of her deepest feelings about her city.
She had just finished The Waves, published in the autumn of 1931, with its six characters’ lives fragmenting and coming together again in the ‘vast conglomeration’ of London. But she was worried that the novel was too class-bound and aetherial. Her next novel, The Years, would give a much rougher, seedier picture of London. In between, she wrote a little spoof-biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning of Wimpole Street, Flush, with some ‘low life scenes’ of dog-stealing and street crime.(4)This coincided with her London essays.
What fascinated her was the connection between London’s surfaces and its depths, its lavish displays and its iron grid of production and systems, its wealth and its poverty. All the essays – whether about trade or shopping, parliament or domestic life, famous men or obscure women – analyse these links. Read together, they make a diagnosis of consumer capitalism, parliamentary democracy and everyday urban life in the early twentieth century which should correct the notion that Woolf was an apolitical or rarefied writer.
The essay on the Docks sails you past London’s domes and spires and stately mansions to show you its cranes and wharfs, its mud and sewers and rubbish-dumps, and the ruthless processes which put all produce, including waste-products, to use. The Oxford Street essay similarly shows how the whims and appetites of middle-class consumers drive, and are driven by, relentless marketforces. ‘We demand shoes, furs, bags, stoves, oil, rice puddings, candles; and they are brought us’. The essay on Great Men’s Houses reveals, not the tourist version of the library, the study-chair and the portraits, but how the Carlyles’ house in nineteenth-century Kensington (like her own childhood home) was a ‘battlefield’ for women and servants. They were the slave labour fighting every day ‘against dirt and cold for cleanliness and warmth’.(5)The essay on the House of Commons gives us a Dickensian scene of a raucous, bawling, gossipy men-only club, whose current members are so banal, ugly and commonplace that it’s hard to imagine them erected in their afterlives as marble statues.
She loves to see how ‘use produces beauty as a byproduct’, and she aestheticizes even the most unpromising of London scenes. She turns the business of Oxford Street into a post-impressionist painting: ‘everything glitters and twinkles’. She relishes the oddities of the trade in Siberian mammoth tusks, or tortoises. But these vivid word pictures are always attentive to functional detail, like her noting the white fungus growing on the arches of the wine vaults at the dockside Custom houses. ‘Whether lovely or loathsome matters not; it is welcome because it proves that the air possesses the right degree of dampness for the health of the precious fluid’.
London itself is a kind of fungus, a massive growth evolved out of trade, war and industry, changing all the time. She sees it as the hub of a very old civilisation which is, also, endlessly reinventing and renewing itself. It is an enterprise culture in the grip of entropy. The department store palaces will crumble, electricity has transformed domestic labour, fashions continually change, and the voices of the dead, talking to us from their tombs, are as loud and numerous as the masses of the busy living, who will in turn go under the ground. All is energy, noise, and process. There are a few quiet retreats – Keats’s evocative Hampstead house, the fictional Mrs Crowe’s drawing-room salon, where big city society is turned into village gossip, some peaceful hidden graveyards – but what magnetises her is ‘the roar and resonance of London itself’, ‘that rough city song’.
(1) The Diary of Virginia Woolf, January 9 1924, ed Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie, Hogarth Press, 1978, Penguin, 1981, Vol II, p. 283. [Hereafter Diary].
(2) Virginia Woolf to Ethel Smyth, September 25 1940, Leave the Letters Till We’re Dead: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1936-1941, ed Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press, 1980, p. 434.
(3) The six essays were published in Good Housekeeping between December 1931 and December 1932. Five of the essays were collected in The London Scene, Random House, 1975; the sixth was added for a reissue by Snowbooks in 2004.
(4) Diary, November 16 1931, Vol 4, p.53.
(5) Susan Squier, ‘The London Scene: Gender and Class in Virginia Woolf’s London’, Twentieth Century Literature, Vol 29 no 4, Winter 1983, pp.488-500, emphasises the essays’ feminist arguments.