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Representations of London
Before going in London, we had to do some searchs about... London. We are supposed to find a representation of London (positive or negative) in the litterature or the story of arts. As you can image I have chosen an extract from a book by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle : The Sign of four.
You can read the extract if ou clic here.
=> In this extract, we can see a strange et mysterious London, where the fog veils the truth and the name of streat. Finaly, London is a little bit like the most famous detective of England, Sherlok Holmes, mysterious, crazy, annoying but unbelievably appealing. Conan Doyle uses a lexical field of the mistery and some accumulations which plunge the reader in this particular atmosphere ever-present in the novel. As Sherlock Holmes, London scares but is also fascinating...
Some peaple showed us others representations of London :
Light through mist - David Cressman
Waterloo Bridge - Claude Monet
Cosmopolitant London - Olivier Ah-Sam
The Victoria Tower from Lambeth - Whymper
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
“Although Oliver had enough to occupy his attention in keeping sight of his leader, he could not help bestowing a few hasty glances on either side of the way, as he passed along. A dirtier or more wretched place he had never seen. The street was very narrow and muddy, and the air was impregnated with filthy odours. There were a good many small shops; but the only stock in trade appeared to be heaps of children, who, even at that time of night, were crawling in and out at the doors, or screaming from inside. The sole places that seemed to prosper amid the general blight of the place, were the public houses; and in them, the lowest orders of Irish were wrangling with might and main.” (Chapter 8)A Londres au crépuscule - Etienne Sicard
Les rues en diamants et leur soyeux pavage,
Comme des serpentins lâchés des toits obscurs,
Glissent, de pas en pas, le long de mers de murs,
Tapissés du soleil de vitrine en voyage.Un bus à impériale et son rouge ramage
Croise une limousine aux fourreaux de noirs purs,
L’un éteignant le jour et ses rêves d’azurs,
L’autre incendiant la nuit d’une ivresse volage.La Tamise soudain se pare de colliers,
Et Big Ben se maquille à l’or de ses aiguilles,
Chuchotant des dîners, fards des joailliers.La magicienne alors entre de scène en scène
Soulevant les rideaux dont les tons de charmilles
Font frissonner la ville aux plaisirs des mécènes.Francis Etienne Sicard, Lettres de soie rouge, 2011
London - William Blake (1794)
I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.
How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every black'ning Church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.
But most, thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot’s curse
Blasts the new born Infant’s tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.London : The biography - Peter Ackroyd (2000)
London has always been a vast ocean in which survival is not certain. The dome of St Paul's has been seen trembling upon a 'vague troubled sea' of fog, while dark streams of people flow over London Bridge, or Waterloo Bridge, and emerge as torrents in the narrow thoroughfares of London. The social workers of the mid-nineteenth century spoke of rescuing 'drowning' people in Whitechapel or Shoreditch and Arthur Morrison, a novelist of the same period, invokes a 'howling sea of human wreckage' crying out to be saved. Henry Peacham, the seventeenth-century author of The Art of Living in London, considered the city as 'a vast sea, full of gusts, fearful-dangerous shelves and rocks', while in 1810 Louis Simond was content to 'listen to the roar of its waves, breaking around us in measured time'. If you look from a distance, you observe a sea of roofs, and have no more knowledge of the dark streams of people than of the denizens of some unknown ocean. But the city is always a heaving and restless place, with its own torrents and billows, its foam and spray. The sound of its streets is like the murmur from a sea shell and in the great fogs of the past the citizens believed themselves to be lying on the floor of the ocean. Even amid all the lights it may simply be what George Orwell described as 'the ocean bottom, among the luminous, gliding fishes'. This is a constant vision of the London world, particularly in the novels of the twentieth century, where feelings of hopelessness and despondency turn the city into a place of silence and mysterious depths. Yet, like the sea and the gallows, London refuses nobody. Those who venture upon its currents look for prosperity or fame, even if they often founder in its depths. Jonathan Swift depicted the jobbers of the Exchange as traders waiting for shipwrecks in order to strip the dead, while the commercial houses of the City often used a ship or boat as a weather-vane and as a sign of good fortune. Three of the most common emblems in urban cemeteries are the shell, the ship and the anchor. The starlings of Trafalgar Square are also the starlings who nest in the cliff faces of northern Scotland. The pigeons of London are descended from the wild rock-doves who lived among the steep cliffs of the northern and western shores of this island. For them the buildings of the city are cliffs still, and the streets are the endless sea stretching beyond them. But the real confluence lies in this - that London, for so long the arbiter of trade and of the sea, should have upon its fabric the silent signature of the tides and waves.
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