"London itself perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play and a story and a poem, without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets... " To walk alone in London is the greatest rest." That was what Virginia Woolf wrote. In 1931 she was commissioned by the British edition of "Good Housekeeping" to write a series entitled "Six Articles on London Life." Originally published bimonthly, beginning in December of that year, five of the essays were eventually collected and published in 1981. The sixth essay, "Portrait of a Londoner," had been missing from Woolf's oeuvre until it was rediscovered at the University of Sussex in 2004.In these six essays, Woolf demonstrates a huge affection for her hometown--like her heroine Clarissa Dalloway, whose stream-of-consciousness litany at the opening of Mrs. Dalloway famously listed London as one of her true loves.
The London Scene can be considered some sort of awalking tour of Woolf's beloved hometown. The journey begins in the docks, painted in all their grandiose squalor: "Barges heaped with old buckets, razor blades, fish tails, newspapers and ashes ... are discharging their cargoes upon the most desolate land in the world."
Then it flows against the Thames tide westwards, following the commercial pulse of the city from the disembarkment of goods at Tilbury to the crowds of shoppers on Oxford Street: "The first spring day brings out barrows frilled with tulips, violets, daffodils in brilliant layers". On the third chapter, Virginia describes the grand buildings of the City and Westminster. It is as though a past London, now completely forgotten, is coming alive again before our eyes.
This feeling is somehow reinforced by the next chapter, in which our attention is drawn to the houses of famous writers and the way their atmosphere brings us closer to great literary figures such as Dickens and Carlyle, "two of the most nervous and exacting people of their time" fought "for cleanliness and warmth".
Woolf continues with a hymn to the churches of London and a visit to the Houses of Parliament before concluding with her "Portrait of a Londoner": Mrs Crowe, a Cockney widow. All in all, it is a tour de force, the more remarkable for its brevity.From the first piece to the last, we are given contrasting impressions of the city that was always Woolf's first home.We see London as an abstract industrial machine in the first essay,and in the last, where Virginia paints a portrait of Mrs Crowe - an imagined Londoner - glimpsed accidentally through a window, we see the whole of London embodied in an old woman.
It is London itself that seizes her imagination, along with the anonymous selves that haunt its streets.In each piece, she connects the mechanisms of the city with the human: "it is we - our tastes, our fashions, our needs - that make the [docklands'] cranes dip and swing, that call the ships from the sea.our body is their master...because one chooses to light a cigarette, all those barrels of Virginian tobacco are swung on shore...as for the umbrella that we swing idly to and fro, a mammoth who roared through the swamps fifty thousand years ago has yielded up its tusk to make the handle."
The city and the citizen are inextricable.The bright lights and shop fronts of Oxford street are, of course, inanimate, and yet at the same time, "the mere thought of age, of solidity, of lasting for ever is abhorrent to Oxford street".
Someone could say that if she had travelled by the same route today, she might not even have recognised her native city. And maybe, they are right, as a matter of fact this mini-guidebook may not list the hottest restaurants, and London's skyline has changed dramatically since the city's bombing in the Second World War, but Virginia Woolf is still a charming, relevant companion to the delights of a great metropolis.
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interview to Virginia woolf 1937
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