Unreal City: London in Literature
This six- week course will survey fictional representations of the metropolis, exploring the birth of modern policing; dystopian visions of impending disaster; and London as a site of mass migration across two centuries.
Who is this course for?
Informal learners or anyone with an interest in London history. No previous skills or knowledge is needed, but curiosity and an appetite for reading will be helpful. No advance reading is required as this is a general survey course, with reading lists and recommendations supplied for future exploration in the student’s free time.
What can I expect?
- This will be a presentation with plenty of room for discussions.
- Participants will be supplied in advance with the critical material that will be examined in class.
- Participants will be provided with a detailed secondary reading list so that they can do deeper exploration on any topic that has sparked interest after the course has finished.
Need to Know
You will learn
- To identify the major fictional portraits of London from over 200 years of history
- To define key moments in London’s social history
- To identify some of the literary trends / shifts in style across 200 years of fiction writing
- To pursue further reading on these subjects, with a detailed bibliography/secondary reading list for each session
Meet the Tutor
Sarah Wise
Sarah Wise teaches 19th-century social history and literature to undergraduates and adult learners and is visiting professor at the University of California’s London Study Center. Her debut, The Italian Boy: Murder and Grave Robbery in 1830s London, was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction. It was the inspiration for Sky’s The Frankenstein Chronicles.
Her follow-up, The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum, was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize, and was the basis for the BBC’s series The Victorian Slum. Her most recent book, Inconvenient People, was shortlisted for the 2014 Wellcome Prize.
She contributed a chapter to ‘Charles Booth’s Poverty Maps’ -- the best-selling illustrated book by Thames & Hudson/London School of Economics. Her TV work includes providing background material for BBC1’s ‘Secret History of Our Streets’, and BBC2’s ‘The Victorian Slum’, and she has twice been the history expert on ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ Most recently she appeared on Radio 4’s ‘In Our Time’, speaking about the work of Charles Booth.
Course Overview
Week 1
Session 1: The late-18th century to the mid-1830s
Romantic London – Wordsworth, Blake, Thomas De Quincey. Regency London – bucks, bruisers, dandies, men-about-town. The Newgate Novel – amoral tales of villains. The ‘silver fork novel’ of High Society.
Week 2
Session 2: The mid-19th century
Dickens, crime, policing and detection. The slums of St Giles. Edgar Allan Poe. Dostoevsky in Haymarket. London’s first time-travel fantasy.
Week 3
Session 3: The late 19th century.
Slum fiction, disaster/dystopian fiction, science fiction.
Week 4
Session 4: The Inter-War Years
The Roaring Twenties, Evelyn Waugh, Virginia Woolf. The Depression of the Thirties, Patrick Hamilton, Simon Blumenfeld, Pamela Hansford Johnson.
Week 5
Session 5: War and postwar.
Horror, science fiction, post-modernism, social upheaval and mass migration. Colin MacInnes, Nigel Kneal, Nell Dunn, Sam Selvon, Margaret Drabble, BS Johnson.
Week 6
Session 6: 1980 to Today.
London during the Thatcher years, multiculturalism, new-Victorianism, thrillers, crime writing.
Dates and Times
Unreal City: London in Literature
– , 5:37 - 7:37
