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Introduction London Voices 1820–1840: A “Luminous Guide”
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Published:December 2019
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The “Luminous Guide” in our title comes from a publication whose frontispiece deserves, even demands, its own indented space:
Leigh’s New Picture Of London; Or, A View Of The Political, Religious, Medical, Literary, Municipal, Commercial, And Moral State Of The British Metropolis; Presenting A Luminous Guide To The Stranger, On All Subjects Connected With General Information, Business, Or Amusement. To Which Are Subjoined A Description Of The Environs, And A Plan For Viewing London In Eight Days.1
Assembled and published by the bookseller Samuel Leigh in 1839, this volume was the latest (and last) in a series of travel guides to London first published in 1818. As the spectacularly loquacious title suggests, it set out to provide a painstakingly comprehensive introduction to the city for the tourist or other temporary resident: places to go, people to see, experiences to be savoured. Above all, the book promised its readers a way to make sense of the city—literally to make newly legible a space that was becoming notoriously bewildering even for those who considered themselves natives. Leigh’s publication was, in other words, a practical way of counteracting the overwhelming sense that Thomas De Quincey had identified some years earlier in a famous essay. Encased in a coach flying towards the metropolis, De Quincey had figured London as some kind of monstrous planet, an “attracting body,” gathering to it “the infinite means needed for her infinite purposes”; he concluded that “the coming metropolis forces itself upon the dullest observer, in the growing sense of his own utter insignificance … a poor shivering unit in the aggregate of human life.”2 The sense of a gathering storm, even of an approaching quasi-biblical apocalypse, is palpable: small wonder that Leigh needed to proclaim, and loudly, the all-inclusiveness of his “luminous” approach.
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