London Through the Pen

Originally published as London in English Literature, this book was written by the American scholar Percy H. Boynton (1875–1946). A Harvard graduate who taught English literature at the University of Chicago for many years, Boynton here examines London through the lens of literary sources. The book proceeds chronologically: from the fourteenth-century walled London of Chaucer, through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of Shakespeare, to the Commonwealth and Restoration eras of Milton and Dryden, then to the eighteenth century of Addison and Johnson, the Romantic period of Lamb and Byron, and the nineteenth century as seen by Dickens and George Eliot, ending with the contemporary London of the early twentieth century. The author sets literary texts against the city's geography, so that readers see both how the London within its walls gradually expanded into the Victorian metropolis and how writers of different periods left their own impressions of the city in verse drama, essays, and novels. The book offers both an overall grasp of the relationship between writers and their times and a bibliography of significant works about London from each period, with notes and appendices, making it a suitable introduction for readers approaching English literature and London's urban history together. This Chinese edition, introduced by the Yeeyan Gutenberg Project and translated by several hands, appears in the Writers and Cities series.