Imagined London by Anna Quindlen

Author:Anna Quindlen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781426201820
Publisher: National Geographic Society
Published: 2004-08-28T10:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

Luckily on that visit to London I had a more historically accurate opportunity to visit its rich past. The British Museum had just opened a show on London 1753, as though someone had known I was coming and would only be able to stomach so much of Internet cafés and Starbucks lattes and all the one-world paraphernalia that has so homogenized foreign travel. The British Museum is not crowded in on the Brompton Road with the Victoria and Albert, the Natural History, and the Science Museums. Nor is it one of the gems in the necklace of important places that curves around Trafalgar Square: the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery with their columns and plinths and plumes of water trumpeting their importance.

The British Museum is instead surrounded by bookstores and other small shops and houses in the midst of Bloomsbury, in such an unlikely setting that one shopkeeper a block away said that when he saw people enter with cameras and guidebooks he knew instantly to say, “Left at the end of the street, then down and it’s on the right hand” even before they’d opened their mouths. Perhaps as well as any other great London institution the museum plays with the idea of how past and present conjoin. The building itself does the trick, by combining a square and stodgy classical Greek temple facade with a glass-and-steel skylit roof over the great court. The transparent roof went in in 2000 and is an absolutely magical marriage of technology, beauty, and function. (Contrary to Gershwin’s “Foggy Day” lament, the British Museum has not lost its charm.) And inside the museum itself, for those of us who tend to think of the London Wall as venerable antiquity, there is the Rosetta stone and the famous mummies, as well as Greek, Asian, and Mexican treasures procured for the museum by generations of distinguished archaeological grave robbers.

So while the London show spoke to my inner antiquarian, its material was, in fact, by the British Museum’s standards, rather recent. The wonderful thing about it, however, was that it did what London, in its history and its variety, has always done—it showed clearly that there is really nothing new under the sun.

That, I think, is one of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned from reading English literature, the kind of unvarying nature both of social problems and personal dramas. There is very little to separate, say, Georgette Heyer’s Regency drama Arabella, about a young woman muddling through her long-awaited London season, from Nancy Mitford’s Radlett girls in The Pursuit of Love, except for the passage of time and the claims of craft. Dances, dresses, men, marriage. The hypochondriacal moneylender Mrs. Islam in Monica Ali’s contemporary novel Brick Lane may be a Bangladeshi immigrant, but she is also a Dickens character in a modern London setting. John Mortimer’s hapless Rumpole, married to She Who Must Be Obeyed and drinking cheap plonk after representing yet another of the Timsons—“A family to breed from, the Timsons.

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