The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London

"London was burn'd" was the unequivocal account of the Great Fire recorded by one Londoner, Alfred Wallis, in a family ledger. Over thirteen thousand houses, almost four hundred acres of land within the City walls, eighty-seven churches, forty-four livery halls and numerous other prominent buildings, including the Guildhall, the Royal Exchange and St. Paul's, were destroyed by fire in the space of a few days at the beginning of September 1666. It is not just because of the enormity of this devastation that the Great Fire has been assigned such a prominent place in chronicles of late seventeenth-century England, but also because of the richness of the sources associated with the Fire and the rebuilding of London--in particular, the vivid eye-witness accounts written by Samuel Pepys.

It is an eclectic range of these sources, from Wenceslaus Hollar's 1666 engraving of the City of London to Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders published in 1722, that Cynthia Wall employs in her impressive and wide-ranging book to argue that the Fire led to "a cultural reconception of space" (4). London, Wall claims, "had to be renegotiated on every level; the maps, the architectural treatises, and the textual topographies were all, along with the literary productions of the period, part of the cultural attempt to rechart that -uncanny territory" (95). Wall is clearly competent at handling this vast array of sources, and so it is a pity that in such a beautifully illustrated book more is not made in the text of the twenty-eight plates. Focusing on London, but ranging widely over the Restoration and early Augustan period, the discussion brings together architecture, cartography, history, literary criticism and cultural geography. Its success in making connections between these fields makes this book a valuable contribution to a number of areas of scholarship which have in recent years become increasingly concerned with space as a category of analysis.

In many texts written in the immediate aftermath of the Fire--sermons, official proclamations, newspapers, and poems--Wall charts various "rhetorics of loss." The Fire had a leveling effect, not only materially but also, she claims, in its impact on the social order. London was initially reimagined not as an ordered whole but as a chaotic ruin; Biblical metaphors became all too real as "the flaming flame was not quenched, and God hath- cast everybody out of their pleasant habitations" (21).

To the argument, well-rehearsed amongst historians, that London was not rebuilt along any of the lines proposed by John Evelyn, Christopher Wren, Richard Newcourt, Valentine Knight or Edward Jerman because of the practical demands of business and everyday life Wall adds the "cultural stubbornness" of Londoners; they exhibited "a more deliberate, insistent, and widespread cultural preference for recovering the London known and lost, rather than creating a London new and unknown" (40). Particularly striking amongst the evidence Wall employs to support this argument is the transformation the London Gazette underwent in the months after the Fire. Having refused to publish advertisements unrelated to state matters before the Fire, despite public pressure, it was only after the Fire that the newspaper began to carry advertisements detailing new addresses and pleas for the return of property. And so newspapers became "a crucial genre of relocation, an instrument of reconstruction" (69).

In the development of maps and written topographies of London, the Fire also marked a turning point. Of the few maps produced before the Fire, the majority were bird's-eye views; after the Fire, as topographical accuracy became more of a concern, two-dimensional ground plans replaced detailed elevations. As more maps were produced after the Fire so too were more topographies; the Fire, according to Wall, marked a transition from topographical depictions of London as fixed and knowable, to accounts, such as Daniel Defoe's Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26), in which space in London is characterized as variable and uncertain.

This material appears in the first half of the book and although it could stand alone as a convincing argument about the transformation of perceptions of urban space, it is used in the second half of the book as a context in which to situate various literary works of the Restoration and Augustan period, in particular Defoe's writings, as well as drama and urban poetry. Wall considers this literature not by genre but by space--streets, the public spaces of shops and parks, and the private spaces of churches and houses--to argue against T. S. Reddaway, who claims in The Rebuilding of London after the Great Fire (1940) that the rebuilding "passed without comment."

Throughout, Wall emphasizes the interconnections between the two parts of the book to relate the developments in London's urban spaces to textual changes: "the literary remapping of London is part of the literal remapping" (76). Wall is most confident in her discussion of streets and it is here that the overlap between physical structures and imaginative literature can be clearly charted. "In a sense, the changing hierarchy of streets operated both metaphorically and analogically with literary genres meeting new needs. The literature of the underworld matches step for step the new encomia of the streets. Physical mobility affects social mobility; spatial negotiation entails social navigation; charting streets turns to narrativizing them" (119). It is in this respect--analysis of links between sources that are usually considered in isolation--that this book is at its most stimulating. In her preface, Wall notes that these connections can partially be explained by the personal ties between the creators of these texts. Furthermore, as individuals they wore different hats; John Ogilby, for example, was a mapseller, a bookseller and a writer. It is unfortunate that these remarks are not pursued more fully in the central sections of the book in order to explore both the people behind and in front of these texts.

The book culminates with a consideration of the novel. "Novelistic space," unlike poetry and drama, Wall argues, "is wider, its occupation longer, its visualization more detailed, its spaces more intimately and privately known. A novel--and the experience of reading a novel--occupies and travels- space" (213). Like many recent studies that are concerned with early novels, Wall's book can be considered under the umbrella of what Robert Markley has dubbed "new economic criticism." Much of this scholarship has sought to explore associations between the Financial Revolution and Augustan literature. Central to this analysis is the notion of public credit and its characterization in various genres as an unstable presence. In what is perhaps Wall's most ambitious argument, she hints at a connection between such economic metaphors and her wider theme of space. "Spatial changes in London share--perhaps even sponsor--the economic metaphors; both literally and figuratively unsettled the familiar landscape" (77).

The Great Fire is a turning point in the history of London, not least in that, as Wall shows, it led to a significant transformation of cultural conceptions of space. However, the Fire must also be recognized for intensifying and bringing into clearer relief existing political, religious, social and economic tensions. It is the detail with which Wall illustrates these larger themes through her particular focus on space that makes this book relevant for an audience interested in late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century England generally.