Anthology

Early twentieth-century London was filled with a variety of creative, brilliant minds writing
remarkable tales from different points of view. This semester, we covered many different styles
of writing that all shared the same setting. It’s amazing how many perspectives can be covered
within the same area in the same time period. Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent was filled
with sneaky espionage and accidental bombings. For this story, my source was an article from
“The North London News and Finsbury Gazette” that connected the bombing in the novel to the
real life bombing in Greenwich Park in 1894.

I found a poem titled “The Embarkment” by T. E. Hulme that was similar to the poems
that we read in class by Ezra Pound, John Gould Fletcher, and F S Flint. Their poems and the
poem I found all have a similar basis and setting in London and are all based on the Imagist
Movement that was occurring at this time. This movement began in England before spreading
to the United States and the rest of the world.

For thrills with mild mystery, we read Marie Belloc Lowndes’ The Lodger. For this novel,
I found an image from “The Penny Illustrated Paper” dated September 8, 1888, that depicted a
policemen finding the body of a woman in the streets. During the time of the Whitechapel
Murders, many penny papers like this were sold and they were very popular.

Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-conscious novel Mrs. Dalloway was my personal favorite to
read, as we read through the one day in the lives of Mrs. Dalloway and her acquaintances. One
such acquaintance is Septimus Smith, a shell-shocked veteran who sees two psychiatrists,
each with different ideas of therapy. I found an article from The Evening News dated July 24,
1913, called “Mental Maladies: The Modern Treatment of the ‘Poor Lunatic.’” This source
described another doctor’s idea of therapy and the use of St. Luke’s Mental Hospital as a place
to get away from the stresses of everyday life when one was mentally ill or unstable.

My final source was a letter from Aldous Huxley, the author of the last book we read,
Brave New World, to George Orwell, author of the novel 1984. This letter contains Huxley’s
views of Orwell’s novel and his belief that the current path of the world will lead to a future filled
with hypnosis, conditioning and excessive “materialism.”

The works that we read contributed greatly to my understanding of London in the early
twentieth-century, but the extra research for these primary sources vastly improved this
knowledge. Though some works describe it to be a dark, grim part of society, other works show
London’s hidden beauty and mysterious secrets.