Woolfian London: In which I attempt to reconcile Virginia Woolf’s London with my London.

Although Virginia Woolf’s London is not even 100 years old, it is still a very different London than the one I’m currently living in.  In The London Scene, Woolf chronicles different aspects of her hometown in six essays that were originally written for Good Housekeeping, taking us everywhere from the cozy home of the London dweller to the hustle of cargo around the Thames. 

It’s hard for me to picture some of the images that Woolf paints so well as being more than images, as being the landscape of a place she lived and of a place I currently live: sail ships dotting the Thames, stray cats wandering the busiest warehouses, or tortoises being sold alongside flowers and shoes at an outdoor market (6, 13, 20).  Am I really wandering the same streets that Woolf wandered?  She only wrote these essays in ’31 – how can so much change in such a relatively short period of time?

Woolf herself, however, provides me with the answer.  In her words, “The charm of modern London is that it is not built to last; it is built to pass” (23).  I struggled over this idea for a little while.  Of course I know that people, and thus cities, change over time, but I am used to thinking of London itself as a historical museum: even though the particular artifacts on display may alter through the years, the structure of the building itself will remain.  

But Woolf, a direct inheritor of the modern world from the old – someone who had seen firsthand the collapse of what were once believed to be permanent structures in the wake of WWI – knows better.  As she witnesses the constant cycle of demolition and creation upon Oxford Street, a garish yet attractive shopping district and neighborhood, she understands that this need to “prov[e]” that “stone and brick” can be made “as transitory as [Londoners’] own desires” is a constant source of not only delight, but of innovation (24).  To constantly demolish and rebuild entirely is a creative act, and a purposeful one, too; London’s contents can be rearranged, but London the city will and does remain.

Not everything that Woolf describes feels as though it arrives from another era.  St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey still stand proud, along with the preserved houses of writers such as Dickens and Keats; Oxford Street is still a great shopping hub; and the Port of London remains a bustle of activity. 

I was particularly struck by how contemporary Woolf’s musings upon government felt.  Woolf expresses concern over the fact that government used to call for great individuals, yet now government merely produces “instruments” to function well within “committees” (61).  The danger, Woolf suggests, is that government has become too much like a machine in which people operate and choose not as they believe, but as the political faction they have been pressed into would like them to believe.  Woolf praises the House of Commons for ushering in a new era of democracy that takes into account commoner voices, democracy that does more than listen to individual aristocrats (62).  Her praise, however, is measured by the worry that the political machine will grow beyond man’s control.  Given the ongoing debates in the western world on the individual versus the society, on the prevalence of divisive political parties, etc, her words could not feel more timely.

[image from Virginia Woolf Society]