Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
INTRODUCTION
My Father will be so good as to fetch home his prodigal Daughter from Town, I hope, unless
he wishes me to walk the Hospitals, Enter at the Temple, or mount Guard at St James.
Letter to Cassandra Austen, 18 September 1796.
Jane Austen was born in 1775 and died in 1817. For almost her entire adult life London
was the capital of a country at war with France (1792-1815), with only brief intervals of
peace. And yet London flourished, the greatest trading city in the world, with a population
growing at a startling rate. New districts pushed the boundaries of London ever outwards
with their fine streets, fashionable squares and spacious churches. The Port of London
brought in goods from all over the world to fill the shops with a variety of wares never before
seen on such a scale. Wealth, fuelled by rapid industrial development and agricultural im-
provements, poured into the capital. Much of this London remains, to be discovered by the
explorer of today, and it can seem very familiar - great public buildings, elegant streets,
green parks. And yet the London Jane Austen knew, and incorporated so confidently into her
novels, was very different from the London we know now.
Jane Austen, after a portrait by her sister Cassandra,
c.
1810.
Kensington, Knightsbridge, Hampstead and Islington were all separate villages. Green
fields and market gardens still resisted the fingers of development that pushed between them.
Vast, lawless slums or 'rookeries' existed cheek by jowl with fashionable districts. The
only policing, apart from the handful of Bow Street Runners, was by parish constables and
private watchmen. Prisons of almost medieval squalor were scattered throughout the city.
The civic improvements of the later nineteenth century were yet to come - London Bridge
was still the crumbling medieval structure of the nursery rhyme, shorn of its shops and
