Literature

Literature

London has been the setting for many works of literature. The two writers who

are perhaps most closely associated with the city are the diarist Samuel Pepys,

famous among other things for his eyewitness account of the Great Fire, and

Charles Dickens, whose representation of a foggy, snowy, grimy London of street

sweepers and pickpockets is a major influence on people's vision of early

Victorian London.

James

Boswell's Life of Johnson is the most notable biography in English. Most of it

takes place in London, and is the source of

Johnson's famous aphorism: "When a man is tired of London,

he is tired of life; for there is in London

all that life can afford."

The

earlier (1722) A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe is a

fictionalisation of the events of the 1665 Great Plague. Later important

depictions of London

from the 19th and early 20th centuries are the afore-mentioned Dickens novels,

and Arthur Conan Doyle's famous Sherlock Holmes stories. The 1933 novel Down

and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell describes life in

poverty in both cities. Among modern writers, perhaps the most pervasively

influenced by the city is Peter Ackroyd in works such as London: The Biography, The Lambs of London

and Hawksmoor.