Peter Ackroyd: London: The Biography

It was also remarked by Grosley that "melancholy prevails in London in every family, in circles, in assemblies, at public and private entertainments. The merry meetings, even of the lowest sort, are dashed with this gloom." Dostoevsky observed the "gloom" which "never forsakes" the Londoner even "in the midst of gaiety." The wine sold in London taverns was also considered "to occasion that melancholy, which is so general." Even the theatre was held responsible for the unhappy distemper; one traveller described how the son of his landlord, after being taken to see Richard III, "leaped out of bed and, after beating the wainscot with his head and feet, at the same time roaring like one possessed, he rolled about the ground in dreadful convulsions, which made us despair of his life; he thought he was haunted by all the ghosts in the tragedy of Richard the Third, and by all the dead bodies in the churchyards of London."

Everything was blamed except, perhaps, for the onerous and exhausting condition of the city itself...

The whole universe may be found within a grain of London's life. The "gate of heaven," in St. Bartholomew the Great, was located beside the shambles of Smithfield. But if it is a sacred city, it is one which includes misery and suffering. The bowels of God have opened, and rained down shit upon London.

The most abject poverty or dereliction can appear beside glowing wealth and prosperity. Yet the city needs its poor. What if the poor must 'lie, or be deprived, in order that the city might live? That would be the strangest contrast of all. Life and death meet and part; misfortune and good fortune shake hands; suffering and happiness inhabit the same house. "Without Contraries," Blake once wrote, "is no progression." He reached this truth by steely observation of the city. It is always ancient, and forever new, that disparity or disjunction itself creating a kind of ferment of novelty and inventiveness. It may be that the new protects the old, or the old guards the new, yet in the very fact of their oneness lies the secret of London's identity shining through time...

London goes beyond any boundary or convention. It contains every wish or word ever spoken, every action or gesture ever made, every harsh or noble statement ever expressed. It is illimitable. It is Infinite London.