Chapter 4 - London Spied

Summary

Chapter 4 explores how a range of popular spy guides published in the second half of the eighteenth century both shape and reflect a sense of the city as home to fraud and deception. It situates these surveys of urban life alongside earlier precursors like Ned Ward’s The London Spy and mid-century writing about the city, including the novel, that presented the city as home to various cheats and frauds. The repetitive works, in which a new arrival is taken on a tour through the city by one versed in its ways, highlight various tensions in the representation of the metropolis in the period, including between claims to novelty and the repetition of familiar scenes and between an understanding of the city as a space of false appearances and an insistence that these performances can be read and understood.