7 - Dryden’s London

Summary

Dryden's greatest subject, which occupied him all his professional life, was the emergence into history of the modern city. Much of his conduct as a writer - the forms he chose or invented, the kinds of human behavior he examined, and his choice of a poetic rhetoric - were responses to the challenges posed by that subject. Even politics, though national in its terms of reference, was generated, as he saw it, along an axis between Whitehall and Cornhill. In reflecting on the momentous changes in metropolitan organization that were taking place around him and the new kinds of sociability to which they were giving birth, he was also helping to mold and direct these things, never merely an observer. We will look first at his experience of the old metropolis, which came to a spectacular end in September 1666, then his engagement, beginning with Annus Mirabilis, with the new metropolis, and finally his concern, in the last decade of his life, with the relationship of the metropolis to the nation at large.