Preface

Summary

Cities were moods, emotional states, for the most part collective distortions, where human beings thrived and suffered, where they invested their souls in pains and pleasures, taking these pleasures and pains as proofs of reality.

(Saul Bellow, The Dean's December (1998), p. 285).

I want to think of London four centuries or so ago as a city to imagine or perceive. A city that existed in the mind, as well as in wood or brick. One where perceptions of its current state made all the difference for which policy to follow or crime to track down. And a city packed with people who we should evaluate on their own terms, their own senses of what London meant for them, because when all is said and done it was these perceptions that led to each one of the policies and prosecutions that we can count and measure today.

Bellow writes of any city in plurals, as ‘moods’, ‘states’, or ‘distortions’. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London, too, was a city of pluralities and multiplicities. It was a city marked by difference, needless to say: differing experiences, impressions, standards of living, hopes, and failures. There is no such thing as a single London, except for what it meant to each one of the many thousands who traipsed along its streets each day of the week.