london in literature course 2025

London in Literature: 1778 to 1948

Live online course, 10 September to 19 November 2024.

London was founded as Londinium in 43 CE  by the colonising Romans. Its citizens have come from all nations and places, particularly during the last 200 years; it is one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. London’s culture is deeply rooted in traditional English class and gender structures, but these have been repeatedly challenged and updated by many forces, including migration, two world wars, and political movements such as the suffragettes. London is dynamic, exciting, complex, sometimes dangerous or tragic, sometimes hopeful. All this goes into the literature of this great city.

In this course we observe London as it changes from the eighteenth century until World War II, and we also witness an ever-changing notion of London that constantly feeds back into national identity. We will ask: How is London characterised in this novel? What might this mean for a sense of identity – British, English, cosmopolitan, or something else?

Set books

• Fanny Burney, Evelina (1778)
• Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861)
• Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
• Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1907)
• Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)
• Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (1948)

Daniel Defoe described London of the eighteenth century as ‘a great and monstrous Thing’. We begin with Frances Burney's Evelina (1778) and, like its titular character, we step wide-eyed into the perplexing class and gender codes of the fashionable places of late eighteenth century London. London’s potential for monstrosity links the next three texts of the course, as we explore characters corrupted to various degrees in Great Expectations (1861), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and The Secret Agent (1907). Overweening social ambition, terrorism, and murder are all fostered by London living - alongside generosity, compassion, and creativity.

In 1925, Virginia Woolf opens Mrs Dalloway with Clarissa’s delight in London’s vibrancy as she steps out into Westminster on a beautiful June morning: ‘What a lark! What a plunge!’ But the book also explores the painful legacies of the First World War, visible on the sunlit streets of London. 

By the early 1940s, during the Second World War, The Heat of the Day (1948) conjures London as a place of darkly intimate moral complexity, as Stella must discern if her lover is, or is not, a spy for the axis powers.

The course is taught by Dr Angela Harris. Sessions are live online via Zoom. 

Six sessions, Wednesdays, fortnightly, from 10 September until 19 November 2025, 6.00 pm to 8.00 pm British time.