Imagined London Read Online Free PDF

and a lucrative lifestyle; the British magazines are full of them, in towering heels and dwindling skirts. But seeing Hyde Park through the eyes of a Forsyte is as ridiculous as seeing Greenwich Village through the eyes of Henry James. The modern, the ever changing, insists on tapping you on the shoulder or, occasionally, slapping you in the face. In the Princes Gardens block where the Roger Forsytes once set up housekeeping, there are indeed the expected elegant white houses with small pillared porticos. But at the corner is the half-sunken modern block that is the sports center of the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, “pilates classes, inquire within.” And, across the square, a kind of Soviet gray structure sits as the antidote to the slenderlightness of the older houses; it must be a dormitory, for only college students use flags as curtains. The students fly across the square on bicycles and the occasional skateboard or pair of Rollerblades; if Soames Forsyte was appalled at his daughter’s necklines, he should see the young women with pierced navels moving hither and yon.
    In fact, he was appalled long before the twentieth century had given over to the twenty-first: “A democratic England,” he concludes bitterly by the end of the saga. “Disheveled, hurried, noisy and seemingly without an apex…. Gone forever, the close borough of rank and polish.” Every British generation has complained that its successor has transgressed the old standards. One of London’s best known poems is a version of the kind of not-what-it-used-to-be that you can hear creaking out of the old hands at any pub. In this case the old hand happens to be Wordsworth:
    Milton! Thou should’st be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! Raise us up, return to us again…
    Or, as the cabbie on his way to Islington said as he frowned at a brace of Indian students on bicycles, his complaint at one with the spirit of Soames and Wordsworth both, “The city isn’t what it was, miss, I can tell you that.” The jeremiad that followed about the effects of immigration on the economy, the crime rate, and unemployment was as old as time, and as literature.
    Galsworthy is a better novelist than he is given credit for, and he chooses his settings well. Soames’s sister Winifred lives in a house in Green Street rented for her and her husband Montague, who gambles and womanizes. Green Street is a pleasant and quiet lane off the park, and anyone would be pleased to own one of the houses that line it. But they are markedly less grand than those of the elder Forsytes, clearly the right place for a female child who has married a man of little fortune and uncertain reputation. These are buildings slighter, less chesty, more burgher than baron.
    Property is, after all, what the saga is about, and what so many English novels, particularly of the nineteenth century, find of greatest concern. (Galsworthy, like Edith Wharton, is a twentieth-century man who appears to have been becalmed a century before his time.) Americans confuse this with class, since they liketo think of themselves as members of a classless society, just as they like to think of their British counterparts as hopelessly immured in a hierarchy hatched a millennium ago. Neither is accurate. It is a mistake to make too much of democracy, or aristocracy. The great fulcrum is industry. At the end of the third book of the Forsyte saga, there is a society wedding at which the family takes pride in the inability to distinguish between themselves, landed bourgeoisie, and the titled family with whom they were now allied. “Was there, in the crease of his trousers, the expression of his moustache, his accent or the shine on his top hat, a