Page 21 - Gullivers

It was, in fact, Samuel Johnson who, in very different vein, famously remarked ‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life’. The idea of the city as a source of endless fascination as well as being the centre of all worthwhile political and cultural activity was, in effect, the obverse of the notion of the countryside
as the site of the ideal existence. This idea too has its roots in classical antiquity. The speaker of the ‘Beatus ille’ is an inhabitant of the city of Rome whose sentiments in praise of a country life constitute the entire subject matter of Horace’s pœm – except for its brief closing section in which the speaker decides to leave the country be and to remain in the city aster all. Augustan Rome, where Horace lived, was during the pœt’s lifetime the centre of a great and expanding civilisation. So too was London during the lifetime of Swist. And if much early- eighteenth century writing offers a conventionally laudatory view of the pleasures of the country, so dœs a great deal of contemporary and later writing insist on the attractions of London, which acted as a magnet to ambitious men (and some women) from the English provinces as well as from Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. For aspiring writers, the attractions of the metropolis were obvious, for London was increasingly the leading centre of English-language print culture. It was the Dublin-born Richard Steele, along with the English provincial Joseph Addison, who most eloquently evoked the attractions of city life, in essays in The Tatler (1709-10) and The Spectator (1711-12). Addison, in his account of twenty-four hours in London (The Spectator, no. 454), represents the modern city as offering an exciting new form of social experience, one running entirely counter to life
in the country, since life in the now well-lit city did not come to a halt when the sun set but continued unabated around the clock.
I. Swist and Dublin 15