London stories

London Stories: Everyman's Library Pocket Classics 

 Jerry White (editor) 

London has the greatest literary tradition of any city in the world. Its roll-call of story-tellers includes cultural giants who changed the way the world thought about writing, like Shakespeare, Defoe and Dickens. But there has also been an innumerable host of writers who have sought to capture the essence of London and what it meant for the people who lived there or were merely passing through. They found a city of boundless wealth and ragged squalor, of moving tragedy and riotous joy; and they faithfully transcribed what they saw and felt in the stories they told of London town.
They are stories of fact and fiction and occasionally something in between. Some voices will be familiar to many readers and others practically unknown. But all give us insights into these writers’ very varied Londons; and all tell their stories gratifyingly well.

Authors include John Evelyn, Thomas de Quincey, W. M. Thackeray, Henry Mayhew, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, George Gissing, J. B. Priestley, Jean Rhys, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Maeve Binchy, Doris Lessing, Hanif Kureishi and Shena Mackay.

Jerry White has been writing London history for nearly fifty years. He began with two small-scale oral histories of neighbourhoods in Spitalfields and Finsbury Park and moved on to an acclaimed trilogy of London histories spanning the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has won a number of awards, including the prestigious Wolfson History Prize (2002). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

    Publisher ‏ : ‎ Everyman; 1st edition (27 Mar. 2014)
    Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
    ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 9781841596167
    Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.2 x 3.1 x 19 cm