‘Flash Style’: Pierce Egan and Literary London, 1820–28

Abstract

In the paper I have set myself the task of trying to explain how it was that Pierce Egan's Life in London should have enjoyed such a widespread and lasting appeal during the middle years of the nineteenth century. Life in London, I want to argue, positively rejoices in the role-playing nature of modern urban existence: unlike many of the ‘bourgeois’ classics of the High Victorian period, it is more interested in viewing class society as a repertoire of possibilities – of Ins and Outs, Ups and Downs – than in putting individuals in their place. In part, Tom and Jerry's metropolitan movements can be seen to re-trace many of the well-worn paths of the aristocratic rake or roue. But in other ways they act in exactly the same ways as young ‘gents’ from the lower ranks seeking to pass themselves off as gentlemen of leisure (it is in this sense that Life in London can be seen as a truly ‘Cockney’ text, because of the way in which it re-interprets the insecurity and isolation of the lower middle-class Londoner as an invitation to overleap all bounds). That such a finesse should have been possible in the early 1820s argues that there must have been a considerable vogue during the late Regency for the various kinds of cant and slang. In Life in London this patter is absolutely incessant, irritatingly so, in the eyes of most modern readers, but one of the effects of this thick verbal texture was to create what would have been otherwise unimaginable in the context of the time, that is, a kind of classless language, a polyglot vocabulary that was not tied down to any particular social milieu. In this way Life in London succeeded in capturing the age of ‘improvement’ at its utopian moment, and the improvement it imagined was (in certain curious ways) highly inclusive and democratic in nature: the pre-Pooter fantasy of the lower middle-class.