Romantic London and the Architecture of Memory

Abstract

AbstractThis essay attempts a reading of the relationship between literature and architecture in Romantic writings. The correspondence between external and internal structures – between the literal city as encountered outside the text and the reimagined city constructed in textual space – is most discernible in the context of metropolitan improvements. In the opening decades of the nineteenth century, Regency London underwent a series of significant urban changes. These developments, notwithstanding their importance to the culture and cityscape of London, ironically nurtured intense anxieties about the consequences of change. The loss of certain buildings or spaces in the city as a result of urban growth overlaps with experiences of personal loss, so that the new architecture in the city ironically acts as aides‐mémoires of the drastic shifts in subjective history. Buildings thus impress the mind in a way that yields an intensely personal understanding of the changing urban environment. De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821) is read as a case study that explores the implications of metropolitan improvements and the extent to which memories of loss are projected onto the buildings and streets of the newly expanded London.