The Soul of London: A Survey of a Modern City

by Ford Madox Ford

Evoking the glamour and frivolity of its high society life's growth over the centuries into a bewildering mass of possibilities, and the hardship of its working people, Soul of London (1905) displays an alluring humanity. Part history, part personal reminiscence and part prose poem, Ford's prophetic image of the evolution of modernity prefigures the social alienation that would transform twentieth century literature.

Genres: London, Travel, History, Essays, British Literature

128 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1995

About the author

Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals The English Review and The Transatlantic Review were important in the development of early 20th-century English and American literature.

Ford is now remembered for his novels The Good Soldier (1915), the Parade's End tetralogy (1924–1928) and The Fifth Queen trilogy (1906–1908). The Good Soldier is frequently included among the great literature of the 20th century, including the Modern Library 100 Best Novels, The Observer′s "100 Greatest Novels of All Time", and The Guardian′s "1000 novels everyone must read".

Reviews

[Lynda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps the best books I have ever read about the British and London.

[Milo · Rating 3 out of 5]

As much a city symphony as a more digressive amusement on the city, or rather, the metropolis, and its effect upon the human soul. Many of Ford’s prophecies have been fulfilled – of the vast anonymity, the clamouring of self-promotors, an increasingly interior and unaffected populace surrounded by empty monuments. Those paper buildings he predicts: they are among us. No more do we build juggernauts. But this is not a work of single or sole account. It begins strikingly, a London divided into its various presences, of its various peoples; the London not of maps but of those who live within it. My London is not all London – large swathes of the city remain unknown to me, and will likely continue their obscurity. The city then not the city but that part of it we inhabit, in the physical and mental character. Ford often makes expression of the subjective in this way: of seeing so many people from a train window – this is a likening to the project itself. What flits of light, of insight, can be found in a thousand fragments? The tower can be built in many ways, signifying different gods. Ford sometimes makes this his mission. To contradict himself. To love London and to hate London. To speak of London with such abstraction as to make the city an irrelevance. Then to indulge in its minutia. There is a vast middle section of this book quite distracted by its own conceit. Ford finds himself in a mercantile history of the Thames – quite unbidden – slowly floating back to his subject; where a book like this can digress is a boundary of some mystery, given that digression is the object. But that there is a distance, a distance too far from the cloud-city, or a distance too far from an image of the city, proves itself. But in its beginning and in its ending Ford comes upon some great vision of old London, and near as much new London. As much the city as that particular section to which Ford owes origin; as much that section as the cast of mind the city seems to impute upon him. Perhaps this is a psychological novel folded inside out; perhaps, like The Good Solider, we are reading a travelbook as written by the protagonist of a story, whose own tendency to slippage becomes, itself, self-portraiture. To delineate it too precisely risks defeating the object. It is at times a fragile thing.

P.S. I imagine Ford had Chesterton in mind when writing about his many Napoleons.

[Rachel Stevenson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting snapshot of Edwardian London.

[Akerumi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great description by Ford, lots of details.

[Hon Lady Selene · Rating 4 out of 5]

But, for my own part, if this particular work gives a number of readers pleasure, or that counterpart of pleasure which is pain; if it awakens a Londoner here or there to an interest in the human aspects of his London; or if a man who loves London here and there throughout the world and across many seas is aroused to a bitter sweet remembering of old days, if in fact its note rings true to a section of mankind, I should call myself satisfied.

For my part, Ford can rest satisfied in his grave, it's a little long , but overall I am satisfied with this essay because Ford truly does understand:

For London is before all things an incomparable background; it is always in the right note, it is never out of tone.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Over one hundred years after this book was first published, it is still so accurate about the unique sensibility that is London that I felt as if I were there, feeling that London way. Amazingly, the Soul of London has remained much the same, in tact even into the twenty-first century. Ford nailed it in a timeless description of the humble and regal London Town.

[Linn J · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF. Föll mig inte alls i smaken. Klassisk bok med beskrivningar om London och att det är en stad som är obegränsad och influerar alla som vet om den staden på individ och geografisk nivå. Nja... För filosofisk för mig

[Jacek]

I found Ford's tone here insufferable, and the contents meaningless. But we humans learn by the doing; The Soul of London (1905) was so hard to drag myself through that I pulled Provence (1935) off the shelf to see whether his nonfiction got better eventually. I read a paragraph at random. My jaw dropped.

-=-

The Inheritors
The Benefactor
The Soul of London
An English Girl
The Fifth Queen
Mr. Apollo
The Nature of a Crime
The 'Half-Moon'
A Call
The Portrait
Ancient Lights
The Simple Life Limited
Ladies Whose Bright Eyes
The Panel
The New Humpty Dumpty
Mr. Fleight
The Young Lovell
The Good Soldier
The Marsden Case
New York Is Not America
Parade's End
A Little Less than Gods
No Enemy
Return to Yesterday
When the Wicked Man
The Rash Act
It Was the Nightingale
Henry for Hugh
Provence
Great Trade Route
Vive Le Roy
The March of Literature

[Janet Roger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ford Madox Ford was in many ways an outsider. Born 1873, in Wimbledon, Surrey. Christened Joseph Leopold Ford Hermann Madox Hueffer at a time when a German surname wasn’t flavor of the month. His English mother, born on what was then considered the wrong side of the blanket to the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, added a note of the bohemian rather than stability to his life.

Then at sixteen when his father died and Ford moved to London to finish his schooling, it began to dawn how he as a provincial never would be able to see the capital through the eyes of the born not made Londoner. So when he sets off writing The Soul of London he doesn’t even try.

Instead he tips the situation on its head, calls his first chapter, From a Distance, and gives us a wonderful analysis and commentary of what he calls its foreignness. The variety and anonymity of people ever coming and going in the Capital: top-notch society entertaining themselves and the grind of London’s working classes, the misery of its poor – all vital to the outsider’s understanding of the essence and soul of London.

Ford makes a convincing case. And gives us an unbeatable grandstand overview of the Edwardian metropolis.