Imagined London by Anna Quindlen Page B

to be country pleasures: dogs, horses, especially gardening.
    This is clear in many of the most beloved English novels. Agatha Christie would much prefer to be in St. Mary Mead with Miss Marple or even on a cruise with Hercule Poirot then set down in the center of Chelsea. Austen is famously unequivocal in Emma when thehypochondriacal Mr. Woodhouse says stoutly, “The truth is, that in London it is always sickly season. Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be.” (This sentiment stands in opposition to the oft-quoted—too oft-quoted, actually—sentiment of Samuel Johnson that “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.”)
    In her memoirs Jessica Mitford recalled her father’s trips: “On very rare occasions he lumbered into his London clothes and with much heavy breathing prepared for the trip—always considered a tremendously arduous journey, although it was actually only eighty miles—to sit in the House of Lords.” By contrast to the exile of the Elizabethans, in any number of English novels the good folks of the shires travel to the capital, or “to town,” as it is so often described, only under duress, and when they return to the villages and estates which they consider their proper homes a reader can almost feel them take in a lungful of good clean air.
    Initially, of course, this was for simple sanitary reasons. The streets of long ago London were punctuated by enormous garbage piles; one afternoon, as I watched a man with a begrimed face pick through a trash basket in Regent’s Park, I realized that I’d met his like before, in Dickens and in the diaries of Samuel Pepys, in the person of the trash pickers and vendors who made their living off the refuse.
    But the garbage was not the worst of it. Even a sheltered young reader could, sooner or later, figure out what was inside a “slops jar” and what would be the net effect of throwing its contents out an upstairs window in what, half a millennium ago, was the most populous city in Europe. Disease ran rampant in London because sewage did. London Bridge had a public toilet, the contents of which went directly into the Thames. It is one thing to stand in the grand semicircle of Trafalgar Square and admire how the terrain slopes gently down to Big Ben and from there to the river, quite another to consider how important that was during the era when raw sewage ran through the gutters directly into the water. Even when the gutters were replaced by sewers, the sewers fed right into the famous river, until the water was brown, the water birds died, and members of Parliament talked of leaving Westminster because of the fumes. The Big Stink, it was called before it was remedied in the nineteenth century.
    But it was not just the noisome air that drove the determination, evident in so many English novels, to stay safely away from London. There was the stench of evil, too, or at least license, so at odds with the sense of village rectitude. The eighteenth century, for instance, marked the heyday of what, in Heyer’s romance novels, is known as the “ton,” a class of cynical dandies whostood prevailing standards of good behavior on their head. Husbands and wives were expected to spend little time together; infidelity was de rigueur. (Hence this tight-lipped exchange in a Heyer novel, Devil’s Cub, one of her typical tales of true love amid the debauchery: “He frowned. ‘Orgies, Fanny?’ ‘Orgies, Hugh. Pray do not ask more.’”)
    Stories reached the landed gentry of the escapades of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, the queen of ton society, who used padding to make her upswept hair three feet high, who performed onstage and gambled her husband’s money away, who spoke in a peculiar form of baby talk called the Cavendish Drawl. When Sheridan wrote The School for Scandal, Georgina was the model for the lead role of the good-hearted but loose-living Lady