The English were the first modern people to develop a city-dwelling majority: some time around 1850, the year when Dickens was writing Bleak House, Henry Mayhew was editing his explorations of London’s meaner streets, and American literature was still dwelling in the small-town world of The Scarlet Letter. More than a century had passed since the English had invented a modern urban art form: the novel. Admittedly, Cervantes and Rabelais had shown the way, by organizing its parent formats—the romance and the short story—around characters rather than situations, as Boccaccio and Chaucer had done. But stringing together short stories is not the same as the intense realism of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. We experience Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe as real people, because their experience is comprehensive. Defoe does not need to digress into daisy chains of anecdote tragical-historical-pastoral. Moll’s world is already full: she exists in the present intense.
Even novelists doubted whether the intensity of that present was a healthy experience.
Even novelists doubted whether the intensity of that present was a healthy experience. In the 1770s, when Boston contained 20,000 people, London was on the way to its first million. “London is literally new to me,” grumbles the misanthropic Matthew Bramble in Smollett’s Humphry Clinker(1771). “New in its streets, houses and even in its situation. . . . What I left open fields, producing hay and corn, I now find covered with streets, and squares, and palaces, and churches.” Bramble
