The City of Long Memory

This chapter talks about a certain repatriation that has taken place in London: the remembering and reclaiming of the city and of Indigenous travelers by descendant communities. In this entanglement of memory between the city and its Indigenous history, activism, ceremony, and reenactment are central to the story. Indigenous communities, particularly from Canada, have continued to assert relationships to the Crown through journeys to London, in a tradition that goes back to earlier journeys by Indigenous diplomats. Furthermore, the development of a Maori community in London attests to a lived Indigenous presence in the city, even if other travelers such as Pocahontas remain metaphors in a new, allegedly multicultural city. Together, these stories illustrate the ways in which memory has entangled London in Indigenous history, even as the city has tended to forget its own empire.

A Notebook, 1929

Do you see this?He pins black cloth over his greatcoat,leaves his room in Warner Street and trundles his olding bonesdown to the Strandwhere Australia House corners the thoroughfare.The black cloth speaks indictment. Coveredin toy skeletons, it drapes his stooping shoulders,...

A Hat Factory, circa 1875

Above a sea of chimneypotted and stovepiped men,four gargoyles perch in the Oxford Street skyline.Neither lions nor demons nor saints: beavers. They look down fromHenry Heath’s factory, where seventy men sew and blockVictorian manhood.Newly carved and ensconced, the beavers are already epitaphs...

A Lost Museum, 1793

Sparry bodies, eagle stones, Muscovy mica, ponderous earths; garnets of twenty-six sides, violet fluors, Brazil rubies, Peru emeralds. Eora people are singing, Eora people are dreaming, Eora people are stick-firing the land, Eora people are seeing the ships come in. Eora people are greeting the newcomers, Eora people...

That Kind Urbanity of Manner

This chapter analyzes how London became a place driven by ritual. As scholars of the early nineteenth century have noted, British society experienced a social revolution in which an ever more formal culture “acquired taboos, introduced strict rules of propriety, and became reticent about sex and the emotions revolting from the customs of their elders.” The word most often used to describe this new reality was “manners.” Simultaneously lauded and lambasted by authors from Jane Austen to Charles Dickens, ritual, in the form of manners, comportment, sentiment, and protocol, began to transform Georgian values into what would eventually come to be known as Victorian culture.

Atlantes, 1761

Atlantes (n. pl.): The plural form of atlas; stone carvings of male figures, used as columns to support the entablature of a Greek or Greek-style structure. What a cannonball does to a human body: blossoms it in pink and white and red and grey and yellow,...

A Debtor’s Petition, 1676

Come listen to me and I will declare a story as true as you ever did hear I merry will be while my money doth last and only will shew that the worst is past. King’s Bench. Queen’s Bench. Wood Street. Poultry. Fleet. Ludgate. Tothill Fields. Coldbath Fields....

Dawnland Telescopes

This chapter examines how London had to learn to be colonial. From the very first moments of sustained encounter in the late sixteenth century, places like Ossomocomuck and London were entangled through the creation of knowledge. Even before explorers stepped ashore in “Virginia,” they were propelled there by an unprecedented urban crisis that threatened the stability of London society. This urban context shaped how English explorers and colonists saw the territories and people they encountered and how they attempted—often unsuccessfully—to organize themselves and others in these unfamiliar places. Meanwhile, the experiences of Indigenous travelers to London, and in particular those originating in the homelands of the eastern Algonquian peoples suggest that parallel Indigenous processes of exploration were taking place.

The Unhidden City

This chapter adds to the canon of secret Londons through the inscription of another layer, another arcane and invisible text in the palimpsest that is the urban landscape. Such accounts of other Londons gesture toward the irreducible survivals of past landscapes in a place that constantly unearths its own history. As stated by Prof. Timothy Morton, “the streets beneath the streets, the Roman Wall, the boarded-up houses, the unexploded bombs, are records of everything that happened to London.” London's history exists in its form. From histories of the Underground to accounts by urban explorers entering the city's sewers and crypts, from compendia of obscure folklore to catalogs of nearly forgotten ghost stories, London provokes a predilection with the hidden.

Civilization Itself Consents

This chapter considers two moments—an ethnographic display of military regimentation from the third quarter of the nineteenth century, and an anti-modern jeremiad from the first years of the twentieth. Both involved North American Indigenous people and were deeply shaped by narratives of civilization and progress. But perhaps more importantly, both happened in a specific place and time: the late Victorian and Edwardian city, where particular kinds of urban development created new anxieties about London and its empire. These strands came together at a series of large-scale Indigenous spectacles in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A Seneca runner, a group of Aboriginal Australian cricketers, a Maori rugby side, and Lakota Wild West Show performers all riveted London, and their presence there speaks much not just about Indigenous visitors but about Victorian and Edwardian—and imperial—culture.