London: A Poem in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal

The poem is preceded by a Latin epigraph from Juvenal: “Quis ineptae [iniquae] / Tam patiens urbis, tam ferreus ut teneat se?” (Juv. 1.30-1). Roughly translated, the lines mean: “Who can so endure the wicked city or be so iron-willed as to bear it?” The epigraph establishes that the poet has been moved to write his satire because of the follies of the city. Only an “iron-willed” person could see the city’s vices and not react. The epigraph foreshadows the poem’s righteously indignant tone at the corrupt, disordered world its two characters inhabit.

18th-century poets like Johnson perfected the heroic couplet—sets of rhyming lines written in iambic pentameter. “London” is an illustrative example. Written entirely in heroic couplets with an AABBCC rhyme scheme, this long work has fairly regular line lengths and few enjambments. Its uniform structure lends itself to the classical form Johnson is using, with pithy rhymes bringing out the sharp satire. The poem has a declamatory quality; it is meant as a public address to a targeted audience of English people. Johnson emphasizes the oratorial aspect by filtering the poem through two characters. The first is the poem’s speaker, who presents the story of Thales’s departure to the reader in the first 34 lines. From Line 34, we hear from Thales directly; his farewell speech makes up the rest of the poem. Thales is named for Thales of Miletus, an ancient Greek philosopher and prophet who lived in the sixth century BC. Thales could also be an allusion to the poet Richard Savage, Johnson’s friend who left London for Wales because of political persecution. Thales embodies the idealistic, virtuous Englishman, too pure to survive in the corrupt environment of London.

The poem’s chief setting is the bank of the River Thames, where Thales, the speaker, and other friends await the boat which will take Thales away from London. The setting marks an important spatial and figurative vantage point for Thales to survey the city he is leaving behind. Since the poem is modelled on a Juvenalian satire, its tone is ironic and mocking and its mood bleak. The speaker and Thales are both pessimistic about the present and the future of London; they can see only misery in the city, and have little hope it will change for the better.

Since Johnson wrote the poem less than a year after moving to London in 1737, part of the poem’s scornful power comes from the poet’s discomfort with the dangers of urban life. Unlike the comforting familiarity of the countryside, the city is brutal and filled with “malice, rapine, accident” (Line 13). The juxtaposition of nature in the countryside and the industrial nightmare of the city is one of the poem’s most important themes. The speaker and Thales equate their yearning for the countryside with their nostalgia for the lost glory of England. The past often intrudes in the poem in the form of former rulers such as Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603), Edward III (1327–77), and Alfred the Great (849–899). This longing for an idealized golden age was common in 18th-century literature and art, which looked to the Renaissance and ancient Greece and Rome for inspiration (Johnson’s poem is modelled closely after the third satire of ancient Roman author Juvenal). The desire to return to a better yesterday was a reaction to rising urbanization and the bitter factionalism in English politics.

References to urban blight can be found throughout the poem, with the speaker and Thales lamenting the conditions of “the poor” (Lines 170, 233) in London. As large groups came to London from the countryside to find work, the city was ill-prepared to handle the influx. Migrants often lived in dilapidated and overcrowded tenements, where “falling houses thunder on your head” (Line 17). Linked to the conditions of the poor population are concerns about class bias. Those living in poverty in London are often portrayed at the mercy of the rich: “All crimes are safe, but hated poverty” (Line 157). In Lines 230-241, Thales describes how bands of rich young hooligans in well-lit carriages prey on “the poor” for entertainment. Such young men, drunk on “folly, youth, and wine” (Line 232) have impunity because of their wealth and can do as they please. However, “the poor” (Lines 170, 233) that Johnson mentions in the poem are not always the working class; they are also intellectuals who are living in poverty because they refuse to pander to the ruling Whig party—a condition Johnson found himself in.

The poem is filled with allusions to stock characters and real public figures, which would appeal to Johnson’s contemporaries. Stock characters are stereotypes embodying particular qualities—such as Orgilio the fraudster and Balbo the bumbling speaker. These add shorthand referential humor to the poem. Meanwhile, Johnson’s brave naming of real names sharpens the bite of his satire. When he says that Thales must “strive in vain to laugh at H----y’s jest” (Line 74), “H----y” is the thinly veiled John Henley (1692-1759), a cleric and preacher who included vulgar jokes in his sermons, and edited a pro-government paper while on the payroll of Whig leader and de-facto Prime Minister Robert Walpole. As mouthpieces for Johnson, the speaker and Thales dislike the Whigs for their liberal political convictions, and for their support of parliamentary democracy, instead of absolute monarchy. Moreover, Johnson was horrified by Whig objections to the power of the Anglican Church as a recipe for anarchy and moral corruption. Johnson saw Whig philosophy as inimical to social order and peace; hence, London, the seat of Whig power, becomes a symbol of apocalyptic disorder. Further, in practice the Whig government was intolerant of criticism, quelling voices of dissent; its officials were also considered highly corrupt and partisan.

Johnson answers the threat of lawlessness associated with the present political climate with a call for religious and moral conservatism. Hence, the poem’s frequent references to virtue and vice, innocence and corruption. London is a place where women are both dangerously free to be freethinkers and at risk: “a female atheist talks you dead” (Line 18), but evildoers can “bribe a virgin’s innocence away” (Line 78).

Johnson also evokes the specter of immigrants destroying English values—a xenophobic paranoia that decency has been replaced with French and Italian debauchery. Johnson invents his own stock character, Orgilio the fraud, whose name has French origins, while Balbo the fool sounds vaguely Italian. Thales laments that “the rustic grandeur […] the surly grace” (Line 102) of England have been lost to “obsequious, artful, voluble and gay” (Line 111) manners imported from France. The adjectives used here are telling: While “rustic” and “surly” are associated with masculine strength, “artful” and “voluble” are associated with feminine artifice. In Line 129, Thales points out that the English fail miserably at the art of flattery, being naturally more straightforward: “These arts in vain our rugged natives try.” The adjective “rugged” again references ideals of masculine behavior. Thales’s alarm at growing French influence is linked to the traditional rivalry between England and France, but more specifically identifies Johnson’s concern about growing cosmopolitanism and its effects on English cultural production. Johnson, an aspiring playwright who would never have success with his plays, mocks the fashion that “warbling eunuchs fill a licens’d stage” (Line 59). The “warbling eunuchs” are Italian castrati sopranos (male singers castrated before puberty), whose masculinity Johnson doubts, but whose singing was greatly loved by King George II (1683-1760). In 1737, the opera was freed from the restrictions of the Licensing Act, while London theatre companies needed to get all their plays approved by the Lord Chamberlain’s office to censor any satire of the Whig government. Thus, the theatre companies of London really suffered in the period, while the opera, dealing with apolitical themes, prospered.

In its urban squalor and moral corruption, London shares a soul with decadent Paris and ancient Rome: “London! the needy villain’s gen’ral home, / The common shore of Paris and of Rome” (Lines 93-94). The comparison draws a direct line between Juvenal’s satire on Rome and Johnson’s poem on London. In fact, “London” contains many lines from Juvenal, which Johnson sometimes retrofits to his context. For example, the idea that the entire establishment would publicly mourn "Should heav’n’s just bolts Orgilio’s wealth confound” (194) is a direct quotation from Juvenal, included despite the fact that Johnson later agreed with a reader who noted that such a scenario was unlikely in 18th-century London.

Another country to which the poem often refers is Spain. The treatment of France and Spain is markedly different, because of the different threats they posed: Thales terms England “Of France the mimic, and of Spain the prey” (Line 106). While France was seen as a threat to jobs and culture, Spain was a threat to trade. Spain was England’s direct competitor for colonizing the Caribbean and Spanish coast guard often attacked English ships, so Thales wonders if there are any islands not yet claimed by Spain:

No pathless waste, or undiscover’d shore;

No secret island in the boundless main?

No peaceful desert yet unclaim’d by Spain? (Lines 171-173).

Thales searching for a peaceful escapes becomes England looking for “undiscover’d” (Line 171) land to conquer. This shows how Thales’ individual pursuit serves as a poetic analogue for England’s colonial journey. Public opinion against Spain was so extremely negative in England, that Walpole was forced to declare war against Spain in 1739, two years after Johnson wrote “London.”

Some of the important literary devices used in the poem are hyperbole and satire. Exaggeration is necessary to paint a sufficiently bleak picture of Johnson’s London, as well as to drive home the threat posed by foreign powers. Since the sociopolitical satire is meant to move readers to take action, it needs to be forceful and emphatic. This was one of the guiding principles of Juvenal, and one which Johnson imitates. Thus, Johnson uses hyperbolic lines such as “The supple Gaul was born a parasite” (Line 124) and “Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, / And sign your will before you sup from home.” (Lines 224-225). The first equates French people with literal vermin, while the second states that simply leaving the house after dark means guaranteed death. Just like hyperbole describes the corruption of London, it also idealizes the countryside. Thales is headed to the shore of “Cambria,” or Wales, which like “Hibernia’s Land” (Line 9), the Greek name for Ireland, is infinitely superior to the city. While vice reigns in the city, in the country “honesty and sense are no disgrace” (Line 44). The country is the site of “some pleasing bank where verdant osiers play / Some peaceful vale with nature’s paintings gay” (Lines 45-46). The “wilds of Kent” (Line 257) are also a refuge from London’s villainy, where renting “some hireling senator’s deserted seat” (Line 213) can lead to an idyllic life of making its gardens bloom and directing its rivulets. However, this image is more of a beautiful garden than that of an untamed wilderness—an idea representative of the concept of nature in the first half of the 18th century. In this pre-Romantic era, nature’s beauty was found in its order.

Johnson’s writing smoothly shifts between personal, social, and political satire. At one level, the satire is about the pitfalls of city life and the rational individual’s resistance to a world of corrupt institutions. At another, it is a sharp commentary on the degenerate society of London, too steeped in materialism and cheap entertainment to care for the larger social good. Fleeting pleasures distract people from pressing issues and “lull to servitude a thoughtless age” (Line 60), an age when no “social guilt” (Line 83) or collective responsibility exists, and “unrewarded science toils in vain” (Line 38) or the idea of knowledge for knowledge’s sake perishes. At a third level, the satire is about the broken political climate of Johnson’s day.

As is typical, Johnson’s satire relies on humor and irony. The speaker and Thales ruefully underscore that in London the usual moral order is upside-down: The good are punished and the evil rewarded. Lines such as “All crimes are safe, but hated poverty” (Line 159) drip with the irony that criminals roam free while victims of circumstance are punished. In London, everything, including human behavior, is a commodity: “Where looks are merchandise, and smiles are sold” (Line 179). Although the poem’s humor is more sharp than playful, there is comedy in lines such as “He gropes his breeches with a monarch’s air” (Line 151), referring to King George II’s method of expressing displeasure to his court by turning his back to them, separating the flaps of his coat, and showing them the backside of his breeches.

The poem’s two ending couplets show that Johnson, in the manner of Juvenal, considers satire an act of virtue. “London” is not meant to merely express discontent or perform irony, it is meant to instruct and transform. Thales offers to once again expend his anger for the sake of virtue, and write a sharp satire against vice, if his friends wish it. The verbs “point” (Line 263) and “animate” (Line 263), filled with sharpness and life, are a metatextual comment on Johnson’s satirical style. Johnson’s style is vivid and specific, and meant to fight injustice and immorality.

Then shall thy friend, nor thou refuse his aid,

Still foe to vice, forsake his Cambrian shade;

In virtue’s cause once more exert his rage,

Thy satire point, and animate thy page (Lines 260-263).