Lost cities: London’s apocalypse

Abstract

Frank Kermode in The Sense of an Ending, that indispensable atlas for chroniclers of the Apocalypse, writes of what he calls the ‘resilience’ of apocalyptic thought. It is, he says:

patient of change and of historiographical sophistications. It allows itself to be diffused, blended with other varieties of fiction-tragedy for example, myths of Empire and of Decadence and yet it can survive in very naive forms. Probably the most sophisticated of us is capable of naive reactions to the End.

(Kermode, 1966: 9)

I am not sure at this point whether to lay claim to naiveté or sophistication, but what I do intend to do here is to examine the blending together of the apocalyptic with other myths of the late nineteenth century, Empire and Decadence among them, and also to look specifically at the function of Gothic in the dense mythical clusters of the fin de siècle.

The Last Judgement begins, and its vision is seen by the imaginative eye or everyone according to the situation he holds.

(William Blake)