PART ONE. 1. John Lyly: London the Ideal City
2. Donald Lupton: London Bridge
3. Robert Herrick Laments Leaving his Native London
4. Herrick's Joyful Return to London
5. John Webster: The Decrepitude of Some London Buildings
6. John Donne: The Lively Streets of London
7. William Habington: In Praise of London in the Long Vacation
8. Philip Stubbes: Puritan Objections to Stage Plays
9. Shakespeare: "On your imaginary forces work"
10. Shakespeare: The best actors are but shadows
11. Thomas Nashe: "Adieu, farewell, earth's bliss"
12. Thomas Dekker: The Plague and its Victims in 1603
13. Sir John Davies: "Our glorious English court's divine image"
14. Edmund Spenser: Another View of Love at Court
15. Anon: A Courtier
16. Thomas Dekker: "How a young gallant should behave himself in an ordinary"
17. John Earle: A Shopkeeper
18. Thomas Middleton: A Goldsmith Gulled
19. Barnabe Rich: Vanity Fair
20. Thomas Harman: An Abraham man
21. Robert Greene: Beware of Pickpockets
22. Middleton: Roaring Girls
23. Ben Jonson: Pickpockets at Bartholomew Fair
24. John Earle: A Prison
25. Donald Lupton: Bedlam
26. Dekker and Middleton: Entertainment Provided by the Inmates of Bedlam
27. Andrew Marvell: The Execution of Charles I
28. John Evelyn: "The funeral sermon of preaching"
29. Evelyn: Persecution of Royalist Churchgoers
PART TWO. 1. Celia Fiennes: Some Topographical Features of London
2. Daniel Defoe: London Surging in Size
3. John Evelyn: Charles II's Triumphal Entry into London
4. Evelyn: Bodies of Cromwell and Others Exhumed
5. Evelyn: Gambling and Debauchery at the Court of Charles II
6. Evelyn: James II's Ill-Timed Feast for the Venetian Ambassadors
7. Samuel Pepys Describes the Plague
8. Daniel Defoe's Imaginative Reconstruction of the Great Plague
9. John Dryden: London on Fire
10. Pepys' Buried Treasure
11. Defoe: London Before and After the Fire
12. John Evelyn: Some Unusual Proceedings of the Royal Society
13. Ned Ward: The Rebuilding of St Paul's Cathedral
14. Joseph Addison: The Royal Exchange
15. Ned Ward: Crowds at the Entrance to the Royal Exchange
16. Defoe: Westminster Abbey
17. Samuel Johnson in Praise of London
18. John Gay: The Labyrinthine Streets of London
19. Gay on Pall Mall
20. Jonathan Swift: "A Description of a City Shower"
21. Tobias Smollett: Ranelagh and Vauxhall Gardens
22. Hannah More: The Bluestocking Circle
23. Ned Ward: Pork Sellers at Bartholomew Fair
24. Benjamin Franklin: "Work, the Curse of the Drinking Classes"
25. John Gay: Perils of London by Night
26. James Smith: Sex-Workers in the Strand
27. Daniel Defoe on Shoplifting
28. Defoe: Newgate Prison
29. Samuel Richardson: An Execution at Tyburn
30. Samuel Johnson: The Crime of Poverty
31. Thomas Holcoft: The Gordon Riots
PART THREE. 1. Charlotte Bronte: London as Life and Freedom
2. Mary Robinson: "London's Summer Morning"
3. Charles Dickens: A London "Pea-Souper"
4. William Cobbett: The Great Wen
5. William Wordsworth: Alienation and Anonymity
6. Alfred, Lord Tennyson: The Noise of Life Begins Again
7. William Blake: "Marks of Woe"
8. Charles Dickens: A Sunday in London
9. William Makepeace Thackeray: "Going to See a Man Hanged"
10. Thomas Hood: Let's All Go Down the Strand
11. John Ruskin recalls a childhood paradise at Herne Hill
12. William Wordsworth: "Composed upon Westminster Bridge, Sept 2, 1802"
13. Matthew Arnold, "Lines Written in Kensington Gardens"
14. George Borrow on Cheapside
15. Frederick Locker-Lampson, "St James's Street", 1867
16. Charles Dickens: Going Up the River
17. Nathaniel Hawthorne: a London Suburb
18. William Blake: St Paul's Cathedral on Holy Thursday
19. Thomas de Quincey: Tourists Must Pay to See the Sights of St Paul's Cathedral
20. Charles Dickets: The Building of a Railway
21. Henry Mayhew and George Cruikshank: The Great Exhibition and the Crystal Palace
22. John Ruskin: The Crystal Palace
23. Thomas De Quincey: The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, Destroyed
24. Benjamin Disraeli: A View of Politicians
25. Anthony Trollope: Publicans and Sinners
26. Alfred, Lord Tennyson: "Ode Sung at the Opening of the International Exhibition" (1862)
27. Charles Dickens: A London Hackney-Coach
28. Charles Lamb: "The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple"
29. Wilkie Collins: A Child's Sunday in London
30. Elizabeth Gaskell: Haste to the Wedding
31. Charles Dickens: Dinner in Harley Street
32. Charles Dickens: Bran-New People
33. William Thackeray: Wars and Rumours of Wars
34. Robert Smith Surtees, Sponge in the City
35. Herman Melville: The Temple
36. William Makepeace Thackeray: "Great City Snobs"
37. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Writing Woman
38. Leigh Hunt: A London Waiter
39. Henry Mayhew: Covent Garden Market
40. Charles Dickens: Bleeding Heart Yard
41. Charles Kingsley: The Making of a Chartist
42. William Morris: "Prologue: The Wanderers"
43. Henry Mayhew: "The Narrative of a Gay Woman"
44. Thomas De Quincey: "Preliminary Confessions"
45. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: "Jenny"
46. Christina Rossetti: "In an Artist's Studio"
47. Thomas Hardy: "The Ruined Maid"
PART FOUR. 1. Thomas Hardy: "Snow in the Suburbs"
2. Henry James: A Saturday Evening Stroll
3. Lionel Johnson: "By the Statue of King Charles at Charing Cross
4. George Moore: A Train Journey
5. Emily Constance Cook: The Respectable Grime of Ages
6. Henry James: The Appeal of the Great City
7. Oscar Wilde, "Impression du Matin"
8. H G Wells: An evening in Hyde Park
9. Robert Bridges, "London Snow"
10. Oscar Wilde: "London Models"
11. Vernon Lee: the mazes of aesthetic London
12. George Moore: Bohemian Life in Mayfair
13. George Gissing: A Struggling Writer
14. William S. Gilbert: The House of Peers
15. Anthony Trollope: The House of Commons
16. George Gissing: The Crystal Palace Park
17. Arnold Bennett: A London Bank
18. C W Murphy: "I live in Trafalgar Square"
19. Henry James: A Steamer down the Thames
20. Joseph Conrad: Sunset on the Thames
21. George Eliot: A House by the Thames
22. Margaret Oliphant: The Painter and the Philistine
23. George Gissing: The Women's Movement
24. Mary Augusta Ward: A Politician and his Wife
25. Lady St Helier: Politics and the Music-Hall
26. George and Weedon Grossmith: Nobody is Invited to a Ball
27. George Gissing: Supreme Ugliness in the Caledonian Road
28. Joseph Conrad: Bombs and Pornography
29. Israel Zangwill: A Child of Ghetto
30. D H Lawrence: Outcasts of Waterloo Bridge
31. Amy Levy: "Ballade of an Omnibus"
32. Arthur Morrison: A Slum
33. Baroness Emmuska Orczy: Death on the Tube
34. Virginia Woolf: Leaving London
35. Richard Jeffries: Drowned London
36. Beatrix Potter: Town Mouse and Country Mouse.