Two Tales of a City: London in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist and Samuel Johnson’s London

Adopting a descriptive-analytical method, this article aims to closely examine the representations of London in Ben Jonson’s early seventeenth-century play The Alchemist and Samuel Johnson’s mid-eighteenth-century poem London. These two great examples of literary texts provide the reader with two highly distinguishable treatment of the subject, that is to say London. Jonson’s drama depicts life in his native London mainly to satirize it. Likewise, Samuel Johnson’s poem denounces London life for what he thinks to be its immorality, anarchy and corruption. However, both authors seem to have been fascinated with London at the same time: while Jonson’s interest is evident from his detailed cataloguing of city sites, Samuel Johnson gradually reconciles himself to London to finally declare it to be the city that houses “all that life can afford”.