‘The city cannot be reduced to a comprehensive and comprehensible vision’.

Bleeding London (1997), Trivia (1716) and Journal of the Plague Year (1722) all convey attempts to objectively and comprehensibly define London. Through Stuart London, the reader is presented with a subjective first-person diary from his city walking, with Nicholson implying that this is the only way to fully categorise and comprehend London. However, the impossibility of the task is mirrored by Stuart’s ‘drained and evacuated’ descent into suicidal thoughts, and the reader realises there is no set way to interpret the city. Trivia attempts to refute this, labelling itself as a didactic, ‘immortal’ depiction of London for any ‘honest men’ to examine. Yet its very title, ‘the art of walking’, establishes Gay’s paradoxical desire for a subjective ‘art’ to be reduced to a definitive ‘guide’. As Nicholson concedes at the end of his novel, Stuart London is ‘a London walker, if not the London walker’, and both texts establish that a definite article cannot describe one man’s experience of such a ‘great’ and ‘infinite’ city as a universal interpretation. Matos comments that, ‘any account of a country in a state of flux cannot be permanent and definitive’, yet this should not only be applied to the apocalyptic scenes described in Journal of the Plague Year. It is the sheer immensity of London that renders it undefinable, and any attempt to ‘reduce’ it to a moral or even physical order is futile.