Editor\u2019s note: This is the eighth post in our theme for April 2025, The City Aquatic. For additional entries in the series, see here<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n By Christopher Ferguson <\/em><\/p>\n In October 2015, \u201cAnn C\u201d of Grantham posted a review on Tripadvisor<\/em> in which she praised Earl\u2019s Sandwiches in Covent Garden as a \u201cPearl in the Ocean of London.\u201d\u00a0 By describing the British capital in this fashion, she invoked a metaphoric construction more than two and half centuries old.[1]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0During the late eighteenth century, Britons began employing the ocean as a metaphor for London.\u00a0The use of this aquatic imagery expanded over the course of the nineteenth century and flourished in the years immediately around the turn of the twentieth century.\u00a0Though its appearance in print became less widespread after the 1920s, it nevertheless continued to be used selectively throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.\u00a0 Indeed, the metaphor continues to be employed in descriptions of London in the present day, including in those produced by journalists, scholars, novelists, bloggers, and tour guides.\u00a0<\/p>\n In this essay I offer a brief examination of the history of the urban metaphor \u201cthe ocean of London.\u201d\u00a0I do so as a (small) contribution to the large, ever-expanding literature chronicling and analyzing representations of the British capital, but also as a means of exploring the larger question of why specific metaphors do \u2013 and do not \u2013 become attached to certain urban environments at particular moments in time. The ocean was not always perceived as a logical metaphor for London, nor has it proved especially appealing to those describing other cities in other places and times.\u00a0Why was this the case?\u00a0<\/p>\n In their classic study Metaphors We Live By<\/em>, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that in allowing us to \u201cconceive of one thing in terms of another,\u201d metaphors function as a means for promoting understanding \u2013 as tools for comprehension.[2]<\/a>\u00a0 Metaphors are not arbitrary \u2013 indeed, to succeed they must be culturally specific.\u00a0Those that work best do so because they align closely with prevailing cultural values and preoccupations.\u00a0Examining why Britons came to employ the metaphoric construct \u201cLondon as ocean,\u201d thus offers useful insights into how they perceived life in their nation\u2019s capital during the era of industrial modernity.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Cities are complex entities.\u00a0This complexity, Max Muller argues, makes them especially fruitful subjects for metaphoric constructions.[3]<\/a>\u00a0 Most of us, I suspect, are familiar with the metaphor of the \u201ccity as jungle.\u201d\u00a0Metaphoric constructions of urban geography invoking the human body, anatomy, and the circulatory and digestive systems are likewise quite common.\u00a0Descriptions of streets as arteries, or sewers as intestines, for instance, were employed regularly in Western writings about cities during the nineteenth century, with Victor Hugo\u2019s extended excursus on the Paris sewers (as the city\u2019s \u201cintestines\u201d or \u201centrails\u201d) in Les Mis\u00e9rables<\/em> providing perhaps the most famous example.[4]<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n The metaphor of \u201cLondon as ocean,\u201d however, is far more historically and geographically specific.\u00a0In the more than two decades I have spent researching and analyzing urban representations produced by Britons during the \u201clong\u201d nineteenth century, I have found myself repeatedly confronted by the metaphor of the \u201cocean of London,\u201d and the need to figure out what Britons sought to convey in employing this aquatic imagery.\u00a0<\/p>\n The metaphor was very likely an invention of my period of expertise.\u00a0My research has unearthed no one referring to London as an ocean before the 1750s, and uses of the construction were still quite rare until the second quarter of the nineteenth century.[5]<\/a>\u00a0 Thus, regardless of exactly when the metaphor of \u201cLondon as ocean\u201d was initially conceived, its popularization and first widespread use were a nineteenth-century phenomena.\u00a0This makes the metaphor the \u201cocean of London\u201d a rhetorical artifact of the modern era, specifically the era of the early industrial revolution.\u00a0<\/p>\n The metaphor was also always unique to London.\u00a0Though Britain experienced dramatic rates of urbanization during the years that the oceanic metaphor proliferated, I have yet to find any examples of persons writing in English employing the image of the ocean in reference to other cities \u2013 no oceans of Manchester, Birmingham, or Liverpool, much less Paris, Chicago, Berlin, Melbourne, or Istanbul.\u00a0The metaphor of the \u201cocean of London\u201d is thus a remarkably specific linguistic artifact.\u00a0It was intended to convey meanings about one urban community during a particularly dramatic moment in that city\u2019s history.\u00a0<\/p>\n But why London as ocean<\/em>?\u00a0After all, other metaphors also were introduced during the same years to describe the city.\u00a0 The journalist William Cobbett notoriously referred to London as a cancerous tumor (\u201cthe great wen\u201d); Charles Dickens described it as a \u201cmagic-lantern\u201d; the journalist Walter Bagehot claimed that London was \u201clike a newspaper\u201d; and the architect Clough William Ellis depicted the city as an \u201coctopus.\u201d[6]<\/a>\u00a0Yet none of these images captured the popular imagination as effectively as the metaphor of \u201cLondon as ocean,\u201d despite the considerable influence of their authorial creators.\u00a0This suggests that the metaphor of London as a large, deep body of water possessed a peculiar usefulness for Britons in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.\u00a0<\/p>\n At first glance, it might seem an obvious choice for the capital city of an island-dwelling nation.\u00a0Indeed, Ian Brookes notes that English culture is notable for producing and employing a significant number of nautical metaphors, including being \u201call at sea,\u201d \u201cadrift,\u201d or \u201chigh and dry.\u201d[7]<\/a>\u00a0The years that saw the image of London as ocean gaining in popularity also coincided with those in which Britain\u2019s naval, maritime, and imperial supremacy was at its peak.\u00a0This was likewise the era in which the seaside first came to feature as a holiday destination for rising numbers of British urban-dwellers, and in which Britons also increasingly celebrated the role of water and the waves in contributing to their (supposedly) distinctive character as the inhabitants of an \u201cisland nation.\u201d[8]<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n These same years, however, also witnessed a heavy tendency on the part of British writers, artists, poets, and composers to place nature and the urban in sharp juxtaposition in their works, in order to highlight the differences believed to exist between them.[9]<\/a>\u00a0In fact, a wide swathe of contemporary Britons regularly emphasized the supposed unnaturalness and \u201cartificiality\u201d of the capital city \u2013 sometimes even in the same writings in which they employed the metaphor of London as ocean.\u00a0In 1831, for example, the physician James Johnson provided an extensive discussion of the \u201cartificial\u201d elements of London life he believed were contributing to ill health in the Metropolis \u2013 its smoke, fashions, \u201cunnatural\u201d hours of work and socializing, rampant consumerism, and varieties and modes of employment.\u00a0He began this discussion, however, by recalling the depressive influences the city had first exerted over his own mind, when as a young man he found himself to be \u201ca drop of water in the ocean\u201d of London life.[10]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Given the existence of many similar texts like Johnson\u2019s, the choice of employing an entity typically conceived by Europeans as timeless and natural as the means of depicting and understanding a place routinely described as the apex of human endeavor, modernity, and artifice appears a bit more surprising.\u00a0Nevertheless, over the course of the nineteenth century many Britons embraced the ocean as their metaphor of choice when describing London, and some of their reasons for doing so likely were related to Britain\u2019s status as an island nation.\u00a0<\/p>\n One of the foremost functions of the oceanic metaphor was as a means of representing and comprehending London\u2019s enormous size.\u00a0This was the gist, for example, of one of the most oft-cited phrases employing the metaphor, \u201cthe illimitable limitary ocean of London,\u201d penned by the celebrated intellectual Thomas Carlyle in 1850, and then regularly recycled by other writers in the remaining decades of the century.[11]<\/a>\u00a0Britons routinely noted the difficulty of finding language or imagery adequate for accounting for London\u2019s historically unprecedented, gargantuan size during a century when the capital grew from a population of a little over a million to more than seven million persons, and represented one of the largest \u2013 and by 1850, the<\/em> largest \u2013 city on earth.[12]<\/a>\u00a0For many \u2013 if not most \u2013 Britons, the ocean was probably the largest entity they had encountered in their lives, and thus offered the best available means for metaphorically representing something on the scale of the national capital.\u00a0<\/p>\n The ocean also functioned as what Lakoff and Johnson call a \u201ccontainer\u201d metaphor.[13]<\/a>\u00a0The ocean, like London, was a bounded entity.\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s like the sea \u2013 and we swim in it,\u201d announces a character in H. G. Wells\u2019s 1908 novel Tono-Bungay<\/em> when pointing to \u201cLondon spreading wide and far.\u201d[14]<\/a>\u00a0London, like the ocean, could be visited.\u00a0It could be journeyed to, over, or across.\u00a0This allowed metropolitan metaphors to be aligned with much older nautical imagery representing the human life course as a \u201csea voyage\u201d dating back to ancient times.[15]<\/a>\u00a0The protagonist in Wells\u2019s same novel, for instance, expresses ambivalence at finding his aunt and uncle seemingly \u201cadrift\u201d in London\u2019s \u201climitless crowd,\u201d and worries that he too will be \u201cswallowed up\u2026sooner or later by this dingy London ocean.\u201d[16]<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n This fear of being \u201cswallowed,\u201d in turn, is indicative of another oceanic property Britons found useful when describing London: the ocean, like the Metropolis, had depth, or an \u201cunderside\u201d as Wells\u2019s put it.[17]<\/a>\u00a0Indeed, the ocean possessed vast depths that remained mysterious, uncharted, and largely unknown until the twentieth century \u2013 not unlike much of London, according to many contemporary commentators.\u00a0This may explain, for instance, why the metaphor was particularly popular with the authors of mystery novels, where narrators warned of what could be found in \u201csound[ing] the depths of the London ocean, which contains all kinds of disagreeable things,\u201d or in which characters \u201cslipped away into the great ocean of London life.\u201d[18]<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n Physical properties of the ocean also proved useful for encapsulating distinctive features of London life.\u00a0The roar of the ocean waves, and the regular movement of the tides, were ideally suited for describing traffic.\u00a0A visitor to the city in the 1870s, for example, reported how \u201cthe tide of human life surged along the streets and roared through the channels beneath.\u201d[19]<\/a>\u00a0 The essayist William Howitt invoked the image of the tides in describing London\u2019s seemingly relentless expansion over the neighboring countryside \u2013 \u201con every side the tide of population has rolled on with brick and mortar\u201d \u2013\u00a0 while in an early description of what we would now call \u201crush hour,\u201d the journalist Henry Mayhew claimed London traffic consisted of \u201ctwo tides,\u201d the first lasting from nine until eleven in the morning, the second from two to five in the afternoon.[20]<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n In addition, the ocean was not only familiar to island-dwelling Britons; it also occupied a complicated place in the nation\u2019s moral imagination.\u00a0On the one hand, the ocean represented a positive entity, as a longstanding source of sustenance, a facilitator of wealth from maritime trade, and a potent line of national defense.[21]<\/a>\u00a0Yet, it also produced devastating storms, and was the grave of countless British sailors, soldiers, convicts, emigrants, and fisherfolk, thousands of whom died at sea every year during the nineteenth century.[22]<\/a>\u00a0The ocean produced admiration, awe, and terror in equal degree \u2013 and so did London.\u00a0The ocean\u2019s status as an ambiguous, value-neutral entity, thus made it equally serviceable for Britons expressing positive and negative sentiments about the nation\u2019s capital, unlike purely negative metaphors like that of the \u201cgreat wen\u201d or the octopus.\u00a0<\/p>\n The size and importance of the ocean in British life, in turn, also meant that the idea of the ocean itself encompassed a wide range of different types of associations, allowing these, in turn, to be aligned with the varied social and physical features of the metropolitan environment.\u00a0London\u2019s multifaceted nature made it unique among nineteenth-century British cities.[23]<\/a>\u00a0It was the center of banking, finance, and government, a large port and hub of manufacturing and marketing, and the primary locus of the country\u2019s literary, artistic, leisure, and entertainment industries.\u00a0It was more than a \u201chive\u201d of manufacturing, for instance, meaning that it required a richer, more multi-dimensional metaphoric stand-in than the beehive which famously became one of the most favored signifiers for industrial Manchester.[24]<\/a>\u00a0The ocean supplied such a complex signifier, one capable of encompassing the wide range of places London occupied in the national mind.\u00a0<\/p>\n One of the most popular uses of the \u201cocean of London\u201d \u2013 one already alluded to above \u2013 conveys the multifaceted meanings of the nautical metaphor when applied to the British capital with especial richness: that of the image of the individual person as a \u201cdrop of rain\u201d in the \u201cocean of London.\u201d\u00a0In the hands of some commentators, for example, this image served as a means of conveying visual uniformity.\u00a0In 1851, an anonymous journalist noted the impossibility of identifying \u201cforeigners\u201d in the crowds gathered to witness the opening of the Crystal Palace Exhibition, because \u201cthey were lost in the ocean of London population,\u201d whose \u201caspect was entirely, exclusively English.\u201d[25]<\/a>\u00a0The journalist John Fisher Murray used the same imagery when describing the seeming uniformity of London\u2019s built environment \u2013 as an \u201cocean filling the mind\u201d with \u201can eternity of town, without beginning and without end,\u201d consisting of \u201cmiles of dingy streets,\u201d each like all the others.[26]<\/a>\u00a0 For the writer Richard Lovett, the same image instead served to capture London\u2019s enormous size.\u00a0 In 1865, he noted that \u201cKensington alone \u2013 a mere drop in the ocean of London life \u2013 contains more people than Bradford, York, and Scarborough combined.\u201d[27]<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n The urban-ocean metaphor functioned not only as a measure of size, but also simultaneously as a means of conveying size\u2019s consequences \u2013 specifically the social conditions of individuals who found themselves immersed in the massive metropolitan populace.\u00a0Even in this context, however, the range of sub-meanings could vary considerably.\u00a0The late-nineteenth-century mystery writer Fergus Hume, for instance, used the image to explain the failure to apprehend a murderer in his 1893 novel The Fever of Life<\/em>.\u00a0The latter had \u201cdisappeared into the depths of London, from whence he never emerged,\u201d having fallen \u201cinto the immense ocean of London like a drop of rain.\u201d[28]<\/a>\u00a0In 1884, an editorialist in the Aberdeen Journal<\/em> made a similar point about real criminals, noting that a recent London burglar would have likely gone free if not for the \u201cexemplary presence of mind\u201d of a servant girl who chased the criminal with \u201cextraordinary tenacity and courage.\u201d\u00a0 Without her actions, the writer warned, \u201cthe man who have dropped again into the great ocean of London life, where the chances of identifying him would have been slender indeed.\u201d[29]<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n For many other writers, this same aquatic imagery was enlisted instead as a means of conveying the social and emotional experiences of individuals \u2013 especially those newly arrived in the Metropolis \u2013 isolated or lost in the London crowd.\u00a0The traveler recently arrived in London, Murray contended, shrunk to the condition of \u201cisolated insignificance.\u201d\u00a0Their \u201cindividuality,\u201d he claimed, \u201cwas lost, as the drop of rain that, falling, intermingles with the ocean.\u201d\u00a0Indeed, he argued that the \u201csocial isolation of individual drops in this great ocean of human life\u201d constituted one of the most \u201cremarkable\u201d characteristics of London society, and for many persons this experience was deeply unpleasant.[30]<\/a>\u00a0An author writing in the Penny Magazine <\/em>a few years before had also employed the oceanic metaphor to make similar claims.\u00a0\u201cThe stranger who comes to reside in London,\u201d the writer observed, \u201cbegins to understand what it is to be a hermit amongst millions\u2026a drop of rain that has fallen in the ocean.\u201d\u00a0Under the weight of such realizations, the newcomer\u2019s \u201csense of self-importance\u201d was diminished, and \u201cloneliness\u201d would \u201cdepress his energies.\u201d[31]<\/a>\u00a0In fact, it was this very experience of emotional distress when confronted with the immensity of the London crowd that the physician Johnson sought to convey when invoking this same drop in the ocean imagery in 1831.\u00a0Johnson recalled how as a young man he had first \u201cmingled\u201d with the \u201ctide of existence\u201d in the London streets, and how his \u201cheart sunk.\u201d\u00a0\u201cI felt, as it were, annihilated \u2013 lost, like a drop of water in the ocean.\u201d[32]<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n When wedded to the longstanding metaphor of the \u201cvoyage of life,\u201d the image of the person as a drop of water in the larger ocean of London became a means for encapsulating the struggle for success and recognition in the city, especially when applied to writers, actors, or artists.\u00a0It was used in this fashion by James Boswell, for example, in his Life of Samuel Johnson<\/em> (1791), and was likewise used by biographers of literary figures like Carlyle or Henry Fielding, as the means of narrating the achievements of men whose talents had allowed them to rise out of, and above, the city\u2019s oceanic masses.[33]<\/a>\u00a0It also was employed with equal regularity in recalling the lives of those who failed to do so \u2013 men like the Scottish poet William Thom, who, unable to handle the pressures of literary competition in the capital, sank into poverty and depression, becoming \u201ca poor human wreck on the ocean of London traffic.\u201d[34]<\/a>\u00a0Regardless of the individuals\u2019 success or failure, however, the journalist Nicol Watson argued, \u201cWherever the human barque may at last have cast-anchor\u2026and whatever may have been the adventures of the voyage, matters not.\u201d\u00a0The launch, she contended, was \u201calways momentous.\u201d\u00a0For \u201cpoet and peasant, merchant or mechanic,\u201d London proved a \u201cwondrous ocean,\u201d an arena of ambitions and temptations, successes and failures, all greater than themselves.[35]<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n A large, multi-dimensional city like London thus required a metaphor to match.\u00a0At the end of the eighteenth century, Britons increasingly embraced the ocean as their metropolitan metaphor of choice on account of its singular ability to encapsulate not only their capital\u2019s tremendous size, but also a wide range of other kinds of spatial, social, sensory, and emotional characteristics associated with life in modern London.\u00a0Familiar associations with the ocean became the means for describing and comprehending initially unfamiliar aspects of London space and society.\u00a0These images and associations, in turn, subsequently became embedded in the habits of British discourse, long after their novelty had expired, because they remained useful means of making sense of the nation\u2019s largest city.\u00a0Each individual use of the \u201cocean of London\u201d became one drop in a veritable sea of commentary in which the metaphor served to convey \u2013 and to make comprehensible \u2013 the immense size, the sights and sounds, the social character, and the emotional experience of inhabiting one of the largest cities in the nineteenth-century world.\u00a0It took an ocean of imagery to capture the multitude of meanings contemporary Britons collected around modern London, and thus they used the literal ocean as one potent modality for making these meanings accessible and understandable to their fellow Britons, whether they inhabited London, the British Isles, the Empire, or some other corner of the vaster English-speaking world.\u00a0<\/p>\n Christopher Ferguson is Associate Professor of History at Auburn University.\u00a0He is the author An Artisan Intellectual: James Carter and the Rise of Modern Britain, 1792-1853 <\/em>(Louisiana State University Press, 2016), as well as a number of other articles, essays, and book chapters on nineteenth-century British cultural and urban history, including: \u201cLondon and Early Environmentalism, 1770-1870,\u201d in A Mighty Capital Under Siege: The Environmental History of London, 1800-2000<\/em> (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), edited by Bill Luckin and Peter Thorsheim; and, \u201cUrbanity,\u201d in the forthcoming New Cambridge History of Britain, Volume 4: 1750-1900<\/em>, edited by Miles Taylor and Lara Kriegel.\u00a0<\/p>\n Featured image (at top): a view of the Thames and the Houses of Parliament by Gustave Dor\u00e9 from\u00a0London: A Pilgrimage<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(1872) courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. <\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Ann C, \u201cReview of Earl\u2019s Sandwiches, Covent Garden,\u201d Tripadvisor<\/em>, 22 October 2015; https:\/\/www.tripadvisor.ie\/ShowUserReviews-g186338-d5616136-r321006172-Earls_Sandwiches-London_England.html<\/a> [accessed May 9, 2024].\u00a0<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By<\/em> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 5.\u00a0<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> Max Muller, \u201cUnderstanding Cities Through Metaphors,\u201d Pandemic<\/em> (April 30, 2018); https:\/\/www.pandemic.space\/2018\/04\/30\/understanding-cities-through-metaphors\/<\/strong><\/a> [accessed April 30, 2024].\u00a0<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> The original 1862 translation of Hugo\u2019s magnum opus employed \u201cintestines\u201d; more recent translations have shifted to \u201centrails.\u201d\u00a0 The meaning is the same for all intents and purposes.\u00a0 See: Victor Hugo, Les Mis\u00e9rables<\/em>, trans. Frederic Charles Lascelles Wraxall (1862; New York: Heritage Press, 1938), pt. 5, 85; Hugo, Les Mis\u00e9rables<\/em>, trans. Norman Denny (London: Penguin, 1982), 1061.\u00a0<\/p>\n [5]<\/a> Based on keyword searches in Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, <\/em>the earliest publication employing the construction was likely David Garrick and William Wycherley\u2019s The Country Girl, A Comedy <\/em>(Dublin, 1766), 7.\u00a0 However, evidence from other sources, including James Boswell\u2019s The Life of Samuel Johnson<\/em>, suggests the \u201cocean of London\u201d may have been used in conversation at least a decade before (see, Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. <\/em>[London, 1791], vol. 1, 49, 464; vol. 2 55).\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n [6]<\/a> William Cobbett, Rural Rides<\/em> (1830; London: Penguin, 2001), 49; Charles Dickens to John Forster, 30 August 1846, in The Letters of Charles Dickens: Volume Four, 1844-1846<\/em>, ed. Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 612; Walter Bagehot, \u201cCharles Dickens\u201d (1858), reprinted in The Works of Walter Bagehot<\/em>, 5 vols. (Harford, CT: Traveler\u2019s Insurance Company, 1891), vol. 2, 252; Clough Williams-Ellis, England and the Octopus <\/em>(London: G. Bles, 1928).\u00a0<\/p>\n [7]<\/a> Ian Brookes, \u201cAll at Sea: Nautical Metaphors in the English Language,\u201d Oxford University Press English Language Global Teaching Blog<\/em> (June 16, 2014); https:\/\/oupeltglobalblog.com\/2014\/06\/16\/all-at-sea-nautical-metaphors-in-the-english-language\/<\/strong><\/a> [accessed March 28, 2023].\u00a0<\/p>\n [8]<\/a> Paul Readman, Storied Ground: Landscape and the Shaping of English National Identity <\/em>(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 25-34; Cynthia Fansler Behrman, Victorian Myths of the Sea <\/em>(Athens: Ohio University Press, 1977); Eric Saylor and Christopher M. Scheer, eds., The Sea in the British Musical Imagination<\/em> (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2015); John K. Walton, The English Seaside Resort: A Social History, 1750-1914 <\/em>(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1983).\u00a0<\/p>\n [9]<\/a> Alain Frogley, \u201cTonality on the Town: Orchestrating the Metropolis in Vaughan William\u2019s A London Symphony<\/em>,\u201d in Felix W\u00f6rner, et al, eds., Tonality, 1900-1950: Concept and Practice<\/em> (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2012), 187-188.\u00a0<\/p>\n [10]<\/a> James Johnson, A Change of Air; or, The Pursuit of Health<\/em> (London: S. Highley and T. and G. Underwood, 1831), 2-3.\u00a0<\/p>\n [11]<\/a> Thomas Carlyle, The Life of John Sterling<\/em> (London: Chapman and Hall, 1851), 70.\u00a0<\/p>\n [12]<\/a> Carl Nightingale, Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet<\/em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 254-255.\u00a0<\/p>\n [13]<\/a> Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By<\/em>, 29-30.\u00a0<\/p>\n [14]<\/a> H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay<\/em> (1908; New York: Random House, 1931), 127.\u00a0<\/p>\n [15]<\/a> Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck and Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence<\/em>, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997).\u00a0<\/p>\n [16]<\/a> Wells, Tono-Bungay<\/em>, 105.\u00a0<\/p>\n [17]<\/a> Wells, Tono-Bungay<\/em>, 107.\u00a0<\/p>\n [18]<\/a> Fergus Hume, The Fever of Life <\/em>(London: Sampson, Low, Marsten, and Company, 1883), 70; William Le Queux, Hushed Up!\u00a0 A Mystery of London <\/em>(London: Eveleigh Nash, 1911), 255.\u00a0<\/p>\n [19]<\/a> John Mortimer, \u201cA Holiday in the South,\u201d in Papers of the Manchester Literary Club, Volume II<\/em> (Manchester: A. Ireland and Company, 1876), 85.\u00a0<\/p>\n [20]<\/a> William Howitt, The Northern Heights of London <\/em>(London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1869), 283; Henry Mayhew, \u201cThe Great World of London,\u201d in Henry Mayhew and John Binney, The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of Prison Life <\/em>(London: Griffon, Bohn, and Company, 1867), 54.\u00a0<\/p>\n [21]<\/a> Readman, Storied Ground<\/em>, 25, 32; Behrman, Victorian Myths and the Sea<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n [22]<\/a> Blumenberg, Shipwreck<\/em>, 67; David Larm, Shipwrecks of Great Britain and Ireland <\/em>(London: David and Charles, 1981).\u00a0<\/p>\n [23]<\/a> Richard Dennis, \u201cModern London,\u201d in Martin Daunton, ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain: Volume III, 1840-1950<\/em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 95-132.\u00a0<\/p>\n [24]<\/a> Anne Beswick, \u201cThe Story behind the Manchester Bee \u2013 and why it\u2019s used everywhere in the city,\u201d Visit Manchester<\/em> (March 20, 2020); https:\/\/www.visitmanchester.com\/ideas-and-inspiration\/blog\/post\/the-story-behind-the-manchester-bee-and-why-it-s-used-everywhere-in-the-city\/<\/a> [accessed July 16, 2024].\u00a0<\/p>\n [25]<\/a> Daily News<\/em> (May 2, 1851).\u00a0<\/p>\n [26]<\/a> John Fisher Murray, The World of London<\/em>, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1845), vol. 1, 67.\u00a0<\/p>\n [27]<\/a> Richard Lovett, London Pictures: Drawn with Pen and Pencil<\/em> (London: RTS, 1890), 14.\u00a0<\/p>\n [28]<\/a> Fergus Hume, The Fever of Life<\/em> (London: Sampson, Low, Marsten, and Company, 1893), 414.\u00a0<\/p>\n [29]<\/a> \u201cUnpunished Crimes,\u201d Aberdeen Journal<\/em> (January 14, 1884).\u00a0<\/p>\n [30]<\/a> Murray, World of London<\/em>, vol. 1, 14.\u00a0<\/p>\n [31]<\/a> \u201cThe Looking-Glass for London,\u201d Penny Magazine for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge<\/em>, vol. 6, no. 338 (1834): 110-111.\u00a0<\/p>\n [32]<\/a> Johnson, Change of Air<\/em>, 2.\u00a0<\/p>\n [33]<\/a> Nicol Watson, \u201cOn Coming to London,\u201d Chambers\u2019s Journal<\/em>, vol. 13, no. 627 (1896), 26-27; Frederick Laurence, The Life of Henry Fielding <\/em>(London: Arthur, Hall, Virtue, and Company, 1855), 6-7.\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/themetropole.blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/london-bridge.jpg?w=1024\")
![\"A](\"https:\/\/themetropole.blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/westminster-bridge.jpg?w=1024\")
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/themetropole.blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/unnamed.jpg?w=769\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
![London: A Pilgrimage<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(1872) courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. <\/p>\n[1]<\/a> Ann C, \u201cReview of Earl\u2019s Sandwiches, Covent Garden,\u201d Tripadvisor<\/em>, 22 October 2015; https:\/\/www.tripadvisor.ie\/ShowUserReviews-g186338-d5616136-r321006172-Earls_Sandwiches-London_England.html<\/a> [accessed May 9, 2024].\u00a0<\/p>\n[2]<\/a> George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By<\/em> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 5.\u00a0<\/p>\n[3]<\/a> Max Muller, \u201cUnderstanding Cities Through Metaphors,\u201d Pandemic<\/em> (April 30, 2018); https:\/\/www.pandemic.space\/2018\/04\/30\/understanding-cities-through-metaphors\/<\/strong><\/a> [accessed April 30, 2024].\u00a0<\/p>\n[4]<\/a> The original 1862 translation of Hugo\u2019s magnum opus employed \u201cintestines\u201d; more recent translations have shifted to \u201centrails.\u201d\u00a0 The meaning is the same for all intents and purposes.\u00a0 See: Victor Hugo, Les Mis\u00e9rables<\/em>, trans. Frederic Charles Lascelles Wraxall (1862; New York: Heritage Press, 1938), pt. 5, 85; Hugo, Les Mis\u00e9rables<\/em>, trans. Norman Denny (London: Penguin, 1982), 1061.\u00a0<\/p>\n[5]<\/a> Based on keyword searches in Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, <\/em>the earliest publication employing the construction was likely David Garrick and William Wycherley\u2019s The Country Girl, A Comedy <\/em>(Dublin, 1766), 7.\u00a0 However, evidence from other sources, including James Boswell\u2019s The Life of Samuel Johnson<\/em>, suggests the \u201cocean of London\u201d may have been used in conversation at least a decade before (see, Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. <\/em>[London, 1791], vol. 1, 49, 464; vol. 2 55).\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n[6]<\/a> William Cobbett, Rural Rides<\/em> (1830; London: Penguin, 2001), 49; Charles Dickens to John Forster, 30 August 1846, in The Letters of Charles Dickens: Volume Four, 1844-1846<\/em>, ed. Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 612; Walter Bagehot, \u201cCharles Dickens\u201d (1858), reprinted in The Works of Walter Bagehot<\/em>, 5 vols. (Harford, CT: Traveler\u2019s Insurance Company, 1891), vol. 2, 252; Clough Williams-Ellis, England and the Octopus <\/em>(London: G. Bles, 1928).\u00a0<\/p>\n[7]<\/a> Ian Brookes, \u201cAll at Sea: Nautical Metaphors in the English Language,\u201d Oxford University Press English Language Global Teaching Blog<\/em> (June 16, 2014); https:\/\/oupeltglobalblog.com\/2014\/06\/16\/all-at-sea-nautical-metaphors-in-the-english-language\/<\/strong><\/a> [accessed March 28, 2023].\u00a0<\/p>\n[8]<\/a> Paul Readman, Storied Ground: Landscape and the Shaping of English National Identity <\/em>(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 25-34; Cynthia Fansler Behrman, Victorian Myths of the Sea <\/em>(Athens: Ohio University Press, 1977); Eric Saylor and Christopher M. Scheer, eds., The Sea in the British Musical Imagination<\/em> (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2015); John K. Walton, The English Seaside Resort: A Social History, 1750-1914 <\/em>(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1983).\u00a0<\/p>\n[9]<\/a> Alain Frogley, \u201cTonality on the Town: Orchestrating the Metropolis in Vaughan William\u2019s A London Symphony<\/em>,\u201d in Felix W\u00f6rner, et al, eds., Tonality, 1900-1950: Concept and Practice<\/em> (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2012), 187-188.\u00a0<\/p>\n[10]<\/a> James Johnson, A Change of Air; or, The Pursuit of Health<\/em> (London: S. Highley and T. and G. Underwood, 1831), 2-3.\u00a0<\/p>\n[11]<\/a> Thomas Carlyle, The Life of John Sterling<\/em> (London: Chapman and Hall, 1851), 70.\u00a0<\/p>\n[12]<\/a> Carl Nightingale, Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet<\/em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 254-255.\u00a0<\/p>\n[13]<\/a> Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By<\/em>, 29-30.\u00a0<\/p>\n[14]<\/a> H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay<\/em> (1908; New York: Random House, 1931), 127.\u00a0<\/p>\n[15]<\/a> Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck and Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence<\/em>, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997).\u00a0<\/p>\n[16]<\/a> Wells, Tono-Bungay<\/em>, 105.\u00a0<\/p>\n[17]<\/a> Wells, Tono-Bungay<\/em>, 107.\u00a0<\/p>\n[18]<\/a> Fergus Hume, The Fever of Life <\/em>(London: Sampson, Low, Marsten, and Company, 1883), 70; William Le Queux, Hushed Up!\u00a0 A Mystery of London <\/em>(London: Eveleigh Nash, 1911), 255.\u00a0<\/p>\n[19]<\/a> John Mortimer, \u201cA Holiday in the South,\u201d in Papers of the Manchester Literary Club, Volume II<\/em> (Manchester: A. Ireland and Company, 1876), 85.\u00a0<\/p>\n[20]<\/a> William Howitt, The Northern Heights of London <\/em>(London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1869), 283; Henry Mayhew, \u201cThe Great World of London,\u201d in Henry Mayhew and John Binney, The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of Prison Life <\/em>(London: Griffon, Bohn, and Company, 1867), 54.\u00a0<\/p>\n[21]<\/a> Readman, Storied Ground<\/em>, 25, 32; Behrman, Victorian Myths and the Sea<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n[22]<\/a> Blumenberg, Shipwreck<\/em>, 67; David Larm, Shipwrecks of Great Britain and Ireland <\/em>(London: David and Charles, 1981).\u00a0<\/p>\n[23]<\/a> Richard Dennis, \u201cModern London,\u201d in Martin Daunton, ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain: Volume III, 1840-1950<\/em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 95-132.\u00a0<\/p>\n[24]<\/a> Anne Beswick, \u201cThe Story behind the Manchester Bee \u2013 and why it\u2019s used everywhere in the city,\u201d Visit Manchester<\/em> (March 20, 2020); https:\/\/www.visitmanchester.com\/ideas-and-inspiration\/blog\/post\/the-story-behind-the-manchester-bee-and-why-it-s-used-everywhere-in-the-city\/<\/a> [accessed July 16, 2024].\u00a0<\/p>\n[25]<\/a> Daily News<\/em> (May 2, 1851).\u00a0<\/p>\n[26]<\/a> John Fisher Murray, The World of London<\/em>, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1845), vol. 1, 67.\u00a0<\/p>\n[27]<\/a> Richard Lovett, London Pictures: Drawn with Pen and Pencil<\/em> (London: RTS, 1890), 14.\u00a0<\/p>\n[28]<\/a> Fergus Hume, The Fever of Life<\/em> (London: Sampson, Low, Marsten, and Company, 1893), 414.\u00a0<\/p>\n[29]<\/a> \u201cUnpunished Crimes,\u201d Aberdeen Journal<\/em> (January 14, 1884).\u00a0<\/p>\n[30]<\/a> Murray, World of London<\/em>, vol. 1, 14.\u00a0<\/p>\n[31]<\/a> \u201cThe Looking-Glass for London,\u201d Penny Magazine for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge<\/em>, vol. 6, no. 338 (1834): 110-111.\u00a0<\/p>\n[32]<\/a> Johnson, Change of Air<\/em>, 2.\u00a0<\/p>\n[33]<\/a> Nicol Watson, \u201cOn Coming to London,\u201d Chambers\u2019s Journal<\/em>, vol. 13, no. 627 (1896), 26-27; Frederick Laurence, The Life of Henry Fielding <\/em>(London: Arthur, Hall, Virtue, and Company, 1855), 6-7.\u00a0<\/p>\n[34]<\/a> \u201cWilliam Thom, the Inverurie Poet,\u201d Aberdeen Journal<\/em> (August 2, 1899).\u00a0<\/p>\n[35]<\/a> Watson, \u201cOn Coming to London,\u201d 26.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Editor\u2019s note: This is the eighth post in our theme for April 2025, The City Aquatic. For additional entries in the series, see here By Christopher Ferguson In October 2015, \u201cAnn C\u201d of Grantham posted a review on Tripadvisor in which she praised Earl\u2019s Sandwiches in Covent Garden as a \u201cPearl in the Ocean of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":212869,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12032],"tags":[58494,42863,17618,11616,5347],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-212868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-history","tag-meanings","tag-metaphor","tag-metropole","tag-origins","tag-urban"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Origins and Meanings of an Urban Metaphor \u2013 The Metropole - Som2ny Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=212868\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Origins and Meanings of an Urban Metaphor \u2013 The Metropole - Som2ny Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Editor\u2019s note: This is the eighth post in our theme for April 2025, The City Aquatic. 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