2 SEPTEMBER 1666: 350 YEARS SINCE THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON
Pepys and Evelyn were the most famous chroniclers of the fire, but it also inspired a few amateurs and hacks...
In the early hours of 2 September a small fire broke out in a bakery in Pudding Lane. In the five days that followed it grew into a conflagration that would devastate the third largest city in the Western world. This short edition is the essential guide to the Great Fire of London and includes first-hand descriptions from the diaries of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, as well as a gripping account from renowned historian Adrian Tinniswood.
Pepys and Evelyn were the most famous chroniclers of the fire, but it also inspired a few amateurs and hacks...
David Best’s London 1666, a wooden replica of the city in the 17th century, which will be set alight on 4 September 2016. Photograph: Amer Ghazzal/REX/Shutterstock
One of the more surprising consequences of the fire that destroyed London 350 years ago this week was the way it spawned an entire literature of loss. While the most famous accounts of the Great Fire, by diarists Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, didn’t see the light of day until the 19th century, broadside ballads with titles such as “The Londoners’ Lamentation” and “London Mourning in Ashes” began to appear on the blackened streets within weeks.
Some were eloquent in their simplicity: “Old London that, / Hath stood in State, / above six hundred years, / In six days space / Woe and alas! / is burn’d and drown’d in tears.” But there were also heroic couplets and Pindaric odes and Latin verses. There were outrageously mannered compositions – “And still the surly flame doth fiercer hiss / By an Antiperistasis” – and conceits of metaphysical weirdness. The makeshift camps outside the City walls were so full of sleeping refugees that the area was “the Counterfeit of the Great Bed of Ware”.
The authors of these poems were as diverse as their literary output. Some were hack journalists and impoverished academics. Others were amateurs who published nothing else, like John Tabor, a Hampshire rector whose “Seasonable Thoughts in Sad Times” makes one glad he didn’t venture further into literature: “Upon September’s second day i’ the’ year / Much talkt of Sixty six, did there appear / By two i’ th’ morning these consuming Flames, / Which did break out first in the Street of Thames...”
Classical and biblical images abound. London has fallen like Troy; it burns like another Rome. Jerusalem is laid in the dust once more, Babylon is conquered. “London and Sodom may sit down together, / And now condole the Ashes of each other.”
But the most remarkable thing about this literature of loss is that almost as soon as it saw the light of day it evolved into a literature of renewal. Joseph Guillim, for example, ends his “Dreadful Burning” with the hope that “from our Ruin’d City may arise, / Another, whose high Towers may urge the Skies”. John Dryden in his poem “Annus Mirabilis” dreams of a city of gold whose streets will be paved with silver. The anonymous author of “London Undone” waits for a day when peace will “make rude Stones into a City Dance”. And the anonymous author of “The Londoners’ Lamentation” ends with a childlike plea for reconciliation:
If we still hate each other thus,
God never will be friends with us.
One of the more surprising consequences of the fire that destroyed London 350 years ago this week was the way it spawned an entire literature of loss. While the most famous accounts of the Great Fire, by diarists Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, didn’t see the light of day until the 19th century, broadside ballads with titles such as “The Londoners’ Lamentation” and “London Mourning in Ashes” began to appear on the blackened streets within weeks.
Some were eloquent in their simplicity: “Old London that, / Hath stood in State, / above six hundred years, / In six days space / Woe and alas! / is burn’d and drown’d in tears.” But there were also heroic couplets and Pindaric odes and Latin verses. There were outrageously mannered compositions – “And still the surly flame doth fiercer hiss / By an Antiperistasis” – and conceits of metaphysical weirdness. The makeshift camps outside the City walls were so full of sleeping refugees that the area was “the Counterfeit of the Great Bed of Ware”.
The authors of these poems were as diverse as their literary output. Some were hack journalists and impoverished academics. Others were amateurs who published nothing else, like John Tabor, a Hampshire rector whose “Seasonable Thoughts in Sad Times” makes one glad he didn’t venture further into literature: “Upon September’s second day i’ the’ year / Much talkt of Sixty six, did there appear / By two i’ th’ morning these consuming Flames, / Which did break out first in the Street of Thames...”
Classical and biblical images abound. London has fallen like Troy; it burns like another Rome. Jerusalem is laid in the dust once more, Babylon is conquered. “London and Sodom may sit down together, / And now condole the Ashes of each other.”
But the most remarkable thing about this literature of loss is that almost as soon as it saw the light of day it evolved into a literature of renewal. Joseph Guillim, for example, ends his “Dreadful Burning” with the hope that “from our Ruin’d City may arise, / Another, whose high Towers may urge the Skies”. John Dryden in his poem “Annus Mirabilis” dreams of a city of gold whose streets will be paved with silver. The anonymous author of “London Undone” waits for a day when peace will “make rude Stones into a City Dance”. And the anonymous author of “The Londoners’ Lamentation” ends with a childlike plea for reconciliation:
If we still hate each other thus,
God never will be friends with us.
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