The Moving Pageant is the first annotated anthology of writings on London street life. It comprises nearly one hundred extracts from over two centuries of literary life, including pieces by: * Alexander Pope * Jonathan Swift * Daniel Defoe * Samuel Johnson * Eliza Haywood * Horace Walpole * William Hazlitt * William Wordsworth * Charles Dickens * Flora Tristan * Edgar Allen Poe * Charlotte Bronte * Fyodor Dostoyevsky * Octavia Hill * Beatrice Potter * Henry James * Oscar Wilde * Arnold Bennett * Joseph Conrad * H.G. Wells The volume assembles a rich and varied selection of this abundance of writing, showing London as truly unique in its immensity, and, ultimately, supremely representative of our modern urban world in the making. The Moving Pageant comes complete with a superb editor's introduction, illustrations, and biographical and critical commentaries on each of the writers' entries. It also displays many genres and styles of writing, and includes street-ballads, music-hall songs, excerpts from novels, epic poems, and documentary accounts of riots and executions, as well as descriptions of state pageants and processions.

Spanning public and private, documentary and the imaginative, the writings collected here evoke the physical and social atmosphere and the cultural life of London's streets and other sites of ceremony and popular assembly.