Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II.

About the book

Bob Tallyho has inherited a country estate, but his cousin Tom Dashall's accounts of metropolitan pleasures make rural sporting life seem increasingly insufficient. Under Tom's guidance, London becomes a sequence of places to visit, people to observe, and social codes to learn. The narrative moves between fashionable streets and less respectable amusements, drawing theatres, gambling, coffeehouses, sporting encounters, and public institutions into its expansive itinerary. Dialogue, slang, verse, and explanatory digressions often matter more than a tightly advancing plot. The cousins' adventures create a lively but partial picture of the city, shaped by masculine privilege and period prejudices. This edition contains both volumes of the work issued as by an Amateur, preserving a form poised between comic fiction and illustrated urban survey.

• Urban spectacle
• Fashion and social knowledge
• Pleasure and privilege

Why read it

Its combination of fictional companions, street-level observation, and digression makes the city itself the organizing presence of the book.

Methuen 1905 edition of both volumes, reproducing the work issued in 1821 as by an Amateur