London Excursion (John Gould Fletcher)

Name: London Excursion (John Gould Fletcher)
Author: John Gould Fletcher

“London Excursion” follows a traveller’s movement from green outskirts into a vast, mechanical city and back out again. Riding on a bus, the speaker watches roads, housetops, dark industrial forms, trams, posters, arches, viaducts, and red walls gather around him. Each boundary passed seems to cut him off from the green world he has left behind. He resists the city’s hard angles and crushing steel, longing to become soft, shapeless, and free, but is thrust onward by its noise, motion, and force. As the city approaches, roses and natural images are battered away by black cubes, crumbling buildings, wheels, and sunless rock. On arrival, the speaker sees the city as a restless red sea licking at housefronts, with smoke, dust, and the threat of collapse. Yet he rejects both frantic motion and the builders’ rigid efforts, descending through the city’s steel structures. On foot, he gains a foothold on the pavement and accepts an unnamed duty. He wanders through shadowed back streets, among sunlit passers-by, until he reaches a forgotten shop with cool corridors. From a bus-top, he observes taxicabs, bowler hats, gas-standards, traffic, heat, and the shifting mass of the crowd. The city then overwhelms and transforms him. Blown about like a leaf, he experiences it as a multitude of voices and forces. A sudden will drives him across traffic and through corridors into unfamiliar offices. He claims the city’s people, pavement, uproar, fashions, faces, and movements as material he must carry away to sing amid his green surroundings. Eventually the city becomes a hollow clamour against frozen housefronts, lost in glittering movement. Unable to find a place for himself, he leaves. Noise and motion slide him outward toward green recesses and repose. During the journey away, the departing crowd rushes toward darkness while the city seems to fling streets and lamps after them. They leave behind fading signs of their brief achievement: fires, gold lights on dark walls, and stifled night uproar. At the station, the speaker descends into green and becomes alone. Looking back, he sees the city enlarged into a single grey, unlit wall under crushing night. He continues onward, his memories freezing like birds’ cries in hollow trees, toward the hostility of night.

By John Gould Fletcher · First published 1914 · Genre: Travel literature, Historical fiction, Biographical · 1,603 words

First lines

'BUS

Great walls of green, / City that is afar.

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London Excursion (John Gould Fletcher) is listed on Textopian as an essay by John Gould Fletcher, dated 1914 CE.

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Work type: Essay
Author: John Gould Fletcher
Date: 1914 CE
Language: English
Genres: Travel literature, Historical fiction, Biographical
Length: 1,603 words
Structure: 1 section, 81 paragraphs
Reading fit: Fairly Easy (7th Grade)

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Work identity for London Excursion (John Gould Fletcher) by John Gould Fletcher
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Genres

Travel literature — The book is set around the excursion of the main character in London, placing it squarely in the realm of travel literature.
Historical fiction — The work is set in a specific past time period, making elements of it fall under the historical fiction genre.
Biographical — As the title suggests a specific person—John Gould Fletcher—the book can be assumed to have biographical elements.