Compare and Contrast the Three Poems Exploring the Image Each Poet Gives of Pre 19oo London.

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Snita Lal                Literature

COMPARE AND CONTRAST THE THREE POEMS EXPLORING THE IMAGE EACH POET GIVES OF PRE 19OO LONDON

The three poems I have studied each convey a different perception of pre 1900 London.

        The poem ‘Conveyancing’ is based around the movement that was happening in London. The definition of the word conveyancing is the movement from one place to another. It is an observational account from the poet’s point of view and what he thought London was like. This is made clear by the way he expresses the vast amount of traffic that occupied the roads.

        In the first verse of the poem Thomas Hood has described the movement of the trains as ‘loco-motion’. It also contains a comparison between the motions of the people with the actions of the waves from the ocean. As the ‘billows’ are constantly moving backwards and forwards so are the people. The horse drawn vehicles were the beginning of public transport and they could be rented or hired.

In pre 1900 London the main mode of transport was the horse drawn vehicles, which were more commonly known as ‘hackney carriages’ and these were the equivalent to our taxis:

‘There’s always hacks about in packs’

This line explains that the hacks never appeared to come on time but when they did it seemed as if they all came together at once and it’s this reason why he has written this. The journey in a hack wasn’t smooth as this was due to the cobbled roads and like the cars today they used to be raced by their drivers for fun.

The third verse goes on to another form of transport, which was the single horse drawn carriage.

‘A car not quite so small and light

As those of our Queen Mab age;’

In this verse the poet makes a reference to a character taken from the Shakespearean play ‘Romeo and Juliet’, Queen Mab. Queen Mab was the goddess of all fairies and caused lots of mischief for example if you went to sleep feeling good then woke up feeling ill, Queen Mab was to blame for it. He has made this reference because he had described that the carriages resemble Queen Mab’s carriage, which was small as a nutshell and the carriages looks like those from the time of Queen Mab.

The horses that pulled the carriage are said to be ‘broken well’ which indicates that they were well-trained and posed no threat or danger to anyone. He says in a humorous way the condition of the horses by saying they are ‘broken winded’ meaning they are frail and breathless because of the amount of work they had done.         In the next verse he talks about the actual journey and what it felt like. Like our buses the horses used to stop at certain points to pick and drop people off.

The journeys were not smooth because the roads were uneven and cobbled making the people inside feel all shaken up. This also making them feel a bit faint and sick. This extract shows this;

‘Till you grow faint and sicky,

Perched up behind, at last to find,

Your dinner is al1 dickey!’

        Staying on the same subject of what the journey was like Thomas Hood has carried it in to the next verse. The verse is about how the rides used to be time consuming and people never wanted to go on them with other people that were boring. And he has included a quote that is taken from a ‘ditty’, which is a silly little rhyme and adds to the humour of the poem:

Join now!

                                ‘Ye banks and braes’

As the poem progresses further so does the mode of transport, the steam train.

‘Instead of journeys, people now

May go upon a Gurney’

A ‘Gurney’ is a steam train and they take the place of the horses in transporting people.

        The stagecoach is another style of pre 1900 London vehicles. It's the equivalent to our modern day buses. Again there is a reference to a Shakespearian quote:

‘The world a sage has called a stage’

Sage is a wise person and this is Shakespeare himself and he called life a stage on which ...

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