London and urban culture in eighteenth‐century literature

This essay provides an overview of some of the key critical approaches to the literature of eighteenth‐century London over the last two decades, before going on to explore a series of examples of the figure of the new arrival in London from the literature of the period. The outsider or new arrival became, for eighteenth‐century writers, something to think with and offered an opportunity to examine London's sense of its own modernity, and interrogate the ways in which commerce might be reshaping social interactions in the city.