In the year Jane Austen was born, Temple Bar – one of the old gateways of London – still carried what remained of the head of a Jacobite executed in 1746. As the centre of British government, finance and culture, Georgian London was a focus for public displays of all kinds. Fashionable life paraded around the rapidly expanding residential areas of the north and west while in the south and east manufacturing workshops proliferated to supply London’s commercial zone. In 1811 the population reached over a million. Austen presents London as a small world and as a metropolis in which it is possible to sink from view. In Pride and Prejudice Lydia and Wickham travel to London for ‘concealment’ and Darcy is only able to hunt them down through the channels of the servant class (3:5, 3:10). Frank Churchill disappears to London to purchase a piano in Emma (2:7) and Austen introduces Robert Ferrars as an anonymous male consumer commissioning a pearled toothpick-case in Sense and Sensibility (2:11).

Along Pall Mall and Bond Street fashionable ladies did their afternoon shopping (fig. 29); Charles Lamb preferred the lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street. He took William Wordsworth to see Bartholomew Fair at Smithfield in 1802 and the older poet’s fascinated repulsion at the way everything was ‘jumbled up together’ captures London as a whole. Summer fairs were set up for trade but their circuses and theatrical side-shows were popular sites of entertainment for all classes. This mingling of occupations is emblematic of the flux and variety of London in Austen's time, when it was an international centre of banking and insurance, and also the home of the gambling clubs or ‘hells’ in Pall Mall. Theatre and opera flourished alongside the brothels, Turkish baths and fruit market of Covent Garden; the recently founded British Museum, the Royal Academy and the Royal Society fostered the arts and sciences while tea gardens and exhibition halls promoted all manner of musical, mechanical, optical and aerostatic amusements.