Editor’s note: This is the eighth post in our theme for April 2025, The City Aquatic. For additional entries in the series, see here
By Christopher Ferguson
In October 2015, “Ann C” of Grantham posted a review on Tripadvisor in which she praised Earl’s Sandwiches in Covent Garden as a “Pearl in the Ocean of London.” By describing the British capital in this fashion, she invoked a metaphoric construction more than two and half centuries old.[1] During the late eighteenth century, Britons began employing the ocean as a metaphor for London. The use of this aquatic imagery expanded over the course of the nineteenth century and flourished in the years immediately around the turn of the twentieth century. Though its appearance in print became less widespread after the 1920s, it nevertheless continued to be used selectively throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Indeed, the metaphor continues to be employed in descriptions of London in the present day, including in those produced by journalists, scholars, novelists, bloggers, and tour guides.
In this essay I offer a brief examination of the history of the urban metaphor “the ocean of London.” I do so as a (small) contribution to the large, ever-expanding literature chronicling and analyzing representations of the British capital, but also as a means of exploring the larger question of why specific metaphors do – and do not – become attached to certain urban environments at particular moments in time. The ocean was not always perceived as a logical metaphor for London, nor has it proved especially appealing to those describing other cities in other places and times. Why was this the case?
In their classic study Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that in allowing us to “conceive of one thing in terms of another,” metaphors function as a means for promoting understanding – as tools for comprehension.[2] Metaphors are not arbitrary – indeed, to succeed they must be culturally specific. Those that work best do so because they align closely with prevailing cultural values and preoccupations. Examining why Britons came to employ the metaphoric construct “London as ocean,” thus offers useful insights into how they perceived life in their nation’s capital during the era of industrial modernity.
Cities are complex entities. This complexity, Max Muller argues, makes them especially fruitful subjects for metaphoric constructions.[3] Most of us, I suspect, are familiar with the metaphor of the “city as jungle.” Metaphoric constructions of urban geography invoking the human body, anatomy, and the circulatory and digestive systems are likewise quite common. Descriptions of streets as arteries, or sewers as intestines, for instance, were employed regularly in Western writings about cities during the nineteenth century, with Victor Hugo’s extended excursus on the Paris sewers (as the city’s “intestines” or “entrails”) in Les Misérables providing perhaps the most famous example.[4]
The metaphor of “London as ocean,” however, is far more historically and geographically specific. In the more than two decades I have spent researching and analyzing urban representations produced by Britons during the “long” nineteenth century, I have found myself repeatedly confronted by the metaphor of the “ocean of London,” and the need to figure out what Britons sought to convey in employing this aquatic imagery.
The metaphor was very likely an invention of my period of expertise. My research has unearthed no one referring to London as an ocean before the 1750s, and uses of the construction were still quite rare until the second quarter of the nineteenth century.[5] Thus, regardless of exactly when the metaphor of “London as ocean” was initially conceived, its popularization and first widespread use were a nineteenth-century phenomena. This makes the metaphor the “ocean of London” a rhetorical artifact of the modern era, specifically the era of the early industrial revolution.
The metaphor was also always unique to London. Though Britain experienced dramatic rates of urbanization during the years that the oceanic metaphor proliferated, I have yet to find any examples of persons writing in English employing the image of the ocean in reference to other cities – no oceans of Manchester, Birmingham, or Liverpool, much less Paris, Chicago, Berlin, Melbourne, or Istanbul. The metaphor of the “ocean of London” is thus a remarkably specific linguistic artifact. It was intended to convey meanings about one urban community during a particularly dramatic moment in that city’s history.
But why London as ocean? After all, other metaphors also were introduced during the same years to describe the city. The journalist William Cobbett notoriously referred to London as a cancerous tumor (“the great wen”); Charles Dickens described it as a “magic-lantern”; the journalist Walter Bagehot claimed that London was “like a newspaper”; and the architect Clough William Ellis depicted the city as an “octopus.”[6] Yet none of these images captured the popular imagination as effectively as the metaphor of “London as ocean,” despite the considerable influence of their authorial creators. This suggests that the metaphor of London as a large, deep body of water possessed a peculiar usefulness for Britons in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
At first glance, it might seem an obvious choice for the capital city of an island-dwelling nation. Indeed, Ian Brookes notes that English culture is notable for producing and employing a significant number of nautical metaphors, including being “all at sea,” “adrift,” or “high and dry.”[7] The years that saw the image of London as ocean gaining in popularity also coincided with those in which Britain’s naval, maritime, and imperial supremacy was at its peak. This was likewise the era in which the seaside first came to feature as a holiday destination for rising numbers of British urban-dwellers, and in which Britons also increasingly celebrated the role of water and the waves in contributing to their (supposedly) distinctive character as the inhabitants of an “island nation.”[8]
These same years, however, also witnessed a heavy tendency on the part of British writers, artists, poets, and composers to place nature and the urban in sharp juxtaposition in their works, in order to highlight the differences believed to exist between them.[9] In fact, a wide swathe of contemporary Britons regularly emphasized the supposed unnaturalness and “artificiality” of the capital city – sometimes even in the same writings in which they employed the metaphor of London as ocean. In 1831, for example, the physician James Johnson provided an extensive discussion of the “artificial” elements of London life he believed were contributing to ill health in the Metropolis – its smoke, fashions, “unnatural” hours of work and socializing, rampant consumerism, and varieties and modes of employment. He began this discussion, however, by recalling the depressive influences the city had first exerted over his own mind, when as a young man he found himself to be “a drop of water in the ocean” of London life.[10]
Given the existence of many similar texts like Johnson’s, the choice of employing an entity typically conceived by Europeans as timeless and natural as the means of depicting and understanding a place routinely described as the apex of human endeavor, modernity, and artifice appears a bit more surprising. Nevertheless, over the course of the nineteenth century many Britons embraced the ocean as their metaphor of choice when describing London, and some of their reasons for doing so likely were related to Britain’s status as an island nation.
One of the foremost functions of the oceanic metaphor was as a means of representing and comprehending London’s enormous size. This was the gist, for example, of one of the most oft-cited phrases employing the metaphor, “the illimitable limitary ocean of London,” penned by the celebrated intellectual Thomas Carlyle in 1850, and then regularly recycled by other writers in the remaining decades of the century.[11] Britons routinely noted the difficulty of finding language or imagery adequate for accounting for London’s historically unprecedented, gargantuan size during a century when the capital grew from a population of a little over a million to more than seven million persons, and represented one of the largest – and by 1850, the largest – city on earth.[12] For many – if not most – Britons, the ocean was probably the largest entity they had encountered in their lives, and thus offered the best available means for metaphorically representing something on the scale of the national capital.
The ocean also functioned as what Lakoff and Johnson call a “container” metaphor.[13] The ocean, like London, was a bounded entity. “It’s like the sea – and we swim in it,” announces a character in H. G. Wells’s 1908 novel Tono-Bungay when pointing to “London spreading wide and far.”[14] London, like the ocean, could be visited. It could be journeyed to, over, or across. This allowed metropolitan metaphors to be aligned with much older nautical imagery representing the human life course as a “sea voyage” dating back to ancient times.[15] The protagonist in Wells’s same novel, for instance, expresses ambivalence at finding his aunt and uncle seemingly “adrift” in London’s “limitless crowd,” and worries that he too will be “swallowed up…sooner or later by this dingy London ocean.”[16]
This fear of being “swallowed,” in turn, is indicative of another oceanic property Britons found useful when describing London: the ocean, like the Metropolis, had depth, or an “underside” as Wells’s put it.[17] Indeed, the ocean possessed vast depths that remained mysterious, uncharted, and largely unknown until the twentieth century – not unlike much of London, according to many contemporary commentators. This may explain, for instance, why the metaphor was particularly popular with the authors of mystery novels, where narrators warned of what could be found in “sound[ing] the depths of the London ocean, which contains all kinds of disagreeable things,” or in which characters “slipped away into the great ocean of London life.”[18]
Physical properties of the ocean also proved useful for encapsulating distinctive features of London life. The roar of the ocean waves, and the regular movement of the tides, were ideally suited for describing traffic. A visitor to the city in the 1870s, for example, reported how “the tide of human life surged along the streets and roared through the channels beneath.”[19] The essayist William Howitt invoked the image of the tides in describing London’s seemingly relentless expansion over the neighboring countryside – “on every side the tide of population has rolled on with brick and mortar” – while in an early description of what we would now call “rush hour,” the journalist Henry Mayhew claimed London traffic consisted of “two tides,” the first lasting from nine until eleven in the morning, the second from two to five in the afternoon.[20]
In addition, the ocean was not only familiar to island-dwelling Britons; it also occupied a complicated place in the nation’s moral imagination. On the one hand, the ocean represented a positive entity, as a longstanding source of sustenance, a facilitator of wealth from maritime trade, and a potent line of national defense.[21] Yet, it also produced devastating storms, and was the grave of countless British sailors, soldiers, convicts, emigrants, and fisherfolk, thousands of whom died at sea every year during the nineteenth century.[22] The ocean produced admiration, awe, and terror in equal degree – and so did London. The ocean’s status as an ambiguous, value-neutral entity, thus made it equally serviceable for Britons expressing positive and negative sentiments about the nation’s capital, unlike purely negative metaphors like that of the “great wen” or the octopus.
The size and importance of the ocean in British life, in turn, also meant that the idea of the ocean itself encompassed a wide range of different types of associations, allowing these, in turn, to be aligned with the varied social and physical features of the metropolitan environment. London’s multifaceted nature made it unique among nineteenth-century British cities.[23] It was the center of banking, finance, and government, a large port and hub of manufacturing and marketing, and the primary locus of the country’s literary, artistic, leisure, and entertainment industries. It was more than a “hive” of manufacturing, for instance, meaning that it required a richer, more multi-dimensional metaphoric stand-in than the beehive which famously became one of the most favored signifiers for industrial Manchester.[24] The ocean supplied such a complex signifier, one capable of encompassing the wide range of places London occupied in the national mind.
One of the most popular uses of the “ocean of London” – one already alluded to above – conveys the multifaceted meanings of the nautical metaphor when applied to the British capital with especial richness: that of the image of the individual person as a “drop of rain” in the “ocean of London.” In the hands of some commentators, for example, this image served as a means of conveying visual uniformity. In 1851, an anonymous journalist noted the impossibility of identifying “foreigners” in the crowds gathered to witness the opening of the Crystal Palace Exhibition, because “they were lost in the ocean of London population,” whose “aspect was entirely, exclusively English.”[25] The journalist John Fisher Murray used the same imagery when describing the seeming uniformity of London’s built environment – as an “ocean filling the mind” with “an eternity of town, without beginning and without end,” consisting of “miles of dingy streets,” each like all the others.[26] For the writer Richard Lovett, the same image instead served to capture London’s enormous size. In 1865, he noted that “Kensington alone – a mere drop in the ocean of London life – contains more people than Bradford, York, and Scarborough combined.”[27]
The urban-ocean metaphor functioned not only as a measure of size, but also simultaneously as a means of conveying size’s consequences – specifically the social conditions of individuals who found themselves immersed in the massive metropolitan populace. Even in this context, however, the range of sub-meanings could vary considerably. The late-nineteenth-century mystery writer Fergus Hume, for instance, used the image to explain the failure to apprehend a murderer in his 1893 novel The Fever of Life. The latter had “disappeared into the depths of London, from whence he never emerged,” having fallen “into the immense ocean of London like a drop of rain.”[28] In 1884, an editorialist in the Aberdeen Journal made a similar point about real criminals, noting that a recent London burglar would have likely gone free if not for the “exemplary presence of mind” of a servant girl who chased the criminal with “extraordinary tenacity and courage.” Without her actions, the writer warned, “the man who have dropped again into the great ocean of London life, where the chances of identifying him would have been slender indeed.”[29]
For many other writers, this same aquatic imagery was enlisted instead as a means of conveying the social and emotional experiences of individuals – especially those newly arrived in the Metropolis – isolated or lost in the London crowd. The traveler recently arrived in London, Murray contended, shrunk to the condition of “isolated insignificance.” Their “individuality,” he claimed, “was lost, as the drop of rain that, falling, intermingles with the ocean.” Indeed, he argued that the “social isolation of individual drops in this great ocean of human life” constituted one of the most “remarkable” characteristics of London society, and for many persons this experience was deeply unpleasant.[30] An author writing in the Penny Magazine a few years before had also employed the oceanic metaphor to make similar claims. “The stranger who comes to reside in London,” the writer observed, “begins to understand what it is to be a hermit amongst millions…a drop of rain that has fallen in the ocean.” Under the weight of such realizations, the newcomer’s “sense of self-importance” was diminished, and “loneliness” would “depress his energies.”[31] In fact, it was this very experience of emotional distress when confronted with the immensity of the London crowd that the physician Johnson sought to convey when invoking this same drop in the ocean imagery in 1831. Johnson recalled how as a young man he had first “mingled” with the “tide of existence” in the London streets, and how his “heart sunk.” “I felt, as it were, annihilated – lost, like a drop of water in the ocean.”[32]
When wedded to the longstanding metaphor of the “voyage of life,” the image of the person as a drop of water in the larger ocean of London became a means for encapsulating the struggle for success and recognition in the city, especially when applied to writers, actors, or artists. It was used in this fashion by James Boswell, for example, in his Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), and was likewise used by biographers of literary figures like Carlyle or Henry Fielding, as the means of narrating the achievements of men whose talents had allowed them to rise out of, and above, the city’s oceanic masses.[33] It also was employed with equal regularity in recalling the lives of those who failed to do so – men like the Scottish poet William Thom, who, unable to handle the pressures of literary competition in the capital, sank into poverty and depression, becoming “a poor human wreck on the ocean of London traffic.”[34] Regardless of the individuals’ success or failure, however, the journalist Nicol Watson argued, “Wherever the human barque may at last have cast-anchor…and whatever may have been the adventures of the voyage, matters not.” The launch, she contended, was “always momentous.” For “poet and peasant, merchant or mechanic,” London proved a “wondrous ocean,” an arena of ambitions and temptations, successes and failures, all greater than themselves.[35]
A large, multi-dimensional city like London thus required a metaphor to match. At the end of the eighteenth century, Britons increasingly embraced the ocean as their metropolitan metaphor of choice on account of its singular ability to encapsulate not only their capital’s tremendous size, but also a wide range of other kinds of spatial, social, sensory, and emotional characteristics associated with life in modern London. Familiar associations with the ocean became the means for describing and comprehending initially unfamiliar aspects of London space and society. These images and associations, in turn, subsequently became embedded in the habits of British discourse, long after their novelty had expired, because they remained useful means of making sense of the nation’s largest city. Each individual use of the “ocean of London” became one drop in a veritable sea of commentary in which the metaphor served to convey – and to make comprehensible – the immense size, the sights and sounds, the social character, and the emotional experience of inhabiting one of the largest cities in the nineteenth-century world. It took an ocean of imagery to capture the multitude of meanings contemporary Britons collected around modern London, and thus they used the literal ocean as one potent modality for making these meanings accessible and understandable to their fellow Britons, whether they inhabited London, the British Isles, the Empire, or some other corner of the vaster English-speaking world.
Christopher Ferguson is Associate Professor of History at Auburn University. He is the author An Artisan Intellectual: James Carter and the Rise of Modern Britain, 1792-1853 (Louisiana State University Press, 2016), as well as a number of other articles, essays, and book chapters on nineteenth-century British cultural and urban history, including: “London and Early Environmentalism, 1770-1870,” in A Mighty Capital Under Siege: The Environmental History of London, 1800-2000 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), edited by Bill Luckin and Peter Thorsheim; and, “Urbanity,” in the forthcoming New Cambridge History of Britain, Volume 4: 1750-1900, edited by Miles Taylor and Lara Kriegel.
Featured image (at top): a view of the Thames and the Houses of Parliament by Gustave Doré from London: A Pilgrimage (1872) courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
[1] Ann C, “Review of Earl’s Sandwiches, Covent Garden,” Tripadvisor, 22 October 2015; https://www.tripadvisor.ie/ShowUserReviews-g186338-d5616136-r321006172-Earls_Sandwiches-London_England.html [accessed May 9, 2024].
[2] George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 5.
[3] Max Muller, “Understanding Cities Through Metaphors,” Pandemic (April 30, 2018); https://www.pandemic.space/2018/04/30/understanding-cities-through-metaphors/ [accessed April 30, 2024].
[4] The original 1862 translation of Hugo’s magnum opus employed “intestines”; more recent translations have shifted to “entrails.” The meaning is the same for all intents and purposes. See: Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, trans. Frederic Charles Lascelles Wraxall (1862; New York: Heritage Press, 1938), pt. 5, 85; Hugo, Les Misérables, trans. Norman Denny (London: Penguin, 1982), 1061.
[5] Based on keyword searches in Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, the earliest publication employing the construction was likely David Garrick and William Wycherley’s The Country Girl, A Comedy (Dublin, 1766), 7. However, evidence from other sources, including James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, suggests the “ocean of London” may have been used in conversation at least a decade before (see, Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. [London, 1791], vol. 1, 49, 464; vol. 2 55).
[6] William Cobbett, Rural Rides (1830; London: Penguin, 2001), 49; Charles Dickens to John Forster, 30 August 1846, in The Letters of Charles Dickens: Volume Four, 1844-1846, ed. Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 612; Walter Bagehot, “Charles Dickens” (1858), reprinted in The Works of Walter Bagehot, 5 vols. (Harford, CT: Traveler’s Insurance Company, 1891), vol. 2, 252; Clough Williams-Ellis, England and the Octopus (London: G. Bles, 1928).
[7] Ian Brookes, “All at Sea: Nautical Metaphors in the English Language,” Oxford University Press English Language Global Teaching Blog (June 16, 2014); https://oupeltglobalblog.com/2014/06/16/all-at-sea-nautical-metaphors-in-the-english-language/ [accessed March 28, 2023].
[8] Paul Readman, Storied Ground: Landscape and the Shaping of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 25-34; Cynthia Fansler Behrman, Victorian Myths of the Sea (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1977); Eric Saylor and Christopher M. Scheer, eds., The Sea in the British Musical Imagination (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2015); John K. Walton, The English Seaside Resort: A Social History, 1750-1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1983).
[9] Alain Frogley, “Tonality on the Town: Orchestrating the Metropolis in Vaughan William’s A London Symphony,” in Felix Wörner, et al, eds., Tonality, 1900-1950: Concept and Practice (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2012), 187-188.
[10] James Johnson, A Change of Air; or, The Pursuit of Health (London: S. Highley and T. and G. Underwood, 1831), 2-3.
[11] Thomas Carlyle, The Life of John Sterling (London: Chapman and Hall, 1851), 70.
[12] Carl Nightingale, Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 254-255.
[13] Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 29-30.
[14] H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay (1908; New York: Random House, 1931), 127.
[15] Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck and Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997).
[16] Wells, Tono-Bungay, 105.
[17] Wells, Tono-Bungay, 107.
[18] Fergus Hume, The Fever of Life (London: Sampson, Low, Marsten, and Company, 1883), 70; William Le Queux, Hushed Up! A Mystery of London (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1911), 255.
[19] John Mortimer, “A Holiday in the South,” in Papers of the Manchester Literary Club, Volume II (Manchester: A. Ireland and Company, 1876), 85.
[20] William Howitt, The Northern Heights of London (London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1869), 283; Henry Mayhew, “The Great World of London,” in Henry Mayhew and John Binney, The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of Prison Life (London: Griffon, Bohn, and Company, 1867), 54.
[21] Readman, Storied Ground, 25, 32; Behrman, Victorian Myths and the Sea.
[22] Blumenberg, Shipwreck, 67; David Larm, Shipwrecks of Great Britain and Ireland (London: David and Charles, 1981).
[23] Richard Dennis, “Modern London,” in Martin Daunton, ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain: Volume III, 1840-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 95-132.
[24] Anne Beswick, “The Story behind the Manchester Bee – and why it’s used everywhere in the city,” Visit Manchester (March 20, 2020); https://www.visitmanchester.com/ideas-and-inspiration/blog/post/the-story-behind-the-manchester-bee-and-why-it-s-used-everywhere-in-the-city/ [accessed July 16, 2024].
[25] Daily News (May 2, 1851).
[26] John Fisher Murray, The World of London, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1845), vol. 1, 67.
[27] Richard Lovett, London Pictures: Drawn with Pen and Pencil (London: RTS, 1890), 14.
[28] Fergus Hume, The Fever of Life (London: Sampson, Low, Marsten, and Company, 1893), 414.
[29] “Unpunished Crimes,” Aberdeen Journal (January 14, 1884).
[30] Murray, World of London, vol. 1, 14.
[31] “The Looking-Glass for London,” Penny Magazine for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, vol. 6, no. 338 (1834): 110-111.
[32] Johnson, Change of Air, 2.
[33] Nicol Watson, “On Coming to London,” Chambers’s Journal, vol. 13, no. 627 (1896), 26-27; Frederick Laurence, The Life of Henry Fielding (London: Arthur, Hall, Virtue, and Company, 1855), 6-7.
[34] “William Thom, the Inverurie Poet,” Aberdeen Journal (August 2, 1899).
[35] Watson, “On Coming to London,” 26.
