History Of A Young Lady's Entrance Into The World '

A Portrait of the Londoner as an Adolescent

In response to prompt 22

As we consider the representation of adolescents in London, we are prompted to question the role they play in a city so saturated with adults. I wish to explore this question by painting a portrait of the Londoner as a child and as depicted in Fanny Burney’s Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (1778) and Ford Madox Ford’s The Soul of London (1905). Where Ford’s novel highlights a young boy’s experience of London as a modern city, Burney’s novel depicts an innocent girl named Evelina and the dangers she encounters upon entering London (or what Burney boldly calls in his title, “The World”). Further, in analysing Evelina, I wish to explore the role of a female adolescent in the late 18th century in direct contrast to a young boy’s experience of modern London. Just as the children of these texts come of age, so to speak, we see London’s “coming of age” as it develops into a modern city.

Firstly, The Soul of London offers a

Her experience is evidently very different from the experience of a young boy in modern London; she is constantly represented as property and told what she should think and who she should be. The men in Evelina refer to her as an ‘angel’, an ‘actress’, and a ‘pretty little creature’. Evelina came to London to be independent and to seek pleasure, but she ultimately leaves the gardens feeling disillusioned. Depicted as a burdensome child that must be accompanied everywhere, Evelina does not have a right to find her own idea of pleasure in London. For how can one find moral delight when the city is so saturated with immorality? How can one achieve independence when the very state of being alone is an invitation for harassment? Other’s ideas of pleasure come at the cost of Evelina’s