Cam Balzer, Northwestern University

In a brief essay entitled "The Gods of the City," Italo Calvino writes,

Each city has an implicit program that must be found every time it is forgotten lest that city face extinction. The ancients represented the spirit of the city with just that bit of vagueness and precision that the operation requires, invoking the names of gods who had presided at its foundation.... A city can go through catastrophes and dark ages, see different generations follow one another in its houses, see these houses change stone by stone, but at the right moment and in different forms it must find its gods once again.

After the upheavals of the Commonwealth and the Restoration, and a catastrophe as great as the fire of 1666, London was no doubt a city in search of "the gods who presided at its founding."

A version of this paper was presented at the Modern Language Association convention, Chicago, 29 December 1995.