The MP John Byng's reference to the metropolis as ‘that encreasing Wen’ occurs over thirty years before the more famous ‘Great Wen’ of Cobbett's Political Register essays of 1822–6, which were collected as Rural Rides in 1830. This chronology reminds us that writers of Lamb's generation grew up and lived at a time of intense debate over London's growing socio-economic and cultural influence, over the country as a whole and rural life in particular. Raymond Williams traces usage of the term ‘wen’ for describing London's phenomenal growth as far back as 1783, and, moreover, proposes that it was a politically expedient term, rather than an accurate reflection of the capital's relationship to the country. Williams argues that, far from being aberrant,

Nevertheless, at the end of the nineteenth century the fact of London's accelerated expansion in the early decades could still be imaged in terms of monstrosity, as Conan Doyle's novel Beyond the City indicates: ‘When the Metropolis was still quite a distant thing … in the days when the century was young’, recalls the narrator, there were cottages scattered amongst ‘rolling country-side’ before ‘the City had thrown out a long brick-feeler here and there, curving, extending, and coalescing, until at last the little cottages had been gripped round by these red tentacles, and had been absorbed …’.