This book is the product of obsession and rejection and its writing has been akin to an exorcism! The obsession has been to try and discover, over the course of the last twenty-five years, how the City of London was seen by those who lived before 1914. The rejection was the hostility this faced from funding bodies, publishers and fellow academics. On quite a number of occasions I was tempted to abandon the task, given the other demands on my time, but I did not. Conversation with non-academics convinced me that there was a genuine interest in the results of my research. The project thus grew and grew until it became a book-length monograph. It is for that reason I am so grateful to Pickering and Chatto, and Robert Wright, the editor of their series on Financial History, for their advice and making my findings available. I am also grateful to all those who have suggested novels and novelists I might read, in the hope that they might deal with the City of London. In this I would single out the bookseller Richard Beaton for his suggestions. Many valuable finds resulted, and even when none were made, the voyage of discovery has been an enjoyable one. The depth and diversity of the culture of the Victorian and Edwardian eras has been an astonishment to me, and all I have been able to do is skim the surface. I would also like to thank Francis Pritchard and Paul Lee for help they provided during the final production stages of this book.

How my book will be received remains an unknown as it is unlike anything I have ever produced before. Though its theme is the City of London as a financial and commercial centre, it is not a factual account. Though it relies heavily on novels it is not an exercise in literary criticism. Though it attempts to identify ideas and images it is not a cultural history.