In writing The Waste Land (1922), T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) first considered as a title He do the Police in Different Voices, drawn from Dickens’s Betty Higden (1997: 1.16.198). It invites comparison between Our Mutual Friend and The Waste Land, the realist and modernist cities. Noting this resonance, Karl Smith (2008) reads Dickens's London as a precursor of Eliot's ‘Unreal City’. But, of course, Eliot's London is not the same as Dickens’s, even if, written ‘after Dickens’, it necessarily incorporates the former as an intrinsic element of its own. Indeed, Eliot's London owes as much to Baudelaire's Paris as to Dickens. In his notes to the poem (2005: 81), Eliot glosses his famous image of London by reference to ‘Les sept vieillards’.

In ‘Les sept vieillards’, the modern city is a ‘swarming [fourmillante] city, city full of dreams’ (l. 1), haunted by ‘ghosts in daylight’ (l. 2). It is ‘swarming’, that term which we have encountered repeatedly throughout this study, from Wordsworth to Dickens to James. In this version of Paris, ‘a dirty yellow fog filled all the space’ (l. 9), where Baudelaire's poetic persona encounters seven ‘monstrous’ old men (l. 42). Horrified, he seems unable to differentiate reality from waking nightmare, uncertain whether the seven are doppelgängers of one another or one subject multiplying itself (l. 36). As ‘baroque spectres’ (l. 31), they become allegorical figures of the space of the city and modern life. In suggesting that Baudelaire's image of the city lies somewhere behind that of The Waste Land, alongside numerous other allusions, Eliot links modernism with decadence, speaking to the melancholia of the modern subject. The modernism of this ‘Unreal City’ lies precisely in this overwhelming sense of prior aesthetic traces that inscribe any attempt to read the city, this cacophany of precedent voices, as much as in the sense of social fragmentation that alienates the subject. The reality of modern space has become ‘unreal’, if not – as in the late Dickens – ‘for the first time’ (ED 23.261), yet in a manner which the earlier tradition of the aesthetics of space could necessarily only anticipate, still to fully realise.