The General Introduction addresses the unique role of London in English national consciousness and in English literature, given their tendency to represent London as somehow larger than life, as escaping the merely naturalistic and entering the realm of the symbolic or fantastic, with parallels in the great mythopoeic cities of Western culture—Rome, Jerusalem, Athens, Babylon, Troy. It looks at the idea of the City in Classical and Christian culture, as well as London’s development, in the nineteenth-century, into that unprecedented phenomenon, a megalopolis (the Great Wen) that had begun not just to astonish visitors with its size and complexity but to seem alien to its own inhabitants.