… Claude Monet’s painting The Thames at Westminster, William Wordsworth’s poem ‘Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802’, and Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist, “The expedition” chapter 21?

For this assignment, I found that the set of documents represented the perspectives of three different artists of the city of London during the 19^th century. Although Monet’s painting and Wordsworth’s poem seem to be like snapshots of the Westminster Bridge taken at dawn by tourists or foreigners, Dickens, as a true Londoner, takes his reader on a long walk throughout London streets. Through these works, I examined the evolution of the city of London as an industrial metropolis during the 19^th century, as well as the interaction between the natural world and the city. I also compared the degrees of imagination and reality in the two literary representations of urban scenes and analysed how the literary movements—Romanticism and Realism—to which their authors belonged, might have influenced them in their interpretations of London’s streets. Finally, despite their different genres and styles, I identified a few common features in Wordsworth’s poem and Dickens’ prose. As a conclusion, I gave my personal response to these three works of art.

Illustration on top of this page: Claude Monet, The Thames below Westminster, about 1871. Copyright: The National Gallery, London. https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/claude-monet-the-thames-below-westminster