Though countless outstanding novelists either grew up in London or made it their home – from Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson to Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing and Angela Carter – the capital is astonishingly short of public memorials to them. And that dearth is only underlined by this week’s news of plans for a statue of George Orwell at the entrance to the BBC’s New Broadcasting House. As the accompanying inscription (“if liberty means anything, it means the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear”) highlights, Orwell the journalist and former BBC employee is being feted, not the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm.
Even if the Orwell sculpture is counted, it only takes the tally of statues of novelists across the city’s 32 boroughs to two, together with one of Virginia Woolf in Tavistock Square; though you can find the odd bust and a few depictions of fictional characters. Today’s exponents of the genre may find some consolation in the fact that playwrights do equally badly: just Maggi Hambling’s Oscar Wilde tribute and Leicester Square’s highly unsatisfactory monument to Shakespeare.
Those authors who are seen as fit to be set in stone alongside the royals and other distinguished public figures tend to be either non-fiction writers – philosophers, historians, religious, political or scientific thinkers – or poets. Spenser, Donne, Milton, Keats, Burns, Tagore and Betjeman have all been awarded statues (the latter now greets travellers at St Pancras station), reflecting an inherited sense of poetry as the loftiest of the verbal arts.
Most of Britain’s leading 19th-century novelists, it’s true, are commemorated in Westminster Abbey, but this is a far from ideal arrangement: they are grudgingly squeezed into Poets’ Corner, like second-class members of a gentlemen’s club; the memorials are usually modest floor stones or tablets; and the Abbey charges hefty entrance fees. Tellingly, too, a number of poets from across the 20th century have won places, but no novelists have been allowed in who were born after 1900, as if the door was long ago closed to such prose arrivistes.
Arguably, their gestural presence in Poets’ Corner has provided a pretext for their absence from London’s streets and squares, which otherwise seems inexplicable (except in the case of Dickens, whose will stipulated no memorial). Where, for example, are the statues celebrating Defoe and George Eliot, Mary Shelley and Arthur Conan Doyle? They are in the places they came from or went to, but not in London.
While other English cities appear equally indifferent to storytellers in their public art commissions, anyone travelling to Edinburgh for the festival will find a capital that, like Dublin or Paris, has a strikingly different approach to celebrating its nation’s literary giants. The alternative experience starts as soon as you emerge from Waverley station to find the 200ft-high Scott Monument towering above: a statue of a novelist (also honoured in the station’s name, the series title of his historical works) inside a gothic spire that dominates Edinburgh’s main street and gloriously dwarfs its other memorials, including those commemorating John Knox, the Duke of Wellington and Queen Victoria.
