A collection of descriptions and references to sounds drawn mainly from primary sources such as autobiographies, diaries and statutes, as well as novels written around the times they depict.
| Sub-category | 1st to 10th |
11th to 15th |
16th to 17th |
18th | Early 19th |
Late 19th |
Early 20th |
Late 20th |
| General sounds of street and town | 7 | 1 | 3 | 12 | 12 | 6 | ||
| Open-air markets | 1 | 2 | 2 | |||||
| Road traffic | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||
| Communal living and confinement | 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | ||||
| River traffic and related sounds | 5 | 2 | 3 | |||||
| Plague, war and disaster | 1 | 6 | 2 | 1 | 4 | |||
| Sound qualities of buildings | 1 | |||||||
| Sounds of crowds | 1 | 1 |
Period referred to: 1857
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: Little Dorrit
Type of publication: Novel
Author: Charles Dickens
Year of publication: 1857
Page/volume number: Chapter 14
Little Dorrit travels across London at night
They had shrunk past homeless people, lying coiled up in nooks. They had run from drunkards. They had started from slinking men, whistling and signing to one another at bye corners, or running away at full speed. Though everywhere the leader and the guide, Little Dorrit, happy for once in her youthful appearance, feigned to cling to and rely upon Maggy. And more than once some voice, from among a knot of brawling or prowling figures in their path, had called out to the rest to 'let the woman and the child go by!'
So, the woman and the child had gone by, and gone on, and five had sounded from the steeples.
Period referred to: 1820s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: Lavengro
Type of publication: Novel/memoir
Author: George Borrow
Year of publication: 1851
Page/volume number: Chapter XXIX
Early nineteenth century street sounds in George Borrow’s Lavengro
And there I continued in thought before the fire, until my eyes closed, and I fell asleep; which was not to be wondered at, after the fatigue and cold which I had lately undergone on the coach-top; and, in my sleep, I imagined myself still there, amidst darkness and rain, hurrying now over wild heaths, and now along roads overhung with thick and umbrageous trees, and sometimes methought I heard the horn of the guard, and sometimes the voice of the coachman, now chiding, now encouraging his horses, as they toiled through the deep and miry ways. At length a tremendous crack of a whip saluted the tympanum of my ear, and I started up broad awake, nearly oversetting the chair on which I reclined—and, lo! I was in the dingy room before the fire, which was by this time half extinguished. In my dream I had confounded the noise of the street with those of my night-journey; the crack which had aroused me I soon found proceeded from the whip of a carter, who, with many oaths, was flogging his team below the window.
Period referred to: 1880s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: The Secret Agent
Type of publication: Novel
Author: Joseph Conrad
Year of publication: 1907
Page/volume number: Chapter 4
Joseph Conrad depicts an Islington street in the 1880s
However, he ventured another question. “Did you walk down here?”
“No; omnibus,” the little man answered readily enough. He lived far away in Islington, in a small house down a shabby street, littered with straw and dirty paper, where out of school hours a troop of assorted children ran and squabbled with a shrill, joyless, rowdy clamour.
Period referred to: 1880s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: The Secret Agent
Type of publication: Novel
Author: Joseph Conrad
Year of publication: 1907
Page/volume number: Chapter 2
A walk through Belgravia in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent
Before reaching Knightsbridge, Mr Verloc took a turn to the left out of the busy main thoroughfare, uproarious with the traffic of swaying omnibuses and trotting vans, in the almost silent, swift flow of hansoms [. . .] And Mr Verloc, steady like a rock – a soft kind of rock – marched now along a street which could with every propriety be described as private. In its breadth, emptiness, and extent it had the majesty of inorganic nature, of matter that never dies. The only reminder of mortality was a doctor’s brougham arrested in august solitude close to the curbstone. The polished knockers of the doors gleamed as far as the eye could reach, the clean windows shone with a dark opaque lustre. And all was still. But a milk cart rattled noisily across the distant perspective; a butcher boy, driving with the noble recklessness of a charioteer at Olympic Games, dashed round the corner sitting high above a pair of red wheels.
Period referred to: 1880s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: The Nether World
Type of publication: Novel
Author: George Gissing
Year of publication: 1889
Page/volume number: Chapter XXX
The clamour of life in the Farringdon Road Buildings
What terrible barracks, those Farringdon Road Buildings! . . . The yells of children at play in the courtyard tortured her nerves; the regular sounds on the staircase, day after day repeated at the same hours, incidents of the life of poverty, irritated her sick brain and filled her with despair to think that as long as she lived she could never hope to rise again above this world to which she was born.
Period referred to: 1880s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: The Nether World
Type of publication: Novel
Author: George Gissing
Year of publication: 1889
Page/volume number: Chapter XXX
George Gissing describes the sounds of Waterloo Station
Waterloo Station is a convenient rendezvous; its irregular form provides many corners of retirement, out-of-the-way recesses where talk can be carried on in something like privacy. To one of these secluded spots Scawthorne drew aside with the veiled woman who met him at the entrance from Waterloo Road. So closely was her face shrouded, that he had at first a difficulty in catching the words she addressed to him. The noise of an engine getting up steam, the rattle of cabs and porters' barrows, the tread and voices of a multitude of people made fitting accompaniment to a dialogue which in every word presupposed the corruptions and miseries of a centre of modern life.
Period referred to: 1880s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: The Nether World
Type of publication: Novel
Author: George Gissing
Year of publication: 1889
Page/volume number: Chapter XI
The quiet of a summer morning in London
Occasionally her eyes wandered, and once they rested upon her grandfather's face for several minutes. But for the cry of a milkman or a paper-boy in the street, no sound broke the quietness of the summer morning. The blessed sunshine, so rarely shed from a London sky—sunshine, the source of all solace to mind and body—reigned gloriously in heaven and on earth.
Period referred to: Late 29th century
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Type of publication: Novel
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
Year of publication: 1886
Page/volume number: Search for Mr Hyde
The quietness of night-time London in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
It was a fine dry night; frost in the air; the streets as clean as a ballroom floor; the lamps, unshaken, by any wind, drawing a regular pattern of light and shadow. By ten o'clock, when the shops were closed, the by-street was very solitary and, in spite of the low growl of London from all round, very silent. Small sounds carried far; domestic sounds out of the houses were clearly audible on either side of the roadway; and the rumour of the approach of any passenger preceded him by a long time. Mr. Utterson had been some minutes at his post, when he was aware of an odd, light footstep drawing near. In the course of his nightly patrols, he had long grown accustomed to the quaint effect with which the footfalls of a single person, while he is still a great way off, suddenly spring out distinct from the vast hum and clatter of the city.
Period referred to: 1850s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: Bleak House
Type of publication: Novel
Author: Charles Dickens
Year of publication: 1853
Page/volume number: Chapter XLVIII
A moonlit London night in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House
A very quiet night. When the moon shines very brilliantly, a solitude and stillness seem to proceed from her that influence even crowded places full of life [. . .] even on this stranger's wilderness of London there is some rest. Its steeples and towers and its one great dome grow more ethereal; its smoky house-tops lose their grossness in the pale effulgence; the noises that arise from the streets are fewer and are softened, and the footsteps on the pavements pass more tranquilly away. In these fields of Mr. Tulkinghorn's inhabiting, where the shepherds play on Chancery pipes that have no stop, and keep their sheep in the fold by hook and by crook until they have shorn them exceeding close, every noise is merged, this moonlight night, into a distant ringing hum, as if the city were a vast glass, vibrating.
What's that? Who fired a gun or pistol? Where was it?
The few foot-passengers start, stop, and stare about them. Some windows and doors are opened, and people come out to look. It was a loud report and echoed and rattled heavily. It shook one house, or so a man says who was passing. It has aroused all the dogs in the neighbourhood, who bark vehemently. Terrified cats scamper across the road. While the dogs are yet barking and howling—there is one dog howling like a demon—the church-clocks, as if they were startled too, begin to strike. The hum from the streets, likewise, seems to swell into a shout. But it is soon over. Before the last clock begins to strike ten, there is a lull. When it has ceased, the fine night, the bright large moon, and multitudes of stars, are left at peace again.
Period referred to: 1850s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: Bleak House
Type of publication: Novel
Author: Charles Dickens
Year of publication: 1853
Page/volume number: Chapter X
Holborn traffic and a cock crowing in Bleak House
Peffer is never seen in Cook's Court now. He is not expected there, for he has been recumbent this quarter of a century in the churchyard of St. Andrews, Holborn, with the waggons and hackney-coaches roaring past him all the day and half the night like one great dragon. If he ever steal forth when the dragon is at rest to air himself again in Cook's Court until admonished to return by the crowing of the sanguine cock in the cellar at the little dairy in Cursitor Street, whose ideas of daylight it would be curious to ascertain [. . .]
Period referred to: 1870s
Sound category: Ambient > General sounds of street and town
Title of work: Travels in the Air
Type of publication: Travel/Autobiography
Author: James Glaisher
Year of publication: 1871
Page/volume number: Not known
London heard from a balloon
I have seen London by night. I have crossed it during the day at the height of four miles. I have often admired the splendour of sky scenery, but never have I seen anything which surpassed this spectacle. The roar of the town heard at this elevation [7,000 feet] was a deep, rich, continuous sound—the voice of labour. At four miles above London, all was hushed; no sound reached our ears.
Period referred to: 1850s
Sound category: Ambient > Voices in the street
Title of work: The Three Clerks
Type of publication: Novel
Author: Anthony Trollope
Year of publication: 1858
Page/volume number: Unknown
‘Shrill voices shrieked at him as he passed’
He went along the Strand, over the crossing under the statue of Charles on horseback, and up Pall Mall East till he came to the opening into the park under the Duke of York's column. The London night world was alive as he made his way. From the Opera Colonnade shrill voices shrieked at him as he passed, and drunken men coming down from the night supper-houses in the Haymarket saluted him with affectionate cordiality. The hoarse waterman from the cabstand, whose voice had perished in the night air, croaked out at him the offer of a vehicle [. . .]