River Thames
Literature

The Thames is mentioned in many works of literature including novels, diaries and poetry. It is the central theme in three in particular:

Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome, first published in 1889, is a humorous account of a boating holiday on the Thames between Kingston and Oxford. The book was intended initially to be a serious travel guide, with accounts of local history of places along the route, but the humorous elements eventually took over. The landscape and features of the Thames as described by Jerome are virtually unchanged, and the book's enduring popularity has meant that it has never been out of print since it was first published.

Charles Dickens ' Our Mutual Friend (written in the years 1864–65) describes the river in a grimmer light. It begins with a scavenger and his daughter pulling a dead man from the river near London Bridge, to salvage what the body might have in its pockets, and leads to its conclusion with the deaths of the villains drowned in Plashwater Lock upstream. The workings of the river and the influence of the tides are described with great accuracy. Dickens opens the novel with this sketch of the river, and the people who work on it:

In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark Bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening was closing in. The figures in this boat were those of a strong man with ragged grizzled hair and a sun-browned face, and a girl of nineteen or twenty. The girl rowed, pulling a pair of sculls very easily; the man with the rudder-lines slack in his hands, and his hands loose in his waisteband, kept an eager look-out.

Kenneth Grahame 's The Wind in the Willows, written in 1908, is set in the middle to upper reaches of the river. It starts as a tale of anthropomorphic characters "simply messing about in boats" but develops into a more complex story combining elements of mysticism with adventure and reflection on Edwardian society. It is generally considered one of the most beloved works of children's literature and the illustrations by E.H.Shepard and Arthur Rackham feature the Thames and its surroundings.

The river almost inevitably features in many books set in London. Most of Dickens' other novels include some aspect of the Thames. Oliver Twist finishes in the slums and rookeries along its south bank. The Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle often visit riverside parts as in The Sign of Four. In Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, the serenity of the contemporary Thames is contrasted with the savagery of the Congo River, and with the wilderness of the Thames as it would have appeared to a Roman soldier posted to Britannia two thousand years before. Conrad also gives a description of the approach to London from the Thames Estuary in his essays The Mirror of the Sea (1906). Upriver, Henry James ' Portrait of a Lady uses a large riverside mansion on the Thames as one of its key settings.

Literary non-fiction works include Samuel Pepys ' diary, in which he recorded many events relating to the Thames including the Fire of London. He was disturbed while writing it in June 1667 by the sound of gunfire as Dutch warships broke through the Royal Navy on the Thames.

In poetry, William Wordsworth 's sonnet On Westminster Bridge closes with the lines:

T. S. Eliot makes several references to the Thames in The Fire Sermon, Section III of The Waste Land.

The Sweet Thames line is taken from Edmund Spenser 's Prothalamion which presents a more idyllic image:

Also writing of the upper reaches is Matthew Arnold in The Scholar Gypsy:

Wendy Cope 's poem 'After the Lunch' is set on Waterloo Bridge, beginning:

Dylan Thomas mentions the Thames in his poem "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London". "London's Daughter", the subject of the poem, lays "Deep with the first dead...secret by the unmourning water of the riding Thames".

Science-fiction novels make liberal use of a futuristic Thames. The utopian News from Nowhere by William Morris is mainly the account of a journey through the Thames valley in a socialist future. The Thames features in H. G. Wells ' The War of the Worlds. The Thames also features prominently in Philip Pullman 's His Dark Materials trilogy, as a communications artery for the waterborne Gyptian people of Oxford and the Fens, and as a prominent setting for his novel La Belle Sauvage.

In The Deptford Mice trilogy by Robin Jarvis, the Thames appears several times. In one book, rat characters swim through it to Deptford. Winner of the Nestlé Children's Book Prize Gold Award I, Coriander, by Sally Gardner is a fantasy novel in which the heroine lives on the banks of the Thames. Mark Wallington describes a journey up the Thames in a camping skiff, in his 1989 book Boogie up the River.

Many of the principal characters of the Rivers of London urban fantasy series by Ben Aaronovitch are genii locorum (local gods) associated with River Thames and its tributaries. This includes Father Thames, the original god of the Thames but now (in the books) confined to non-tidal reaches above Teddington Lock and Mama Thames the goddess of the tidal Thames below Teddington.
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