Real Life in London, Volumes I. and II.: Or, the Rambles and Adventures of Bob Tallyho, Esq., and His Cousin, the Hon. Tom Dashall, Through the Metropolis; Exhibiting a Living Picture of Fashionable Characters, Manners, and Amusements in High and Low Life (1821)
Real Life in London, Volumes I. and II.: Or, the Rambles and Adventures of Bob Tallyho, Esq., and His Cousin, the Hon. Tom Dashall, Through the Metropolis; Exhibiting a Living Picture of Fashionable Characters, Manners, and Amusements in High and Low Life (1821)
Before Instagram, before modern-day socialites, there were Bob Tallyho and Tom Dashall, two cousins whose wanderings through the wilds of 1820s London created a genre. Badcock (writing as John Badcock) crafted a satirical panorama that moves from fox hunts in the countryside to the gambling hells and drawing rooms of the metropolis, skewering everyone from pretentious aristocrats to swindlers masquerading as gentlemen. The novel operates as a series of comic set pieces: Tom returns from hunting, extolling London's pleasures to his country cousin, who wavers between the honest simplicities of rural life and the glittering corruptions of the city. What follows is a guided tour through shops, theaters, clubs, and taverns, each encounter revealing another layer of London's absurd social theater. The book captures a moment when London was transforming into the modern capital we recognize, full of new money, new pleasures, and old frauds wearing fresh disguises. It remains a remarkable time capsule of early nineteenth-century urban life, written with the knowing wit of someone who clearly delighted in exposing the pretensions of the fashionable world.
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“The most unfair part of it, Wallace thinks, is that when you tell white people that something is racist, they hold it up to the light and try to discern if you are telling the truth as if they can tell by the grain if something is racist or not, and they always trust their own judgment. It's unfair because white people have a vested interest in undermining racism, it's amount, it's intensity, it's shape, its effects. They are the fox in the henhouse.””
— John, active Badcock
“Memory sifts. Memory lifts. Memory makes due with what it is given. Memory is not about facts. Memory is an inconsistent measurement of the pain in one’s life.””
— John, active Badcock
“This could be their life together, each moment, shared, passed back and forth between each other to alleviate the pressure, the awful pressure of having to hold time for oneself. This is perhaps why people get together in the first place. The sharing of time. The sharing of the responsibility of anchoring oneself in the world. Life is less terrible when you can just rest for a moment, put everything down and wait without having to worry about being washed away. People take each others hands and they hold on as tight as they can, they hold on to each other and to themselves because they know that the other person will not.””
— John, active Badcock
“You have to let it go if you're going to keep moving, if you're going to survive, because the past doesn't need a future. It has no use for what comes next. The past is greedy, always swallowing you up, always taking. If you don't hold it back, if you don't dam it up, it will spread and take and drown.The past is not a receding horizon. Rather, it advances one moment at a time, marching steadily forward until it has claimed everything and we become again who we were; we become ghosts when the past catches us. I can't live as long as my past does. It's one or the other.””
— John, active Badcock
“It feels impossible in the way only possible tasks can seem, when you know that despite the scale of what you must do, it’s not really beyond the realm of possibility to do it, and so it feels impossible because you know you must.””
— John, active Badcock
“There will always be good white people who love him and want the best for him but who are more afraid of other white people than of letting him down. It is easier for them to let it happen and to triage the wound later than to introduce an element of the unknown into the situation. No matter how good they are, no matter how loving, they will always be complicit, a danger, a wound waiting to happen. There is no amount of loving that will ever bring Miller closer to him in this respect. There is no amount of desire. There will always remain a small space between them, a space where people like Roman will take root and say ugly, hateful things to him. It’s the place in every white person’s heart where their racism lives and flourishes, not some vast open plain but a small crack, which is all it takes. Wallace presses his tongue flat. “Good white people,” he says.””
— John, active Badcock
“This is why Wallace never tells anyone anything. This is why he keeps the truth to himself, because other people don’t know what to do with your shit, with the reality of other people’s feelings. They don’t know what to do when they’ve heard something that does not align with their own perception of things.””
— John, active Badcock
“Affection always feels this way for him, like an undue burden, like putting weight and expectation onto someone else. As if affection were a kind of cruelty too.””
— John, active Badcock
“Being so aware of their bodies makes him aware of his own body, and he becomes aware of the way his body is both a thing on the earth and a vehicle for his entire life's history. His body is both a tangible self and his depression, his anxiety, his wellness, his illness, his disordered eating, the fear of blood pouring out of him. It is both itself and not itself, image and afterimage. He feels unhappy when he looks at someone beautiful or desirable because he feels the gulf between himself and the other, their body and his body. An accounting of his body's failures slides down the back of his eyes, and he sees how far from grace he's been made and planted.””
— John, active Badcock
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<a href="https://lex-books.com/book/real-life-in-london-volumes-i-and-ii-or-the-rambles-and-adventures-of-bob-tallyh-f3335bc2-c842-4604-aea4-5faa6040f7bd"><img src="https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg" alt="Read Real Life in London, Volumes I. and II.: Or, the Rambles and Adventures of Bob Tallyho, Esq., and His Cousin, the Hon. Tom Dashall, Through the Metropolis; Exhibiting a Living Picture of Fashionable Characters, Manners, and Amusements in High and Low Life (1821) by John, active Badcock free on Lex" width="160" height="40"></a>[](https://lex-books.com/book/real-life-in-london-volumes-i-and-ii-or-the-rambles-and-adventures-of-bob-tallyh-f3335bc2-c842-4604-aea4-5faa6040f7bd)[url=https://lex-books.com/book/real-life-in-london-volumes-i-and-ii-or-the-rambles-and-adventures-of-bob-tallyh-f3335bc2-c842-4604-aea4-5faa6040f7bd][img]https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg[/img][/url]Read Real Life in London, Volumes I. and II.: Or, the Rambles and Adventures of Bob Tallyho, Esq., and His Cousin, the Hon. Tom Dashall, Through the Metropolis; Exhibiting a Living Picture of Fashionable Characters, Manners, and Amusements in High and Low Life (1821) by John, active Badcock free on Lex: https://lex-books.com/book/real-life-in-london-volumes-i-and-ii-or-the-rambles-and-adventures-of-bob-tallyh-f3335bc2-c842-4604-aea4-5faa6040f7bdCite this book
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John, active Badcock. Real Life in London, Volumes I. and II.: Or, the Rambles and Adventures of Bob Tallyho, Esq., and His Cousin, the Hon. Tom Dashall, Through the Metropolis; Exhibiting a Living Picture of Fashionable Characters, Manners, and Amusements in High and Low Life (1821). Lex, lex-books.com/book/real-life-in-london-volumes-i-and-ii-or-the-rambles-and-adventures-of-bob-tallyh-f3335bc2-c842-4604-aea4-5faa6040f7bd.John, A. B. (n.d.). Real Life in London, Volumes I. and II.: Or, the Rambles and Adventures of Bob Tallyho, Esq., and His Cousin, the Hon. Tom Dashall, Through the Metropolis; Exhibiting a Living Picture of Fashionable Characters, Manners, and Amusements in High and Low Life (1821). Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/real-life-in-london-volumes-i-and-ii-or-the-rambles-and-adventures-of-bob-tallyh-f3335bc2-c842-4604-aea4-5faa6040f7bdJohn, active Badcock. Real Life in London, Volumes I. and II.: Or, the Rambles and Adventures of Bob Tallyho, Esq., and His Cousin, the Hon. Tom Dashall, Through the Metropolis; Exhibiting a Living Picture of Fashionable Characters, Manners, and Amusements in High and Low Life (1821). Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/real-life-in-london-volumes-i-and-ii-or-the-rambles-and-adventures-of-bob-tallyh-f3335bc2-c842-4604-aea4-5faa6040f7bd.
