All is laid bare to her gaze, and in looking about her the writer cannot help but act as ‘a glutinous slab that takes impressions’ (p. 200) of London’s restless cavalcade of ever-changing colours—‘the glossy brilliance of the motor omnibuses; the carnal splendour of the butchers’ shops with their yellow flanks and purple steaks; the blue and red bunches of flowers burning so bravely through the plate glass of the florists’ windows’ (p. 179).

As in Woolf’s novels, aesthetics and politics go hand in hand in these essays. The ephemeral and the momentary catch Woolf’s eye in the capital, but so do the age-old problems of poverty and misfortune. She refers to her ‘comfortable capitalistic head’ in ‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’ and calls herself ‘a benevolent spectator … irretrievably cut off’ (p. 148) from the great mass of her less fortunate fellow citizens. However, although for the time being ‘the barrier is impassable’ between the privileged elite and those below them on the social and economic scales, Woolf is inspired by the thought that the ardour of working women, which she witnessed herself in 1913 at a Women’s Co-operative Guild congress and has subsequently heard echoed in their writings, may be ‘about to break through and melt us together so that life will be richer and books more complex and society will pool its possessions instead of segregating them’ (p. 153). And it is for its ability to erase divisions and provide a sense of community, albeit temporarily, that Woolf, above all, relishes ‘the sociability of the streets’ (p. 177) of London. ‘As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six,’ she says soon after the beginning of ‘Street Haunting’, ‘we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room’ (p. 177). London’s streets are great obliterators of difference, great conduits of diversity, where the poor and the outcast, ‘the humped, the twisted, the deformed’ (p. 180) live cheek by jowl with their better-off fellow citizens. And it is her contact with this ‘maimed company of the halt and the blind’ (p. 181) that occasions some of Woolf’s most lyrical and powerful, if conflicted, writing:

They do not grudge us, we are musing, our prosperity; when, suddenly, turning the corner, we come upon a bearded Jew, wild, hunger-bitten, glaring out of his misery; or pass the humped body of an old woman flung abandoned on the step of a public building with a cloak over her like the hasty covering thrown over a dead horse or donkey. At such sights the nerves of the spine seem to stand erect; a sudden fire is brandished in our eyes; a question is asked which is never answered. Often enough these derelicts choose to lie not a stone’s throw from theatres, within hearing of barrel organs, almost, as night draws on, within touch of the sequined cloaks and bright legs of diners and dancers. They lie close to those shop windows where commerce offers to a world of old women laid on doorsteps, of blind men, of hobbling dwarfs, sofas which are supported by the gilt necks of proud swans; tables inlaid with baskets of many coloured fruit; sideboards paved with green marble the better to support the weight of boars’ heads, gilt baskets, candelabra; and carpets so softened with age that their carnations have almost vanished in a pale green sea. (p. 181)

What Woolf calls further on in this essay ‘the splendours and miseries of the streets’ (p. 183) always caught her eye, but her language in this extract shows just how profoundly her conscience was also engaged: her writing is both class-bound yet deeply humanitarian, detached yet passionately connected: ‘And what greater delight and wonder can there be’, she asks towards the end of the essay, ‘than to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into those footpaths that lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of the forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men? (p. 187). The ‘fascination of contemporary life’ (p. 173) had no more eager literary chronicler between the wars, and in essays such as ‘The Cinema’, ‘The Sun and the Fish’, her account of an excursion to the Yorkshire moors to witness the solar eclipse of 1927, ‘Flying over London’, and ‘Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car’, Woolf responded with equal gusto to what she calls in ‘Street Haunting’ ‘the velocity and abundance of life’ (p. 185).

In Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Years, and other novels, Woolf exposes the coercive force of patriarchy, militarism, and imperialism in British society. Yet at the end of ‘Thunder at Wembley’ (1924), Woolf’s account of the vast and spectacular British Empire Exhibition of 1924–5, where a myriad imperial fruits were laid out for Londoners to admire and consume, a fierce squall, which seems to have its source in the furthest reaches of the Empire, is taken as a sign that the Colonies may be on the verge of reasserting themselves and breaking free:

The sky is livid, lurid, sulphurine. It is in violent commotion. It is whirling water-spouts of cloud into the air; of dust in the Exhibition. Dust swirls down the avenues, hisses and hurries like erected cobras round the corners.