London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
Top of the morning to you London Walkers. Wherever you are.
It’s Monday, December 22nd, 2025.
And here it comes – your daily London fix.
And once again, I’m playing at home. This one’s yet another English Lit number.
Let’s get back. It’s this day, December 22nd, 1880.
A winter date that feels right for endings.
Cold in the bones.
Short light.
Long shadows.
Appropriate accompaniment for a passing.
On that day, December 22nd, 1880, at the age of 61, the great novelist George Eliot crosses over. And, yes, here in London. In Chelsea. George Eliot died in London. In Chelsea. We look at the house on our Chelsea Walk.
It was, in its way, a very George Eliot death.
Not dramatic.
Not operatic.
No fainting couches or grand last speeches.
Just life, bumping into mortality at a bad angle.
She had only just returned from the Continent.
A holiday, a change of air,
a little rest after a lifetime of thinking harder than almost anyone around her.
Back in London she went out to a concert.
Music, society, the civilised pleasures of the city.
And there she caught a cold.
A cold.
Nothing much.
The sort of thing you brush off.
The sort of thing you tell yourself you will sleep away.
Except this was the nineteenth century. No antibiotics.
No miracle recoveries.
A chill could turn treacherous.
The cold deepened, complications set in, and by December 22 she was gone.
London went on.
Cabs rattled. Bells rang.
The Thames slid past,
grey and imperturbable. But English literature had lost one of its quiet giants.
George Eliot, of course, was not George Eliot at all.
She was Marian Evans,
later Marian Lewes,
a woman who understood from the start that talent was not enough.
A woman needed camouflage.
So she chose a man’s name,
and not just any man’s name. George, solid and English.
Eliot, spare and respectable.
A name that could walk into a publisher’s office without raising eyebrows.
And once inside,
what she did was extraordinary.
She wrote novels that insisted on moral seriousness.
She made ordinary lives matter. Provincial towns,
awkward people,
slow disappointments,
tiny victories.
She took the everyday and said: look again. This counts.
Adam Bede.
The Mill on the Floss.
Silas Marner.
And then Middlemarch, that vast, breathing thing,
a novel so intelligent it can make you feel slightly dim in its presence. Yet so humane it never sneers at you for it.
She was doing something new.
She was writing fiction that thought.
Fiction that asked how we ought to live,
and what we owe one another,
and how often we fail without meaning to.
Her characters do not just act.
They reflect.
They hesitate.
They make mistakes for reasons that make painful sense.
And the irony is that the woman who anatomised society so brilliantly
was never fully allowed into it.
She lived for years with George Henry Lewes,
devoted,
intellectually matched,
emotionally sustaining.
But he was married,
though separated,
and Victorian England drew a hard line.
Eliot paid the price.
Doors closed.
Invitations dried up.
Respectability withdrew its hand.
She answered by writing better books.
By the time of her death,
she was famous, admired, translated, discussed.
Queen Victoria read her.
So did working men and women. She had become, despite everything,
a national figure.
Yet even in death the rules bit back.
She could not be buried in Westminster Abbey.
Too irregular.
Too morally complicated.
The Victorians could stretch only so far.
Instead she was laid to rest in Highgate Cemetery,
in the section reserved for dissenters and outsiders.
It is, in its own way, fitting. Highgate is magnificent.
Leafy, brooding, theatrical.
A place where reputations linger and arguments seem unfinished.
If you stand there today,
you feel her presence.
Not in a spooky sense.
In an intellectual one.
She’s still asking questions.
Still watching human beings tie themselves in knots.
And December 22 is a good day to think about her.
Think of that London concert.
The lamps. The muffled cough.
The moment when something small tips into something fatal.
It reminds us how narrow the margins were,
how quickly life could turn.
It also reminds us how much she packed into the years she had.
She was a translator of
German philosophy,
an editor, an essayist,
a novelist who reshaped the form. She insisted that sympathy was not sentimentality
but moral labour.
She believed that
understanding another person was one of the hardest things we ever attempt.
There’s a line from Middlemarch that people quote endlessly,
for good reason.
About how the growing good
of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts,
and that things are not so ill with you and me as
they might have been,
because of people who lived faithfully a hidden life.
That sentence has outlived empires.
So on this anniversary of her death, imagine London in 1880.
Imagine the cold.
Imagine the quiet closing of a door. And then remember what did not close.
The books remain.
The minds she changed remain.
The permission she gave other writers,
especially women,
to take intelligence seriously, remains.
George Eliot caught a cold at a concert and died at 61.
English literature caught fire and has never quite put it out.
You’ve been listening to This… is London, the London Walks podcast. Emanating from www.walks.com.
Home of London Walks, London’s signature walking tour company.
London’s local, time-honoured, fiercely independent, family-owned, just-the-right-size walking tour company.
And as long as we’re at it, London’s multi-award-winning walking tour company. Indeed, London’s only award-winning walking tour company.
And here’s the secret: London Walks is essentially run as a guides’ cooperative.
That’s the key to everything.
It’s the reason we’re able to attract and keep the best guides in London. You can get schlubbers to do this for £25 a walk. But you cannot get world-class guides – let alone accomplished professionals.
It’s not rocket science: you get what you pay for.
And just as surely, you also get what you don’t pay for.
Back in 1968 when we got started we quickly came to a fork in the road. We had to answer a searching question: Do we want to make the most money? Or do we want to be the best walking tour company in the world?
You want to make the most money you go the schlubbers route. You want to be the best walking tour company in the world you do whatever you have to do to attract and keep the best guides in London – you want them guiding for you, not for somebody else.
Bears repeating: the way we’re structured – a guides’ cooperative – is the key to the whole thing.
It’s the reason for all those awards, it’s the reason people who know go with London Walks, it’s the reason we’ve got a big following, a lively, loyal, discerning following – quality attracts quality.
It’s the reason we’re able – uniquely – to front our walks with accomplished, in many cases distinguished professionals:
By way of example, Stewart Purvis, the former Editor (and subsequently CEO) of Independent Television News.
And Lisa Honan, who had a distinguished career as a diplomat (Lisa was the Governor of St Helena, the island where Napoleon breathed his last and, some say, had his penis amputated – Napoleon didn’t feel a thing – if thing’s the mot juste – he was dead.)
Stewart and Lisa – both of them CBEs – are just a couple of our headline acts.
Or take our Jack the Ripper Walk. It’s the creation of the world’s leading expert on Jack the Ripper, Donald Rumbelow, the author of the definitive book on the subject. Britain’s most distinguished crime historian, Donald is, in the words of The Jack the Ripper A to Z, “internationally recognised as the leading authority on Jack the Ripper.” Donald’s emeritus now but he’s still the guiding light on our Ripper Walk. He curates the walk. He trains up and mentors our Ripper Walk guides. Fields any and all questions they throw at him.
The London Walks Aristocracy of Talent – its All-Star Team of Guides – includes a former London Mayor. It includes the former Chief Music Critic for the Evening Standard. It includes the Chair of the Association of Professional Tour Guides. And the former chair of the Guild of Guides.
It includes barristers, doctors, geologists, museum curators, a former London Museum archaeologist, historians, university professors (one of them a distinguished Cambridge University paleontologist); it includes a criminal defence lawyer, Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre actors, a bevy of MVPs, Oscar winners (people who’ve won the big one, the Guide of the Year Award)… well, you get the idea.
As that travel writer famously put it, “if this were a golf tournament, every name on the Leader Board would be a London Walks guide.”
And as we put it: London Walks Guides make the new familiar and the familiar new.
And on that agreeable note… come then, let us go forward together on some great London Walks.
And that’s by way of saying, Good walking and Good Londoning one and all. See ya next time.