In this perfect companion to London: The Biography,
Peter Ackroyd once again delves into the hidden byways of history,
describing the river''s endless allure in a journey overflowing with
characters, incidents, and wry observations. Thames: The
Biography meanders gloriously, rather like the river itself. In
short, lively chapters Ackroyd writes about connections between the
Thames and such historical figures as Julius Caesar and Henry VIII,
and offers memorable portraits of the ordinary men and women who
depend upon the river for their livelihoods. The Thames as a source
of artistic inspiration comes brilliantly to life as Ackroyd
invokes Chaucer, Shakespeare, Turner, Shelley, and other writers,
poets, and painters who have been enchanted by its many moods and
colors.
關於作者：
PETER ACKROYD is the author of London: The Biography,
Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, and
Shakespeare: The Biography; acclaimed biographies of T.S.
Eliot, Dickens, Blake, and Sir Thomas More; thirteen novels; and
the series Ackroyd’s Brief Lives. He has won the Whitbread Book
Award for Biography, the Royal Society of Literature’s William
Heinemann Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the
Guardian Fiction Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the
South Bank Award for Literature. He lives in London.
目錄：
List of Illustrations
List of Maps
The minnon of Histony
Tathen Thames
Pssuing Tonnt
Beginnings
The Sacied Riven
Elemental and Equal
The Wonking Riven
The Riven of Tnade
The natunal Riven
The Healing Spning
The Riven of Ant
Shadows and Depths
The Riven of Death
The Riven''s End
An Alternative Topography,From Source to Sea
Bibliography
Index
Author''s Acknowledgements
Illustration Cerdits
內容試閱：
CHAPTER I
The River as Fact
It has a length of 215 miles, and is navigable for 191 miles. It
is the longest river in England but not in Britain, where the
Severn is longer by approximately 5 miles. Nevertheless it must be
the shortest river in the world to acquire such a famous history.
The Amazon and the Mississippi cover almost 4,000 miles, and the
Yangtze almost 3,500 miles; but none of them has arrested the
attention of the world in the manner of the Thames.
It runs along the borders of nine English counties, thus
reaffirming its identity as a boundary and as a defence. It divides
Wiltshire from Gloucestershire, and Oxfordshire from Berkshire; as
it pursues its way it divides Surrey from Middlesex or Greater
London as it is inelegantly known and Kent from Essex. It is also
a border of Buckinghamshire. It guarded these once tribal lands in
the distant past, and will preserve them into the imaginable
future.
There are 134 bridges along the length of the Thames, and
forty-four locks above Teddington. There are approximately twenty
major tributaries still flowing into the main river, while others
such as the Fleet have now disappeared under the ground. Its
"basin," the area from which it derives its water from rain and
other natural forces, covers an area of some 5,264 square miles.
And then there are the springs, many of them in the woods or close
to the streams beside the Thames. There is one in the wood below
Sinodun Hills in Oxfordshire, for example, which has been described
as an "everlasting spring" always fresh and always renewed.
The average flow of the river at Teddington, chosen because it
marks the place where the tidal and non-tidal waters touch, has
been calculated at 1,145 millions of gallons 5,205 millions of
litres each day or approximately 2,000 cubic feet 56.6 cubic
metres per second. The current moves at a velocity between 1?2 and
23?4 miles per hour. The main thrust of the river flow is known to
hydrologists as the "thalweg"; it does not move in a straight and
forward line but, mingling with the inner flow and the variegated
flow of the surface and bottom waters, takes the form of a spiral
or helix. More than 95 per cent of the river''s energy is lost in
turbulence and friction.
The direction of the flow of the Thames is therefore quixotic. It
might be assumed that it would move eastwards, but it defies any
simple prediction. It flows north-west above Henley and at
Teddington, west above Abingdon, south from Cookham and north above
Marlow and Kingston. This has to do with the variegated curves of
the river. It does not meander like the Euphrates, where according
to Herodotus the voyager came upon the same village three times on
three separate days, but it is circuitous. It specialises in loops.
It will take the riparian traveller two or three times as long to
cover the same distance as a companion on the high road. So the
Thames teaches you to take time, and to view the world from a
different vantage.
The average "fall" or decline of the river from its beginning to
its end is approximately 17 to 21 inches 432 to 533 mm per mile.
It follows gravity, and seeks out perpetually the simplest way to
the sea. It falls some 600 feet 183 m from source to sea, with a
relatively precipitous decline of 300 feet 91.5 m in the first 9
miles; it falls 100 30.4 m more in the next 11 miles, with a
lower average for the rest of its course. Yet averages may not be
so important. They mask the changeability and idiosyncrasy of the
Thames. The mean width of the river is given as 1,000 feet 305 m,
and a mean depth of 30 feet 9 m; but the width varies from 1 or 2
feet 0.3 to 0.6 m at Trewsbury to 51?2 miles at the Nore.
The tide, in the words of Tennyson, is that which "moving seems
asleep, too full for sound and foam." On its flood inward it can
promise benefit or danger; on its ebb seaward it suggests
separation or adventure. It is one general movement but it
comprises a thousand different streams and eddies; there are
opposing streams, and high water is not necessarily the same thing
as high tide. The water will sometimes begin to fall before the
tide is over. The average speed of the tide lies between 1 and 3
knots 1.15 and 3.45 miles per hour, but at times of very high
flow it can reach 7 knots 8 miles per hour. At London Bridge the
flood tide runs for almost six hours, while the ebb tide endures
for six hours and thirty minutes. The tides are much higher now
than at other times in the history of the Thames. There can now be
a difference of some 24 feet 7.3 m between high and low tides,
although the average rise in the area of London Bridge is between
15 and 22 feet 4.5 and 6.7 m. In the period of the Roman
occupation, it was a little over 3 feet 0.9 m. The high tide, in
other words, has risen greatly over a period of two thousand
years.
The reason is simple. The south-east of England is sinking slowly
into the water at the rate of approximately 12 inches 305 mm per
century. In 4000 BC the land beside the Thames was 46 feet 14 m
higher than it is now, and in 3000 BC it was some 31 feet 9.4 m
higher. When this is combined with the water issuing from the
dissolution of the polar ice-caps, the tides moving up the lower
reaches of the Thames are increasing at a rate of 2 feet 0.6 m
per century. That is why the recently erected Thames Barrier will
not provide protection enough, and another barrier is being
proposed.
The tide of course changes in relation to the alignment of earth,
moon and sun. Every two weeks the high "spring" tides reach their
maximum two days after a full moon, while the low "neap" tides
occur at the time of the half-moon. The highest tides occur at the
times of equinox; this is the period of maximum danger for those
who live and work by the river. The spring tides of late autumn and
early spring are also hazardous. It is no wonder that the earliest
people by the Thames venerated and propitiated the river.
The general riverscape of the Thames is varied without being in
any sense spectacular, the paraphernalia of life ancient and modern
clustering around its banks. It is in large part now a domesticated
river, having been tamed and controlled by many generations. It is
in that sense a piece of artifice, with some of its landscape
deliberately planned to blend with the course of the water. It
would be possible to write the history of the Thames as a history
of a work of art.
It is a work still in slow progress. The Thames has taken the
same course for ten thousand years, after it had been nudged
southward by the glaciation of the last ice age. The British and
Roman earthworks by the Sinodun Hills still border the river, as
they did two thousand years before. Given the destructive power of
the moving waters, this is a remarkable fact. Its level has varied
over the millennia--there is a sudden and unexpected rise at the
time of the Anglo-Saxon settlement, for example--and the discovery
of submerged forests testifies to incidents of overwhelming flood.
Its appearance has of course also altered, having only recently
taken the form of a relatively deep and narrow channel, but its
persistence and identity through time are an aspect of its
power.
Yet of course every stretch has its own character and atmosphere,
and every zone has its own history. Out of oppositions comes
energy, out of contrasts beauty. There is the overwhelming
difference of water within it, varying from the pure freshwater of
the source through the brackish zone of estuarial water to the
salty water in proximity to the sea. Given the eddies of the
current, in fact, there is rather more salt by the Essex shore than
by the Kentish shore. There are manifest differences between the
riverine landscapes of Lechlade and of Battersea, of Henley and of
Gravesend; the upriver calm is in marked contrast to the turbulence
of the long stretches known as River of London and then London
River. After New Bridge the river becomes wider and deeper, in
anticipation of its change.
The rural landscape itself changes from flat to wooded in rapid
succession, and there is a great alteration in the nature of the
river from the cultivated fields of Dorchester to the thick woods
of Cliveden. From Godstow the river becomes a place of recreation,
breezy and jaunty with the skiffs and the punts, the sports in Port
Meadow and the picnic parties on the banks by Binsey. But then by
some change of light it becomes dark green, surrounded by
vegetation like a jungle river; and then the traveller begins to
see the dwellings of Oxford, and the river changes again. Oxford is
a pivotal point. From there you can look upward and consider the
quiet source; or you can look downstream and contemplate the coming
immensity of London.
In the reaches before Lechlade the water makes its way through
isolated pastures; at Wapping and Rotherhithe the dwellings seem to
drop into it, as if overwhelmed by numbers. The elements of
rusticity and urbanity are nourished equally by the Thames. That is
why parts of the river induce calm and forgetfulness, and others
provoke anxiety and despair. It is the river of dreams, but it is
also the river of suicide. It has been called liquid history
because within itself it dissolves and carries all epochs and
generations. They ebb and flow like water.
CHAPTER 2
The River as Metaphor
The river runs through the language, and we speak of its
influence in every conceivable context. It is employed to
characterise life and death, time and destiny; it is used as a
metaphor for continuity and dissolution, for intimacy and
transitoriness, for art and history, for poetry itself. In The
Principles of Psychology 1890 William James first coined the
phrase "stream of consciousness" in which "every definite image of
the mind is steeped . . . in the free water that flows around it."
Thus "it flows" like the river itself. Yet the river is also a
token of the unconscious, with its suggestion of depth and
invisible life.
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