![]() Together they travelled on the river, visited Hampstead Heath and rode the newly opened underground railway. Rimbaud felt that by comparison Paris looked like nothing more than a ‘pretty provincial town’ and loved the ‘interminable docks’, while Verlaine was captivated by the ‘incessant railways on splendid cast iron bridges’ and the ‘brutal, loud-mouthed people in the streets’. Neither were particularly politically motivated, but the anti-establishment environment would undoubtedly have appealed to the outlaw couple.ĭrawing by Verlaine of Rimbaud in Canon Street They became part of Soho’s expat anarchist dissident set, reportedly attending meetings helmed by Karl Marx in Old Compton Street, drinking heavily, taking hash and opium (Rimbaud advocated ‘derangement of all the senses’) and keeping warm at the British Museum, where Rimbaud’s name – but not Verlaine’s – was later added to the Reading Room roll of honour. At first they settled in Howland Street in Fitzrovia. Verlaine’s brother-in-law described Rimbaud as ‘a vile, vicious, disgusting little schoolboy’, but Verlaine found him an ‘exquisite creature’ probably for much the same reasons. Rimbaud was 17, Verlaine ten years older, married with a child. They had arrived in London in September 1872 after fleeing scandal in Paris. ![]() The pair enjoyed a tempestuous relationship in a variety of London addresses, which culminated in the aforementioned fish-slapping incident in Camden. Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine were the Gallic rhymers in question. Getting a face full of wet fish is usually associated with Monty Python at Teddington Lock rather than French poets in North London, but such is the warping power of Camden Town. Here you would fail to detect the least trace of any monument to superstition.Īrthur Rimbaud on London in Illuminations I am an ephemeral and a not too discontented citizen of a metropolis considered modern because all known taste has been avoided in the furnishings and the exterior of the houses as well as in the plan of the city.
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