Topic > London after the fire - 1801

Depending on how you view life will affect how you feel about the city you live in. People who live honest lives and see the glass as half full will be more confident about tragedies. not living an honest life and seeing the glass half empty will be more disparaging during tragedies. An optimist will also view tragedy as a time for reconstruction, while a pessimist will view the same tragedy as life as we know it. In this essay I will describe the vision of London from Dyden's Annus Mirabilis and Pepys's Diary, I will discuss what each passage has in common and what it differs regarding the depiction of the Great Fire of 1666, I will show each author's attitude towards of the city, the nation and its people and ultimately show which writer is most optimistic about the city's future. Already from the first line of the Annus Mirabilis it can be seen that the author saw the city before the fire as a great city that has turned its back on the worst "Yet London, empress of the northern climate, by a high destiny you have greatly expired" (2085, 1-2). Dryden felt that the city had claimed too much fame and perhaps too much sin. This poem is a remnant of the Bible story of Sodom and Gomorrah because those cities were destined to be destroyed by God due to the sinful nature of the people of the cities. Dryden must have believed that London must suffer the same fate, but instead of being completely destroyed and gone forever, London is not completely burned and is rebuilt better than before "Great as the world, which at the death of time must fall and rise again in noblest way." frame by fire" (2085, 3-4). Looking at Pepys' feelings towards London it is a little harder to decipher because he is writing... in the middle of a sheet of paper... and this will keep him from seeing the sky fall if everything doesn't go as he believes Great Fire of 1666. I described each author's attitude towards the city, the nation and its people and finally presented Dryden as the most optimistic writer about the future of the city. Remember to look on the bright side of things when tragedy occurs sometimes it's what makes us resilient enough to rise from the ashes and rebuild. Every place on earth experiences a tragedy and it's not the tragedy that defines people, but it's the actions they take afterwards that put those at stake. I really am.