Thomas Anstey Guthrie ("F. Anstey") (1856-1934)

Over the course of a fifty-year literary career, which began with the bestselling novel Vice Versâ (1882), the writings of Thomas Anstey Guthrie (1856–1934) were strongly marked by his sense of himself as a Londoner. This article considers the ways in which he conceptualized the city and negotiated the binaries with which it appeared to present him. It teases out the contrasts on which Anstey’s vision of London was predicated. It points to Kensington, where he grew up and where he chose to spend his final years, as the place in which that vision was anchored and those contrasts were concentrated.