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　　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 observati***. Thames: The

Biography meanders gloriously, rather like the river itself. In

short, lively chapters Ackroyd writes about connecti*** 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 othe***riters,

poets, and painters who have been enchanted by its many moods and

colors.

List of Illustrati***

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

　　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 Li***ture’s William

Heinemann Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the

Guardian Fiction Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the

South Bank Award for Li***ture. He lives in London.

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　　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 Middle*** (or Greater

London as it is inelegantly known) and Kent from Es***. 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 milli*** of gall*** (5,205 milli*** 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

*** 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 ***st 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 wate***ill 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

othe***ords, has risen greatly over a period of two thousand

years.

　　The reason is ***. 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 Barrie***ill

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 generati***. 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 ***ect of its

power.

　　Yet of course every stretch has its own character and atmosphere,

and every zone has its own history. Out of oppositi*** comes

energy, out of contrasts beauty. There is the overwhelming

difference of wate***ithin 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 Es*** 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 al***tion 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 c***ider 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 f***etfulness, 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

generati***. 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 c***ciousness" 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 unc***cious, with its suggestion of depth and

invisible life.

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媒体评论

　　Thames smells authentically of the water, of an autho***ho has

walked the towpath and knows not only the impressive statistics…but

also the Turne***ater-colours of the Thames itself…. It is not just

the subject that sets this book apart but also the compelling new

perspectives that [Ackroyd] brings. —The Times

　　“The pages glint with scintillating nuggets recovered from the

river…. You might well think that the garlanded biographer of

Dickens and Turne***as born to write this extraordinary book.” —The

Observer

　　“Mesmerising. . . As soon as you open this account of the Thames,

you will want to immerse yourself in it. . . . No one is better

than Ackroyd at evoking the texture and atmosphere of the distant

past.” —Daily Telegraph

　　“An u***sable performance.” —The Guardian

　　"[A book of] substance and unflaggingly interesting detail. . . a

very enjoyable and highly idiosyncratic account of the subject."

—The Spectator

　　“Wonderful…. Peter Ackroyd’s writing is such a pleasure that

Thames can be read all at once, with increasing delight, and

afterwards dipped into, like stretches of the great waterway it

charts and celebrates.” —Financial Times Magazine

　　“[Ackroyd’s] exhaustive reclaiming of the Thames inks in

colourful new detail. —TIME

　　“a rich offering by a masterly writer…” —Times Li***ry

Supplement

　　“[Ackroyd] presents his material as a cornucopia of treats and

insights delivered from all directi***.” —The Independent

书籍介绍

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 observati***. Thames: The Biography meanders gloriously, rather like the river itself. In short, lively chapters Ackroyd writes about connecti*** 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 othe***riters, poets, and painters who have been enchanted by its many moods and colors.