The new year has started with familiar worries about the nature of British society. Too drunk? Too hedonistic? Too lazy? Too diverse? What must it all look like to a newly arrived eastern European, someone who has never been to London before?
"On Saturday nights, a half-million workers, male and female, together with their children, flood the city like a sea, flocking especially in certain sections and celebrate the Sabbath all night until five in the morning," he notes. "They stuff themselves and drink like animals ... They all race against time to drink themselves insensate. The wives do not lag behind their husbands but get drunk with them; the children run and crawl among them."
The traveller was struck, too, by the wide variety of other visitors he encountered in the capital. "You look at these hundreds of thousands, these millions of people humbly streaming here from all over the face of the earth," he observes. "It is like a biblical picture, something out of Babylon, a prophecy from the Apocalypse coming to pass before your eyes."
The year was 1862 and the visitor was Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, arriving in London a few years before the publication of his novel Crime and Punishment. He spoke no English and asked for directions using sign language. His essay on his first impressions of London, just republished by John Michell and Richard Adams, makes sobering reading nearly 150 years later, as the country and capital enter another period of reflection about drink, antisocial behaviour and immigration. Dostoevsky even focuses on another current topic of nervousness as he describes a night-time visit to the West End.
"One night, in the crowd of lost women and profligates, I was stopped by a woman making her way hurriedly through the crowd," he wrote. "She was dressed all in black, and her hat hid her face almost completely." The woman pressed a piece of paper into his hand which said, in French, "I am the resurrection and the life." Dostoevsky was curious. "I learned later that it was Catholic propaganda, as usual poking its nose everywhere ... There is an abundance of these propagandists, men and women. It is subtle, calculating propaganda."
So all that time ago, there was a worry about women covering their faces and promoting their dangerous religious beliefs. And there were other shocking sights: "in the Haymarket, I noticed mothers bringing their young daughters to do business. Little girls about 12 years old take you by the hand and invite you to follow them."
More than once Dostoevsky refers to the "savages" he sees in London. He mocks the English poets for singing about "the beauty of provincial shepherds' dwellings shaded by oaks and elms, and their virtuous wives and their blond, blue-eyed daughters" and ignoring "the suffering, the grumbling, and the torpor".
So in this week when the workforce has been criticised for its torpor and Londoners for their drunkenness, it is worth remembering that, well, it was ever thus. London is a brawling, noisy, drunken, messy, immoral, overcrowded city where other people's religions are seen as sinister, but it has been a brawling, noisy, drunken, messy, immoral, over-crowded city for almost as long as there have been too many people living on top of each other, a laissez-faire attitude to life and alcohol available freely in the Haymarket and elsewhere.
It wasn't all bad. Dostoevsky also found the city "so dazzling that you seemed to be touching what you had previously been able only to imagine". And he loved London women: "what beauties they sometimes are! With faces meant for keepsakes ... I have never before or since beheld anything approaching that ideal beauty."
So when you are sitting on an over-crowded bus or train, assailed by workshy drunks and profligates and exploited 12-year-olds, remind yourself that if the place has gone to the dogs, it did so long before our grandparents were born. And that eastern European bloke asking painstakingly for directions may be the next Dostoevsky.
duncan.campbell@guardian.co.uk