a little bit of insight into an imagination..

Virginia Woolf welcomes the reader to her own personality through her style of writing in this piece. She grabs the reader’s hand when she mentions the universally recognized lead pencil, which is so malleable in its uses. The pencil represents the capability to recreate- take what has been done and gradually change it, which is what Woolf does through her essay’s journey. In fact, the pencil is really just an excuse to take the reader on her journey through the London streets. The journey, as are many of the journeys we have studied in this course, takes the protagonist full circle. The journey is a journey of experience and observation. Our protagonist introduces us to the range of lives of the London streets. The tone of the piece carries the reader through this journey, peaking at the entrance of each new character. First, however, we are brought into a setting where “in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful.” After examining this statement further, the words themselves are the setting. Champagne brightness conjures up Christmas festivities, the bubbling of the champagne-colored light echoes onomatopoeically in “sociability.” The alliteration of “sociability of the streets,” also embraces the reader’s attention having lured her in with the often passionless, yet on occasion, that supreme desire to obtain that seemingly and, “accidentally, but miraculously sprinkled with beauty,” mundane lead pencil. Woolf’s image of the pearls gives insight into her imaginative twisting of reality into unreality. She draws the picture of these characters on the street and then goes further to comment on their lives behind the scenes she witnesses. “Let us choose those pearls, for example, and then imagine how, if we put them on, life would be changed.”