The mixing of the elements of earth, air, fire, and water occurred in the development of modern cities, such as London, another city set in a swamp, portrayed by recent writers and nineteenth-century ones as the sublime city with slimy slums. The lost and repressed slimy swamps return in a fascination with, and horror of, the slimy slums of the city figured and denigrated as jungle or swamp in some late nineteenth-century writers about London. These writers construct a circularity of figurality and so are placist. The pejorative associations of a jungle or swamp are applied to the feral city slum, and the jungle or swamp comes to be seen in the same denigratory (literally ‘darkened’) light (or dark) as the city slum. Beside(s), or above, the nether world of the uncanny city of dreadful night, nineteenth-century London also possessed and displayed the upper or fore world of the sublime city of delightful light encapsulated in the Crystal Palace built in London for the Great Exhibition of 1851 that fascinated Dostoevsky as the quintessential symbol of modernity. The sublime city is made possible by draining and building on its slimy swamps and it makes slimy slums. All three go hand-in-hand.