Fiction
Many P.G. Wodehouse novels use the setting of Piccadilly as the playground of the rich, idle bachelor in the inter-war period of the 20th century. Notable instances of this are present in the characters of Bertie Wooster and his Drones Club companions in the Jeeves stories and the character of James Crocker in the story Piccadilly Jim.
In Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula, Count Dracula owns a house on Piccadilly.
In Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, the family mansion Marchmain House, which is supposedly located in a cul-de-sac off St James's, near Piccadilly, is demolished and replaced with luxury flats; although an incident in fiction, this is, in fact, representative of the period. In Granada TV's dramatization of the novel Bridgewater House in Cleveland Row, which like its prototype backs on to Green Park, was used as the exterior of Marchmain House.
In Arthur Machen's 1894 novella The Great God Pan, Helen Vaughan, the satanic villainess and offspring of Pan, lives off Piccadilly in the pseudonynmous Ashley Street.
Margery Allingham's fictional detective, Albert Campion, has a flat at 17A Bottle Street, Piccadilly, over a police station. However, Bottle Street is a made-up name.
In the Lord Peter Wimsey novels by Dorothy L. Sayers, Lord Peter's address in London is 110a Piccadilly. The number 110a was chosen in homage to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's use of 221b Baker Street for Sherlock Holmes.
In the 1881 comic opera Patience, the popular poetaster and fraud Bunthorne's means of publicizing himself is to walk down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in his medieval hand.
In a Virginia Woolf short story, The Legacy, the main character's (Gilbert Clandon) wife kills herself by stepping into on coming traffic at Piccadilly.
There was a British film made in 1929 called Piccadilly.
The British band Squeeze refers to the area in the song "Piccadilly" on their album East Side Story with the lyrics "She meets me in piccadilly/A begging folk singer stands tall by the entrance/His song relays worlds of most good intentions/A fiver a ten p in his hat for collection."
The American band OneRepublic references Piccadilly in their song "Good Life" with the lyrics "Woke up in London yesterday/Found myself in the city near Piccadilly."
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Famous quotes containing the word fiction:
“The purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader’s mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“If there were genders to genres, fiction would be unquestionably feminine.”
—William Gass (b. 1924)
“A fiction about soft or easy deaths ... is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)