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Imagining London, 1770–1900 Alan Robinson

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Imagining London, 1770–1900

10.1057/9780230596924 - Imagining London, 1770-1900, Alan Robinson

Other works by this author: POETRY, PAINTING AND IDEAS, 1885–1914 SYMBOL TO VORTEX: Poetry, Painting and Ideas, 1885–1914 (US edition)


INSTABILITIES IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH POETRY


Alan Robinson




© Alan David Robinson 2004

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–3289–1 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Robinson, Alan, 1957– Imagining London, 1770–1900 / Alan Robinson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 1–4039–3289–1 (cloth) 1. English literature—England—London—History and criticism. 2. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 3. English literature—18th century—History and criticism. 4. Authors, English—Homes and haunts—England—London. 5. London (England)—Intellectual life. 6. London (England)—Historiography. 7. London (England)—In literature. 8. Art, English—England—London. 9. London (England)—In art. I. Title. PR8477R63 2004 820.9′3241—dc22 2004044360 10 13

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.


For Perdita, for Chloe, for Käte, with love




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List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgements

xii

Preface

xiv xviii

Abbreviations 1

Unruliness and Improvement

1

2

Gendered London

20

3

Capital City

45

4

A Tale of Two Cities: Dickens’s ‘London’

76

5

The Painting of Modern Life

124

6

Aesthetes and Impressionists

152

7

Property and Propriety

186

8

In the Cage

218

Notes

250

Index

281

vii



Contents




1 Thomas Rowlandson, Vauxhall Gardens (RA 1784). © Guildhall Library, Corporation of London 2 George Cruikshank, Grievances of London (1812). © Guildhall Library, Corporation of London 3 George Cruikshank, The Piccadilly Nuisance! Dedicated to the Worthy, Acting Magistrates of the District (1818). © Guildhall Library, Corporation of London 4 Joseph Mallord William Turner, London from Greenwich Park (Turner Gallery 1809). © Tate, London 2003 5 Robert Barker, London from the Roof of the Albion Mills (1792). © Guildhall Library, Corporation of London 6 Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, Ludgate Hill, from Fleet Street (1830). © Guildhall Library, Corporation of London 7 Anon., View (of) Carlton Terrace near the York Pillar, London. Winter Fashions for 1837 and 38 (1838). Published by B. Read and H. Bodman. © Guildhall Library, Corporation of London 8 William Blake, London. Copy C, 1789, 1794. © Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC 9 William Blake, Title page of Copy G of The Book of Urizen. © Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC 10 William Blake, The House of Death (1795). © Tate, London 2003 11 James Gillray, A Corner, near the Bank; – or – An Example for Fathers (1797). © Guildhall Library, Corporation of London 12 James Gillray, Sandwich Carrots, dainty Sandwich Carrots (1796). © Guildhall Library, Corporation of London 13 John Orlando Parry, A London Street Scene (1835). © Dunhill Museum & Archive, 48, Jermyn Street St James’s, London SW1 14 ‘The Haunted Lady, or “The Ghost” in the Looking-Glass’, Punch, 4 July 1863 15 Hablot Knight Browne, ‘The End of Quilp’, The Old Curiosity Shop (London: Chapman and Hall, 1907) 16 Hablot Knight Browne, ‘The Lord Chancellor copies from Memory’, Bleak House (London: Chapman and Hall, 1907) 17 Hablot Knight Browne, ‘The Appointed Time’, Bleak House (London: Chapman and Hall, 1907)

ix


3 5

5 8 11 16

18

22

24 25 32 34

50 72 86 96 97



x Imagining London, 1770–1900


117

134 136

136 139 140 142 144 148 150

154 156 157

158 158 160 164 165

166


18 ‘Our Friend, MACLUCKIESPECH, mistrusting those confounded Banks, resolves to carry his Capital in his Trousers’ pockets – ’Tis so comforting to have a feeling of Security’, Punch, 5 December 1857 19 Ford Madox Brown, An English Autumn Afternoon, Hampstead – Scenery in 1853 (1852–3, 1855). © Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery 20 John Ritchie, A Summer Day in Hyde Park (1858). © Museum of London 21 Claude Monet, Green Park, London (c. 1871). © Philadelphia Museum of Art: Purchased with the W.P. Wilstach Fund, 1921 22 Augustus Egg, Past and Present, III (1858). © Tate, London 2003 23 Ford Madox Brown, Take Your Son, Sir, detail (1851, 1856–7). © Tate, London 2003 24 William Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience (1853–4). © Tate, London 2003 25 John Roddam Spencer-Stanhope, Thoughts of the Past (RA 1859). © Tate, London 2003 26 Arthur Boyd Houghton, London in 1865. © English Heritage. Kenwood. The Iveagh Bequest 27 Luke Fildes, Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward (1874). © Royal Holloway, University of London 28 James McNeill Whistler, The Thames in Ice (1860). Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC: Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F 1901.107 29 Henry Pether, Trafalgar Square by Moonlight (c. 1865). © Museum of London 30 John O’Connor, From Pentonville, looking West – Evening (1884). © Museum of London 31 James McNeill Whistler, Variations in Flesh Colour and Green: The Balcony (1864–70). Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC: Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F 1892.23 32 Claude Monet, The Thames Below Westminster (c. 1871). © The National Gallery, London 33 Camille Pissarro, Lordship Lane Station, Dulwich (1871). © Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London 34 James Tissot, The Thames (1876). © Wakefield Art Gallery 35 Giuseppe De Nittis, The National Gallery, London (1878). Musée du Petit Palais, Paris © Bridgeman Art Library 36 Giuseppe De Nittis, Domenica a Londra (1878). Private collection. Photograph © Piero Dini Archive, Montecatini Terme



168 179

181

182


37 Phoebus Levin, The Dancing Platform at Cremorne Gardens (1864). © Museum of London 38 William Logsdail, St Martin-in-the-Fields (1888). © Tate, London 2003, © Bridgeman Art Library 39 Walter Sickert, Bonnet et Claque (1887). Private collection. © ProLitteris, 2002, 8033 Zürich, Photograph © Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd, London 40 Walter Sickert, The P.S. Wings in an O.P. Mirror (c. 1889). Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen © ProLitteris, 2002, 8033 Zürich, © Bridgeman Art Library

xi

The origins of this book lie in a rather different research project, ‘Representing Modernity in London’, supported by the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung in 1988–9. I am grateful to the Humboldt Foundation for awarding me the Research Fellowship which took me to the University of Cologne and to Helmut Bonheim both for the invitation which enabled this and for his hospitable welcome during my stay in the Englisches Seminar. Over about a decade, with enforced interruptions, I have written this book first for a general then for a specialist audience. That it has come to assume its present form is due to the promptings and provocations of a succession of readers. Ron Ewart cast a cold eye on the earliest complete draft and suggested useful improvements. Kurt Tetzeli made incisive and salutary remarks on the first version of Chapter 4 and, at a crucial time, gave me pause for thought. Elaine Honigmann read early versions of some of the art historical material and commented helpfully on how paintings work. Hans Christoph Binswanger, Manfred Gärtner and Ernst Mohr scrutinised some of my first drafts on economic issues but should in no way be held liable for my subsequent ventures into their territory. Later versions profited from the comments of Michael Wheeler, of anonymous publisher’s readers representing several disciplines, and, particularly, from the detailed reading of Joseph Bristow. Throughout its various drafts this book has been an ongoing dialogue with Esther Giger Robinson, who has the keenest eye I know for non sequiturs and has constantly sharpened my thinking. For considerable and considerate help with obtaining the illustrations I would like to thank Rebecca Barker, Mariella Basile Bonsante, Stacy Bomento, Carol Burns, Louise Bythell, Susan Casteras, Sandy Chapman, Julie Cochrane, Francesca Dini, Louise Fountaine, Sacha Gerstein, Joanne Grice, Katja Jaisli, Stephen James, Renato Martinoni, Susan Pugh, David Robinson, Anna Shepherd, Richard Shone, Jeremy Smith, Rebecca Staffolani, Peter Tilley, Maristella Trulli and Younis Zaman. Lynne Walker kindly sent me photocopies of her work on women on Victorian London and I am grateful to her and to Deborah Cherry for arranging this, as I am to Helmut Holzhey for sending me philosophical publications he had edited. Carol Idone, Kurt Peter and Annlies Stoffel helped with questions of psychology. My research would not have been possible without the excellent service provided by Xaver Baumgartner and the staff of the University Library in St Gallen, the staff in interlibrary loans at the Kantonsbibliothek Vadiana, and the staffs of the Universitätsbibliothek Konstanz, the Bodleian Library, Oxford, the Museum of London, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the xii



Acknowledgements

Guildhall Library. At Palgrave Macmillan I am grateful to Emily Rosser for accepting my typescript for publication and to Paula Kennedy, Tim Kapp and Ruth Willats for dealing so efficiently with innumerable queries. I am indebted to the Research Fund of the University of St Gallen for purchasing for the University Library a large number of books in my areas of research, for travel expenses, and for a subsidy to Palgrave Macmillan to offset the additional printing costs they incurred through the inclusion of illustrations. In the St Gallen English Department I am grateful for the practical help provided by Yves Rittener, Frances Ilmberger, Claudia Rosenhan and, above all, Doris Zängerle, who has processed more drafts of this book on more updates of Word Perfect than either she or I would care to remember and has contributed in all kinds of ways to keeping the whole thing going. The period during which this book was written has been the most difficult in my life. When times were darkest I reflected, like Ezra Pound in Canto 76, ‘shd/I chuck the lot into the tide-water?/le bozze’. That I didn’t has been due to the continuing encouragement of Gillian Malpass; to the support of Iain Bruce, Mick Clark, Ron Ewart, Martin Gardner, Norman Robinson and Pam Robinson; to Perdita, Chloe and Käte, who have grown up alongside this book in our years as the Swiss Family Robinson, and, most of all, to Esther, who never gave up believing in this book and in me and without whom it simply wouldn’t exist. I would like to dedicate this book with love to my daughters, who have always been in my thoughts while I was writing it and will one day, I hope, understand what it was all about.

Earlier versions of some material in Chapters 5 and 6 were published in Anglistentag 1990 Marburg. Proceedings, ed. Claus Uhlig and Rüdiger Zimmermann (Tübingen, 1991); Bild und Text im Dialog, ed. Klaus Dirscherl (Passau, 1993); and Aspects of Modernism: Studies in Honour of Max Nänny, ed. Andreas Fischer, Martin Heusser, Thomas Hermann (Tübingen, 1997).



Acknowledgements xiii

Combining a unique overview of metropolitan visual culture with detailed textual analysis, this interdisciplinary study offers an interpretation of how Londoners sought to make sense of the social transformations of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It argues that they lived in two cities simultaneously: the actual spaces of the metropolis, which can be analysed into a socially stratified and gendered topography; and an imaginary ‘London’, an interior world constructed from personal sensory and imaginative experience but also from verbal and visual representations, which both reflected and shaped their understanding of the ‘real’ metropolis and influenced their actions in this ‘real’ environment.1 By insisting that London’s culture must be located in the physical spaces and practices of the city, I oppose the self-reflexive trend in recent literary history of examining discursive representations in isolation from the material contexts in which they originated and were embedded. Equally, in discussing changing constructions of ‘London’, I have also made a conscious break with the models which currently dominate literary studies by choosing to analyse not just social ‘discourses’, but what might be described as the idiosyncrasies of individual ‘idiolects’. In my view, the influence of structuralist Marxism, of Foucauldian discourse theory and of the Lacanian concept of the ‘symbolic order’ has led to a disproportionate emphasis on social ‘structure’ to the exclusion of subjective ‘agency’.2 To redress this imbalance, literary studies would need once again to take seriously what, in the fullest sense, is meant by the literary imagination. Criticism would be required not just to place a text within the cultural materialist context of social practice, or within the ideological context of competing discourses, but also to treat it as authored by an individual with a unique personality, bearing physically, linguistically and psychologically the traces of a distinctive history, and engaged in complex perceptual interaction with his or her environment. My assumption is that the experiential world we inhabit is formed by both introjection and projection. In other words, what we take to be reality is an unconscious fusion of external stimuli, mediated and structured by internalised cultural frameworks of interpretation and expectations that are to some extent susceptible of sociohistorical reconstruction; and of mental representations, i.e. ‘imagos’, ‘objects’, whose subjective distortions invite a complementary psychoanalytical approach. Inevitably, my survey cannot be comprehensive. What I have done is to combine the panoramic (indicating changing patterns in representational modes and conventions) with an insistence on the particularity and complexity of individual imaginings of ‘London’. My focus is consciously xiv



Preface

restricted to the perspective of the middling sort, later the middle classes, who, as producers and consumers, frequented printsellers and galleries, and subscribed to the periodicals and circulating libraries through which ideological attitudes were disseminated. Two interconnected leitmotifs run through my exposition. The first is the role of money in London’s free-market economy and the kinds of social relations which unregulated capitalism encouraged or produced. Although the book’s main focus is on Victorian London, my decision to extend its chronological range to the late eighteenth century challenges the orthodoxy in recent literary studies that late Victorian London saw the emergence of a ‘commodity culture’. In fact, with the rise of the ‘monied interest’, which followed the Financial Revolution of the 1690s, the consequences of the new commercialism had drawn comment since the 1720s, as the historiography associated with John Brewer, Roy Porter, Paul Langford et al. has emphasised. As consumption ceased to be regulated by legal or religious prohibitions, the ‘world of goods’ offered material and symbolic resources to all with the requisite purchasing power to choose and construct identities and lifestyles which destabilised the social order. The emergence of capitalist market exchange in London was thus a crucial factor in the evolution of a ‘posttraditional society’ characterised by the absence of any indisputable cultural authority or value.3 In tracing some features of this ‘modernising’ London, the themes I have highlighted are the fear of insubordination from the 1770s to the 1880s among London’s vast influx of migrants, and the effects on class relations of the capitalist transformation of the labour and housing markets, transportation, and the City of London. Recent accounts have emphasised the growth of consumer culture following the Great Exhibition and the emergence of department stores. Less attention has been given to the equally significant influence of the financial markets on the character of later Victorian London. The mid-1840s witnessed a remarkable take-off in speculative share dealing and financial fraud, which was further stimulated by the laissez-faire permissiveness of the company legislation passed between 1855 and 1862. The emergent plutocracy made their money through credit transactions often ‘secured’ only by elaborate cross-holdings of bills of exchange. Financial scandals suggested that, at its worst, this credit system was what deconstructionists would now term one of deferral, marked by the absence of any tangible underlying to the alarmingly proliferating futures contracts, or to the eagerly promoted share issues in companies with no paid-up capital. In any case, sceptics were right in recognising that this world of virtual reality, and the self-sustaining networks of social exchange-values which, correspondingly, reflected one’s worth in an increasingly market-mediated society, marked a relativistic departure from earlier value systems. My narrative examines how this was reflected and represented in fiction and painting.



Preface xv

The second leitmotif is gender relations in London’s patriarchal society. In discussing these, my aims were to trace changes in both the actual situation of women and the interdependent constructions of femininity and masculinity throughout the period. Over the last sixteen years an awareness of gender has become axiomatic in urban historiography. Influential studies in the late 1980s and early 1990s (by Lynda Nead, Deborah Epstein Nord) analysed representations of women in relation to medical and legal discourses and sanitary reform. Foregrounding the emblematic figure of the fallen woman, their emphasis on the threat of physical and moral ‘contamination’ melodramatised the situation of women in London. Subsequently (inspired by Amanda Vickery), the ideological model of ‘separate spheres’ has become increasingly questioned, together with the view (advanced by Nancy Armstrong, Mary Poovey, Elizabeth Langland) of bourgeois women as unreflecting instruments of a Foucauldian disciplinary power.4 Instead, emphasis has shifted to investigation of the possibilities of mobility and agency which had been tacitly acknowledged by Poovey. Although this revisionist approach is salutary, in my view its concentration on West End consumers and the exceptional achievements of the intellectually gifted and socially privileged has tended to underplay the drastic financial and legal discrimination which continued to hamper women until the late nineteenth century. My own analysis accordingly places two different emphases. First, I stress the economic and legal constraints on women and the similarities rather than the differences between prostitution and its ‘respectable’ counterparts: the marriage market and marital ‘coverture’. Second, I use object relations psychology to complement Poovey’s cultural materialist analysis of ‘social formations’ and Nead’s Foucauldian analyses of midVictorian visual culture. As the historian John Tosh commented in 1994: Masculinity . . . is both a psychic and a social identity: psychic, because it is integral to the subjectivity of every male as this takes shape in infancy and childhood; social, because masculinity is inseparable from peer recognition . . . Most patriarchal forms in history have arisen from psychic needs combined with a perception of the material advantage to be derived from power over women. Tracing the inter-connections and weighing their social impact is clearly a major task for historians.5 My discussions aim to further this debate. The structure of the book is chronological. Chapters 1 and 2 are devoted to representations of late Georgian London. Thematically, Chapter 1 analyses forms of commercial capitalism, while Chapter 2 establishes the analytical framework for subsequent discussions of gender. Chapter 3 then offers a sociohistorical account of the transformations which capitalism effected in the Victorian metropolis. Building on this foundation, the remaining chapters are devoted to detailed discussions of three novelists – Dickens,



xvi Imagining London, 1770–1900

Trollope and James – whose writings offer chronologically successive crosssections of Victorian London, and to a complementary survey of painting from the 1850s to the 1890s. In introducing their edited collection of essays on English Art 1860–1914 (Manchester, 2000), David Corbett Peters and Lara Perry noted a lack ‘in the art-historical literature’ of ‘any developed understanding’ of how ‘English art was woven into the cultural history of which it was a part’. Chapters 5 and 6 on the evolution of Victorian paintings of London address this issue by offering a contextualised account of the relationships between ‘modern’ English painting, its French counterparts, and cultural modernity. The overall picture which emerges is one of continuity in London’s increasingly commercial and service-oriented economy and of disconcerting upheavals in the physical fabric of the city, in working practices and social mores, in constructions of femininity and masculinity, and in the stylistic conventions of the artefacts which represented these. As readers thread their way through the bustling imaginary city of the following pages, I hope that they will come to share my fascination with the Stones of London.



Preface xvii

In footnotes and parenthetically in the text the following abbreviations are used: A AA BH BI CTW CY DC DS ED EuD GE L LC1 LC2

LD Life MC N NB OCS OMF OT

Autobiography, ed. F.W. Dupee (Princeton, 1983) The Awkward Age [1899, 1908] (Harmondsworth, 1976) Bleak House [1852–3], ed. Norman Page (Harmondsworth, 1974) British Institution Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America, ed. Richard Howard (New York, 1993) Can You Forgive Her? [1864–5] (Oxford, 1973) David Copperfield [1849–50], ed. Trevor Blount (Harmondsworth, 1971) Dombey and Son [1846–8], ed. Peter Fairclough (Harmondsworth, 1976) The Mystery of Edwin Drood [1870], ed. Arthur J. Cox (Harmondsworth, 1975) The Eustace Diamonds [1871–3], ed. Stephen Gill and John Sutherland (Harmondsworth, 1977) Great Expectations [1860–1], ed. Margaret Cardwell (Oxford, 1994) Letters, ed. Leon Edel, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1974–84) Literary Criticism, vol. I. Essays on Literature. American Writers. English Writers , ed. Leon Edel and Mark Wilson (New York, 1984) Literary Criticism, vol. II. French Writers. Other European Writers. The Prefaces to the New York Edition, ed. Leon Edel and Mark Wilson (New York, 1984) Little Dorrit [1855–7], ed. John Holloway (Harmondsworth, 1974) John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, 3 vols. (1872–4; rpt. Philadelphia, 1886) Martin Chuzzlewit [1843–4] (Oxford, 1951) Novels 1886–1890, ed. Daniel Mark Fogel (New York, 1989) The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F.O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (1947; New York, 1961) The Old Curiosity Shop [1840–1], ed. Angus Easson (Harmondsworth, 1972) Our Mutual Friend [1864–5], ed. Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth, 1976) Oliver Twist [1838], ed. Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford, 1966) xviii



Abbreviations

PE PF PP PR RA SB SP T VS

The Painter’s Eye, ed. John L. Sweeney (1956; rpt. Madison, Wis., 1989) Phineas Finn, The Irish Member [1867–9], ed. John Sutherland (Harmondsworth, 1977) The Pickwick Papers [1836–7], ed. Robert L. Patten (Harmondsworth, 1972) Phineas Redux [1873–4] (Oxford, 1973) Royal Academy Sketches by Boz, Illustrative of Every-Day Life and Every-Day People (Oxford, 1957) The Spoils of Poynton [1897, 1908] (Harmondsworth, 1975) The Complete Tales of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel, 12 vols. (1962–4) Victorian Studies



Abbreviations xix




1

The aim of this chapter is to locate some salient art forms of late Georgian London within the context of a ‘modernising’ metropolis. To do so, I focus thematically on what, from the viewpoint of the upper ranks and the middling sort, were the benefits and the unwelcome by-products of the commercial prosperity that was destabilising their society. Optimism, encouraged by technological advances and decades of economic expansion, was evident in rising consumer expectations and pride in the capital’s civic amenities. Weighing against this, however, were trepidation about the levelling tendencies inherent in commercialised leisure and market-mediated consumption, and justified fears of popular insurgence in the context of mass migration and political unrest. Proceeding chronologically, I first examine the insubordination associated with different kinds of unregulated public assembly and the anxieties associated with and projected onto urban crowds. Then I analyse the emergence of the panorama of the 1790s, which, I argue, epitomised the links between technology and entrepreneurial capitalism. Finally, I consider topographical prints which reflected the architectural remodelling of the West End in the Regency period and the reformation of manners negotiated on the city streets.

Disorderly assemblies Profiting from a veritable ‘urban renaissance’, prosperous late Georgian Londoners enjoyed an extensive, socially stratified range of cultural offerings. Among these, the crucial distinction was between exclusive gatherings, to which access was restricted by subscription, invitation or rank, and ‘public places’ of commercialised entertainment (such as the theatre, the opera and pleasure gardens), which admitted anyone who could afford a ticket.1 The latter provoked consternation in some quarters, as their social promiscuousness was perceived as challenging traditional patterns of distinction and subordination. Vauxhall Gardens, less ‘polite’ than Ranelagh but not so 1





‘vulgar’ as the other pleasure gardens to which lower admission was charged, exemplify what was at stake. While the boxes at the theatre and the opera, and the latter’s high prices, ensured a measure of segregation, the transgressive excitement of a visit to Vauxhall lay in the unregulated mingling of ranks in its promenades, supper boxes and illuminated Grove. Its notoriety as a place of assignation dictated vigilance to matrons intent on chaperoning their charges through the marriage market. Other disenchanted observers were also wary of the trend towards ‘profligacy and licentiousness’ which they saw epitomised by Vauxhall. One such was Smollett’s Matt Bramble, who represents two significant strands of anti-urban polemic in this period: a condemnation of the metropolitan ‘tide of luxury’ rooted in a Horatian tradition celebrating the contrasting virtues of rural retirement, and a ‘country ideology’ hostility to the commercialism of the Whig monied interest, at its brashest in the impresario Jonathan Tyers’s transformation of Vauxhall into a Rococo theme park, where elevated and ‘low’ kinds of entertainment formed a hybrid mix.2 Bramble comments: The diversions of the times are not ill suited to the genius of this incongruous monster, called the public. Give it noise, confusion, glare, and glitter; it has no idea of elegance and propriety. . . . Vauxhall is a composition of baubles, overcharged with paltry ornaments, ill conceived, and poorly executed; without any unity of design, or propriety of disposition. It is an unnatural assembly of objects, fantastically illuminated in broken masses; seemingly contrived to dazzle the eyes and divert the imagination of the vulgar.3 His distaste is couched in aesthetic terms: Vauxhall’s hotchpotch of Handel, Hayman and flashy spectacle offends against the compositional values of an Academy painting. The fact that the frippery designed to amuse ‘the vulgar’ can also command the attention of a polite clientele betrays a degrading lack of discrimination in ‘the public’. This flouting of aesthetic decorum is the counterpart to the neglect of social propriety Bramble notes in the ‘well dressed people’ ‘exposed to the eyes of the mob’, synonymous for him with stockjobbers, City tradesmen and their wives. Social climbing became a key theme of 1770s caricatures.4 What he was overreacting to can be gauged from Rowlandson’s watercolour (RA 1784) (figure 1). London’s literati and newspaper editors hobnob with the macaroni Major Topham (editor of the fashionable World), who is quizzing Lady Bessborough and the Duchess of Devonshire, the object that year of media libels asserting that, in her canvassing for Charles James Fox in the Westminster election, she had transgressed genteel bounds not only socially but also sexually.5 Two years earlier, scandal had linked her with the Prince of Wales, who is pictured whispering to his former mistress Mary ‘Perdita’ Robinson, near carousing cits and prostitutes.6 Despite Bramble’s emotive



2

Figure 1 Thomas Rowlandson, Vauxhall Gardens (RA 1784). © Guildhall Library, Corporation of London

usage of ‘mob’, the ‘rabble’ were excluded by the admission charge of one shilling. To raise the entry barrier, this was doubled in 1792, ostensibly because additional, more expensive decorations had been introduced, but primarily, I believe, as a response to the escalating social unrest of that year. A comparable attempt to abolish the one shilling gallery at the playhouse failed.7 Both initiatives were symptomatic of an emergent desire – which would gather strength in the Regency period – to reinstate the demarcations which commercialised culture was perceived to be undermining. Indeed, in the eyes of conservative polemicists, the democratisation of consumer pleasures was fomenting insubordination of all kinds. For, as ‘luxuries’ (in contrast to ‘necessaries’ or ‘conveniences’) became more widely accessible, it was claimed that the emulative acquisitiveness of the labouring poor would destroy all social prerogatives and distinction. One cause of apprehension was the influx of rural migrants tempted by London’s consumer culture. The consequence predicted by innumerable jeremiads between 1751 and 1771 was that, aspiring to unaffordable privileges beyond their station, frustrated migrants would either resign themselves to idleness and beggary or become thieves and sharpers, for, ‘London being an immense wilderness, in which there is neither watch nor ward of any signification, nor any order or police, affords them lurking-places as well as prey’.8 The scale of the metropolis liberated the anonymous faces in the crowd from the supervision exercised in smaller communities, raising the



Unruliness and Improvement 3


spectre of criminality. As Adam Smith asserted, once a ‘man of low condition’ comes from a country village ‘into a great city, he is sunk in obscurity and darkness. His conduct is observed and attended to by nobody, and he is therefore very likely to neglect it himself, and to abandon himself to every sort of low profligacy and vice.’9 The disturbing novelty of living surrounded by strangers inspired not only a desire for social control but also a psychological, even an epistemological, unease in some observers. Consider Hazlitt’s analysis of the ‘wearisome sensation’ he experienced walking from Oxford Street to Temple Bar: A crowd of people presents a disjointed, confused, and unsatisfactory appearance to the eye, because there is nothing to connect the motley assemblage into one continuous or general impression, unless when there is some common object of interest to fix their attention, as in the case of a full pit at the play-house. The same principle will also account for that feeling of littleness, vacuity, and perplexity, which a stranger feels on entering the streets of a populous city. Every individual he meets is a blow to his personal identity. Every new face is a teazing, unanswered riddle.10 Similarly, the challenge which London’s masses posed to Wordsworth’s social and psychological sense of ‘distinction’ is apparent throughout Book VII of the 1805 Prelude. Whereas Enlightenment theories conceived of the city as a body in which respiration and circulation should be facilitated, his embalming imagination felt most comfortable in the city at times when the lifeblood of its goods and people ceased to circulate and it became a virtual mausoleum: Nature’s intermediate hours of rest When the great tide of human life stands still, The business of the day to come unborn, Of that gone by locked up as in the grave; 11 By depicting the metropolis at its most depopulated, as if dead or at least in suspended animation, when its ‘mighty heart is lying still’, he could reassuringly contrive to ruralise it.12 Now that we are so accustomed to processing visual data at high speed, it takes an effort to imagine the nervous agitation of newcomers, relentlessly importuned by haphazard, abruptly alternating impressions. Signs, advertisements, window displays of merchandise and prints competed for attention with the cries of street traders, the rush of coaches, the cacophony of pattens, horseshoes and iron-shod wheels on uneven stone paving, and the shifting faces of passers-by (see figures 2 and 3). In the early part of Book VII, as Wordsworth recollects them in tranquillity, the ‘quick dance / Of Colours,



4

Figure 2 George Cruikshank, Grievances of London (1812). © Guildhall Library, Corporation of London

Figure 3 George Cruikshank, The Piccadilly Nuisance! Dedicated to the Worthy, Acting Magistrates of the District (1818). © Guildhall Library, Corporation of London





lights and forms, the Babel din’ of shops, shows and cosmopolitan streets are recalled with pleasure. In later sections, however, the ‘thickening hubbub’ is regarded less positively, and ultimately London resists integration into Wordsworth’s narrative of triumphant self-fashioning. Why is most apparent in the much discussed episode based on his visit to Bartholomew Fair in 1802 but – significantly – set amid the political turmoil of 1791. It records the attempted sublimation of fears that link the body and the body politic at times when ‘half the city shall break out/Full of one passion’ (646–7). In a passage (659–95) whose headlong rhythms mimic the observer’s vertiginous panic at feeling crowded, what threatens to overwhelm him, submerging his identity and overpowering his imagination, is the onrush both of impressions and the throng itself. What I wish to highlight is less the epistemological and ontological anxieties it expresses than the fears about London’s popular culture which it reiterates from Burke. Wordsworth’s phrasing alludes to Burke’s gibe that the French National Assembly was forced to adopt ‘publick measures [which] are deformed into monsters’ by ‘clubs composed of a monstrous medley of all conditions, tongues, and nations’. The Assembly ‘act like the comedians of a fair’ before a socially and sexually ‘mixed mob of ferocious men, and of women lost to shame’, among whom libertinism runs riot.13 Burke’s metaphor depended on his London readers’ knowledge that many ‘comedians’ at Bartholomew Fair were also West End actors in the pantomime and spectacle which for decades had been elbowing out serious drama.14 His implication is that the seeds of insubordination should be located not just in Jacobin radicalism but also in London’s commercialised entertainments, which blurred the distinction between elevated and ‘low’ culture. Recalling a situation familiar to his audience, he scoffs that in the ‘profane burlesque’ in which the Assembly acts its ‘farce of deliberation’, ‘As they have inverted order in all things, the gallery is in the place of the house’. In other words, catcalls from the one shilling gallery drown out the actors’ declamations, so that the elite’s paternalistic counsel goes unheard. It was no coincidence that, amid the other counter-revolutionary measures taken in 1792, London managers tried to abolish this apple- and orange-throwing section of theatres. Wordsworth’s nightmarish vision of the masses, captivated by mountebank orators and swayed in their fickleness by popular print and visual culture, likewise burlesques the ‘Promethean thoughts’ of the uneducated, who here enjoy a carnivalesque licence. His condescension towards the commercialised consumption of city-dwellers – ‘The slaves unrespited of low pursuits/Living amid the same perpetual flow/Of trivial objects’ (701–3) – is founded in a belief in the nervous debilitation widely supposed to result from the sensationalism of metropolitan life. Fortunately, he can sublimate the energies associated with this disorderly assembly, summoning a deus ex machina, the creative ‘spirit of Nature’, to diffuse ‘Through meagre lines and colours, and the press/Of self-destroying, transitory things – /Composure and ennobling



6

harmony’ (739–41). The ‘Composure’ which he and his poetic canvas thereby attain is spiritual, hierarchical and aesthetic: the compositional achievement of translating the confusion of this low genre scene (like Bramble’s Vauxhall Gardens) into imaginative form is a triumphant containment of the frightening insurgency of the crowd and of the outbreaks of vulgar ‘passion’ which it both represents and arouses. The grotesque mode conventionally harbours intractable material, representing in symbolic form desires or attributes from which spectators consciously dissociate themselves. This is apparent in the physiognomic and bodily deformity which Georgian caricaturists projected onto the metropolitan underclass, recalling Wordsworth’s view of the ‘freaks of Nature’ at Bartholomew Fair, and anticipating Victorian stereotypes of the ‘residuum’. In a less aggressive form of ridicule, the urban crowd, reduced to undifferentiated impersonality and including citizens of all ranks, was often imagined within the satirical category of the ‘Nuisances’, ‘Miseries’ or ‘Grievances’ encountered on the streets. Wry accounts of the tribulations of pedestrians had been a popular theme since Swift’s mock pastorals or ‘town eclogues’ and John Gay’s Trivia: Or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716). The standard topoi included jocular grumbles about rain, fog, puddles and mud, refuse, falling objects (ranging from bricks to night soil), and obstructions animate and inanimate.15 George Cruikshank’s Grievances of London (figure 2) is a representative example, combining the stench emanating from the itinerant dust cart and noxious trades such as tallow-chandling and cat’s meat production, with the hazards of having one’s clothes stained by a dyer’s or by a sooty ‘climbing boy’. In reliving their exasperation in this humorous form, genteel pedestrians joined a reassuring community of fellow sufferers with whom they could laugh at their shared predicament. Other prints, however, display less equanimity. One example is The Piccadilly Nuisance (figure 3), where the elbowing throng spills over the pavements, trampling social distinctions and niceties underfoot. Whereas, in contrast to Regency satirists, Victorian observers of the later, more self-controlled stage of urban capitalism would emphasise the subdued, automaton-like ‘indifference, the unfeeling isolation’ of the mutual strangers on inner-city streets, Cruikshank dramatises their brutalisation into recklessly competitive animals.16 Far from being a place of orderly assembly, his Piccadilly seethes with an anarchic mass. He suggests that dangerously undirected energies threaten, like the careering coach on the right, to assert their will regardless of the common good. That the capacity for unruliness was not confined to the lower classes is indicated by the social promiscuousness of this crowd and by another Cruikshank print of the same year, Inconveniences of a Crowded Drawing Room, which depicts the shoving and pushing at one of Queen Charlotte’s receptions. The pretext of The Piccadilly Nuisance was the ineffectuality of local government. But its




8


satirical target is also what results when people are unable to govern themselves. Such impulses would increasingly become the object of censure, as the final section of this chapter explains.

In the later eighteenth century, ribbon development and burgeoning inner suburbs extended the metropolis beyond the core formed by the City of London, the City of Westminster and the Borough of Southwark. Its immensity challenged the assimilative capacity of dominant ways of seeing, provoking innovations in representational modes and visual technology. Take, for example, one stock subject for painters: the expansive prospect from Greenwich Hill. Traditional approaches are exemplified by John Feary’s A View from One Tree Hill in Greenwich Park (RA 1779), more a conversation piece than a topographical prospect, John Robert Cozens’s London from Greenwich Hill (c. 1791) and George Samuel’s combination of genre interest with a Claudian composition, London from Greenwich Park (RA 1816, BI 1817).17 A different attitude is implied by Turner’s London from Greenwich Park (Turner Gallery, 1809) (figure 4), which suggests the prodigious extent of the metropolis, as the dazzlingly highlit Thames reaches

Figure 4 Joseph Mallord William Turner, London from Greenwich Park (Turner Gallery 1809). © Tate, London 2003



Sublimity and surveillance


Where burthen’d Thames reflects the crowded sail, Commercial care and busy toil prevail, Whose murky veil, aspiring to the skies, Obscures thy beauty, and thy form denies, Save where thy spires pierce the doubtful air, As gleams of hope amidst a world of care.18 As a redeeming counterbalance to London’s grimy materialism, Turner’s late Augustan verses offer the consolations of religion; his painting, with deer tranquilly grazing, offers the consolations of pastoral. And yet, despite his conventional anti-urbanism, Turner indicates what might inspire a sense of sublimity. For the ‘murky veil’ which ‘Obscures thy beauty, and thy form denies’ and thus frustrates the desire to perceive London as a whole, could lead observers to imagine for themselves its almost inconceivable vastness, in that progress from baffled perception to inner transcendence that characterised the late eighteenth-century understanding of the sublime. Similarly, Joanna Baillie contrasted the ‘goodly’ panorama from Hampstead with the ‘sublime’ sight of foggy, clouded London, ‘In her grand panoply of smoke array’d’ like a ‘curtain’d gloom’, or by night, ‘Her luminous canopy athwart the dark’ with ‘myriads of lamps’ like the aurora borealis.19 As the new industrial technology was translated into the conventions of sublime landscape, so the romance of technological progress became linked to an emergent consciousness of the sublimity of London. Philippe de Loutherbourg, who would evoke the industrial sublime in Coalbrookdale by Night (1801), was also quick to sense the awe which London inspired. His Eidophusikon (1781 ff.) drew a select audience who watched enraptured as skilfully manipulated lighting re-created the effect of dawn rising over a prospect of London reaching from Greenwich Park to the distant hills of Hampstead, Highgate and Harrow.20 The fact that Loutherbourg’s most successful other displays were of such typical sublime themes as shipwrecks and the cavernous expanses of Pandemonium from Paradise Lost indicates that what caught the public imagination was not merely the dynamism of the changing illumination but also the sensational thrill communicated by the unprecedented scale of the metropolis. A few years later, the early industrialists’ exhilaration in physically mastering the environment found its visual counterpart in a new kind of painting: the circular ‘panorama’, which offered a 360-degree survey of the city with the accuracy of a camera obscura.21 By expanding to fill the spectator’s entire visual field with no distracting picture frame, and by eliminating any external reference points that might disturb the trompe l’oeil effect, the



back into the picture space, only to disappear amid the indistinctness of the city fog. When first exhibited, the painting was accompanied by the artist’s epigraph:


panorama superseded earlier prospect painting. Such was the totality of its naturalistic illusionism that it no longer seemed ‘art’, provoking in some quarters the kind of aesthetic revulsion that would later greet the advent of photography. It smacked of mechanical dexterity or showmanship, which made it distasteful to those artists concerned with their social prestige who were currently intent on displacing the traditional denigration of painting to a ‘craft’ rather than a dignified profession. But to the middling sort who were busily installing steam power and increasingly using iron supports and girders in their factories, the early panoramas’ associations with new industrial inventions were doubtless an added stimulus.22 They should be interpreted in the context of other examples of entrepreneurial pride in the interplay between commerce and technology. England’s first balloon ascent had taken place in London in 1784 and the novelty of an aerial view of the city was quickly exploited by architects in search of town planning commissions. William Daniell translated George Dance the Younger’s daring vision of a Proposed double London Bridge (1800) into an architectural perspective which was popular as a print and attracted crowds when exhibited as a ‘panorama’ entertainment at Sadler’s Wells.23 The view was painted as if seen from a balloon tethered over Southwark Bridge, and it is characteristic of the period that its grandiose vision of an imperial capital able to vie architecturally with Napoleonic Paris was linked to the apparently boundless prospects opened up by the new aeronautical technology. Daniell also produced overviews of the internationally admired, gargantuan new docks, which bolstered London’s dominant role in Britain’s imperial trade and global financial, communications and information networks.24 Despite their considerable price, his aquatints sold well, as there was a ready market among the mercantile bourgeoisie for bullish depictions of the commercial developments which were boosting their own rise to prominence. For example, London’s industrialising breweries (including the world’s largest, Barclay and Perkins’s, which was a magnet for tourists) were celebrated in oil paintings, many of which were exhibited in the high-art spaces of the Royal Academy.25 It thus seems not accidental that the earliest London panorama, exhibited in two versions in 1791–6, was painted from the roof of the Albion Mills, which obtrudes with disconcerting prominence to occupy over one quarter of the painting itself (figure 5 is one of six aquatints which reproduce the 360-degree view), just as Thomas Girtin’s Eidometropolis (1802) was a panorama of London viewed from the top of the British Plate Glass Manufactory.26 Clearly, the new industrial buildings offered convenient vantage points (the Albion Mills at Blackfriars Bridge was the highest landmark between St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey), but their high profile was also ideological and technological: as the first building in the world to use rotary power from steam, the Albion Mills was ‘the prototype of the very large multi-storey London factory or warehouse’. As such it was indivisible from



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Figure 5 Robert Barker, London from the Roof of the Albion Mills (1792). © Guildhall Library, Corporation of London

entrepreneurial pride in the new technology – but, in its potential to render skilled trades obsolescent, also the focus of the kind of industrial conflict which Blake would record. It was also ‘widely considered to have a stranglehold on the price of bread’.27 Scarcely had the drawings for the panorama been completed, however, when these dark satanic mills were gutted on 2 March 1791 in a fire rumoured to have been started by arsonists, but more probably caused by the overheating of a machine. A contemporary cartoon depicts millers dancing on Blackfriars Bridge with gleeful Schadenfreude over the Mills’ untimely demise.28 Down below them was another side-effect of urban development which the complacent panorama overlooked: close by Blackfriars Bridge ‘the common sewers discharge themselves, and blacken the water round about’.29 Written accounts suggest some of the emotions and expectations associated with the panoramic overview. For Southey, to see the metropolis whole was to exult in imposing an imaginative order on what exceeds one’s perceptual grasp: I would have climbed St. Paul’s, if it had been only to see London thus mapped below me, and though there had been nothing beautiful or sublime in the view: few objects, however, are so sublime, if by sublimity we




12


In contrast to the ground-level perspective of strollers negotiating London’s maze of streets, panoramic ‘mapping’ rendered the metropolis intelligible, creating the illusion of mastery, but at the expense of reducing it to the eerie silence of a ghost town, or the chilling impersonality of a machine for living in.31 One should, however, be wary of imputing the desire of Londoners to obtain an overview of their sprawlingly disparate city solely to the pursuit of power (compare pp. 80–2). Recent critics who make this assumption should be aware that, in drawing consciously or unconsciously on French Situationist accounts of urbanism and psycho-geography, they are projecting these theorists’ perceptions of state control in the France of the 1960s onto the nineteenth century. In Foucauldian readings of the nineteenth century, it is axiomatic to link the panorama, in its purpose-built ‘roundhouse’, with another innovation of the 1790s, whose architectural similarity suggests its ideological congruence: the Panopticon advocated by Jeremy Bentham, and realised in modified form as Millbank Penitentiary. The implication is that both ‘scopic technologies’ were emblematic of an emergent disciplinary regime which sought to effect subjection through constant visibility. This view is rooted in an interpretation of ‘modernity’ as the pursuit of control through instrumental rationality. Eighteenth-century London did indeed witness the growth of administrative institutions devoted to the classification and systematisation of knowledge, notably the Excise, and of legislative interventions, such as the Westminster Paving and Lighting Acts.32 To these can be added the introduction of house-numbering, and of the Census in 1801, together with unprecedentedly detailed mapping, such as Richard Horwood’s 26 inch to 1 mile map, showing every house in the area between Islington, Limehouse, Kennington and Brompton. In the case of the Excise, there was a connection of the kind postulated by Foucauldians between the surveillance activities of the bureaucratic state apparatus and the exercise of power: tax revenue was crucial to the imperialist ambitions of the ‘fiscal-military’ state. In other instances, however, attributing such innovations solely to the consolidation of social control misrepresents the local contingencies in these tentative reforms and the trade-off which most citizens were willing to negotiate between limited infringements of liberty and privacy (accompanied, however, by increased accountability) and the benefits of greater safety and infrastructural efficiency.



understand that which completely fills the imagination to the utmost measure of its powers, as the view of a huge city thus seen at once: – house-roofs, the chimneys of which formed so many turrets; towers and steeples; the trees and gardens of the inns of court and the distant squares forming so many green spots in the map . . . Where the city ended it was impossible to distinguish it.30

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Despite the alarmist claims of a magistrates’ lobby ranging from Henry Fielding’s An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751) to Patrick Colquhoun’s influential A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, extended in seven editions between 1795 and 1807, there was no unequivocal or systematic drive towards the all-intrusive police state of modern anachronistic fantasies. On the contrary, despite frequent eruptions of popular protest, the Wilkite disturbances of the 1760s and 1770s, the terrifying Gordon Riots of 1780 and the radical and loyalist demonstrations of 1792–5, this notion met with entrenched resistance among parliamentarians rightly suspicious of absolutism, who chose to protect the constitutional rights of the ‘freeborn Englishman’ by refusing to create a standing police force associated with ‘French-style’ despotism.33 Likewise, in municipal government, commercial and rateholder lobbies ensured the continuing devolution of power to the City and to parish vestries. It is true that civil liberties were suspended during the Napoleonic Wars and in their immediate aftermath; intelligence was gathered by Home Office and Post Office spies. But although subterfuge and surveillance are dominant themes in London fiction from Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) to Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), the metropolis evoked by such novels is one of inscrutability and mystery rather than panoptic regulation. Only in London could the transgressive existence of a Dorian Gray or the double lives of the male characters in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde remain temporarily unobserved, or a Wakefield ‘step aside’ from the system, to live for twenty years in undiscovered proximity to the wife from whom he had impulsively absented himself.34 The belief that London’s citizens could be monitored effectively is one that would have amused contemporaries: despite the mass of statistical information that was gathered, the lack of centralised, coordinated planning hampered metropolitan government until the 1880s. London was characterised in this period less by panoptic control than laissez-faire and bureaucratic muddle.

Improving views The previous section has considered representations of the commercial ‘improvements’ of entrepreneurial capitalism. Here the focus is on topographical prints which, like the urban sketches in literary magazines, emphasised the city’s visual magnificence and were untroubled by dissonant elements. The theme is the connection between conspicuous consumption, the architectural facelift which Regency London was about to undergo, and the ideology of metropolitan ‘improvement’ which accompanied this and would be utilised in promoting, and cashing in on, the civic vision of the upwardly mobile. A key figure is the Tory Rudolph Ackermann, whose style-setting monthly Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions and Politics (1809–28), posted to subscribers at home and abroad, included fashion





plates and furniture designs that were later gathered into what we would now term coffee-table books. His serialised Microcosm of London (1808–10) provides the fullest record of the self-image which the polite classes cultivated of themselves and of their city.35 In 104 lithographs by Rowlandson and Augustus Charles Pugin, genteel viewers were led on a tour through all the key institutions of the City, the government and the judiciary, celebrating the sources of their prosperity and the foundations of their power. The artists’ use of interior views offered a glimpse behind the scenes but also the opportunity for vicarious participation in the decision-making, for example, in the boardroom of the Admiralty, in Lloyd’s Subscription Room or at the many courts in session. ‘London’ – here little more than the City and the City of Westminster – is at the same time presented as a centre of entertainment, culture and consumption. The attractions of art and other exhibitions, playhouses and the exclusive milieux of St. James’s (St. James’s Palace, Buckingham House, Brooks’s Club) vie with those of upmarket retailers, who provided a showcase for provincial manufacturers. St. James’s parish workhouse and Bridewell are included, not as a haunting reminder of poverty and crime but rather, like the images of Christ’s Hospital School, the Foundling Hospital and the women’s ward at Middlesex Hospital (popular on London outings because of the elevating sentiments they inspired), as a tribute to philanthropic foresight. The inclusion of popular venues such as Vauxhall, Bartholomew Fair and the Royal Cock Pit suggests an audience from the upper bourgeoisie, for in fashionable circles a backlash was setting in against the social promiscuousness that had reached its height in the 1790s. The trend towards greater exclusiveness was heralded by the closure of Ranelagh in 1803 and the raising of admission charges at Vauxhall in 1809 to 3s 6d and in 1821 to 4s 6d. A similar move at Covent Garden failed in 1809 when, following two months of ‘Old Price riots’, cheap seats were reinstated in the pit and gallery. By tacit understanding, London’s parks became stratified, Hyde Park as the afternoon preserve of the elite in their carriages, Kensington Gardens as the promenade of the middling sort.36 Reacting against the encroachment of ever-increasing numbers of newly rich, the beau monde moved to exclude undesirables: ‘By the 1820s and 1830s . . . many houses of great hostesses which [sic] were still fairly lax in defining social acceptability were only attended by men.’37 Hitherto in Georgian London the pattern of housing had been socially heterogeneous: ‘the garden squares and principal streets would be designed for the better sort of resident, the back streets for the middling sort, and the courts and mews for the lower orders, decently screened from view’.38 But now, pandering to the new exclusiveness, John Nash’s reshaping of central London confirmed a trend towards segregation that would gather force throughout the nineteenth century. His aims combined monarchical propaganda with the exploitation of a lucrative market. Since 1789 carefully orchestrated royal pageantry had



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enlisted patriotic sentiment to strengthen support for the monarchy and patrician order. Nash’s intended remodelling of the West End into a royal quarter, with the Regent Street Quadrant as a triumphal way linking Carlton House with the ‘picturesque’ garden suburb of Regent’s Park, marked the climax of such ideological manipulation through the display of royal splendour.39 At the same time, like most construction projects since the Great Fire, it was a commercial speculation. The beauty of Regent Street was not merely aesthetic: it would, Nash stressed, ‘be a boundary and complete separation between the Streets and Squares occupied by the Nobility and Gentry, and the narrow Streets and meaner Houses occupied by mechanics and the trading part of the community’.40 Since the 1660s prosperous families had been gravitating from the City to the ‘Town’. As a new demarcation of residential acceptability, Regent Street gave this social division definitive form, boosting West End property values by placing Soho firmly beyond the pale. The exclusivity Nash was selling to the ‘quality’ was also something which parvenus wanted to buy into, either directly or vicariously through merchandise which advertised its association with the self-congratulatory exuberance of the 1820s. Aristocratic landowners, who had profited from the Napoleonic Wars, were engaged in the lavish refurbishment of their town houses, matched in their extravagance by the Prince Regent’s rebuilding of Carlton House and, as George IV, of Buckingham Palace, by a massive state-building programme and by the golden age of Club building in the 1820s and 1830s.41 The new embellishments were commemorated in books of engraved prints, such as Thomas Hosmer Shepherd’s Metropolitan Improvements (1827–30) and London and its Environs in the Nineteenth Century (1829–31). 42 His principal subject is the architecture intended to substantiate James Elmes’s wish-fulfilling letterpress, which, omitting recent disturbances, presents London’s history as a complacent narrative of ‘progressive improvements’, culminating in ‘the popular regency and peaceful reign of our present king’.43 Elmes’s blatant propagandism has led critics to assert erroneously that Shepherd’s illustrations mark ‘a departure from an earlier “Enlightenment” approach to depicting the city’ where topographical views accommodated both elegant promenaders and ‘working members of the “lower” orders’. Topographical artists, it is held, ‘imagined the streets themselves as largely devoid of people, and certainly of the chaos – not to say anarchy – of the London scene’; in Shepherd’s work, a ‘striking “social” absence’ is ‘that of the urban crowd’.44 Correcting these influential misconceptions has important implications for how we should visualise Regency London. I will start with the received view that Shepherd’s streets are ‘largely devoid of people’. In fact, his images of the main thoroughfares (the Strand, Fleet Street, Ludgate Hill, Farringdon Street, Holborn, Cheapside, Cornhill, Leadenhall Street, Aldgate High Street) are as congested with carriages and shoppers as literary accounts lead one to expect (figure 6). Elsewhere, as in





Figure 6 Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, Ludgate Hill, from Fleet Street (1830). © Guildhall Library, Corporation of London

any city, the density of pedestrians and traffic varies according to location. Comparison of Shepherd’s streets with corresponding mid-nineteenthcentury photographs shows a massive increase in traffic (occasioned by omnibuses and freight haulage to and from railway stations), but only a moderate increase in pavement crowding, proportionate to the growth in population. This pattern continued into the 1880s.45 The belief that Shepherd – like the panorama – omits ‘the urban crowd’ drastically overestimates the physical presence of London’s population of 1,379,000 in 1821; although to contemporaries from the provinces (where in 1801 only nineteen towns had a population of over 20,000) the unrelieved congestion of street upon street of shops could indeed seem overwhelming. The second assertion is that Shepherd edited out unpalatable aspects of London and its Environs. In fact, his social topography is far more varied than is acknowledged, extending into inner suburbs such as Clerkenwell and to Chelsea and Southwark. In suggesting that ‘other areas of social life’ are omitted, recent critics commit the same error as their Victorian predecessors in overestimating the proportion of the very poorest (see pp. 60–1 below) who, rather than the bulk of the working classes, dominate their sensationalising accounts. Inevitably, given his book’s selective focus on the architecturally picturesque, Shepherd does not depict London’s rookeries. Nevertheless,



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as a matter of course, he regularly includes crossing sweepers and beggars as an integral part of the picture and, in one print, a gin shop. Far from being wilfully excluded from Shepherd’s illustrations, London’s labouring poor, who could not afford the time to saunter, were largely elsewhere: in the docks, in workshops and small factories, or at home as outworkers. By contrast, lower-class employees in the service sector who had occasion to be in central London – porters, packers, carriers, servants, nursemaids, milkmaids, milliners, shopworkers, street traders and entertainers, advertising men – are appropriately prominent in his evocation of a working city. The crucial point is that the orderly bustle in Shepherd’s views reflects not ideological distortion, as modern critics infer, but rather the complex reformation of manners that was becoming increasingly evident in public behaviour. The negotiation of civility had been most evident on London’s streets, where an etiquette of acceptable conduct, discouraging jostling, spitting and urinating, and proscribing excessive swearing and drunkenness, seems to have become customary during the eighteenth century.46 For decades the diffusion of ‘politeness’ had been associated with the refining influence of female sensibility and, later, of Evangelicalism. Lower down the social ranks, the artisan and lower-middle-class aspiration to self-improvement complemented Nonconformist inculcation of continence, temperance and frugality, fostering the work discipline required by capitalist production.47 By the later 1820s the result of this ‘civilising’ process was a gradual rejection of the libertine, misogynistic values common to plebeian workplace culture and Regency bucks.48 In William Heath’s print series Fashion and Folly (1822), for example, the rural baronet Lubin, like Jerry Hawthorn in Pierce Egan’s Life in London (1820–1), treads the obligatory round of amusements for a Regency ‘Corinthian’, which differed little from those of a Restoration rake: dandyish display, indulgence in flesh and horseflesh, gambling, drinking bouts and brawling with Charleys (night watchmen).49 But whereas this laddishness leaves Lubin bankrupt in the Fleet Prison, Egan’s protagonist abandons low life for Somerset, where in Egan’s sequel (published in 1828) he has left rakishness behind and become a paragon of the reformed rural gentry. Architecturally and morally ‘improved’ London made excellent publicity not just for civic apologists but also for tradesmen. Nash’s developments repeatedly served as a backcloth to grace the topographical fashion plates directed at nouveaux riches from the mid-1820s until the late 1840s by the Bloomsbury tailor-printmaker Benjamin Read. As in Ackermann’s Repository, what was being promoted in Read’s astute advertising was a designer lifestyle. I mentioned earlier the publicity campaigns of the Hanoverian monarchy. The post-war triumphalism evident in new monuments such as Marble Arch and the much lampooned Achilles statue of Wellington in Hyde Park continued into the early Victorian period with the completion of Trafalgar





Figure 7 Anon., View (of) Carlton Terrace near the York Pillar, London. Winter Fashions for 1837 and 38 (1838). Published by B. Read and H. Bodman. © Guildhall Library, Corporation of London

Square and Nelson’s Column. Read’s marketing strategy utilised this vogue for patriotism by including images of the Household Cavalry and of Marble Arch and the newly refurbished Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle; in several prints Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and the Duke of Wellington are depicted riding past his fashion models, as if to endorse his products. In this example (figure 7), the royals are brought into the picture indirectly, as the upper-class strollers are posed against the Duke of York’s Column (1831–2) in Waterloo Place. The middle ground is traversed by Pall Mall, on which are prominently depicted the first public gas lighting installed in London (from 1807) and some of the new wave of gentlemen’s clubs – on the left the United Services Club, on the right the Athenaeum (1829–30). By 1837, the year of this fashion plate, however, Read’s Regency style was as obsolescent as the vision of metropolitan chic on which he sought to capitalise. The post-war construction bubble had burst in 1825, followed by a severe depression lasting until 1836, and in building until the late 1840s, which shook the confidence of London’s propertied classes.50 It is significant that the most representative books of topographical prints were products of the late 1820s, with a final flourish in Thomas Shotter Boys’s Original Views



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of London As It Is (1842) and in books celebrating the Great Exhibition. They waned together with the civic optimism that had been apparent in the remodelled West End and in entrepreneurial faith in the limitless possibilities of commercial and industrial progress. After this period, as I explain in Chapter 5, the marketability of views of London would noticeably decline.


2

This second chapter on late Georgian London is concerned with gender relations in a society increasingly shaped by market forces. Throughout the book my analysis of London’s patriarchal culture encompasses three interconnected aspects: male fantasies about women; the constructions of femininity which both reflected women’s social situation and sought to shape it proactively; and the mobility and (in)dependence of women of the bourgeoisie. Within this framework, this chapter begins by discussing Blake. My provocative aim is to broaden historiographical discussion of gender in this period beyond its recent concentration on ‘polite’ discourses. Blake’s visions of London are important for their suggestive psychological insights into ‘hegemonic masculinity’ and, in their account of the demoralisation of semi-skilled outworkers, as a corrective to the complacency of genteel consumers. I then examine the interaction between men and women on London’s streets, arguing that, in addition to socioeconomic factors, consideration of childrearing practices can illuminate the fantasies which influenced male behaviour. Finally, I consider the position of polite women as beneficiaries of the public culture created by commercialised leisure but as simultaneously constrained by the marriage market, by longstanding discrimination, and by ideological opposition to their unprecedented public visibility.

Urizen: or, petrified man Although he attracted disciples in the 1820s, Blake remained a marginal figure. After bourgeois opinion had swung in the mid-1790s towards an entrenched conservatism, his radicalism was unpalatable; his ‘enthusiastic’ style had also little appeal for radical Dissenting intellectuals. His illuminated books, paintings and prints appeared quaint beside the classicism of Fuseli and Flaxman, which was favoured by sophisticated Enlightenment taste; despite exhibiting intermittently at the Royal Academy until 1808, he seems to have sold nothing there after 1785.1 As an artisan engraver, he aspired to the dignified status of an artist and accordingly directed his efforts towards 20



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radicalising the high-art tradition. But in the end he failed to gain acceptance in the public culture of art, while his fruitless desire to transform that culture isolated him from the lower-class audience that would have understood his ‘enthusiastic’ rhetoric, rooted in counter-Enlightenment millenarianism and permeated with the inspired bibliolatry of plebeian and tradesman Dissent.2 He deserves our attention, however, as he developed through the Urizen/ Albion myth a wide-ranging critique of the patriarchal mentality which, significantly, coexists with gynophobic fantasies. His earliest representations of London sought to demystify the indoctrination which persuaded the labouring poor to identify with the system which oppressed them. For, as Godwin argued, ‘One part indeed of a community or empire may be held in subjection by force; but this cannot be the personal force of their despot; it must be the force of another part of the community, who are of opinion that it is their interest to support his authority. Destroy this opinion, and the fabric which is built upon it falls to the ground.’3 The increasingly harsh, profit-oriented regime which Blake had observed in the charity schools of his own parish led him to increasingly explicit attacks on Pharisaism.4 The results of the Church’s sexual repressiveness provoked his antinomian indignation.5 His main concern, however, was the connection of social control with ‘priestcraft’ and ‘State Religion’, ‘the source of all Cruelty’.6 The first stage in Blake’s undermining of ‘the primeval priest’s assumed power’ (U, 2) is the genealogy of morals in MHH, 11. This anti-clerical subversion is then developed in his Lambeth books, where his Dissenting ‘Bible of Hell’ (MHH, 291) starts with a parody of The First Book of Moses, called Genesis: The First Book of Urizen (1794). Its origins can be traced to Blake’s millenarian poem ‘London’ (c. 1791–4) (figure 8), whose speaker is, I propose, one of the figures depicted: the bowed patriarch who will come to be known as Urizen. The ‘marks’ on the faces in the crowd are the ‘mark’ of the ‘beast’ (Antichrist) of Revelation, without which ‘no man might buy or sell’, and thus tokens of the last days of this commercial Babylon, where the chimney sweeper is sold by his parents and the ‘hapless soldier’ is hired for the King’s shilling that was also the going rate for the cheapest ‘youthful harlot’.7 Unlike Francis Wheatley’s picturesque Cries of London (RA 1792–5, subsequently sold as engravings), Blake reproduces cries of fear, weeping, curses, sighs. The psycho-history of this regime of misery is the topic of Urizen, which marks the transition from Blake’s early critiques of ideology to more intuitive analysis of the Fall of mankind and hence the origins of patriarchal repression.8 Its rewriting of Genesis begins by parodying the notion of the geometrical creation of the universe which Blake had encountered in Paradise Lost and visualised in his frontispiece to Europe (1794), ‘The Ancient of Days’ and print of Newton (1795).9 Before Urizen’s intervention the universe is a single, organic being through which energies pulse in a rhythmic systole and diastole (U, 36–8). But, feeling threatened by what (like Genesis and Milton) Urizen regards as ‘A void immense, wild, dark and deep,/Where nothing was’ – but



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Figure 8 William Blake, London. Copy C, 1789, 1794. © Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC


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which is in fact ‘nature’s wide womb’ (U, 60–1) – he tries to create an environment that he can entirely control, setting boundaries by dividing space with his compasses. In historical context, Urizen represents the Enlightenment faith that rational enquiry would lead to the discovery of scientific laws, enabling Man to master the fickle vagaries of a feminized ‘Nature’ (U, 400–10; FZ, VI, 226–33). But Urizen can also be read as an allegory about the ambivalence of the male pursuit of autonomous selfhood (compare pp. 39–41). Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Blake criticises the sterility of masculine ‘conceptions’. Urizen’s ‘Brooding’ (parodying that of the spirit of God in Genesis and Milton) and ‘enormous labours’ are a ‘self-contemplating’ act, in which he wilfully severs himself from the sustaining energies of the universe, creating the very ‘void’ he had earlier feared (U, 1–25). The symbiotic unity of the macrocosm is sundered and it collapses into ‘ruinous fragments of life’ (U, 96–104). Hitherto, one assumes, the ‘Eternals’ have formed one single spiritual being with no corporeal forms. Now, through his ‘wrenching apart’ (U, 147) Urizen is ‘rent from Eternity’ (U, 142) and becomes ‘a clod of clay’ (U, 144). As in Genesis 2, where Yahweh moulds the adamah or ‘red clay’ into adam (mankind), so, in an act of damage limitation, Los gives form to Urizen in a second male process of self-fashioning that is simultaneously a restriction and diminishment (U, 121–275). Both comic and pitiable in his paranoia and his unyielding dogmatism, Urizen creates an elaborate catalogue of laws (U, 75–84), like the jealous skygod of the Old Testament (‘Nobodaddy’ as Blake calls this patriarchal tyrant), who punishes his creation for their inability to keep his commandments (U, 443–6).10 But it is his self-control that creates his ‘sinful’ desires and, by writing laws to curb the sins he attributes to others, his restrictions themselves bring these sins into being (U, 85–95). His Original Sin of ‘Self-closed’ withdrawal has created a claustrophobic world, effectively a prison, in which each form of repression replicates itself. The title-page (figure 9) shows this graphically: Urizen’s tablets of Law force him to adopt a hunched, involuted posture, which is echoed in the gravestones on which he leans and the overarching weeping willow (the ‘Tree of Mystery’), which, in its leaflessness, completes the sterile circle. He looks frozen, huddled up for warmth. His monumental composure belies his insecurity; he is petrified by the fear of losing control. Within this geometric design, as if circumscribed by compasses, the only organic element is his flowing beard, suggesting the tears he has stored up in his self-imposed misery, but which his wilfully closed eyes prevent from escaping. This ambivalence is the crucial aspect of Urizen’s personality as the representative patriarch, who, having set in motion an oppressive system which demands ever more strenuous efforts to maintain, enslaves both himself and those for whom he claims responsibility. The implications of this situation are highlighted in several versions of the myth. Intrapsychically, in the allegorical terms of the Four Zoas, Urizen



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Figure 9 William Blake, Title page of Copy G of The Book of Urizen. © Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC

(reason) tries to repress passion (Luvah), which inevitably returns in the explosive guise of Orc. Politically, the patriarchal tyrant also cannot rest secure: in a recurrent cycle, Urizen fears usurpation by the Promethean Orc, or by his Oedipal rival, Fuzon.11 Society as a whole also suffers from Urizen’s


Figure 10

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William Blake, The House of Death (1795). © Tate, London 2003

repressive measures. Having cursed all his race, ‘for he saw / That no flesh nor spirit could keep / His iron laws one moment’ (U, 442–6), as in ‘London’ Urizen explores his dens, i.e. the alienated, deathly world he has brought into being (U, 447 ff) (figure 10): Oft he stood by a howling victim, questioning in words Soothing or furious; no one answered, everyone wrapped up In his own sorrow howled regardless of his words . . . He knew they were his children, ruined in his ruined world. . . . He could not take their fetters off, for they grew from the soul, Nor could he quench the fires, for they flamed out from the heart, Nor could he calm the elements because himself was subject. So he threw his flight in terror & pain & in repentant tears. (FZ, VI, 72–153) In all versions of the Urizen myth what then happens is crucial: Urizen is followed by a ‘cold shadow’ (his spectre) which develops into a spider’s web that comes to span the world: So twisted the cords, and so knotted The meshes, twisted like to the human brain. And all called it The Net of Religion. (U, 452–69; FZ, VI, 234–57)



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In Four Zoas this then takes root as the ‘Tree of Mystery’, whose ramifications Blake had explored in the Songs of Experience and would develop at length in Jerusalem.12 In Blake’s early versions of this, Urizen is usually the object of a debunking mockery: the design for ‘The Human Abstract’, echoed in that for plate 27 of Urizen, depicts the neurotic law-giver beneath the Tree of Mystery, ensnared in the toils of his own ‘Net of Religion’. Another view is, however, suggested in the illustration to ‘London’ (figure 8), which appears in reverse on plate 84 of Jerusalem: ‘I see London blind & age-bent begging through the streets / Of Babylon, led by a child: his tears run down his beard’. As Urizen explores his dens, Blake suggests the weakness behind the patriarch’s bluff of omnipotence, implying his remorse for what he has inadvertently brought about, and his bewilderment as to how to start to make restitution (FZ, VI, 87–153). The image, at odds with the radical condemnation of Blake’s early texts and with Urizen’s subsequent steeling himself against his own emotions, foreshadows the emphasis on forgiveness in Jerusalem, where the fallen Albion is redeemed by the Divine Mercy.13

Jerusalem or Babylon? The fields from Islington to Marybone, To Primrose Hill and Saint John’s Wood, Were builded over with pillars of gold, And there Jerusalem’s pillars stood. (J, 27. 19–22) In Jerusalem the Urizen myth is adapted to the inner division of Albion, who is dominated by his vampirish ‘reasoning spectre’ which stands between him and his ‘immortal imagination’: O human imagination! O divine body I have crucified, I have turned my back upon thee into the wastes of moral law. There Babylon is builded in the waste, founded in human desolation.14 But the terminology has changed: this psychomachia, repeated anew in every generation and every individual, is now an apocalyptic Heilsgeschichte which, in imagining the restoration of wholeness to a divided self and a divisive society, offers its own version of metropolitan ‘improvement’. The imaginative roots of Blake and many of his class lay in the Dissenting tradition of millenarianism, in which England had come to be equated with a second Israel (‘Israelism’) or regarded as the instigator of the return to Palestine of the lost Tribes of Israel, whose restoration and conversion to Christianity would herald the Second Coming.15 From this ‘Israelist’ tradition and the recent theories of speculative mythologists Blake drew the belief that



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prior to the Fall Britain and the Holy Land were identical.16 But although Jerusalem had once been ‘builded here / Among these dark Satanic mills’ (M, 1. 21–8), Blake experienced Georgian London as Babylon in view of its commercialism, its warmongering and its repressive legislation, and because of his own experience, after 1795, of internal exile. Babylonian London has a dual existence: as the embodiment in social practice of Urizenic ‘moral law’ and as the inner landscape of despairing resignation which Londoners inhabit. Conversely, however, the New Jerusalem which exists in potential can already be glimpsed as a contrary state of the human soul, if readers are but willing to venture an imaginative leap of faith. Blake’s bifocal vision thus alternates disconcertingly between topographical details and their symbolic counterparts in the drama of mankind’s redemption. The lyric on plate 27 (from which the epigraph to this section is taken) illustrates this well. It begins by recalling a pastoral, prelapsarian idyll among the meadows of north-west London, with its rural retreats and pleasure grounds. This is then contrasted with the cycles of oppression resulting from Albion’s Fall: druid sacrifices at London Stone, executions at Tyburn and the bloody wars with Napoleon. Opposing this, with signs of hope, is the ceaseless striving to build a different kind of city: What are those golden builders doing Near mournful ever-weeping Paddington, Standing above that mighty ruin Where Satan the first victory won, Where Albion slept beneath the fatal tree (J, 27. 43–7; cf. 12. 25–44) Blake’s syncretic imagination draws together the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in Eden, where the serpent won his ‘first victory’; and his own version of this, Nobodaddy’s Tree of Mystery, ‘the fatal tree’ of Moral Law, expressed in England’s savage penal code with its ‘fatal tree’, the gallows which, until 1783, stood at Tyburn, at Marble Arch overlooking Paddington (cf. J, 28). But although Satan won ‘the first victory’, Christ’s self-sacrifice on the ‘fatal tree’ at Golgotha foreshadows the end of Albion’s Moral Law and thus the millenarian final victory. The ‘golden builders’ are also both literal and symbolic. In 1795 the Paddington Estate Act had enabled leasehold construction on the estate and, between 1807 and 1815, Connaught Place was built. In 1801 a new section of the Grand Junction Canal was opened, creating a direct trade link between Brentford and the Paddington Basin, and welcome employment for the shanty-dwellers of Tomlin’s Town, which had sprung up in the 1790s in the south-east corner of Paddington. On the same ground in the 1820s the construction of Tyburnia (now the Hyde Park estate) would begin.17 These



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outward signs of urban regeneration near the former site of the ‘fatal tree’ correspond to the struggle of the prophet-artist Blake/Los to preserve and communicate a vision of the essential divinity of all humans (J, 34, 91; MHH, 23). A passage in propria persona evokes Blake writing ‘in South Molton Street, what I both see and hear / In regions of humanity, in London’s opening streets’ (34. 29–43). The chartered streets are ‘opening’ in an imaginative expansion that locates the possibility of redemption in the very heart of London’s Babylonian city of death.18 For just down Oxford Street from the former site of Tyburn, England’s ‘Golgotha’, in his workshop in South Molton Street Blake builds a clandestine city of art, ‘Golgonooza’, invisible to the surveillance of ‘Satan’s watch-fiends’, or government spies. It is a reminder that ‘God is within & without; he is even in the depths of hell’.19 Two forms of collective labour take place in Golgonooza. On the looms of Cathedron, Enitharmon and the daughters of Los weave a physical body for humans reduced to insubstantial spectres (J, 59. 26–38); in Los’s furnaces they are imaginatively transformed (FZ, VIII, 29–37, 174–81). The ‘spectres’ are, in Blake’s allegory, fragmented personalities who are effectively zombies (M, 40. 30 ff.; J, 10. 7–16, 54. 1–8). The point is clearer in the earlier Four Zoas, where we see how, in the mere struggle to survive under Urizen’s oppressive regime/Pitt’s Napoleonic war machine, labourers have dwindled into selfabsorbed apathy: First trades & commerce, ships & armed vessels he builded laborious, To swim the deep; & on the land children are sold to trades Of dire necessity, still labouring day & night; till all Their life extinct, they took the spectre form in dark despair (FZ, VIIb, 11–14) Significantly, the hope of redemption is located among the looms of Cathedron. Blake knew at first-hand the atrocious conditions in the weaving industry: in the Royal Asylum for Female Orphans near his former home in Lambeth (M, 26. 48–50) and among the silk-weavers of Spitalfields. Their predicament was symptomatic of the deteriorating conditions of London’s semi-skilled workforce in general.20 For decades the pattern in many trades had been for artisans to carry out skilled tasks and divide the rest of the production process into piece-work which they subcontracted to domestic outworkers. After Waterloo their situation became more precarious. A fall in bread prices released more money for consumption, creating a mass market in standardised articles such as clothing, footwear and furniture. This was supplied by provincial manufacturers whose lower labour costs enabled them to undercut their London competitors. To survive, London’s non-luxury trades were driven to move downmarket, diluting craft skills in an even more extreme division of labour which exploited women and children at subsistence rates.



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Being home-based, silk-weaving was particularly vulnerable, unlike trades whose shopfloor organisation or houses of call enabled some unionised resistance. By 1818, wages for the more skilled journeymen had fallen from those of carpenters and bricklayers to those of labourers.21 Conversely, although work in family units depressed wages, the fact that male handloom weavers had always required the subsidiary labour of women and children gave them a sense of gender solidarity that distinguished them from artisans in other crafts who, in bonding together to exclude the unapprenticed, particularly targeted single women. In this, I believe, lies the symbolic importance of weaving in Jerusalem. For while other artisans mounted an embittered resistance against the female interlopers who were undercutting their wages, Spitalfields journeymen adopted instead a strategy of cooperation. In 1802 Samuel Sholl formed a United Benefit Society for silk workers, incorporating men, women and children; organised weavers lobbied successfully for the Spitalfields Act of 1812, which allowed women to complete apprenticeships and be paid the same as journeymen. The system remained a patriarchal one but, unlike other artisan trades, placed communal solidarity before the bachelor lifestyle and values of journeymen’s workplace culture.22 Blake suggests that, in the face of the threat to their livelihood by capitalist competition, male and female workers must make common cause. Hence, on the one hand, the daughters of Los weave to clothe the ‘spectres’ in the physical form they have lost, that is, to console the male artisans for the loss of status and the prerogative of skill with which they had identified their masculinity. On the other hand, the men must welcome and value the women’s cooperation on equal terms. To express this in the allegorical terms of Jerusalem: in each fragmented personality, and in mankind (‘Albion’) as a whole, the divided elements of the fallen self must be brought back into equilibrium. The masculine ‘spectre’ of domineering selfinterest (‘the reasoning power in every man’, J, 54) must be reunited with the feminine ‘emanation’ (‘Jerusalem’, ‘Enitharmon’) of benevolence and solidarity. This gender ‘combination’ within working families serves as a symbolic model of resistance to divisive working practices. Within six years of the publication of Jerusalem, however, the repeal of wage-fixing and the lifting of the ban on French imports had reduced Spitalfields’ silk-weavers to penury. Jerusalem’s millenarian vision of relationships founded on mutual respect is, however, clouded by gynophobic fantasies which conflict with Blake’s criticism of patriarchy, even as, paradoxically, they demonstrate its validity.23 Albion’s rejection of his ‘emanation’ Jerusalem leads to his domination by his masculine ‘Spectre’; this then brings about the corresponding Fall of Jerusalem, who is subsequently dominated by the feminine ‘Shadow’ ‘Vala, builded by the reasoning power in man’ ( J, 39. 38–40, 53. 25–6). The narrative of patriarchal tyranny in Urizen is thus complemented in FZ, VIII



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and the later part of Jerusalem by a focus on the evil and deceit of Vala’s avatars Tirzah and Rahab, who symbolise both Mother Nature and, idiosyncratically, ‘Natural Religion’ (Deism), in that both deny ‘God & eternal life’.24 The female stratagems depicted by Blake – and by Mary Wollstonecraft in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) – are defences that have evolved to compensate for women’s vulnerability under patriarchy.25 Nevertheless, the extraordinary physical and emotional cruelty of the Daughters of Albion goes beyond this sociopolitical context, voicing nightmarish fears of female domination: tantalising seductiveness followed by frigid rejection leads to male sexual frustration and thus, supposedly, militaristic aggression; castration anxieties pervade the episodes in which men are flayed or, like Samson, shorn (J, 58. 1–12, 66–70, and design on 69). These domineering ‘Tormentors & Punishers’ are the antithesis to Enitharmon, the helpmeet and muse of Blake/Los’s sublime, phallic Imagination, who epitomises women’s proper role as ‘the pathos’, ‘the comforters of men’ (J, 72, mirror writing; 90. 1–13). Enitharmon’s regenerative weaving in Cathedron is contrasted with the sinister weaving of Vala, Tirzah and Rahab which, through parturition, binds man ‘upon the stems of vegetation’, trapping him in ‘the dark satanic body’ (FZ, VIII, 174–328). Blake can be claimed to be voicing a Neoplatonic or Gnostic hostility to the imprisonment of the soul in a physical incarnation, and a desire to transcend the material world consonant with aspects of Christian thought ( J, 77. 13–16, 56. 5–17, 90. 34–43). But this doctrinal rejection of ‘maternal humanity [which] must be put off eternally’ ( J, 90. 36) is indivisible from the fear which Urizen earlier expressed of ‘nature’s wide womb’ (U, 61) and hence of the power of the pre-Oedipal mother. Los exclaims: ‘But what may woman be / To have power over man from cradle to corruptible grave?’ (J, 30. 25–6); his dread is apparently justified by Vala’s triumphant taunt: ‘O woman-born / And woman-nourished & woman-educated & woman-scorned!’ ( J, 64. 16–17). The overarching Tree of Mystery (figure 9), which was earlier the symbolic outgrowth of Albion/ Urizen’s Moral Law, is reimagined in the design for J, 25 as the human body itself, whose fibrous veins and integuments are woven by Mother Nature. Like the Greek Fates, Rahab, Vala and Tirzah spin and measure Albion’s umbilical cord in an act of generation that is simultaneously a disembowelling, which will force him to lose his vestiges of the Divine Vision, symbolised by the sun, moon and stars on his body (J, 30. 20–1). This dualistic view of women can be paralleled by other unresolved contradictions in Blake’s textual palimpsests. But the fact that his vision of the reintegration of anima and animus in the self and in social practice coexists with an instinctual gynophobia emphasises how much male attitudes to women are influenced not just by the ‘mind-forged manacles’ of ideology but also by unconscious fantasy. This is also a theme of the following section.



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In 1763 Boswell remarked that ‘ladies’ in London ‘have not the same advantages of indulging passion and whim and curiosity that men have’.26 The final section of this chapter will qualify his statement. Nevertheless, as far as the public arena of the streets was concerned, his observation would hold until at least the 1850s.27 For although, through their charitable works, middle-class women might encounter a greater range of social classes than middle-class men, propriety required that on public outings an unmarried woman be accompanied by a female companion or a male escort. Workingclass women walked alone, as, by necessity, did governesses, reflecting the gap between their genteel pretensions and their social standing. But while a man could merge into the crowd, an unaccompanied woman of whatever class remained conspicuous, inevitably attracting attention, however unwelcome this might be. If a genteel woman chose to cross this conventional threshold of respectability, it was in the knowledge that she risked exposing herself to verbal or physical harassment, albeit less drastic than that meted out to control the freedom of plebeian women.28 At worst, as modern criticism has overemphasised, she might find herself in another moral category altogether: that in which the female counterparts to the male ‘peripatetic’ or ‘walker of the streets’ were ‘those female peripatetics who are technically called streetwalkers’.29 The likelihood of a ‘polite’ woman being accosted was, however, probably lower on the street than at some fashionable venues, where ‘polite’ men posed the risk (see pp. 41–2). Instead, given the deterrent effect of the class markers of her attire, the realistic hazard was of running a gauntlet of appraising leers, so that a significant – but historiographically underestimated – factor facilitating women’s mobility was surely the gradual ‘improvement’ in street behaviour (see p. 17). Steering clear of obvious no-go areas, genteel women in Georgian London shopped in the afternoon in the City or in the Strand, but would have avoided this area after dark when the evening ‘trade’ encompassed prostitution. What might go on during the day is suggested by Gillray’s etching ‘A Corner, near the Bank; – or – An Example for Fathers’ (1797) (figure 11). One genteel young woman lifts her skirt to expose her calf; both are flirting with an old roué, who carries in his pocket a presumably pornographic volume entitled ‘Modest Prints’. Gillray’s disingenuous exemplum itself panders to erotic fantasy. Its interest lies in implying that women were not always passive victims of ‘the male gaze’. Instead, in the relative anonymity of the crowd, they themselves could participate in the noncommittal role-playing that characterised London’s street culture. Later, in the fraught debates of the 1860s and 1880s about women in the West End, it was partly this which alarmed conservatives. In the fantasy of the male stroller, London, with its ‘endless succession of Shops, where Fancy (miscalled Folly) is supplied with perpetual new gauds &



Streetwalking: reality and fantasy


Figure 11 James Gillray, A Corner, near the Bank; – or – An Example for Fathers (1797). © Guildhall Library, Corporation of London

toys’, was a place where ‘every appetite [was] supplied with its proper food’.30 In literary accounts, references to whores are integrated seamlessly and incidentally into the bill of fare. Compare, for example, Byron’s description of Don Juan’s arrival outside his hotel in St James’s: From whence poured forth a tribe of well-clad waiters; While on the pavement many a hungry whore, With which this moralest of cities caters For gentlemen whose passions may boil oer, Stood31 The whores, ‘hungry’ for trade but also near starvation, commodify themselves into exchange-values just along the street from ‘St James’s hells’, the gambling houses, where the money of the wealthy also changed hands, and from St. James’s Park, where the most desperate of London’s prostitutes plied for custom.32 Among such oral fantasies, Lamb’s imagination of the bliss provided by mother London is the most outspoken: ‘Where has Spleen her food but in London? – humour, interest, curiosity, suck at her measureless breasts without a possibility of being satiated. Nursed amid her noise, her crowds, her beloved smoke, what have I been doing all my life, if I have not lent out my heart with usury to such scenes?’33 The final metaphor introduces



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a different element, however, drawing attention to London’s cash nexus. To Lamb, the London streets were ‘a pantomime and a masquerade’ which ‘feed me without a power of satiating me’.34 In this commercial emporium, which thrived on the fashionable stimulation and ceaseless reinvention of imaginary needs, men and women aroused by the wares on show could indulge daydreams of financial or sexual potency and fantasise about taking possession of what they desired. But although temporarily they might misidentify with this grandiose self-image, consumer capitalism’s ‘masquerade’ of illusions would ultimately melt into air, leaving them unsatiated by commodities which (in Lamb’s words below) were ‘Eye-pampering, but satisf[ied] no heart’. The young Boswell had tried to dramatise himself as a Restoration rake. Similarly, Lamb adopted the literary pose of a libertine to evoke the temptations of Georgian London’s principal shopping and red-light district: Just as important to me (in a sense) is all the furniture of my world. Eyepampering, but satisfys no heart. Streets, streets, streets, markets, theatres, churches, Covent Gardens, Shops sparkling with pretty faces of industrious milliners, neat sempstresses, Ladies cheapening, Gentlemen behind counters lying . . . Lamps lit at night, Pastry cook & Silver smith shops, Beautiful Quakers of Pentonville, noise of coaches, drousy cry of mechanic watchmen at night, with Bucks reeling home drunk if you happen to wake at midnight, cries of fire & stop thief, Inns of court . . . old Book stalls . . . These are thy Pleasures O London with-the-many-sins – O City abounding in whores [!]35 He is recalling the flirtations with filles de chambre and grisettes that readers of Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey found so titillating.36 In prints such as ‘The Rival Milleners’, after J. Collet (c. 1770), London’s ‘industrious milliners’ and ‘neat sempstresses’ were depicted flirting with polite male customers.37 They were considered fair game by roving males and, given their low rates of pay, may indeed have resorted to occasional prostitution. (E.C. Barnes’s The Seducer (c. 1860), depicting a milliner with her hatbox, and the similar ogling of milliner by stroller in Charles Hunt’s A Coffee Stall (1881) indicate that by the mid-nineteenth century nothing of this had changed.) 38 Unaccompanied lower-class women in general on the streets were fantasised as sexually available, as in Gillray’s salacious reworking of the ‘Cries of London’ genre, ‘Sandwich Carrots, dainty Sandwich Carrots’ (figure 12). Since Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress, the country girl who, arriving in London, is inveigled by a bawd into prostitution was a standard topos. In this case, the approach comes from a rake, John Montagu, fifth Earl of Sandwich, following in the footsteps of his notoriously dissolute father. The street seller’s apparent reciprocation of his interest connects this image to the flourishing trade in sex guides for the ‘Ranger’ or ‘Rambler’, some of which are displayed in the bookseller’s window: ‘The Beauties of Bond Street’, ‘A List of Servant Maids’, recalling Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies: Or, Man of Pleasure’s Kalendar (1786).39



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Figure 12 James Gillray, Sandwich Carrots, dainty Sandwich Carrots (1796). © Guildhall Library, Corporation of London

In the mindset of Georgian males, the crucial moral distinction was between this public milieu and the sacrosanct suburban idyll of ‘Beautiful Quakers of Pentonville’. Lamb’s phrase alludes to Hester Savory, whom he adored without ever speaking to her. In ideological terms, she was a being from another sphere. But in fact she had more in common with her disreputable counterparts than genteel men and women felt comfortable in admitting. What linked them was their position within patriarchal capitalism as commodities with an exchange-value. Boswell illuminates the ambivalent position of Georgian women within this system of male purchasing power. Although he was conscious of being dependent on an allowance from his father, he had no sympathy with the economic dependency of the women whom he patronized physically and morally. A mercenary marriage aroused in him a self-righteous disgust: Her marrying him was just to support herself and her sisters; and yet to a woman of delicacy, poverty is better than sacrificing her person to a greasy, rotten, nauseous carcass and a narrow vulgar soul. Surely she who does that cannot properly be called a woman of virtue. She certainly wants feeling who can submit to the loathed embraces of a monster. She



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If he ever reflected that the prostitutes whom he hired out were themselves driven to ‘loathed embraces’ to ‘support’ themselves, he rationalised this by dismissing them as plebeian women with none of the genteel pretensions of the ‘defiled’ wife he describes. His comments expose the tenuous distinction between prostitution and the ‘respectable’ marriage market. The strict requirement of premarital chastity in women of the upper ranks and the middling sort had economic as well as moral grounds: a woman’s exchange-value as the vehicle for the transfer of male property, status and connections depended on her virtue remaining intact (see p. 207). A double standard freed their unmarried male counterparts from this restriction; indeed, for many, sexual initiation with a prostitute was a rite of passage into manhood. This entailed a caste differentiation between artificially asexual ‘pure’ women and ‘impures’, onto whom was projected responsibility for the desires which ‘civilised’ men repressed in themselves, or whose gratification they consciously deferred. Thus, Boswell follows every instance of backsliding into ‘low street debauchery’ by recriminations against the prostitutes involved: a ‘little profligate wretch’ or ‘a low, abandoned, perjured, pilfering creature’. The inability to reconcile these apparently conflicting aspects of womanhood was, I argue below, exacerbated by childrearing practices. But it persisted also because to concede any similarity between the ‘pure’ and the ‘impure’ would draw into the open the exploitative subordination of all women. The unpalatable truth, confronted with ever bolder explicitness as the nineteenth century wore on, was that in London almost all women were forced to sell themselves to men. What, indeed, was the London ‘Season’ other than ‘the Smithfield Show / Of vestals brought into the marriage mart’?41 The dissociation, and ideological effort, involved in sustaining the spurious distinction between the good and the bad woman are evident in the attitudes to ‘fallen’ women in Book VII of Wordsworth’s Prelude. In one of his characteristically unpopulated street scenes, his persona remarks: The feeble salutation from the voice Of some unhappy woman now and then Heard as we pass, when no one looks about, Nothing is listened to.42 What is significant is what does not happen here. Wordsworth’s early poetry is pervaded with episodes in which the pedestrian pauses to learn a moral lesson from a solitary figure. But here no interaction takes place, enabling him to preserve the stereotypical beliefs about prostitutes that he had



appears to me unclean: as I said to Miss Dempster, like a dirty table-cloth. I am sure no man can have the gentle passion of love for so defiled a person as hers – O my stomach rises at it!40


presumably absorbed from sentimental literature and advances when his underlying anxieties about sexuality emerge in Book VII, 347–435.43 There his description of entertainments at Sadler’s Wells is interrupted by the story of Mary of Buttermere. We might ponder on the associations which make Mary so abruptly and anachronistically thrust herself into his consciousness. It is worth pausing to tease out the tangled chronological layers. Wordsworth is writing about a visit to Sadler’s Wells in 1791. Inset into this narrative are three compulsive digressions involving ‘fallen’ or ‘falsely gay’ women.44 The first is sparked off by the recollection of a melodrama, Edward and Susan, or The Beauty of Buttermere, performed at Sadler’s Wells in April–June 1803. This was based on the predicament of Mary Robinson, who in October 1802 had been tricked into a bigamous marriage. In the same month Wordsworth had married Mary Hutchinson. Earlier in 1802 Wordsworth had passed through London, en route to Calais to discuss legal and financial arrangements with his former lover, Annette Vallon, who had expected to marry him and with whom he had a daughter, by then aged nine and a half.45 Their reunion, after eight or nine years, cannot have been an easy one and it must have been difficult for Wordsworth to avoid selfreproach.46 My conjecture is that he sensed a parallel between the ruined maid of Buttermere and the ruined maid of Blois and that, at however unconscious a level, in his marriage of October 1802 he felt himself (like Mary Robinson’s seducer) to be something of a bigamist. This is of course guesswork, but then Annette Vallon is a figure who is strikingly absent from Wordsworth’s official life history in The Prelude, save in another displaced, obliquely autobiographical narrative, excised from the 1850 text: that of Vaudracour and Julia. I would therefore read the disturbed memories that break into this Sadler’s Wells section as Wordsworth’s exploration not merely of his own loss of childhood innocence and sexual initiation, but also as a furtive acknowledgement of his complicity in the fate of a ‘fallen’ woman. But although initially his narrative indicts Mary Robinson’s male seducer, with an indignation into which all of Wordsworth’s sense of guilt is self-righteously projected, the subsequent memories contrive to shift responsibility onto the female. For the self-image with which the male narrator identifies is deftly transformed. The adult roué is replaced by an infant, who is the helpless victim of his bad mother’s loose behaviour. It is, after all, the woman’s fault; she is to be held responsible for our first and most fatal Fall from grace. There are two stages to this sleight of hand. Wordsworth’s ‘memorial verse’ to Mary (restoring her purity and surely expressing what the poet would have wished for her) suggests at first that she is dead. Thomas De Quincey wishes a similar euthanasia on the prostitute Ann: ‘I now wish to see her no longer; but think of her, more gladly, as one long since laid in the grave; in the grave, I would hope, of a Magdalen taken away, before injuries and cruelty had blotted out and transfigured her ingenuous nature,



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or the brutalities of ruffians had completed the ruin they had begun.’47 Charles Dickens’s Little Nell and Little Em’ly inspire similar emotions. Although this erroneous impression is corrected (Mary now lives ‘Without contamination’ (353), while – the best thing that could have happened to him – her illegitimate child has been laid to rest), the elegiac mood leads directly into the second digression. The narrator recalls a prattling toddler whose mother, it is censoriously implied, is the stereotypical actress of the period, given over to sexual promiscuity (383–92). His ingenuousness arouses in the narrator a desire to protect him from the inevitable Fall he himself has undergone: I behold The lovely boy as I beheld him then, Among the wretched and the falsely gay, Like one of those who walked with hair unsinged Amid the fiery furnace. He hath since Appeared to me ofttimes as if embalmed By Nature – through some special privilege Stopped at the growth he had (395–403) Wordsworth projects onto this vulnerable innocent all the self-pity that derives from his own sense of maternal abandonment.48 Were it not for the bad mother’s dereliction, it is implied, the boy would not be exposed to ‘distress and guilt, / Pain and abasement’ (405–6). But the poet spares or denies him his initiation into adulthood and the culpability that is an inevitable part of experience. Instead, by arresting the flow of time, Wordsworth terminates his existence (like his ‘Lucy’ who ‘seemed a thing that could not feel / The touch of earthly years’), embalming him in an imaginary stasis.49 He is the last of Wordsworth’s idealised child-figures, such as the ‘infant babe’ (‘No outcast he, bewildered and depressed’), whose pantheistic symbiosis with Nature corresponds to the nurturing contact with their mother.50 The ‘painful theme’ (436) is then concluded by the third digression: the narrator’s recollection of the first time he heard ‘The voice of woman utter blasphemy – / Saw woman as she is to open shame / Abandoned, and the pride of public vice’ (418–20). He is recalling his first encounter, at the age of 17, with a prostitute. The flaunting ‘pride’ is what he thinks he observes; the ‘shame’ is what his adolescent self believes such an assertive woman ought to be feeling. He therefore projects this onto her, presumably reflecting his own shocked disturbance at sexual abandon. The phrase (like the ‘dissolute men / And shameless women’ (387–8) of Sadler’s Wells) echoes Burke’s fantasies (quoted on p. 6) of the libertine ‘women lost to shame’ in the French Assembly.



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Middle-class morality, with which the ‘respectable’ working classes increasingly came to identify, insisted that, following seduction and possibly illegitimate motherhood, the ‘fallen’ woman had embarked on an irreversible decline. (Plebeian morality by contrast did not stigmatise premarital sexuality; documentary evidence suggested that prostitution was often a transient episode in the lives of otherwise ‘respectable’ women.) 51 Wordsworth’s narrator emphasises this irrevocability, as on mature reflection he comes to sympathise with the prostitute who has suffered ‘the overthrow/ Of her soul’s beauty’ (432–3). In fictional texts she either emigrates or dies, ideally in a penitent self-sacrifice that either restores her tainted purity or removes her contagious threat to the innocence of other women. Such narrative makeshifts to deal with an awkward plot situation by removing the embarrassing presence of the transgressor were doubtless consonant with the dominant prejudices of nineteenth-century society. But they themselves also contributed ideologically to maintaining such moral segregation, perhaps as effectively as the Contagious Diseases Acts (1864–9) which transformed prostitution from a role adopted occasionally or temporarily by many indigent working-class women to a permanent identity, which cast the prostitute beyond the pale. The guileless reaction to the prostitute which is attributed to Wordsworth’s teenage self speaks volumes in this regard: Full surely from the bottom of my heart I shuddered; but the pain was almost lost, Absorbed and buried in the immensity Of the effect: a barrier seemed at once Thrown in, that from humanity divorced The human form, splitting the race of man In twain, yet leaving the same outward shape. (421–7) The woman’s voice is reduced to a reported summary – ‘blasphemy’ (418) – and she is stripped of her femininity, subsumed within ‘the race of man’, only to be banished from this as inhuman or subhuman. Her ‘outward shape’ proclaims her to be a woman and it is of course exactly this which she is displaying as a commodity. Her discrepant behaviour cannot, however, be reconciled with his sacrosanct ideal of womanhood, and so, in instinctive panic, he denies her femininity. But although a ‘barrier’ represses this traumatic recognition, splitting in twain the acceptable and the unacceptable woman, they share ‘the same outward shape’. Decades later Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s persona would voice similar ‘doubt and horror’ at the thought that the prostitute Jenny and his cousin Nell are both ‘Of the same lump’ of female clay ‘For honour and dishonour made,/Two sister vessels’.52



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To understand the persistent male fantasies discussed in this chapter, we must, I contend, take account of child-rearing practices, for it is on the small boy’s ambivalent experience of his first love-object, his mother, that the patriarchal stereotypes of woman are based. As object relations psychoanalysts have emphasised, the pre-Oedipal mother, whose dominant presence from birth looms larger than the more cognitively differentiated perception of the father in later infancy, survives in fantasy as an all-embracing figure whose intense bond with her child is both sentimentalised and feared. By contrast, the largely absent father is associated with the outside world, with autonomous selfhood, symbolised by the phallus, possession of which in our culture guarantees access to socioeconomic privileges and power.53 So powerful is the shaping by this feminine matrix, and so overwhelming are the fears which the pre-Oedipal mother’s power inspires, that, throughout the centuries and in the most disparate cultures, aggressive interventions have subsequently been made, by forcible separation of the mother–son dyad or by painful rites of passage, to extirpate the symbiosis with the mother, to enable the boy to ‘make a man of himself’.54 Likewise, the ritual of baptism, with its male midwife; as a symbolic rebirthing in the name of the father, it establishes a claim to paternity which, unlike maternity, is not unequivocally evident and denies the importance of the mother’s labour.55 Stereotypically, the author of Female Government (1779) advocated that as soon as the male child is weaned he should be removed from the mother’s presence ‘and by no means suffered to see that dangerous parent, until by a masculine and proper education he may be judged to be superior to the contagion of effeminate manners’.56 The institutions of ‘hegemonic masculinity’, which prevent women from developing their own masculine strengths, originate, as Blake’s Urizen/Albion myth suggested, in this male insecurity in which the ‘real’ man strenuously denies the feminine within him, only to project it unconsciously in its negative aspects onto the women with whom he forms adult relationships, or to direct his hostility against ‘effeminacy’ in men.57 In the nineteenth century the androgynous, pre-Oedipal years, when the middle-class boy (dressed in petticoats prior to his ‘breeching’ at about the age of six) lived in the female environment of the nursery, were when the major influences on his psyche took place and his adult attitudes to women were formed. A complicating factor is that the genteel boy’s primary love-object may well not have been his mother, but rather his nanny, a fellow subordinate, with whom the child may have had a closer rapport than with his elegant but remote mater.58 The most intimate bodily experiences were delegated to female servants. It was surely they who inspired the middleclass boy’s erotic fantasies, which might subsequently, at the Oedipal stage, be channelled into curiosity about his more aloof and mysterious parents and the primal scene. The domestic arrangement I am imagining is that of prosperous families, where parents and children occupied distinct parts



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of the house, and where children were ‘presented’ to their parents on brief ritualised occasions in the early evening, in an interval between work and social engagements. Of course, lower down the middle-class income scale, mothers took on some childcare themselves, delegating the least pleasant duties to a young nursemaid-housemaid.59 Nevertheless, we should, I believe, think of children’s erotic fantasies in the middle-class household as focused, on the one hand, on the relatively accessible body of the nanny or nursemaid and, on the other hand, on the concealed bodies of the parents. It seems that Freud’s influential theories originated in this context. His nurse, he recalled, ‘was my teacher in sexual matters and grumbled because I was clumsy, incapable’. He noted further: ‘that later (between the ages of 2 and 2½) my libido towards mater was awakened, namely on a journey from Leipzig to Vienna, during which we must have stayed overnight together, giving me the opportunity to see her nudam.’ (This journey actually took place when Freud was about four years old.)60 The legacy of these child-rearing practices is clearest in some notorious erotic obsessions with working-class women (such as that of Arthur Munby) but it was a crucial factor, I would argue, in the widespread Victorian tendency to dissociate sexuality from the middle-class wife and mother.61 As George Bernard Shaw, brought up almost entirely by servants, said of his mother: ‘Her almost complete neglect of me had the advantage that I could idolize her to the utmost pitch of my imagination and had no sordid or disillusioning contacts with her.’62 Heterosexual relationships, in which the male consciously or unconsciously chooses his partner for her resemblance to his mother, re-enact the unresolved issues of childhood. The small boy must learn to weld together his hitherto fragmentary mother images (the good mother, who provides satisfaction and security, and the bad mother, who is not constantly available) into a unified imago. The ability to accept in the self and the Other the coexistence of both good and bad characteristics, and hence achieve a stable self-image and object constancy, is the prerequisite for all mature relationships. Otherwise, there survive instead contradictory images based on the pre-Oedipal mother, who provides reassurance and oral satisfaction but is so overwhelmingly powerful and/or demanding beside the little boy that she arouses fear and resentment. In the adult attitudes that correspond to this unresolved stage of development the female inspires in the male a masochistic sense of helplessness (carried over into castration anxieties, inspired by the fear of retribution for his own aggressive defiance, or oral fantasies of being ingested or swallowed up into a yawning female void or vagina dentata) or a sadistic desire for revenge against an intimidating figure on whom he remains involuntarily dependent. Revealingly, representations of masculinity in the later nineteenth century were often polarised between fantasies of male absorption by or impotence in the face of domineering women (which proliferated from Keats’s ‘La Belle



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Dame Sans Merci’ (1819) to the vampires and Salomes of the fin de siècle) and, as reaction formations, ‘muscular Christianity’ and, later, the cult of public school heartiness with its ostentatiously ‘manly’ sports and militant imperialism. Here brutal rites of passage could be enacted, but here also physical contact among males was permissible, with no homophobic sanctions. The homosocial pleasures of ‘Clubland’ formed the last bastion of male supremacy. Within nineteenth-century culture there was accordingly an artificial divide between domesticated female purity (associated with the remote middle-class mater) and alternative images of women, onto which the shameful fantasies and behaviours that must be withheld from the idealised mother could be projected. Such dissociations were facilitated by the fact that there were in effect two mothers in the middle-class boy’s life – his actual mother and his nursemaid or nanny – and also by the contradictions in the nursemaid’s own position. On the one hand, she held absolute sway over the small boy; on the other, as a servant, she was his social and economic inferior. These shifting experiences of dominance and deference, mastery and submissiveness, surely influenced the complex patterns of dependency and the gender roles that evolved in adult heterosexual relationships. Male fantasies – evident in metaphorical descriptions of the city as a feminine body – intersected with actual sexual practices. The city as woman reflected attitudes to women in the city: the ‘respectable’ emotions associated with the wife, and the ‘disrespectable’ emotions that surfaced in encounters between streetwalkers, milliners, shopgirls and strollers.

Women’s room(s) for manoeuvre Through their participation in the new commercialised leisure, genteel women enjoyed unprecedented access to ‘public places’ and, through debating societies and the forum of print culture, to the Habermasian ‘public sphere’, but not to public office or to taverns, clubs and the largely male preserve of coffeehouses, where intelligence was gathered and business deals struck. They frequented circulating libraries, concerts, plays, opera, assemblies, ridottos and masquerades, shopped for ‘luxuries’, and promenaded in pleasure gardens as well as in the Park.63 But although their civilising influence on the reformation of manners was regarded as vital to this culture of polite sociability, they were disbarred from most forms of male agency, and were constantly reminded that a prime function of fashionable venues was as markets where they circulated as commodities on display.64 It is thus not accidental that the plot of Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778) should threaten to resemble A Harlot’s Progress. Her country-bred ingénue, handicapped by a family history of imprudent marriages, comes out at the age of 17 and has to negotiate her risky exposure to potential husbands at Vauxhall, Ranelagh and the Pantheon, while fending off the compromising intimacies and sexual assaults of predatory rakes and the vulgar attentions



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of her parvenue grandmother and City relatives. Deserted at critical moments by her chaperones and initially misled by her inexperience, she nevertheless reaches the safe haven of marriage, safeguarded by paternalistic mentors and by the prudence which she acquires. The melodramatic elements in Burney’s novel of manners convey the anxieties provoked by women’s dependency and vulnerability to scandal. That a factual basis underlay the literary conventions is suggested by the Memoirs of the Late Mrs Robinson Written by Herself (1801), which detail the pitfalls Mary Robinson encountered following her unwise early marriage: her husband’s mistresses in Soho and Covent Garden; the constant dunning of her husband and their imprisonment for debt; the snares laid for her by libertines in ‘public places’ and in the twilight world of Drury Lane theatre, where she attracted the sexual interest of, among others, the Prince of Wales (see figure 1). Genteel women were also assailed from another direction as their increased public profile, evident also in their prominence in the arts, inspired a crisis in hegemonic masculinity and hence a backlash from the 1760s onwards.65 Symbolically, censure was directed in the 1770s at women’s cross-dressing in a ‘masculine’ riding-habit, more appropriate to the outdoor leisure activities in which they were now active. As traditional constructions of gender were questioned, medical discourses reasserted essentialist differences between women and men, establishing pseudo-scientific dogmas that would survive for decades. Eighteenth-century sensational psychology insisted that women’s nervous system was distinguished from that of men by its finer ‘sensibility’; they were physically disadvantaged but morally privileged by their less robust constitution, which forestalled sensual excess.66 In the nineteenth century this ‘refinement’, diagnosed as ‘hysteria’ or ‘neurasthenia’, would become a disciplinary tool of alienists or neurologists. 67 In the later eighteenth century anatomical investigation sought to uncover the physical characteristics which were held to determine the different intellectual and moral nature of women, and hence their alleged unfitness to participate in the public sphere.68 A century later it would be argued that any woman in higher education developed her mental capacity by draining energy from her reproductive organs, endangering her fertility and thus the future health of the race by her excessive ‘brain work’. The male anxieties expressed in biological speculations and medical practice coincided with an emergent ‘domestic ideology’, about whose features there is now widespread consensus and increasing scepticism that its injunctions can be straightforwardly equated with social practice. A child-centred focus in the home was encouraged by the popularisation of Locke’s and Rousseau’s ideas on child-rearing and by the Evangelical revival, which stressed the child’s birth into original sin and its need for corrective guidance. Within this discursive context, prescriptive emphasis was placed on childbirth as the fulfilment of a woman’s femininity, and on breast-feeding as a token of the selfless dedication that she would continue to devote to the spiritual



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and moral nurture of her offspring. Within the context of urban capitalism, prescriptive encomia of the ministering angel who rendered the bourgeois home a spiritual haven attempted to construct a moral counterbalance to the utilitarian calculus of political economy. The feminised home (like the newly constructed ‘aesthetic’ realm) was accorded a redemptive importance as a privileged locale of non-alienated (re)production where the humane values endangered by the cash nexus were upheld, and where the vicissitudes of circulating capital were ostensibly replaced by the security of inalienable possession.69 As a result, Woman’s role was ostensibly aggrandised, but within narrow confines; she was elevated but also burdened by her responsibility for the emotional and spiritual welfare of her husband, to whom in every other respect she remained subordinate.70 The didactic emphasis on domesticity can be exemplified by Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801), the literary equivalent of Gillray’s satirical print The Fashionable Mamma (1796). Lady Delacour is punished for her reckless devotion to London Society with the loss not merely of her dowry but of two children. She is abetted in her dissipation by the cross-dressing Harriet Freke (a caricature of Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminist views and freethinking sexuality) until, duelling dressed in man’s clothing, she suffers a wound to her breast, with plain symbolic import. Despite Freke’s rakish incitement, Delacour has preserved her virtue, if not her modesty. This enables her to be cured of her maternal disfigurement and hedonistic ambitions and instead, emulating Belinda’s reasoned self-discipline, to find a proper familial outlet for her energies, together with her correspondingly reformed husband. The elasticity or the rigidity of this framework of propriety depended on women’s ingenuity in finding room for manoeuvre and on their prudence in choosing a companionate husband rather than an authoritarian who stood on his legal rights. The social reality was marked by considerable variation and individual negotiation of prescriptive roles, rather than universal powerlessness. Recent revisionist accounts have emphasised the capacity from the late eighteenth century onwards of socially and economically privileged women to claim or imagine the rights of citizenship for themselves. Thus, Linda Colley argues that although the Evangelical revival brought a moralistic repressiveness, it also opened up public roles in philanthropic associations, as did patriotic activism. By analogy with the male discourse of classical republicanism, Harriet Guest proposes that the discourse of ‘republican motherhood’ accorded domesticity a civic function as the source and guarantor of female ‘virtue’.71 Ironically, this moral elevation of the ‘household virtues’ as the basis for women’s engagement in the public sphere anticipates the arguments in that bête noire of Victorian feminists, Ruskin’s essay ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’. In any case, the celebratory focus on exceptional women ignores the fact that for the vast majority of women the greatest constraints remained economic dependency and the discriminatory letter of the law – as Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of



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Woman (1798) and Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) insisted – rather than the ideological prescription of ‘separate spheres’, which often did not correspond to social practice. Since at least the seventeenth century, when sufficient wealth had been generated to permit this, female members of commercial and manufacturing families had withdrawn from formal business enterprise, although they often continued to be actively involved behind the scenes in organisational and administrative work.72 In ‘polite’ households, however, the wife’s domestic responsibilities were extensive: behind the outward display of female leisure lay, invisibly but indispensably, the work involved in the management of household and servants, the raising of children, and the maintenance of kinship and business networks and social credit through correspondence, the ritual exchange of visits and home-based sociability. The ‘private’ sphere was thus more permeable than watertight; ‘home consumption’ could not be separated from the rest of the capitalist economy. As the nineteenth century progressed, this pattern was replicated ever lower down the social scale, as increased earning power gradually made this marker of ‘respectable’ status more attainable. It was an aspiration of London artisans from the mid-1820s when the breadwinner wage was advocated with the argument that ‘married women’s work harmed domestic life, contaminated female morality, undercut male wages, and prevented men from earning enough to keep their wives at home’.73 The difference was that household management at this level entailed an increasing proportion of hands-on rather than supervisory functions. Among the lower middle classes the pretensions of shabby gentility required the maintenance not merely of a maid-of-all-work but also the fiction of wifely leisure, even though many lower middle-class housewives engaged in manual labour, thus compromising one of the principal criteria by which they differentiated themselves from their social inferiors.74 In tracing social practices and gender constructions in late Georgian London, this chapter has sought to establish an analytical framework that will be extended chronologically in subsequent chapters. Its emphasis on the inextricability of psychological and socioeconomic factors is continued in Chapter 3, which examines the class tensions that attended the capitalist transformation of Victorian London.



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3

This chapter marks the transition to Victorian London and lays the sociohistorical foundations for the discussion of fiction and painting in subsequent chapters. It examines the wholesale transformations wrought by capitalism: through the rail and road developments and the speculative housing market which reshaped the structure and hence the social meanings of the metropolis; through the casual labour market and its attendant problems of poverty and social unrest; and through the City’s consolidation as the world’s leading financial centre. The first two sections describe spatial and social mobility and the disorientation and class tensions to which these migrations contributed. The following section traces the evolution of middle-class perceptions of the working classes, and of the fantasies which they projected onto the ‘residuum’ of city savages. The chapter concludes by analysing the moral dilemmas posed by the gulf between rich and poor, and efforts to understand the human consequences of laissez-faire capitalism.

Displaced persons Arguably, the salient feature of Victorian London was mobility. As the prototypical modern metropolis, it was a fluid environment whose consumer culture promised (as Postmodernists stress) unprecedented possibilities of social mobility and gender performativity amid rapidly changing fashions and lifestyles. By contrast, adaptability of an involuntary, even catastrophic kind was enforced on the unskilled and semi-skilled by the seasonally and cyclically fluctuating labour market. It was also a place of unceasing physical mobility, both into and within the city. Almost half of London’s staggering growth in population in the nineteenth century came from migrants. They moved into residential areas which themselves were often the result of innovations in transportation. As an example, take the commuter suburbs opened up in Kensington and St John’s Wood by the advent in 1829 of the omnibus, which followed the route of the New Road, London’s mid eighteenth-century northern bypass, from Paddington Green to the Bank. By 1835 more than 45



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600 buses were in operation on suburban routes, carrying nearly half a million people in and out of central London each day. By the 1840s there was a regular steamboat service between London Bridge and Westminster Bridge; by 1850, cheaply, from London Bridge to the Adelphi and Chelsea. In 1863 the world’s first steam underground, the Metropolitan Railway, opened. From 1869 the network of horse-drawn tramcars increased mobility in outlying areas; banned from the centre, they remained a predominantly working-class form of transport. The major turning point in nineteenth-century London was, however, the irruption of the railway in the late 1830s.1 At first the new railways were aimed at long-distance, inter-city transport; local rail commuting really took off only in the 1860s. They nevertheless made an immediate impact on the area around the stations through the increased road traffic required to distribute the goods brought in by rail, and by the immense space which the fifteen main stations swallowed up. Annexing almost 800 acres for depots, yards and viaducts – an area sufficient for a fair-sized town – rival companies hacked swathes into the centre, creating barriers which often segmented the inner districts into inaccessible wedges doomed to dereliction.2 The scale of this social engineering was heralded by the London and Birmingham Railway. Dickens’s famous descriptions of the Camden Town phase of construction indicate the mixed feelings which such changes aroused.3 The area loses its picturesque homeliness but will ostensibly gain in salubrious amenities; in the meantime, there is sheer havoc. The building site, with its ‘carcases’ of tenements, abortive ‘shapes and substances of incompleteness’, ‘giant forms of cranes, and tripods straddling over nothing’ resembles the apocalyptic monstrosities in Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings. There are ‘Babel towers of chimneys’ but they want ‘half their height’; the entrepreneurs are overreachers, driven by hubristic greed: ‘One or two bold speculators had projected streets; and one had built a little, but stopped among the mud and ashes to consider farther of it. A bran-new Tavern, redolent of fresh mortar and size, and fronting nothing at all, had taken for its sign The Railway Arms.’ This was not the only form of speculation involved. Writing in 1846, Dickens engineered that the railway is built through ‘Staggs’s Gardens’. In 1845 there began ‘the systematic practice of stagging – applying heavily for the shares in new companies with a view to selling them immediately at a premium’.4 Gambling in railway shares became a mania, contributing to the major commercial and financial crisis of 1847. In the hands of unregulated capitalism, the new technology utterly reshaped the demography and social geography of inner London. The railway companies preferred to cut through working-class areas where the land was cheaper, the tenants powerless and the landlords easier to deal with; for public relations this could be presented as ‘ventilating’ the city by removing pockets of insanitary housing. Estimates of the number of poor evicted by



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demolitions for railway construction vary between 76,000 and over 120,000. But as the slums were demolished, so the workforce in the central districts (who worked irregular hours and lacked cheap and conveniently timed transportation) were driven into adjacent areas and compressed into ever more overcrowded housing. A contemporary survey estimated that 500,000 casual labourers ‘had to live close at hand to be “on the spot at the lucky time”; in the Drury Lane slums for the Covent Garden market, at Tower Hill for the docks, in Soho for the West End tailoring trade’.5 The social remodelling of central London was thus in part unintentional: railway developers were concerned with maximising their profit and not with urban reconstruction. But interventionist planning also played a role. John Nash (pp. 14–15) had intended merely to contain the Soho slums, not to eradicate them. Within a few years, however, street planners became preoccupied with the links between social and physical hygiene and used street improvements to extirpate the rookeries which were held to harbour moral contagion as well as disease. Street clearance probably accounted for the displacement of not far short of 100,000 persons between 1830 and 1880.6 The City of London’s physical fabric and social composition were changed irrevocably: as land prices spiralled, commercial premises edged out what little residential accommodation the rail and road construction had left. At mid-century the resident population of the City peaked at just short of 130,000. By 1881 this had fallen to 51,000; by 1901 to 27,000 (see figure 36 below). Land values in the City were six to eight times higher than even the most elegant West End residential addresses.7 The ground was taken over by warehouses and, from the late 1830s, by purpose-built office blocks and the monumental façades of joint-stock banks and insurance companies, reflecting the City’s steady growth in invisible earnings.8 A commentator in 1845 observed that ‘a dwelling in the City is a thing not now considered desirable’; City merchants were moving towards the fashionable west, or emigrating for economy and fresh air to the suburbs, relinquishing areas within ‘short walks or rides from the City’ to their clerks.9 The metropolis became compartmentalised into functionally and socially specialised districts. The City formed a buffer zone between the East End and the respectable shopping and residential districts to the west, while in north London the marshalling yards and gasworks around Euston, St Pancras and King’s Cross divided Regent’s Park and St Marylebone from Pentonville and Islington, which moved decisively down-market.10 Housing development was shaped by the vagaries of capitalist speculation. One factor with far-reaching consequences was that the ground plan of central London was largely mapped out by corporate estates and the estates of wealthy landowners, who had varying conceptions of what constituted desirable residences on their property. The less exclusively minded encouraged leasehold development by speculative builders who, in fits and starts whenever cheap credit was available, overbuilt in quantity and quality. When these substantial houses, aimed at a wealthy



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middle-class clientele, proved difficult to let, they were subdivided for multiple occupation into apartments or rooms which passed ever further down the social scale, provoking a knock-on effect of migration from the centre. This centrifugal migration was accelerated by the dramatic expansion of the rail commuter network in the 1860s and 1870s. Middle-class, semi-detached suburbia would eventually grow into ‘Metroland’. Its earlier stages are recorded genially by George and Weedon Grossmith in The Diary of a Nobody (1892) and witheringly by John Ruskin in Fors Clavigera (May 1873). As so often, Ruskin descends into a personal inferno, projecting his tormented sense of a Fall from grace onto the sanctified but now degraded landscape of his south London childhood: That same district is now covered by, literally, many thousands of houses built within the last ten years, of rotten brick, with various iron devices to hold it together. . . . They are fastened in a Siamese-twin manner together by their sides, and each couple has a Greek or Gothic portico shared between them, with magnificent steps, and highly ornamented capitals. Attached to every double block are exactly similar double parallelograms of garden, laid out in new gravel and scanty turf, on the model of the pleasure grounds in the Crystal Palace, and enclosed by high, thin, and pale brick walls. . . . Think what the real state of life is, for the people who are content to pass it in such places . . . The women and girls have no pleasures but in calling on each other in false hair, cheap dresses of gaudy stuffs, machine made, and high-heeled boots, of which the pattern was set to them by Parisian prostitutes of the lowest order: the men have no faculty beyond that of cheating in business; no pleasures but in smoking or eating; and no ideas, nor any capacity of forming ideas, of anything that has yet been done of great, or seen of good, in this world. That is the typical condition of five-sixths, at least, of the ‘rising’ middle classes about London – the lodgers in those damp shells of brick.11 This vision of the social pretensions and materialistic banality of a suburban lifestyle driven by fashion and commercialised leisure arose from a complex mixture of observation and fantasy. The serpent that destroyed his Eden assumed various forms in Ruskin’s imagination: the writhing snakes of his sexual nightmares and the dragon of the Hesperides, which he associated with England’s devotion to Mammon worship, which defiled the purity of nature with industrial pollution and the unsightly waste of consumer capitalism.12 To elucidate his savage indignation, the final section of this chapter places his jeremiads against London in the context of his writings on economics.



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Cross-cultural misunderstandings

In many ways, the social tensions in Victorian London confirmed the predictions of eighteenth-century commentators about the consequences of mass immigration. The sheer massiveness of the metropolis spawned unprecedented infrastructural problems, to which local government, hampered by its antiquated vestry system and the vested interests of the City, was ill equipped to respond. The rule of order was also challenged by the spectre of political unrest which intermittently haunted the capital. (Mass meetings in 1816–19, the Cato Street conspiracy and the Queen Caroline affair were followed by Reform demonstrations in 1831–2, Chartist protests in 1842 and 1848, menacing agitation in Hyde Park in 1855 against the Sunday Trading Bill and in 1866–7 for the Second Reform Bill, and riots in the West End in 1886.) In the imagination of the middle classes issues of government and self-government were linked by the unruliness they associated with and attributed to London’s ‘submerged tenth’, reflecting the cross-cultural misunderstandings which marked their attempts to regulate their social, and supposedly moral, inferiors. In contrast to the brutalisation satirised by Regency caricaturists, by the 1830s what was castigated by official or self-appointed guardians of the law was mostly unmannerliness. Compare John Orlando Parry’s A London Street Scene (figure 13), a large watercolour made for his music-hall performances. With subversive humour he depicts a street urchin picking the pocket of one of the hated new policemen, an indication of the painting’s topicality, like the new gas lamppost against which the peeler is leaning, and the advertising posters which are as transient as the hoarding and the Georgian building marked down for demolition on which they are plastered. The City is in flux: St. Paul’s, symbolic of earlier redevelopment after the Great Fire, is edged out by the first stages of the speculative jerry-building that will eventually usurp the picture space. Amidst the destruction Parry emphasises vitality, evident in the heterogeneity of London types ranging from the coachman (or Chelsea pensioner?) and soldier, through a ‘climbing boy’, to a butcher’s delivery boy and a coalheaver or a dustman with his fantail hat. But although a music hall audience might appreciate Parry’s irreverence, other Londoners were less amused. As overcrowded housing drove the poor out of doors, the streets became the contested terrain on which the middle-class ideology of respectability was enforced. Obstruction, nuisance, soliciting, loitering with intent to do a mischief, suspicion of causing a breach of the peace were all working-class offences.14 Demands that the police clamp



The ordinary brute, who flourishes in the very centre of ornate life, tells us of unknown depths on the verge of which we totter, being bound to thank our stars every day we live that there is not a general outbreak, and a revolt from the yoke of civilization. (Times leader, 25 December 1862)13


Figure 13 John Orlando Parry, A London Street Scene (1835). © Dunhill Museum & Archive, 48, Jermyn Street St James’s, London SW1

down on such infringements of ancient common law provisions or on prostitutes, barrow-boys or hawkers, reflected the self-righteous indignation of the municipal middle classes. Paradoxically, the more public behaviour ‘improved’, the more intolerable seemed aberrations from the new conventions of decency. With hindsight, it is apparent that a remarkable transformation in mores took place in nineteenth-century London. Bloody sports, ranging from bullbaiting to prize-fighting, gradually disappeared; symptomatically, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA from 1840) was set up in 1824. In 1820 the last beheading after hanging was carried out, and in 1832 the last gibbeting; also in 1832 the public dissection of hanged persons was banned. Pillorying was abolished in 1816, as, a few years later, were public whippings.15 Capital punishment persisted, but at least after 1868 the degrading public spectacle of hanging ceased. Improved policing, but also street lighting, gradually made London less rough after dark: by 1842 most of London’s main streets were gas-lit. The spread of elementary education through Sunday Schools and National Schools, culminating in the Education Act of 1870, was crucial in diffusing ‘civilised’ values. Following earlier Malthusian advocacy of ‘moral restraint’, in the last third of the century birth control or ‘family limitation’ became more widespread, alleviating one potential source of economic hardship. Better nutrition, purer water and improvements in



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hygiene, facilitated by sewerage systems, less overcrowded housing and cheap cotton clothing, became available to an ever greater proportion of the working classes, enabling them to enjoy a decent standard of living. Sensationalist fantasies about London’s ‘rookeries’ (fed by Newgate fiction, mid-century ‘penny dreadfuls’ such as G.M. Reynolds’s Mysteries of London and lurid crime reporting) were, however, only gradually dispelled. Having left behind the social controls of small rural communities, the metropolitan middle classes found themselves confronted by an unregulated multicultural environment in which they were made conscious as never before of the exotic otherness of the working classes. In this climate of anxious uncertainty an instinctive xenophobia emerged. Seeking reassurance, they tried both to reimpose on the alien masses the rural patterns of deference that the metropolis had rendered obsolete, and to remake the working classes in their own image. The Newspaper Stamp Act constrained until 1855 and the paper tax until 1861 the working classes’ access to inflammatory material, while the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge’s Saturday Magazine and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge’s Penny Magazine (1832–45) offered improving reading to the masses, although their readership probably didn’t extend beyond artisans.16 The distribution of temperance tracts and the establishment of evangelical mission halls were reinforced from the late 1860s and 1870s by the Settlement movement. The ‘improvident’ habits of the urban poor could, it was held, be attributed to their removal from the civilising influences in village life of the clergyman and the squire. It was therefore proposed to colonise the East End with an urban gentry drawn from the professional classes, as it had become apparent that the working classes only attended church to secure whatever hand-outs were on offer. From the 1840s charities and model dwelling companies sought to inculcate self-help and thrift into the denizens of the strictly superintended artisans’ dwellings they had constructed for this purpose, although the really poor were excluded from such schemes.17 The promotion of ‘rational recreation’ marks the final phase of this paternalism.18 The middle classes’ concern at the presumed breakdown of communal structures in London was largely based on ignorance. Their own culture was centred on the church or chapel; they could not conceive what might replace for the godless proletariat the cohesion which institutionalised religion provided in their own lives. Their preconceptions were founded on the lurid accounts of doctors and evangelical missionaries into darkest London, who, shocked by the inhuman living conditions of the urban underclass, drew the patronising conclusion that the squalor was caused not by indigence but by immorality. If the working classes lived in anonymous obscurity, then this would offer carte blanche to the criminal tendencies which, it was feared, were characteristic of slum dwellers. In fact, of course, in working-class areas, like most immigrant communities, migrants from the same area of origin gravitated to the same streets to form kinship and friendship networks of support.19



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It is true that among the poorest there was constant mobility from one slum to another, in a ‘moonlight flit’ to elude the rent collector or bailiff, and this rootlessness lends some credence to the supposed instability of the nomadic working classes. But paradoxically it was perhaps the middle classes’ own insecurity in the face of an uncertain future, and their solitary pursuit of selfreliance, that led them to project onto the working classes their own sense of loneliness amid neighbours who resolutely kept themselves to themselves. Their desire to construct and mark a self-conscious identity was expressed not just through their self-representation in the media but also through changes in housing patterns. While ‘the world of industry revolved around income distinctions, that of London was concerned with status distinctions’.20 As if to assert the latter, while at the same time acknowledging its precariousness, the middle classes segregated themselves in residential enclaves which bullishly proclaimed their superior purchasing power but also implied a defensive withdrawal into the secure environment of like-minded conformity. The upper middle class abandoned the city altogether, save for the smartest West End addresses. The less well-heeled had to content themselves with the more modest exclusiveness of suburbs with working-class pockets (from which they drew their domestic labour) or of middle-class streets in working-class districts, or, in the case of the lower middle class, with subtly differentiated details of moulding and decorative brickwork intended to elevate their terraced housing above the virtually indistinguishable terraces of artisans.21 Distance fosters mistrust and a fear of the unknown. As they withdrew to their semi-detached bastions or their villas in leafy suburbs that were effectively ghettos, the middle classes doubtless reflected that ‘Good fences make good neighbors’.22 But at times they also must have wondered whether they were ‘walling in or walling out’, as what they had repressed in their self-regulating pursuit of respectability returned to haunt them in fears that they projected onto a ready series of scapegoats: the working classes, the fallen woman or prostitute, the New Woman and the homosexual. What these anxieties had in common was to see the outsider(s) as a foreign body threatening the political well-being and the social hygiene of the metropolis – and hence as something to be suppressed. When the repressed inevitably resurfaced in middle-class nightmares, it was accordingly through the imagery of disease, contamination and degeneracy.23

Riff-raff Malodorous exhalations of all kinds assailed the Victorian middle-class sensorium. Up to the 1850s the stench of decomposing corpses pervaded the streets around the overfilled graveyards.24 Besides this and the sulphurous ‘London particular’, or dense fog, it is sewers and cesspools that come most readily to mind if one tries to imagine the smells of Victorian London,



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largely because the middle classes were so preoccupied by the insalubriousness of slum dwellings. Given that many unventilated and overcrowded tenements and common lodging houses had cellars or courtyards full of refuse and pools of stagnant ‘water’, their anxiety is understandable, however prurient this fascination may at times have been. But we should also call to nose the so-called ‘noxious trades’: ‘As early as 1850 West Ham had established itself as a rapidly growing centre of soap, chemical, rubber, bonemeal, paint, glue and tarpaulin manufacture. A large proportion of these trades depended upon London for raw material like animal carcasses and offal.’25 Such enterprises were by no means confined to the outer suburbs. Until 1855 huge numbers of live sheep and cattle were driven into the centre of London and slaughtered in Smithfield Market.26 Each Monday the surrounding streets were steeped in excrement and offal. Millions of horses kept traffic circulating; newcomers remarked that horse dung and urine made London’s streets smell like a stable yard. Rain transformed the dung, mixed with soot, general refuse (such as straw and vegetable remains) and stone dust ground from the paving stones by iron-rimmed wheels and iron horseshoes, into a glutinous liquid manure. Despite the efforts of crossing-sweepers, a walk through the streets left its mark. In houses too: ‘the furniture is often covered with dust, even more than once in the day, so that writing on it with the finger becomes legible, and the lungs and air tubes of the inhabitants, with a moist lining to detain the dust, are constantly pumping in the same atmosphere.’27 Those who moved out for cleaner air were forced to endure the nauseous smell of the brickfields; not even in one’s suburban villa could one breathe a sigh of relief. Unlike the more intellectual senses of sight and sound, smells rub our nose in our own physicality. Personal hygiene aims to remove the odours which remind us of the sensuality that self-discipline seeks to control; public hygiene attempts to extend this orderliness into the regulation of society. At its most zealous it resembles an allergic reaction or a neurotic obsession which, like any compulsive behaviour, is an attempt to exercise a ritual control over troubling emotions which cannot be repressed and manifest themselves indirectly in a form that symbolises the source of the neurosis. ‘Unclean thoughts’, ‘smut’ and ‘filth’ exert a disturbing fascination, for which dirt and the body’s waste products provide emotive symbols. We dissociate ourselves from them by projecting our guilty sense of pollution onto scapegoats: the ‘scum’ or ‘dregs’ of society, who are ‘as common as muck’. Thus, in Victorian usage ‘ “residuum” referred to the offal, excrement, and other waste that constituted the sanitary problem, and was also the name applied to the lowest layer of society that constituted the social and political problem’.28 The concern with public hygiene in Victorian London reflected the very real and recurrent threat of cholera: there were major epidemics in 1832, 1849, 1854 and 1866. Typhus, typhoid, tuberculosis and smallpox were



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principally diseases of the poor, exacerbated by overcrowding, poor diet and insanitation; cholera was the great leveller that struck all classes alike. It may have caused fewer deaths but it literally brought home the public health problem to the middle classes. The water supplied to the metropolis was a major source of infection; prior to Bazalgette’s sewerage system (completed in 1875) the Thames was virtually an open sewer, as a pungent account from 1854 conveys: The entire excrementation of the Metropolis . . . shall sooner or later be mingled in the stream of the river, there to be rolled backward and forward around the population . . . Sewers . . . furnish chambers for an immense faecal evaporation; at every breeze which strikes against their open mouths, at every tide which encroaches on their inward space their gases are breathed into the upper air – wherever outlet exists into houses, footpaths and carriageway . . . From the polluted bosom of the river steam up, incessantly though unseen, the vapours of a retributive poison.29 The evaporation of noxious waste terrified the mid-Victorians because they believed that infection was transmitted through the ‘miasma’ that arose from decomposing organic matter, and presumably clung to one like stale tobacco smoke. But, as the emotive phraseology indicates, contamination was imagined as a moral as well as a physical threat. Sewage, which ‘mingles’ promiscuously with the Thames water and thus circulates ‘around the population’, is associated metaphorically with bodies that are conduits for disease. The tidal imagery of exchanging vapours and fluids evokes other fears of contagion through illicit sexuality: the ‘open mouths’ of the sewers ‘breathe’ out infection whenever a tide ‘encroaches on their inward space’; the ‘polluted bosom’ of the river, like a venereal whore, passes on ‘a retributive poison’. Those who irresponsibly condone insanitation in the body politic, whether by laxity in public works or transgressive sexuality, are reminded that the wages of sin is death. In this respect, there are striking parallels between Dickens’s Bleak House and a lecture delivered by the Dissenter Edward Miall at the City of London Literary Institute, subsequently published in his The British Churches in Relation to the British People (1849). Miall starts with a literal description of the ‘residuum’, then warns of the threat this underclass poses to the health of the metropolitan ‘social body’: There lies at the bottom of society . . . a thick sediment of physical destitution, which it is morally impossible for the light of Christianity to penetrate and purify. . . . Men exiled by want from the sympathy, and even notice, of the great mass of their fellows – driven to subsist precariously and scantily on garbage – clothed in rags, loathsome both to sight and smell – preyed upon by vermin – herding for shelter in dark, damp



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cellars, or dilapidated and filthy garrets, or, still worse, packed nightly, in nakedness, body to body, along the noisome dormitories of cheap lodging-houses . . . devoid of all moral motive, because divorced from hope, and denuded of self-respect – men in this frightful abyss are, as a class, as much below the immediate reach of the gospel, as the better tended cattle that are driven to the shambles. . . . Out of this slimy bed of physical destitution rises perpetually a pestiferous moral exhalation dangerous to all other classes of society – most dangerous to those immediately contiguous to it. Swarms of thieves, trained from infancy to their business of plunder, and of prostitutes turned nightly into our thoroughfares to ply their deadly seduction, carry with them the taint of demoralization into all other sections of the social body. That physical wretchedness . . . avenges itself upon our supineness and neglect, by permeating the entire mass of uplying humanity with a moral typhus, perilous to every family in the land, and carrying into not a few the germ of death.30 Such fantasies came to occupy a larger place in mainstream middle-class opinion than the actual conditions in London’s slums, which were widely misunderstood as revelations about the lives of ‘nomadic’ street-folk in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor and the harrowing details in the Blue Book reports on the worst slums were misleadingly extended to the poor in general.31 A widespread anxiety in the mid-1880s was that under the pressure of a trade slump, exacerbated by the demise of several of London’s traditional industries and by a severe housing crisis, respectable artisans would join forces with the scavenging, shiftless paupers.32 In 1886 a mob went on the rampage in the West End, smashing windows in Clubland and looting shops. The following year Trafalgar Square was occupied for months by an encampment of thousands of the unemployed, who in the end were forcibly dispersed by two squadrons of the Life Guards. The threat appeared to have been dispelled, however, by the Dock Strike of 1889, in which the demonstrations passed off in an orderly manner. As more cheap workmen’s trains in the 1890s enabled the labour aristocracy to migrate from the centre and trams made less well-paid workers more mobile, segregating them from the corrupting proximity of the ‘residuum’, the middle classes breathed again. For the ‘residuum’ itself various final solutions were proposed, ranging from compulsory labour colonies to enforced emigration or even sterilisation. The terms in which casual labourers were described had shifted to the discourse of ‘degeneracy’. No longer were they perceived in moral terms as improvident or workshy; instead, in bourgeois fantasy, there had evolved in the abyss of the metropolitan slums a genetically unfit race, who, like the subterranean Morlocks of H.G.Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), posed a constant threat to the precarious rule of the Eloi.



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the good workman, fresh from the soil, becomes in the first city generation a poor workman; and by the second city generation, devoid of push and go and initiative, and actually unable physically to perform the labor his father did, he is well on the way to the shambles at the bottom of the Abyss. . . . the children grow up into rotten adults, without virility or stamina, a weak-kneed, narrow-chested, listless breed, that crumples up and goes down in the brute struggle for life with the invading hordes from the country.33 Economically, the ‘Abyss’ symbolises the descent into humiliating pauperism suffered gradually by the old (who, as increasing age brought infirmity and the incapacity to work, were doomed to end their days in the workhouse) or catastrophically by the able-bodied as the result of accident, illness or unemployment. Targeting one contributory factor, London marshals statistics to castigate the lucrative business of slum ownership, as George Bernard Shaw had in Widowers’ Houses (125–6; 139). But beneath the apparent intelligibility offered by rational analysis, there lurks something more disturbing. For ‘the Abyss’ encompasses regression to the ‘primordial’ (163) or the subhuman beyond redemption through social or economic reform. Dockland harbours ‘gutter-wolves’, ‘a new species, a breed of city savages’ who live and prey in the slum that is their jungle (163–4); when the ‘festering contents of slum, stews, and ghetto’ walk into Kent to pick hops, ‘As they drag their squat, misshapen bodies along . . . they resemble some vile spawn from underground’ (97). Whereas an emergent late nineteenth-century ideology (exemplified by Walter Besant and, sometimes, Arthur Morrison) represented the East End as ‘The City of Dreadful Monotony’, to Jack London the East End was ‘The City of Degradation’ (124–5): ‘Everything is helpless, hopeless, unrelieved, and dirty. Bath-tubs are a thing totally unknown . . . The very cobblestones are scummed with grease’ (132–3). His divergent perspective may be attributed partly to his contrasting experience of the Old and the New World (he reiterates how poorly paid, badly fed and badly housed East Enders are by comparison with Americans) and to his undue reliance on commentators who themselves drew on hearsay evidence. Symptomatically, the epigraph to London’s chapter ‘The Ghetto’ is furnished by Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’ (1886): Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the Time, City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?



These fin-de-siècle anxieties are concentrated in Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (1903), which reformulates mid-Victorian discourses in Darwinian terms:

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There among the glooming alleys Progress halts on palsied feet, Crime and hunger cast our maidens by the thousand on the street.

There the smouldering fire of fever creeps across the rotted floor, And the crowded couch of incest in the warrens of the poor.34 Tennyson’s scorn at the prevailing complacency about evolutionary progress was an immediate response to W.T. Stead’s exposé of child prostitution, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’; a recycling of the pathetic stereotype of the sempstress, familiar in the 1840s and 1850s in innumerable illustrations to Hood’s poem ‘The Song of the Shirt’; and a reiteration of Evangelical indictments of the working-class immorality held to result from factory work or urbanisation. He was responding also to the 1884–5 Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes, which asserted a causal link between overcrowded dwellings and working-class incest.35 There surely was incest, prostitution and sweated labour; but, as a recent historian insists: ‘To portray the East End as one sombre mass of unmitigated woe would be a travesty.’36 London’s interpretation carries conviction when he observes the spiritual cost of deprivation: the cheapening of human life (13); the lack of privacy; the occasional conviviality but more often mere torpor (30, 133); the domestic bickering; the wife-beating in which desperate, economically dependent labourers vented their frustration on their economically dependent ‘slaves’ (130). He also saw clearly the demoralisation caused by the casual labour market: There are no jobs going begging through lack of men and women. The dockers crowd at the entrance gate, and curse and turn away when the foreman does not give them a call. . . . 514,000 textile workers oppose a resolution condemning the employment of children under fifteen. Women, and plenty to spare, are found to toil under the sweat-shop masters for tenpence a day of fourteen hours. Alfred Freeman crawls to muddy death because he loses his job. Ellen Hughes Hunt prefers Regent’s Canal to Islington Workhouse. Frank Cavilla cuts the throats of his wife and children because he cannot find work enough to give them food and shelter.37 But he becomes more tendentious in asserting that, as a consequence of these environmental factors and the depletion of the genetic stock by emigration and conscription, degeneracy has taken place (129, 126, 133). (Significantly, the accompanying photographs in the first edition of 1903 tell a more balanced story. There are disturbing images of people sleeping



There the Master scrimps his haggard sempstress of her daily bread, There a single sordid attic holds the living and the dead.


rough. But – even allowing for the composed artificiality of early photography, as in John Thomson’s Street-life in London (1876) – the overall impression of the East End is orderly and surprisingly salubrious.) This distorted perception leads London to an apocalyptic vision in which ‘the Ghetto folk will be unable to render efficient service to England in the world struggle for industrial supremacy’ (134). Should England lose this, the ‘unfit’ (165) will, he suggests, ‘perish like flies at the end of summer’; otherwise, driven by desperation to riot in the West End, ‘before rapid-fire guns and the modern machinery of warfare, they will perish the more swiftly and easily’ (134). The truth was less sensational but did not justify complacency, as two overlapping attempts to demythologise darkest London – those of Arthur Morrison and Charles Booth – revealed. Morrison’s ‘A Street’ (October 1891), which later introduced his Tales of Mean Streets (1894), met the middle-class stereotypes head-on: This street is in the East End. There is no need to say in the East End of what.38 . . . But who knows the East End? It is . . . one will say: a shocking place, where he once went with a curate; an evil plexus of slums that hide human creeping things; where filthy men and women live on penn’orths of gin, where collars and clean shirts are decencies unknown, where every citizen wears a black eye, and none ever combs his hair. The East End is a place, says another, which is given over to the Unemployed .. . a race . . . [which] now and again . . . migrates bodily to Hyde Park with banners, and furnishes adjacent police courts with disorderly drunks. Still another knows the East End only as the place whence begging letters come. In contrast to such fantasies, Morrison (like Gissing’s depictions of similar working-class districts in Clerkenwell in The Nether World (1889)) describes dingy, regimented housing and the social and residential demarcation of ‘grades of decency’ from lower middle-class shopkeepers through milliners and dressmakers, domestic servants and industrial workers to ‘places skirting slums’.39 By 1900 East London was a city within the city; with a population of two million, it was larger than Vienna or Berlin. It made no sense to generalise about such a variegated area, which, far from being a den of vice, was most evidently characterised – in the view of those associated with Toynbee Hall, the People’s Palace and the annual art exhibitions at St Jude’s, Whitechapel from 1881 to 1898 – by its dreary monotony and its cultural and material impoverishment. Such, at any rate, was Morrison’s rational assessment. A more lurid story is told in his fiction, as, for example, in the opening chapter of A Child of the Jago (1896), which regurgitates the dominant assumptions about the ‘residuum’ in evoking the ‘close, mingled stink’ that rose from ‘the foul earth and the grimed walls’ as the Jago ‘festered’.40 The Jago – actually the ‘Old



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Nichol’ – was indeed a notorious slum (undergoing demolition, however, when Morrison’s novel appeared), so that this evocation of degradation is not unexpected. What is surprising is that the working-class mores depicted in Jago are paralleled in Tales of Mean Streets, which purport to be more representative of the East End as a whole.41 Within this Darwinian jungle the ‘fittest’ apparently stand little chance of survival. Although there is no communal solidarity (save in not ‘narking’), nonconformist behaviour is not tolerated. If an enterprising individual takes the initiative towards betterment, the jealous resentment of the group is aroused, who instinctively forestall the attempt to break out, dragging the escapee back down to their level.42 This herd mentality leads the narrator to regard East Enders with a pessimistic determinism: with an irony ranging from the sadistic to the cynically amused, he presents them as unable to benefit from or even be destroyed by whatever windfall comes their way.43 This is in part because, unlike the prudent middle classes or the shabby genteel, they ‘are utterly unable to see beyond the present’ and hence squander their resources in immediate gratification.44 Their destructive aggression is self-directed (they wallow in booze on a Saturday night or drift in a permanent alcoholic stupor) or erupts in drink-induced violence, with a brutal husband idolised by his mother and defended by his beaten wife.45 Typically, Morrison’s characters are work-shy malingerers who play the system and, luxuriating in self-pity, see themselves as victims.46 Their regressive passivity is encouraged by anarchist and anticapitalist agitators, who are depicted as fatuous, hypocritical poseurs. Strikes and unionism also attract the narrator’s disapproval.47 In keeping with this ideological attitude, in Jago charity is presented as inefficacious, a form of moral hazard that merely fosters individual irresponsibility rather than self-reliance; the interventionism of the Salvation Army, the Settlement scheme, Toynbee Hall and other attempts to civilise the East End are also dismissed as futile.48 Morrison, who grew up in Poplar, was an East End insider who suppressed his background and masqueraded as a middle-class social explorer, adopting many of the ideological axioms of the anthropologist among the city savages. This vacillation is expressed in the conflicting voices of his texts. Against reviewers’ charges of exaggeration – ‘do not let us delude ourselves into imagining that half London is inhabited by a race of Yahoos’ – Morrison stressed his realistic accuracy, even if obscenities, both linguistic and sexual, were undoubtedly toned down.49 His ‘Preface’ to Jago speaks of the artist’s ‘duty’ to depict the ‘horrible places and horrible lives’ that the polite community overlooks; a responsibility exercised in the narrator’s exposure of abuses such as the negligible piece-rates paid to sweated labour. But Morrison’s sympathy was qualified by an intransigent insistence on the degeneracy of slum-dwellers. While H.G. Wells, in reviewing Jago, emphasised the demoralising effect of a pernicious environment, Morrison saw the underclass as genetically inferior. A eugenic solution was required: ‘It is



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monstrous that the weak should be destroyed by the strong, but still more so that the strong should be destroyed by the weak . . . For my own part, I believe, as Father Jay does, in penal settlements; it would be far cheaper than our present prison system. Why not confine them as lunatics are confined? Let the weed die out, and then proceed to raise the raisable.’50 In the novel itself, a priest and a surgeon question the right of the Jago’s ‘nest of rats’ to multiply without restriction.51 Morrison’s ambivalence towards the East End arguably reflected that of contemporary middle-class opinion in its oscillation between dispassionate rationalism and an instinctive moral panic. Where did the truth lie? A reviewer challenged the accuracy of Mean Streets by reference to the apparently more objective data of social investigation: ‘We do not say that Mr Morrison has not drawn from the life. He may have done so and yet not painted the typical East-Ender. What we assert is that he has taken the worst characters in Mr Booth’s Class A . . . and has set them up . . . as if they were truly representative of East London’.52 The reference is to Charles Booth’s massive investigation, the Life and Labour of the People in London (1889–1903) – a stark contrast to the moral panics of the 1880s engineered by W.T. Stead as editor of the Pall Mall Gazette – which had scotched some persistent illusions.53 Booth’s statistical survey divided the population of East London into eight classes: A. The lowest class of occasional labourers, street-sellers, loafers, criminals and semi-criminals (1.25%) B. Casual earnings – ‘very poor’ (11.25%) together the ‘poor’ C. Intermittent earnings (about 8%) D. Small regular earnings (nearly 14.5%) E. Regular standard earnings – above the line of poverty (over 42%) F. Higher class labour (the best paid artisans, foremen, warehousemen and lightermen) (about 13.5%) G. Lower middle class (shopkeepers and small employers, clerks, etc. and subordinate professional men) (nearly 4%) H. Upper middle class (‘the servant-keeping class’) (5%)

}

He demonstrated that, far from being homogeneous, the East End varied considerably in its standards of prosperity and respectability: Hackney had a considerable upper-middle-class element, while poverty was relatively low in Mile End Old Town, rising, however, to 49.1 per cent in Whitechapel (with its tailoring sweatshops) and 58.7 per cent in Bethnal Green (afflicted by the decline of weaving). His differentiated picture made clear that the East End, despite its lurid reputation, was statistically no more poverty-stricken (at a disturbing 35.2 per cent) than many districts in central and south London.



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The ‘Leave-alone principle’ The final part of this chapter examines how Victorian commentators sought an explanation for the gulf between London’s rich and poor in the consequences of free-market capitalism. Carlyle’s influential interpretation of social relations in the 1840s was informed by his Romantic critique of his ‘post-traditional society’, in which the loss of transcendental values led individuals to seek meaning in materialist self-gratification. In his view, the one dogma that enjoyed wide support was laissez-faire, the ‘Leave-alone principle’.55 The Church offered no guidance; the moribund aristocracy (‘Idle Dilettantism’) abdicated the responsibility of leadership; the bourgeois and the skilled artisans (‘Working Mammonism’) pursued their economic self-interest.56 Morality had thus become reduced to ‘Expediency’ and ‘computations of Profit and Loss’: either those of Utilitarianism or of a debased Christianity, where a moral ‘investment’ led to an anticipated return in the afterlife.57 While paying lip-service to established religion, what people were genuinely afraid of was the ‘Hell’ of ‘Not succeeding’ (PP, 123). They attended church to be seen to be respectable, but their real ‘worship’ was devoted to capitalist entrepreneurs, such as Hudson ‘the Railway King’, who promised the miraculous transformation of ‘a dying railway’ into ‘umbrageous flowery scrip, to enrich with golden apples, surpassing those of the Hesperides, the hungry souls of men’.58 Carlyle’s fear was that the speculative share-mania that seized London in the 1840s foreshadowed a democratic future in which the enfranchised masses would choose as their elected representatives ‘mere big Capitalists, Railway Directors, gigantic Hucksters, Kings of Scrip, without lordly quality, or other virtue except cash’ (LD, 27, 227–8). In assessing the values of a contract-based, market-mediated society, his central argument was that, by rendering ‘Cash Payment’ ‘the universal sole nexus of man to man’, capitalism had instrumentalised human relationships, supplanting the bonds of mutual obligation which had formerly united heroic governors and their willing subordinates.59 To remedy the moral indifference of the market, he advocated that a new working aristocracy, formed of ‘Captains of Industry’, should rule as benevolent paternalists; the workshy, at whatever level of society, must go to the wall.60 Marx, although not sharing Carlyle’s idealised view of patriarchal fealty, similarly appraised the result of crude applications of laissez-faire (as the use in 1888 of a Carlylean idiom to translate his polemic indicates):



Contrary to popular prejudice, the ‘residuum’ was a tiny minority: ‘The hordes of barbarians of whom we have heard, who, issuing from their slums, will one day overwhelm modern civilization, do not exist. There are barbarians, but they are a handful, a small and decreasing percentage: a disgrace but not a danger.’54

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Their critique, like Ruskin’s, was directed at those entrepreneurs and politicians who self-servingly invoked popularisations of the supposedly iron laws of political economy.62 London’s economy had long been characterised by a large reserve of unskilled and semi-skilled labour, comprising two-thirds of the working population.63 On moral grounds Carlyle objected to the resulting free-market system of temporary contracts (PP, 233–7). Hiring labourers by the day, at a rate determined by supply and demand, made for flexibility (LD, 22). But it exploited unskilled or seasonally employed workers, who were abruptly laid off with no means of livelihood, like the 60,000 valets dismissed each year when the London Season ended (PP, 234). In practice, such predictable fluctuations necessitated all but the most skilled workers’ turning their hand to several tradeable services during the year.64 But switching occupations as a makeshift solution to the oversupply of labour could not alleviate the repercussions of the pressure on margins to which the growth of a mass market was subjecting London’s small businesses (cf. pp. 28–9, 65). Henry Mayhew’s contemporaneous investigations into the effects of extreme competition revealed working practices in London which anticipate many features of ‘flexible’ employment, outsourcing and price dumping today.65 The system he uncovered involved outworkers employed by East End ‘show-shops’ (for cheap bespoke goods) and ‘slop-shops’ (cheap ready-made), who also, however, supplied West End clients at knock-down prices, a healthy profit being pocketed by the ‘sweaters’, who acted as middlemen.66 A manual working week normally comprised 72 hours: twelve hours a day (including two for meals), six days a week. But outworkers were driven to exploitative ‘over-work’. Mayhew encountered slop shoemakers, tailors and milliners who worked sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. A milliner working for a fair employer would produce six mantles in a week; a sweated outworker produced nine. Her overwork not only damaged her health but also undermined the ‘honourable’ trade, for the outworkers’ overproduction reduced the capacity required elsewhere, leading to redundancies in decent businesses which their undercutting had rendered uncompetitive. The consequent oversupply of labour enabled unscrupulous employers to pare wages to subsistence rates, so that, in a vicious circle, ever more workers were forced into the slop-trade, where they worked longer and longer hours to make up for the reduction in pay. Sometimes an entire family struggled to earn what the male breadwinner had formerly earned alone.



The bourgeoisie . . . has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’. . . . It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade.61

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I call ‘strapping’ doing as much work as a human being or a horse possibly can in a day, and that . . . with the foreman’s eyes constantly fixed upon you, from six o’clock in the morning to six o’clock at night. The shop in which I work is for all the world like a prison; the silent system is as strictly carried out there as in a model gaol. If a man was to ask any common question of his neighbour, except it was connected with his trade, he would be discharged there and then. If a journeyman makes the least mistake, he is packed off just the same.67 As in some large corporations now, teams of workers were assembled to compete against each other in serial short-term tasks, with the constant fear of redundancy in the background. The pressure exerted by payment by piece-work rather than a daily wage encouraged ‘scamping’ on quality, as the extortionately low ‘under-pay’ commanded by self-employed outworkers necessitated overproduction: A very quick hand, a little master, working, as he called it, ‘at a slaughtering pace,’ for a warehouse, made 60 plain writing-desks in a week of 90 hours; while a first-rate workman, also a quick hand, made 18 in a week of 70 hours. The scamping hand said he must work at the rate he did to make 14s. a week from a slaughter-house; and so used to such style of work had he become, that, though a few years back he did West-end work in the best style, he could not now make eighteen desks in a week, if compelled to finish them in the style of excellence displayed in the work of the journeyman employed for the honourable trade. Perhaps, he added, he couldn’t make them in that style at all. The use of rosewood veneers facilitated scamping, for if, in his haste, the cabinet-maker damaged the veneer, or if it was faulty or of inferior quality: ‘he takes a mixture of gum shellac and “colour” (colour being a composition of Venetian red and lamp black), which he has ready by him, rubs it over the damaged part, smooths it with a slightly-heated iron, and so blends it with the colour of the rosewood that the warehouseman does not detect the flaw’.68 Such ‘viewy and cheap’ goods inevitably deceived customers’ unpractised eyes. Speculative building subcontractors likewise concealed a multitude of structural sins.69 Mayhew’s findings chime with Carlyle’s and Ruskin’s concern with the quality of life for both producer and consumer, which seemed to Carlyle in every way ‘shoddy’, ‘Cheap and Nasty’. What he meant by this pervasive moral dishonesty was: the ‘dishonourable’ production of slop-goods that were



Higher productivity was exacted from day-labourers by surveillance. Mayhew interviewed a journeyman carpenter at a so-called ‘strapping-shop’, who ‘was so fatigued that he could hardly rest in his seat’:


invitingly cheap but merely trash ‘cunningly varnished over’; speculative bubbles such as ‘Overend-Gurney Bankruptcies, Chatham-and-Dover Railway Financierings, – Railway “Promoters” generally’: ‘all these are diabolic short-cuts towards wages; clutchings at money without just work done’. Emblematic of this, in a metropolis jerry-built literally and metaphorically on spec., was the fact that ‘London bricks are reduced to dry clay again in the course of sixty years, or sooner’.70 Later chapters trace how the credulity of unwitting purchasers was also abused in London’s financial markets.

Dives and Lazarus71 Contemporaries found nineteenth-century London shockingly impersonal; we would perhaps find it shockingly personal. Apart from the cynically inadequate Poor Law, there were no state welfare provisions; no mediating institutions stood between the prosperous and the poor, to provide a buffer or an alibi. Now a bureaucratic apparatus of benefits has replaced human contact, in keeping with the functional segregation of the late-capitalist city. The Victorian middle classes, by contrast, when addressed by beggars or by begging letters for money or admission to a hospital to which they subscribed, felt directly, paternalistically responsible. The dominant faith in the moral value of individual effort led poverty in London to be misunderstood as resulting from divine providence or the dereliction of the ‘undeserving’ poor rather than from the structural problems of the casual labour market. The increasing flow of charitable funds to the East End after the political unrest of 1866–7 thus led to protests that the working classes were being ‘demoralized’ by indiscriminate alms-giving and outdoor relief.72 A contemporary observer summarised the prevailing attitude: Pauperism is regarded as a species of moral sore, an incurable social disease, aggravated by kindness and fostered by generosity, only susceptible of alleviation by harsh and repressive measures. The true pauper is held up by Poor-Law officials as a contemptible animal, endowed with the ignorance and passion of savage life united with the meanness and vices of modern civilization; he makes no effort to raise himself or his children from the position in which they are contented to exist, and his delight is to live in idleness upon the rates.73 There was no co-ordinated supervision of charity to avoid duplication. Workshy paupers allegedly exploited this situation, by unscrupulously going the rounds of the gullible. To re-establish thrift and self-reliance, it was argued, a clear distinction should be made between deterrent Poor Law relief and charity. The former, which was a legal entitlement, should be raised to an adequate level for the ‘honest poor’ and more stringently targeted to exclude the



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‘clever pauper’ (that perennial malingerer who has been a thorn in the side of the self-righteous ever since Elizabethan legislation against ‘sturdy beggars’). Charity should be restored to a personal relationship of obligation between the supervisory donor and the recipient of the gift, enabling it to be made contingent upon continuing good conduct and thus fostering both self-help and social control. For, at present, in salving his conscience by a noncommittal donation, the giver degraded both himself and the object of his charity. (Hence the Settlement movement, inspired by Carlyle, which was intended to put into practice this vision of a new urban feudalism.) Foremost in the attack against irresponsible alms-giving was the Society for Organising Charitable Relief and Repressing Mendicity, founded in 1869. The potential absurdity of its zealous belief that one had to be cruel to be kind was pointed up by Ruskin: ‘all the clergy in London have been shrieking against almsgiving to the lower poor this whole winter long, till I am obliged, whenever I want to give anybody a penny, to look up and down the street first, to see if a clergyman’s coming.’74 To give, or not to give, that was the question. Why it seemed such an overwhelming one had to do with the unique character of the metropolis. Economic development took a distinctive course in London, where arguably the essential character of Britain’s economy was most apparent: namely, an orientation towards commerce and services.75 Its distance from fuel and heavy raw materials and its high land prices precluded the factory development that characterised the industrial North. Instead, London remained a city of small enterprises, which were increasingly undercut by the economies of scale possible in factory-based production, which, with the railway, also benefited from decreasing transport costs. Whereas skilled trades which specialised in finishing high-quality goods continued to thrive, after 1850 many traditional manufacturing industries either went to the wall or relocated from inner London to the provinces or the outskirts, if proximity to the market was important. The workforce that remained in the centre could often compete only by minimising the overheads of high rents and high wages through resorting to outwork at unskilled piece-rates. ‘Sweating’ increasingly became the fate of the East End poor, while merely a few hundred yards from Whitechapel, the City developed into the world’s leading financial centre. Despite London’s continuing manufacturing strength, its small-scale enterprises were neither prominent nor spectacular; instead, what made the headlines were financial scandals. The stock market bubble of the later 1840s was followed from the mid-1850s by further speculative booms and busts, spurred by massive trading in joint-stock companies, a telecommunications revolution and the founding of international loan companies. In the 1860s it was plain that a new plutocracy was emerging in London; in the same decade, as a result of the economic changes outlined above, there was a sudden rise in begging on the streets. Reflecting the moral discomfort of middle-class onlookers, a recurrent theme in Dickens’s novels from Little Dorrit (1855–7) onwards, and in George Eliot’s



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from Felix Holt (1866) onwards, is the renunciation or near-renunciation of inherited wealth, in an attempt to disavow one’s involuntary complicity in ill-gotten gains. The most acute insights into the middle-class conscience are, however, offered by Ruskin, who as the puritanical son of a prosperous sherry merchant tormented himself about the justifiability of his legacy. ‘Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life?’ Ruskin’s gropings for an answer are recorded month by month in Fors Clavigera (1871–84), where in a literal form of spiritual accounting, he scrupulously enumerates all his property and publishes monthly accounts of his expenditure. He sought redemption by giving away a tithe of his income and possessions but continued to be plagued by self-recrimination. At times, as he sits in self-judgment before the tribunal of his conscience, there is an exhibitionism, even a megalomania in the self-sacrifices he details and in the publicity of his soul-searching. But, more frequently, Fors movingly reveals Ruskin’s struggle to live out in his own life the consequences of his earlier censure of capitalism and, in so doing, to solace his perturbed spirit. (His condemnation of capitalism had originated as part of a typological narrative of cultural decline in The Stones of Venice (1851–3). This was extended to London in the final volume of Modern Painters (1860), where, echoing Carlyle, Turner’s The Garden of the Hesperides is interpreted as an allegory of ‘the death which attends the vain pursuit of wealth’ amid London’s ‘Covent Gardens of the Hesperides’.)76 Only by quoting something shocking, as Ruskin himself did, can I hope to bring home what it was in London that aroused his compassion and his savage indignation. For he was haunted by scruples that his possessions and dividends made him complicit in a system that was responsible for, or at best condoned the kind of atrocities he excerpted from the Pall Mall Gazette and the Morning Post and printed, as an admonition, in red letters: let us keep, for the reference of future ages, a picture of domestic life, out of the streets of London in her commercial prosperity, founded on the eternal laws of Supply and Demand, as applied by the modern Capitalist . . . ‘On Wednesday an inquest was held on the body of Annie Redfern, aged twenty-eight, who was found dead in a cellar at 5, Chicksand Street, Mile End, on the morning of last Sunday. This unfortunate woman was a fruitseller, and rented the cellar in which she died at 1s. 9d. per week – her only companion being a little boy, aged three years . . . Her knees were drawn up and her arms folded in such a position as to show that she died with her child clasped in her arms. The room was very dark, without any ventilation, and was totally unfit for human habitation. The cause of death was effusion of serum into the pericardium, brought on greatly by living in such a wretched dwelling. The coroner said that as there were so many of these wretched dwellings about, he hoped the jurymen who



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Thus Annie Redfern is commemorated fortuitously in Ruskin’s desultory text; she must represent the nameless multitude who passed unrecorded. Ruskin realised that he was a voice crying in the wilderness. By 1873 Unto this Last (1862) had sold only 900 copies, but the so-called ‘Great Depression’ lent his anti-capitalist views renewed urgency and a new currency from the late 1870s onwards. His frustration is one reason for the near-hysterical revulsion against London that periodically surfaces in Fors: ‘this fermenting mass of unhappy human beings, – news-mongers, novel-mongers, picturemongers, poison-drink-mongers, lust and death-mongers; the whole smoking mass of it one vast dead-marine storeshop, – accumulation of wreck of the Dead Sea, with every activity in it, a form of putrefaction’.78 But although such jeremiads are surely informed by Ruskin’s unresolved disgust with his own life, his vision of the morbidity of capitalist London cannot be dismissed as merely the projections of a misanthrope.

Wealth/illth Imagine society as a body, which enjoys ‘wealth’ (i.e. etymologically, ‘wellbeing’) if its metabolism functions properly, or suffers from ‘illth’ if the labour of its workers is not used to foster the circulation of life-giving energies.79 This, in essence, is how Ruskin adapts the classical economists’ concern with what Adam Smith termed ‘circulating capital’ and money, the ‘great wheel of circulation’.80 What concerned Smith was whether the market was efficient; what mattered to Ruskin was whether it was just. His insights into capitalist London complement those of his contemporary Marx, who, while Ruskin was writing at his desk at 163 Denmark Hill, was writing at his desk in the British Museum. I shall try to draw them together, emphasising, as they did, the paradoxical omnipresence but invisibility of the human body in capitalist processes. Only economic historians now read Marx. His tendentious analyses have been superseded by theories of marginal utility and econometrics. The labour theory of value which he and Ruskin employed is also now an antiquarian curiosity. Nevertheless, it is worth dusting it down, for it has the unique advantage of restoring a human measure to things. Through its focus on the producer, it enabled both Ruskin and Marx to see two things clearly: the human cost of unregulated capitalism, and the value that should be placed on human life.



were connected with the vestry would take care to represent the case to the proper authorities, and see that the place was not let as a dwelling again. This ...incited a juryman to reply, “Oh, if we were to do that, we might empty half the houses in London; there are thousands more like that, and worse.” Some of the jurors objected to the room being condemned; the majority, however, refused to sign the papers unless this was done.’77


How can we recognise what is valuable? Ruskin regarded use-value (as opposed to utility, which is subjective and relative) as naturally inherent in an object as a kind of latent energy. Exchange-value, by contrast, is artificial and must be conferred through social convention. Accordingly, when a bargain is reached, an agreed value is ascribed to an object that reflects its scarcity, or the cost of its production, or the desire or exigency of the parties to the exchange. Prior to the ascertainment of its market price in an exchange, an object is an unknown quantity; until then, from the commercial viewpoint, it is worthless. This struck Ruskin as utterly misguided. For him value was first and foremost an ethical concept; it could be appreciated qualitatively but not quantified. One sensed it intuitively in things that enhance life, which, despite their commodification in exchange, are essentially priceless. Ruskin turned to etymology to recover a traditional wisdom about this: what is valuable (‘from valere, to be well or strong’) ‘is that which leads to life with its whole strength’ (152–3, 84). Most natural things, however slight their commercial value and however slighted they are as a result, are ‘intrinsically’ valuable in their power to sustain or animate life: for example, a sheaf of wheat, a cubic foot of pure air, a cluster of flowers (153). They become ‘effectually’ valuable in the hands of those who are able to use them well. Other things of intrinsic value may be produced by human labour if it is employed wisely. In the labour theory of value which held sway up to the 1870s, the exchange-value of goods corresponded to the amount of labour they embodied (David Ricardo’s view) or the amount of labour required to command them (Adam Smith’s view). Ruskin implicitly accepted this theory (although he later tried to reconcile it with some consideration of demand), but baulked at its dehumanising reduction of labour to an abstract common denominator of value. To the unreflecting eye, everyday commodities appear untouched by human hand. But they have a history, which both Marx and Ruskin were determined to reconstruct. For in every product labour is embodied; and what labour is, Ruskin insists, is the physical process of individual people at work: it is ‘the quantity of “Lapse,” loss, or failure of human life, caused by any effort. . . . In brief, it is “that quantity of our toil which we die in” ’ (182–3).81 This expenditure of vital energy is worthwhile only if it contributes to the commonweal(th), which consists of things essentially ‘valuable’. The crucial point to grasp is that the true value of whatever we acquire is the life of the spirit that it cost to produce it. Although we, as consumers, seem to be dealing with commodities, we are in fact trading in human life. If from the product, or from the money for which it may be exchanged, we can infer the now invisible labour which they represent, then, in respecting this, we may restore to our economically mediated relationships the human dignity they have lost. Which brings us to the intangible ‘cost’ of capitalism. Exchange ‘value’ lies in the eye of the consumer: what something is worth to me determines how much I am prepared to pay for it. The market price is therefore influenced



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by demand (stimulated by advertising and marketing) and by supply, including commercial competition. It is negotiated between the self-interest of the retailer and that of consumers, as the aggregate of their individual decisions about the subjective utility of a commodity. But the market price may differ from the ‘cost’ to the labourer, to society as a whole or to the natural environment. There is thus a potential conflict of interest, which it requires some form of interventionism to resolve. It is now widely recognised that if a business is responsible for providing employment or a utility which benefits the community as a whole, then part of its costs should be borne by public subsidies, at least in the form of tax incentives. Conversely, if a private investment incurs social costs – for example, environmental pollution, ill-health caused by noxious industrial processes, or mass redundancy as a result of ‘rationalisation’ – then these should be charged to that institution. The aim of social policy should be to reconcile private gain with public welfare, and the interests of the producer with those of the consumer, by taking hidden costs into account. This was less evident in the 1860s. Smith had argued that although self-interest is what motivates economic activity, nevertheless a providential ‘invisible hand’ ensures that, unintentionally, the gains are distributed to benefit the populace as a whole. Ruskin and Marx were less sanguine. On the contrary, as volume I of Das Kapital (1867) exhaustively documents, in Britain only punitive legislation and government inspectors curbed the exploitative tendencies of capitalism. In their view the real cost of industrial capitalism – its waste of human life – was borne disproportionately by the workers. Many of the abuses which they excoriated would be eliminated by reforms prohibiting child labour, reducing the working day and improving health and safety provisions. The main problem which they addressed remains, however: the unjust distribution of the social product. Greed is perennial; to explain why it thrives under capitalism both Ruskin and Marx drew, directly or indirectly, on the anti-commercial views advanced in Aristotle’s Politics.82 Aristotle evaluates economic relationships ethically by reference to what he takes to be the natural order, rooted in an agrarian society. The most natural kind of social production in his opinion is agriculture, which furnishes what is immediately required for the ‘economy’, which in the Greek means ‘the management of a household’.83 Natural production, extending also into barter, is directed towards and limited by what each community needs for its own consumption, which also imposes a restraint on accumulation. But things go awry when money, rather than goods, changes hands. For then the fatal delusion arises that the aim of exchange is not utility but unlimited profit. Aristotle disapproved of trade via middlemen. This was because he believed that it is only through natural growth or the human transformation of natural resources that value is created. When a product is not physically altered but merely transported or marketed, then, in Aristotle’s view, no natural increment can accrue; any monetary profit which



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results is therefore morally wrong.84 (Hence Aristotle, like Ruskin, would certainly have condemned the supposed unproductivity of the service sector.) The best one could say of money in trade was that it was at least being employed for the purpose for which it was intended, namely to enable the exchange of goods. What was wholly against nature was when the monetary means became the end, i.e. when money served no commercial function but instead, in financial transactions, itself generated new money in the form of interest. The art of making money, the desire for unlimited riches, was termed by Aristotle ‘chrematistics’, as opposed to the useful art of ‘economics’. Its modern equivalent, for both Ruskin and Marx, was unregulated capitalism. Marx took from Aristotle a compact model of how commodity capitalism destroys the body politic like a cancer.85 The natural metabolic process (as in barter economies and in simple commodity production) would be commodity–money–commodity, i.e. a labourer realises the monetary equivalent of his product, which he then transforms into another product that is useful to him. In selling in order to buy, he exchanges his labour for that of another, preserving a balance within the system. But the capitalist metabolism adopts a different cycle: money–commodity–money. A commodity (whether labour power itself, or a finished product, or any capital investment) is purchased merely to be sold at a profit, so that there is an increment on the outlay. The goal is not an increase in use-value but an increase in exchange-value. Unlike the natural exchange of goods, which is merely a means to a useful end, this cycle does not culminate when a moderate need is satisfied. Instead, capital (which requires the constant stimulation of imaginary, insatiable needs) goes on replicating itself, for its short-sighted end is unlimited self-aggrandisement. To flesh out this abstract model, Marx recalled that human labour is both the measure of exchange-value and, through production, the source of the only value that is recognised economically.86 It is embodied in commodities which, in turn, are transformed into money: money is therefore former, objectified labour.87 The miser is content to leave his money in suspended animation, but the capitalist wants to bring his money back to life, as capital. But capital can only be galvanised into productivity, to increase its value, by the energy of living labour; it is accordingly ‘dead labour, which, like a vampire, can only revivify itself by sucking in living labour, and which lives the more intensely, the more it absorbs’.88 It has a ‘werewolf’s ravenous hunger for surplus labour’, i.e. labour over and above what is required for the labourer’s subsistence and reproduction. As much as possible of this, after deduction of other necessary expenses, is appropriated as ‘surplus value’ by capital, in the form of the capitalist. By using shiftwork to maximise its return from the fixed capital of machinery (into which earlier labour has been converted), and by exacting ever higher productivity without permitting sufficient respite for rest and recreation, it drinks up ever more of the workers’ lifeblood, curtailing their life expectancy by overwork.89



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(Marx draws an apposite analogy with soil exhaustion caused by the irresponsible desire to exact an agricultural yield that exceeds what nature can sustain.)90 Paradoxically though, the capitalist himself does not gain more life. His ego may expand as he draws this power into himself but, in his devotion to aggrandising the fetishised capital which enslaves him, he sacrifices his humanity. A corresponding alienation is arguably characteristic of the reified experience of consumers, evident in their ‘endless oscillation between feverish, frustrated, over-stimulated and somewhat desperate desire and an utter boredom and indifference to all these new things which are somehow always the same’.91 What this meant in London’s casual labour market is made graphic in a Punch cartoon from 4 July 1863 (figure 14). The Society lady has purchased her ball dress from a first-rate house, which has exploited the overwork of a dressmaking ‘assistant’ to produce it.92 The stylish dress shows no trace of its shabby origins, but the apparition in the mirror betrays the parasitic relationships behind the scenes: the workwoman depends on the lady’s money (itself derived from the labour of others), and the lady and her go-between, the modiste, require the workwoman’s labour or vital energy, which is embodied in the dress. The conspicuous consumption of the lady results in the actual consumption of the workwoman, whose lifeblood has been drained by the modiste, at the hitherto unreflecting lady’s behest. Punch was illustrating a recent scandal that had also caught Marx’s attention.93 ‘Death from simple Overwork’, as the story was entitled, merited a paragraph in all the London papers in the last weeks of June 1863. Dressmakers usually worked continuously for an average of 16½ hours, but during the ‘Season’ often as many as 30 at a stretch, sustained by sherry, port or coffee. At one of London’s superior establishments Mary Anne Walkley, aged 20, and 60 colleagues, 30 to a room with only a third of the necessary volume of air, had worked for 26½ hours without a break, sewing dresses for a ball organised in honour of the new Princess of Wales. She became ill on a Friday and died two days later. The doctor, summoned too late, testified to the Coroner’s Jury that the cause of death was long working hours in an overcrowded room and being cooped up in a cramped, badly ventilated dormitory. Dispiritingly little had changed since the 1842 Royal Commission on the Employment of Women exposed similar conditions among those toiling to produce upper-class fashions, creating the furore which culminated in Hood’s influential ‘The Song of the Shirt’, published in Punch at Christmas 1843. Two Commissioner’s reports of 1862 and 1863 illuminated another aspect of the demand for services during the London ‘Season’.94 Journeymen bakers in the West End worked from 11 p.m., with one or two very brief breaks, until 8 a.m. the following morning. From then until 4, 5, 6 or 7 p.m. they were sent out to deliver bread or, sometimes, set to baking biscuits. They were left with six, often only four or five hours’ sleep. On Fridays – ahead of



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‘The Haunted Lady, or “The Ghost” in the Looking-Glass’, Punch, 4 July 1863



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Figure 14

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a weekend of entertaining – work always started earlier, say at 10 p.m., and continued uninterrupted until 8 p.m. on the Saturday evening or, mostly, until 4 or 5 a.m. on the Sunday. There were a further four or five hours’ work to be done on the Sunday. Journeymen employed by ‘underselling masters’ (about three-quarters of all London bakers) were forced to work even longer hours, many of them unpaid. Like Marx, Ruskin also uses the metaphor of vampirism to convey how the lifeblood of exploited labour is transfused into the privileged: How far is it lawful to suck a portion of the soul out of a great many persons, in order to put the abstracted psychical quantities together and make one very beautiful or ideal soul? If we had to deal with mere blood instead of spirit . . . the thing would of course be managed; but secretly, I conceive. But now, because it is brain and soul that we abstract, not visible blood, it can be done quite openly, and we live, we gentlemen, on delicatest prey, after the manner of weasels.95 As the self-contempt conveys, Ruskin found his complicity in such iniquities intolerable. He saw this pernicious caste system as merely a symptom of a general malaise: the unethical distribution of the benefits resulting from the social product. He believed that just as natural objects have an inherent value, so too labour – and hence human life – has a just value independent of its fluctuating market price: ‘Everything has its proper and true worth at any given time, in relation to everything else; and at that worth should be bought and sold’ (185). (What he meant in this concession to relativism was that the ‘worth’ of labour should vary in relation to living costs and not as a result of the cyclical demand for labour power. He was advocating a minimum or even a fixed wage to ensure a decent standard of living.) Any exchange in which labour is sold below its natural price – taking advantage of the producer’s ignorance, distress or powerlessness – is therefore appropriation: If, in the exchange, one man is able to give what cost him little labour for what has cost the other much, he ‘acquires’ a certain quantity of the produce of the other’s labour. And precisely what he acquires, the other loses. In mercantile language, the person who thus acquires is commonly said to have ‘made a profit’; and I believe that many of our merchants are seriously under the impression that it is possible for everybody, somehow, to make a profit in this manner. Those who thus profit enjoy considerable social kudos, ‘whereas the minuses have, on the other hand, a tendency to retire into back streets, and other places of shade, – or even to get themselves wholly and finally put out of sight in graves’ (91).96 The evolution of Victorian London fostered such segregation, which of course then, as now, was also managed on a global scale.



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In Ruskin’s view, the crimes daily recorded in London’s police courts and ‘the filth and poverty permitted or ignored in the midst of us’ were ‘stains of disease’ on ‘the whole social body’, a ‘disgrace to the whole body politic’ (232–6). He was taking up the mid-Victorian discourse which regarded the physical and moral contagion of the underclass, which resulted from their culpable neglect by their betters, as a threat to London’s ‘social body’. If the consequence were not to be either ‘swift revolution’ or what (in an uncanny anticipation of D.H. Lawrence) he describes as ‘mere darkness and dissolution, till, out of the putrid elements, some new capacity of order rises, like grass on a grave’, then the upper classes must exercise a Christian, paternalistic responsibility, a ‘perfect supervision and sympathy’ over the lower orders. His Tory humanitarianism derives from Carlyle: the ‘lordly’ must rule the ‘servile’, for ‘if the servile part be not separated and rendered visible in service, it mixes with, and corrupts, the entire body of the state; and if the lordly part be not distinguished, and set to rule, it is crushed and lost’. Noblesse oblige; it behoved the upper classes to administer the commonwealth to ensure the well-being rather than the (self-)destruction of all (47, 160–1, 234–6). As he had argued in The Stones of Venice, II (1853), in a text that would inspire William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement, this should begin with the decision to produce only useful things under healthy conditions, rather than the modern ‘degradation of the operative into a machine’.97 The consumer’s insistence on rock-bottom prices forced production costs to be reduced to an artificially low level, which, as Mayhew had shown, led to sweated outworking. The middle-class consumer who had the means to pay more should therefore, Ruskin emphasised, exercise a moral responsibility. For the short-sighted choice to buy an article that has been produced under exploitative conditions creates further demand for such products, perpetuating the injustice; it also precludes the possibility of devoting that money to another, more justly produced article, whose manufacture contributes positively to the dignity and well-being of its producer. It is a waste of money and, through this, of the labour, the vital energy, which that purchasing power commands.98 In treating economic exchanges as symptomatic of the ‘wealth’ or ‘illth’ – and hence the quality of life – of society as a whole, Ruskin valued their utility or disutility not according to the emergent relativism of free-market capitalism and marginal utility theory but instead ethically, in terms of Christian and Platonic absolutes. His critique of the unacknowledged dependency of consumers and capitalists on the undervalued resources of others extended beyond Carlyle’s attack on the instrumental relationships of the cash nexus towards a vision of all life as characterised, for good or ill, by symbiotic processes of reciprocity. Ruskin’s conservatism and conservationism came together in his insistence that the limited resources of both human beings and the natural environment be managed with an ecological respect, as



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they are too precious to waste.99 Like Thoreau, he believed that ‘the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run’.100 In today’s neoliberal climate it appears that this debate about ‘costs’ and ‘values’ might once again be timely.



The narratives of Charles Dickens, one of the many migrants from the Home Counties into nineteenth-century London, offer revealing insights into the disorientation caused by migration and by the capitalist reshaping of the city.1 But although his experiences were representative ones, his imaginative transformation of them was unique in combining reportage and social criticism with the obsessive fantasies that set his metropolitan fiction apart from that of his contemporaries. The London he depicts is recognisably that of the 1820s to 1860s, dominated subjectively by law courts and lawyers’ offices, slums, prisons, the City and the river. But it is also a place of fog-bound ‘devious mazes’ (MC, 127) and macabre hallucinations, in which the supposedly familiar turns without warning into a terrifying reminder of what has been repressed. This chapter therefore looks at both the realistic and the melodramatic in Dickens’s tale of two cities by tracing, through recurrent preoccupations and motifs, some of the idiosyncrasies of his imaginary ‘London’. His professed aim was to act like ‘a good spirit who would take the housetops off . . . and show a Christian people what dark shapes issue from amidst their homes’ (DS, 738). The intricate plots of his later novels thus reveal arcane patterns of physical and moral corruption, in which what unifies the East End, the West End and the City is violent crime, illicit sexuality, financial duplicity, the spread of disease or the mysterious circulation of capital. His uncoverings of the truth typically culminate in exuberant confrontation scenes in which the melodramatic villain is unmasked before an assembled audience. As justice is seen to be done, these spectacular set-pieces are moments of festive comedy in which, temporarily, the discrepancy between appearance and reality is removed. But despite the omniscience implied by his panoptic narratives, his wish-fulfilling recourse to providential accidents and dei ex machina, and the investigations of the many amateur and professional detectives who are his authorial surrogates, in Dickens’s ‘London’ much remains obscure(d). And indeed the impulse to conceal drove his imagination as much as the desire to reveal. 76



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Dickens relished amateur theatricals, charades and the comedy of errors that disguise brings about. Fooling around with farcical cases of mistaken identity perhaps offered him relief from the uncomfortable knowledge that in middle-class society other forms of impersonation could be embarrassing or pathetic. For, in an era devoted to ‘emulation’, Dickens’s own uneasy sense of leading a double life made him all too aware of the precariously sustained façades of the shabby genteel or the newly rich. As his novels trace such elaborate fabrications into the higher echelons of society too, by the end it appears that virtually nothing is unequivocally the genuine article. Metamorphosis is thus the characteristic feature of Dickens’s ‘London’: metamorphosis through social mobility (the shabby genteel Montague Tigg is transformed into the parvenu Tigg Montague, David Murdstone into Trotwood Copperfield, etc.); metamorphosis through hypocritical dissimulation and split personalities; metamorphosis in which, as in capitalist exchange, people are commodified, commodities displace people and, like fetishes, take on an apparent life of their own; metamorphosis through similes, metaphors and grotesque conceits. This ‘London’ afflicted by mutability, where things and people are stubbornly not what they seem, grew out of Dickens’s earliest observations of urban change. My chronological track through his metropolis begins therefore with Sketches by Boz (1833–6).

Urban rhythms As Pierce Egan’s bestselling Life in London (1821) had demonstrated, there was a market for literature that could capture the flavour of fashionable slang; being up-to-date as a writer entailed an alertness to the neologisms and linguistic subcultures of the metropolis. Dickens’s skills as a shorthand reporter had given him an acute ear for idiosyncrasies of speech. In Boz his narrative voices burlesque the specialised jargons that are the verbal equivalent of the division of labour, and the linguistic mannerisms that express social affectation, such as the cant of clerks posing as ‘gents’, the put-downs by which cads, counter-jumpers and ‘snobs’ jockey for position, or the bowdlerisms of anguished propriety. As in Oliver Twist, however, Dickens toned down to avoid vulgarity: he was astute enough to avoid offending his public by excesses in either radicalism or language. A reviewer noted approvingly: ‘The vernacular idiom is given in all its truth and richness, yet free from grossness.’2 In a sequence of chapters entitled ‘Scenes’ we move from the rhythms of metropolitan speech to the rhythms of metropolitan life. ‘The Streets – Morning’ and ‘The Streets – Night’ (SB, 47–58) track the intersection and alternation of diverse social groups, each of whom occupies centre stage on the streets at a specific hour, corresponding to their gender and their social status. The time scale is subsequently extended; Dickens traces the rapid turnover of business premises and the fluctuations in social standing of



A Tale of Two Cities


urban districts in a period of economic volatility and geographical expansion. Where once there were old public houses, there are now gin palaces: ‘splendid mansions, stone balustrades, rosewood fittings, immense lamps, and illuminated clocks, at the corner of every street’, which, with the cynicism of free enterprise, ‘are invariably numerous and splendid in precise proportion to the dirt and poverty of the surrounding neighbourhood’ (SB, 183–4). Familiar landmarks disappear, as in Scotland Yard, where gentrification takes hold: the pub is converted into a ‘wine-vaults’, the bootmaker and tailor move up market and a dressmaker’s and jeweller’s appear (SB, 67–8). With the new technology of gas-lighting, plate glass windows, and steel girders to increase the floor space, the consumer capitalism I described in Chapter 1 emerges in all its garishness: Six or eight years ago, the epidemic began to display itself among the linen-drapers and haberdashers. . . . The disease gradually progressed, and at last attained a fearful height. Quiet dusty old shops in different parts of town, were pulled down; spacious premises with stuccoed fronts and gold letters, were erected instead; floors were covered with Turkey carpets; roofs supported by massive pillars; doors knocked into windows, a dozen squares of glass into one; one shopman into a dozen (SB, 182–3) The city is being given a face-lift: more aggressive marketing demands that purpose-built shops replace their unobtrusive predecessors, which, with the addition perhaps of a bow-window, had simply been adapted from ordinary terraced housing. The stucco on the glitzy façades has all the connotations of duplicitousness and licentious display that the Victorian middle classes associated with the laxer morals of the Regency period. The speculative investment manifest in these garish showrooms had generated a plethora of bubble companies in the 1825 boom; in the 1830s it found a home in fly-by-night life insurers, on which Dickens based the Anglo-Bengalee, ‘with a “branch” in a first floor over a tailor’s at the West-end of the town, and main offices in a new street in the City, comprising the upper part of a spacious house resplendent in stucco and plate-glass, with wire blinds in all the windows, and “Anglo-Bengalee” worked into the pattern of every one of them’ (MC, 431–2). 3 The rise and fall of urban areas is paralleled by the life cycle of individuals in the city, such as the prostitute in the pawnbroker’s shop, who, having reached this ‘stage’ in her Hogarthian progress, has before her a conventionally inevitable descent into alcoholic pauperism and then ‘but two more stages – the hospital and the grave’: In the next box is a young female, whose attire, miserably poor but extremely gaudy, wretchedly cold but extravagantly fine, too plainly



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bespeaks her station. The rich satin gown with its faded trimmings, the worn-out thin shoes, and pink silk stockings, the summer bonnet in winter, and the sunken face, where a daub of rouge only serves as an index to the ravages of squandered health never to be regained, and lost happiness never to be restored, and where the practised smile is a wretched mockery of the misery of the heart, cannot be mistaken. (SB, 194–5; my emphasis) Tarted up like the new gin palaces and shops, the prostitute forms part of the consumer spectacle through which Boz – reading the signs on the streets by projecting his own narratives into them – strolls as an ostensibly disembodied roving eye. There are, however, important differences between Boz and the midcentury Parisian flâneur, who developed out of a Bohemian tradition and prided himself on his detachment from bourgeois materialism, identifying his gesture of revolt with those of other marginal figures, such as rag-pickers, absinthe drinkers and whores. Boz, by contrast, is far from disaffected and identifies with the viewpoint of the upwardly mobile middle classes, with whom he sought to establish a literary rapport. Both as a person and as a writer Dickens desperately wanted to belong. The price of social acceptance was suppressing his childhood degradation into what he had experienced as a form of prostitution. With this in mind, one might reconsider this apparently facile set piece from the harlot’s progress. The woman’s conjectured history is abbreviated, reducing her to a stereotypical figure. The narrator assumes he has no need to rehearse the details familiar from countless improving narratives; his supercilious appraisal marks an appropriate distance between the ruined maid and her respectable observer. Nevertheless, despite Boz’s unruffled rhetorical composure, for Dickens there was more at stake here emotionally than meets the eye. The setting, a pawnbroker’s shop, was one which, as I will show, had haunted him since childhood. The streetwalker was, I shall argue, in many respects his alter ego. Not until the later 1840s would this subtext become explicit, when in his autobiography Dickens abandoned the elaborate pretence of the exuberant Boz years when he had masqueraded as a genteel stroller, slumming it in ‘a little amateur vagrancy – walking up one street and down another, and staring into shop windows, and gazing about as if, instead of being on intimate terms with every shop and house in Holborn, the Strand, Fleet-street and Cheapside, the whole were an unknown region to our wandering mind’.4

‘Reading’ London Indeed, the Metropolis is a complete CYCLOPÆDIA . . . There is not a street in London but what may be compared to a large or small volume of intelligence, abounding with anecdote, incident, and peculiarities.5




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‘Reading’ was a metaphor applied not only to the spectator’s ‘excursive’ visual experience of landscape gardens, prints and paintings (see pp. 126–7), but also to the city. As a cultural practice, it implied the stroller’s semiotic competence to decode the signs on the streets, in a literary convention of metropolitan spectatorship extending from sixteenth-century cony-catching pamphlets through eighteenth-century essayists to early nineteenth-century sketches.6 It is, however, important to emphasise that (as Boz’s ‘reading’ of the streetwalker indicated) this pretension to objective insight dissimulated the artificial framework of pre-existing cultural narratives and the mere conjectures which strollers projected into what they ‘saw’. In other words, the ‘figure’ in the carpet of London’s social practices was not simply uncovered by such readers but to a large extent woven by them. Nineteenth-century Londoners experienced their city as both a discursive construct and a construction in space. Their exploration of its ramifications resembled, I suggest, the incremental process by which one responds to a long literary text. Their freedom of movement and interpretation was not constrained but also not entirely unrestricted in that their responses were directed by the planning of thoroughfares and entry points, by the functional and hierarchical organisation of space in districts, households and workplaces, and by the rhetoric of public monuments and architectural styles through which social actors constructed and promulgated their self-image.7 To some extent, the ideological ordering which this conveyed and reproduced was that of an ‘implied author’, although the degree of intentionality (beyond the profit motive) and of concerted planning was extremely circumscribed in nineteenth-century London.8 As they negotiated their continually changing environment, Londoners ‘naturalised’ what was unfamiliar by trying to fit their observations into the interpretive conventions they had internalised, relying on a cultural memory which was also embodied in the architectural palimpsest they inhabited. In so doing, they assumed that there were intelligible Gestalten that could be constructed if they could but assemble the scattered hermeneutic clues, evolving hypotheses that enabled them to make sense of the information they pieced together, and gradually revising these interpretations to take account of a new perception which forced them to qualify their previous assumptions: ‘The master of the house with the green blinds is in a public office; we know the fact by the cut of his coat, the tie of his neckcloth, and the self-satisfaction of his gait – the very green blinds themselves have a Somerset House air about them’ (SB, 226). Reading is, however, rarely a straightforward decoding but must rely on speculation based on fragmentary, often insufficient evidence. Just as in the



Night is generally my time for walking. . . . it affords me greater opportunity of speculating on the characters and occupations of those who fill the streets. (OCS, 43)

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literary text there are gaps and elisions which must be filled by imaginative inferences, so Victorian readers of London were confronted with the fact that most of its motive forces were concealed behind façades, plastered over, as it were, by stucco, or mystified by the fetishism of commodities. Their desire to grasp the city in its totality was inevitably doomed to frustration. It eluded them because of its scale, its inscrutability, and because there was no exhaustive rationale holding together its centrifugal expansion and its apparently arbitrary accretions. Thus, instead of a unifying omniscient narrative, Victorian multi-plot novels often present a plurality of partial accounts, which themselves reflect the dispersion of the city into a plurality of districts, discourses, subcultures, with, as the century drew to a close, an increasing emphasis on the constraining subjectivity and the unreliability of perception and narrative point of view. Dickens soon questioned the stage convention of melodrama that appearances are a transparent index of reality.9 What came to drive his imagination was the illegibility and inscrutability of Victorian London. Nevertheless, in a contradictory impulse, he also sought to uncover – or impose – a meaningful structure on the superficial chaos. In this he was representative of his age. A nostalgic yearning for wholeness was arguably the dominant feature of the nineteenth-century imagination, with its historicist efforts at reconstruction and attempts to find a metaphoric coherence that would unify the disjunct metonymic detritus of the city. The increasing impersonality of nineteenthcentury fashions, devoid of the conspicuous markers of occupation that had been readily legible in earlier periods, made the identity of the middle-class individual in the crowd increasingly inscrutable. The contemporary obsession with the pseudo-sciences of physiognomy, phrenology and ethology was an attempt to penetrate these opaque surfaces; similarly, the pioneering art historian Giovanni Morelli (1816–91) would base his influential method of attribution on the tell-tale traces of anatomical details. Such decoding was encouraged by the decipherment in 1822 of the Rosetta stone hieroglyphs and by the inferential techniques of contemporary palaeontology and philology, which could reconstruct the whole structure from fragmentary evidence. Philology and etymology could, to the Romantic imagination, be means of recovering a prelapsarian integrity, symbolised by the Ursprache that preceded our modern babble. In 1836 Emerson had written in orthodox terms that: ‘By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause.’ A similar, secularised aspiration to find ‘every form’ ‘significant of its hidden life and final cause’ underlies much nineteenth-century writing about the city. Emerson’s observation that ‘man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects’ would find its counterpart in Baudelaire’s correspondances and in the selfconscious symbolic structures of Dickens’s later novels, which seek a metaphorical pattern, an implicit or occult unity, underlying the apparently





random divagations of narrative lines and footpaths that intersect across the city as text.10 The ostensible arbitrariness with which the stroller explores the maze of streets finds an appropriate form in Boz’s episodic, occasional narratives. The chapters in ‘Scenes’ are ‘sketches’ in the sense of drafts and fragments which could be extended into ‘Tales’, as in Dickens’s chronologically earliest narratives. But in their brevity they are also self-contained: they reflect the way in which on city streets one has intermittent glimpses of other lives, often moving in their intensity, lives which, having intersected with our own, then continue their path, leaving us to conjecture their future course. Through its high density of population, the city throws together social groups who would otherwise never meet. Siste viator! Through the lighted windows of a hospital the stroller has intimations of mortality; he reflects on the bustling pedestrians outside Newgate Prison, ‘not even knowing, or if they do, not heeding, the fact, that as they pass one particular angle of the massive wall with a light laugh or a merry whistle, they stand within one yard of a fellow-creature, bound and helpless, whose hours are numbered’ (SB, 240–1, 201). Strange meetings, unexpected intimacies, but, equally, estrangement and anonymity. The city joins together but also puts asunder.11 The capitalist economy depends on the circulation of people and goods, which city planning tries to facilitate. On the other hand, certain kinds of contact were deprecated in Victorian London, which evolved so as to reduce the likelihood of undesirable social encounters. Boz antedates this segregation; its narrative geography belongs to the complacent Regency convention of London ‘contrasts’ rather than the Victorian convention of the traveller, like Mayhew, into ‘the undiscovered country of the poor’ or the explorer of the Dark Continent of the East End. In this respect Boz is the offspring of its influential forebear, Life in London, with which it also shares a faith in benevolent paternalism, accompanied by sentimental lamentation at individual misfortune. One difference with important consequences is, however, its social focus. Egan’s London – like Nash’s – is contained within a mile radius of Piccadilly and is devoted to elegant leisure, with a polarisation into ‘Corinthians’ and plebeians.12 Boz, by contrast, portrays the upwardly mobile middle classes. In time this focus led Dickens to explore the capitalism which drove them and hence the darker energies of the metropolis. Thus, instead of viewing Boz as the culmination of Regency sketches of London, one may reverse the perspective and view it also as the starting point of Dickens’s more troubled investigations of metropolitan life. For although there are affinities between Egan’s catalogues of urban types and the even-handed impassivity of Dickens’s observations of urban eccentricities, Boz’s detachment can also be seen to herald the alienated world of Dickens’s later fiction. Perhaps reflecting the cursory glance of the eye scanning a crowd or a shop window display, the ‘London’ of Boz is often a world of surfaces with no depth, in which Dickens’s use of metonymy reduces people to perceptual



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fragments. There is little attempt to evoke the inwardness of a personality; where one might have expected subjectivity, one has instead merely individuality in terms of visual idiosyncrasies, which in turn provoke excesses of verbal grotesquerie. Characterisation becomes a function of verbal mannerism; the figures in the early sketches, for example ‘the four Miss Willises’, have no existence independently of the improvisational conceits for which they serve as a pretext: ‘They were three long graces in drapery, with the addition, like a school-dinner, of another long grace afterwards – the three fates with another sister – the Siamese twins multiplied by two’ (SB, 14). Elsewhere, characterisation is frequently generic, in the tradition of the Theophrastian ‘character’, for example, the ‘master of the workhouse’ (SB, 4–5); domestic settings are equally generic types. Details of outward appearance displace psychological analysis; description focuses less on the person than on his or her material attributes that are also presumed signs of character. Hillis Miller likewise emphasises the stylistic principle of metonymy in Boz, evident in the ‘literary strategy’: ‘first the scene, with its inanimate objects, then the people of whose lives these objects are the signs, and finally the continuous narrative of their lives, which may be inferred from the traces of themselves they have left behind’.13 Gradually, however, Dickens’s fascination with the workings of the city changed: his imagination turns from the signs that are visible on the streets to what is concealed from sight. It is in The Old Curiosity Shop that this fascination with the inscrutability of the metropolis emerges. Quilp’s manoeuvres against Nell’s grandfather are unspectacular; the bankruptcy has long been a fait accompli before it manifests itself in the funereal transformation of the Old Curiosity Shop (OCS, 162–3). The scanty, superannuated furnishings in the counting-house that is the centre of Quilp’s web of power likewise offer no warning signs of the danger that threatens, save perhaps in the violence hinted by the clock hand which has been twisted off for a tooth-pick (OCS, 88). This is in keeping with the central paradox of Dickens’s later novels that the more powerful the éminences grises of London, the more insignificant are the traces left by their machinations. We learn early on that Quilp is a slum landlord, a moneylender and a ship-breaker, but the narrator’s account of his activities is portentous rather than precise: Mr Quilp could scarcely be said to be of any particular trade or calling, though his pursuits were diversified and his occupations numerous. He collected the rents of whole colonies of filthy streets and alleys by the waterside, advanced money to the seamen and petty officers of merchant vessels, had a share in the ventures of divers mates of East Indiamen, smoked his smuggled cigars under the very nose of the Custom House, and made appointments on ’Change with men in glazed hats and round jackets pretty well every day. (OCS, 72–3)





The narrator either has no conception of how Quilp manages his business empire or is uninterested in the details. (Throughout his fiction, from Ralph Nickleby to Fascination Fledgeby, Dickens’s usurers are always more at home in melodrama than in the City.) It is not through his financial and legal intrigues, but through his sexual energy – from which the virginal Nell is saved only by death – that Quilp comes to life. Take, for example, Quilp’s persecution of Nell’s loyal servant, Kit. Characteristically, Quilp himself avoids becoming implicated directly: he pulls the strings by using his obsequious lawyer Brass to frame Kit on a trumped-up charge of theft. So much, on the naturalistic level, meets the eye. But to grasp why Quilp directs so much of his energy against someone who to him is a mere pawn, a satellite of Nell’s, we need to move beyond realism and respond to what Dickens’s fantasy intuits as the motivating drives of capitalism. Quilp’s counting-house contains what at first appears to be merely fanciful grotesquerie on the narrator’s part: ‘a great, goggle-eyed, blunt-nosed figurehead of some old ship, which was reared up against the wall in a corner near the stove, looking like a goblin or hideous idol whom the dwarf worshipped’ (OCS, 564).This hypertrophied torso, which reduces the other furnishings to ‘pigmy proportions’, seems a cruel practical joke at the expense of its dwarfish owner, ludicrously accentuating his stunted underdevelopment. As Quilp lays about this long-suffering roommate with a rusty iron bar, he asks: ‘Is it like Kit – is it his picture, his image, his very self?’ (OCS, 566) The answer, clearly, is No. But in Quilp’s imagination, distorted by jealousy of Kit’s affections for Nell, this oversized fetish represents both Quilp’s priapic sexuality and the rival who frustrates the satisfaction of this insatiable appetite. Quilp’s graven image is in effect an effigy for his witchcraft: ‘I’ve been screwing gimlets into him, and sticking forks in his eyes, and cutting my name on him’ (OCS, 566). When it makes its final appearance, however, its connotations are unequivocally sexual: [Quilp] was attended, as usual, by Tom Scott, who sat crouching over the fire after the manner of a toad, and from time to time, when his master’s back was turned, imitated his grimaces with a fearful exactness. The figurehead had not yet disappeared, but remained in its old place. The face, horribly seared by the frequent application of the red-hot poker, and further ornamented by the insertion in the tip of the nose of a tenpenny nail, yet smiled blandly in its less lacerated parts, and seemed, like a sturdy martyr, to provoke its tormentor to the commission of new outrages and insults. (OCS, 613) Quilp’s servant is bonded to his master through a masochistic dependence, being unable to realise his sadistic fantasies of reciprocating the blows he regularly endures. His crouching posture ‘after the manner of a toad’ indicates his restive submissiveness, but carries also suggestions of a humiliating



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bestiality which the narrator, however explicit about the sexual component in Quilp’s brutality, can merely intimate. It is in this context that the figurehead is reintroduced, like a Saint Sebastian penetrated repeatedly by Quilp’s phallic blows with the poker and the nail. Quilp clearly derives pleasure from his vicarious torturing of his rival, Kit, in ‘outrages’ that virtually amount to a series of rapes. But authorial retribution is at hand: a few pages later for Quilp, the devil who had lived like a salamander in fire, there is, ironically, death by water. His corpse is washed up in Execution Dock, Wapping, where the illustration accompanying the text (figure 15) depicts him spreadeagled beneath an outsized wooden pile that rears above him: a grotesque phallus, a stake impaling him through the heart? As a presumed suicide, Quilp is indeed ‘buried with a stake through his heart in the centre of four lonely roads’ (OCS, 665). It is a symbolic end for one who, like a vampire, channelled his sexual drive into violent possessiveness. We should expect no less, for in this novel Dickens has moved beyond the visible signs on the streets to explore the hidden, darker energies that motivate the intrigues of the metropolis. The common trait of his egoistic villains is, literally and figuratively, a monstrous appetite, an aggressive desire to ingest other people. Until the later 1840s this is often conveyed with zest, as in the case of Major Bagstock, who unfortunately has no stomach for his Mephistophelian schemes. Whereas Quilp ‘ate hard eggs, shell and all, devoured gigantic prawns with the heads and tails on, chewed tobacco and water-cresses at the same time and with extraordinary greediness’ (OCS, 86), Bagstock’s relish for relish leads to gout and apoplexy of truly heroic dimensions: ‘his complexion like a Stilton cheese, and his eyes like a prawn’s’, ‘essence of savoury pie oozing out at the corners of his eyes, and devilled grill and kidneys tightening his cravat’ (DS, 187, 349–50). One can only laugh at this fatuous Falstaff, eaten up by consuming passions. But, I will argue, there is a more sinister aspect to Dickens’s oral fantasies, which led him to an intuitive indictment of capitalism in London.

Castaways ‘life is made of ever so many partings welded together.’ (GE, 222) The imaginative contours of Dickens’s ‘London’ became more apparent when the excavations into his past that he undertook in his mid-thirties unearthed fears of loss, abandonment and mortality. As is well known, his autobiography records two major upsets, which presumably could not have made such an impact, had they not reactivated disturbances from early childhood. In 1822, aged ten, Dickens had moved with his family from Chatham to Camden Town, which he misrepresents as a virtual slum. It seemed he had fallen from grace. He was dejected and ashamed but also




Hablot Knight Browne, ‘The End of Quilp’, The Old Curiosity Shop (London: Chapman and Hall, 1907)



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resentful and vindictive; a revealing aside betrays his repressed fantasies: ‘small Cain that I was, except that I had never done harm to any one’ (Life, I, 55). Then, at Warren’s Blacking he was forced to soil his hands with manual labour: for this extraordinary ‘child of singular abilities’ this comedown shook the foundations of his grandiose self-image: ‘It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age. . . . I know that I have lounged about the streets, insufficiently and unsatisfactorily fed. I know that, but for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond’ (Life, I, 51, 57; my emphasis). The trauma of object loss is evident also in Dickens’s contemporaneous characterisation of the ‘castaway’ Florence Dombey: ‘not an orphan in the wide world can be so deserted as the child who is an outcast from a living parent’s love’ (DS, 326, 423). As a wage-earner, he was not badly paid: at six or seven shillings a week he earned roughly three times as much as Kit Nubbles receives from the Garlands, or David and Dora Copperfield pay their page; Sam Weller is well satisfied with about five shillings a week and two suits a year.14 What mattered, however, was his catastrophic lapse into shabby gentility, which perhaps (as for the prostitute observed by Boz) heralded a further decline into the ‘residuum’. We should remember that well into the nineteenth century ‘castaway’ had strong connotations of sinfulness, of being a ‘reprobate’ or a ‘fallen woman’, as well as a social outcast.15 The blacking warehouse at Hungerford Stairs and, later, at Chandos Street, Covent Garden was on the edge of London’s red-light district; into the 1820s the Strand and its environs remained probably the most important area of London prostitution16 (cf. pp. 31, 33). On his rambles at this time, the pubescent Charles cannot have overlooked this; as he too found himself a walker of the streets, his sense of being what one might call a ‘fallen boy’ seems to have inspired fears of an irrevocable loss of caste. These anxieties emerge in David Copperfield. The warehouse where David works is described as ‘down in Blackfriars’, ‘at the waterside’, ‘abutting on the water when the tide was in, and on the mud when the tide was out’ (DC, 208–9). (Significantly, the full description closely resembles those of Fagin’s lair in Saffron Hill and Bill Sikes’s hideout at Jacob’s Island in Bermondsey, suggesting the imaginative proximity of the bottling warehouse and the underworld (OT, 115, 339).) We return to this milieu when David and Peggotty catch sight of the prostitute Martha ‘not far from Blackfriars Bridge’. They track her to the marshland overlooked by Millbank Penitentiary (DC, 746–8). Metaphorically, this amphibious landscape is a place of transgression, where civilisation and nature, the law and the outlawed, the city and the wilderness meet. Literally, this zone (like Staggs’s Gardens in DS, Ch. 6) is a commonplace feature of nineteenth-century London: the site marked down for capitalist exploitation. While Thomas Cubitt had his eye on what would become Pimlico, John Johnson built on





another part of the Grosvenor Estate: the area between Horseferry Road and Millbank Penitentiary. Speculative development has come to a premature halt – perhaps in the financial crash of the later 1820s – but has left its traces in the shells of some jerry-built houses and a rubbish dump, where animate and inanimate castaways find their last resting place: ‘the ground was cumbered with rusty iron monsters of steam-boilers, wheels, cranks, pipes, furnaces, paddles, anchors, diving-bells, windmill-sails, and I know not what strange objects, accumulated by some speculator, and grovelling in the dust, underneath which . . . they had the appearance of vainly trying to hide themselves.’ The heavy-handedness of the metaphor suggests that the narrator, confronted by disturbing material, is taking refuge in emotional platitudes: the machinery, once the whim of an entrepreneur, is an analogy for Martha, the fallen woman, and for the discarded objects of seducers like Steerforth. ‘ “I descended,” says Rosa Dartle, “into a doll, a trifle for the occupation of an idle hour, to be dropped, and taken up, and trifled with, as the inconstant humour took him. . . . Since then, I have been a mere disfigured piece of furniture” ’ (DC, 872). She mocks Emily in similar words: ‘ “You were a part of the trade of your home, and were bought and sold like any other vendible thing” ’, ‘ “I thought you a broken toy that had lasted its time; a worthless spangle that was tarnished, and thrown away” ’ (DC, 788–9). David too is Steerforth’s ‘plaything’ (DC, 358). Next to this waste ground, factory effluvia mingle with the miasma emanating from the open sewer of the Thames and, allegedly, decomposed corpses. This is the habitat of those who subsist on the margins of the capitalist economy: Slimy gaps and causeways, winding among old wooden piles, with a sickly substance clinging to the latter, like green hair, and the rags of last year’s handbills offering rewards for drowned men fluttering above high-water mark, led down through the ooze and slush to the ebb-tide. . . . As if she were a part of the refuse it had cast out, and left to corruption and decay, the girl we had followed strayed down to the river’s brink. The surreal simile, ‘like green hair’, links two milieux where bodies are bought and sold: it evokes both the prostitute’s conventionally anticipated suicide by drowning and the dubious world of dredgers for corpses, like Hexam and Riderhood in Our Mutual Friend.17 The passage is about pollution (cf. pp. 54–5). With callous indifference, capitalist exploitation produces both industrial waste products and human ‘refuse’ like Martha, the ‘residuum’ of the urban cycle. ‘The wheels rolled on, and rolled down by the Monument and by the Tower, and by the Docks; down by Ratcliffe, and by Rotherhithe; down by where accumulated scum of humanity seemed to be washed from higher grounds, like so much moral sewage’ (OMF, 63).



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Between 1846 and 1858 Dickens planned and virtually ran Urania Cottage, a ‘Home for Homeless Women’.18 In contrast to this pragmatic response towards prostitution, his contemporaneous fiction betrays his repressed fantasies. David associates Martha’s Hogarthian Progress with that of Emily; what he cannot consciously acknowledge, but his text gives away, is its proximity to his own life history. For in the bitterness of her own rejection by Steerforth, Rosa contemptuously dismisses Emily as ‘ “this low girl whom he picked out of the tide-mud” ’, ‘ “This piece of pollution, picked up from the water-side” ’ (DC, 740, 788). In these phrases, utterly inappropriate to the sandy beach at Yarmouth where Emily grew up, the narrator’s own anxieties find an involuntary outlet. Rosa brackets Emily with the whores down by the Thames, where David too worked in the warehouse ‘at the waterside’, abutting ‘on the mud when the tide was out’. Similarly, after his own unmasking, Heep has no compunction in exposing what he sees as David’s sham gentility: ‘ “I don’t make myself out a gentleman (though I never was in the streets either, as you were)” ’; Micawber is ‘ “the very scum of society, – as you yourself were, Copperfield, you know it, before anyone had charity on you” ’ (DC, 817, 816). Dickens could not bring himself to allow David to soil himself in a blacking warehouse; instead he deals with wine bottles. But, through his alter ego Uriah, the repressed anxieties about defilement force their way out. David’s increasing hatred for Uriah the hypocrite feeds on his own uneasy sense of ‘imposture’: at Dr Strong’s school, ‘what they would think, if they knew of my familiar acquaintance with the King’s Bench Prison?’ (DC, 284–5). The King’s Bench Prison is, of course, where David used to breakfast and spend his evenings with the Micawbers; it casts a shadow also over David’s first meeting with Heep. When David inquires why Uriah is working so late, he replies: ‘ “I am improving my legal knowledge, Master Copperfield . . . I am going through Tidd’s Practice” ’ (DC, 290), i.e. William Tidd’s Practice of the Court of King’s Bench. This coincidence comes as such a shock to David that he has a nightmare about it: ‘dreaming, among other things, that [Uriah] had launched Mr Peggotty’s house on a piratical expedition, with a black flag at the masthead, bearing the inscription “Tidd’s Practice”, under which diabolical ensign he was carrying me and Little Em’ly to the Spanish Main, to be drowned’ (DC, 293). Uriah engineers the downfall of the two castaways, David and Emily, empowered, apparently, by an insider’s knowledge of David’s double life. In the following sections I will argue that Dickens’s imagination associated his own degradation to a castaway, the streetwalkers he witnessed around him at that time in London’s red-light district, and the pawning, sale or loss of clothes or cast-offs. These were linked both to the renewed insecurity caused by his father’s bankruptcy and imprisonment and to the object loss, with intimations of death, which this entailed. Throughout his novels he continued to project his anxieties and inner conflicts into his imaginary





‘London’. They find their way into plots which, although tangentially linked to more realistic material, nevertheless seem detachable or extraneous: for example, in Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend the Clennam/Dorrit and Wrayburn–Hexam–Headstone plots have little to do with the material on the financial markets. It appears that in the various subplots within each novel different elements of Dickens’s personality were engaged. To make my exposition clearer, in the remainder of this chapter I have separated these imaginative strands, exploring first the melodramatic aspects of Dickens’s metropolis before concluding with his more detached portrayal of the plutocratic city of the 1850s and 1860s.

The sentimental and the uncanny Dickens’s early experiences of the metropolis doubtless resembled those of many other migrants. Deracinated, frequently shifting lodgings to elude his father’s creditors, he found himself in a London that was itself constantly being uprooted. The Great Fire of 1666 had virtually obliterated the medieval city, but never before the nineteenth century would a Londoner have experienced such an unrelentingly continuous transformation of his or her environment. Dickens’s evocation of the railway’s upheavals in Camden Town (see p. 46) was complemented by a later passage on the street ‘improvements’ that gathered pace in the 1850s. As one would expect, in this article published in the same month as the first instalment of Bleak House, efforts at slum clearance command his approval. But he also suggests the sense of provisionality that inevitably accompanied social engineering on this scale: At the top of Farringdon Street in the City of London, once adorned by the Fleet Prison and by a diabolical jumble of nuisances in the middle of the road called Fleet Market, is a broad new thoroughfare in a state of transition. A few years hence, and we of the present generation will find it not an easy task to recall, in the thriving street which will arise upon this spot, the wooden barriers and hoardings – the passages that lead to nothing – the glimpses of obscene Field Lane and Saffron Hill – the mounds of earth, old bricks, and oyster-shells – the arched foundations of unbuilt houses – the backs of miserable tenements with patched windows – the odds and ends of fever-stricken courts and alleys – which are the present features of the place.19 Whole streets disappeared from the map, to make space for technology that even a generation earlier would have seemed incredible. The railway and the telegraph accelerated movement in time and space; as Dickens halfjokingly suggests, the ‘perpetual motion’ of cabs and carts rattling to and fro, top-heavy with luggage and freight, gave people who lived around the new railway stations a ‘nomadic’ restlessness.20



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Transience was built into the very fabric of London. The leasehold system encouraged speculative builders to throw up houses that were not built to last; but obsolescence was also dictated by the rapidly changing requirements of capitalism. New types of buildings spread like wildfire: purpose-built factories, warehouses and shops were succeeded by banks and office blocks and, finally, by department stores, luxury hotels and restaurants. The population explosion sent shock waves out into the countryside: Little Nell wanders through the entire housing cycle from the smart terrace to the shabby genteel lodging to the decaying slum and eventually the brickfields that mark (as in Cruikshank’s famous etching of 1829) ‘the furthest outposts of the invading army of bricks and mortar’.21 The first London house that Dickens could recall, in Bayham Street, Camden Town, was part of a bridgehead of newly developed streets, surrounded by fields. What his autobiography emphasised, however, was not its semi-rural charms but a sleaziness that had existed largely in his imagination. After the lost paradise of Chatham, it had never seemed like home.22 The disappearance of familiar landmarks creates a disorientation that is primarily psychological: to live, virtually as a displaced person, in a cityscape where everything must be regarded as provisional is profoundly ‘unsettling’. This is, I believe, reflected in the dominant stylistic modes of Dickens’s fiction: the sentimental and the uncanny. The former, like the urban pastoral of Blake’s Songs of Innocence, embodies the intermittent sense of living in a nurturing environment. The latter conveys the anxiety aroused by living in a world in which one cannot feel at home, where the familiar, in which one had trusted, suddenly turns into a frightening reminder of repressed anxieties. The gloomy vaults and subterranean passages in which the protagonists of Gothic novels fled from their nightmarish persecutors are transformed into the labyrinth of London’s rookeries and dark alleys. ‘ “Stop thief! Stop thief!” There is a passion for hunting something deeply implanted in the human breast’: Dickens’s metropolis harbours all the terrors of a small child lost in a bewildering crowd, bereft of a guardian’s protection, ‘repulsed and pushed about, stunned by the noise and confusion’.23 The threats are internal as well as external, however, for Dickens’s ‘London’ is also haunted by paranoid fantasies in which, through projection, objects become retributive agents of the superego, turning the child’s imaginative energies against itself. That Dickens understood the process of projection is shown by his comments on a childhood encounter at the Guildhall with the effigies of Gog and Magog: ‘I was in a state of mind as to these and all such figures, which I suppose holds equally with most children. While I knew them to be images made of something that was not flesh and blood, I still invested them with attributes of life – with consciousness of my being there, for example, and the power of keeping a sly eye upon me.’24 In the sentimental mode Dickens vies with the most extreme Victorian idealisation of the home as ‘the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all





injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division . . . a temple of the hearth watched over by Household Gods’.25 The female characters whom he holds up for admiration embody the domestic ideology promoted by conduct books, family magazines and books of household management.26 The evocations of social harmony – as in the Christmas festivities from Dingley Dell onwards (‘Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days’ (PP, 458)) – and appeals for paternalistic solidarity between rich and poor to create a national happy family also convey this yearning for reassurance in the dysfunctional ‘Bleak House’ of mid-century England. But frequently what should be a sanctuary for the many children in Dickens’s novels afflicted by separation anxiety is itself harmful or offers no emotional security. The lares and penates with which the child seeks to identify (whether an heirloom or the small child’s transitional object or ‘security blanket’) are liable to be possessed by brokers, distraining for debt, or sold to a second-hand shop or pawnbroker. In Boz, for example, the stroller browses through the second-hand clothes on display in Monmouth Street: We love to walk among these extensive groves of the illustrious dead, and to indulge in the speculations to which they give rise; now fitting a deceased coat, then a dead pair of trousers, and anon the mortal remains of a gaudy waistcoat, upon some being of our own conjuring up, and endeavouring, from the shape and fashion of the garment itself, to bring its former owner before our mind’s eye. (SB, 75) The tone here is jocular, even mock-heroic. But, characteristically, the conceit soon takes a more sinister turn as the narrator, claiming to see the man’s whole life written ‘legibly on those clothes’, projects into them a fictitious ‘autobiography’ that seems a narrative of Dickens’s own worst fears. On his father’s death, the imaginary owner of the clothes is taken out of school and employed as a messenger boy in an office. He falls into bad company and becomes habituated to alcohol and crime; his family are reduced to destitution and the man to ‘banishment or the gallows’: ‘What would the man have given then, to be once again the contented humble drudge of his boyish years’?27 (Rob the Grinder (‘young Cain that you are!’ (DS, 378)) is another version of this topos, like Carker the Junior and, originally, Walter Gay. Likewise, in GE Pip’s elders and betters warn him against his suspected propensity to become a second George Barnwell.) Read thus, it is a trite cautionary tale, in the manner of Hogarth’s ‘Progresses’ and Industry and Idleness or Cruikshank’s The Bottle (1847) and The Drunkard’s Children (1848). But, more profoundly, it implies that when, through adversity, one is driven to pawn one’s clothes, the outward tokens of respectability, one loses not just one’s place in society but one’s very identity. In this rite of passage the



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pawnbroker’s is the cavernous gateway to the underworld; the liminal state of poverty is the prelude to death. The cast-offs in Monmouth Street are a lower-middle-class memento mori: this is the world of shabby gentility, haunted by the spectres of the pawnbroker or the broker’s man. In a period where social insurance was rudimentary, save in the form of friendly societies, where accident, illness, the death of the breadwinner, the failure of a firm or an unregulated bank could plunge a family into debt, sudden misfortune could toll the knell of a lower-middleclass family’s precarious struggle for respectability. Facilis descensus Averni. Dickens knew at first hand the secret humiliations of poverty and debt; to characterise his childhood we might invoke George Eliot’s sympathetic phrase: ‘the pathos of a lot where everything is below the level of tragedy except the passionate egoism of the sufferer’.28 The shame caused by a visit to the pawnbroker is played down in the light-hearted treatment of the Micawbers’ impecuniousness, although to maintain the façade of gentility they ask David to sell the goods on their behalf (DC, 220–1). By contrast, the ‘bitter sense of humiliation’ that a sensitive person might feel is all too evident in Martin Chuzzlewit’s pawning of his watch where, despite having waited for the cover of darkness, he has the misfortune to be recognised and worries that his family might learn of his degradation, ‘the bare possibility of which filled him with shame and wounded pride’ (MC, 227). In such a sordid transaction, what is exposed to the glare of publicity is not just one’s dignity but one’s very self: body and soul are bought and sold. If the phrase seems melodramatically excessive, let us imagine the young Dickens at the end of his father’s imprisonment. To secure his release under the Insolvent Debtors Act, John Dickens had to prove that, as a declared bankrupt, the ‘wearing-apparel and personal matters’ that his family retained were worth no more than £20. To confirm this, Charles was summoned to be scrutinised: ‘It was necessary . . . that the clothes I wore should be seen by the official appraiser. . . . I recollect his coming out to look at me with his mouth full, and a strong smell of beer upon him, and saying good naturedly that “that would do,” and “it was all right.” Certainly the hardest creditor would not have been disposed (even if he had been legally entitled) to avail himself of my poor white hat, little jacket, or corduroy trowsers’ (Life, I, 61–2). The mood, as so often in the autobiography, veers between jauntiness and self-pity. It is in Dickens’s novels of the same period that the raw wounds are exposed: ‘ “There is no slave in a market: there is no horse in a fair: so shown and offered and examined and paraded, Mother, as I have been” . . . “The licence of look and touch,” [Edith Granger] said, with flashing eyes, “have I submitted to it, in half the places of resort upon the map of England? Have I been hawked and vended here and there, until the last grain of self-respect is dead within me, and I loathe myself?” ’ (DS, 473). When Florence Dombey and David Copperfield temporarily become streetwalkers, cast-off clothes mark the threshold of the underworld of crime and





violence. Florence, having lost sight of her nurse in a street brawl, is abducted by Mrs Brown: ‘she pushed the child before her into a back room, where there was a great heap of rags of different colours lying on the floor; a heap of bones, and a heap of sifted dust or cinders; but there was no furniture at all, and the walls and ceiling were quite black’ (DS, 129). Mrs Brown is, the adult reader realises, a ragpicker; in Bleak House Esther Summerson observes ‘the setting forth of shop windows and the sweeping out of shops, and the extraordinary creatures in rags, secretly groping among the swept-out rubbish for pins and other refuse’.29 She exists, in every sense, on the margins of London, among the brick-fields, and scrapes a living from the ‘residuum’, of which she herself forms part. To the terrified child, however, who is threatened with death if she is disobedient, Mrs Brown is a witch.30 In the event Florence is not murdered or eaten, but is stripped of her fine garments and, almost, of her long curls. She is spared this last violation when Mrs Brown sees in her the innocent child that her own daughter, whom she prostituted (DS, 847), once was. Instead, the witch turns her into a vagabond, disguising her in cast-offs ‘from some ditch or dunghill’. Florence’s transmogrification into a castaway, is, however, of short duration. It has been merely a quick-change act; as soon as the genteel girl is clothed again in expensive clothes, she reassumes her social station and no one realises the extent of her distress. But this apparently fortuitous meeting demonstrates not merely the geographical proximity of Mrs Brown’s hovel and the Dombey house, but also the facility with which social and sexual boundaries are transgressed. For the physical resemblance that briefly transforms the attractive Florence into her double, Mrs Brown’s daughter, might, under other circumstances, likewise have led her to seduction and abandonment as a streetwalker.31 She herself and not merely her clothes might have been sold. The symbolism of Florence’s cross-dressing is reinforced somewhat heavy-handedly later in the novel, when Florence’s stepmother is revealed to be Mrs Brown’s niece. The two cousins – Edith Skewton and Alice Marwood – have both prostituted themselves and, in Dickens’s original plan, would each have been James Carker’s mistress. It is merely the marriage certificate that gives Edith’s purchase by Mr Dombey the cachet of respectability.32 When David Copperfield runs away from the bottling warehouse, he is mugged by a streetwise artful dodger. To survive, he is twice driven to sell his clothes and on each occasion the experience has frightening associations with death. In the first shop: ‘as there were a great many coats and pairs of trousers dangling from the low ceiling, and only two feeble candles burning inside to show what they were, I fancied that [the shopowner] looked like a man of a revengeful disposition, who had hung all his enemies’ (DC, 236). The second dealer whom David must brave is a reincarnation of Fagin, that ‘loathsome reptile, engendered in the slime and darkness through which he moved: crawling forth, by night, in search of some rich offal for a meal’ (OT, 120–1). If the first shop was that of a hangman, the second is that of



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an ogre.33 His intimidating catchphrase – ‘Oh, my eyes and limbs, what do you want? Oh, my lungs and liver, what do you want?’ (DC, 240) – implying that the young David is like ‘some rich offal’, suggests that in his usurious bargaining he ingests his clients. David’s and Florence’s nightmares return in Bleak House, which repeats the association of rag-and-bottle or marine-store shop and death. The secondhand dealer, Krook (as his nickname ‘The Lord Chancellor’ indicates, the equivalent of the legal predators in the Court of Chancery), is both hangman and cannibal: ‘The litter of rags tumbled partly into and partly out of a onelegged wooden scale, hanging without any counterpoise from a beam, might have been counsellors’ bands and gowns torn up. One had only to fancy . . . that yonder bones in a corner, piled together and picked very clean, were the bones of clients, to make the picture complete’ (BH, 99). Hair arouses in him a fetishistic cupidity that is as prurient as Mrs Brown’s: ‘Hi! Here’s lovely hair! I have got three sacks of ladies’ hair below, but none so beautiful and fine as this. What colour, and what texture!’ ‘That’ll do, my good friend!’ said Richard, strongly disapproving of his having drawn one of Ada’s tresses through his yellow hand. ‘You can admire as the rest of us do, without taking that liberty.’ (BH, 100–1) Bones, hair, bodies living and dead: in capitalist London, everyone and everything becomes a commodity. Dickens’s childhood anxieties seem to have evolved into – or perhaps become rationalised in – an adult mistrust of capitalism. Krook’s shop is advertised by his shop-sign in the so-called ‘Dolly system’: ‘The name is derived from the black wooden doll, in white apparel, which generally hangs dangling over the door of the marine-store shops, or of the “rag-and-bottles”, but more frequently the last-mentioned. . . . The dolly-shops are essentially pawn-shops, and pawn-shops for the very poorest’34 (figure 16). When the dolly reappears outside a tomb-like shop in Phiz’s illustration ‘Tom-all-Alone’s’ it is, however, as an effigy of death accompanying the omniscient narrator’s most outspoken prophecies of ‘retribution’ for moral dereliction.35 In this apocalyptic novel the fate of a society devoted to what Ruskin would term ‘illth’ is foreshadowed by the symbolic self-destruction of Krook and thus figuratively of the moribund legal system that his shop represents. Having consumed others for so long, Krook finally consumes himself, in a death ‘engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself’ (BH, 512). In an illustration, the missing corpse of Krook, whose body has spontaneously combusted, is replaced by his hanged effigy, formed by the anthropomorphic clothes strung up from the ceiling (figure 17). It is ‘The Appointed Time’ and the lex talionis inexorably takes effect. Predictably, it does so by an uncanny metamorphosis of the innocent dolly into its macabre double, the hanging clothes in the shop.





Figure 16 Hablot Knight Browne, ‘The Lord Chancellor copies from Memory’, Bleak House (London: Chapman and Hall, 1907)

These fantasies are also integral to Great Expectations, which – in its movement from the fears which Pip projects onto London to their apparent confirmation in the commodifying relationships he experiences – encapsulates Dickens’s intuitive understanding of capitalist society. Pip’s first impressions of the metropolis – a phantasmagoria of death and slaughter – confront him with his deepest anxieties about guilt and punishment. In Kent he had been



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Figure 17 Hablot Knight Browne, ‘The Appointed Time’, Bleak House (London: Chapman and Hall, 1907)

brought up by hand in the shadow of the gibbet, regarded by his elders and betters as ‘Naterally wicious’ and warned that his ingratitude might lead to his death, either like a pig with its throat cut, or hanged like the idle and murderous apprentice, George Barnwell. Magwitch had hung Pip up by the heels, like the dead hare in Mrs Joe’s pantry that witnessed his thefts. Now,





as Pip leaves Jaggers’s office, with its death-masks of clients taken down from the scaffold, he wades through the offal of Smithfield market and ‘the shameful place, being all asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam, seemed to stick to me. So, I rubbed it off with all possible speed’ (GE, 163).36 But his attempt to remove this defilement (as Jaggers neurotically washes off the ‘taint of prison and crime’ (GE, 260)) is in vain. His escape route is in effect a blind alley which leads him inexorably to the whipping-place and the gallows at Newgate Prison (cf. SB, 196). In the crimes of which he is accused or accuses himself, he is typical of Dickens’s conscientiously intimidated heroes, who are repeatedly taunted by reminders of the retribution they fear for their acted or unacted desires. (Compare the dangling suit of clothes, a dyer’s shop sign, which are a supposed premonition of the hanging which awaits Kit (OCS, 550).) By the time he arrives at his lodgings in the funereal Barnard’s Inn, described with jocular irony as overlooking a square like ‘a flat burying-ground’ (GE, 171), Pip’s morbid fantasies have led him to experience London only as a city of death, where animal and human lives are expended. A ‘mortuary’ was originally a customary gift claimed by the parish priest from a deceased parishioner’s estate. In Dickens’s necropolis the beneficiaries of the mortuary are the agents of the law. The Newgate Prison gatekeeper – like a body snatched by a resurrection man – is dressed in mildewed clothes which, Pip assumes, he has bought cheaply from the executioner. (Similarly, the hangman Dennis wears the clothes of those he has ‘worked off’; having appropriated their vital energy, then their ‘mortal remains’ (cf. p. 92), in his ‘faded dress’ which ‘seemed discoloured by the earth from graves’ he embodies the ghoulishness of the law.)37 The mortuary benefits extend into the higher echelons of the law. Like the Newgate gatekeeper’s clothes, Wemmick’s mourning rings are ‘portable property’ gleaned from the hanged. Jaggers, by contrast, carefully avoids visible evidence of his scavenging. His disingenuous defence of the murderess Molly which established his legal reputation ‘may almost be said to have made him’ (GE, 388); although he has subsequently made himself her master, he nevertheless remains aware that he is in a sense her creature, having profited professionally from the murder she committed, on his behalf as it ironically turns out. Similarly, as the ‘brought-up London gentleman’ whom Magwitch ‘owns’, Pip imagines himself as if made by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein out of gobbets of flesh from mortuary corpses (GE, 317, 335). Such obsessive fantasies can be understood as a melodramatic expression of: (a) patterns of social interaction in which people are instrumentalised or reduced to narcissistic extensions of others, and (b) a profound intrapsychical conflict. Melanie Klein’s later theories provide, I believe, the best gloss on Dickens’s violent imaginative world and in the next section I use a Kleinian framework to interpret the sadomasochistic emotions that characterise Dickens’s imagination of relationships and of the self.38 For now, I want to suggest that the



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imagery of his novels implies that he came to see the destructive energies of the archaic self as thriving under a system of unregulated capitalism. The imaginative connection between oral sadistic fantasies and the capitalist commodification of the human body is explicit in Our Mutual Friend. In its opening chapter, ‘the setting sun glanced into the bottom of the [Hexams’] boat, and, touching a rotten stain there which bore some resemblance to the outline of a muffled human form, coloured it as though with diluted blood’ (OMF, 44). Shortly afterwards Gaffer, the ‘bird of prey’, trawls up a corpse. His daughter averts her gaze, provoking Gaffer’s irate rejoinder, ‘ “As if it wasn’t your living! As if it wasn’t meat and drink to you!” ’, which causes her to shiver and ‘turn deadly faint’ at these Gothic frissons of cannibalism. Riderhood reiterates the point: ‘ “I a’most think you’re like the wulturs, pardner, and scent ‘em out.” . . . Both men then looked with a weird unholy interest at the wake of Gaffer’s boat.’ Hexam’s and Riderhood’s scavenging is a macabrely literal version of the cannibalising activities symbolised by the dustheaps of the novel. For the Harmon fortune was founded on the exploitation of both refuse and the labour power of the refuse collectors. In his insatiable appetite to ingest and recycle other bodies and waste products, his greedy absorption of other energies into himself, Harmon is the last of Dickens’s capitalist ghouls.39 There is a thematic progression from Dickens’s earlier obsession with pawnbroker’s, rag-and-bottle and marine-store shops, which connoted transience and loss. In earlier novels, occasional figures such as Jo the crossing-sweeper or Mrs Brown the rag-gatherer brought the reader into contact with the urban underworld of refuse, and the underclass of scavengers and street-finders, who illustrate the marginal efficiency of the London economy in its lucrative utilisation even of the ‘residuum’.40 They form the logical culmination of his fascination with discarded objects, cast-offs and castaways: for at the end of the supply chain to marine-store shops, after the street-buyers of scrap and worn-out articles, are the street-finders and dustmen who gather saleable rags and bones. In Our Mutual Friend this urban detritus is laid bare as the final substratum in Dickens’s morbid excavations into the city and the self. In keeping with this grim logic, the rag-and-bottle shop of earlier novels is transformed into Mr Venus’s taxidermist’s shop, where not objects but bodies are commodified and recycled. Freudian interpreters of Our Mutual Friend would like its dust-heaps to have contained human excrement, confirming their preconceptions about the anal personality. Alas, the reality refutes their theories. As Mayhew makes clear, ‘that subterranean city of sewerage unto which the Thames supplies the great outlets’ was the preserve of sewer-hunters; the open sewer of the Thames itself was scavenged by mud-larks and dredgermen. Thus if one wants to find a connection between excrement and money the characters who come closest are Hexam and Riderhood. By contrast, Boffin, the ‘Golden Dustman’, was occupied with another human residuum; his job would have been to




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1. ‘Soil,’ or fine dust, sold to brickmakers for making bricks, and to farmers for manure, especially for clover. 2. ‘Brieze,’ or cinders, sold to brickmakers, for burning bricks. 3. Rags, bones, and old metal, sold to marine-store dealers. 4. Old tin and iron vessels, sold for ‘clamps’ to trunks, &c., and for making copperas. 5. Old bricks and oyster shells, sold to builders, for sinking foundations, and forming roads. 6. Old boots and shoes, sold to Prussian-blue manufacturers. 7. Money and jewellery, kept, or sold to Jews.41 This recycling parallels the transformational cycle of ‘circulating capital’, as Adam Smith termed it, and of the human body itself: ‘We therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life.’42 Decomposition, disintegration or resurrection: these are the ultimate concerns in Dickens’s last completed novel. The dust-heaps comprise the by-products of human life, in the most literal sense: ‘dust, the universal article into which his papers and himself, and all his clients, and all things on earth, animate and inanimate, are resolving’ (BH, 359). They epitomise the continuous process of physical decay (resisted by Lady Tippins and the ‘mature young’ Mrs Lammles) and, as they tower above the Holloway skyline, are a memento mori impossible to overlook. My thesis is that beneath their realistic engagement with a succession of newsworthy themes, the fundamental preoccupation of Dickens’s novels is a struggle between death, in the form of destructive and self-destructive energies, and the yearning for a new life. As a romance motif, resurrection or rebirth figures in several novels: those who survive mortal illness are either morally regenerated (Dick Swiveller, Martin Chuzzlewit) or are enabled to transcend their unhappy childhood (Oliver Twist, Esther Summerson). The theme becomes an obsession in Dickens’s middle age. In A Tale of Two Cities the supposedly dead Old Bailey spy Roger Cly has faked his own burial; the ‘resurrection-man’ Jerry Cruncher becomes a reformed character; while through self-sacrifice Sydney Carton redeems his hitherto wasted life. Other characters, however, lead a funereal existence in their own mortuaries. Claustrophobic, bleak houses are the symbolic locales of those reclusive characters (notably Mr Dorrit, Mrs Clennam and Miss Havisham), who are sick unto death. Satis House promises material satisfaction but brings only satiety; it is a house where there is enough of everything but love. In contrast to its destructive fire, the Thames offers the archetypal water of life and initiates Pip’s moral restoration. Its presence in Our Mutual Friend is, however,



‘empty and remove the collection of ashes, bones, vegetables, &c., deposited in the dust-bins, or other refuse receptacles throughout the metropolis’. The dust-heaps themselves were composed of:

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more ambivalent. The foetuses preserved in jars in Mr Venus’s shop find a counterpart in the drowned corpses that Hexam and Riderhood haul out of the Thames. Riderhood’s near-drowning leaves him unrepentant; later, after his abortive attempt at a cleansing rebirth as his respectable self in the Thames (870), Headstone makes sure that neither he nor Riderhood comes back from a watery grave. Gaffer Hexam is ‘baptized unto Death’ (222); for John Harmon and Eugene Wrayburn by contrast, their near-death by water is a baptism into a new life. But the characters who haunted Dickens in his final years were not the reprieved but the doomed men: Bradley Headstone, John Jasper and the Bill Sikes of his public reading. The following section tries to make sense of these life-and-death struggles.

Eros and Thanatos My concern now is with the destructive and self-destructive energies in Dickens’s ‘London’, as manifest in two capitalist enterprises and in the power struggles that characterise his depictions of sexuality. My starting point is Little Dorrit and Dombey and Son, which are melodramas about the decline of moribund family businesses. The information provided about the economic factors involved is negligible. Instead, Dickens focuses on the inner conflicts of their directors, Mrs Clennam and Mr Dombey. Through her inner drama of guilt and reparation and his fear of the energies that erupt in his alter ego, Carker, both transform their mercantile and family houses into mausoleums. Mr and Mrs Dombey are repeatedly described as statues; Mrs Clennam has ‘the impenetrability of an old Egyptian sculpture’ (LD, 87).43 Frigid, inanimate, unyieldingly rigid, stones, gravestones, Murdstones, Headstones: Dickens’s imagination turned persistently to characters who have petrified their feelings or buried their essential self from a fear of what might emerge if they relinquished their self-control. Mrs Clennam’s mortification originated in her Calvinist upbringing of, in her words, ‘wholesome repression, punishment, and fear’ (LD, 843). Within a year of her wedding she discovered that she had been tricked into an invalid marriage, as her supposed husband was already secretly married and had a son, Arthur. Her predicament, like that of her successor Miss Havisham, attracts little sympathy, as in both novels the narrator identifies with the viewpoint of the wronged adoptive child rather than the wronged ‘mother’. Instead, in the narrator’s vindictive portrayal Mrs Clennam resembles a child’s imago of the tyrannical bad mother, unqualified by later, more realistic perceptions. She apparently regards herself as a justified sinner, invoking the jealous sky-god of her childhood to legitimise her as the self-appointed agent of divine retribution (LD, 407, 843–51, 859–63). Her revenge against her rival, Arthur’s mother, reaches its height when, having earlier claimed her son, she withholds from her a codicil bequeathing her 1,000 guineas. At this point, however, it seems she has transgressed her own moral standards, for





her efforts at ‘suppression’ (LD, 840) result in her aggression being directed against herself in a psychosomatic paralysis which she construes as the ‘appointed’ ‘reparation for [her] sins’ (LD, 89). They also cripple the ‘House’ of Clennam in which, symbolically, the codicil is concealed, because watching over this repressed secret absorbs all her energies; it is to this that the family business has dwindled down. Just as Miss Havisham cannot relinquish the past, represented by the rotting wedding feast, so Mrs Clennam perpetuates her similar injury by continuing to hoard the codicil which is a constant reminder of it. Their acts of revenge are punishingly self-destructive: having been slighted as women, in their self-imposed celibacy they deny themselves sexual pleasure and suppress their own fertility; as businesswomen, they withhold from circulation the energies stored in their capital, causing the Havisham brewery and the Clennam House to stagnate.44 At the end of the novel, like Miss Havisham, Mrs Clennam belatedly tries to make restitution but is likewise punished by the narrator: in her case by being struck dumb like Mrs Joe and afflicted by a yet more devastating paralysis, so that ‘she lived and died a statue’ (LD, 863). Arthur inherits this conflict between Eros and Thanatos. His penitential upbringing has caused him to lapse into an inertia which is virtually a suicidal resignation from life. On his return to London, disillusioned by his reunion with Flora Finching and half-hearted in his courtship of Pet Meagles, he declines into an acute depression. At the age of forty, impotent, listless, he can scarcely summon the will to break the hold exercised over him since childhood by his domineering ‘mother’. His only gesture of defiance is a passive one: to relinquish the family business as he senses that it is somehow tainted by wrongdoing. The business ‘House’ which his parents, but above all his mother, built up, and which was also the family home in which she raised him, symbolises the guilt of all kinds with which they have burdened him. His feelings about the business are thus indivisible from his feelings about his mother; in renouncing it, he hopes to free himself from her claims upon him, through a final act of exculpation. Later, in his strenuous public exoneration of his partner, Doyce, from responsibility for the financial débâcle of their firm, Arthur also adopts the only just course. There is, however, something masochistic in the way that, in ‘atoning’ for the ‘crime’ of his ill-judged investment in Merdle’s Bank, as earlier in expiating his complicity in his parents’ presumed iniquities, he is drawn to self-abasement as a scapegoat (LD, 781–3). To the limited extent that he succeeds in freeing himself from his excessively punitive conscience, it is through a process of inner reparation in which he learns to trust in his capacity to give and receive love. Amy Dorrit revives for Arthur his own childhood misery; in seeking to nurture and protect her, he tries to deal with his own emotional needs. Later the parent–child roles reverse. Amy comes to accept herself as deserving of love and at her ‘Mother’s knee’ (LD, 884) Arthur, the would-be paternalistic guardian, belatedly experiences some of the loving reassurance he had lacked as a child.45



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The fairy-tale ending of Dombey and Son is apparently even more optimistic. Following the symbolic death of his bankruptcy, Dombey’s belated responsiveness to his daughter’s love outweighs his unconscious death-instinct. As Dombey’s redeeming angel and the tutelary spirit of a new family business, Florence gives birth to an heir who bears a nominal connection to her much-abused brother but who, happily, will be Paul Gay and not Paul Dombey. The child-woman Florence embodies love as Agape rather than as Eros. Like Little Nell she is surrounded by threats to her virginal innocence but survives intact her brush with the bawd Mrs Brown, avoids the moral contagion of another procuress’s daughter, her stepmother, and ends up safely in an antiseptic relationship with Walter Gay.46 It might appear that sexuality is also sublimated by the impotent Dombey and the frigid Edith, whom he appears to have chosen as a decorative object rather than a sexual partner and potential mother of a male successor to the firm. But the bland surface is deceptive. For Dombey, Edith and Carker are enmeshed in sadomasochistic collusions and inner conflicts which are characteristic of the destructive sexual energies in Dickens’s ‘London’. At first, with his bristling teeth which protrude like ill-fitting dentures, Carker appears as the despicable cad of domestic melodrama. He has briefly taken Alice Marwood as his mistress, only to leave her indigent and, after her conviction for robbery, to abandon her to transportation as a convenient way of getting rid of her.47 There were many middle-class men who sowed their wild oats with working-class women whom they subsequently paid off (setting them up in a shop, for example, or providing a dowry) or discarded as incompatible with their ambitions. Carker is exceptional only in the degree of his unscrupulousness. Like Uriah Heep, he has deferred his gratification (although he amuses himself in the meantime with a collection of erotica), while perfecting a ‘project for the gaining of a voluptuous compensation for past restraint’.48 Edith will be his reward. But he becomes less of a stereotype as the contest between him and his ‘mistress’ unfolds. Against her will, Edith is bonded with Carker, who, her instinctive revulsion tells her, has ferreted out her most humiliating secrets. He is intimate with the self-hatred that has led her to marital prostitution: her old conviction that she and her mother had been known by this man in their worst colours, from their first acquaintance; that every degradation she had suffered in her own eyes was as plain to him as to herself; that he read her life as though it were a vile book, and fluttered the leaves before her in slight looks and tones of voice which no one else could detect; weakened and undermined her. Proudly as she opposed herself to him, with her commanding face exacting his humility, her disdainful lip repulsing him, her bosom angry at his intrusion . . . she knew, in her own soul, that the cases were reversed, and that the triumph and superiority were his, and that he knew it full well. (DS, 607; cf. 458–9, 524–5)





Carker’s knowledge gives him a power over both Dombey and Edith; she might accordingly just be a pawn in his plot against the master whom he despises. In Bleak House the lawyer Tulkinghorn also toys sadistically with his employer’s wife, Lady Dedlock, controlling her by his knowledge of her premarital liaison and illegitimate child. Her illicit sexuality finds a counterpart in Tulkinghorn’s voyeuristic observation of her, placing him in a position to expose her by uncovering her double life, or rather her essential self, which she has suppressed throughout her opportunistic marriage.49 But for Carker the mainspring of this relationship is sexual. His first erroneous assumption is that Edith reciprocates his desire, that her contempt for her husband will lead her to abandon him for his more competent ‘Manager’. Later, the knowledge that she hates him, but is apparently powerless to stop him doing what he likes with her, spurs on his lust to possess her (DS, 735–6). By contrast, what Edith intends, after Dombey has refused a separation, is to humiliate him with all the opprobrium that will attach to his wife’s apparent adulterous liaison, but without actually consummating a sexual union with Carker, whom she loathes. (Dickens had designed that Edith become Carker’s mistress, but in the end evaded the problematic issue of female adultery, and the even more problematic implication of Edith’s collusion in or even stimulation by Carker’s sadistic treatment.)50 Carker is thus, for Edith, simply a means to revenge herself against Dombey; but she cannot suppress the nauseating sensation that, despite her wishes, through the penetrating scrutiny of his voyeuristic gaze, he ‘knows’ her. And, to add to her humiliation, in an implausible authorial turn of the screw, Dombey employs Carker as his go-between with Edith. Although superficially dissimilar, Dombey and Carker are two sides of the same patriarchal coin, the latter expressing the energies that Dombey seeks to master in the rigor mortis of his self-restraint.51 Dombey’s investments, unlike Carker’s, are not directed towards monetary or libidinal gain but rather towards a denial of transience, which ironically results in the object loss he sought to prevent. Had he been concerned with strategic alliances, he would not have disregarded Florence’s potential as a marriageable asset; had he been an entrepreneur or a speculator, he would have more actively promoted the circulation of his capital. Instead, Dombey’s attention is focused on Paul as a narcissistic extension of himself, whom he tries to will into precocious adulthood so that Paul junior can in effect become Paul senior.52 This is the real business of Dombey and Son. In his impatience that Paul is so slow in reaching his growth target, Dombey commodifies his son, like a capitalist who invests in a share whose exchange-value depends on anticipated earnings. As a merchant, Dombey trades with discounted bills in the futures market in commodities; so in his private life he tries to compress time by writing off his past losses, such as his first wife’s inconvenient death, and by abdicating from the present, which is merely a frustrating obstacle to the fulfilment of his desires, when



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his emotional investment will mature. In the meantime he lives in suspended animation, until, like a vampire, he can emerge from the family mausoleum and absorb his son’s life into his own. But he has got ahead of himself and, with grim irony, his oblivion to the present, and consequent emotional neglect of his son, kills the boy before he can regenerate his father. In this novel about transience, the paralysing inertia that results from Dombey’s attempt to control the flow of time can be seen as an extreme response to the challenges faced by his society as a whole. Pragmatic acceptance of the inevitability of technological and, by implication, capitalist innovation is set against a sentimental, sometimes reactionary conservatism. The details of what is going on are somewhat hazy. It is, for example, not clear why, given the flourishing maritime trade with the colonies and, following the recent Opium War, with China (where Walter Gay seeks his fortune as a supercargo), there is no demand for the nautical instruments in Sol Gills’s commercially unviable shop. The losses of this ‘old-fashioned’ business are implausibly financed out of Gills’s cautious investments, which unexpectedly turn out to have been ahead of their time. The investments are unspecified. We should probably assume that Gills wisely stood outside the risky bubble market in railway shares, lodging his money instead in the safe haven of Consols, with their steady 3 per cent return. His defensive strategy should be distinguished from the obdurate non-interventionism of Dombey, who seems unconsciously to will his bankruptcy, courting commercial suicide. His depressive resignation is such that he delegates the management of his business to Carker, who pursues his own investments at the expense of the firm; he also relinquishes his wife to Carker’s more capable hands. In the 1840s the railway was the motor accelerating the circulation of capital in the economy and in the volatile stock market. It represents the energies for change which Dombey’s old-fashioned mercantilism has tried to ignore and which the arriviste Carker has tried to harness for his own ends. But in their punishing encounters with the railway both men symbolically meet their come-uppance: Dombey is confronted with the anxieties he sought to repress, Carker by an impersonal force that rides roughshod over him, as he had over others. For Dombey, to whom living is synonymous with object loss, the train carrying him to Leamington after his son’s death becomes a symbol of tempus edax rerum, ‘a type of the triumphant monster, Death’ (DS, 354). To Carker too the train means death, in violent retribution for the aggressive energies of his sexual and capitalist appetite. For, under the gaze of the supposedly cuckolded Dombey who has hunted him down, Carker stumbles on a railway track in front of a train and ‘was beaten down, caught up, and whirled away upon a jagged mill, that spun him round and round, and struck him limb from limb, and licked his stream of life up with its fiery heat, and cast his mutilated fragments in the air’ (DS, 875). His death is heavy with symbolism. There is an apparent allusion to Ixion who had intended to seduce Hera, the wife of Zeus: ‘Zeus, however, reading





Ixion’s intentions, shaped a cloud into a false Hera with whom Ixion, being too far gone in drink to notice the deception, duly took his pleasure. He was surprised in the act by Zeus, who ordered Hermes to scourge him mercilessly until he repeated the words: “Benefactors deserve honour”, and then bind him to a fiery wheel which rolled without cease through the sky.’53 Unlike Zeus, Dombey has played no part in frustrating Carker’s scheme – and indeed is himself merely a pawn in Edith’s and Alice Marwood’s plots of revenge against the detested men in their lives.54 But from the moment when he surprises the would-be adulterer at his hotel in France, the patriarch regains the upper hand. Having putatively transgressed all moral and legal constraints, Carker is symbolically castrated as the figure of authority whom he flouted looks on, just as earlier, in his nightmarish flight, he has been tormented by the hallucinations of his superego. Having abandoned all ‘restraint’, he is torn apart by a steam engine, the motor force of the industrial capitalism into which his class channelled its covetousness. But he is also torn apart, like King Pentheus, by the Dionysian energies over which he lost control. As if to mark an obsession, Dickens returned to this internal conflict in Our Mutual Friend, which also replays the eternal triangle of Dombey, in which a strong woman is the object of the possessive rivalry of two paternalistic men. At the hands of another novelist, Bradley Headstone, the schoolmaster from Deptford, who (like Uriah Heep) has struggled to rise above his charity school origins, might have found a less gory fate. Gissing or Hardy would perhaps have placed him with an utterly incompatible, perhaps alcoholic wife in a soulless marriage of attrition, tormented by regret that, through the impulsive lovemaking that had obliged him to marry, he had sacrificed all his aspirations. In Dickens’s imagination he is a much more lurid character, overwrought, lumpish, thrashing violently around himself like a baited bear, as, losing all self-government, he directs against others the aggression implicit in the arduous regime to which, in his ambition and his insecurity, he has hitherto subjected himself. Wrayburn’s frenzied attacker is brought to light when, in a macabre recapitulation of his earlier dumping of Wrayburn’s mangled body in the river, Headstone is observed sinking a bloodstained bundle in the Thames.55 To try to shift the blame for his premeditated murder, Headstone had disguised himself as the notorious Riderhood, revealing his essential self in the garb of his criminal double (OMF, 697). Riderhood fishes out this tell-tale suit of clothes, symbol of the uncontrollable impulses that Headstone has tried in vain to submerge, just as earlier he fished out corpses from the river. Having been accustomed to market these dead bodies, Riderhood attempts to use the embodiment of Headstone’s criminality, the clothes, to blackmail him. He produces the bundle, like a skeleton from the cupboard, before Headstone’s assembled pupils, confronting the teacher’s schoolroom self with his criminal other. When Riderhood then states that he saw the man who wore the



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clothes sink the bundle: ‘Bradley, slowly withdrawing his eyes, turned his face to the black board and slowly wiped his name out’ (OMF, 867). In striking himself off the register of respectability, Headstone’s erasure of himself is a ritualised gesture of self-punishment, like the self-inflicted death-stroke with which Othello, who had ‘done the state some service’, takes the law into his own hands. Before setting out on his last journey, Headstone ‘made a little parcel of his decent silver watch and its decent guard’ which he addresses to his neighbour, the schoolmistress Miss Peecher, whose love he did not requite, but with whom he might have been expected to make a conventional match (OMF, 867).56 He commits the silver watch to her care: a legacy which attempts to entrust her with his as yet untarnished reputation. She is not the keeper of his conscience but represents the solid lower-middle-class world from which he is now outcast, whose values he had so unwillingly flouted. When he disguised himself as Riderhood, he cast off his uniform of outward conformity, the ‘decent black coat and waistcoat, and decent white shirt, and decent formal black tie, and decent pantaloons of pepper and salt’ (OMF, 266). Now he divests himself of his other insignia of respectability, above all the silver watch which, in the eyes of Podsnappery, was the token of a life of unimpeachable time-keeping and self-regulation. As ever in Dickens, the enforced discarding of his clothes and other cast-offs heralds his social and physical death. There is little to distinguish Headstone’s and Wrayburn’s attempts to ensnare Lizzie Hexam. Headstone has no respect for her, only an overmastering lust for which he despises himself, as, in this infatuation with an illiterate woman whose father is suspected of theft and murder, he risks undermining the lower-middle-class future he has mapped out so doggedly. He knows that she does not love him. Nevertheless, he assumes she will be unable to resist his offer of economic security in marriage and tries to strengthen his proposal by emotional blackmail, enlisting the support of his egoistic protégé, Charley Hexam, to whose happiness his sister Lizzie has always self-sacrificially deferred. But Lizzie bravely insists on ‘her self-reliant life and her right to be free from accountability to this man’ (OMF, 450–62). Her second lover poses a greater threat, however, for there the enemy is within. Wrayburn is cynically aware of his hold on her affections and, as he continues to harass her, calculates that it can only be a matter of time before she succumbs. Lizzie consciously rejects his strategems, but cannot overcome her desires, which she sublimates in romantic idealisation. Her emotional ambivalence temporarily blinds her to the economic realities of her situation. Just as Holman Hunt and Ford Madox Brown had their prospective working-class wives educated (see pp. 140–3), so Eugene funds Lizzie’s schooling, as Dick Swiveller had that of the Marchioness. It is surely not a disinterested move on Eugene’s part and, in accepting his disingenuous aid, Lizzie compromises herself by a financial obligation. Given their social





disparity, marriage is, for him, unthinkable; but he is selfishly indifferent to how he is compromising her reputation. His planned seduction would be little more than a monetary transaction and he comes close to buying Lizzie in the 15 shillings he pays Jenny Wren’s alcoholic father to supply him, like a pimp, with her address. The psychological bond between the two men is striking. In leading the teacher a dance into one cul-de-sac after another, Eugene appears to be taking the initiative, but in fact abdicates to his rival the responsibility for finding a way out of their impasse. It appears that unconsciously he invites retribution for his guilty desires; thoughts of seductive ‘wickedness’ immediately precede his bludgeoning down by Bradley (OMF, 766). As a pathetic victim, Eugene profits from having all his unacceptable emotions projected onto the incensed Bradley. The two characters can thus be interpreted as acting out different aspects of the same masculine personality in an intrapsychical conflict. Lizzie’s sympathies lie with Eugene – a bourgeois version of the melodramatic Byronic villain – in whom she senses a nobility that has become perverted into cynicism but which her love might have restored (OMF, 590–1). Her intuition is apparently borne out by the novel’s wish-fulfilling compromise in which the morally regenerated would-be seducer does the decent thing by the female redeemer whose devotion has saved his life. But this romance ending leaves the sinister aspects of Eugene’s paternalism unresolved. The relentless will which he shares with Bradley is apparent in the way in which he forces Lizzie to confess her passion for him: ‘There was something in the attitude of her whole figure as he supported it, and she hung her head, which besought him to be merciful and not force her to disclose her heart. He was not merciful with her, and he made her do it’ (OMF, 763). Although the language verges on cliché, with the stereotypical figures of the timid virgin and her husky seducer, the scene as a whole has an extraordinary intensity. What is striking is its sadistic tendency. Lizzie justifiably fears Headstone’s volcanic aggression but here it is the equally patriarchal Eugene who subjects her to a kind of rape, abusing the feminine submissiveness which Dickens so idealised. She may evade his economic machinations but her emotional dependency leaves her open to manipulation, allowing him to violate her feelings and hence her integrity as a person. Moreover, one has the sense that Dickens, while consciously sympathising with her plight, is intuitively closer to the remorseless male who forces her. In the early novels the most energetic characters, such as Quilp and Jonas Chuzzlewit, release their aggression in wife-beating; Dombey and Murdstone, more refined, content themselves with emotional cruelty. As a boy, Steerforth threw a hammer at Rosa Dartle, cutting through her mouth, to leave a labial scar. This, ‘the most susceptible part of her face’, is ‘like a mark in invisible ink’; when, briefly, she flies into a passion with Steerforth, ‘I saw it start forth like the old writing on the wall’.57 Rosa cannot bring herself to leave



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the Steerforth household; there is a masochistic compulsion in her continuing attachment (‘If I had been his wife, I could have been the slave of his caprices for a word of love a year’ (DC, 871)), and the scar reminds her constantly of Steerforth’s power over her, which has disfigured her for life, ruining her prospects as a commodity on the marriage market (DC, 350). The trace left by his impassioned excess becomes a figure for her sexuality; it betrays the tormenting desires that, however exasperated by her hopeless infatuation with her victimiser, she cannot conceal. Desires, whose only outlet is in aggressive hatred: directed outwardly in her cynicism and in the browbeating she gives to Emily, whom Steerforth has likewise discarded; directed against herself in her consumption or perhaps anorexia nervosa: ‘Her thinness seemed to be the effect of some wasting fire within her, which found a vent in her gaunt eyes.’58 Similar situations recur in Dickens’s novels, usually seen from the perspective of the woman. The jealous John Jasper bullies Rosa Bud; like Pecksniff and Headstone he attempts to manipulate the reluctant woman by emotional blackmail, threatening her, as Pecksniff does Mary Graham, that a loved one will be harmed if she exposes his sexual harassment (ED, 226–31; MC, 465–70). The form that this takes falls into a pattern. Rosa remarks: ‘He has made a slave of me with his looks. He has forced me to understand him, without his saying a word; and he has forced me to keep silence, without his uttering a threat. . . . When he corrects me, and strikes a note, or a chord, or plays a passage, he himself is in the sounds, whispering that he pursues me as a lover, and commanding me to keep his secret. I avoid his eyes, but he forces me to see them without looking at them. . . . to-night when he watched my lips so closely as I was singing, besides feeling terrified I felt ashamed and passionately hurt. It was as if he kissed me, and I couldn’t bear it, but cried out.’ (ED, 95–6) Jasper ‘obliges’ her to know this, just as later on she is ‘compelled by him’ to endure ‘his declaration of love [which] soiled her’. She abhors him, but succumbs in these authorial rape fantasies to the ‘fascination of repulsion’ (ED, 95, 226, 234). Unlike Rosa’s fiancé, the ineffectual Edwin Drood, Jasper electrifies her with a sexual ‘magnetism’; like a Gothic villain, he savours his sadistic persecution of this convent girl. The narrator’s point of view alternates – characteristically, I will argue – between victim and aggressor. To interpret these recurrent emotional contests, it seems appropriate to adopt a psychoanalytical approach. Suggestive clues are offered by the public reading with which Dickens experimented in 1863, and which became the performance of his life: ‘I have been trying, alone by myself, the Oliver Twist murder, but have got something so horrible out of it that I am afraid to try it in public.’ Not until five years later did he risk acting out this conflict before an audience. In the murder scene: ‘The raised hand, the





bent-back head, are good; but shut your eyes, and . . . the cries for mercy, the “Bill! dear Bill! for dear God’s sake!” uttered in tones in which the agony of fear prevails over the earnestness of the prayer, the dead, dull voice as hope departs, are intensely real. When the pleading ceases, you open your eyes with relief, in time to see the impersonation of the murderer seizing a heavy club, and striking his victim to the ground.’59 Spectators, then and on subsequent occasions, were horror-struck. What mesmerised them was witnessing the release of something shockingly primeval, a Bacchic frenzy. The emotional strain of each reading prostrated Dickens; often he had to be brought round, as if from death. And yet he was driven to commit the murder over and over again, in a compulsive re-enactment of a deep-seated inner conflict that he projected into this final, fatal encounter between ‘beater’ and ‘cringer’. In his autobiography Dickens describes his childhood self (like Oliver Twist or Paul Dombey) as ‘quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally’. Vulnerable, afraid of rejection, this ‘feminine’ figure represents that part of Dickens’s divided personality – what D.W. Winnicott would term a ‘false self’ – that seeks to ensure the continuing approval and good will of those on whom s/he is dependent, through compliance with their expectations. Literally, or merely in her fear of abandonment, s/he is an orphan; her diminutive size corresponds to her self-image as a neglected infant, starved of affection, who is not allowed to claim more space. S/he is, like Smike, outwardly uncomplaining and passive, or torments herself, like Florence Dombey or Esther Summerson, with self-punishing reproaches or the suppression of her emotional needs. In this final self-dramatisation s/he emerges as the victim, Nancy: the pathetic streetwalker, ennobled by but also punished for her self-sacrificial love for the villain who remorselessly casts her off. By contrast, her antagonist Sikes embodies the reprehensible aggressions that Dickens (‘small Cain that I was’) strove to repress but also the anxiety that, should he express these, he would lose irrevocably the love he so desperately needed and thus destroy himself. When the blacking warehouse moved its premises to Chandos Street, Dickens and Bob Fagin worked near a window, sometimes attracting ‘quite a little crowd’ of onlookers: ‘I saw my father coming in at the door one day when we were very busy, and I wondered how he could bear it’ (Life, I, 67). The child’s hurt and shame are projected onto his father, disavowed as much as the angry reproaches which he so assiduously repressed. A comparable dissociation is evident in Dickens’s fiction. Florence Dombey is permitted to feel ‘good’, morally acceptable emotions – above all a self-abasement arising from a guilty sense of having inexplicably disappointed her idealised father – while her self-pity and aggression are voiced on her behalf by the indignant narrator. A similar ventriloquism takes place in Little Dorrit, although here it is supposedly the character herself who effects the projection: ‘Little Dorrit was not ashamed of her poor shoes. . . . Little Dorrit had a misgiving that



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[Clennam] might blame her father, if he saw them; that he might think, “why did he dine to-day, and leave this little creature to the mercy of the cold stones!” She had no belief that it would have been a just reflection; she simply knew, by experience, that such delusions did sometimes present themselves to people’ (LD, 209; cf. 531). The defence mechanisms of early childhood that are reactivated here remained central to Dickens’s novelistic imagination of the self and of relationships. A recurrent pattern emerges: resentment at what is perceived as parental inadequacy or neglect; denial and repression of this anger, in order not to forfeit the love for which the child yearns or to jeopardise the support on which it is dependent, but also to shield both the parent and the ego from these destructive impulses. The suppressed aggression of the false self is accordingly internalised, displaced onto alter egos, or vented on his or her behalf by the narrator.60 The contradictory positions represented by Dickens’s imagos of Sikes and Nancy can also be seen as melodramatic versions of the social roles that were ascribed to middle-class men and women in the nineteenth century: the oral sadistic male, whose aggressive desire to consume manifested itself as capitalist acquisitiveness; and the self-consuming female, who, it was maintained, had no desires or appetite of her own and could thus selflessly devote herself to the nurture of her husband and family.61 Dickens could empathise indignantly with the plight of his neglected child-women (and, arguably, with the sexual nonconformity of Louisa Bounderby, Edith Dombey or Lady Dedlock), even while, contradictorily, applauding the maternal self-denial of Amy Dorrit who would, like the self-sacrificing pelican of emblem books, give her life for her dependent offspring (LD, 277, 433) and even figuratively breastfeeds her father and her lover (LD, 273–4, 825).62 Likewise, although his middle-class perspective made him critical of upper-class nepotism, and the angry young men of his early novels (Nicholas Nickleby, young Martin Chuzzlewit) touchily rebuff anything that might be construed as patronage, where women were concerned he was a confirmed advocate of paternalism.63 His cynical view of the collusions between beaters and cringers made him aware that (as John Stuart Mill was arguing at the time) however benevolent its façade, paternalism presupposes an unequal distribution of power in a relationship: the magnanimity or the complacency of one partner entails the subservience or the dependency of the other. But although his melodramatic plots expose with disconcerting clarity the dubieties that result, Dickens could not consciously admit the shortcomings of the patriarchal system that, alternately, he both upheld and undermined.64

Credit and credulity A major preoccupation of the guilt-ridden protagonists in Little Dorrit and Great Expectations is, literally and in Kleinian terms, with ‘reparation’. It seems they are born involuntarily into original debt: into a network of





obligations and indebtednesses which they must assume, will inevitably impose on others, and from which, as they cannot forgive themselves, they may be redeemed only by the absolution of those to whom they try to make amends, or by self-sacrificial renunciation of their claims. The previous section speculated on Dickens’s own emotional investment in this theme. Now, however, my concern is with his responses in more realist mode to the systems of reciprocal indebtedness that actually did structure mid-Victorian metropolitan society. As a way of anticipating the future but at the same time postponing the day of reckoning, credit was crucial to London’s economy. It laid the foundation of its speculative building booms and its entrepreneurial expansion and, as bills of exchange, smoothed the circulation of goods and services. The rich ran up accounts with tradesmen; the poor lived on ‘tick’ provided by shopkeepers and on the slate of the local publican; the middle classes invested in Consols and other securities, providing the Government with credit and boosting the National Debt, and relied for their business dealings on paper money in various forms. But however much creditors sought to minimise their risk by securing loans by collateral and adjusting the level of interest, their trust in redemption was inevitably an act of faith. In the early nineteenth century, when banks and businesses offered few legal safeguards to creditors, the fortunes of someone in commerce had accordingly depended on whether he could inspire confidence in his creditworthiness. Hence much of the middle-class devotion to the outward trappings of respectability. Tigg Montague’s fraudulent company succeeds because the opulent furnishings of his Pall Mall apartment and of the AngloBengalee’s offices in the City create the illusion of prosperity: ‘look at the iron safes, the clock, the office seal – in its capacious self, security for anything. Solidity! Look at the massive blocks of marble in the chimney-pieces, and the gorgeous parapet on the top of the house!’ (MC, 432). Although the Anglo-Bengalee is backed by no capital, it nevertheless appears creditworthy; but only because of the credulity of its creditors. At mid-century this credibility gap, coupled with an ostensible decline in corporate governance, brought about a crisis of confidence in London’s paper credit. For Dickens, writing just after the wave of white-collar crime that accompanied the railway boom, financial fraud was a revealing symptom of a morally bankrupt London characterised by ‘shows and pretences’: with ‘conspicuous people’ trading on ‘rotten banks of religion, patriotism, virtue, honour’, there were large amounts ‘of mere paper in circulation, on which anybody lived pretty handsomely, promising to pay great sums of goodness with no effects’ (DS, 908–9). Shocking cases of financial mismanagement following the introduction of joint-stock limited liability in 1855 and the laissez-faire Joint Stock Companies Act of 1856 suggested that the moral guideline of ‘my word is my bond’ no longer obtained; instead caveat emptor was the maxim of a London increasingly devoted to Mammon worship.65



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In Bleak House (1852–3) and Little Dorrit (1855–7) Dickens analysed contemporary London in Carlylean terms: an idle, moribund aristocracy and its hangers-on (the Dedlocks, the Hampton Court Bohemians, West End mews dwellers) enmeshed nepotistically with irresponsible Government (the Coodles, Doodles, Foodles, etc., the Tite Barnacles) and corrupt institutions (Chancery, the Circumlocution Office); middle-class Captains of Industry (Rouncewell, Doyce) and middle-class dilettantes and drones (Turveydrop, Skimpole, Carstone, Gowan); unemployed casual labourers (Bleeding Heart Yard) and their capitalist exploiters (Casby). As in Mayhew’s contemporaneous classification of ‘Those that will work, Those that cannot work, and Those that will not work’, Dickens employs the Carlylean touchstone of work to discriminate the morally deserving from the undeserving.66 Carlyle likewise influenced his attacks on Mammon worship, which, in their blasphemous ironies, resemble other contemporary criticism of capitalist idolatry.67 In an article contemporaneous with Little Dorrit Dickens described Hudson the ‘Railway King’ as ‘The last famous golden calf that disfigured this country’.68 The novel itself, which depicts Merdle as a Hudson-like golden calf, develops Carlyle’s argument from ‘Hudson’s Statue’ that contemporary England combined a hypocritical Christian faith – the worship of ‘respectable Hebrew and other fetishes’ – with real worship of ‘quite other gods and fetishes’, namely ‘Hudsons and scrips’.69 Official religion is represented by Mrs Clennam’s joyless sabbatarianism and Calvinist vindictiveness: ‘she still abided by her old impiety – still reversed the order of Creation, and breathed her own breath into a clay image of her Creator’ (LD, 844). Popular worship, by contrast, is directed towards Merdle: ‘nobody had the smallest reason for supposing the clay of which this object of worship was made, to be other than the commonest clay . . . All people knew (or thought they knew) that he had made himself immensely rich; and, for that reason alone, prostrated themselves before him, more degradedly and less excusably than the darkest savage creeps out of his hole in the ground to propitiate, in some log or reptile, the Deity of his benighted soul’ (LD, 611; cf. 440–1). Merdle has the Establishment in his pocket. His stepson is made one of the Lords of the Circumlocution Office; he himself is proposed for a peerage. West End fashion goes eastwards to the City, where Merdle ‘continued his shining course’ (LD, 678, 756): ‘Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him’ (Matt. 2: 1). He may be a false prophet but such is his charisma that he is taken for the new Messiah: ‘The rich man, who had in a manner revised the New Testament, and already entered into the kingdom of Heaven. . . As he went up the stairs, people were already posted on the lower stairs, that his shadow might fall upon them when he came down. So were the sick brought out and laid in the track of the Apostle – who had not got into the good society, and had not made the money’ (LD, 673; cf. LD, 444–5, Matt. 19: 24). The sarcasm is laid on with a trowel. But Dickens’s outrage is genuine and it leads him





(who in 1850 had excoriated Millais’s Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop for blasphemy) to one of the most outspoken passages in any Victorian novel.70 In a grotesque parody of the Nativity, the ‘wise men’ rumoured to have been bringing Merdle a peerage, witness the disappearance of his star from the firmament; stripped of his heavenly aura, he is dead meat. The narrator alludes to the discovery of Merdle’s body, after he has cut his throat in a public baths: ‘he, the shining wonder, the new constellation to be followed by the wise men bringing gifts, until it stopped over a certain carrion at the bottom of a bath and disappeared – was simply the greatest Forger and the greatest Thief that ever cheated the gallows’ (LD, 777). Dickens’s blasphemous metaphors suggest the affinities between the emotions invested in religious worship and in its secular travesties. The philosopher’s stone, the alchemist’s Grail which would turn base metals into gold, has usually been misinterpreted as literal rather than figurative: not as the catalyst of a spiritual transformation but instead as a materialistic shortcut to easy money. There has likewise seemed something magical about the way in which capital, accruing interest but itself seemingly distinct from the commodified labour power which it represents, apparently generates itself.71 Like his wealth, the dishonest speculator Merdle, ‘had sprung from nothing, by no natural growth or process that any one could account for’ (LD, 776). His sudden materialisation as a parvenu presents no obstacle to his creation of a financial empire until a panic overtakes the City, as rumours circulate about his failure. At first, in the register of commercial diplomacy, these merely ‘doubt whether Mr Merdle’s wealth would be found to be as vast as had been supposed; whether there might not be a temporary difficulty in “realising” it; whether there might not even be a temporary suspension (say a month or so) on the part of the wonderful Bank’ (LD, 776). The question is whether the capital with its accrued interest is there literally or merely symbolically. There is an implicit analogy with the theological debate about consubstantation and transsubstantation. Is the wafer miraculously transmogrified into the body of Christ, or is this to be understood metaphorically, as a sign for the real presence that does not materialise? Faith in the ultimate convertibility of paper securities requires no less a willing suspension of disbelief. In the case of the Anglo-Bengalee such faith was entirely misplaced, for the esoteric mysteries that were performed in its inner sanctum (‘an awful chamber, labelled Board-room: the door of which sanctuary immediately closed, and screened the great capitalist from vulgar eyes’) were mere hocuspocus (MC, 434). In the later 1850s financial wizardry also kept naive investors spellbound. First their money was turned into paper securities, then those disappeared into thin air, rapidly followed by the conjurors themselves. The English mistrust of paper money and securities goes back to the Financial Revolution of the 1690s. Before looking at why it became so acute in the later 1850s and 1860s, it is worth pausing to reflect on the nature of paper money. We might think of a banknote as an institutional promissory



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note: ‘I promise to pay the bearer on demand . . .’. In itself the paper is of negligible value; it is worth something as a means of payment for goods and services only if it is accepted as a conventional sign, representing the precious metal into which it may be converted, in keeping with the gold standard which was reintroduced in 1821. Acknowledging the importance of this material guarantee of value, the 1844 Bank Charter Act limited the money supply by restricting the issue of banknotes to the equivalent of the Bank of England’s bullion reserves, plus an additional £14 million (subsequently increased by £475,000) which would be covered by the Bank’s government securities. Provincial, Scottish and Irish banks issued their own banknotes, the quantity being pegged at the amount in circulation in 1844, although this quota could be exceeded by Scottish and Irish banks if the surplus was covered by bullion deposits. Most nineteenth-century trade was, however, conducted through bills of exchange, promissory notes in which the purchaser of goods contracted to pay their vendor a specific sum at a fixed future date. The vendor could anticipate this payment by cashing the bill at an acceptance house (or at an accommodating bank), which charged for this credit facility by deducting a discount corresponding to the length of time before the bill was due and the degree of risk that the bill might not be honoured. The acceptance house or bank could then either recover the full value of the bill on its due date or sell it on, at just under face value, to a discount house, i.e. bill-broker. To finance this transaction the discount house borrowed short term, expecting to make a profit on the difference between the interest it had charged in rediscounting the bill and the interest it had had to pay on the money it borrowed. It is clear that under this system the proliferation of credit might easily outrun the realisable assets of the creditors, including the banks and acceptance houses which had guaranteed the bills of exchange. The money employed by bill-brokers and the deposits lodged with joint-stock banks (which were themselves increasingly loaned to bill-brokers) were largely held at call. These institutions assumed that, in a crisis in the discount market, the Bank of England would tide them over by advancing cash on the security of their otherwise illiquid bills.72 Such a crisis happened in November 1857. There had been scandals in the banking sector in 1856. In February the Tipperary Bank failed, followed in September by the Royal British Bank; in both cases (to which Dickens alludes in Little Dorrit) fraud as well as incompetence had hastened their demise. But the systemic shock of 1857 came from a different direction: speculation and credit fraud in foreign trade. In October the stoppage of some leading American banks and consequent failure of British mercantile houses had led to extensive calls on London’s discount houses which, in turn, placed pressure on the Bank of England. The increased drain on the Bank’s reserves (compounded by the Indian Mutiny which interrupted remittances from India and necessitated capital





for military materials) led to a progressive raising of the discount rate from 5½ per cent to 10 per cent, in an attempt to stem the demand for accommodation. On 27 October the Borough Bank of Liverpool failed. From 9 to 11 November justified rumours of the imminent failure, owing to extensive bad loans, of the Western Bank of Glasgow and the City of Glasgow Bank led to their being besieged by banknote holders insisting on convertibility and by depositors demanding to withdraw their savings in gold. To prevent a riot, the Bank of England despatched over £1,000,000 of sovereigns to Glasgow. Accordingly, the Scots moneybags – or rather the Scot with money in his bags – was an irresistible target for Punch (figure 18). When this cartoon appeared on 5 December the situation was comic; on 12 November it had seemed no laughing matter. The emergency in Glasgow, followed by the suspension of the large London bill-brokers Sanderson, Sandeman and Co., exacerbated the unease in the discount market, provoking ever more importunate requests for advances from the Bank of England. Between 10 and 12 November the Bank’s bullion decreased from £7,411,000 to £6,524,000 and its cash reserve from £2,420,000 to £581,000; conversely, its discounts and advances increased from £14,803,000 to £18,044,000. Its resources were nearing exhaustion. Nevertheless, the fear was that if it ceased such assistance, the resulting panic would place impossible demands on the banking system and bring down so many mercantile firms that the disaster would possibly destroy Britain as a mercantile community.73 Urged by the Bank’s Directors and at least one large discount house, the Government thus resolved to take the controversial step of suspending the 1844 Bank Charter Act, enabling further banknotes to be issued at a discount rate of not less than 10 per cent, in the hope that this would steady nerves in the financial market. It is tempting to see similarities with the situation in autumn 1998 when the Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, organised a rescue operation to prevent the collapse of the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund. (A similar operation was mounted in 1890 by the Bank of England, together with a consortium of banks, to rescue the Barings finance house.) Like the hedge fund, many of the mercantile firms and finance houses threatened with bankruptcy in 1857 had overextended themselves by using a dangerously high leverage. It was unsound to bail them out (as this would invite moral hazard) but even more irresponsible to risk allowing the ‘contagion’ to spread. In 1857, as in 1998, the strategy worked. On 18 November, as the crisis deepened, the gold in the Bank reached its lowest point, £6,484,000; on 21 November the Bank’s discounts and advances peaked at £21,616,000, more than double their amount back on 27 October when the crisis began. But of the authorized £2 million excess banknotes, only £928,000 were actually required; by 30 November only £15,000 were still in circulation and on 1 December the entire over-issue had been returned. It had nevertheless been a massive



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Figure 18 ‘Our Friend, MACLUCKIESPECH, mistrusting those confounded Banks, resolves to carry his Capital in his Trousers’ pockets – ’Tis so comforting to have a feeling of Security’, Punch, 5 December 1857


shock: between November 1857 and February 1858, 146 mercantile firms and five banks suspended payment. The crisis caused by discount houses attempting to get the Bank of England to rediscount their already rediscounted bills suggested that overextension of paper money was leading to a bubble economy. In January 1858 Punch published the tongue-in-cheek Prospectus of ‘The Unlimited Accommodation Bill Discounting Company. Paid-up capital £0,000,000,000’.74 The Honorary Secretaries, Archibald M’Flitter and Benjamin Bolt, Esquires, Temporary Offices, Hook’em Court, Snivey Street, complain that: Commerce has been checked, and much embarrassment occasioned, through the scanty powers extended to the Mercantile Community, of making their acceptances convertible to cash. In the foolish want of confidence engendered by the panic, houses high in enterprise have fallen simply through the fact of their being low in credit: and many of the most successful overtraders have been driven to suspend . . . The absurd amount of caution which the banks have all been exercising has had the most depressing influence on traders, whose finances were not open to minute investigation, but whose credit had been good, simply from the reason of its having been unquestioned. Less than a decade later, in May 1866, the huge discount house of Overend, Gurney, and Co. went bankrupt, bringing down with it the railway contractors Peto and Betts and some 180 credit and finance companies. The difficulties of London’s acceptance and discount houses had been heightened by the City’s increasing involvement in foreign loans, where the potential profits but also the potential losses were much higher (evidenced by the knock-on effect in London of the financial panic in America), and by the worldwide adoption as a means of payment of bills drawn on London. Dickens had grasped this intuitively in Little Dorrit, where although Merdle was modelled on Hudson, ‘the Railway King’, and on John Sadleir, whose forgeries bankrupted the Tipperary Joint-Stock Bank, the impressionistic aura that surrounds him is that of a much bigger, global operator.75 The precariousness of this international credit network was exacerbated by fraud. The most disturbing finding of the Parliamentary Select Committee that held a post-mortem on ‘the recent Commercial Distress’ was the exposure of extensive transactions involving fictitious credit. To obtain capital, unscrupulous English trading houses had been sending drafts drawn upon them, in payment for non-existent goods, to their foreign agents. After these bills had been negotiated abroad, they found their way back to England, where imprudent banks and discount houses were prepared to accept them to gain a commission. One such house had a capital of under £10,000 and liabilities of about £900,000. As the bills fell due, the credit was rolled over, using longer-dated replacements as ‘security’.76 Elaborate structures of futures



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contracts were thus built up, in a ramshackle lean-to based on cross-holdings of bills, which, it was hoped, the Bank of England would shore up in an emergency. Jerry-built finance houses mortgaged to the hilt and the real houses which such houses financed are the theme of John Hollingshead’s very Dickensian article of December 1857, ‘The City of Unlimited Paper’.77 The first ‘paperhouse’ he surveys is Collaps, Vortex, Docket, and Company, general merchants, who specialise in ‘ramification’. Their ‘ramifications’ extend to M’Vortex and Company in Glasgow, O’Docket and Company of Dublin, Alphonse Collaps and Company of Paris, and so on through ‘branches’ in India, North America, Australia and, irresistibly, the Cape of Good Hope. Of course, these subsidiary offshoots trade in and off one another’s bills of exchange, in a system of reciprocal credit, underwritten, as lender of last resort, by the Bank of England. For, as Hollingshead suggests (on the evidence of the previous few weeks) Collaps, Vortex, Docket, and Company has become so gigantic that, rather than its being suspended, the Bank Charter Act will be suspended instead. The tour through ‘paper-houses’ is a playful one but it ends bleakly. For, anticipating uncannily the repercussions of the collapse in 1866 of Overend and Gurney, Hollingshead depicts the corrupt joint venture of the Etna and Vesuvius Joint Stock Bank, Filch Lane and ‘the great builders and contractors, Messrs. Chaos, Rotbill, and Clay, of Bankside’ to build New Babylonia on ‘the great marsh of East Babel’. ‘Suddenly shoals of bills of exchange appeared in the Money Market – and especially in the accounts of the Etna and Vesuvius Bank – drawn upon hodmen, carpenters, bricklayers, carters, and labourers . . . Suddenly came the general crash and paralysed enterprise left New Babylonia – the hideous nightmare – the paper monster – which it remains at the present time’. The powerful description which follows of the derelict building site resembles that in Dombey of the devastation wreaked by railway construction in Camden Town. What is different is the sense of finality in this metropolitan dystopia: ‘the home of the rag-picker and the tramp; silent and awful as a city of the dead; silent as the grave of sunken capital should be’. There is literally nothing behind the grand façades of New Babylonia, with its ‘large ghastly shells of mansions, some with broken, weather-beaten stucco fronts, some with ruined porticoes half completed’. This wasteland ‘backed’ only by credit is the consequence of and the literal counterpart to the City of Unlimited Paper centred on the Royal Exchange, whose ‘rulers – solid and substantial as they appear to the eye – are made of paper’; ‘all they touch is transformed to paper’, and ‘the stately-looking palaces in which they live and trade’ are ‘cardboard houses’. Hollingshead’s point is that however remote the make-believe worlds of the City of Unlimited Paper and the Stucconia colonized by its parvenu directors may seem to be from the grim realities of New Babylonia, they share a common ground: they are all





fabrications of credit. Similarly, Dickens will suggest in Our Mutual Friend that there is nothing of substance behind the ostentatious exterior of many West End town houses: the magnificent façade of ‘Stucconia’ conceals a void, like the flats of an elaborate stage-set. It appears that there is no place outside the ‘ramifications’ of the credit system, with its network of reciprocally accepted bills of exchange. Whether voluntarily or involuntarily, whether hodman or magnate, everyone in London lives on borrowed time. Credit – and its embodiment, paper – thus become in Our Mutual Friend the final unifying metaphor in Dickens’s increasingly dispirited vision of the interconnectedness of metropolitan life.

Counterfeits – and genuine articles? In the boom years preceding the Overend and Gurney crash, the Partnership and Limited Liability Acts 1855, Joint Stock Companies Act 1856, and Companies Act 1862 led to a much remarked flood of new joint-stock banks and companies. Such ventures were encouraged by the unparalleled permissiveness of England’s company law in 1862: ‘as few as seven persons [could] incorporate a company merely by registering a memorandum of association; each shareholder, moreover, only had to subscribe to one share, with no minimum value and on which no money need have been paid’.78 In a break with deposit-banking traditions, emulating instead continental investment banking, new finance companies were formed, including the International Finance Society, explicitly linked to the Crédit Mobilier, and ‘rip-off finance houses’, including the Crédit Foncier and Mobilier of England of Albert Grant MP (the principal model for Trollope’s Melmotte). Taking on credit risks that banks wouldn’t touch, the latter offered advances ‘secured’ by bills of exchange often drawn on unfinished railway works, and also rigged the market in the shares of the companies they promoted.79 Accordingly, in Dickens’s novel, Lammles’ wide-boy associates dabble with ‘traffic in Shares’; speculative company promoters gather at Veneering’s: the ‘Fathers of the Scrip-Church’ (OMF, 159–60, 312–13, 690). The Veneerings’ dinner-party guests include ‘Boots’, ‘Brewer’, ‘a Payer-off of the National Debt, a Poem on Shakespeare, a Grievance, and a Public Office’. The muted cynicism of this metonymy, which reduces the guests’ identity to their economic functions or social roles, is only the conceivable mode for Dickens’s plutocratic ‘London’ of the mid-1860s in which people are merely commodities. What upholds Society in this novel (like the credit sustained by promissory notes and cross-holdings of bills of exchange) is a tacit agreement, for as long as mutual self-interest makes this worthwhile, to honour one another’s social exchange-value, however inflated this may be. The West End has its own rituals of underwriting. Conspicuous consumption and having the right address reassuringly suggest substantial capital



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assets, but the successful flotation of a new parvenu requires prestigious guarantors to maintain that, although not blue-blooded, he is undoubtedly blue-chip. Hence the indispensability of backers such as Podsnap, who, basking in the warm glow of his patronage, can outface any impertinent cavils (OMF, 307). The Lammles’ and the Veneerings’ stock rises accordingly. There are generous dividends for the Veneerings’ shareholders in the form of regular banquets; the Lammles’ well-advertised search for larger premises also suggests a healthy cash flow. The superficiality of this parvenu world finds its appropriate metaphor in the large mirror in the Veneerings’ diningroom, which, impassive, inscrutable, ‘Reflects Veneering . . .’, ‘Reflects Twemlow . . .’, and so forth, with the even-handed impersonality of etiquette and the moral indifference of money (OMF, 52–3). The reciprocity involved in these alliances of convenience has its syntactic equivalent: Lady Tippins is ‘pleased to patronize Mrs Veneering opposite, who is pleased to be patronized’. The echoing corresponds to the mirroring reflections: this is a self-regarding circle which (like the unpublished and unaudited accounts of many new joint-stock companies) excludes all critical intruders. The nouveau-riche gathering is linked with the financial and marriage markets. The Lammles, both confidence tricksters, unwisely take each other on trust. Each misleads the other about their supposed wealth and they make a mercenary marriage, where, ironically, there turns out to be no money to be realised and they are left with an inconvertible paper security: their marriage certificate. To recoup their losses, they invest their combined energies in another ‘partnership affair, a money-speculation’, namely, to inveigle Georgiana Podsnap into endowing Fascination Fledgeby with all her worldly goods (OMF, 476). They may not be able to capitalise on their own marriage, but they can at least profit from Georgiana’s. For if their scheme matures, Fledgeby will take Georgiana at a premium and they can cash his note of hand for their cut of the loot. But Mrs Lammle suffers qualms of conscience and warns off Podsnap, who, as Georgiana’s father, has of course first claim on her as a marriageable asset. Fledgeby has, however, carefully hedged his bets and, in his worthless promissory note, Lammle is left with an even queerer bill than the junk bonds which Fledgeby buys up in the City. It is thus not surprising that Dickens’s ‘London’ of the mid-1860s is indeed the capital city, where everyone and everything are assumed to be purchasable. Veneering buys a seat in Parliament; there is a grim jest, reminiscent of Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’, about ‘orphan-stock’; Riderhood and Gaffer Hexam sell corpses; Venus buys Wegg’s amputated limb and flogs it back to him; Boffin insists that ‘If I pay for a sheep, I buy it out and out. Similarly, if I pay for a secretary, I buy him out and out’; refuse, ‘That mysterious paper currency which circulates in London when the wind blows’, whirls about the streets before being gathered into dustheaps to be sifted, lucratively.80 But the speculators who work, on paper, at any rate, in the ‘money-mills’ of the City seem cheap beside Lizzie Hexam, who preserves





her integrity, despite the bribes offered by both her suitors, through actual work at a real paper mill (OMF, 667). Elsewhere, what passes as current in the London of Our Mutual Friend usually turns out on closer inspection to be counterfeit: the appropriately named Veneerings, the wolves in Lammles’ clothing, and the pathetically transparent deceptions of Lady Tippins: ‘Whereabout in the bonnet and drapery announced by her name, any fragment of the real woman may be concealed, is perhaps known to her maid; but you could easily buy all you see of her, in Bond Street; or you might scalp her, and peel her, and scrape her, and make two Lady Tippinses out of her, and yet not penetrate to the genuine article’ (OMF, 164; cf. 475). In her devotion to the artificiality of ‘Society’, Lady Tippins has become a human sham. A virtual automaton, more prosthesis than person, she could as readily be dismantled as that ‘ligneous sharper’, Silas Wegg, with his wooden leg, ‘that timber fiction’; as the dolls clothed by Jenny Wren; and the skeletons and stuffed animals assembled by Mr Venus, the taxidermist cum resurrectionist (OMF, 96, 357). The duplicity of Fledgeby and Wegg is exposed; conversely, the apparent unscrupulousness of Riah and Boffin is revealed to be fraudulent. Bella Wilfer reassesses her dismissive view of John Harmon, with the result that the pendulum swings the other way and she idealises him as much as Lizzie Hexam does Eugene Wrayburn. What is disconcerting is the absence of any authoritative source of moral judgement. The only character who confidently makes clear-cut assessments is the myopic, opinionated Podsnap. The confusion elsewhere is best epitomised by the usually acute Jenny Wren, who for some time misconstrues Riah, and the frankly bewildered Twemlow, who spends most of the novel puzzling over who is Veneering’s oldest friend, but in the final chapter courageously voices his moral certitude about Lizzie and Eugene. Readers must also revise their opinion of borderline characters who develop away from their initial villainy (Mrs Lammle, Venus) or who become unequivocally despicable (Charley Hexam). What then should one make of Harmon’s metamorphoses, which resemble those of Headstone? After the death of his murderous double, George Radfoot, whose clothes he has put on, John Harmon adopts the aliases of Julius Handford and John Rokesmith. His uneasy manner at the Wilfer home arouses suspicions that he is a ‘Murderer’ or a ‘Robber’ (OMF, 83). He appears later at Pleasant Riderhood’s shop dressed in the clothes of the drowned man, much as Dennis, the hangman in Barnaby Rudge, dons the clothes of those he has executed. Elsewhere, Twemlow, who in loco parentis gives away Sophronia Lammle, née Akershem, is thanked by the bride ‘for counterfeiting the late Horatio Akershem Esquire’ (OMF, 163). Unlike Headstone’s, Twemlow’s and Harmon’s are surely two innocent cases of personation? The paradox is that the genuineness of Bella’s affection can be tested only by a touchstone that is itself a fake. But how can she be sure that her husband, whoever he professes to be, is the genuine article?



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In the contorted moral logic implicit in John’s paternalistic re-education of his teenage bride, by not wanting the money, Bella somehow comes to deserve it and the novel ends happily but inconsequentially with the lavish refurbishment of the Harmons’ desirable residence on the borders of Mayfair. But although John tries to avoid a mercenary marriage, the romantic union that he so desired is inevitably defiled by their dustheaps of wealth. At the very moment when Bella declares her loving allegiance to ‘Rokesmith’, nobly renouncing her great expectations, she tells Mr Boffin: ‘He is worth a Million of you’ (OMF, 664). Bella proves herself to be indeed a worthy helpmeet, improving herself during her husband’s absence by reading The Complete British Family Housewife and the City Intelligence from the newspaper, so that she can join in his male conversation. At home, however, John seems uninterested in the markets: ‘But he cared, beyond all expression, for his wife, as a most precious and sweet commodity that was always looking up, and that never was worth less than all the gold in the world.’ The playful tone invites the reader to share the joke with the teasing husband and the complacent narrator, whose description of Bella at home in her ‘trim little wrappers and aprons’ is condescending in the extreme (OMF, 749–50). Their benevolent coverture reduces her, despite her keen intelligence, to a second Dora Copperfield, with, however, the desirable skills in household management of an Agnes Wickfield.81 In Great Expectations Wemmick tries to maintain a cordon sanitaire against the contaminating miasma of Little Britain, although even in the 1820s, when this novel is set, his escapist idyll was nostalgic, as the retro style of his Gothick cottage orné or ‘country box’ concedes. Nevertheless, despite the defensive self-parody in these Walworth sentiments, the belief that privileged enclaves could survive untouched by the encroachments of capitalism was a supreme fiction that Dickens strove to maintain, even as his late work exposed it as unsustainable. In Our Mutual Friend the monetary phrases that Bella and John slip into likewise confirm that their love cannot exist outside the commodifying framework of possessiveness and property that supports the bourgeois institution of marriage. Dickens’s paternalistic hero is part of the same patriarchal system as Headstone and Wrayburn; his middle-class wife, a ‘Home Goddess’ (OMF, 431), lacks Lizzie’s economic self-sufficiency and her (limited) capacity to resist male direction. The resulting dubieties would become inescapably apparent in late nineteenth-century London, where the clear distinctions of Podsnappery gave way to a problematic uncertainty in social and moral categorisation.




5

It has long been recognised that French Impressionism was in some ways a response to the economic, political and social upheavals of Second Empire Paris. But although the links between the Victorian novel and the city have received extensive critical attention, treatments of Victorian painting have largely failed to consider why, despite radical changes in London comparable in scale to Haussmann’s remodelling of Paris, no developments in English art occurred comparable to French Impressionism.1 To begin with, then, a puzzle: in the Royal Academy exhibition of 1845, a typical year, out of a total of 1,470 exhibits there were only four identifiable views of London; equally surprisingly, the Illustrated London News, the leading picture-paper, rarely devoted more than 2 per cent of its annual pictorial coverage to London views.2 Why? Several factors explain in part why paintings of the metropolis were so scarce. (a) Unlike the early nineteenth century, when even paintings of London breweries had been exhibited at the Royal Academy, urban motifs had come to be thought insufficiently dignified for Academy treatment. They were largely the province of the illustrated magazine – notably the Illustrated London News (founded in 1842) which, like its rival the Pictorial Times (launched in 1844), courted subscribers with an ambitious engraved panorama of London made from daguerrotypes – and, in the latter decades of the century, of photography and the topographical postcard rather than the finished canvas.3 (b) The London cityscape was simply unpictorial: save for the Regent’s Park area, for most of the century there were no expansive vistas. Even those that were available were ignored by native artists; it took visitors from Paris, such as Monet and De Nittis, to grasp immediately the artistic potential of the London parks and the newly constructed Embankments (1862–74).4 The problem was that after the Georgian period there was no coordinating vision of urban design. While authoritarian planning was able to remodel Second Empire Paris and imperial Vienna, in utilitarian London, with ratepayers wary of extravagance, there was no aesthetic 124




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conception of the city as a work of art: the Embankments, for example, were built not to embellish the capital (grandiose schemes were consistently rejected) but instead to accommodate the new sewerage system, built to combat the recurrence of cholera epidemics, and the underground Metropolitan Railway.5 Disparaging comparisons with Paris were rife in architectural journals; Dickens commented tetchily: ‘The meanness of Regent-street, set against the great line of Boulevards in Paris, is as striking as the abortive ugliness of Trafalgar-square, set against the gallant beauty of the Place de la Concorde.’6 The Metropolitan Board of Works, responsible for city planning between 1855 and 1888, oversaw the vast new sewerage system and masterminded the decongestion of the capital by the construction of new thoroughfares. But, although the scale of the changes was impressive, the new communications links in the centre, such as Charing Cross Road, Shaftesbury Avenue, Northumberland Avenue and Queen Victoria Street, were characterised by the same sober functionalism that marked the more outlying transport axes (Southwark Street, Clerkenwell Road, Great Eastern Street, etc.) rather than by architectural panache. (c) The Victorians were reluctant city-dwellers. The Londoner’s ideal was retreat into a rural or suburban villa. Genre paintings of London had been sentimentalised since the late eighteenth century, as in Wheatley’s popular Cries of London series and, later, the work of Mulready, or the sanitised traders in Pollard’s London Markets series (1822). But most Victorian genre paintings looked outside the metropolis, evidencing an agrarian nostalgia in their purchasers and a desire to reconstruct the social harmony and deferentiality so conspicuously absent from the metropolis, but ideologically central to the rural genre tradition And while English artists had responded early to the romance of industrialisation, in the metropolis the fascination with technological progress had worn off by the mid-nineteenth century. Contrast, for example, the structural prominence of the engine sheds in Monet’s Gare St Lazare series with the token hints accorded to Brunel and Wyatt’s Paddington Station in Frith’s The Railway Station. One must turn to architectural perspective watercolours or to photographs for representations of the new stations themselves.7 Similarly, to my knowledge, although the Crystal Palace was engraved and photographed, it inspired nothing other than paintings in a topographical manner or dutiful official records of the Great Exhibition, before Camille Pissarro saw its imaginative potential in its new location in Sydenham.8 In painting, as in architecture, the Victorians were only half-hearted modernists. An increasing awareness of the problems of urbanisation meant that unvarnished depictions of metropolitan life would have had little market potential. These factors go some way to explaining the paucity of paintings of Victorian London but not why those that were produced were, before the late 1880s,





distinctively different in character from their French counterparts. My answer to that question comes in two instalments. Chapter 6 examines the evolution of late Victorian paintings of London; whereas this chapter focuses on the 1850s and 1860s, when genre painting held absolute sway over middle-class taste. These were the decades when capitalism in London assumed definitive architectural and geographical form. To understand why the resulting changes in social practices were not matched by corresponding innovations in English painting, we need to examine the expectations of the middle-class audience and the dominant influence of John Ruskin, the first critic who claimed to define ‘modern’ painting in England.

The emergence of a bourgeois public If one tries to tease out what in the early and mid-nineteenth century might have been recognised as the Englishness of English art, a salient feature is the emphasis on literary rather than painterly qualities. ‘To consider a picture aright is to read’9 Most Victorian genre paintings are overloaded with anecdotal detail that compels the spectator to focus on their representational aspect rather than on their subordinated visual shapes and design. Although this apparent indifference to formal concerns is unprecedented in its extremity, it goes back to the literary bias of Augustan taste, where typically no distinction was acknowledged between the verbal and the visual medium. To ‘read’ a painting was merely to translate into words the intellectual content that it embodied. The conventional ‘ut pictura poesis’ analogy accorded painting a high status only in so far as it emulated its sister art through implicit verbal allusiveness. Hence in early eighteenth-century England iconographic allusions pervaded both the prestigious genre of history painting and the elaborately composed vistas of the poetic-emblematic landscape garden, which sought to realise the ideal landscapes of Poussin and, above all, Claude Lorrain.10 Similarly, in Hogarth’s mock-heroic history painting (as later in Gillray’s caricatures) a learned audience recognised the visual rhymes with Old Master paintings, and implicit allusions to classical and biblical topoi and to the iconography of the emblem books; a less educated public appreciated the visual jokes and contemporary satire. In both the poetic-emblematic garden and the Hogarthian progress the spectator’s visual experience was necessarily excursive. It was impossible to take in all the details of the artefact at once: the pictorial circuit of a garden must be explored, physically entered into, for its intricacies of spatial relationships to be appreciated; likewise a Hogarth print requires successive attention to its juxtaposed narrative incidents. Later in the century, however, this temporal element was increasingly drawn into question as academic painting came to reject narrative diffuseness in favour of what Lessing had



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termed the ‘pregnant moment’.11 The vogue for the sublime in landscape, which overwhelmed the beholder with an awe-inspiring grandeur, found its counterpart in the peripeteia of history painting. In his Academy lectures Reynolds was unequivocal in condemning genre painting by contrast with the unitary idealism of the Michelangelesque Grand Manner: ‘The Sublime impresses the mind at once with one great idea; . . . the Elegant [Reynolds implies the Venetian and Dutch schools] may be produced by repetition; by an accumulation of many minute circumstances.’12 Despite the new academic orthodoxy, however, popular taste still preferred the ‘excursive’ perceptual experience required by the ‘picturesque’ tour and its illustrated counterparts in travel narrative and landscape watercolours, and by the narrative structures of genre painting that demand a gradual ‘reading’.13 What was new in the nineteenth century was that, as the art market was democratised, popular taste was able to exercise a greater influence on art production. A middle-class market Almost all historians of Victorian painting remark on the proliferation of good cheap reproductions to which the development of steel engraving and, above all, lithography gave rise. By 1820, lithography was well established for the reproduction of decorative prints, while coloured lithographs virtually created a market for high-quality colour-plate books in the 1840s.14 The print market made readily accessible emergent kinds of painting. Hence between about 1800 and 1830, while ‘heroic’ history painting was in irreversible decline, a genre of ‘sentimental’ or ‘domestic’ history began to flourish, reflecting a new emphasis on the biographical side of history, as imagined by Scott, Carlyle and Macaulay. History painting was thus gradually democratised, and came to merge with the established category of narrative genre.15 For a transitional period, paintings illustrating domestic genre scenes from literary texts enjoyed an enormous vogue. Between 1830 and the 1850s as many as 100 such paintings were hung each year in London exhibitions alone, before the genre was displaced in the 1850s by paintings of contemporary life, which reached their peak in the 1860s.16 The relative lack of state, municipal or church patronage meant that painters had to rely for their income on the private purchaser. The competitions (1842–7) to provide decorative mural paintings and frescoes for the rebuilt Palace of Westminster artificially prolonged academic history painting in the Grand Manner. Despite its theoretical pre-eminence, history painting had always been commercially marginal; even in the heyday of Reynolds, Academy exhibitions had been dominated by landscape and portraiture.17 But after this anachronistic commission, institutional support for this genre petered out. Instead, in the boom years of the 1850s and 1860s, the sale of engraving copyrights boosted the earnings available from modern life paintings to unprecedented heights. From Derby Day (RA 1858), for example, Frith earned £1,500 for the painting itself, £1,500 for engraving rights and a further





£750 for exhibition rights; the dealer Lloyd made £3,000 on the engraving of Frith’s Ramsgate Sands (RA 1854). (From the 1870s, with the decline of genre painting, the rich pickings lay instead in portraiture.) In the mid-nineteenth century, most painters saw the main chance in the speculative production of small-scale works, suitable for the relatively restricted dimensions of the middle-class interior, with either an anecdotal interest or an edifying theme designed to foster the complacency of the bourgeois social conscience. The shift in the market from a public school and/or Oxbridge-educated aristocracy to commercial or industrialist purchasers who were largely unfamiliar with the classics and had not made the Grand Tour made works which alluded to antique or Renaissance themes unintelligible and hence unsaleable. High-art subjects were absent from the Society of British Artists exhibitions, where the low-budget collector was likely to get most of his paintings.18 This movement away from the high-art tradition can be expressed positively as a taste for the Dutch school or, negatively, as a bourgeois unease with the Old Master tradition. The Dutch school was collected by the Prince Regent and by a new generation of merchant connoisseurs, several of whom vied with one another in amassing collections of its modern English equivalent. In the years following 1815 a series of exhibitions familiarised a wider public with this work.19 Genre painting, whether Dutch or English, has an immediate appeal and can be understood as straightforwardly literal. The Italian Old Masters, by contrast, seemed to demand more cultivation to appreciate them and the uninitiated purchaser ran more of a costly risk of misattribution than if he bought an authenticated modern work, more suited, in any case, in its tonal values to the garishly decorated Victorian interior. (Early nineteenthcentury speculators had failed to distinguish between original and schoolpiece; as a result, many had had their hands burnt. The potential sale of a painting’s engraving copyright was another economic reason why as yet unfamiliar modern originals were more attractive as a short-term speculation than already much-reproduced Old Masters.)20 To a largely Protestant class of nouveaux riches inherently suspicious of visual images and uncertain of the effect of social mobility on their moral standards, Renaissance or baroque paintings might have seemed unacceptably lewd in their display of naked flesh. Modern English genre subjects by contrast were almost entirely purified of the indelicate innuendos of some seventeenth-century Dutch genre works and were unexceptionable in their sentimentalism, their reassuring piety or their didacticism. In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the narrator comments on Dorothea’s bewilderment in Rome, noting ‘the gigantic broken revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of the hand-screen sort’.21 In Evangelical England, implicit and explicit censorship made artists reluctant to alienate prospective purchasers. As in the mid-Victorian novel, social problems were usually broached in mid-Victorian painting, if at all,



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only at a chronological remove. Even then the topical allusion was likely to be studiously ignored: reviews of Holman Hunt’s Rienzi (1848–9) make no mention of its implicit reference to the 1848 Chartist agitation. It was not merely the much-lamented unpicturesqueness of modern dress that made a contemporary setting unacceptable. The original version of The Governess (?RA 1845), Richard Redgrave’s first venture beyond historical costume pieces, so displeased its owner, the merchant clothier John Sheepshanks, that Redgrave was forced to remodel the composition, to mitigate the implied bleakness of the governess’s situation.22 Just as Victorian authors sometimes acceded to readers’ pressure and revised their novels, so several genre paintings were reworked as a result of aesthetic distaste (e.g. the repainting of the mistress’s face in Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience (RA 1854) (figure 24) which had made the theme too harrowing for the painting’s first owner) or moral disapproval (e.g. the two versions of Abraham Solomon’s First Class – The Meeting (RA 1854)).23 When literature was illustrated in paintings rather than in magazines, the verbal text generally lost its cutting edge: for example, the many works inspired by Thomas Hood’s poem ‘The Song of the Shirt’ lack entirely Degas’s sense of the boredom and sheer exhaustion of the laundresses whom he depicts.24 Frith’s Hogarth-inspired moral progress The Road to Ruin I–V (RA 1878) is tame beside those of his eighteenth-century predecessor, while his At Homburg 1869 (RA 1870) was castigated for daring to depict a woman smoking in public.25 We have, then, the situation of a greatly enlarged market for art in which newly rich purchasers (not yet termed Philistines) exercised a constraining influence on artistic production. At the same time, they lacked the cultural assurance that went with old money. In their insecurity they turned for direction to those who claimed to know, leading to the burgeoning of advice manuals for the culturally illiterate and hence to the unprecedented sway held by a new breed of art critical pundits.

Ruskin and Ruskinism The later 1830s and 1840s saw the emergence in Britain of the specialised art critic, the specialised art journal and, that hitherto Germanic phenomenon, the professional art historian.26 The democratisation of the art market had aroused considerable curiosity about what had hitherto been unaffordable. Eager for guidance, the disoriented public turned to the new mass periodicals, such as the Penny Magazine, where Anna Jameson’s articles on the early Italian painters reached a large audience in the 1840s. But it was one critic above all who caught their imagination, John Ruskin, whose overbearing direction of English art in the mid-nineteenth century was as decisive as Roger Fry’s Francophile and abstractionist bias between 1910 and 1934, or Clement Greenberg’s influence on the New York school of painters.





The young Ruskin emerged as a polemicist in 1843, with an ambitious defence of Turner’s later paintings. Modern Painters I was designed to educate the taste of the middle classes and boldly appropriates high culture, to make it seem the preserve not of the aristocracy or connoisseurs but of a newly constituted middle-class public. Its Protestant ideology challenges the customary authority of the art institutions with the iconoclasm of a dissenting individual, founded on the authority of the Book of Nature. The parvenu Turner is depicted as subverting both the Academy tradition of Platonic, idealised nature (enshrined in the Grand Style and Reynolds’s still influential Discourses) and the aristocratic taste for classical landscape, epitomised by Claude Lorrain, which had dominated the pastoral tradition in eighteenthcentury poetry and painting. True naturalism, Ruskin insists, steers between the Scylla of over-literalism (as in the Dutch school and Canaletto) and the Charybdis of over-idealism (as in classical landscape): it reconciles ‘minutiae of detail’ with ‘grandeur of impression’.27 His criteria set the terms for debate about ‘modern’ painting. On moral grounds ‘Brilliancy and rapidity of execution’ offended against Ruskin’s Protestant work ethic, as did what he terms ‘careless rendering of casual impression’.28 He regarded art as concerned with what is essential or specific (form) rather than what is accidental (transitory and subjective impressions of light and colour).29 Nevertheless his acute sensitivity to what his theory deprecated, namely slight variations in local colour and intricate modifications of hue, must have inspired painters reading what are in effect prose poems on the transient metamorphoses of nature: ‘The stones and gravel of the bank catch green reflections from the boughs above; the bushes receive greys and yellows from the ground; every hair’s breadth of polished surface gives a little bit of the blue of the sky, or the gold of the sun, like a star upon the local colour; this local colour, changeful and uncertain in itself, is again disguised and modified by the hue of the light, or quenched in the grey of the shadow.’30 In 1851, to champion Millais, Ruskin returned to the criticism of what he defined as ‘modern’ painting. His pamphlet, Pre-Raphaelitism, commandeered the group, depicting them as implementing his advice in Modern Painters I to ‘go to nature . . . rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing’.31 In this new alignment, the conservative Art Journal was quick to note a manoeuvre against the art establishment: ‘The author of “Modern Painters” has . . . conferred a factitious importance on the “school,” as he calls it, by taking it under his protection, and giving it the benefit of his public advocacy’.32 Like Fry sixty years later – who commanded respect by virtue of his distinguished career in Old Master attribution, as a founding editor of the Burlington Magazine and as a museum director, before his epoch-making championship of Post-Impressionism in 1910 – Ruskin brought impressive credentials as an expert in early Italian painting and as a cultural historian to his defence of the new art. The Pre-Raphaelites had their own mouthpiece,



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The Germ, in which to disseminate their aesthetic views but they relied on Ruskin’s stature for their public relations. At a crucial moment in the movement’s breakthrough, his critical authority gave him the power to create a receptive constituency of opinion and to determine the criteria by which Pre-Raphaelitism should be appreciated. In the case of Holman Hunt there is some justification for acknowledging Ruskin’s influence, for Hunt had read Modern Painters I and II with enthusiasm in 1847.33 In retrospect, it seemed to Ruskin that Hunt’s The Strayed Sheep (i.e. Our English Coasts, 1852) (RA 1853) ‘showed to us, for the first time in the history of art, the absolutely faithful balances of colour and shade by which actual sunshine might be transposed into a key in which the harmonies possible with material pigments should yet produce the same impressions upon the mind which were caused by the light itself’.34 He was commending Hunt’s development of the principles he himself had praised in Turner’s high-key late works, in contrast to the restricted scale of tonal values conventionally employed in Academy painting, whereby nature’s brilliance was subdued, as if viewed through a camera obscura or tinted Claude glass, and only the most conspicuous tonal contrasts marking ‘steps of distance’ could be recorded.35 Paradoxically, however, as recent scholars have noted, the Pre-Raphaelites’ uncompromising representation of optical sense-data means that their paintings do not look naturalistic, as each object, regardless of its implied distance from the viewer, is depicted with equal intensity, precision and implicit significance.36 Traditionally, oil paintings had been blocked out as an overall design on a mid-toned ground, then built up gradually through a series of colour glazes. Pre-Raphaelite oil paintings by contrast, because of their ‘fresco’ technique on a (sometimes wet) white ground, were constructed piecemeal, as, with the Pre-Raphaelites’ miniaturist brushwork, only a small area of canvas could be covered in a single painting session. Unlike Impressionist paintings, where rapid brushwork enabled the painter constantly to readjust the atmospheric consistency over the whole canvas, Pre-Raphaelite works agglomerated over weeks or months. Atmospheric conditions, even vegetation, varied enormously during such a protracted period. Hence, even though they sought to reproduce what one would witness at a specific time of day in a particular season, the finished paintings were accumulations of individually authentic but often incompatible observations. Their minute attention to local colour was achieved at the expense of overall coherence. This compositional fragmentation was compounded by Hunt’s and Brown’s refusal to structure their paintings in the Claudian manner through chiaroscuro contrasts between areas of light and shade. Their reduction of the tonal difference between foreground and background had the effect of minimising aerial perspective, compressing a picture space which already appeared shallow because of the tendency of bright colours to pull forward towards the surface of the painting. As a result, conventional tonal modulation





is replaced by a kaleidoscopic surface pattern of juxtaposed, unrelated details of local colour. As the Athenaeum Français commented on what was, for Ruskin, Hunt’s naturalist masterpiece, Strayed Sheep: ‘The grass gives the individuality of each blade, each with its own light, its reflection and its shadow – each part astonishes by the truthfulness of its reproduction, and nevertheless the whole wants truth, and wholly fails to recall nature.’37 Thus, as Allen Staley has demonstrated, although the landscapes of Brown and Hunt in the early and mid-1850s were naturalistic in inspiration and orientation, their ‘tendency toward a richly articulated two-dimensional pattern’ gives them a surprising affinity with Rossetti’s consciously decorative paintings, confirming unintentionally the dominant movement away from naturalism in avant-garde English painting in the later 1850s and 1860s.38 Ruskin’s critical shaping of modern painting reached its height in the Academy Notes, which he published to accompany the RA exhibitions from 1855 to 1859. As The Economist remarked in June 1857: ‘Mr. Ruskin’s Notes have by this time attained a degree of popularity that renders their verdicts of extreme practical importance to all exhibitors. They are in almost as universal use as the catalogues, and to many must serve as sole guide to the excellences of the yearly Exhibitions.’39 But while his interventions as kingmaker had been indispensable for the Pre-Raphaelites in the early 1850s, Ruskin himself noted that in 1856 Pre-Raphaelitism had come to dominate the RA exhibition, consolidating its position in 1858 as the acknowledged period style of the 1850s.40 Correspondingly, his support had become less crucial. His supersession can be illustrated by the contrast between two paintings which Ruskin himself supervised. Millais’s majestic open-air portrait of Ruskin at Glenfinlas in 1853 celebrated the critic as hero, in a landscape unprecedented in its fidelity to Ruskin’s early dogmas. He took pains to ‘keep [Millais] up to the Pre-Raphaelite degree of finish – which I have done with a vengeance, as he has taken three months to do half a background two feet over’.41 By contrast, John Brett’s Val d’Aosta (RA 1859), a frigid exercise in the early Pre-Raphaelite mode of scrupulous naturalism, won even from its mentor praise that was at best subdued: ‘Historical landscape it is, unquestionably; meteorological also; poetical – by no means: yet precious, in its patient way; and, as a wonder of toil and delicate handling, unimpeachable.’42 In private Millais remarked acidly: ‘There is a wretched work like a photograph of some place in Switzerland, evidently painted under [Ruskin’s] guidance, for he seems to have lauded it up sky-high; and that is just where it is in the miniature room! He does not understand my work, which is now too broad for him to appreciate, and I think his eye is only fit to judge the portraits of insects.’43 (Ruskin’s early emphasis on ‘laborious finish’ and ‘faithfulness in transcript’ had, however, been increasingly tempered during the 1850s by insistence on the importance of ‘invention’ and ‘imagination’.)44 While Millais’s The Vale of Rest, which epitomised the more symbolic form of landscape that was now in vogue,



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sold for £700, Brett’s painting failed to find a buyer at the RA exhibition itself or in the following months. Finally Ruskin himself bought it for £200.45 A review described Val d’Aosta as ‘Truly an epitaphical gravestone for PostRuskinism’, and it was indeed the end of an era.46 William Michael Rossetti, writing in 1869, assessed in retrospect the years from 1844 to 1860 that marked the heyday of ‘Ruskin and Ruskinism’: His sway is now, to a considerable extent, remote, abstruse, and ceremonial. He no longer wields the practical powers of government, but remains a great unfamiliar abstraction of sovereignty. When the idea of authority has to be invoked, he is there for the purpose: but, when people want immediate instructions as to what they are to do next, it is not to him that they recur.47

The road not taken Although the art criticism in the Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ proclaimed that the proper subject of art was contemporary society – ‘the poetry of the things about us; our railways, factories, mines, roaring cities, steam vessels’ – in the work of the Pre-Raphaelite group and their associates representations of modern metropolitan life are few and far between.48 They obviously saw no necessary correlation between a programmatic commitment to ‘realism’ and the depiction of modern life. The verisimilitude that aroused such controversy in Millais’s Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop (RA 1850) could be expressed equally in minute botanical notations, or in the laborious reconstructions in their history paintings of the late 1840s. ‘Realism’ implied the sincere attempt to achieve ‘truth’ or ‘accuracy’ in representation but could lead just as easily to the archaeological confections of late nineteenth-century neoclassicism as to the fusion of technical experiment and metropolitan iconography in French Impressionism. There is a striking divergence between the English avant-garde and the French avant-garde after Courbet. But in retrospect it seems clear that English painting might have taken an entirely different direction had Ford Madox Brown developed his astonishingly advanced landscapes of the 1850s.49 In ‘The Pretty Baa-Lambs’ (RA 1852), for example, painted at Stockwell (then still a village on the outskirts of London, despite increasing residential development in the 1830s and 1840s), Brown addressed the same problems of plein-air naturalism that the French Impressionists would explore a decade later. Many earlier artists had made preliminary studies out of doors, and Constable had added the finishing touches out of doors to studio paintings, but Brown painted both figures and landscape in situ. His fidelity to the tonality and hues of reflected light and shadows is maintained in the unpretentious An English Autumn Afternoon, Hampstead – Scenery in 1853 (BI 1855)





Figure 19 Ford Madox Brown, An English Autumn Afternoon, Hampstead – Scenery in 1853 (1852–3, 1855). © Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery

(figure 19) and Walton-on-the-Naze (1859–60). In these works Brown was depicting the kind of suburban leisure motifs that the French Impressionists were to explore in the 1870s and 1880s, in a stimulating fusion of experimental technique and content. Why, then, did his innovations apparently lead nowhere? One important factor was the public incomprehension of Brown’s extreme naturalism of colour, particularly his handling of reflected light. A prospective purchaser of ‘The Pretty Baa-Lambs’ demanded an explanation: ‘I cannot understand the summer heat, and the bluish [?] green of the ground, or the purplish tone of the sky.’50 Not surprisingly, he did not buy the painting. A further crucial factor was the miniaturist technique that Brown adopted, which was utterly unsuitable for registering momentarily changing light effects out of doors. Brown worked for five months on ‘The Pretty Baa-Lambs’ and about six months on An English Autumn Afternoon, which sold for a mere 9 guineas, the frame itself having cost him 4 guineas. (As Millais dolefully remarked, ‘I fear [this background] will take me 3 weeks more at least. You know how dreadfully these out of door affairs hang fire . . .’)51 It was Ruskin who had advocated such minuteness and the Pre-Raphaelites’ reluctance to proceed to a more practicable, freer handling (and Millais’s castigation by the critics for so doing) was in large measure due to the climate of opinion Ruskin had created. A further reason for the neglect Brown suffered was the informality of his subject matter. Even Ruskin apparently had little sympathy for An English Autumn Afternoon. He commented: ‘What made you take such a very ugly subject, it was a pitty [sic] for there was some nice painting in it?’ Brown’s



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heated rejoinder was: ‘Because it lay out of a back window’.52 Brown was not the first to experiment in this way. Thomas Jones, for example, produced in Naples in 1782–3 an astonishing series of ‘finished studies’, not sketches of buildings.53 Disconcerting in their abrupt cropping, they fill the picture space with blank walls or rooftops, exploring variations in texture and tone and drawing out the sculptural forms in these architectural masses. There are comparable, if less bold, examples in the early work of Carl Blechen, such as Blick auf Dächer und Gärten (c. 1835). This unpretentious urban realism, celebrating the charms of the mundane, is the antithesis to the Romantic Fensterbild (e.g. Friedrich, Carus), in which the artist’s window is the threshold to a hazily intimated beyond. But landscape painting could only meet the requirements of high art if elevated by heroic incident or poetic idea; while to please a middle-class audience it required a narrative element. An English Autumn Afternoon lacked both. The cosy sentimentality which it shared with genre painting (the analogy between the young couple and the cooing doves and, as in Arthur Hughes’s The Long Engagement (RA 1859), the faithful spaniel) also passed unnoticed because of its compositional peculiarities. For the sense of intimacy is generated also by formal devices: the high horizon tilts up the picture plane, minimising the perspective recession, while the spectator’s eye meanders through the random lines of the foreground roofs and allotments that lead nowhere, other than to the encircling trees and fence in the middle ground which mark the boundary of this middle-class hortus conclusus. Whereas the panorama views of the 1790s and early 1800s had celebrated London’s sublime vastness, Brown domesticates the metropolis into a suburban idyll. Charles Allston Collins’s May, in the Regent’s Park (RA 1852) was likewise a composition striking in its lack of specific focus. Puzzled to discover the point of this urban landscape, The Athenaeum remarked caustically that ‘The botanical predominates altogether over the artistical’.54 What was missed in these paintings becomes clear if one compares John Ritchie’s more conventional A Summer Day in Hyde Park (BI 1858) (figure 20) and Hampstead Heath (BI 1860).55 Ritchie’s representation of Hyde Park is intended to be read: the spectator can peer over the shoulder of a man on the left at the legible newspaper headline about the Indian Mutiny, or merely read the physiognomic detail of the crowd. One might contrast Monet’s depictions of Hyde Park and Green Park (figure 21) during his English exile of 1870–1, which attempted to transpose to London the kind of modern-life subjects he had explored in the 1860s in Paris.56 Instead of Ritchie’s cluttered foreground, with a large-scale frieze of characters who obstruct the landscape, Monet opens up the picture space into a continuous vista; his evocative handling reduces characterisation to an expressive shorthand, in which energetic brushstrokes themselves suggest posture and psychological attitude. The promenading figures are integrated into an atmospheric whole that gives the illusion of spontaneity in its unhierarchical structure, rather than Ritchie’s





Figure 20

John Ritchie, A Summer Day in Hyde Park (1858). © Museum of London

Figure 21 Claude Monet, Green Park, London (c.1871). © Philadelphia Museum of Art: Purchased with the W.P. Wilstach Fund, 1921

laboured grouping of figures in the studio in front of what is virtually a theatrical backdrop. The relative obliquity of Monet’s paintings made them virtually illegible in England, and both his work and Pissarro’s contemporaneous London paintings found no ready English market. This may be, as Alan Bowness has suggested, that when exhibited by Durand-Ruel in company with Barbizon painters, Monet and Pissarro were misinterpreted as passé by a British public familiar with the landscape painting of Constable, the Norwich School and Turner.57 The British avant-garde in the 1860s and 1870s was



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moving towards decorative formalism while French painters continued Hunt’s and Brown’s experiments with juxtaposed brushstrokes of unmixed colour to convey their optical ‘impressions’. The motifs of many French Impressionist canvases are drawn from popular excursion venues, such as Asnières, Argenteuil, Bougival and Saint-Germain, and the developing holiday resorts on the northern coast. In London too day-trips became all the rage, particularly to Brighton, Ramsgate and Margate. The immense popularity of Frith’s Ramsgate Sands and Derby Day owes much to the recent development of railway excursions.58 Topicality alone, however, would not have ensured these paintings’ staggering commercial success. If one compares William Dyce’s Pegwell Bay: A Recollection of October 5th, 1858 (RA 1860) (Pegwell Bay, a mere donkey ride from Ramsgate, is patronised by a parvenu family in one of Dickens’s Sketches by Boz) and Brown’s Walton-on-the Naze (an Essex resort accessible from London by steamer) it becomes clear that narrative incident was the crucial factor.59 The mid-Victorian public could make little of the oblique symbolism in Dyce’s canvas, with its curiously disjunct figures almost in suspended animation; or of Brown’s relegation of human interest to the corner of a small canvas dominated by a sweeping vista, in which he records atmospheric light with preternatural clarity. In English painting in the 1850s and 1860s, unlike French Impressionism, there was a general division between modernity in subject matter and modernity in technique. When English painters turned to the innovative features of the capitalist metropolis – such as the purpose-built banks that were a symptom of the separation of business and residential quarters (George Elgar Hicks, Dividend Day at the Bank of England (RA 1859)); or the post office (George Elgar Hicks, The General Post Office, One Minute to Six (RA 1860)); or the railway station (William Powell Frith, The Railway Station (1862), Frederick Bacon Barwell, Parting Words, Fenchurch Street Station (RA 1859)); or the omnibus (William Maw Egley, Omnibus Life in London (BI 1859)) – the emphasis fell on anecdote rather than on form.60 The stiltedness of these compositions with their serried rows or self-contained clumps of figures, each with its own story to tell, surely recalls the packed stages of Victorian spectacular theatre.61 Their appeal lay in the artist’s physiognomic differentiation of the socially variegated crowd and in the near-photographic verism which distinguished these highly-finished canvases from their close, if occasionally ‘vulgar’ relatives in subject-matter in the illustrated magazines.62 Such paintings were regarded naively as a ‘copy’ of the actual scene: with dispiriting monotony Frith’s paintings were praised by reviewers (applying Ruskinian criteria?) as a ‘literal scene’ or ‘marvellous transcript’, evidencing ‘perfect accuracy’ and ‘marvellous fidelity’.63 Like several French Impressionists, Frith in Derby Day and The Railway Station used photography, but whereas they profited imaginatively from the tonal characteristics and disconcerting cropping of the new medium, Frith merely used it as a convenience to transpose artificially posed groups onto canvas.




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Fallen women and uplifting artists No woman can or ought to know very much of the mass of meanness and wickedness and misery that is loose in the wide world. She could not learn about it without losing the bloom and freshness which it is her mission in life to preserve. Her position is somewhat peculiar, and to her unsophisticated eyes may seem partly unintelligible. In order to protect itself, society is compelled to punish a woman’s faults and transgressions more severely than it punishes the failings of the stronger sex; and yet it is necessary that the very sex which is to be so disproportionately punished should be left in ignorance of the dangers and characteristic features of transgression.64 As Lynda Nead has shown, the fallen woman was a frequent theme in the visual culture of mid-Victorian England.65 The Thames banks were a notorious haunt of prostitutes, who, so the dominant ideology insisted, were led inevitably to suicide by drowning, having transgressed the bourgeois ideal of feminine purity, which (as an extra-marital outlet for the male sexual drive) they paradoxically helped to sustain.66 But while the sexual double standard made the repercussions of male adultery an acceptable theme for painting, a female adulteress posed too great a threat to the stability of the home, that cornerstone of the Victorian middle classes. Augustus Egg’s trilogy Past and Present (RA 1858) seems to have been the only modern-life depiction of female adultery exhibited at the Royal Academy during the middle decades of the nineteenth century.67 Its final image of the outcast wife (figure 22), denied access to her children and now an indigent prostitute huddled under the Adelphi arches, drew criticism from the conservative Art Journal for not going far enough in its deterrent warning against the consequences of female adultery: ‘[the Adelphi arches] are the lowest of all profound deeps of human abandonment in this metropolis; but he has forgotten the rats which meet in hungry hundreds on the vantage-ground left by the retiring tide, – those inhabitants of lower London would have assisted the desolation of the place.’68 The critic’s vindictive impulse was part of a patriarchal backlash against the Divorce Act of the previous year. Although, in its deliberately unequal provisions, this discriminated against women, the fear in some male quarters was clearly that it might open the doors to a mass exodus of discontented wives. A wife’s adultery struck at the roots of patriarchal claims to property:



I have argued that, through his technical dogmas, Ruskin decisively shaped the course of mid-Victorian painting. In terms of subject matter and ideology, however, the major influence was the censorship exercised by the middle-class consensus of opinion. The repercussions of this in two thematic areas are examined in the remainder of this chapter.

Figure 22

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Augustus Egg, Past and Present, III (1858). © Tate, London 2003

property, that is, in the patrilineal inheritance that might unwittingly pass to another man’s child but property also in the wife’s body itself, for the violation of which the injured husband (up to the 1950s) might sue his wife’s lover for damages.69 In Parliamentary debate on the Act there was a general consensus that the sin of adultery was the same for men and women but, the Lord Chancellor argued, ‘every man must feel that the injury was not the same’. A discriminatory deterrent against female adultery was imperative, as Spencer Walpole, a member of the 1850 Divorce Commission, explained: ‘the other sex, when they feel that be their conduct ever so bad they will still retain their husband’s name and their husband’s rank, . . . may be tempted to commit these offences to a greater extent than when they know that the penalty which hangs over a guilty wife is degradation from her former honourable position’.70 The Athenaeum, by contrast, adopted the same arguments about the need to protect an innocent female audience that motivated the literary censorship exercised by the circulating libraries: in the last [picture] we come to such a sink of misery and loathsomeness, painted with such an unhealthy determination to dissect horror and to catalogue the dissecting-room that we turn from what is a real and possible terror as from an impure thing that seems out of place in a gallery of




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The assertion that Egg himself is guilty here of transgression indicates the precariousness of the prescriptive dogma of separate spheres: if there were a clear demarcation between the ‘unstained’ young audience at the RA exhibition and the fallen woman, or between the paterfamilias and his alter ego, the seducer so significantly absent from Egg’s trilogy, then such vigilant supervision of the moral boundaries would be superfluous. The suppressed connection between the fallen woman and her male lover was thematised in Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience (RA 1854) and in Ford Madox Brown’s Take Your Son, Sir (1851, 1856–7) (figure 23). In the latter, cast in the pose of a madonna, the woman plaintively confronts the father of her child, who is reflected in the convex mirror that encircles her head like a halo. It is a portrait of Emma, Brown’s second wife, and one of their sons; the figure depicted in the mirror is that of Brown himself. Should we regard the picture as a transfiguration of bourgeois life, celebrating the sacredness of hearth and home and conjugal love? (Compare the idyllic couples in An English Autumn Afternoon and Walton-on-the-Naze; the

Figure 23 Ford Madox Brown, Take Your Son, Sir, detail (1851, 1856–7). © Tate, London 2003



laughing brightness, where young, unstained, unpainted and happy faces come to chat and trifle. There must be a line drawn as to where the horrors that should not be painted for public and innocent sight begin, and we think Mr Egg has put one foot at least beyond this line.71

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woman’s strained expression could be dismissed as characteristic of Brown’s somewhat grotesque figure painting.)72 Or should we interpret it as a genre painting, intended, like Brown’s treatment of emigration, The Last of England (1852–5) (for which Brown and his wife also served as models) to draw attention to disquieting aspects of middle-class life? The fact that the viewer must adopt the male position of the figure in the mirror forces the middle-class male spectator to acknowledge his complicity in the moral dubieties of the patriarchal system. The woman’s words in the title, a mixture of deferentiality and defiance, mark a disparity between the woman with no wedding ring and the male. The distance between them is made graphic by the diminutive scale of the man, a reflection of Brown’s own uneasiness. When the painting was begun he was a widower with a seven-year-old daughter from his first marriage, to whom he felt his prime obligation. But he had fallen in love with his young working-class model, Emma Hill, who had given birth to their daughter, Catherine, in November 1850. Brown’s precarious financial situation prevented immediate marriage, as did Hill’s status as the daughter of a bricklayer, which made her unsuitable to be the wife of a middle-class painter and the stepmother of his daughter. Yet her predicament as a ‘fallen woman’ was his keenly felt responsibility. The postponed marriage did take place in April 1853, after Hill had briefly attended a ladies’ seminary in Highgate to acquire the requisite deportment.73 Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience (figure 24) – set in St John’s Wood, notorious for its maisons de convenance – is also charged with private obsessions.74 Ostensibly it was intended as a secular pendant to Hunt’s The Light of the World, with which it was exhibited at the RA in 1854. But if it is seen as part of a sequence of paintings on the sexual exploitation of women – following on from the attempted rape in Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus (RA 1851) and Claudio’s pleading with his sister to sacrifice her virginity to save his life in Claudio and Isabella (RA 1853) – a prurient undercurrent in Hunt’s work emerges. The model for the woman was Hunt’s working-class protégée, Annie Miller; the man is disquietingly like a self-portrait (compare Millais’s drawing of Hunt, from the same year).75 A letter from Edward Lear to Hunt implies that The Awakening Conscience was directed against the sexual double standard: ‘I think with you that it is an artificial lie that a woman should so suffer and lose all, while he who led her [to] do so encounters no share of evil from his acts.’76 But, whether consciously or not, the painting’s religious emphasis, reinforced by biblical quotations on the frame and in the RA catalogue – as the woman, suddenly recalling her lost innocence, looks out of her gilded cage into the sunlit garden, symbolising repentance and salvation – directs attention away from the male seducer. As with so many of the women in the Pre-Raphaelite circle, our knowledge of Miller is largely restricted to what was said about her in the masculine gossip surrounding the painters themselves.77 Legend has it that she was a promiscuous woman led astray by Rossetti, but her supposedly loose morals





Figure 24 2003

William Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience (1853–4). © Tate, London

may perhaps have been mere flirtatiousness, magnified and distorted by Hunt’s jealousy and puritanical imagination. Her astute opportunism, leading ultimately to marriage with the cousin of a Viscount, doubtless required judicious use of her physical charms. But the attempt to reduce her behaviour to licentiousness surely expressed masculine resentment at a woman who did not know her place but instead had the courage to take her life into her own hands. Hunt’s self-appointed mission to redeem her depended on the widespread fantasy that working-class women were prey to rampant sexual desires of which middle-class women were entirely ignorant; not merely libidinous, they were also sexually available. But he must have been conscious that, in rescuing her from her ‘degraded’ life in a Chelsea slum, he had translated her into another twilight milieu – that of the artist’s model – which, from a middle-class viewpoint, was also compromising. In prescribing for Miller lessons in writing and manners, which he paid for as he would later her lodgings, Hunt had raised her expectations beyond marriage to an artisan; despite the apparent chasteness of their relationship she was in effect a kept woman. Fearing an action for breach of promise, Hunt was careful never to propose marriage explicitly, although this was clearly the subtext of their relationship, reflecting her ambitions and his middle-class mixture of prudence (in seeking a wife with modest economic expectations), paternalism (in the



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desire for an impressionable young woman) and priggishness. His desire for patriarchal control was apparent in his attempts to forbid her modelling for other painters. When marriage seemed in the offing, he retrieved a portrait of her from the philandering artist George Price Boyce, fearful lest the impropriety of being known as Boyce’s model would damage his future wife’s reputation and hence his own. The Awakening Conscience can be seen as a warning to her of the consequences of disregarding his plans. For in the dominant ideology of the fallen woman, the wages of sin was death, as Ruskin’s commentary insisted, drawing attention to ‘the countenance of the lost girl . . . the eyes filled with the fearful light of futurity, and with tears of ancient days’ and the painting’s supposed proleptic narrative, foreshadowing how ‘soon’ the ‘pure whiteness’ of her dress hem ‘may be soiled with dust and rain, her outcast feet failing in the street’.78 The woman’s situation is glossed over as moral dereliction rather than patriarchal exploitation or her own deliberate choice among the limited alternatives open to her. After years of shillyshallying on Hunt’s part and manoeuvring on Miller’s, which Hunt construed as sexual and moral recidivism, she resisted Hunt’s pressure to emigrate to Australia (where the fallen women whom Dickens and Angela Burdett-Coutts rehabilitated in Urania Cottage, Shepherd’s Bush, were sent to begin a new life) and in July 1863 made a successful marriage. Before his own marriage in December 1865 to the unequivocally respectable Fanny Waugh, it seems that Hunt, prudent as ever, concluded his complicated engagement with Miller by buying back his letters and presents. Hunt was not alone in his mystification of social practice. In 1858 John Roddam Spencer-Stanhope occupied a studio in Chatham Place, Blackfriars, near Blackfriars Bridge where David Copperfield catches sight of the prostitute, Martha. The view from his studio window is recorded in Thoughts of the Past (figure 25), which obviously met contemporary standards of acceptability, for it was exhibited at the RA in 1859. The model was Fanny Cornforth, who also sat to Rossetti, in the studio upstairs, for the fallen woman in Found.79 In the flesh, as model and former prostitute, she was regarded as a marketable commodity; on canvas, in Stanhope’s display of her at the RA, she was also a marketable commodity. Her situation highlights the dubieties in the Pre-Raphaelites’ ostensibly progressive attitude to women. Working-class models were chosen for practical reasons: modelling was not socially respectable and to avoid impropriety a middle-class woman would sit, as Christina Rossetti once did to Hunt, only with a chaperone and without accepting any payment.80 At Frith’s mansion, models, like tradesmen, had a separate entrance, reaching his studio by an external iron staircase.81 But modelling was a desirable alternative to such drudgery as sewing shirts at a sub-subsistence piece-rate or to the occasional prostitution to which indigent desperation drove some working-class women. (Charles Booth recorded the regular pay for models ‘whether for face or figure’ at 7 shillings





Figure 25 John Roddam Spencer-Stanhope, Thoughts of the Past (RA 1859). © Tate, London 2003

for a full day, including two meals, and 3s 6d or 5 shillings for half a day. A day’s pay was therefore the equivalent of about half a week’s wages for a servant or of up to a whole week’s earnings in sweated outworking; in 1849 Mayhew recorded the weekly earnings of sweated needlewomen at 2–3 shillings net.)82 The moral idealism of the Pre-Raphaelite painters restrained them from sexual exploitation of their models but there was an element of self-dramatisation, if not self-congratulation in the painters’ view of themselves as knight errants to working-class damsels in distress, exemplified in Hunt’s behaviour towards Miller and Rossetti’s reference to Elizabeth Siddall’s ‘escaping from degradation and corruption’.83 In fact, their painting merely avoids one kind of false position by another form of falsification, namely, the representation of the fallen woman as conscience-stricken reprobate. Stanhope’s Thoughts of the Past relays uncritically the received middle-class wisdom about prostitution: the riverside setting heralding the supposedly inevitable suicide; the straggling plant that symbolises the woman’s unhealthy condition but also implies her presumed nostalgia for rural innocence and, as in The Awakening Conscience, her instinctive striving for the ‘light’ of redemption. Compare the innuendo with which Dickens’s Master Humphrey, about to rescue the imperilled



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Covent Garden Market at sunrise too, in the spring or summer, when the fragrance of sweet flowers is in the air, overpowering even the unwholesome steams of last night’s debauchery, and driving the dusky thrush, whose cage has hung outside a garret window all night long, half mad with joy! Poor bird! the only neighbouring thing at all akin to the other little captives, some of whom, shrinking from the hot hands of drunken purchasers, lie drooping on the path already, while others, soddened by close contact, await the time when they shall be watered and freshened up to please more sober company, and make old clerks who pass them on their road to business, wonder what has filled their breasts with visions of the country. 84 In its prurient disingenuousness, this fancy for fragrant flowers from the country typifies the tawdry metaphors used throughout the Victorian period to dissimulate the patriarchal treatment of female sexuality. As Cornforth hired out her body as artist’s model in Stanhope’s studio, his place of assignation was perhaps for this working-class woman merely one place of enforced self-exposure masquerading as another, even less respectable. Modelling was clearly preferable to prostitution or sweated labour, but these restricted possibilities were dictated by class and gender inequalities that Stanhope’s painting glosses over.85

Uneasy encounters The popularity of Frith’s paintings of the 1850s and those of his many imitators lay undoubtedly in their narrative character: they are pre-eminently paintings that can be read. But probably of equal significance in these representative social panoramas is their ideological blandness. In Frith’s representation of Derby Day, for example, an annual occasion unparalleled in its carnivalesque mingling of all social strata, although extreme inequalities are evident in the juxtaposition of the acrobats, urchins, and travelling folk with the aristocrats and their picnic, the young acrobat gazes at the lavish spread in wonder rather than aggressive jealousy. Similar idealisation is evident in Hicks’s The General Post Office. One Minute to Six. Frasers remarked on the restriction of the painting to ‘a set of persons in good society’ with clean, ‘pink faced’, well-dressed newsboys. These well-scrubbed youths also caught the eye of The Times, which deplored the lack of ‘grime and printer’s ink in their threadbare garments and shapeless headgear’.86 One might compare Brown’s Carlylean social allegory, Work (1852, 1856–63), intended to demonstrate the dignity and necessity of labour – epitomised in the heroic rhetoric accorded to the navvies laying a new sewer or water-main in Hampstead – and to distinguish the deserving and undeserving poor. In



virgin Little Nell, recalls the caged bird and the ‘flowers’ of Covent Garden, another notorious centre of prostitution:

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the sonnet Brown wrote to accompany the painting there is a hint of social criticism:

But this appeal to the middle classes not to ignore the ‘residuum’ is itself dictated by class interests, as the next lines, warning of unbridled social animosity, make clear: Untrained, their state reflects on thy deserts, Or they grow noisome beggars, to abound, Or dreaded midnight robbers breaking through.87 Indicating a possible solution to the problem of social control, Brown includes F.D. Maurice, co-founder of the Working Men’s College where Brown and Ruskin taught, who represents the belief that a liberal education informed by the ideal of Christian brotherhood might effect social ‘improvement’ (although Brown’s catalogue note seems to concede its limited efficacy). By contrast, the condescending indoctrination distributed by the genteel lady in her tract ‘The Hodman’s Haven, or drink for thirsty souls’ is scorned by the navvies, who turn instead to the potboy’s refreshments. Paintings which offered a more critical view of the metropolis were correspondingly unpopular. John Ritchie’s A Summer Day in Hyde Park (figure 20) was shown not at the Royal Academy but at the British Institution, a second-rate alternative, where, opined the Athenaeum in 1850: ‘platitudes of conception, vulgarity in treatment, and lowness of aim make the rule’. It seems even there to have attracted little attention.88 Like Frith’s contemporaneous Derby Day, Ritchie’s painting is a panorama of urban leisure. The foreground includes middle-class strollers, shoeless working-class children and a farming couple on an outing to the capital, while behind them the upper classes ride in their carriages. There is again no suggestion of radical social tension, but we are brought closer to the experiential reality of the London parks by an incident on the margins of Ritchie’s frieze: a matronly woman in the middle of the bench frowns disapprovingly as a soldier importunes the nursemaid sitting next to her, who studiously ignores him. (One might compare Manet’s more urbane treatment of a similar theme at a higher social level in Chez le Père Lathuille (1879).)89 The soldier is trying his luck with a presumed loose woman or ‘Dollymop’: many servant-maids, nurse-maids who go with children into the Parks, shop girls and milliners who may be met with at the various ‘dancing academies,’ so called, are ‘Dollymops’. . . . Soldiers are notorious for hunting



Ah, beauteous tripping dame with bell-like skirts, Intent on thy small scarlet coated hound, Are ragged wayside babes not lovesome too?


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The everyday tensions of class and gender relationships are foregrounded more explicitly by Arthur Boyd Houghton.91 Houghton worked as a woodengraver to support himself in the absence of buyers for his paintings, and it seems likely that this encouraged him to depict in oil subjects which were normally the province of the illustrated magazines. In the early 1860s he produced a series of paintings of London street-life. Updating the Hogarthian comic-history tradition, some of these satirise military recruitment for the Volunteer movement, ranging in mood from the genial Volunteers (1860) through the serried pomposity of Volunteers Marching Out (1860) to the disquieting Recruits (Portland Gallery 1859).92 What is distinctive about Houghton’s street scenes, unlike those of his contemporaries, is the infiltration into the crowd of grotesque or sinister elements which forestall the viewer’s complacent enjoyment (like the one-legged war veteran in Manet’s Rue Mosnier Pavoisée (1878)). In the harrowing Itinerant Singers (exh. Portland Gallery, 1861, as Poor Nomads) Houghton focused on the kind of street bohemians (they were in fact French children) that Manet depicted in his contemporaneous The Old Musician (1862). He turns the frieze format employed by Frith and his imitators to ironic use. The involuntary proximity of his figures typifies the disjunct anonymity of the metropolitan crowd and emphasises the callous indifference to poverty of the two upper-class strollers, one of whom gazes superciliously past the beggars, while the other, more down-to-earth, casts a roving eye on the showily dressed woman next to him. Houghton had lost the sight of his right eye in a childhood accident, and this handicap, which led to migraines and virtual colour-blindness, thwarted his hopes of an Academy career. He disguised his self-consciousness about his disfigurement ‘by cultivating the image of a jovial Bohemian, with his bushy Bengal Cavalry-style beard and black eyepatch’.93 But despite his outward bonhomie, Houghton must have felt socially an outsider and his periodic depressions are surely reflected in the cynicism of his last modern life painting, London in 1865 (figure 26), painted the year after his wife’s tragically early death. A young woman (presumably a nursemaid) thrusts a perambulator out of the picture space, confronting the viewer with a physical barrier that is as uncompromising as her haughty, oblique gaze. She and her charges must negotiate the impersonal scrutiny of the urban crowd: the beggar woman on the left, perhaps recently bereaved, looks wistfully at the tiny tots in the pram; a policeman frowns with professional disapproval at the street urchin immediately behind the nursemaid, whose furtive backward



up these women, especially nurse-maids and those that in the execution of their duty walk in the Parks when they may easily be accosted. Nursemaids feel flattered by the attention that is lavished upon them, and are always ready to succumb to the ‘scarlet fever’. A red coat is all powerful with this class, who prefer a soldier to a servant, or any other description of man they come in contact with.90


Figure 26 Arthur Boyd Houghton, London in 1865. © English Heritage. Kenwood. The Iveagh Bequest

glance suggests he has been caught pickpocketing and collared by the stern sergeant of Volunteers. The abrupt cropping and overlapping layers of the figures crammed into this small canvas (30.5 × 25.4 cm) evoke the claustrophobic press of the urban mass. The nursemaid’s inscrutable expression is typical of Houghton’s style in the dark opacity of the eyes. The semi-blind painter doubtless projected onto the figures in his crowds the visual detachment from his environment that he himself experienced, but the nursemaid’s indirect gaze, like the vacuous expressions of the people in Itinerant Singers and Recruits, is first and foremost the mask that characterises metropolitan life. Like the professional reserve



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of the barmaid in Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1881–2), Houghton’s nursemaid adopts a self-defensive withdrawal to counter a predatory milieu. Her avoidance of the viewer’s eye is not demureness but the disabused, streetwise strategy of an unaccompanied woman in a crowd where the safeguards of social and gender segregation that otherwise operated in Victorian London are temporarily suspended. Houghton’s empathetic response to her situation in a male-dominated environment is matched only by Emily Osborn’s Nameless and Friendless (RA 1857). In this a bereaved woman artist is herself reduced by the masculine gaze to a prospective commodity (two gentlemen compare her charms with those of a ballerina on a print they are examining) just like the painting she hopes to sell to a West End dealer.94 Such dissenting voices were exceptional. Mid-century genre paintings were dominated by an ideology of connectedness, as if to confute the anxiety that England was disintegrating into ‘Two Nations’, or the concerns expressed in Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869). The harmonious middle-class group in Egley’s Omnibus Life in London (1859) and Charles Rossiter’s idealisation of the third-class railway compartment in To Brighton and Back for 3/6 (RA 1859) lack entirely the incisiveness of a Daumier. Even so, the latter drew the opprobrium of the Illustrated London News, whose reviewer haughtily dismissed it as ‘a piece of empty vulgarity, coarsely painted. It should not have been admitted at all to the Academy, much less to the prominent place it occupies’.95 This reluctance to face up to the class realities of metropolitan life is a major reason why in England, unlike France, advanced technical experimentation was almost entirely divorced from equally challenging subject matter. Victorian London, unlike contemporary Paris, was segregated geographically along class lines; buildings likewise were specialised in function. Theatres, for example, had separate staircases for different classes, while the mixing of classes that characterised continental apartment buildings was one reason for their unpopularity in England.96 It is, however, noticeable that the French Impressionists who depicted the shadier side of the upper classes and their problematic negotiations with their social inferiors were those who were not dependent on the sale of paintings for their livelihood. Whereas Manet and Degas cultivated a pose of disabused irony, some of Caillebotte’s paintings suggest the precariousness of the flâneur’s class identity.97 His superb Paris, A Rainy Day (1877) captures the insouciance of the haute-bourgeoisie, but in his Le Pont de l’Europe (1876), by contrast, the upper-class strollers seem anxious and isolated. They vie for the focus of the painting with the lounging workman in the foreground, who stares down onto the railway tracks with a bored indifference that pays no acknowledgement to the elegant rentiers beside him. In its literal foregrounding of social tensions, it is a work that would have been virtually unthinkable in contemporary London.98 There upper-class Society (Tissot and Orchardson) and working-class alienation were held strictly apart.





Figure 27 Luke Fildes, Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward (1874). © Royal Holloway, University of London

The contrast is already clear by the 1870s, which were, I believe, a crucial decade in the evolution of English Modernism. The leading artists associated with The Graphic from 1869, Luke Fildes, Hubert Herkomer and Frank Holl, produced harrowing images of urban poverty. Fildes’s monumental canvas, Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward (figure 27) enjoyed the rare distinction of having to have a rail placed around it at the 1874 RA exhibition, with a policeman to protect it from the crowds. It was based on a drawing Fildes had made in 1869, the year in which the Charity Organisation Society was founded in London (see pp. 64–5), and likewise expresses the ideology of the professional middle classes. In keeping with the current attempt to tighten up on abuses by separating the ‘deserving’ poor (the object of Poor Law legislation) from ‘demoralized’ mendicants (exploiters of charitable aid), the applicants in Fildes’s painting are queuing up to register at a police station to obtain tickets for admission to the workhouse. The street he depicted was ‘somewhere near the Portland road’.99 This part of Kensington, Notting Dale, had been notorious as early as 1850: ‘in a neighbourhood studded with elegant villas . . . is a plague spot scarcely equalled for its insalubrity by any other in London: it is called the Potteries.’ . . . Its topography included a septic lake covering an acre, open sewers and stagnant ditches galore, a puzzle of cul-de-sacs and impenetrable settlement (especially on its most fashionable quarter), and a heap of hovels numbering under two hundred by mid-century. It was exceptionally low-lying, but made more of a gully for surface water from



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the surrounding district by having been extensively dug for brick-clay for the mansions round about, and left unpaved and unmetalled. In 1851 the population was returned as 1,177; pigs outnumbered people three to one. It was a nauseous place, but from it came a substantial supply of good quality bacon raised on middle-class swill, a profitable flow of rents for middle-class landlords, and a large pool of adult and juvenile labour for middle-class households – domestic servants, cleaners, wet-nurses, prostitutes, laundry-women, needlewomen, gardeners, night-soil men, chimney-sweeps, odd-job men, and builders.100 The middle-class audience to whom this and similar tear-jerking works were addressed were notably absent from the canvases themselves. The implication is that they – despite perhaps electing the Kensington Poor Law Board and depending on the Potteries for their own domestic labour – are not directly involved with this suffering. And indeed, with a dissociation that seems staggering, Fildes himself would move just three years later into a smart ‘Queen Anne’ house designed for him by Norman Shaw on the Holland Park Estate, a mere stone’s throw from Portland Road.101 As the market for modern-life paintings contracted, all three radical painters were soon to abandon social realism in favour of more lucrative careers as fashionable portraitists.102 As Chapter 6 will demonstrate, the London avant-garde was supplanting the earlier definition of ‘modern’ painting in terms of Ruskinian naturalism by one based on decorative formalism. Atkinson Grimshaw’s fluctuations in style can serve as a barometer of popular taste. In the mid-1860s he produced landscapes in a Pre-Raphaelite naturalistic idiom. During the 1870s (the decade when he enjoyed his greatest success in London and was taken up by the dealers, Thomas Agnew and Son) he sought to capitalise on the vogue for aestheticism, incorporating all the paraphernalia of blue-and-white porcelain, Japanese fans and the emergent rococo taste into paintings which, like Tissot’s, celebrate the schönen Schein of conspicuous consumption. By the later 1870s he had turned to neoclassicism and Tennysonian romance; his perseverance as a dedicated follower of fashion was rewarded by an invitation to exhibit at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1885, by which time he had moved to Whistler’s Chelsea.103 The modernisation of Victorian London thus found no straightforward equivalent in mid-century English painting. Unlike the French, English artists seemed unable or unwilling, before the ‘London Impressionists’ in the late 1880s and the Camden Town Group in the late Edwardian period, to fuse modernity in subject matter with modernity in technique.




6

This chapter contextualises the evolution of ‘modern’ English art in late Victorian London. Its leitmotifs are the impact of capitalism on the art market and on motifs chosen by artists, and the affinities and divergences between English and French painting. I begin by considering the economic and cultural capital invested in Rossetti’s commodifications of female sexuality, then turn to another variety of Aestheticism, that of Whistler, situating his work beside that of other French-trained artists in London. The focus then shifts to the social connotations of painting. I elucidate what was at stake in this respect in the Whistler v. Ruskin trial, then examine the class anxieties revealed by the reception of French Impressionism, and conclude by analysing Sickert’s music-hall paintings.

Desirable objects Influenced by Greenberg’s teleological account of Modernism, art historians have often been tempted to interpret the development of Rossetti’s paintings of women in formalistic terms, although the ‘gross sensuality’ of Bocca Baciata (?Hogarth Club 1860) and similar ‘fleshly’ works was evident to contemporaries.1 Such a procedure was encouraged by Rossetti himself, who explained that he had adopted the restricted format of the half-length portrait to simplify composition, enabling him to concentrate on problems of fleshpainting and colour, and wrote of Fazio’s Mistress (1863): ‘I am now painting a lady plaiting her golden hair. This is in oil and chiefly a piece of colour.’2 His protestations of a primarily painterly concern were apparently supported by the self-conscious intertextuality of the ‘Venetian’ allusions in Fazio’s Mistress, Monna Vanna (1866) and Veronica Veronese (1872), although, since Reynolds, Venetian ‘colour’ had had sensual associations and connoted meretricious sexuality.3 Within this emergent discourse the artist gained the cachet of modernity by representing his work as elevated by its formal purism above the crude photographic realism of genre painting, and the purchaser 152




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the cachet of being able to appreciate – and value highly – aesthetic idealism rather than gross literalism. And indeed a painting such as The Blue Bower (1865) readily lends itself to interpretation along these lines. It proclaims its decorative qualities in the prominent pattern of the tiles, whose sensuous curves are echoed in the rounded contours of the woman, whose rich green robe sets up a colour harmony or ‘arrangement’ in blues and greens. Prompted by Rossetti, F.G. Stephens, writing in the Athenaeum, adopted the proper aesthetic tone to legitimise the painting’s avant-garde pretensions: he remarked that save the eastern tiles and passion flowers, ‘there is nothing to suggest subject, time or place. Where we thus leave off, the intellectual and purely artistic splendour of the picture begins to develop itself. The music of the dulcimer passes out of the spectator’s cognizance when the chromatic harmony takes its place in appealing to the eye.’4 Alastair Grieve, writing a century later, endorses Stephens’s approach: ‘Like his friend Whistler, Rossetti is making a picture without a specific subject but which is a colour harmony.’5 But the painting does have a subject: namely a woman in a sexual bower of bliss. To ignore this is to overlook the tendentiousness of Stephens’s attempt to elevate Rossetti’s painting into the category of the aesthetically progressive work, for which there was a lucrative market in the 1860s. The dealer Gambart snapped up The Blue Bower for £120, reselling it to another dealer, Agnew, for £500. Such paintings satisfied two kinds of male desire. The mystificatory jargon of artist and critic was a marketing ploy to boost the paintings’ exchange-value as speculative commodities and as vehicles for the newly rich to convert their economic capital into cultural capital. Rossetti, like Whistler, encouraged this by creating a distinctive artistic ‘brand’ through formulaic repetition. But the mystification also lent a specious respectability (like the exotic settings of Etty’s and Alma-Tadema’s nudes) to what was essentially high-class eroticism, as the comments of ‘insatiable’ male collectors of Rossetti and his follower, Burne-Jones, confirm.6 The paintings’ sought-after sensuality was rendered even more piquant by their technical modernity, as the sinuous curves that link Rossetti’s paintings with the linearity of Burne-Jones, Albert Moore and Leighton struck an ‘advanced’ note of formal expressiveness. For Rossetti himself Lady Lilith (like his comparable femmes fatales, Pandora and Astarte Syriaca) personified his nightmares about the irresistible, emasculating female, who, ‘subtly of herself contemplative’, strangles the helpless male in her ensnaring toils of hair.7 But for his male patrons the sublimity of Rossetti’s icons of the Eternal Feminine perhaps lay in the fact that although their dusky eyes hinted at hidden enormities, their oblique gaze and erotic languor flatteringly intimated deferentiality to the (economic) potency of the beholder, or the narcissistic vanity and hence the fundamental weakness of Woman, rather than the emancipatory challenge of their real-life counterparts (cf. pp. 203–9).8 In the speculation-led art market of the 1870s these desirable objects fetched astronomical prices, up to a staggering £2,100




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Aestheticising London Rossetti’s associate in Chelsea, Whistler, had moved in May 1859 to London, where, excited by Courbet’s realism, it apparently seemed to him that he might establish himself as a Francophile painter of modern life. At the RA in 1862 he exhibited The Thames in Ice (figure 28) which is a startling anticipation of Monet’s experiments of the late 1860s. The background, with its factory chimneys, is reduced to a virtual monochrome wash, against which the black masses of the ships are silhouetted starkly, in a dramatic tonal contrast perhaps encouraged by his contemporary work with etchings. But what is arresting in an Academy picture is the sketchiness of The Thames in Ice, which Whistler completed in only three days. The river is swept in broadly; as with Monet it is water that provokes technical experiment. Much of the middle ground is painted thinly; this restraint accentuates the richer beige pigments that Whistler drags across the foreground, their variations in hue evoking the grimy slush of the river under the overcast sky. There are no

Figure 28 James McNeill Whistler, The Thames in Ice (1860). Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC: Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F 1901.107



for Astarte Syriaca. As later sections show, Whistler learned to exploit a comparable niche market, often consisting of the same finance and industrial magnates who bought Rossetti’s works.

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gradations of hue to model the large ship or the lighter in the middle ground, which appears as a result as a flat, almost abstract shape. Similarly, the foreground figure rises up out of the snow, defined impressionistically by a handful of broad strokes that are not different in character from those that evoke the banked-up snow around him. There is no attempt to ease the tonal transition between this man and the river, nor to indicate the spatial relationship between the two; recession is suggested merely by a distinction in tone, although the high-key river appears paradoxically closer than the dark figure, emphasizing the apparent two-dimensionality of the picture space. The technical experimentation in this bold work did not, however, lead Whistler towards urban impressionism. Instead, although he continued to depict the Thames in the early 1860s in sometimes striking paintings – notably The Last of Old Westminster (RA 1863) with its bold diagonal composition and energetic, notational brushwork – he gradually moved away from the French realist tradition.9 I would emphasise two features of the familiar tale of his disconcerting shifts in direction in the 1860s. First, the business acumen evident when, in exhibiting Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl (as it was later retitled) at Morgan’s Gallery in 1862, he condoned its advertisement as ‘Whistler’s Extraordinary Picture The Woman in White’, in an attempt to cash in on Wilkie Collins’s recent bestseller The Woman in White (1859–60). The White Girl thus became the painting of the book, which it in no way illustrates; in marketing this spurious tie-in Whistler demonstrated the talent for self-publicity that would arouse such controversy in the 1870s. Second, his decisive contribution to redefining modernity in English painting in terms of decorative idealism rather than metropolitan realism, which should be located in a tradition of what might be termed the ‘metropolitan picturesque’. Late Georgian vedute had offered a selective vision of the industrial city.10 An aestheticising approach continued in the work of the Pether family, who specialised in the atmospheric depiction of the metropolis and surrounding towns by moonlight11 (figure 29). As Henry Pether’s paintings of the Pool of London, the Adelphi and Cheyne Walk, Chelsea indicate, an association had grown up between moonlit views and the Thames. In June 1863 George Price Boyce noted having made ‘a study of moonlight effect on river from my balcony’, perhaps similar to his remarkable The Thames by Night from the Adelphi (exh. 1866), which in its tonal washes perhaps influenced his friend Whistler’s early Nocturnes (the first of which dates from 1866).12 The industrial actuality veiled by Whistler’s ‘Moonlights’, as they were first called in the 1870s, is indicated by Robin Spencer: The Battersea industries benefitting from proximity to the muddy polluted riverside . . . included ribbon, silk and glove manufacturers, sugar refiners, starch, varnish and colour makers, various chemical works, including the manufacturer of Condy’s Fluid, barge and boat builders, as well as the





Figure 29 Henry Pether, Trafalgar Square by Moonlight (c. 1865). © Museum of London

older agriculture-related processors, distillers, maltsters and flour mills. Among the most prominent profiles in Whistler’s Nocturnes are the graphite burning chimneys of Morgan’s Patent Plumbago Crucible Company’s Works, the world’s largest crucible makers. Quoting ironically from Whistler’s Ten O’Clock lecture (1885), Spencer remarks that: ‘Whistler’s vision of this lurid world, where “the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky” and the “Tall chimneys become campanili”, presented the acceptable face of the march of civilisation. Not surprisingly, it appealed very much to those leading the march, and prominent industrialists and landowners were among the first purchasers of the Nocturnes.’13 The capacity of light effects to transmogrify the late nineteenth-century London of advertising hoardings and trams is also evident in John O’Connor’s majestic vista of St. Pancras Hotel and Station from Pentonville Road: Sunset (RA 1884) (figure 30), which swathes Sir George Gilbert Scott’s St. Pancras Hotel in a romantic mist, as if it were an enchanted castle. Thomas Hardy’s The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved (1892) suggests an appropriately ambivalent commentary: ‘It was one of those ripe and mellow afternoons that sometimes colour London with their golden light . . . and produce those marvellous sunset effects which, if they were not known to be made up of kitchen coal-smoke and human and animal exhalations, would be rapturously applauded.’14 And indeed O’Connor’s picturesque sunset was attributable to dust particles in the atmosphere, produced not just by London’s sulphurous air but also by the massive eruption of Krakatoa in 1883.



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Figure 30 John O’Connor, From Pentonville, looking West – Evening (1884). © Museum of London

The late Victorian aestheticisation of the cityscape is heralded almost programmatically in Whistler’s Variations in Flesh Colour and Green: The Balcony (1864–70) (figure 31). His characteristic repainting makes it difficult to date the elements in this mish-mash of styles, but at least the ideology underlying the painting is consistent. Within a composition based on Japanese woodcuts, an Albert Moore-like group of models, costumed up with all the chic accoutrements of japonisme, sprawl languidly on a balcony.15 The picture was apparently painted from Whistler’s house in Lindsey Row; across the river the industrial chimneys of Battersea are reduced to two-dimensional flatness. They function as a compositional element, setting off the foreground with their near-monochrome indistinctness, and are treated by the women merely as a monotonous backdrop, which they may either overlook or turn their backs on in consummate ennui. It could serve as an emblem for ‘modern’ English art in 1870, the year it was exhibited at the RA as ‘The Balcony’.

London Visitors When Monet and Pissarro took refuge in London in 1870–1 it seems they did not meet Whistler.16 At this period all three might be described as nascent ‘Impressionists’, in the broad sense that their paintings stressed the subjective element in perception, attempting to ‘render not the landscape, but the sensation produced by the landscape’.17 Whistler himself used the current French terminology to describe his work: Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge (c. 1872–5) was ‘A moonlight effect’, and Nocturne in Black





Figure 31 James McNeill Whistler, Variations in Flesh Colour and Green: The Balcony (1864–70). Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC: Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F 1892.23

and Gold: The Falling Rocket (c. 1875) ‘was not painted to offer the portrait of a particular place, but as an artistic impression that had been carried away [from the scene]’.18 But while Monet’s and Pissarro’s ‘impressionism’ was a plein-air practice intended to create the illusion of spontaneity in its notations of fleeting effects of light and colour, for Whistler ‘impressionism’ was not a matter of naturalistic fidelity to optical sense-data but rather an imaginative alchemy in which memory distilled mundane reality into a near-abstract design intended to evoke an emotional mood. His painting pointed towards Symbolism in its atmospheric suggestivity and in its emphasis on the decorative rather representational aspects of painting. At the turn of the century Monet would return to a London where ‘impressionism’ was now understood as urban naturalism. His work too had changed; his serial paintings of 1899–1904 embody a meditative consciousness of transience, as the spectral silhouettes of the London bridges and Houses of Parliament loom out of the fog. Their impasted textures and extreme formal simplification draw attention to the painted surface, celebrating the artifice of art. Like Whistler’s Nocturnes, they convey the internalisation of what, to a more dispassionate eye, remains external reality. But thirty years earlier in 1870–1 what was striking was the divergence between English and French painting. In their choice of motifs for speculative small-scale canvases



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designed for the middle-class market, Monet and Pissarro carried over to London the themes of their recent Parisian work. Monet’s paintings of Green Park and Hyde Park were an outgrowth of his Garden of the Princess (1867) and, in handling, of his paintings of La Grenouillère in 1869. Like the French-trained Whistler a decade earlier, Monet also turned to the river, hedging his commercial bets with two pictures of the Port of London, presumably with a mercantile public in mind, and one appealing to civic pride, The Thames below Westminster (1871) (figure 32) next to the newly opened Victoria Embankment (1870) and recent Westminster Bridge (1842–62). It is a painting that can have had little prospect of finding an English purchaser in 1871. The sketchiness of figures and boats lacks both the finish of Academy painting and the attention to detail of the topographical artist; the composition would also have seemed deficient. For while the Embankment wall offers a token concession to academic linear perspective, Monet reduces the indications of pictorial depth to a progressive lightening in tone, from the skeletal jetty, through the mid-tones of the steamboats, to the hazy insubstantiality of the bridge and the Houses of Parliament. These distinctions between foreground and background are, however, reduced by the overall high-key tonality. The result is a compromise between naturalistic detail, in the undulating reflections in the river, and the kind of abstracted simplification of form and spatial relationships with which Whistler was experimenting a little further upstream in Chelsea.

Figure 32 Claude Monet, The Thames Below Westminster (c. 1871). © The National Gallery, London





The majority of Pissarro’s paintings followed on from his recent paintings of the Parisian suburb Louveciennes in depicting suburban streets, the road leading into a village, or generic rural scenes.19 Understandably, he took motifs within walking distance of his lodgings in Norwood; but, despite the rapid extension of the transport network, the London suburbs had not been depicted by contemporary English painters.20 (For a comparable interest in what were then villages on the fringes of urban development, one must look back to Constable’s paintings of Hampstead or John Linnell’s Kensington Gravel Pits (1811–12) and Collins’s Farm, North End, Hampstead (1831). Even in 1897 Camille Pissarro’s paintings of the more central suburb of Bedford Park had no real British counterpart; not until a decade later when his son, Lucien, was painting views of Acton did the suburbs receive attention from the Camden Town painters.)21 Aside from this eccentric choice of subjectmatter, Pissarro’s paintings would also have been difficult to market by virtue of the attention some of them gave to technological innovation: in two paintings of the Crystal Palace, and one of a train leaving the recently opened Lordship Lane Station, Dulwich (1871) (figure 33), doubtless an unwelcome reminder of the regrettable dependence on industrial machinery of the businessman’s pastoral idyll.22 To a French eye by contrast, the railway’s function in suburban development rendered it an integral part of the scene; trains, railway bridges and even the smoke from factory chimneys recur in paintings of the environs of Paris in the 1870s. Pissarro’s static frontal view gives the train a homely character rather than the aggressive, surging

Figure 33 Camille Pissarro, Lordship Lane Station, Dulwich (1871). © Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London



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dynamism of Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed (RA 1844). As a solidly blocked shape, it takes its miniaturised place reassuringly alongside the simplified chunky houses which nestle into the hillside, just as the engine’s exuberant squiggle of steam and smoke blends with the clouds in the overcast sky. It took the unprepossessed eye of a tourist or a foreign resident to appreciate the spectacle of late nineteenth-century London. The western environs of Paris on the Seine around Argenteuil were a favourite haunt of the Impressionists in the early 1870s, so it was natural that on his visit to London in 1874 Alfred Sisley should depict similar riverside motifs.23 His unpretentious, small-scale landscapes of the area around Hampton Court record effects of light but also, with their rowers, sailing dinghies and middle-class promenaders, capture intuitively the emergence of excursionist leisure. Foreign visitors, like those in Tissot’s London Visitors (RA 1874) were understandably alert to London’s rapidly developing tourist attractions, as grand hotels mushroomed in the 1860s.24 The Great Exhibition of 1851 had attracted over six million visitors; its successor, the International Exhibition of 1862, was even larger. Visitors to this included continental tourists, armed with Karl Baedeker’s London und seine Umgebung (1862), which was followed by a French edition in 1866 and an English edition, catering mainly for the American market, in 1878.25 The leisure activities in Tissot’s paintings were not merely those of tourists but also of an emergent plutocracy, able to enjoy a jaunt down the Thames to Maidenhead (The Return from the Boating Trip (1873)) or to Henley Regatta (c. 1877).26 Among the modern-life subjects that Tissot exhibited at the RA in the mid-1870s, his witty social conversation pieces, Too Early (RA 1873) and Hush! The Concert (RA 1875), were well received, appealing as they did to British taste in their combination of high finish (although Hush! is more painterly) and anecdotal interest. Both were acquired for large sums by the dealer Agnew, as was Tissot’s modern fête galante, The Ball on Shipboard (RA 1874), depicting yachting at Cowes in August, the culmination of the London-centred ‘Season’. It was with this painting, however, that the limitations of Tissot’s success became apparent. As a foreigner he perhaps missed the nuances of the English class system, or simply chose to ignore them. His market lay with parvenus (like the Veneerings in Our Mutual Friend (1865) ‘bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new quarter of London’), who responded eagerly to such chic celebrations of their lavish lifestyle. To the Establishment, however, such ostentatious consumption was the mark of vulgarity. The Athenaeum’s frosty review could find in The Ball on Shipboard ‘no pretty women, but a set of showy [rather?] than elegant costumes, some few graceful, but more ungraceful attitudes, and not a lady in a score of female figures’.27 The hauteur of critics voiced the defiance of the beleaguered landed classes, who were being outstripped in wealth and numbers by business magnates.28 In conservative eyes Tissot’s painting was associated with the City bankers and stockbrokers so prominent in Trollope’s





contemporary fiction, who, as the landed interest declined with the agricultural slump from the late 1870s, were increasingly buying their way into the aristocracy. Punch cartoons track these developments. In 1867 ‘A Plutocrat’ was followed by ‘Genteel Poverty Dining in State’.29 Then, after this sporadic sniping, in the early 1870s open season was declared on the embarrassments of the newly rich and the newly poor. The caption to one puzzle picture asks: ‘Which of these two respectable Philistines is waiter, which host?’ The Cockney parvenu and his hanger-on, Major Le Spunger, are satirised in ‘Exclusiveness’, while ‘Not By No Means Whatsumdever’ targets the intermarriage of the plutocracy and an aristocracy deucedly short of the tin: The Hon Cecil d’Argentcourt, eldest son of Viscount Silverlacke (to Mrs. Alderman Jones). ‘MOST CHARMING YOUNG LADIES, YOUR DAUGHTERS, REALLY! CONGRATULATE YOU! S’POSE THEY ALL LOOK FORWARD TO MARRYING – A – FUTURE LORD MAYORS LIKE THEIR PAPA?’ Mrs Alderman Jones. ‘O DEAR NO, MR. D’ARGENTCOURT. FUTURE LORD SILVERLACKES, LIKE YOU!’30 It appears that by the late nineteenth century about a quarter of leading bankers had married into the aristocracy.31 Traditional prejudices against financiers (although not against industrialists) were gradually being eroded. It was less an outright takeover by capitalism than a merger founded on mutual interest. Aristocrats were in unprecedentedly close contact with the City, for advice with investment portfolios as rent-rolls fell, but also in pursuit of well-paid, light-duty jobs: ‘Sometimes these jobs took the form of partnerships within City firms, usually stockbroking; sometimes it might be a half-commission arrangement with a stockbroker, in effect touting for West End custom; and sometimes, if an impecunious aristocrat was very lucky, it might be what was called with delightful accuracy a “guinea-pig” directorship.’ ‘As early as 1866 the Saturday Review concluded that “the City is rapidly becoming another branch of that system of relief for the aristocracy which Mr. Bright denounces” ’. A peer’s name lent an undoubted cachet to a company prospectus and by the mid-1890s about a quarter of the entire nobility were company directors.32 The Stock Exchange, where the number of members shot up from 864 in 1850 to 2,009 in 1878, carried less kudos than merchant banking. The first aristocrat to join was Lord Walter Campbell, the brother-in-law of Princess Louise, in 1877 but by 1900 there were only three peers and about thirty sons of peers on the Exchange. The first Etonian jobber did not enter until 1891.33 Bankers, on the other hand, had often enjoyed a relatively high prestige, as the senior partner of a commercial or private banking firm usually performed only supervisory tasks, devoting no more time to business than a landowner would to the management of his estate.34 But although such ‘gentlemanly capitalists’ tended to blur the distinctions between the aristocracy and the City, before the final two decades of the century they were still denied access to the highest levels of ‘Society’. Symp-



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The Queen really cannot make up her mind to it. It is not only the feeling of which she cannot divest herself, against making a person of the Jewish religion, a Peer; but she cannot think that one who owes his great wealth to contracts with Foreign Govts for Loans, or to successful speculation on the Stock Exchange can fairly claim a British peerage. However high Sir [sic] L. Rothschild may stand personally in Public Estimation, this seems to her not the less a species of gambling, because it is on a gigantic scale – and far removed from the legitimate trading which she delights to honour, in which men have raised themselves by patient industry and unswerving probity to positions of wealth and influence.35 But by 1885 the climate had changed sufficiently for both Natty Rothschild and Ned Baring to be made peers; the 1880s and 1890s saw a spate of business peerages.36 A decade earlier, however, the gates to Society were yielding but had not yet given way and it was Tissot’s misfortune to discover that what had been fashionable among the nouveaux riches of Second Empire Paris received the cold shoulder in England.37 His rather ill-judged canvases with their sexual innuendo, as in Boarding the Yacht (1873), and suggestions of illicit liaisons on and around the Thames were simply too close to reality for comfort. The Thames (RA 1876) (figure 34), for example, was lambasted by reviewers as ‘thoroughly and willfully vulgar’, ‘hardly nice in its suggestions. More French, shall we say, than English’.38 No respectable lady would be so overdressed, or permit herself to be borne off unchaperoned for a jaunt around the Pool of London by a smug naval officer about whose intentions the phallic champagne bottles leave little to conjecture. The figurehead en déshabillé, saluting the flag just behind the women’s heads, suggests cheekily that England expects that every woman will do her duty. It was not that such things did not go on, but rather that by a gentlemen’s agreement they were unmentioned: as The Times reprimanded Tissot, this was, in view of the young ladies who visited the Academy exhibition, ‘Questionable material’, ‘a pleasanter thing in reality than on canvas’. The picture’s damning by the critics coincided with Tissot’s social fall from grace, when he set up house with an attractive divorcée, publicising their liaison in the many portraits of her he exhibited over the following years. Holyday (The Picnic) (c. 1876) was set in the garden of this St John’s Wood villa. It was among those paintings by Tissot exhibited at the Grosvenor



tomatic of this reserve was Queen Victoria’s rejection in 1869 of the proposal that Lionel Rothschild be granted a peerage. (Other bankers were more fortunate: Samuel Loyd Jones (Lord Overstone, 1860) and George Carr Glyn (Lord Wolverton, 1869).)


Figure 34

James Tissot, The Thames (1876). © Wakefield Art Gallery

Gallery in 1877 which Ruskin, moving on from his libellous excoriation of Whistler, dismissed as ‘mere coloured photographs of vulgar society’.39 Oscar Wilde, who could tell an upstart when he saw one, also objected to the ‘over-dressed, common-looking people’ in Tissot’s picture.40 The full self-righteous indignation of the Establishment was vented against Tissot’s A Quiet Afternoon (c. 1879), The Hammock (1878) and Going to Business (Going to the City) (c. 1879). Their exhibition together in 1879 in the unorthodox milieu of the Grosvenor Gallery perhaps made them a target for suspicion and reviewers were not slow to make wounding connections between these works, seemingly innocuous in themselves, and Tissot’s private life.41 Either alluding directly to Tissot’s mistress, or merely to the dubious reputation of St John’s Wood itself, the Punch critic renamed the first painting, The Naughty Old Man; or, I’ll tell your Wife how you spend your Afternoons in Fair Rosamund’s Bower-Villa, N.W. and appended to the last a doggerel jibe: ‘Drive on, Cabby! /Ah! is she good,/She of the Abbey/Road, St John’s Wood?’42 Tissot’s friend, the Italian painter Giuseppe De Nittis, who divided his time after 1874 between Paris and London, was commissioned by the millionaire banker, Kaye Knowles, to produce ten works which presumably encapsulated what London represented socially to Knowles. It is significant that with the exception of La Banca d’Inghilterra a Londra (?1878), which, like Tissot’s contemporaneous Going to Business (Going to the City) depicted the capitalist’s working environment, the series was devoted to the West End.43 De Nittis depicts the swirl of carriages past Green Park down



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Figure 35 Giuseppe De Nittis, The National Gallery, London (1878). Musée du Petit Palais, Paris © Bridgeman Art Library

a mud-rutted Piccadilly towards Hyde Park Corner and the middle-class strollers outside the National Gallery (figure 35) and in the elegant piazza of Trafalgar Square, which would be occupied nine years later by the bivouacs of the unemployed. The highly selective London of Tissot and De Nittis reflects the social experience of the tourist and the nouveau riche.44 In De Nittis’s Trafalgar Square there are vestiges of a former London in his inclusion of a herd of animals presumably being driven to the Metropolitan Cattle Market in Islington; but this functions as picturesque local colour rather than as an indication of a working environment. His Domenica a Londra (1878) (figure 36), depicting ‘Cannon Street Station with its unemployed shoeblacks and its solitary policeman in the desert street’, conveys the oppressive dreariness of the City on the Sabbath.45 What we are shown has nothing to do with the sabbatarian controversy of the mid-1850s but is instead the culmination of a process of geographical segregation that, apart from the clothes worn, could be a scene today: the streets are empty because the City no longer has a residential function. It is given over exclusively to business, just as the West End is given over exclusively to entertainment. De Nittis’s views of the Thames contrast with Monet’s working river of 1870–1, anticipating Monet’s series paintings in their preoccupation with atmospheric effects of fog.46 Although in his Westminster (exh. 1878), as in Caillebotte’s Le Pont de l’Europe (1876), workmen lean disconsolately across the parapet of a bridge, they do not offer an implicit social






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Figure 36 Giuseppe De Nittis, Domenica a Londra (1878). Private collection. Photograph © Piero Dini Archive, Montecatini Terme


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challenge to the middle-class spectator but serve instead merely as a repoussoir, leading the eye back to the visual splendour of the sky.47 Together with Whistler’s Nocturnes, it was this aestheticising view of London, rather than social realism, which consolidated a market niche at the Grosvenor Gallery as the ‘impressionist’ vision of the 1870s. That it did so was the achievement of French-trained painters whose works were bought by parvenus who experienced the London of the 1870s as a spectacle to be consumed.

Cockney impudence For Mr. Whistler’s own sake, no less than for the protection of the purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsay ought not to have admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approached the aspect of wilful imposture. I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.48 Thus Ruskin’s offending remarks on Whistler. The resulting trial for libel in November 1878 became a media event and has rightly been seen as a crucial moment in the history of modern aesthetics. But the significant social issues on trial have been comparatively neglected. If one places emphasis on Pater’s prophetic remark of 1877: ‘Art, then, is thus always striving . . . to become a matter of pure perception, to get rid of its responsibilities to its subject or material’, together with Whistler’s insistence that in his representation of Battersea Bridge his ‘whole scheme was only to bring about a certain harmony of color’, then Ruskin might be cast simplistically as a reactionary opponent of formalistic expressiveness.49 Popular misunderstanding of Whistler’s Nocturnes, which were based on firework displays at Cremorne, arose from the public’s frustrated expectations of a genre scene, as exemplified recently in the anecdotal interest of Phoebus Levin’s The Dancing Platform at Cremorne Gardens (1864) (figure 37). As Whistler himself pointed out in court, if his Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (c. 1875) ‘were called “A View of Cremorne” it would certainly bring about nothing but disappointment on the part of the beholders’.50 But this was not what angered Ruskin. After all, in 1853 he had himself emphasised that ‘the arrangement of colours and lines is an art analogous to the composition of music, and entirely independent of the representation of facts. Good colouring does not necessarily convey the image of anything but itself. It consists in certain proportions and arrangements of rays of light, but not in likenesses to anything’.51 Instead, Ruskin’s outburst needs to be seen in the context of the exorbitant prices commanded by modern-life paintings from the 1850s into the early 1870s, which in Ruskin’s view ‘degraded the productions even of distinguished genius into marketable commodities’.52





Figure 37 Phoebus Levin, The Dancing Platform at Cremorne Gardens (1864). © Museum of London

A deflationary reaction in the market had set in and by recent standards Whistler’s price of 200 guineas was relatively moderate.53 But for Ruskin the work was unprofessionally deficient in labour and finish, and immoral in its neglect of the painter’s duty to elevate and instruct.54 It was, in short, a matter of ‘Cockney impudence’. The phrase deserves to be dwelt on. In the view of Whistler’s counsel ‘Cockney’ meant ‘something dirty and disagreeable’.55 Traditionally, ‘Cockney’ had carried associations of conspicuous consumption without production; from the 1860s to the 1880s the predominant representation of the Cockney was as a sham-genteel swell.56 It is tempting to see a link between Ruskin’s damning comments on Whistler in 1877 and the invention that year in Punch of a new Cockney archetype ’Arry, ‘a cockney cad’, ‘loud, slangy and vulgar’, with a taste for ‘smart patter and snide phrases’.57 To Ruskin, Whistler’s ‘Cockney’ vulgarity lay in his brash self-advertisement and in Ruskin’s instinctive sense that there was something spiv-like about his recent paintings. Punch voiced similar suspicions in its parody of Penny Whizzler, A.A.A. (Anglo-American Artist) v. Rubskin (High-Art Critic). Whizzler is satirised as a showman ‘à la Barnum’, concerned simply with his takings. Sir John Joker (i.e. Holker) asks of one painting ‘What is it? – a bridge, an elephant, or a telescope?’ Whizzler replies: ‘Well, Sir, if you were the lucky purchaser, I should say, “It’s whatever you like, my little dear. You pays your money, and you takes your choice.” ’ In his summing up, Baron Puzzleton concludes that: ‘If there be any truth in the old adage, “Ars est celare artem,” then



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Mr. PENNY WHIZZLER is a great artist, as he has thoroughly succeeded in concealing his art’. Six months earlier Whistler had been mocked by Punch as ‘Penny Whistler’, playing on the musical associations of his colour ‘harmonies’.58 The change to ‘Whizzler’ points instead towards fraud, for the verb ‘whizzle’ means ‘to obtain slily’ (OED). Ruskin tried to rationalise his distaste by maintaining that it was the ‘critic’s first duty in examining designs proposed in public exhibitions to distinguish the artist’s work from the upholsterer’s . . . [and to] recommend the spectator to value order in ideas above arrangement in tints, and to rank an attentive draughtsman’s work above a speedy plasterer’s’.59 Similar assertions were made by Henry James: ‘Mr. Whistler’s productions are pleasant things to have about, so long as one regards them as simple objects – as incidents of furniture or decoration. The spectator’s quarrel with them begins when he feels it to be expected of him to regard them as pictures’. They would be reiterated at the trial by the doyen of Victorian genre painting, W.P. Frith – ‘There is a beautiful tone of color in the picture of Old Battersea Bridge, but the color does not represent any more than you could get from a piece of wallpaper or silk’ – and afterwards in a cartoon.60 The mid-1870s had seen the interior design trade flourish in the West End: in 1875 Liberty & Co. set up in Regent Street; in 1877, the year of the Grosvenor exhibition, Morris & Co. opened a showroom in Oxford Street. There could not have been a starker contrast in ethos and production methods between William Morris, with whom Ruskin was in sympathy, and the materialistic flashiness of Whistler, who a few months earlier had achieved considerable notoriety as the designer of the Peacock Room at the mansion in Princes Gate of the shipping magnate, F.R. Leyland.61 He had presumptuously exceeded Leyland’s modest commission for an appropriate setting f o r h i s painting La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine (1863–4), transforming the entire room into an extravaganza of gilt work, painted leather and blue-and-white porcelain. In the owner’s absence and without his consent, Whistler unveiled this venture into interior decoration at a press conference held in the room itself, where he took the opportunity to distribute his self-advertising pamphlet, Harmony in Blue and Gold. The Peacock Room. The flagrant lack of restraint in both the decoration itself and its hyping by the media was, in conservative eyes, unpardonable; unlike Old Master paintings, the new art did not rely on bitumen in its pigments, but it was tarred with the same brush as the tawdry new money that so avidly bought it up. (Or so it seemed at the time. In fact many of the leading patrons of Aestheticism, although not the self-made Leyland, came from middle-class families that had been prosperous for several generations.)62 I believe that two emotive associations were confused in Ruskin’s mind: first, an aesthetic judgement that Whistler was not an artist but simply crafty; and second, a social judgement that he was in effect a tradesman whose clients were themselves in trade or not quite ‘gentlemen’. (Ruskin’s





counsel likewise envisaged Whistler’s prospective client as a gullible ‘artistic gentleman from Manchester, Leeds, or Sheffield’ – Liverpool, Leyland’s home town, was a pointed omission.)63 In a telling formulation Ruskin confessed that ‘it gives me no little pain to be compelled to point out, as the essential ground of the present action, the confusion between art and manufacture’.64 He meant the increasingly common reduction of art to a material commodity by purchasers who were themselves in manufacture or the finance market. Two years earlier, in 1875, William Quilter, founding president of the Institute of Accountants, who speculated on the art market as shrewdly as on the stock market, had netted from the sale of his collection a rumoured profit of 260 per cent. After his death in 1888 it was revealed that such high auction prices had been engineered by carefully orchestrated bidding up and by astute buying in to corner the market.65 In the 1870s Whistler painted portraits for the banker W.C. Alexander, who specialised in the discount market, the kind of speculation that outraged Ruskin. (A piquant irony, in view of Frith’s slurring comparison of Whistler’s painting to wallpaper design, is that another of Whistler’s patrons was John Gerald Potter, a Lancashire wallpaper magnate, whose up-market products were themselves on the borderline between art and industry.)66 But Ruskin was also expressing his intuition that the hasty execution of Whistler’s paintings smacked of mass production to a ready formula, as if from a template or mould. Similar charges were not uncommon in contemporary reviews of fiction. H.L. Mansel complained of sensation novels that: ‘A commercial atmosphere floats around works of this class, redolent of the manufactory and the shop. The public want novels, and novels must be made – so many yards of printed stuff, sensation-pattern, to be ready by the beginning of the season.’ Trollope was likewise accused of over-production to a formula. Why could he not ‘refrain from striking off more copies of an idea than the plate will bear?’ ‘Of course, if Mr. Trollope only looks upon his art as manufacture, there can be no reason why he should not take as just a pride in turning so many novels out of his brain in the twelvemonth as a machinemaker takes in turning out so many locomotives or looms out of his shed.’67 To Ruskin, Whistler seemed to be cashing in on the speculation mania that had overtaken London by shamelessly increasing his output to anticipate the demand for works which, if stylishly promoted, could set a lucrative trend. It has to be said that Whistler did little to forestall this hostile construction. His generic designation of his work as Nocturnes, distinguishable only by the variation in hue of their washes, and the merest traces of handling in their long liquid brushstrokes, suggested paradoxically that, despite Whistler’s élitist aesthetics, this was artful commodification. James sensed something similar; the instinctive reservations he airs were, I believe, widespread and a decisive element in the prejudiced rejection of ‘impressionist’ painting in Britain: ‘even as “objects”, it is hard to feel strongly about [Whistler’s pictures]; for Mr. Whistler paints in a manner to make it difficult



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to attach a high value to individual pieces. His manner is very much that of the French “Impressionists” and, like them, he suggests the rejoinder that a picture is not an impression but an expression’ (PE, 165). So were Whistler’s paintings ‘art’ or ‘manufacture’? This leading question was pressed in cross-examination by the disingenuously plain-spoken Attorney General, Sir John Holker: ‘Did it take you much time to paint the Nocturne in Black and Gold? . . . How long do you take to knock off one of your pictures? . . . Is two hundred guineas a stiffish price for a picture like this?’68 Holker’s deliberately colloquial ‘knock off’ and ‘stiffish’ masqueraded as Philistine obtuseness but implied that this businesslike idiom was Whistler’s stock in trade. With his apparently labour-saving pictures, Whistler did not seem to be giving solid value for money. Was his flashy style simply a convenient short cut to a quick profit? It was a tricky issue, as in a variety of ways representational cloning was accepted practice. Unlike many of his contemporaries, ironically including Frith himself, Whistler did not rely on photographs. Nor, unlike Frith or Rossetti, did Whistler indulge in the frequent practice of satisfying excessive demand for a specific painting from would-be patrons by producing to order copies of the original work, which changed hands at the same price as the ‘original’.69 Down market from this, replication was part and parcel of Victorian painting as technological advances in reproduction rendered art, in the form of prints, affordable by most middleclass pockets. A small fortune could be made from the canny purchase of the engraving copyright of a work whose sentimental or pious appeal made it a likely money-spinner. On his outlay to Frith of a not inconsiderable £4,500 for exhibition and engraving rights on The Railway Station (1862) the dealer Flatow was said to have earned £30,000. In December 1873 £10,500 changed hands when Agnew acquired similar rights on Holman Hunt’s The Shadow of the Cross.70 Agnew’s were clearly not averse to turning piety into profit. They devoted an entire exhibition to Hunt’s painting, transforming the gallery into a commercialised shrine complete with virtual catafalque on which Christ’s painted body was laid out. This fetishished corpse suggested his real presence in the saleroom where aesthetic pilgrims, in hushed reverence, might pay their respects and a modest fee. In a letter to Rossetti, his patron William Graham voiced his indignation at ‘the low vulgar (Agnewism) of its theatrical exhibition’, ‘ “lying in state” in a silent room draped in black with slippered attendants and reflected gas light and gaping spectators’.71 Four years later in 1877, in the months preceding his libellous exasperation, Ruskin must have watched with some distaste as this icon by his erstwhile protégé, recalling in its typological symbolism earlier paintings that Ruskin had championed, was marketed as an engraving in an edition of over 4,000. Christ was big business, it seemed. In their premises at 39 Old Bond Street Agnew’s had also pioneered the smart idea of disguising a gallery as a high-class interior.72 Their marketing





strategy was emulated in New Bond Street by the opulent Grosvenor Gallery, financed by Sir Coutts and Lady Lindsay, who was related to the Rothschilds, and, significantly, built in an Italian Renaissance idiom, the architectural guise favoured by the new City banks of the 1840s.73 It was a sign of the times that, in this tentative venture into gentlemanly capitalism, the aristocratic Lindsay was willing, for a financial consideration, to open his doors to new money, pandering to parvenu taste in the ostentatiously expensive brocades and hangings. James was not uncharitably disposed towards this attempt to draw an upwardly mobile clientele, who would be attracted by a public gallery with the apparent exclusivity of a patrician connoisseur’s private collection: ‘In so far as his beautiful rooms in Bond Street are a commercial speculation, this side of their character has been gilded over, and dissimulated in the most graceful manner’ (PE, 139). Ruskin had no time for such blandishments: ‘The upholstery of the Grosvenor Gallery is poor in itself; and very grievously injurious to the best pictures it contains, while its glitter as unjustly veils the vulgarity of the worst.’ For him, the undiscriminating superficiality of the new plutocracy was mirrored not just in the specious ‘glitter’ of the ‘upholstery’ but also in the artworks they favoured, not least Tissot’s ‘mere coloured photographs of vulgar society’.74 The exception was the imaginatively powerful work of Burne-Jones, which doubtless appealed to Ruskin by virtue of the sublimination of sexuality in its androgynous women. Whistler’s milieu by contrast was altogether more risqué. His Wapping (RA 1864) was painted at a ‘dive’, the Angel Inn, Cherry Gardens, in Rotherhithe. Its indecency was toned down, after a friend warned Whistler that the extreme décolletage of the prostitute (a ‘jolly gal’ with a ‘superlatively whorish air’, as Whistler described her, modelled on his fiery mistress, Jo Hiffernan) would prevent the painting’s acceptance by the RA jury.75 In the courtroom itself an innuendo flickered around the Nocturne in Black and Gold, ‘the Cremorne nocturne’, as Holker termed it, presumably with a knowing smirk: ‘I do not know what the ladies would say to that, because it is a subject they would not understand – I hope they have never been to Cremorne – (Laughter) – but men will know more about it.’76 William Acton had observed in Prostitution (1857) how the clientele of Cremorne Gardens changed towards evening: ‘As calico and merry respectability tailed off eastward by penny steamers, the setting sun brought westward hansoms freighted with demure immorality in silk and fine linen.’77 Like most commentators, Acton was probably exaggerating: Cremorne was more decorous than its lurid reputation and many supposed ‘prostitutes’ were doubtless entirely respectable working-class women simply enjoying a night out.78 Levin’s The Dancing Platform at Cremorne Gardens (figure 37) suggests the kind of mud that Holker was trying to sling at Whistler: ‘A group of swells and prostitutes occupies the right foreground. In the background, a stout wife knocks off the hat of her husband whom she has discovered with a young woman. On the platform, a man offers a woman a bundle of banknotes. A drunken woman collapses to the far right.’79 The



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Illustrated London News, that organ of family taste, was affronted; its critic’s choice of adjective was precise: ‘We must object to P. Levin’s “Cremorne Gardens – Evening,” as unnecessarily meretricious even for the frequenters of the gardens at the time specified.’80 The judge instructed the jury to award Whistler ‘contemptuous damages’ of a farthing, if they felt that the case ought never to have been brought into court and that no pecuniary damage had been sustained.81 It may not be coincidental that in the 1870s the minister of the Chelsea Baptist Chapel issued a pamphlet in which Cremorne Gardens was condemned as the ‘nursery of every kind of vice’. In May 1877, the very month in which Whistler’s Cremorne Nocturnes opened at the Grosvenor Gallery, the Gardens’ director, John Baum, sued for libel. But although, like Whistler the following year, he won his case, he likewise was awarded only a farthing damages. His licence was not renewed and in 1877 the Gardens were closed.82 The significance of the Whistler v. Ruskin trial was three-fold. First, it highlighted the fact that – despite the idealising discourse of Aestheticism and the propagandist efforts of leading artists to stress their professional calling and depict themselves as gentlemen untainted by trade – in capitalist London art was as much a commodity as any other form of production, and the art market as speculative as the finance market. The fact that Whistler’s paintings could change hands at what Ruskin regarded as such disconcertingly inflated exchange-values, although no one could agree on their worth, was symptomatic of a more widespread relativism that had come to characterise the late Victorian metropolis, in the absence of any authoritative source or guarantee of ‘value’. Anachronistically, Ruskin sought to hold on to the now-superseded labour theory of value as a measure of what was morally justified. But the prices commanded by Whistler’s Nocturnes appeared to be determined solely by market forces, as the new theory of marginal utility explained. Whistler’s assertion that, like the fees charged by any professional, his prices bore a relation to his expertise was belied by his unceasing selfpromotion which, through astute brand-marketing, used publicity to artificially stimulate demand. Sceptics might see disquieting analogies with the company promotions of financial charlatans such as Merdle and Melmotte, who, in a bubble market, traded on the willingness of a credulous public to invest in speculative commodities with scant or no intrinsic value. Second, the trial made graphically apparent the emerging gulf between the public preconception of painting (now labelled derogatively as ‘Philistinism’) and an avant-garde minority of artists, who increasingly rejected didacticism and representationalism in favour of introspective formalism: HOLKER: There is at present a mania for what is called Art. It has become a kind of fashion among some people to admire the incomprehensible and to say of something that cannot be understood, ‘It is exquisite.’ (Laughter) So too in painting.83





Third, it affected radically the public reception of art in England. What little remained of Ruskin’s authority as ‘Sir Oracle’, the unquestioned arbiter of aesthetic taste, had been discredited; in the later 1880s and 1890s a new kind of professional art critic would emerge, to cater through specialist periodicals for the minority interests of diverse art publics. These, in turn, gravitated towards small exhibiting societies (geared to a particular medium or degree of experimentation) and to dealer’s galleries, whose shows were targeted at a specific clientele.84 In the uncertain market that followed the boom in genre painting, purchasers became cautious and painting lost its centrality in English culture. The consensus of critical taste and middle-class patronage that had enabled the rise of genre painting and was evident in mid-century newspaper reviewing was shattered for good. Under cosmopolitan influences, some painters became more ‘advanced’ in technique and/or naturalistic range of motif but at the expense of marginalisation. Not until the controversy aroused by the Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1910 did painting once again capture the public imagination in London.

Impressionism or Naturalism? The incomprehension of avant-garde practice that was highlighted by the Whistler v. Ruskin trial also hampered the reception of French Impressionism in England.85 Its technical innovations were largely ignored. Instead, in the wake of the 1867 Reform Act, attention focused on its supposed moral and political subversiveness. I’ll start by examining this before considering how French Impressionism influenced late Victorian paintings of London. At the outset of the movement English and French reviewers concurred in their bewilderment at the apparent structural incoherence and lack of finish of Impressionist paintings. The Times lamented that, in Manet’s Argenteuil, Les Canotiers (1874), ‘The handling is an exaggeration of the coarsest methods of the scene painter’. These technical shortcomings were, however, castigated less than what was perceived as Manet’s affront to social and artistic decorum. The ‘school’ of ‘young French painters’, we are informed, is ‘coarse and ostentatiously defiant both of rule and culture’; they have ‘surrendered themselves without reserve to a hankering after ugliness in their figure painting, and a studious avoidance of selection and arrangement in their landscape’.86 This emotive correlation between the ‘coarse’ handling and the ‘singularly offensive couple’ who were depicted was echoed in the frosty hauteur of the Art Journal towards Manet’s ‘vulgar figures’, ‘coarse brushwork’ and ‘outrageously-crude colour’.87 Similar treatment was meted out in the same year to Tissot’s paintings of the nouveau riche at play with women whose flashy attire, if nothing else, declared them to be cocottes. If accepted codes of social propriety were transgressed, then the social distinctions themselves might be drawn into question. Signs of ‘vulgarity’ deserved



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public censure and the new painting was not exempt from this conservative monitoring. The vehemence of tone reflected a desire for clarity in social demarcations. After their rapid rise in living standards in the 1850s and 1860s, the professional middle classes were forced to make retrenchments in the 1870s. The scandalous collapse in 1866 of the finance house of Overend and Gurney had shattered any complacency about their new-found prosperity. At the same time, improved wages and reduced working hours enabled the working classes to display their greater purchasing power in leisure activities.88 In Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré’s London: a Pilgrimage (1872) the Varsity Boat Race and Derby Day, where all classes came together, are treated as harmless London carnivals. But in conservative eyes the unabashed proximity of would-be rowdies was a glaring provocation. In her ‘Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt’ (January 1868) George Eliot’s protagonist claims that: To us who . . . often walk abroad, it is plain that we can never get into a bit of a crowd but we must rub clothes with a set of Roughs, who have the worst vices of the worst rich . . . They are the hideous margin of society, at one edge drawing towards it the undesigning ignorant poor, at the other darkening imperceptibly into the lowest criminal class.89 To avert the threat of ‘public disorder’, Holt advocates gradualist reform of legitimate grievances and the promotion of education, rational leisure and ‘fellowship’, to distinguish the respectable working classes from the degraded ‘brutal rabble’. Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy of the following year was on similar lines. Recalling the Hyde Park riots of 1866, Arnold voiced an emergent fear of ‘this vast residuum’ ‘of the working class which, raw and half-developed, has long lain half-hidden amidst its poverty and squalor, and is now issuing from its hiding-place . . . to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes’.90 To counter the anarchic individualism he saw in laissez-faire capitalism and in the competing class interests of Barbarians, Philistines and Populace, Arnold, the inspector of East End schools, advocated the use of education to promote a socially cohesive ‘culture’. The results were paternalist attempts to direct working-class leisure by providing ‘rational recreation’ in the form of organised sport and working men’s clubs (which by the 1880s were, however, firmly in working-class hands), cultural initiatives centred on Toynbee Hall, the People’s Palace, and St Jude’s Whitechapel, and supervision of the music halls. But this desire to foster ‘respectability’ in the working classes by reforming them in the image of their ‘betters’ ran counter to another trend of the 1870s: the wish to reinstate more firmly the differentials which had been eroded by the extension of the franchise in the Reform Act of 1867. As the




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The mantle of moral rectitude, sanctimonious piety, and austere recreations lugubriously endured, had shrunk until it no longer fitted any but the lower middle class, their ultimate weapon of respectability in the struggle to distance themselves from the seaside-postcard vulgarity of the better-off workers, with whom they might otherwise have become confused.92 In this context the English reception of Impressionism became inextricable from the debate over the moral acceptability of another French export, literary Naturalism. English art critics were frequently men of letters who, following the lead of Duranty and Huysmans, represented Impressionism as a Realist movement, whose salient distinction was its modernity of subject matter.93 Only in rare instances before the late 1880s were the technical innovations themselves investigated.94 The shift from form to content is apparent even in a specialist journal, The Artist, where ‘Our Lady Correspondent’ reviewed the Impressionist exhibition of 1881.95 She begins by mocking the paintings’ broad handling and poor draughtsmanship, proficiency in which formed the core of an academic art training: in Mary Cassatt’s Mère et Enfant ‘it is a pity more care was not put into the drawing of the hand, which is large, coarse, and ill shapen’. The implicit social deprecation is then made explicit: ‘Another, and not the least fault of these “Indépendants”, is their admiration for the ugly and the vulgar. These titles show it as much as the pictures. “Physionomie de criminel”, “Déclassés”, “Loge d’actrice”, “Chiffoniers”, “Blanchisseuses”. It is not, mind you, the best side of common life treated sympathetically and poetically, but crudely in all its lowness and vulgarity.’ Gone quite clearly was the deferentiality of the rural poor in the picturesque tradition; not one of these ‘déclassés’ would doff a hat or touch a forelock to ‘Our Lady Correspondent’. Her sense of outrage at being confronted by the surliness of the metropolitan proletariat rose to an anguished crescendo: ‘This is “Realism” so called; this is in art what M. Zola is in literature. Such being the case, let us make a big hole and bury all our ideals; do not let us drag them through the mire till they become sufficiently soiled to suit the new schools.’ She was projecting onto the new French painting her fear of London’s ‘residuum’, the supposedly degenerate casual labour force, “déclassés” in mind and body’. In her tart prediction that art was becoming an atavistic freak show – ‘we may soon expect to see a gallery of monstrosities on canvas equal to the collections at the Jardin des Plantes’ – she was voicing a widespread middle-class anxiety that the hitherto dominant faith in evolutionary progress would find its refutation in the metropolis.



Saturday Review commented in April 1873: ‘The destruction of a political privilege is tacitly compensated by an increase of social exclusiveness.’91 While the upper bourgeoisie increasingly rejected evangelical sanctions against worldly pleasures, it was left to others to hold the thin red line against working-class swells out on a spree:


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Rip your brothers’ vices open, strip your own foul passions bare; Down with Reticence, down with Reverence – forward – naked – let them stare. Feed the budding rose of boyhood with the drainage of your sewer; Send the drain into the fountain, lest the stream should issue pure. Set the maiden fancies wallowing in the troughs of Zolaism, – Forward, forward, ay and backward, downward too into the abysm.96 Tennyson’s vituperation draws the new art into the vortex of middle-class fears about the ‘abysm’ of London in the 1880s. In 1884 and 1885 Henry Vizetelly had published English translations of Zola’s Nana, L’Assommoir, Germinal and Pot-Bouille. The perceived need to shield ‘maiden fancies’ from ‘Zolaism’ coincided with a major social-purity campaign about the vulnerability of minors. In 1885 the National Vigilance Association was founded, which initially targeted prostitution but later extended its range to any material thought capable of corrupting youthful morals.97 In the same year, following W.T. Stead’s exposé of child prostitution in London, The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, the Criminal Law Amendment Act was passed, raising the age of consent for girls from thirteen to sixteen, and criminalising private homosexual activity. It seems that the legislative aim in both cases was to protect ‘the victims of the unnatural lusts of full grown men’.98 Tennyson’s imagery of contagion and defilement is familiar from earlier chapters. But, topically, he moves beyond the customary heterosexual context to add an unconscious homophobic element in the fate he imagines for ‘the budding rose of boyhood’. Tennyson’s overwrought attack on the new art reveals in an unusually unguarded form the anxieties of a beleaguered conservatism. What was overtly at stake in the art criticism of the period – as in the notorious controversy that blew up in London in 1893 over Degas’s L’Absinthe (1876) – was the High Victorian touchstone that ‘degraded’ subjects in painting were only justifiable if their depiction clearly had a moral purpose.99 The desire was to make L’Absinthe as much a sermon against the bottle as Cruikshank’s mid-century illustrations. But, as Frank Rutter shrewdly implies, the subtext of the indignation that greeted Degas in London was the threat that he posed to the late nineteenth-century double standard of sexual morality. His work, like Manet’s, voyeuristically turned the tables on members of the exclusive Jockey Club who were uncovered cruising behind the scenes at the Opéra, and depicted the numbed stupor of the working-class dancers,



Her exasperation was echoed five years later when the ageing Poet Laureate fulminated against the decadence of literary Naturalists, who, in a significant metaphor, ‘Paint the mortal shame of nature with the living hues of Art’:


laundresses and milliners whom they regarded as easy pick-ups. Its exposure of the network of sexual and economic exploitation behind the glittering façade of capitalist leisure broke the tacit gentleman’s agreement that such matters should not be broached in polite society.100 But while Degas’s infringement of social proprieties demanded an active response, Monet’s equally challenging innovations were restricted to technique and could be represented, with chauvinistic complacency, as in any case indebted to Turner and Constable, or be safely left in the hands of marginal avant-garde groups. The reviewers’ dismissal of Impressionism was mirrored by the indifference of the broad middle-class public, which continued to direct its attention towards the Academy exhibitions, while a more select audience gravitated from 1877 towards the Grosvenor Gallery and after 1888 to the New Gallery, where Aestheticism held sway. From the end of the 1880s, however, there was pressure from more ‘advanced’ critics, such as D.S. MacColl and George Moore, for a direct engagement with the innovations of French Impressionism. Their enthusiasm was shared by a group of painters who in 1886 founded the New English Art Club (NEAC). Its members had originally toyed with the idea of calling it the ‘Society of Anglo-French Painters’. But it soon became clear that although all the members were Francophile, their Entente about which French painters should be naturalised in England was not always cordiale. A rift developed between those for whom Jules Bastien-Lepage was the ne plus ultra and a vociferous group of young Turks whose mentors were more radical in their technical experimentation.101 This faction won out and held their first independent exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in December 1889. They called themselves the ‘London Impressionists’ and their spokesman was Walter Sickert.102 Oversimplifying somewhat, late Victorian paintings of London can be broadly categorised as either ‘realist’ or ‘impressionist’. The ‘realist’ manner is exemplified at its best by William Logsdail’s St Martin-in-the-Fields (RA 1888) (figure 38) and The Ninth of November (1887–90). Logsdail went to enormous lengths to achieve absolute fidelity to life, for the former hiring a Pickford’s van, inside which he painted for several months outside Morley’s hotel, and for the latter undertaking detailed studies of the mayoral coach and horses and the liveries of coachman and footmen.103 Behind his grey winter scenes and the overcast landscapes of the Newlyn School (the more traditionalist group within the NEAC) there was an éminence grise, Bastien-Lepage. As the ‘Impressionists’ within the NEAC sought to promote their work, it was therefore understandable that the influence on English art of Bastien-Lepage became the target of their anti-realist polemic. As the straw man of ‘realism’ which the ‘impressionist’ painters were so eager to overturn, Bastien-Lepage’s art was caricatured as ‘the sterile ideal of the instantaneous camera’. Great art, unlike the impersonal work of ‘the modern photo-realist in painting’, was ‘not a catalogue of facts, but the result of the observation of these facts on an individual temperament’.104 These



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Figure 38 William Logsdail, St Martin-in-the-Fields (1888). © Tate, London 2003, © Bridgeman Art Library

remarks by Sickert, who for several years exhibited as ‘pupil of Whistler’, were seconded by another NEAC painter, Charles Furse, who attempted to define French Impressionism as a matter of Whistlerian suggestiveness: what the painter elects to leave out in the treatment of his subject is almost as important as what he chooses to put in. And here it is that the painter’s individuality discovers itself, in his ability to give forth his impressions, not as seen through the lens of the camera, but as abstractions drawn from nature through the subtlety and charm of his mind. It is not the painter’s business to record what he sees, but to suggest what he feels.105 For the ‘London Impressionists’ therefore the question was effectively, where do we go from Whistler? Whistler’s pupils took various routes. Theodore Roussel developed Whistler’s aestheticisation of the industrial riverscape of Battersea and Chelsea in his appealing Blue Thames. End of a Summer Afternoon, Chelsea (Goupil Gallery 1889), and atmospheric Battersea under Snow (probably 1890s) and Battersea Asleep (c. 1905).106 Paul Maitland (Roussel’s pupil) took up Whistler’s fascination with the visual appeal of mundane shopfronts in





his Three Public Houses, Morning Sunlight (Goupil Gallery 1889) and The Hollywood Arms (c. 1891). Sickert’s debt to Whistler was more complex. In 1882 Sickert had abandoned his training at the Slade School to become Whistler’s pupil and assistant and his catalogue Preface to ‘A Collection of Paintings by London Impressionists’ (1889) is a rehash of the precepts of Whistler’s famous Ten O’Clock lecture (1885). ‘Impressionism’, Sickert insists, ‘Essentially and firstly’ ‘ is not realism. . . . It is not occupied in a struggle to make intensely real and solid the sordid or superficial details of the subjects it selects . . . It is, on the contrary, strong in the belief that for those who live in the most wonderful and complex city in the world, the most fruitful course of study lies in a persistent effort to render the magic and the poetry which they daily see around them’.107 But it would be wrong to see Sickert in 1889 as merely a dedicated follower of Whistler. Four years earlier he had begun to move away from Whistler’s alla prima technique, which he came to regard as as superficial as the washes of thinned paint that the master used. As Sickert later explained, Whistler ‘considered it essential to cover the whole picture practically in one wet’, which ‘necessitated an excessive simplification of both subject and background’.108 His dissatisfaction led Sickert to look for a more exacting approach that required a planned build-up towards a complex construction; he found it in his new mentor, Degas. Sickert’s ideal in painting became accordingly a fusion of what was understood at the time as Whistler’s and Degas’s ‘impressionist’ subjectivity with Degas’s draughtsmanship and compositional inventiveness.109 It was expressed in a fine series of paintings of the London music hall. What Sickert found in Degas’s theatre paintings of the 1870s was a subversive concern with the performativity of the urban self. Like a candid camera, Degas takes snapshot exposures of unguarded moments when the social mask slips. His seemingly arbitrary cropping and oblique viewpoints place the stage in a visual continuum with the wings or backstage, emphasising the constructedness of the aesthetic illusion and the physical exhaustion and commodified sexuality behind the glamour of the ballet.110 As so often in Degas’s work, what strikes the viewer is the disjunction, the isolation, the lack of relationship among the figures who occupy the same space but stare blankly, in indifference, distraction or self-absorbed musing, in separate directions. Urban alienation could not be more tellingly portrayed. Sickert played his own variations on Degas’s themes of urban roleplaying and voyeurism. As in Degas’s cafés-concert, in Sickert’s music-hall paintings the audience vies for our attention with the official performers. The logical conclusion of this turning the tables, to put the spectators on show, is reached in Gallery of the Old Bedford (NEAC 1895). When first exhibited the painting carried the title ‘The Boy I Love is up in the Gallery’ and Wendy Baron suggests that it was conceived as a pendant to Little Dot Hetherington at the Bedford Music Hall (Goupil Gallery 1889), who is depicted pointing up to the gallery as she performs this song.111 But although an



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interaction between performer and spectators may be implicit, in Gallery of the Old Bedford the stage itself has disappeared and we must infer the performance from its reflection in the rapt expressions of the audience. They are literally in the limelight themselves, underlit like the artistes whom they are watching. The viewpoint is, however, not that of the performer but rather, as in Degas, an oblique perspective that seizes the opportunity of their distraction by the stage performance to gaze surreptitiously at the audience, who themselves become the spectacle. The intimacy that results is involuntary on their part and possible only because they are unconscious of being under observation. Like Degas’s Dancer with a Bouquet, Seen from a Loge (c. 1877–9) and At the Ballet, Woman with a Fan (c. 1883–5), Sickert’s Bonnet et Claque (1887) (figure 39) juxtaposes performer and spectator(s) but reverses the composition, as it is the singer’s face rather than the spectator which acts as a repoussoir. The startling contrasts in tone, reminiscent of Manet’s peinture claire as well as of photography, have a garishly expressionistic quality. In The Glove (c. 1878) Degas had also painted a bold close-up of a singer but Sickert’s painting is more reminiscent of Ensor and of Munch’s work of the early 1890s. Initially the spectators seem gently caricatured as, jaws hung open, they gape in unconscious mimicry of the singer. But the grinning figure next to her, like

Figure 39 Walter Sickert, Bonnet et Claque (1887). Private collection. © ProLitteris, 2002, 8033 Zürich, Photograph © Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd, London





Figure 40 Walter Sickert, The P.S. Wings in an O.P. Mirror (c.1889). Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen © ProLitteris, 2002, 8033 Zürich, © Bridgeman Art Library

a death’s-head, reminds us of the skull beneath the skin. This macabre element, more appropriate to a dance of death than a palace of varieties, accentuates the mask-like quality of the other faces, particularly that of the standing figure, who acquires a hallucinatory rigor mortis. What seemed at first to be a participatory mirroring of the singer’s gestures appears at second glance more an involuntary or stupefied automatism. Characteristically, the physical proximity suggested by Sickert’s compositional ingenuity involves no emotional closeness. This combination of illusory proximity and distance is paralleled by The P.S. Wings in an O.P. Mirror (Goupil Gallery 1889) (figure 40), which emphasises the disjunction between the singer and the spectators by placing them in spatial planes that are only tangentially related. Reduced to a reflection in a mirror, the singer appears to be addressing no one. The receding diagonal formed by two spectators who seem to reach out to her with eager attention is obstructed from connecting with her by the imperviousness of a third figure, immovable and unmoved, whose profile accentuates the horizontal flatness of the picture space. Her eyes closed in the darkness of the auditorium, this third, inscrutable figure looks like a death mark in alabaster as she relapses into a monumental solipsism. Although the singer’s dress radiates an



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intense warmth, much of it is absorbed by the threatening shade in the underworld of the stalls. If the mirror in The P.S. Wings was used to suggest isolation, the mirrors in Little Dot Hetherington play an intricate game with acts of observation. The top two-thirds of the painting are occupied by a mirror which reflects an angled view of the stage and a section of the audience. A man in the front box is reflected in a mirror within the mirror on the left, and a female onlooker in the wings is exposed to view. This looking-glass world is symptomatic of the general tendency of Sickert’s music-hall paintings to flatten the performers to two-dimensional shapes. This is clearest in The Lion Comique (RSBA 1887), The P.S. Wings and Red, White and Blue (c. 1889) but is true also, despite the more painterly handling, of Gatti’s Hungerford Palace of Varieties: Second Turn of Miss Katie Lawrence (1887–8), and of Miss Minnie Cunningham (NEAC 1892) where the delicate portrait head is literally outshone by the startling luminosity of her incandescent scarlet dress. In Red, White and Blue and The Pit at the Old Bedford (c. 1889) the audience are as sharply outlined in black as the stained glass next to them, suggesting a cloisonné effect reminiscent of the Nabis. Sickert does not proceed as far in his decorative simplification of forms as Maurice Denis (or later Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter at Murnau), but the reduction in Gatti’s Hungerford Palace of the audience to unmodelled blocks of paint as flat as the theatre scenery is nevertheless disconcerting in this naturalistic context. If we return from these paintings to Little Dot Hetherington we might well ponder on the significance of Sickert’s ingenious reduction through the mirrors of all concerned to mere simulacra, replicas of themselves. As Baron notes: ‘No part of the reflected image is also seen as a real object.’112 Where one would expect the emphasis to fall on the raucous vulgarity of the Cockney music hall, on its resilient exuberance, Sickert’s response is muted, a diminuendo in a minor key. The audience at the Hungerford Palace witnesses the performance with rigid impassivity; it is more like a funeral than a free and easy. And while Little Dot Hetherington sings, delicate, almost ethereal in the white highlighting, an ominous figure in black waits in the wings. Et in Arcadia ego? Sickert’s Self-Portrait of these years (c. 1896) hauntingly evokes with its hunted look the grim desolation that he projected into his melancholy paintings of urban leisure. As with Tissot, Whistler and the French Impressionists, Sickert’s paintings courted controversy because of what was seen as their provocative subject matter. Degas was the prime mover here. His influence is apparent in both the handling and the composition of The City Atlas (Goupil Gallery 1889) by Sickert’s fellow ‘London Impressionist’, Sidney Starr, in which an invisible spectator gazes from behind at an unwitting servant or a ‘Glorified Spinster’ riding on the top deck of an omnibus in St. John’s Wood.113 Similarly, behind Sickert’s music-hall paintings there hover Degas’s depictions of the louche encounters at the Opéra between members of the Jockey Club and





dancers who tried to angle a sugar daddy. Sickert’s interest in London’s music halls coincided with that of the newly formed London County Council, which between 1889 and 1891 intervened to make them more orderly. Up to this period many music halls still retained, in conservative eyes, the stigma of their origins as glorified public houses. The attention of moral vigilantes and temperance campaigners was directed towards the drinking which the halls allegedly encouraged, the soliciting prostitutes which they harboured and the vulgarity of the artistes’ material. In his unprecedented elevation of music hall from graphic illustration to the respectability of oil painting Sickert was therefore taking on a recalcitrant topic. It is, however, difficult to reconstruct exactly what in Sickert’s work offended conservative art critics. Anna Gruetzner Robins quotes indignant comments on a now lost painting of Gatti’s Hungerford Palace of Varieties: ‘the lowest degradation of which the art of painting is capable’; an embodiment of ‘the aggressive squalor which pervades to a greater or lesser extent the whole of modern existence’.114 It seems that in this painting the young Sickert was deliberately showing a red rag to John Bull in the shape of a woman wearing ‘a monstrous red hat’ which marked her as a ‘low dame de plaisir’.115 The only trace of this figure in the extant version of Katie Lawrence is a suggestively red-haired young lady with a flamboyantly large hat, which, despite its connotations of meretricious display, is a decorously muted olive colour. One might therefore conjecture that Sickert, like Whistler in his toning down of the décolletage in Wapping, had revised the painting to avoid undue offence. This raises a problem of interpretation. Gruetzner Robins documents some contemporary criticism of the disreputable character of Gatti’s, which she uses as circumstantial evidence that Sickert’s lost painting of Gatti’s was similarly perceived. The reviews she quotes support her argument. But can one extend similar inferences to the surviving version of Katie Lawrence at Gatti’s and to Sickert’s other music-hall paintings? My own view is scarcely, if at all. On the contrary, what is striking about Sickert’s representations of the music hall is their decorousness. His choice of halls is also significant in this regard. The earliest images are of local halls: Bottings Marylebone Music Hall and Collins’s Music Hall, Islington, which attracted a respectably stratified working-class clientele; Collins’s admission prices of two pence to 1 shilling in 1880 had risen to six pence to 3 shillings in 1900 when it was recommended in the twelfth edition of Baedeker’s London and Environs. The bulk of Sickert’s paintings from the LCC clampdown onwards are of the Bedford Music Hall (c. 1888–95), with one of the Tivoli Theatre of Varieties (1892). The Bedford, Camden Town, like the New Canterbury in Lambeth had a deliberate policy of trying to attract an audience from farther afield and also a more respectable, socially mixed ‘family’ audience. This was reflected in its admission prices which ranged from six pence to 1 guinea in 1878.116 Prices at the Tivoli



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(listed, like the Bedford, in Baedeker’s) ranged in 1900 from 1 shilling to 5 shillings. None of Sickert’s extant paintings depicts drinking or prostitution. On the contrary, what his works do illustrate is the reformed character of London’s music halls. The circulating crowds of earlier halls, whose promenading mobility fostered impropriety, and who participated boisterously in the performances are now replaced (as regulation intended) by respectable theatre of variety with fixed seating and a passive audience, exemplary in their sober restraint.117 The subject of Sickert’s music-hall paintings is emphatically not the ‘vice’ that made the headlines in 1894 when Mrs Ormiston Chant of the National Vigilance Committee led a crusade against prostitution in the promenade at the Empire, Leicester Square. Instead, far from being salacious, what they reveal is a subdued vision of urban alienation. In stylistic terms, Sickert’s ‘impressionism’ marked the latest stage in the distinctive evolution of ‘modern’ English painting since the late 1850s, which, in rejecting Ruskinian naturalism for affective symbolism and in emphasizing the subjectivity of perception rather than representational fidelity to optical sense-data, finally heralded the epistemological concerns and self-reflexivity of Modernism. In terms of subject-matter, following the heyday of genre painting, the emergent vogue after 1869 for social realism proved ephemeral. Instead, alongside Whistler’s Nocturnes, in the work of other French-trained painters who adopted the perspective of the tourist or the nouveau riche, an aestheticising vision of London became fashionable. I have argued that this reflected the growing importance of (sub)urban leisure and the functional specialisation of the West End as a district of entertainment and consumer spectacle: a trend to which Sickert responded with considerable detachment. The intersections of painting and capitalism were also apparent in the art market. From the early 1860s, varieties of Aestheticism had appealed to parvenus eager to boost their cultural capital. But it was only with the Whistler/Ruskin trial that the full implications of the shift in values within London’s increasingly market-mediated culture were exposed. Chapters 7 and 8 examine literary representations of these developments in the work of Trollope and James.




7

This chapter examines two interlinked issues in Trollope’s ‘London’: capitalism and gender relations. The first two sections trace his critiques of financial fraud and the abuse of credit from the 1850s to the 1870s. Then, an analysis of contemporary controversies about femininity and the legal and financial situation of women establishes the framework for my concluding discussion of women and property in The Way We Live Now. The debates within and about Trollope’s later novels, like those provoked by Tissot and Whistler, concern the values of a plutocratic society in which absolute standards have been superseded by the market-mediated relativism of social exchange-value. In his depictions of the consequent dubieties of social and moral discrimination, Trollope’s own ambivalence as a ‘conservative Liberal’ has exercised academics. George Levine, echoing John Hagan, concluded that: ‘though there are impressive elements of moral subversion in [Trollope’s] art, his novels become comforting, conservative documents, easy in the ways of the middle class, admiring of the ways of the aristocracy, worldly wise in their acceptance of the inevitabilities of compromise’.1 Subsequently, a revisionist approach has altered the weighting in Levine’s interpretation, according increasing importance to the elements of ‘moral subversion’. Thus, since the late 1970s Trollope criticism has stressed the intricacies of his multi-plot narratives.2 James Kincaid has influentially shown how the closed form of the main plot (often involving a conventional comic resolution) is often subverted or qualified by dissonant elements (narratorial interjections, disruptive minor actions or subplots), which militate against any facile closure.3 A similar approach has been applied to Trollope’s attitudes to women. His obiter dicta about the Women’s Movement are without exception hostile, his professed attitudes to women conservative and banal.4 On the other hand, his publicly voiced dogmas are sometimes at odds with more tolerant private statements and frequently conflict with the liberal responsiveness shown by his novels towards the predicament of individual women.5 How should one deal with this discrepancy? 186




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One approach proposes that, to avoid alienating his readership, Trollope disingenuously paid lip-service to the conventions which he surreptitiously and systematically undermined. It is thus possible to celebrate his coming out as a closet feminist and to antedate his conversion (from ‘an unreconstructed believer in the doctrine of separate natures and separate spheres’) to include earlier novels hitherto regarded as irredeemably chauvinistic.6 I see several potential pitfalls here. Because Trollope offers relatively little evaluative commentary, it is difficult to refute, other than intuitively, a critic’s subjective interpretation. Not surprisingly, therefore, the author’s putative subtext often turns out to conform to what the critic desired to find. The following Catch-22 exemplifies this: ‘If I am right that the novels Trollope wrote from 1861 to 1865 use comic form to mask his sympathy for rebellious women, then the persistent tendency of his critics to see those novels as ultimately affirmative and conventional because they are technically comic suggests that he knew what he was doing.’7 In other words, to disguise his supposed feminist radicalism, Trollope resorted to an obliquity so subtle that contemporary reviewers and subsequent critics have missed the point. Indeed, the very fact that everyone has missed it confirms its existence. But what would be gained by encoding a meaning so cryptically as to render it undecipherable save by the enlightened modern critic? If the interpretation proposed is one unavailable to the author’s intelligent contemporaries, then one should ask whether this was indeed a pioneering text that was so innovative as to be unintelligible at the time, or whether critical anachronism or wish-fulfilment is involved. Raymond Williams suggested analysing the ideological diversity manifest in every era into ‘residual’, ‘dominant’ and ‘emergent’ social formations, which result from more tentative ‘structures of feeling’.8 Likewise, in the self, recently acquired views and experiences are inscribed on the palimpsest of earlier ones, just as conscious attitudes may conflict with the residual traces of former developmental phases which continue to influence us subliminally. The fact that Trollope persisted in holding inconsistent, even incompatible attitudes is thus probably not unrepresentative. In reading his fiction, our most illuminating guide to upper middle-class opinion in the 1870s, one should therefore, as Bill Overton has argued, be alert to ‘the unofficial Trollope’ – ‘that level of awareness implied in the novels which reaches beyond their writer’s ordinary thinking’ – but not attempt, as more recent criticism has unwisely tried to do, to suppress the existence of his alter ego, the conventional ‘official Trollope’.9 For it is in the coexistence of these contradictory elements that he is most revealing of contemporary attitudes. In what follows I shall touch only incidentally on Trollope’s treatment of politics. Instead, my focus is on the function of money in shaping class and gender relations. My starting point is the uneasy accommodations in The Way We Live Now (1874–5) between the upwardly mobile with their moveable property and the aristocracy and gentry, whose real property was increasingly becoming a liability.




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The Way We Live Now is, I will argue, a critique of the monied interest. Its origins lie in The Three Clerks (1857) where, in a series of moral compromises, Alaric Tudor succumbs to the lure of Mammon.10 He rashly agrees to buy shares in the Cornish tin mine of which he is a Government inspector, inviting the charge of self-interest in the recommendations made in his official report. Later, as a director of the Great West Cork railway, he and his partner try to influence the Railway Board into approving a branch line to Ballydehob, expecting (wrongly) to make a killing on the railway shares they have cornered. His worst act is, however, his embezzlement, as co-trustee, of £10,000 of his ward’s fortune to speculate in shares of the Limehouse Thames Bridge Company, which is planning a bridge from Limehouse to Rotherhithe. Attempts to rig the hearings of the Parliamentary investigative committee fail and the shares plunge. Alaric is sentenced to six months in Millbank Penitentiary, after which he begins a reformed life in Australia. Trollope was voicing topical criticism of financial fraud, encouraged by the permissive company legislation passed in 1855–6, but also a perennial condemnation of Mammon worship. A striking passage uncovers the capitalist underworld beneath the City: ‘where every heart is eaten up by an accursed famishing after gold; where dark, gloomy banks come thick on each other, like the black, ugly apertures to the realms below in a mining district, each of them a separate little pit-mouth into hell’ (432). The symbolism perhaps alludes to the temptation of Spenser’s Guyon in Mammon’s house, where ‘but a litle stride’ ‘did the house of Richesse from hell-mouth diuide’.11 What is indisputable is that the narrator, in recalling Alaric’s earlier descent into the Cornish tin mine, to which he appended the tag ‘Facilis descensus Averni’ (111), and in referring to Alaric’s ‘taking down notes in that wretched Pandemonium’ (111), had Milton’s Hell in mind, where the subterranean palace of Pandemonium is decorated with gold mined under Mammon’s direction.12 The materialistic rape of nature that Milton records had been a commonplace since Ovid. Trollope’s description of the ‘stunted’, ‘unearthly’ landscape around the mine-shaft, which ‘looked as though the devil had walked over the place with hot hoofs, and then raked it with a huge rake’ (108–9), expresses a similar idea. The agrarian economy has been supplanted by the wasteland of the money-grubbing devil Undy Scott, who has the previous evening made an unholy pact with Alaric to traffic in shares. In descending into the Miltonic inferno of the mine, with its ‘hidden riches of a lower world’, Alaric’s ‘visit to the provocations of evils not yet dug out from their durable confinement’ (108) confronts him with the physical assets represented by his share certificates and, figuratively, with the diabolical pelf hoarded in the cavernous bank vaults of the City. Trollope’s scepticism towards commerce – ‘Buying and selling is . . . very necessary, and may, possibly, be very good; but it cannot be the noblest



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work of man; and let us hope that it may not in our time be esteemed the noblest work of an Englishman’ – was strengthened by the financial crisis of 1857–8.13 In August 1857 he began The Struggles of Brown, Jones and Robinson (1861–2).14 The partners represent business stereotypes: Jones, the unscrupulous swell; Brown, the conservative senior partner; Robinson, the reckless innovator. The haberdasher’s shop that they set up in Bishopsgate Street would have seemed familiar to any reader of Boz, with its brash attempt to attract custom with ‘glass, gas, gold, and glare’ (30). What is new is their reliance on advertising, which since the Great Exhibition had become a growth industry, and on the discount market. Trollope’s associative link is between delusive advertising and the virtual reality of paper money; as Robinson the copywriter remarks: ‘Credit I take to be the belief of other people in a thing that doesn’t really exist’ (9). On his advice, Brown’s capital dematerialises into promotional publicity (like the inviting prospectuses with which fraudulent company promoters enticed investors); the goods they order are paid by credit rather than cash. They carry a minimal stock, arranging for the goods requested by customers to be delivered immediately from nearby wholesalers, and go for a high turnover, undercutting their competitors by a low profit margin based on a return on goods sold only ½ per cent higher than the interest they have to pay on the credit which finances the purchase of these goods. Like the financial discount houses which Robinson emulates, which survived only by constantly rolling over credit and had no cash reserves but only money at call, their City discount house relies on goods at call. Robinson’s supply-chain management implies that their establishment is a ‘show-shop’, supplied by sweated outworkers for the slop warehouses in nearby Houndsditch.15 His advertising methods are also dubious. In the elaborate card which announces the opening of the store, ‘in a small note at the bottom it was stated that the stock of hosiery, handkerchiefs, ribbons, and gloves, was sufficient to meet any demand which the metropolis could make upon the firm’ (41). Even in small print this is a tall order. The advertising card is a promissory note: although the firm does not at that moment possess the goods which it undertakes to supply, it can obtain them if the bearer of their card so demands. So far so good. But Robinson runs into difficulties in realising his rash promises: first, having committed the firm’s capital to advertising, he must rely on credit to furnish the goods required for immediate delivery but some suppliers insist on cash payment which he cannot meet; second, he advertises goods which do not exist at all, such as 8,000 African monkey muffs, or cannot be sold at the advertised price without making a loss. He is thus oversold, like a financial trader unable to deliver securities or commodities which he has contracted to deliver on a fixed date, or unable to honour a bill of exchange drawn on his house. It is this which leads to the firm’s prosecution.





They have bought up a job lot of high-quality silk mantles, one of which, ‘which would not have been dearly bought for 3 l. 10 s. or 4 l., was unjudiciously ticketed at 38 s. 11½ d’ (107). This article in the window display (price-ticketed, following the practice of the emergent department stores – for example, in the 1850s the much-advertised Peter Robinson’s) is, however, not intended as a loss-leader.16 Instead, Jones’s ploy is that it will stay in the shopwindow and the customers whom it has lured to the store will be offered, at the same price, inferior goods which purport to be identical. Literally pressed by an irate customer, Jones adamantly refuses to sell the mantle. ‘ “A firm needn’t sell an article unless it pleases,” he argued to the magistrate. “A firm is bound to make good its promises, sir,” replied the gentleman in Worship Street. “And no respectable firm would for a moment hesitate to do so” ’ (112). For Trollope, as for Dickens, the decline of business ethics was evident in the fraudulent use of credit, symptomatic of the virtual reality which increasingly characterised free-floating financial and social exchange in capitalist London. Like Ruskin, whose Unto this Last was published the previous year, Trollope adjudges Robinson’s chrematistic activities as morally wrong because unproductive (adding ‘nothing to the world’s wealth’ (187)) and directed only towards profit in exchange rather than use-value (159, 185–8). The Way We Live Now is likewise both topical in criticising the abuse of credit and timeless in its mistrust of commercial exchange and its association of virtue with rural independence. The aristocrats at the Beargarden club pay their gambling debts with worthless IOUs. Lady Carbury tries to seduce editors into puffing her mediocre books to inflate their commercial value by inducing a false belief in their literary worth (just as unscrupulous promoters launching a public company tried to rig the market in their share issue). Impoverished suitors bidding for Marie Melmotte in the marriage market trade on the strength of an aristocratic title, which commands a high exchange-value in ready money, or seek to hoodwink the father into believing their false professions of solvency and the daughter their false professions of love. The most egregious exploiter of credit is, however, Augustus Melmotte, whose London finance house lead manages the flotation of a company which purports to build a railway from Salt Lake City to Vera Cruz.17 It is implied that no construction work takes place; although, intriguingly, when Melmotte’s financial empire collapses there are nearly sufficient assets to satisfy all his proved liabilities. Any building is, however, incidental to the Railway Board’s plans, which are simply to profit from speculative dealing in the company’s shares, which they promote in a prospectus designed to lure other speculators with its lavish promises.18 No paid-up capital is required; the cash flow is in only one direction: to the leading directors who allocate shares to themselves, paying for them as they sell them. Belief in the company’s creditworthiness is bolstered by the inclusion on the board of two peers, a baronet and an MP and, above all, by the charisma of Melmotte, who has the reputation of being a financial wizard.



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Unlike Dickens’s Merdle, who was overawed by his ‘betters’ and even intimidated by his servants, Melmotte is a forceful bully whose grandiose ambition knows no bounds. He is elected as Conservative MP for Westminster and introduced to the House by Disraeli himself, whom Trollope regarded as a cosmopolitan opportunist, representative of the cynicism to which politics had been reduced by Conservative leaders.19 Melmotte’s aspiration to join the parliamentary club – and to a baronetcy – is motivated by his desire for the outward tokens of acceptance. But it is also (as with Trollope’s other City adventurers who seek election, such as Alaric Tudor, George Vavasor and Ferdinand Lopez) a ploy to use political office as a means to social and economic advancement. No one demurs, because this is the accepted strategy of all Trollope’s party hacks, who treat politics as a self-interested game.20 His downfall comes only because he takes the unnecessary risk of forgery to possess himself of the title deeds to a country house and to half a street of houses near the Commercial Road, the former of which he has ‘paid’ for with a promissory note, the latter with railway shares. Had he paid cash, no awkward questions would have been asked; could he still provide ready money, the criminal charges against him would be dropped. But the rumours of forgery undermine his credit, driving down the value of his railway stock and of his daughter as a marketable commodity. Thus, debarred of a face-saving merger with the aristocracy, and with negligible liquidity, Melmotte cannot stave off the imminent scandal and commits suicide. Trollope exemplifies metropolitan venality in two areas. First, the strategic alliance which Melmotte strikes with the Duchess of Stevenage and her brother, Lord Alfred Grendall, smoothing his grudging acceptance by Society in return for ‘opportune pecuniary assistance’, including the share package that goes with Grendall’s guinea-pig directorship, and nepotistic preferment for his second son. Second, the marital alliances proposed between City financiers and the impoverished aristocracy and gentry. Despite anti-Semitic mistrust of Jewish bankers, the Goldsheiner family draw considerable speculative interest. By contrast, the proposed alliance of Georgiana Longestaffe and Ezekiel Brehgert is rejected. Examining why leads us to the ideological centre of the novel. Society’s refusal to ‘recognise’ Brehgert assumes various forms. With Georgiana’s old friend, Julia Triplex, now Lady Monogram, it is the patronising smugness of the arriviste. Although her wealthy husband, Sir Damask, is the son of a contractor and grandson of a butcher, he is part of the hunting set and his clubbability has ensured his and his wife’s entry to Society. To avoid jeopardising her own position and preserve the exclusiveness of what she has attained, Lady Monogram thus blackballs undesirable would-be entrants, dismissing Brehgert – in a magisterial gesture of dissociation from Sir Damask’s own Smithfield antecedents – as a mere butcher. Georgiana’s father’s opposition is founded on anti-Semitic prejudice and on Brehgert’s incompatibility with the world of elegant refinement which the Longestaffes





believe they represent. Having sacrificed the family fortune to emulative display, Longestaffe’s extravagance and his son’s improvidence reduce him to taking out a loan from and selling property to Melmotte and to begging, at first unsuccessfully, for a directorship in Melmotte’s railway company. Financial exigency drives Georgiana to lodge in Grosvenor Square with the Melmottes, to whom eventually the Longestaffe town house itself has to be let. The final humiliation would be for Georgiana to marry not merely someone from the City, nor even someone of dubious cosmopolitan origins like Melmotte, but ‘An old fat Jew!’ (II, 143). The fatuous ideal which Longestaffe has striven to live up to is unsustainable, not merely because of his debts but also because, like the vacuousness of the aristocrats at the Beargarden, it is devoid of all social purpose (I, 116–17). In this form the aristocracy, or the would-be aristocracy like Longestaffe, is a dying species, Trollope implies. Instead, the future lies with London’s plutocracy. Metropolitan capitalism washes over the estates surrounding Carbury Hall, whose beleaguered owner, the Tory squire Roger Carbury, forms a John Bulwark against this floodtide of luxury and corruption. Unlike their neighbours, including the Longestaffes, no Carbury has ever prospered in a trade or profession or married into new money. Instead, they have held their Suffolk acres since the Wars of the Roses and epitomise the landed gentry as opposed to the urbanised gentry with links to commerce. But, although the Carburys have a locally unrivalled pedigree, their falling rent-rolls are insufficient to maintain the estate, for ‘Land is a luxury, and of all luxuries is the most costly’ (I, 48–9). Nevertheless, Roger refuses to let the Manor House, which would permit him to live luxuriously abroad, and persists doggedly on his own land. His standpoint is a venerable one, looking back to the Aristotelian contrast between ‘economics’ (the management of the oikos or household as a productive unit generating use-value) and ‘chrematistics’ (the dishonest pursuit of unlimited gain through money-mediated exchange). As J.G.A. Pocock has elucidated, within the civic humanist tradition virtue was held to be embodied in and safeguarded by land, possession of which and of the income it generated granted the leisure and the independence required to exercise civic responsibility.21 Following the ‘Financial Revolution’, this classical ideology formed the antithesis to the patronage and corruption associated with the stock market. In this sense, Roger is one of the last spokesmen of what Trollope’s narrator in Doctor Thorne (1858) termed ‘the old feudal and now so-called landed interests’.22 The debates among Tories and Old and New Whigs on this issue are chronologically intricate and sometimes disconcertingly inconsistent.23 For our purposes two aspects are relevant, both involving attitudes to credit. The first concerns nepotism and preferment. The 1690s saw the establishment of a major institution of public credit, the National Debt, underwritten by the newly-founded Bank of England, the East India Company and, from



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1711, by the South Sea Company. Government loans enabled both standing army and bureaucracy to expand. Critics argued that the creation of a National Debt brought into being relations of mutual dependency between holders of government office and holders of government securities. Political patronage was held to be integral to these obligations and indebtednesses; investors expected a return on or in return for their money. As placemen, rentiers or stockjobbers they lived off the state, profiting in one form or another from the National Debt, and advocating its increase at the expense of future generations. In Trollope’s London, government funds have lost this central function; instead financial magnates, such as Melmotte, pull the (purse) strings. Alaric Tudor in The Three Clerks, who stands to profit as a stockjobber from his holding of public office, exemplifies the corruption more traditionally associated with the monied interest. The second aspect is what might be described as the psychology of credit. The landed interest, with its admiration for the relative stability provided by real property, was rooted in the past. The monied interest, which anticipated prospective gains and placed its faith in moveable property, was oriented towards the future. Financial speculation is inevitably founded on volatile opinion about the vagaries of the market. Those who embarked in dealing of this kind (rather than entrepreneurs who, like trade in general, got a better press) were presented in eighteenth-century polemic as having succumbed to the seductions of Credit, a female personification akin in her fickleness to Fortuna. It took an impulsive, nervous sensibility to be attracted to this and the Augustans associated speculation (understandably in the case of the South Sea Bubble) with hysteria. ‘Feminine’ inconstancy, fantasy and appetite were the antithesis to ‘masculine’ virtue. This polarity survives, I suggest, in The Way We Live Now in two forms. First, in the antithesis between Roger’s ‘manly’ steadfastness and the unreliability (and sometimes the ‘effeminacy’) of almost all the male characters who dabble in the financial and marriage markets. Second, in the contrast between Roger’s incorruptibility (a kind of ethical gold standard) and the fluctuating value of the ‘credit’ enjoyed by the other characters, which is founded not on moral principles but established conventionally in social exchange. Like Jane Austen’s model landowners, Roger takes seriously his obligations to his tenantry and respects the traditional pieties of land and his Burkean responsibility in husbanding this as a steward for succeeding generations. He represents Carlylean paternalism as opposed to the ‘nomadic’ society created by laissez-faire capitalism. Constancy of this kind is presented by Trollope as a rural virtue, evident also in the loyalty of John Crumb, the dealer in meal and pollard, whose lover unwisely lends credit to the empty promises of the dissolute Sir Felix Carbury. Those who work on and with the land are men of substance, enjoying a self-sufficient independence from the metropolitan networks of nepotism and mutual obligations. Thus, Roger is one of the few characters in the novel who pays his bills promptly rather





than living on credit; he prides himself (albeit with priggish self-righteousness) on being, in every sense, indebted to no man. As in E.M. Forster’s Howards End and Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, a major theme is ‘Who shall inherit England?’, the country being epitomised by a country house. As the as yet childless head of the Carbury family, Roger has steeled himself to relinquish Carbury Hall to his unworthy second cousin, Sir Felix. His intention could be altered only if he were to have an heir of his own. Because Roger and his protégé Paul Montague both fall in love with the same woman, Hetta Carbury, their rivalry dramatises the succession of the estate. Unlike Roger, Paul allows himself to become involved in the railway project and joins the Beargarden club. He also becomes embroiled with an American, Winifred Hurtle, who in Roger’s view is a mere adventuress. Indeed, he drifts unreflectingly into every important decision he makes and, although he has determined to take a moral stand against the other directors and to break off his engagement to Winifred, he lacks the resolution to extricate himself from these compromising partnerships. Roger is initially harsh in his verdict on Paul: ‘What a life it would be for Henrietta Carbury were she to marry a man striving to become rich without labour and without capital, and who might one day be wealthy and the next a beggar, – a city adventurer, who of all men was to him the vilest and most dishonest?’ (I, 133). His condemnation combines Aristotelian criteria with the scepticism of a Victorian paterfamilias towards a suitor’s financial prospects. The ideological difference between the two men remains unresolved but Roger struggles to overcome his resentment, scrupulously dispelling a false impression that would have led Henrietta to reject Paul. In the end Carbury Hall will pass not to the effete Sir Felix, nor entirely to the morally compromised Paul, but rather to the child of Paul and Henrietta. This pragmatic solution symbolically concedes the necessity of finding a modus vivendi between tradition and innovation. Just as Dolly Longestaffe breaks with his family’s traditional legal adviser, Bideawhile, in favour of the more dynamic and commercially minded Squercum, so the Carbury estate must to some extent adapt to the times. The future will be increasingly determined by London plutocrats; this is, simply but regrettably, the way we live now.24

Bounders The Prime Minister (1875–6) extends Trollope’s perceptions of a London dominated by the monied interest: in the huckstering for patronage that characterises political and social gatherings; in the intermeshing of the financial market and the marriage market; and in the mutual interest groups and overlapping personnel of City adventurers, City boards and Parliamentarians. Its anti-hero, Ferdinand Lopez, fails in his attempt to use politics to



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further his City career but he is received into Society by the ambitious Lady Glencora Palliser. By contrast, Plantagenet Palliser is conscious of the respect due to family tradition and of the responsibilities to the res publica which his privileged station carries with it. His landed wealth liberates him from the petty intrigues surrounding appointments to remunerative office and makes it possible for him to take a principled stand. But his gentlemanly civility is revealed to be outmoded. It is a novel about ‘vulgarity’ (that condescending term by which polite society seeks to dismiss any threat to or aberration from its values) and, in touching a raw nerve of the upper classes, was itself condemned as vulgar. To appreciate why, we need to consider the emotions invested in the idea of the ‘gentleman’, who, it was held, was ‘one whose means enable him to live in easy circumstances without engaging in trade, a man of money and leisure’ (OED). This category had traditionally included clergymen of the Church of England, barristers, army and naval officers, and physicians. Victorian middle-class polemic sought to extend access to gentlemanly status to all professionals by emphasising that the gentleman was characterised by moral qualities rather than hereditary rank. But although by mid-century the self-made man might claim to be recognised as a gentleman by virtue of his moral cultivation, he could pass as such only if he acquired the outward trappings of the gentry. With a carriage, a country residence, membership of a hunt and a St James club, and perhaps sons attending a leading public school, he would look the part and might be admitted to the outer edge of the inner circle. The snobbishness in this pursuit of acceptance constituted a large part of its appeal. For although the middle classes wanted to join the gentlemen’s club, they did not want to open the doors to every Tom, Dick and ’Arry. The attractiveness of gentlemanly status lay in its being within range of aspiration, while nevertheless still retaining the cachet of exclusivity.25 But where, when faced with brazen new money, should one draw the line? Although merchants with large capital were generally recognised as gentlemen, for most of the century those whose money was made in retail trade, manufacture or finance were not. From the 1870s, however, as Chapter 6 indicated, forms of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ evolved. But suspicions and hostilities remained, evidenced by efforts to discriminate the gentleman from the ‘cad’ or ‘bounder’. The latter was ‘A person who by his behaviour places himself outside the pale of well-bred society’ (OED). This complacent definition imputes all agency and responsibility to the bounder himself: it is he who oversteps the mark rather than society which ostracises him. The OED also quotes an 1890 dictionary of slang: ‘A vulgar though well-dressed man; a superior kind of ’Arry; one whose dress and personal appearance are correct, but whose manners are of a questionable character’ (the allusion is to Punch’s Cockney archetype ’Arry). By disguising himself like his betters, the bounder seeks to infiltrate Society, but his manners betray him. Hence, Trollope conceived of Lopez as appearing sufficiently plausible to seduce





influential members of Society into taking him up before finally he reveals his essential vulgarity. This lack of clarity, symptomatic of a period of social and political disorientation in which a moral consensus no longer obtains, is the main theme of The Prime Minister.26 It did not go down well with reviewers. From the late 1850s Trollope’s fiction had enjoyed enormous popularity as, in the words of the Saturday Review, ‘the literature of the moral and respectable middle-class mind’.27 But, with the exception of The Times, which lauded The Way We Live Now as ‘only too faithful a portraiture of the manners and customs of the English at the latter part of this 19th century’, both novels of the mid-1870s got a bad press.28 Meredith Townsend, the editor of The Spectator, criticised Trollope’s ‘disposition to attribute to the majority of mankind an inherent vulgarity of thought’, asserting that, as in Brown, Jones, and Robinson, Trollope had surrounded his characters, as if in a ‘sewagefarm’, ‘with an atmosphere of sordid baseness which prevents enjoyment like an effluvium’.29 Like contemporary art criticism, Townsend’s reviews are characterised by intemperance towards infringements of his class-based code of manners: for example, he describes Melmotte as ‘a mere brute, so little human as to excite less interest than one feels in watching an orangoutang’. Expressing his distaste for the characters’ obsession with money, he remarks fastidiously that ‘the reader is as tired as he would be if he waited too long in a dirty anteroom in a City office’. Rather than concede the validity of Trollope’s ‘London’, Townsend implied that, by conceiving scenes which no gentleman could have written, Trollope had revealed himself as a bounder – or perhaps betrayed the caste by whom (as his Autobiography reveals) he had so much wanted to be accepted. This ad hominem attack ‘specially hurt’ Trollope.30 In impugning Trollope’s discrimination, Townsend felt obliged to correct him on points of his ‘coarsely-conceived’ characterisation: Lopez, the hero, is simply intolerable, not because he is a criminal, for his criminality is not made prominent, but because he is such a ‘cad,’ that it is nearly impossible the heroine should have loved him, and quite impossible that he should ever have been mistaken for a gentleman. In his love-making and his jealousy, his efforts to bully, and his intercourse with his friends, he is always a ‘snob’ of the lowest type, who excites no feeling but loathing of the most contemptuous and irritated kind. As the question of Lopez’s gentlemanly status is so crucial to the novel’s debate about values, it is worth taking a more differentiated view. What is indubitable is that despite his careful attention to his demeanour and the outward signs of gentility – his brougham, his hunters, his perfect dress and grooming – by several conventional criteria Lopez would not have been adjudged to be a gentleman. He has been blackballed at the Travellers



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and the Garrick, has not attended Oxbridge or studied Greats but instead modern languages at a German university. To patricians this would have smacked of vocational training for trade rather than the liberal education of a gentleman, and indeed Lopez has worked at a City stockbroker’s before branching out on his own. (Dickens, himself never fully accepted as a ‘gentleman’, sent two of his sons to Germany to prepare for a business career; German-trained dealers executed much of the foreign securities business on the Stock Exchange in the 1870s.)31 His foreignness is also emphasised by his living before his marriage in a flat in Westminster, and later in a flat in Belgrave Mansions. The ‘purpose-built self-contained flat was a rarity as late as 1880’.32 To Victorians it represented the social and possibly sexual promiscuity they associated with Parisian life and, in Lopez’s case, in keeping with his financial speculations, a pursuit of the fashion of the moment and extravagant living beyond his means. It is therefore not surprising that prejudices arise when Abel Wharton discovers that his prospective son-in-law is engaged in what he, like his sovereign (cf. p. 163), regards as ‘ A sort of gambling’ (I, 29). Although Lopez claims to deal in ‘foreign loans’, like Barings or Rothschilds, he in fact speculates in the futures market in commodities. This brings him into the ambit of Trollope’s other financial adventurers. Like Melmotte who trades in shares with no paid-up capital of a railway that exists only on paper, Lopez uses bills of exchange to buy on credit commodities for which he has no use but which he gambles on selling at a profit before he has to repay the loans which financed the purchase. His final schemes are to become the manager of a Guatemalan mine, which implausibly claims to pay shareholders a 20 per cent return (to conservative Victorians anything above the 3 per cent interest on Consols sounded dodgy) and, like Robinson, to use an enormous advertising budget to market a spirit called Bios, distilled from the bark of the appropriately named ‘Duffer-tree’. The targets of Trollope’s satire are familiar: the financial overreacher, speculating with excessive leverage; dishonest promises and promissory notes; the intoxication of the compulsive speculator and his deluded consumers. But there is a nastier element involved. For the commodity in which Lopez most speculates is guano, then becoming an increasingly important fertiliser. In other words, his castles in the air are built on South American birdshit. Given Lopez’s Portuguese antecedents, there might seem to be an implicit, racist equation between the man and (as in The Three Clerks) the defilement associated with his money-grubbing. Trollope himself was relatively free of the widespread anti-Semitism of the period.33 This grosser version of his (and Carbury’s) favourite adage that a man cannot touch pitch and not be defiled is the closest Trollope comes to the knee-jerk xenophobia of the Whartons. (Nevertheless, the fact that Lopez is made to compare himself to Shylock, apparently because he likes to know that his ‘money is fructifying’ (II, 58), makes him into the stereotypical





usurer of anti-Semitism.) The kind of fantasies which underlie their prejudices were writ large twenty years later in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Like other bestsellers of the late 1890s, such as H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1897), Dracula played on contemporary anxieties about foreign invasion. But it fed also on an atavistic fear of the alien. The Transylvanian count has prepared for his siege of London by mugging up the English language and polite culture, as any bounder might do. But his drawing-room manner is a cover for more nefarious schemes: he has coffins delivered to No. 347 Piccadilly, to Bermondsey and to Mile End New Town. All are symbolic addresses: fashionable London is infiltrated, as if by the parvenu; Bermondsey represents the threat of the ‘residuum’; Mile End New Town adjoins the area of the Jack the Ripper murders and was, like Whitechapel in general, from the 1880s onwards the destination of a large influx of Jewish immigrants. Something of this lurid panic is apparent even in The Prime Minister. Lopez has infected the impressionable Sexty Parker with his speculative mania, transforming him into an incarnation of what Ruskin and Marx had described as the vampirism of capital, so that both are perceived by their wives as ‘a-thirsting for blood’ (II, 62). In less overtly melodramatic form, xenophobic mistrust of miscegenation and the contamination of English blood underlie the Conservative anxieties about ‘breeding’, as a chorus of Tory voices contrasts the clean-cut Saxon paragon, Arthur Fletcher, with his rival Lopez, the supposed ‘swarthy son of Judah’.34 Lopez is the pivotal figure who links the novel’s love plots and ideological debates. Trollope’s disapproval of him is implicit in the favourite plot structure which he recycles: a wayward daughter rejects a worthy but dull suitor in favour of a Byronic scoundrel, only to discover that her father was right and the two men differ as ‘Hyperion to a Satyr’ (I, 124).35 This structure applies not only to the Emily–Fletcher–Lopez triangle but also to Glencora’s infatuation with Lopez, in rebellion against her paternalistic husband. Ideologically, like the City adventurer Paul Montague, Lopez obstructs plans for the conservative transmission of real property. For although, somewhat incongruously, Wharton is a commercial lawyer, whose career was launched by his book ‘on the mortgage of stocks in trade’ (I, 22), his allegiances lie with the landed interest, as he intends his daughter to make a dynastic marriage that will further cement the alliance between the neighbouring estates of the Whartons and the Fletchers. As the representative of the monied interest in both the Wharton and the Palliser plots, Lopez thus serves as a screen onto which a constellation of topical anxieties are projected. Trollope conveys the transition from an obsolescent gentlemanly caste to an emergent plutocratic vulgarity through impressionistic associations. Some of the most interesting involve what is represented by changing constructions of masculinity. Although the narrator asserts that Lopez ‘had not the faintest notion of the feelings of a gentleman’ (II, 168), he can formulate this instinctive reserve only by insisting that Lopez was ‘utterly



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unmanly and even unconscious of the worth of manliness’ (II, 187).36 Trollope’s understanding of ‘manliness’ was essentially the early Victorian ideal of the chivalrous conduct of a Christian gentleman, which in The Prime Minister acquires a recognisably bourgeois emphasis by being extended to include hard work as opposed to the ruthless, self-interested competitiveness and unearned income of financial speculation.37 By the later Victorian period, however, this construction was being supplanted by what had evolved via ‘muscular Christianity’ into a new ideal of tough neo-Spartan virility.38 Lopez’s macho behaviour when, cornered and desperate in the later part of the novel, he is depicted as a bullying ruffian, is Trollope’s melodramatic version of this emergent norm. By contrast, Palliser anachronistically embodies the old-fashioned values in ways that Trollope both admires and deprecates. Both before and after Palliser holds office as Prime Minister, the Whig elder statesman St Bungay declares himself disappointed that Palliser is not ‘more manly’ and less ‘conscientiously scrupulous’ (II, 95; cf. I, 62, II, 343, 362). He is right that Palliser’s indecisiveness, unsociable aloofness and refusal to court allies render him unsuited to the task of leading a coalition government.39 And yet, although Trollope demonstrates the practical shortcomings of Palliser’s position, he also sympathised with his inability to adjust to the values of a political system with which he himself (after his experiences as defeated Liberal candidate in the 1868 election) was becoming increasingly disillusioned. Phineas Finn (1867–9) and Phineas Redux (1873–4) had shown how taking government office required unquestioning adherence to the party whip, leaving no scope for individual conscience. In The Prime Minister the party machine, which places partisan tactics above the national interest, corresponds to the unprincipled expediency that characterises a Society increasingly shaped by capitalism. Lopez, the speculator and would-be MP, straddles both worlds, as, with crass misjudgement, Glencora adopts him as her political protégé. Unlike the Duke, who is unconscious of the male privileges he enjoys, the Duchess’s desire to exercise political power can be realised only in the limited ways that are open to her as a woman. In earlier Palliser novels Trollope shows how Alice Vavasor, Lady Laura Standish, even Glencora herself try to live out their political ambitions vicariously through their husband or male protégé.40 In his elections, his career and his trial Phineas Finn is supported by a female cabal; it therefore seems axiomatic to the Duchess that when her husband is made Prime Minister she should continue such intrigues. To the Duke, politics is disinterested public service; to the Duchess, however, who has no political convictions, it is a power game in which nepotism serves to consolidate one’s own position. In the Pallisers’ involvement in public affairs there is a virtual reversal of gender roles as Glencora displays ‘masculine’ traits shared by Trollope’s other forceful women, notably Mrs Hurtle and Mme Max Goesler. She is presented by the narrator, and





describes herself, as a Lady Macbeth whose ambition is spurred on by her husband’s rise to supreme power, leading her, in frustration at his scruples and self-doubts, to take matters into her own hands (I, 48–52, 96; II, 382–3). In her own eyes she acts as ‘Prime Ministress’ (I, 264–5) and for much of the novel the Duke, who underestimates the value to the country of his ‘faineant’ (sic) ministry, is tormented by jealousy that it is her spectacular entertainments rather than his unspectacular policies which are governing the country. The word ‘Prime Ministress’, which sounds more like a diminutive than a feminine form, is reminiscent of contemporary satire (discussed below) on Bloomerism. The plot structure, which repeats a stock Trollopian pattern, is also chauvinistic: the immature and inexperienced woman tries to carry out male functions or make important decisions, fails miserably and finally returns chastened to the patriarchal fold. The narrative is, however, subtler than this schematic outline and is responsive to the Duchess’s plight amid the constraints placed upon her as a woman both by social conventions and by her husband’s insensitivity to her needs (e.g. I, 169–70). Glencora’s behaviour is in part a reaction against the coercion to which she was subjected in Can You Forgive Her?, when her elders coerced her into an arranged marriage, and against Plantagenet’s paternalistic solicitude and supervision in a marriage that seems emotionally undemonstrative and sexually lifeless.41 She no longer deceives herself about what marriage to so ‘irredeemable a scapegrace’ as Burgo Fitzgerald would have meant (II, 154). But she still regrets the possibility of a different, more exciting life which he once represented for her and perhaps supports Lopez in part because he reminds her of Fitzgerald.42 A few years earlier Finn had won two parliamentary seats through the patronage of the Earl of Tulla and Lord Brentford; Palliser had engineered John Grey’s election at Silverbridge, just as in The Duke’s Children he will that of his heir, Lord Silverbridge. The Duchess had assumed she could do the same for Lopez, unaware of the Duke’s double standards in his confusingly intermittent stand against electoral corruption. The characters’ personal and ideological conflicts are focused by the buildings in the novel. I mentioned earlier the connotations of Lopez’s flat. Its antithesis is the unpretentious solidity of Wharton’s Georgian townhouse in Manchester Square, into which the Lopezes’ impecuniousness forces them to move. This Ruskinian temple of the hearth is violated when in Wharton’s absence Lopez invites a disreputable crowd to dinner, and goes over the heads of Wharton’s own domestic staff by employing expensive outside caterers. (It is characteristic of the muddled indignation of the Whartons and perhaps of Trollope himself that it is unclear whether this is most unpardonable as an insult to long-standing employees, as an infringement of traditional ideas of hospitality, or as flouting the principles of economical housekeeping.) The guests include Mrs Leslie and Lady Eustace, ‘within the pale, but having a piquant relish of fastness and impropriety’ (II, 72–3). Emily Wharton knows that her father disapproves of these



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adventuresses and feels that their undesirable presence would be a ‘sacrilege’ and a ‘sin’ (II, 70). The situation recalls Austen’s Mansfield Park where, in Sir Thomas Bertram’s absence, the unprincipled Crawfords and Mr Yates from the London world of ‘fashion and expense’ plan to perform a play that flouts all conventions of propriety. Trollope’s version of this clash between licentiousness and puritan rectitude is scaled down to bourgeois proportions and becomes unintentionally bathetic when later on Lopez lights a cigar, despite sitting in the drawing-room, and Emily reflects: ‘This was a profanation of the room on which even he had never ventured before’ (II, 186). But although Emily may confuse ill-breeding with immorality, Trollope surely expects the reader to see a parallel between Lopez’s disrespect for Wharton’s lares and penates and what Plantagenet sees as Glencora’s desecration of the family townhouse and estate. The Pallisers live in Carlton Terrace, i.e. Carlton House Terrace where, as Trollope began The Prime Minister, Gladstone was in residence. As a political hostess, Glencora holds an ‘archducal’ dinner-party every week and, amid a profusion of hothouse flowers, an ‘almost imperial’ reception with banquet twice a week (I, 93). (The parallel with Lopez’s wining and dining those who might be useful to him is underlined by the fact that Glencora later invites to Gatherum the objectionable Major Pountney, one of Lopez’s vulgar dinner guests at Wharton’s.) Her entertainments spurn Gladstonian restraint, looking back instead to the extravagant displays organised for the Prince Regent in his opulently refurbished but since demolished Carlton House. To a sceptical eye the lavish ‘Elysium of rhododendrons’ and ‘Paradise of mirrors’, so reminiscent of a Merdle or a Melmotte, suggest that Palliser is relying on bread and circuses to rule the country (I, 100). He reluctantly acquiesces in the spectacle but it is implied that there is a sybaritic degeneration, a plutocratic excess out of keeping with aristocratic dignity and inappropriate to Palliser’s vocational sense of duty as a conscientious civil servant. And in fact the description of Glencora’s entertainments echoes almost word for word that of Mme Merlotte’s ball in Grosvenor Square.43 This clash of values becomes even more glaring at the family seat, Gatherum. Its vast grandeur jars with the Duke’s utilitarian sobriety and redefinition of his aristocratic role in keeping with the domestication of the monarchy and new moral earnestness effected by Victoria and Albert. But despite his Liberal views, he is sufficiently blue-blooded to feel a pride in and reverence for his station, to which respect is due. He is thus utterly bewildered by the alterations which the Duchess has ordered. A new conservatory has been erected for tropical plants, as any parvenu might have done (hothouse flowers would prominently adorn the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877), together with an archery ground. (In The Spoils of Poynton the Philistine Mona Brigstock envisages tacking on a ‘winter garden’ to Poynton.) The exotic flowers are an alien intrusion amid the native growths of the landscaped park and suggest a lush decadence: they later proliferated in the





cult of artificiality at the fin de siècle, as in Theodore Wratislaw’s collection, Orchids (1896), including the poem ‘Hothouse Flowers’. Archery was the fashionable sport of the 1870s; that it had attained upper-class respectability but still had ‘snobbish’ connotations is indicated by the Archery Meeting at Brackenshaw Park in Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876). What offends the Duke’s sensibility is less the conspicuous consumption in all of this than ‘an assumed and preposterous grandeur that was as much within the reach of some rich swindler or of some prosperous haberdasher as of himself, – having, too, a look of raw newness about it’ (I, 175). To the Duke, the remodelled Gatherum seems indistinguishable from any country house built by new money, like Loughlinter, financed by profits from Glasgow business: ‘Loughlinter was all of cut stone, but the stones had been cut only yesterday’, ‘ “the young trees show the new man. A new man may buy a forest; but he can’t get park trees” ’ (PF, 156–7). Moreover, in the Duke’s view, only an arriviste would think of using an ancestral home for what we would now call ‘networking’. Ironically, of course, like most country seats from the Renaissance onwards, Gatherum itself was ‘built altogether for show’ (I, 173) and, as other Trollope novels reveal, not that long ago either. The Duke’s distorted view of aristocratic tradition is founded on his temperamental distaste for and ineptitude at power politics and perhaps also on his revulsion against the parasitic existence of his predecessor as Duke of Omnium, the idle debauchee who with old money built the ‘immense pile’ of Gatherum.44 The differences between the Duke and Duchess find partial resolution in The Duke’s Children (1879–80), which concludes the Palliser series. 45 The initially intolerable idea that the future Duke of Omnium might marry an American is one to which Plantagenet finally assents. It is a less radical step than he had anticipated, in that Miss Boncassen (unlike James’s American heroines of 1878–9) adheres strictly to European proprieties and, no republican, assimilates herself to the values of the Whig aristocracy.46 Furthermore, Miss Boncassen – although the granddaughter of a Dutch labourer who became a New York property tycoon – is American ‘aristocracy’: her father, a wealthy man of letters, is being canvassed as the next President. It is a matter of timing as well as of character: in real life Silverbridge’s marriage had been preceded in 1874 by that of Lord Randolph Churchill to Jenny Jerome and cross-Atlantic alliances would become common in the 1880s. Trollope’s depiction of the accommodations and concessions appropriate to London Society concludes therefore with a transfusion of new blood which nevertheless preserves standards of breeding.

Marital prostitution The mergers taking place in London between the landed aristocracy and gentry and the City were the result of financial exigency. Financial exigency



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also drove middle-class women into sleeping partnerships. Denied remunerative work, they were raised for the maternal vocation for which, it was reiterated, they were fitted by virtue of woman’s self-sacrificing nature. The moral superiority which they were accorded in this role was the payoff for their degrading dependency on the protection of their husband, into whom, under common law, they were wholly absorbed. As John Stuart Mill remarked in The Subjection of Women (1869; written in 1861): we are perpetually told that women are better than men, by those who are totally opposed to treating them as if they were as good; so that the saying has passed into a piece of tiresome cant, intended to put a complementary [sic] face upon an injury . . . I believe that equality of rights would abate the exaggerated self-abnegation which is the present artificial ideal of feminine character.47 From the 1850s, however, these assumptions, and the laws that sustained them, were increasingly under attack. The Way We Live Now cannot be understood without reference to this debate about women’s access to property and women as men’s property. As early as 1851, when Punch began to satirise Bloomerism, female crossdressing was perceived as undermining traditional constructions of femininity. A large illustration ridicules be-bloomered Guardswomen, policewomen, female omnibus conductors, jockeys, students and dons. A male servant scrubs the front steps, while the housemaid looks on.48 Dickens’s patronising attack on Bloomerism, ‘Sucking Pigs’ (8 November 1851), likewise mocks the notion of a woman relinquishing proper feminine ‘influence’ and abandoning her duties in the domestic ‘haven of refuge’ to ‘go in to be a public character’ as ‘a Member of Parliament, a Parochial Guardian, a High Sheriff, a Grand Juror’.49 The levity continues in Punch’s Almanack for 1853, which adds a bloomered barrister to the collection of supposed grotesques, with a cartoon showing the ‘Father of the Family’ together with the ‘Mistress of the House and M.P.’. The latter resembles the slovenly household manager, Mrs Jellyby, in Bleak House (1852–3), where Dickens also tried to raise a cheap laugh at the desire for female emancipation: Miss Wisk opines ‘that the idea of woman’s mission lying chiefly in the narrow sphere of Home was an outrageous slander on the part of her Tyrant, Man’.50 (The reference is to Sarah Lewis’s bestseller, Woman’s Mission, discussed below.) Mill complained: ‘It is done too in the very vulgarest way, just the style in which vulgar men used to ridicule “learned ladies” as neglecting their children and household.’51 Although these satirical interventions imply that such developments would be self-evidently absurd, some men do appear to have felt threatened, manifesting their anxieties through reaction formation. Thus, ‘the Moustache Movement’, a craze for palpably manly beards and moustaches, sprouted up





in 1854. This revived fashion appears to have spread from army officers bound for the Crimea, who in a cold clime had need of extra facial hair.52 But it was adopted by others who felt the wind of change, and Punch volumes from 1854 onwards are full of jokes about swells or snobleys sporting stubble that purports to be the full beard of a Crimean officer. And indeed the wars of the mid-1850s seem to have been a testing time when men were expected to prove their manhood. Anticipating the jingoism of 1878, a pair of Punch cartoons at the height of the Indian Mutiny attempt to sort out who are the real men. In ‘Who will serve the country?’ a recruiting sergeant throws down the gauntlet to two men-milliners: ‘Now, brave boys, with those whiskers and shoulders you should be with us, and – I’m sure the ladies would excuse you!’ Meanwhile outside the store, in ‘We’ll Serve the Shop’, women march under (Barbara Bodichon’s) banner ‘Women for Women’s Work’, led by an ‘officer’ in bloomers. If the effeminacy of such ladies’ men were replaced by decent manliness, it is implied, then women also would return to their proper sphere.53 The prevailing misogynistic stereotype was, accordingly, the woman in man’s clothing. Another was the woman as domina. A cartoon, ‘HusbandTaming’, from Punch’s Almanack for 1859 depicts a woman in riding habit with riding crop showing an appreciative female audience a fully domesticated male, who, complete with apron, is about to bath the baby. A poster at the rear of the enclosure advertises the coming attraction: ‘A Perfectly Unbroken Husband next Wednesday’. The allusion is to the contemporary slang term ‘pretty horse-breaker’, which denoted high-class courtesans such as ‘Skittles’ (Catherine Walters) who rode at the fashionable hour in Rotten Row.54 In The Way We Live Now it is, by contrast, a female shrew, Ruby Ruggles, who is tamed, while the forceful Winifred Hurtle, who contemplates horse-whipping her wimpish lover, Paul, is firmly reined in by the narrator. Contemporary anxieties that women might come to hold the whip-hand were manifest also in reviews of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd (1862–3). Condemnation focused not on the heroine’s crime of bigamy but on the controversial scene in which she horsewhips a groom, which one critic insisted was ‘wholly untrue to [women’s] nature’ and proved the heroine to be ‘wanting in the traits which constitute a true woman’.55 The contradiction between what was proclaimed to be woman’s ‘natural’ submissiveness and the need nevertheless to enforce this through regulation emerged in several areas in the 1850s. Sexuality was one. Dr William Acton’s notorious assertions in The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (1857) that: ‘the majority of women (happily for society) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind’ cannot be taken as representative of Victorian sexual practice.56 Instead, what he tendentiously ascribes to female ‘nature’ should be seen as responding to the alarmist reports of female promiscuity which followed the 1857 Divorce Act, and as an attempt to reassure his bachelor patients who (avoiding marriage because they



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dreaded that a wife would be as sexually demanding as a mistress) revealed to him the private fears of impotence that lurked behind the public institutions which safeguarded male power. Just as male experience with prostitutes suggested that ungoverned women do not ‘naturally’ lack sexual or materialistic desire, so the spinster or the working woman implied that women are not ‘naturally’ domestic creatures, unless constrained to be so. That it was not ‘nature’ but financial dependency which determined women’s destiny was a bitter truth that it became ever more difficult to suppress. Although prescriptive works such as Sarah Lewis’s bestselling Woman’s Mission (1839) extolled the sublimity of the moral ‘influence’ mothers exercised by exemplifying Christian ‘selfrenunciation’, even Lewis herself conceded that if a political career were open to women, the most gifted would take this up and ‘the duties hitherto considered peculiar to the sex would sink to a still lower position in public estimation than they now hold’.57 As Marion Reid pointed out in A Plea for Woman (1843), the proselytising fervour with which woman’s self-denying love was promoted, together with the legal restraints and educational disabilities to which women were subjected, betrayed the fear that, given the chance of financial independence, women would not necessarily choose the life that their ‘nature’ supposedly dictated.58 Confirming her suspicions, in 1859 a bullying misogynist pulled no punches: ‘Men do not like, and would not seek, to mate with an independent factor, who at any time could quit – or who at all times would be tempted to neglect – the tedious duties of training and bringing up children, and keeping the tradesmen’s bills, and mending the linen, for the more lucrative returns of the desk or counter.’59 It was women’s lack of access to their own money which ensured that the gilded cage of middle-class marriage remained locked. Coercion into this respectable form of prostitution would cease if women had the right to their own earnings and their own property, as Barbara Bodichon (extending a polemic initiated in the 1790s by Priscilla Wakefield and Mary Ann Radcliffe) argued in Women and Work (1857): idiots and imbeciles must be fed all their lives; but rational beings ask nothing from their parents save the means of gaining their own livelihood. Fathers have no right to cast the burden of the support of their daughters on other men. It lowers the dignity of women; and tends to prostitution, whether legal or in the streets. . . . We do not mean to say work will take the place of love in life; that is impossible; does it with men? But we ardently desire that women should not make love their profession.60 George Drysdale’s observation was similar: ‘we see matches every day in which a young girl marries an old man, or where the fear of remaining an old maid, or the wish to obtain the social advantages and protection of marriage, is the real motive which influences the woman. Such marriages





are in reality cases of legalised prostitution, and are utterly alien to the true spirit of love. It is not woman herself but her unfortunate social position, that is to be blamed for them.’61 In ‘What Shall We Do with Our Old Maids?’, Frances Power Cobbe also advocated increased provision for female employment, so that marriages would be founded on free choice and love, rather than ‘interest’.62 This controversy had been unleashed by the census of 1851 – the year of Punch’s opening salvos against Bloomerism – which revealed that 42 per cent of women aged between twenty and forty were unmarried and a third of women were self-supporting.63 (The ‘problem’ was exaggerated. Of females aged between 35 and 45, 76.2 per cent were married and 8.2 per cent widowed; of those aged 15, 85.9 per cent could expect to have been married at least once by the age of 50.)64 A demographic imbalance meant that, although middle-class women were brought up to marry, there were not enough men to go round, creating what was misperceived as an unprecedented problem of ‘redundant women’, although since 1600 up to 20 per cent of European women had remained permanently single. In response, the ‘ladies of Langham Place’, led by Bodichon and Bessie Parkes, founded in 1859 the Society for the Promotion of the Employment of Women, inaugurating a series of initiatives to expand lower-middle-class women’s access to the job market.65 Predictably, this aroused patriarchal consternation, influentially expressed by W.R. Greg, who feared that, by offering a viable alternative, such initiatives would undermine the institution of marriage, women’s ‘most honourable function and especial calling’.66 His article veers between condescending pontification on what is ‘appropriate’ for women (wives and mothers ‘completing, sweetening, and embellishing the existence of others’, female servants fulfilling ‘both essentials of woman’s being; they are supported by, and they minister to, men’) and attempts to enforce such conduct by blandishments or bluster. His assumed superiority (that of ‘the hardier sex’) sits uneasily with the fear of competition if women encroach on professions ‘hitherto set apart for that [male] sex alone’. Equally inconsistent with his statement that unmarried women would have to ‘carve out artificial and painfully-sought occupations’ is his jealous anxiety that working spinsters would have such ‘a pleasant, ornamented, comfortable path’ that they would take the soft option of man’s work rather than woman’s ‘natural duties and labours’.67 His proposed laissez-faire solution to obviate middle-class female employment was to export half a million ‘redundant’ women to the colonies, thus reducing the domestic imbalance of supply and demand in this commodity. This would result in an increase not only in wage rates but also in the fees commanded by prostitutes so that, unable to afford their higher going rate, middle-class men would be forced to choose ‘between marriage and a life of real and not nominal celibacy’ and would regard marital sex as the better bargain. A causal link between the perceived middle-class trend towards



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delayed marriages and male resort to prostitutes or concubinage had earlier been asserted by Acton.68 Although Greg’s cynical selfishness is repellent, his characterisation of marriage as ‘the recognised mode’ by which men ‘purchase’ ‘all that woman can bestow’ would have been accepted as brutally honest not merely by campaigners for women’s rights but also by the matrons who presided over their daughters’ ‘coming out’. Prior to her marriage a father could sue the seducer of his daughter for monetary compensation; with the loss of her chastity, her market value had been reduced and hence her father’s benefit or profit from her services.69 The husband of an adulteress could sue the male co-respondent for damages against his property in his wife.70 Rape was not recognised within marriage; prior to 1891 a writ for restitution of conjugal rights entitled a husband to detain a wife against her will.71 In effect, a woman was an object possessed by various men, her change of name on marriage merely altering the title deed. The classic statement of a wife’s legal status was that of Sir William Blackstone: By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection and cover, she performs every thing; and is therefore called in our law-french a feme-covert, fœmina viro co-operta; is said to be covert-baron, or under the protection and influence of her husband, her baron, or lord; and her condition during her marriage is called her coverture.72 Under common law, unlike a single woman or ‘feme sole’, a ‘feme covert’ could not bring independent actions in court or sign contracts unless her husband was cosignatory; she could not act as an agent for another person, or as a trustee, or execute or administer a will, or even make a valid will herself without her husband’s consent. On marriage the wife’s personal property passed to her husband; regardless of whether she continued to live with him, all her earnings and any legacies she might inherit were his. He was given control of her freehold land and drew the income from her leaseholds.73 The guiding principle was that, like lunatics or minors, the married woman could not be held responsible for her actions, including any crimes she might commit in her husband’s presence. The small benefits this gave her (e.g. any debts for ‘necessaries’ contracted before and during her marriage became her husband’s liability) were outweighed by the constraints placed on her autonomy. Understandably therefore, the upper and upper-middle classes took the expensive opportunity of circumventing common law by using the law of equity to draw up a marriage settlement. This created a trust, enabling property to be set apart for the wife’s sole and separate use.





This was sometimes further protected against a husband’s duress by ‘restraint against anticipation’, which gave the wife access to the interest on her capital, but prohibited her from alienating or mortgaging the capital itself. The wife’s jointure (the pension she would receive as a widow) ‘often bore a precise relation, depending on the “market” in brides and current rate of interest, to her dowry or inheritance’.74 To the extent of the property settled on her, equity provisions gave a wife a control similar to that enjoyed by a feme sole over her property; it was estimated in the 1850s that about 10 per cent of wives had this ‘privilege’. The iniquities of common law were removed only gradually. The Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 granted a deserted wife the same rights to her property as a feme sole. The Married Women’s Property Act 1870 allowed a wife to retain any earnings and specific kinds of inheritance acquired since marriage; this did not, however, apply retrospectively to the period before the new law came into force. The Married Women’s Property Act 1882 restored to her the property she had owned at the time of marriage and removed restrictions on the amount of separate property to which she was entitled. But, rather than giving a married woman the same rights as a feme sole, by retaining the device of ‘restraint against anticipation’ the Act simply extended to all married women the paternalistic protection previously secured by marriage settlements under equity. A more progressive feature of the 1882 Act, however, was its empowering the married woman with most forms of legal agency and responsibility hitherto withheld from her.75 Amid the legislative intricacies it is easy to lose sight of the fundamental principles that were at stake. Paternalistic coverture was a protection rendered necessary by the married woman’s legal and financial dependency, as the male anxieties expressed in common law made certain that woman was indeed the weaker vessel. The husband’s appropriation of the wife’s resources was rationalised by the argument that the couple shared ‘common interests’ and sanctified by the selflessness ascribed to female nature. The romantic ideology of marriage for love that was gaining ground in the nineteenth century cast a sentimental veil over the sordid reality of what Frances Power Cobbe ironically termed ‘the beautiful ideal of absolute union of heart, life, and purse’.76 Cobbe had no illusions about the male self-interest that conventional euphemisms sought to disguise. Is not the prevailing ideal of wedlock, she asked: ‘that a woman’s whole life and being, her soul, body, time, property, thought, and care, ought to be given to her husband . . . and that when she is thus absorbed even a very mediocre character and inferior intellect can make a man happy in a sense no splendour of endowments can otherwise do?’ How many Victorian husbands, one wonders, sought a partner who would realise this little boy’s vision of the Good Mother? But of course, as Cobbe points out, the restraints placed on wives could be self-defeating: ‘Is perfect love to be called out by perfect dependence? Does an empty purse necessarily imply a full heart? Is a generous-natured



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woman likely to be won or rather to be alienated and galled by being made to feel she has no choice but submission?’ There is ample evidence that the result of this attempted subordination was a marital war of attrition. The traditional view (going back at least as far as Rousseau) was that women had no need for direct institutional ‘power’ because they exercised indirect ‘influence’ through men who had power. Open rebellion against their husbands was impractical; instead, women oppressed by their inequality within a patriarchal marriage were tempted to safeguard their interests by duplicity or by judicious but meretricious use of feminine charms. As Mary Wollstonecraft trenchantly asserted, the ‘artificial weakness’ cultivated in women because found attractive by men, ‘produces a propensity to tyrannize, and gives birth to cunning, the natural opponent of strength, which leads them to play off those contemptible infantine airs that undermine esteem even whilst they excite desire’.77 It was a system that robbed women of their self-respect and led to a male disrespect for women, however dissimulated as ‘chivalry’, that ‘condescension which expresses itself in certain rules of behaviour where non-essentials are involved’.78 Mill perhaps overstated the case when, in a commonplace of contemporary polemic, he equated coverture with slavery. But he was right to emphasise that the wife’s abject dependency inhibited genuine intimacy: Even with true affection . . . the position of looking up to another is extremely unpropitious to complete sincerity and openness with him. . . . How much more true, then, must all this be, when the one is not only under the authority of the other, but has it inculcated on her as a duty to reckon everything else subordinate to his comfort and pleasure, and to let him neither see nor feel anything coming from her, except what is agreeable to him.79 Little ingenuity is required to imagine the forms of collusion that took place between the stalwart paterfamilias, whose boyish insecurities were dissembled behind his legal and financial authority, and the angel of the house, whose loving martyrdom to her family absolved her from any suspicion of selfish intent and who compensated for her helplessness by inveigling manipulation or emotional blackmail. Ironically, the patriarchal discrimination intended to protect men against the assertive, castrating female of their fantasies succeeded only in provoking what it was intended to forestall.

Protection or self-protection It is a very dismal truth that the only hope of most women, at the present moment, for a life worth the living, lies in marriage, and marriage with rich men or men likely to become so, and that in their unhappy weakness they often betray an ungraceful anxiety on this point.80





Although Trollope described The Way We Live Now as being about ‘dishonesty’, I would argue that its main concern is with property in various forms: real property and moveable property; women as the carriers of property; men’s proprietary interest in women.81 Whereas Byron, like many aristocrats, anticipated his legacy by borrowing through ‘post-obit’ bonds, Sir Felix Carbury takes out credit on the security of the dowry expected from his future bride, something which the Nidderdale family also banks on, so that the solvency of both families depends on the indolent male heir’s winning ‘the great Marie-Melmotte plate’ (I, 87). Within this system money, and the independence it confers, always rests with men. The women involved are abused in two ways: those with a dowry, such as Marie, are reduced to vehicles in which the transfer of property from one man to another is effected; those without a dowry, such as Hetta or Georgiana, are under pressure to recoup the family losses but also to safeguard themselves financially. (Their predicament resembles that of Mabel Grex, whose dissolute father Earl Grex has dissipated the family fortune, and of Lady Laura Standish, whose brother’s gambling debts are paid out of her prospective marriage settlement.)82 The impecunious male with a title is in a stronger position than the female with a small portion whose only capital is her physical attractions. Unlike Marie, Georgiana has no financial bait to dangle and feels that she is working against the body clock. Having been unsuccessful in twelve previous seasons, at the age of 29 she fears, with some justification, that she will be perceived as ‘on the shelf’ (I, 304, 204). Seventeen was the usual age of ‘coming out’ and conventionally only two or at most three seasons were allowed to secure a husband. Marriage manuals regarded 20–25 for women and 23–28 for men as the ideal age for marriage. In 1872 the actual mean was somewhat higher: 25.7 years for women and 27.9 years for men.83 Her predicament is thus an unenviable one. Having gradually lowered her marital ambitions from wealth and a coronet to a leading fashionable lawyer, she has not bargained with Brehgert’s proposal, where she also fixes ‘her price a little too high’ (II, 94). Aside from her anti-Semitic prejudices, the disparity in age between Georgiana and her middle-aged suitor, whose physical unattractiveness is emphasised by the narrator, causes reservations on her part. These are, however, less decisive than her emotional immaturity. A frequent charge at the time was that the outlay deemed necessary to establish a bourgeois household inhibited marriage.84 Bachelors were reluctant to compromise on their comforts, venal spinsters held out for an offer from the highest bidder. In W.R. Greg’s view: As soon as the ideas of both sexes in the middle and upper ranks, on the question of the income and the articles which refinement and elegance require, are rectified, – as soon, that is, as these exigencies are reduced from what is purely factitious to what is indisputably real, – thousands



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He might have been referring to Georgiana’s spoilt reaction to Brehgert’s news that for the immediate future they must content themselves with a villa in Fulham rather than a townhouse as well. Brehgert confronts her with other truths that also clash with her precariously maintained illusions. Because she is nervous of her advancing age, she sees only indelicacy and vulgarity when Brehgert, attributing to her a maturity of judgement, addresses her presumed sense of responsibility as a prospective stepmother (II, 270–3). Unfortunately, he merely wounds her narcissism. Her insecurities also lead her to misconstrue his honesty about his circumstances and his affection as ‘the total absence of romance’ in his letter. It is more comfortable to criticise Brehgert’s lack of ardour than to face up to the even more unpleasant reality that not only does she herself not love him but, in the marital prostitution she envisages, is contemplating using him as a means to sustain her materialistic pretensions. Her aspirations resemble those in Eliza Lynn Linton’s overdrawn caricature of ‘The Girl of the Period’: ‘She has married his house, his carriage, his balance at the banker’s, his title; and he himself is just the inevitable condition clogging the wheel of her fortune; at best an adjunct, to be tolerated with more or less patience as may chance. For it is only the old-fashioned sort, not Girls of the Period pur sang, who marry for love, or put the husband before the banker.’86 In her determination to marry only for love, Hetta stands out against the prevailing materialism. It is this integrity which attracts Roger to her; her unspoilt innocence resembles that of the self-abnegating helpmeet idealised in prescriptive works such as Lewis’s Woman’s Mission. As Lady Carbury’s and Paul’s ‘mentor’, Roger naturally assumes that he can extend his paternalism to a feme sole whose family circumstances render her in need of coverture. But although not outspoken like Marie or Winifred, Hetta turns out to be an unexpectedly strong personality who is able to resist the moral blackmail of Roger (who declares he cannot live without her) and of her mother (who upbraids her with her selfishness in not alleviating their financial burden) in their attempts to pressurise her into marriage. In her refusal of the self-sacrifice expected from women (II, 14–15), she displays an independence evident also in her courageous confrontation with her rival, the formidable Winifred. Although he claims to love Hetta, Roger finds it difficult to accept her right to autonomy, subordinating her needs and happiness to his own rivalry with Paul. She is reduced to the object of their quarrel; Roger’s repeated charge that Paul has ‘stolen’ Hetta from him emphasises that the point at issue is the male proprietary claims upheld by patriarchal legislation. His frustrated desire to possess her physically emerges in his grotesque



who now condemn themselves and those they love to single life will find that they can marry without foregoing any luxury or comfort which is essential to ladylike and cultivated and enjoyable existence.85


fantasies about Hetta’s future child. At first, before his resentment towards Paul has abated, Roger’s sexual jealousy takes the form of ‘ideas of perpetuating his name in the person of some child of Hetta’s, – but with the distinct understanding that he and the child’s father should never see each other’ (II, 202). Paul would be reduced to a surrogate father; Roger would stake his own claim to paternity by giving the baby his patronymic and ensuring the ‘patrilinear’ transmission of the Carbury estate. Later, as he realises that he cannot hope to exclude Paul entirely, this is modified to: ‘Hetta’s child must take the name of Carbury, and must be to him as his heir, – as near as possible his own child’ (II, 404). That this is not merely an avuncular interest but instead a sexual fantasy is clear in a later passage when, embracing her, he declares, ‘As you will not be my wife, you shall be my daughter’: ‘I will hurry to grow old that I may feel for you as the old feel for the young. And if you have a child, Hetta, he must be my child’ (II, 407). One illegitimate desire is substituted for another: in the fatherly role intended to lend the sanction of respectability, Roger’s gestures and words smack unpleasantly of incest. Like John Jarndyce in Bleak House, Roger loses his sweetheart to a younger man and, like Jarndyce, attempts to sublimate his sexual frustration by transforming the role of declared lover into that of seigneurial guardian. His repeated insistence, at the age of forty, that ‘You will soon come to find that I am very old’ (II, 471) perhaps expresses his feeling that life for him is now over, but also suggests a feeble self-pity. It is a symbolic castration, by which he seeks to convey or perhaps to convince himself of his sexual innocuousness. Trollope intends us, I think, to admire Roger’s stoic resignation and the pathos of his inner struggle to acquiesce in his loss and to master his anger and his grief. His heroic path of ascetic withdrawal is, however, accompanied by tacit reproach against those whom he holds responsible for his decline. Having failed in his ‘male’ strategies to control Hetta, as she displays a ‘masculine’ resilience, the paternalistic guardian’s assertiveness turns into an impotent submissiveness and he adopts the ‘female’ strategy of attempting to induce feelings of guilt by his sacrificial displays. Throughout The Way We Live Now the greatest authorial disapproval is directed at the strongest female characters. Both – the cosmopolitan Marie and the American Winifred – are foreign. Marie’s position as an outsider is exacerbated by her illegitimacy and by the opprobrium attached to her father’s obscure origins, shady past and nefarious dealings. We first meet her as impressionable twenty-year-old, young for her age and regarded as malleable by all the men around her. Floated on the marriage market by her father, she is compelled to undergo the less than half-hearted attentions of indigent aristocrats until, thoroughly alienated by this phantasmagoria, she succumbs like Ruby Ruggles to the hollow and perfunctory blandishments of Sir Felix. It is a turning point, when she seizes the initiative in her life. Believing naively that Felix loves her, she courageously masterminds their elopement. After he fails to show up, she is gradually and painfully disabused of her



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ill-placed affections. It is finally clear to her that each of her suitors ‘had treated the girl as an encumbrance he was to undertake, – at a very great price’ (I, 33). Accustomed to her commodification and inured to her father’s alternating rages and neglect, she is emotionally detached, numbed into indifference and professes no longer to care what happens to her. (In this she resembles Lucinda Roanoke in The Eustace Diamonds, who is pressurised into marriage by her aunt and her aunt’s lover, who may possibly be her father, until she suffers a breakdown brought on by revulsion at her anticipated union with a man whose only emotional bond with her has been their sadomasochistic collusion.) Nevertheless, with an innate survival instinct, Marie takes her father’s fortune into her own hands and finds her way to California, where ‘a married woman has greater power over her own money than in England’ (II, 453–4). United at the end of the novel with the equally enterprising railway tycoon Fisker, but in control of her property, she has, one feels, fallen on her feet. Trollope suggests that Marie acted wrongly in appropriating the getaway money which Melmotte had lodged in her name to safeguard it from creditors (II, 256). Her ownership had been intended as a legal fiction and Melmotte cannot believe that Marie will not honour the spirit of his duplicity by signing possession over to him. In this respect too, Melmotte had assumed that he could use his daughter ‘as a chattel for his own advantage’ (II, 256), treating her as merely the repository of property, as when he arranged for her to be ‘trafficked for’ on ‘the matrimonial market’ (I, 107). Although he has never shown her the love she so desperately misses, her open rebellion is an affront to expectations of filial loyalty and of the ‘duty’ which, particularly in the case of a woman, should conventionally outweigh self-interest (II, 337). Melmotte is devastated by an ironic reversal of the usual situation whereby the male trustee of a fund set up as part of a marriage settlement could raise money upon this property. Instead, he has effectively placed his own money in a fund over which Marie has trustee’s powers and is legally as helpless as any woman in this situation. Dear reader, please transpose the gender of the persons in the following quotation: ‘But of course, my dear,’ continued Melmotte, ‘I had no idea of putting the money beyond my own reach. Such a transaction is very common; and in such cases a man naturally uses the name of some one who is very near and dear to him, and in whom he is sure that he can put full confidence. . . . It was for these reasons, which I am sure that you will understand, that I chose you. Of course the property remained exclusively my own.’ ‘But it is really mine,’ said Marie. ‘No, miss; it was never yours,’ said Melmotte, almost bursting out into anger, but restraining himself. ‘How could it become yours, Marie? Did I ever make you a gift of it?’




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Adhering to the letter of a law which Melmotte sought to manipulate, Marie’s self-possession enables her to exercise a kind of ‘restraint against anticipation’ over her father. Her financial astuteness is matched by that of the equally disrespectable Winifred. One way of understanding Winifred is to compare her with Lady Carbury. Both have endured the kind of marital oppression that had received scandalous publicity in the Queen Caroline affair and notoriety in the case of Caroline Norton. Where they differ is in how they respond to this: Lady Carbury, like Norton, appeals to the ‘protection’ ostensibly accorded to the weaker sex under coverture; rather than relying on paternalistic support, Winifred opts for self-protection and takes the law into her own hands. Norton’s brutal husband had falsely accused her of ‘criminal conversation’ with Lord Melbourne. Having failed to divorce her on these grounds, he took sole custody of their children and of her earnings, as the law entitled him to do. The controversy aroused by Norton’s A Letter to the Queen (1855) precipitated the reform by which deserted wives were granted access to their property in the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857.87 For my purposes what is significant is that her plea for justice, whether sincerely or tactically, was couched as an appeal to patriarchal responsibility rather than an ‘absurd claim of equality’: The natural position of woman is inferiority to man. Amen! That is a thing of God’s appointing, not of man’s devising. . . . I am Mr Norton’s inferior; I am the clouded moon of that sun. Put me then – (my ambition extends no further) – in the same position as all his other inferiors! In that of his housekeeper, whom he could not libel with impunity, and without possible defence; of an apprentice whom he could not maltreat lawlessly, even if the boy ‘condoned’ original ill-usage; of a scullion, whose wages he could not refuse on the plea that she is legally ‘non-existent’; of the day-labourer, with whom he would not argue that his signature to a contract is ‘worthless.’ Put me under some law of protection; and do not leave me to the mercy of one who has never shewn me mercy.88 Like Norton, Lady Carbury has been ‘ill-treated’ and ‘slandered’ (I, 11); she endures her husband’s ill-usage, then leaves him, returning after a year’s separation and thereby ‘condoning’ his faults. Her only weapons against the domestic tyrant are the survival strategies that a woman acquires in a patriarchal society: ‘from the commencement of her life she had been educated in deceit, and her married life had seemed to make the practice of deceit necessary to her. Her mother had run away from her father, and she had



‘But I know that it did become mine, – legally.’ ‘By a quibble of law, – yes; but not so as to give you any right to it. I always draw the income.’ (II, 253)

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been tossed to and fro between this and that protector, sometimes being in danger of wanting any one to care for her, till she had been made sharp, incredulous, and untrustworthy by the difficulties of her position’ (I, 12–13). Dependency necessitates reliance on a male protector. She turns to Roger as her mentor (although she ignores his advice) and, as Norton turned to Melbourne for patronage, so Lady Carbury seeks influential ‘friends’, having no qualms about trying to obtain favours from newspaper editors by flirtatiously intimating favours in return. As a man, Roger finds it easier to stand outside the nepotism of the metropolis, but Lady Carbury must work within a system which values women for their physical attractiveness and simpering reliance on a knight errant. Her first marriage was for money rather than love and subsequent disillusionments have steeled her cynicism.89 But although she bravely determines that never ‘would she marry again for convenience’ (I, 14), she nevertheless remains financially and emotionally dependent on men, devoting her life to her son’s pleasure, as she had earlier been indoctrinated to secure her husband’s approval. Yet despite her self-image as the emblematic ‘pelican’ who ‘allowed the blood to be torn from her own breast to satisfy the greed of her young’, she nevertheless reproaches Felix for his ingratitude, hoping for ‘some return for her sacrifices’ (I, 214–15, 102). What Trollope reveals is that – beneath the ideology of female selflessness so convenient to patriarchal selfishness – men and women adopt different strategies to control those around them, as Wollstonecraft and Mill had suggested. Whereas Lady Carbury cannot resist the disrespect of her husband and her son, Winifred (who epitomises what contemporaries pejoratively termed a ‘strong-minded woman’) is far from submissive. Perhaps conditioned by satires on ‘Bloomerism’, Roger ‘pictured to himself all American women as being loud, masculine, and atheistical’ (II, 350). His stereotype appears to be borne out by the conflicting accounts of Winifred’s past. She herself claims that her late husband, the Attorney-General of Kansas, despoiled her of what money he could before deserting her, to drink himself to death in Texas. She obtained a divorce under Kansas law for cruelty and drunkenness (I, 252–3, 445). It later transpires that Hurtle is not dead and, he maintains, not divorced. What is indisputable is that ‘she’s had the handling of her own money, and has put it so that he can’t get hold of a dollar’ (II, 395). Her financial independence is important to her; not merely because she has had to struggle to regain her property from Hurtle’s attempt to defraud her, but also because it enables her to enter a married relationship on a footing of equality. She tells Paul that she was ‘determined that I would not plead to you as a pauper’ (I, 253), indicating that she sees herself as the wooer as much as the wooed. Her arrogation here and elsewhere of masculine prerogatives leads to her being punished by the double standards of the period. In nineteenth-century fiction the melodramatic mode often conveys the psychologically most interesting material. This is certainly the case with





Winifred, who brings out archetypal anxieties in the male characters and in the narrator. The female domination which they fear assumes two guises: the physically intimidating woman and the ‘witch’ (I, 389) or femme fatale. As a frontierswoman lacking the ‘protection’ accorded by coverture, Winifred has been forced to take the law into her own hands. In Oregon she killed a man who threatened to rape her, just as she resisted her drunken husband’s attempts at marital rape (I, 444–5). Her instincts for self-preservation are diametrically opposed to the conventional femininity – the ‘assumed weakness’ which men take advantage of – that she so contemptuously rejects (II, 8). With tedious frequency she is referred to as a ‘wild cat’, so that the wimpish Paul is understandably always on edge when caged up alone with this ‘dangerous’ American: ‘She certainly did not look like a woman whom a man might ill-treat or scorn with impunity. Paul felt, even while she was lavishing her caresses upon him, that she might too probably turn and rend him before he left her’ (I, 242; cf. I, 356). The feral register here and elsewhere conveys the ‘unfeminine’ desire which is more than he can cope with; his nervousness is heightened by the knowledge that he can justifiably expect some retribution from her. But if Paul is looking for the door this is also because of a deeper male fear of entrapment. Thus, when Winifred’s landlady smilingly shows him into his fiancée’s sitting-room, Paul interprets this as ‘a smile half of congratulation to the lover, half of congratulation to herself as a woman that another man had been caught by the leg and made fast’ (I, 258).90 Although Winifred resorts to half-truths about her past to place herself in a more favourable light, her fictions are no worse than Paul’s. Nevertheless, she falls foul of the double standards of a society where men sow their wild oats but only women reap what they sow. The impropriety of Winifred and Paul’s staying in the same hotel at Lowestoft is treated by Roger as unpardonable on her part (I, 437–8). But Paul’s offence, the narrator emphasises, is mitigated because (although engaged to two women simultaneously) he accompanies her out of sympathy rather than lust (I, 441–2). By contrast, like the second Mrs Tanqueray, given her unsavoury reputation that has reached even Hetta’s ears, Winifred has no hope of social rehabilitation anywhere other than in California or Mexico. The narrator offers various interpretations of her predicament. Unlike the sheltered Hetta, Winifred’s impropriety is an understandable response to the violence and machinations to which she has been subjected and to which she has had to adapt (II, 390). As a result she has acquired masculine characteristics. Nevertheless, although hardened by adverse circumstances, she has, as it were, a ‘womanly’ soft centre (II, 145). There is a plausibility to this but also an element of male wish-fulfilment in the narrator’s suggestion that, given the benefit of paternalistic protection, Winifred might, with a sigh of relief, cast off her animosity (or her animus) (I, 449–50). The disturbing issues which she raises find no satisfactory resolution. She can be



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idealisingly refeminised, as yearning for ‘lavender’ rather than ‘wild garlic’, and (as patriarchal convention had it) with ‘all a woman’s natural desire to sacrifice herself’ (II, 445, 3). She can be reduced pathetically to La Traviata, the fallen woman of sentimental stereotypes (II, 439–40, I, 443). Or she can be reduced to melodramatic cliché: ‘She and this young Englishman were not fit to be mated. He was to her thinking a tame, sleek household animal, whereas she knew herself to be wild, – fitter for the woods than for polished cities’ (II, 379). This bewilderment is understandable for, like other American women in the fiction of the period, Winifred defies ready classification. In more moderate form, the resilience she embodies as an independent woman would prove a force to be reckoned with in late nineteenth-century London.




8

Henry James’s ‘London’ marks an appropriate conclusion to this study not just chronologically but also technically, in its gradual departure from the conventions of Victorian fiction. In the mid-1880s James conceived of the novelist as competing ‘with his brother the painter in his attempt to . . . catch the colour, the relief, the expression, the surface, the substance of the human spectacle’ (LC1, 53); his contemporaneous novel, The Princess Casamassima, self-consciously vies with Impressionist painting: ‘He liked the reflection of the lamps on the wet pavements, the feeling and smell of the carboniferous London damp; the way the winter fog blurred and suffused the whole place, made it seem bigger and more crowded, produced halos and dim radiations, trickles and evaporations, on the plates of glass. He moved in the midst of these impressions this evening’ (N, 57–8). But although in the same essay James emphasised that ‘the supreme virtue of a novel’ was ‘the air of reality (solidity of specification)’ (LC1, 53), he would subsequently redefine realism, so that in late James, as in late Monet, the early Impressionist concern with the aspect of things evolves into an exploration of the observing consciousness itself. This extreme subjectivity raises the question of how James’s ‘London’ can be related to its historical context. Its narrow social range, together with James’s increasingly inwardlooking style, has led some critics to conclude that he ignored the life of the late Victorian metropolis. Closer inspection reveals this judgement to be wrong: James’s self-conscious aloofness belied his entanglement in contemporary debates about the Woman Question, sexuality, commercialism and mass culture, and poverty.

‘The modern girl, the product of our hard London facts’ (AA, 230) From as early as 1868, in the comments I quoted on p. 209, James demonstrated his interest in the Woman Question. This informs his treatment of the marriage market in his earliest London tales ‘An International Episode’ 218



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(1878–9) and ‘The Siege of London’ (1883), which invite comparison with Trollope’s later fiction.1 In their similar concern with actual or presumed attempts by unclassifiable American parvenues to break into London Society, they reveal the alien James himself trying to break into the English fiction market in the prestigious Cornhill by capitalising on a fashionable theme. What elevates them above pastiche (particularly in James’s modelling of Mrs Headway on Trollope’s Mrs Hurtle) is James’s ability not merely to ventriloquise conventional English chauvinism towards the foreign bounder or adventuress, but unconventionally to empathise with the alien, female perspective and to offer a complementary awareness of the limitations of the Englishman abroad.2 James’s understanding of his English characters on their own territory, however, differs little from that in his fictional models. I shall therefore focus instead on ‘A London Life’ (1888) and The Awkward Age (1899), which trace the increasing autonomy and mobility of the ‘Glorified Spinster’ and the New Woman, and the gradual relaxation of the close chaperoning and censorship that had regulated the purity of the female ‘young person’. The ingenuous Laura Wing epitomises a recurrent Jamesian character type: the American innocent abroad.3 Misled by her bookish idealisation of English culture, she finds a jarring incongruity, a literal ‘duplicity’ between her preconception of the genius of the Berrington place, Plash, as ‘full of peace and purity, of the air of happy submission to immemorial law’ and the ‘stable-stamped’ Barbarians (to use Arnold’s terminology) who currently degrade it (88–9, 104–5). A similar gravitation towards pessimism can be traced in James’s letters. Although, on nearer acquaintance, ‘the “upper Middle Class” ’ had disappointed him, he had retained a lingering respect for the romantic Idea of ‘Old England’, while voicing concern about Britain’s imperial decline; by 1889 this respect had disappeared.4 A turning point was reached during 1885–6, partly as a result of Irish bombings in London and the 1886 riots in the West End. Since his earliest visits to London, James had been shocked by alcoholism, squalor and brutality on the streets; but his social conscience was apparently not acute, his interest in British politics and class tensions intermittent, sentimental and relatively superficial.5 What shook him more in the mid-1880s were the sensationally reported Dilke and Campbell divorce scandals, involving several people who were known to him personally. His revulsion, expressed in an emotive register that becomes progressively more hysterical in tone (‘odious’, ‘foul’, ‘hideous’, ‘abominable’, ‘infect’, ‘besmirch’) amounted to a moral panic: ‘The condition of [the English upper class] seems to me to be in many ways very much the same rotten and collapsible one as that of the French aristocracy before the revolution – minus cleverness and conversation. Or perhaps it’s more like the heavy, congested and depraved Roman world upon which the barbarians came down.’6 In his plan for ‘A London Life’ James specified that Laura’s sister



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‘lives in the smart, dissipated set, the P[rince] of W[ales]’s, etc.’, from whose delinquencies fashionable London Society took its cue; his own contempt for the Marlborough House set (which was drawn into the Campbell divorce case) and for the future King is indicated by his later reference to ‘fat Edward – E. the Caresser, as he is privately named’ (NB, 77; L, IV, 184). A plausible link can thus be made between Laura’s disillusionment and that of James himself. But this does not warrant the assumption that Laura’s responses are unequivocally underwritten by James or that the complexities of the tale can be reduced to a defence of the traditional values of the rural gentry.7 As James’s notebook shows, ‘A London Life’ originated in an anecdote about the suicide of a young woman supposedly shocked by her mother’s love affairs (NB, 76–81). It is less concerned with Laura as a conservative apologist than with her representative predicament in the marriage market, and with two recurrent themes in James’s late Victorian fiction: trepidation about sexuality and fear of public ‘exposure’. Like Trollope’s heroines and the sisters in Gissing’s The Odd Women, Laura suffers from her father’s lack of financial foresight; his bankruptcy leaves her impoverished and haunted by the fear of a further catastrophe. Her demeaning dependency exposes her to emotional blackmail, as her brotherin-law expects her to repay his hospitality by testifying in his intended divorce suit. The purposive, if dreary existence led by her nephews’ governess is an avenue of employment from which her class position and scant education debar her; instead, she realises, as her new home also threatens to break up, she must look to a husband to ‘protect’ her.8 Having been an involuntary witness to the affairs and mutual recriminations of Selina and Lionel, however, the pragmatic necessity of marriage fills her with distaste. Her desire for a different kind of life is evident in her jealous impatience with the governess’s ‘drooping, martyr-like air’ (101) and in her irritation with Lady Davenant’s matchmaking: ‘There was nothing, in general, that the girl liked less than being spoken of, off-hand, as a marriageable article – being planned and arranged for in this particular. It made too light of her independence’ (171). Criticism of the marriage market was, of course, not new. What was new was the widespread coverage which the marriage question was currently receiving in the press. ‘A London Life’ was published in June–September 1888. In August 1888 Mona Caird’s polemical article ‘Marriage’ appeared in The Westminster Review.9 It reached beyond this limited public when the Daily Telegraph ran a daily letters column entitled ‘Is Marriage a Failure?’, receiving in August and September 27,000 letters responding to Caird, a selection of which, edited by Harry Quilter, were published later that year in a book of the same title.10 It seems unlikely that James, who kept up with the serious reviews, and whose sister Alice, then living in England, was alert to feminist issues, could have avoided noticing this controversy, which indicates the discursive context in which Laura Wing’s dissatisfaction needs to be placed.



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While marriage remained practically the only means of livelihood for women, there was little danger of their seeing too clearly the seamy side of the arrangement; for to see that would be to stand helpless and openeyed between the alternatives of selling themselves for a livelihood, and starvation; or, in milder cases, between the alternatives of social failure, and a marriage which, without being altogether worldly, would yet never for a moment, have been thought of in the entire absence of the worldly motive.12 Middle-class women were, however, beginning to have some choice in this matter. The expansion of the service sector and of educational provision after 1870 was gradually creating openings for middle-class women in clerical work, retailing and teaching, in addition to those in more traditionally ‘feminine’ caring professions, such as nursing and charity work.13 Some implications of these developments are suggested in an article that also appeared in 1888 in Macmillan’s Magazine (where James himself published in December 1887 and March 1893), devoted to the novel phenomenon of ‘The Glorified Spinster’.14 Her emergence is attributed to three factors: first, ‘the present contraction of means among the professional classes without their standard of comfort being correspondingly lowered, which has driven the sisters and daughters to seek remunerative employment; the same cause has operated powerfully in checking the marriage-rate, and thus leaving more women unprovided for. Secondly, the democratic spirit of the age, which is unfavourable to satisfied acquiescence in a position of dependence and subjection’. Thirdly, women’s improved education. The article’s composite portrait depicts the ‘Glorified Spinster’ as living in a small bedsit in Kensington, managing to sustain cultural interests on an income that permits shabby gentility. One such independent woman explains that scarcely ‘half of the women at present earning their own living belong to our denomination. All those must be eliminated who are looking forward to marriage as their ultimate destiny, those who are living with their own relations, and again, all who are properly classified as Old Maids, that is to say, women who feel themselves cruelly deprived of their natural sphere of work and happiness’. Glorified Spinsters, by contrast, ‘should be ticketed Not in the marriage market’ and allowed perfect freedom to associate with men as well as women. In the late 1880s the media coverage devoted to such emancipated women was disproportionate to their as yet modest



In ‘Marriage’ and in The Morality of Marriage (1897) Caird traces the development from a matriarchal system to a capitalist patriarchy in which, given the low pay and adverse working conditions for single women, there is no reasonable alternative to mercenary marriages, ‘the worst, because the most hypocritical, form of woman-purchase’.11 Laura’s dilemma is illuminated by Caird’s comments:


numbers but they heralded a trend that would soon gather force, as had become evident by 1893 when Gissing wrote The Odd Women and Shaw Mrs Warren’s Profession. In James’s The Tragic Muse (1889–90) Florence Tressilian, who does without a chaperon, has two latch-keys and rides alone on the top of omnibuses, invites Biddy Dormer to join her in ‘enlightened spinsterhood’ (N, 1239–40). Laura’s frustration is thus heightened by the discrepancy between these new opportunities for self-reliance and the tutelage to which, among London’s élite, she is anachronistically restricted. Her inner conflicts reach a crisis during the London Season when, she knows, she must be married off. Laura literally walks out of Selina’s at-homes, which are frequented almost exclusively by men: ‘she had from the first established her right to tread the London streets alone (if she was a poor girl she could have the detachment as well as the helplessness of it)’ (138). The indirect speech indicates self-pity but also a defiant justification of behaviour that for an upper-class woman could still be regarded as unconventional. From the later 1860s middle-class women’s access to public spaces had been becoming less restricted, variously facilitated by segregated dining areas in restaurants in the new railway hotels and department stores, by tea shops (pioneered from 1880 by the Aerated Bread Company (ABC) and later by Lyons and Co.), and in 1884, by the first ladies public lavatory in Oxford Circus.15 But in the early and mid-1860s incidents in which ‘respectable’ women in the Regent Street area were mistaken for ‘fast’ women or for prostitutes indicated that a visit to the West End without a chaperon to protect and control their respectability could still prove compromising.16 Twenty years later, sources from the same period as ‘A London Life’ offer divergent assessments of the situation. Some melodramatic commentary constructed the socially heterogeneous West End (the terrain not only of the upper classes but increasingly of civil servants, clerks, shopping ladies, ‘girls in business’ and women in various ‘entertainment’ occupations) as a dangerous labyrinth rather than a performative milieu of eroticised consumption and pleasure in which women might develop a streetwise agency.17 By contrast, in the 1888 edition of his Dictionary of London Charles Dickens Jr maintained that: ‘Ladies shopping without male escort, and requiring luncheon, can safely visit any of the great restaurants – care being always taken to avoid passing through a drinking-bar. In some cases a separate room is set apart for ladies, but there is practically no reason why the public room should be avoided.’18 Laura’s insistence on the degree of mobility that was the prerogative of the unmarried ‘American girl’ would thus not have been so shocking as it had been in Daisy Miller and Bessie Alden a decade earlier.19 (Mrs Westgate, outlining the prevailing guidelines in the late 1870s, insists that there are two classes of American girls in Europe: those who walk about alone and those who do not; furthermore, it is also ‘not the custom here for young ladies to knock about London with young men’ (T, 4: 288–9).) But Laura



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violates English custom when, on first acquaintance, she asks a new visitor to their Belgravia home, Wendover, to accompany her to Lady Davenant’s, later compounding this impropriety by knocking about London with him. The socioeconomic tale I have outlined could have been written by Trollope. James’s text has, however, more psychological complexity, conveyed through Laura’s melodramatic imagination. Following the ‘duplicity’ she discovered at Plash, her ‘London Life’ is consciously devoted to uncovering Selina’s adulterous ‘duplicity’ and unconsciously preoccupied with resolving her powerful bond with her sisterly ‘double’, despite her self-conscious dissociation from everything that ‘ “London” had made of the person in the world hitherto most akin to her’ (LC2, 1152). The ‘shames’, ‘horrors’ and ‘abominations’ which, in her distress, she detects around her seem all the more sordid because of their extreme contrast with her sacrosanct ideal of purity, associated with the ‘sacred images’ of the dead parents whom she venerates (132). Earlier, Laura had also idolised her older sibling, regarding any criticism of her as a ‘profanity’ (134). Having swung from over-idealisation to an equally extreme vilification of her now fallen idol, she apparently fears that a latent affinity will manifest itself and that she in turn will also fall short of her perfectionist self-image. This repressed anxiety is acted out in a series of symbolic confrontations with Selina, the first of which takes place in the Soane Museum (153–6).20 With proleptic irony Laura finds herself among ‘uncanny, unexpected objects’ that she edges away from, ‘that she would have preferred not to be in the room with’. A storm breaks and she descends into the Gothic depths of the basement where, in a lightning flash of illumination, she finds herself pursued by what she had tried to avoid. The form of this recognition scene is that of comedy: having tried to elude the other’s observation, Selina and Laura bump into each other and both are caught red-handed.21 But the embarrassment is not relieved by shared laughter; instead, as so often in James, a comic base supports a tragic structure. The revelation which takes place could be interpreted – like many similar scenes in James’s fiction – as the unmasking of a betrayal practised upon the ingénu(e). Selina has lied about her whereabouts; she is with her lover in an out-of-the-way area of London. But the same could be asserted of Laura, whose intemperate indignation at Selina’s deception is fuelled by its unacknowledged similarity to her own. Each ‘recognises’ the other, only to suppress this either out of guilt at the discovery of her own furtiveness or, as both later maintain, a desire to protect the other’s reputation. But it seems that, in this uncanny apparition from the depths of what she had earlier described as ‘a cave of idols’, Laura has glimpsed in her fallen idol Selina repressed aspects of her own personality. In the reciprocal upbraidings which ensue, Laura justifiably condemns Selina’s dereliction of maternal duty; Selina brazenly deflects attention from her adulterous irregularities by cross-questioning Laura about whether she is



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engaged to Wendover (160–3). Her unprecedented solicitude jars with her customary indifference to family responsibilities, but the question is legitimate and is later pressed by Lady Davenant, who is genuinely interested in Laura’s marital prospects. Selina’s casuistical defence is based not on morality but manners, for among London’s socialites, so long as appearances are respected, married women enjoy greater licence than their unmarried counterparts, whose main asset is their chasteness. Characteristically, Laura reacts by turning ‘deep crimson’. She is expressing anger at Selina’s disingenuousness, but perhaps also shamefully conceding the element of truth in her sister’s words, while at the same time blushing on Selina’s behalf. The showdown which Laura subsequently forces also begins with a doubling recognition: ‘It was in the mirror that they looked at each other – in the strange, candle-lighted duplication of the scene that their eyes met’ (168). The mirroring is complete when, under the pressure of Laura’s harrying impassiveness, Selina is driven to the kind of hysterical wailing which hitherto has been associated with Laura: She besought [Laura] to save her, to stay with her, to help her against herself, against him, against Lionel, against everything – to forgive her also all the horrid things that she had said to her. Mrs Berrington melted, liquefied, and the room was deluged with her repentance, her desolation, her confession, her promises and the articles of apparel which were detached from her by the high tide of her agitation. (170) There is a baroque hyperbole in this tableau of the dishevelled magdalen. The verbal excesses, parodying Selina’s effusiveness, encourage us to view this emotional crescendo with sceptical detachment. From the point of view of Laura or the unmoved narrator, Selina’s acting out of her helplessness is an (un)conscious attempt at manipulation. Later on, however, with Wendover at Covent Garden, Laura herself will mount a similar appeal. It would seem that their self-dramatising intensity leads them into relationships which are in effect hysterical collusions. Both Lionel and Wendover are undemonstrative men, whose unresponsiveness goads the sisters into provocative histrionic gestures, in a repertoire which even encompasses the threat to kill themselves (205–6, 211). Now, by contrast, Laura plays the ‘masculine’ role to Selina’s ‘feminine’ hysteric. The scene that they have staged together ends with Selina taking a ‘tremendous vow’ to have no further contact with Captain Crispin, sealing Laura’s triumph in her self-imposed mission to draw Selina back from the brink of ‘reprobation’. Their cat-and-mouse game concludes at Covent Garden (176–88). Wendover has invited them to share a box, which Selina leaves to join the disreputable Lady Ringrose. Laura is angered by this rudeness towards their host and by Selina’s leaving her compromisingly unchaperoned. Feeling exhibited to the public gaze, she draws back the curtain of her box, even as



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she tries to peer behind the curtain of the box that her sister has now entered. But Selina remains masked by the others and in vain Laura ‘tried to sound with her glass the curtained dimness behind them’. This voyeuristic probing epitomises Laura’s compulsive pursuit of a controlling knowledge of her sister’s sexual activity. She can no more give this up than she can let Selina go. In identifying with her sister’s disgrace, Laura again colours with both shame and anger. She feels doubly outwitted: Selina has used her as an involuntary accomplice to dissimulate her assignation but also, she suspects, has contrived to degrade her publicly: Laura found herself face to face with the strange inference that the evil of Selina’s nature made her wish . . . to bring her sister to her own colour by putting an appearance of ‘fastness’ upon her. The girl said to herself that she would have succeeded, in the cynical view of London; and to her troubled spirit the immense theatre had a myriad eyes, eyes that she knew, eyes that would know her, that would see her sitting there with a strange young man. She had recognised many faces already and her imagination quickly multiplied them. As earlier, Laura’s ‘crimsoning’ does indeed lend countenance to her presumed resemblance to Selina the scarlet woman but what she is ‘face to face’ with are largely her own projections. Were she convinced that no one could plausibly equate her with Selina then no self-doubts would be betrayed by her blushes. The society she inhabits is one in which women are subject to constant surveillance: leaving their house on an earlier occasion, Laura had ‘passed through the open door, where the servants were grouped in the foolish majesty of their superfluous attendance, and through the file of dingy gazers who had paused at the sight of the carpet across the pavement and the waiting carriage, in which Selina sat in pure white splendour’ (160). The observation is not merely that of the omnipresent servants and the awestruck underclass, but also the regulatory gaze through which peer group pressure is exercised. Auguste Renoir’s The Theatre Box (La Loge) (1874) and Mary Cassatt’s Woman in Black at the Opera (c. 1879) depict women on display at the theatre, with men staring through opera glasses; in the latter, the woman under observation herself wields opera glasses, presumably at other women who are equally exposed.22 Similarly, James’s ‘The Siege of London’ opens with Waterville directing his opera glass at the women in the audience at the Théâtre Français, knowing ‘that such a course was wanting in true distinction, and that it was indelicate to level at a lady an instrument which was often only less injurious in effect than a double-barrelled pistol’ (T, 5: 13). Given this appraising scrutiny, Laura’s sense of being a cynosure in the auditorium is wholly understandable but is narcissistic in its overestimation



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of her own significance to the ‘myriad eyes’ which she imagines focused in judgment on her. The tension increases when it seems that Selina has decamped. Laura assumes that the ‘hideous hue’ of the ensuing scandal will reflect on her, blighting her prospects irrevocably. (In fact, given the cynicism of London Society, her real handicap is her lack of a dowry.) So, in an access of desperation and wishful thinking, she tries to elicit a proposal. Her misreading of her ‘admirer’ Wendover has been encouraged by his American ignorance of the conventions of the marriage market: by persistently paying his attentions to her, in English eyes he would have been signalling a serious commitment.23 But the excitability of Laura’s immoderate personality is also partly responsible. It is an impossible situation for both of them: For an instant she thought he was coming nearer to her, but he didn’t: he stood there twirling his gloves. Then an unspeakable shame and horror – horror of herself, of him, of everything – came over her, and she sank into a chair at the back of the box, with averted eyes, trying to get further into her corner. ‘Leave me, leave me, go away!’ she said, in the lowest tone that he could hear. The whole house seemed to her to be listening to her, pressing into the box. She is caught between conflicting impulses. Her shame and horror are ‘unspeakable’; instead, these emotions must be acted out in her regressive shrinking into her corner. At the same time, her injunction that he leave her is voiced ‘in the lowest tone that he could hear’: an expression of her mortification but also, in its mutedness, of the faint hope that its half-hearted appeal might go unheard. The bewildered Wendover is understandably perplexed as to how to respond to this contradictory message. Overcome with pity, he protests that he cannot abandon her because he loves her, a volte-face which she dismisses as insincere. It is possible that (like the inhibited Winterbourne in ‘Daisy Miller’) he is unable to take the initiative as a lover and only becomes conscious of his true feelings when galvanised by her distress. It is also possible, as Laura assumes, that he acts merely out of a sense of duty, as his later reaction to Lady Davenant’s intervention suggests. In any case, the narrative focus remains on Laura. She is shocked less that Wendover is not the person she needed him to be than by the revelation that she herself is not the person she thought she was. Her ideal, or idol, of herself has been shattered: ‘The one thing that could have justified her, blown away the dishonour of her monstrous overture, would have been, on his side, the quick response of unmistakable passion. It had not come, and she had nothing left but to loathe herself. She did so violently, for a long time, in the dark corner of the box, and she felt that he loathed her too.’ In her society, amatory overtures are a male prerogative; not only has she flouted this prescriptive rule but, even more grotesquely,



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has exposed herself in vain. Her transgression is a paradoxical one: to gain marital security and respectability she resorted to a strategy more usually associated with a demi-mondaine. Ironically, although she strove to avoid repeating the disgrace which her family has suffered through her father’s bankruptcy and her sister’s delinquency, the repercussions of her identification with Selina have, after all, covered her with shame. The intensity of her self-hatred feeds on two failures with which she can torment herself: she has fallen short not merely of feminine decorum but also of her exalted self-image. It is predictable that in revulsion from her apparent licentiousness, Laura seeks sanctuary with her mother-figure, Lady Davenant, who nudges the hesitant Wendover into the role of knight errant. It is also predictable, however, that Laura absconds from her chaperone’s care and pursues her sister to Brussels, only to retreat from there to ‘Virginia’. Having failed to save Selina’s and her own reputation, Laura is presumably intent on escaping from Wendover, who reminds her of her abject humiliation, and from Lady Davenant’s matchmaking designs, but also from being called into the witness-box in ‘Berrington versus Berrington and Others’. Contemporary divorce cases were reported in sensationalist detail, so that Laura’s fear of gross publicity is entirely justified. Her flight from Wendover also bears suggestive similarities, however, to the endings of The Portrait of a Lady (1880–1) and The Bostonians (1885–6), where the heroine is pursued by an importunate admirer, who tries to persuade or browbeat her into accepting his advances. The common element in all three texts is the heroine’s choice between what is represented by her male lover and, on the other hand, selfdetermination and/or a bond of sisterly solidarity. Arguably, in 1888 Laura is as much a victim of the sexual double standard as Daisy Miller in 1878 and Nanda Brookenham in The Awkward Age (1899), whose marital prospects are likewise blighted by the poisonous atmosphere of those who regard her as morally compromised: ‘the mal’aria they themselves have made for her!’ (AA, 194). Within the London coteries that James depicted in the late 1890s, the treatment of women remains ambivalent.24 On the one hand, Nanda, with her latch-key, her ability to walk unaccompanied in London, her unchaperoned contacts with men, her reading of French Naturalist fiction, and her participation in the salacious gossip of her mother’s salon (which in its adulterous permutations vies with Selina Berrington’s circle), has an unprecedented degree of freedom. On the other hand, the hitherto dominant insistence that unmarried women remain ‘uninitiated’ still has sufficient residual force for her ‘exposure’ to the adult world to count against her (AA, 62, 273–4, 382). In this awkward age of transition, the prescriptive ideal that Nanda preserve a ‘blankness of mind’, a virginal tabula rasa on which her future husband will inscribe himself, can finally be acknowledged as a ‘preposterous fiction’ (211). Nevertheless, without this ‘pious fraud’ (229), her value in the marriage market is negligible.



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The smart set which James portrays is modishly afflicted by ‘neurasthenia’; a reviewer commented: ‘The elemental passions . . . have been so worn down by constant analysis and introspection as to be non-existent’.25 What remains is clever, self-consciously witty talk in which (as in The Sacred Fount) actual or presumptive liaisons are canvassed. In its exhibitionism and its narcissism, their small world is affected by an important trend in late Victorian society: the creation through the new media of a culture of publicity and self-publicity. The marriage market, Vanderbank remarks, places a premium on ‘staring, glaring, obvious, knock-down, beauty, as plain as a poster on a wall, an advertisement of soap or whiskey’ (43). Married women who cannot compete with Mrs Brookenham’s conversational brilliance must find alternative forms of display, parading in décolletage and backless dresses, ‘as some great massive wall shows placards and posters’ (90–2, 94, 135, 280–1, 302). Prior to marriage, by contrast, it is, above all, female innocence that is commodified. As the representative ‘modern girl, the product of our hard London facts’ (230), Nanda is contrasted schematically with the ironically named Agnesina, who is raised under ‘anxious supervision’ (177) and has been ‘deliberately prepared for consumption’ (181): Both the girls struck [Longdon] as lambs with the great shambles of life in their future; but while one, with its neck in a pink ribbon, had no consciousness but that of being fed from the hand with the small sweet biscuit of unobjectionable knowledge, the other struggled with instincts and forebodings, with the suspicion of its doom and the far-borne scent, in the flowery fields, of blood. (181) The contrast between the ‘emphasized virginity’ (87) of Agnesina’s disingenuously sheltered upbringing, the flower imagery in which she is usually described, and the hymenal forcing that awaits her and Nanda is obscene. The passage is even more provocative if, as informed readers at the time surely did, one recognises an echo of W.T. Stead’s The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.26 James is implying a parallel between the marriage market and juvenile prostitution catering for West End clients: what an MP described to Stead as ‘the delivery as per contract of the asset virginity in return for cash down’. In the trade the girls’ ‘price was quoted like that of lambs at so much a head’. Stead recounts how, typically, having been certified as virgo intacta, a child of thirteen to fifteen, unable to conceive of what is involved in the ‘seduction’ to which she has ignorantly agreed, ‘goes to the introducing house as a sheep to the shambles’, to be deflowered despite her ‘helpless, startled scream like the bleat of a frightened lamb’. In some cases the child is sold by her parents, in others she is marked as a likely candidate by a procuress who waits for her opportunity, as the Duchess, having groomed the juvenile, deferential Agnesina, encourages her to seize the main chance.



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James shows that the artificial ignorance enforced on nubile women is not merely hypocritical but also self-defeating as, under the cloak of respectability provided by her mercenary marriage to Mitchy, Aggie loses no time in acquiring with her aunt’s lover Pemberton the sexual knowledge hitherto forbidden her. By writing a novel whose climax is provoked by Nanda’s having read an unspeakable French novel, James deliberately set out to expose the duplicity of middle-class propriety and the literary conventions which upheld it.27 As early as 1884 James had criticised the traditional difference in England ‘between that which people know and that which they agree to admit that they know, that which they see and that which they speak of, that which they feel to be a part of life and that which they allow to enter into literature’ (LC1, 63). Now in 1899, when ‘nothing is more salient in English life to-day . . . than the revolution taking place in the position and outlook of women’, in a novel which itself extended the experience of the woman reader, he was attacking the pernicious results for young women of the whole system of tutelage of which the censorship of the Social Purity movement and the circulating libraries formed part (LC1, 107–9). From 1888, in choosing to depict the adulterous promiscuity that characterised some sets in London Society, James had been testing the boundaries of what was conventionally acceptable.28 He managed to skate over thin ice in ‘A London Life’, What Maisie Knew and ‘In the Cage’ by restricting the perceiving consciousness to that of a girl or unmarried young woman and thus leaving ‘the sordid details’ ‘more suggested than described’.29 Instead, as in The Awkward Age and ‘The Turn of the Screw’, the unspecified ‘horrors’ are those which readers themselves are led to project into the text.30 James’s stenographer later remarked of ‘The Turn of the Screw’: ‘The connoting strength of its author’s reticence was never displayed to better advantage; had he spoken plainly, the book might have been barred from the mails.’31 And yet, the comment of one reviewer of What Maisie Knew is true of James’s late Victorian fiction in general: ‘Most of his obtuse readers will believe Mr. James to be reticent: he is not. The “i’s” are dotted; but the dots are very small ones.’32 The stylistic tightrope walking which this entailed is a leitmotiv in the remainder of this chapter.

Publicity, publication and exposure The following pages address two linked issues which, for clarity, I treat in turn: first, James’s responses to the consolidation of mass culture in late Victorian London; second, the emotions and expectations – both material and sexual – which he invested in writing. The fragmentation of the art public was paralleled by that within the reading public between the mass audience attracted to cheap fiction and the tabloid style of the New Journalism and the minority, specialist audiences interested in the uncommercial experiments of ‘the serious artist’. In Chapter 6 I outlined the cultural capital



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associated with Rossetti’s and Whistler’s formalistically ‘advanced’ works, as status symbols which conferred and advertised one’s membership of a select group. Although far less lucratively, James’s later fiction would ultimately find a similar niche market, as he came to realise that its abstruseness could itself be a unique selling point.33 His pragmatism as a commodity producer conflicted, however, with the idealism of his quasi-religious dedication to Art. As if to come to terms with this contradiction, James wrote several tales about the commercialisation of the arts in late Victorian London. They also consider the psychological aspects of the ‘exposure’ to which the author is subjected by modern publicity and which, by publication, he himself also invites.34 Henry St George’s situation in ‘The Lesson of the Master’ (1888) was, James claimed, ‘in essence an observed reality’ (LC2, 1230–1) which, as James’s observations of the Whistler/Ruskin controversy had demonstrated, included the increasing commodification of painting not just by speculative purchasers but also by artists themselves.35 Foremost among these was Millais who had become, in James’s words, one of the ‘popular purveyors of pictorial anecdote’ (PE, 215). In 1878 his commercial success financed an opulent Genoese palazzo in Palace Gate, half a mile away from St George’s substantial residence in Ennismore Gardens.36 In the same year James was already expressing his disapproval of the direction Millais had taken. He complained of his ‘vulgarity’ and of how ‘he, rich and strong in the painter’s temperament as he is, shirks, as it were, and coquets with, the plastic obligation, and plays into the hands of the public desire for something more amusing or more edifying’ (PE, 165–8). Personal encounters with Millais and his wife in 1879 and 1880 did not mitigate his reservations (L, II, 236–7, 318) which were reiterated in reviews in 1882 and 1897 (PE, 210–11, 253). Millais concurred with James’s strictures. Confronted by his early self at a large retrospective (which James saw) at the Grosvenor in 1886, he confided to a friend that: ‘In looking at my earliest pictures, I have been overcome with chagrin that I so far failed in my maturity to fulfill the forecast of my youth’.37 For James, Millais’s pandering to popular taste was exemplified by his sketch of Lillie Langtry, which capitalised on her photographic prominence ‘in all the shop-windows’ by painting her ‘as if he meant to make her pass for the heroine of a serial in a magazine’.38 James was putting his finger on a striking new phenomenon: the blurring of the boundary between High Art and commerce, and the willingness of some artists to become part of the modern publicity machinery of advertisement and self-advertisement. Langtry became a household word not just for her beauty but also as a mistress of the Prince of Wales. Her liaisons with lavish admirers corresponded to her willingness to sell her beauty to a mass public in the form of photographic icons that were in effect pin-ups. In ‘A London Life’ Laura, shocked by Selina’s liaisons, is grateful that at least ‘Her photographs were not to be purchased in the Burlington Arcade – she had kept out of that; but she



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looked more than ever as they would have represented her if they had been obtainable there’ (T, 7: 136). In the early nineteenth century the portraits of Society ladies reproduced in Keepsake annuals had been relatively decorous. But now this form of self-advertisement had become brasher: the boundaries of the public domain were being redrawn and the private self was increasingly becoming public property. The popular desire for intimate glimpses of the fashionable ‘celebrity’ was catered for by the gossipy sensationalism of the syndicated New Journalism: what James described as ‘the invasion, the impudence and shamelessness, of the newspaper and the interviewer, the devouring publicity of life’ (NB, 82). Its counterpart in painting is satirised in ‘The Death of the Lion’ (1894) in the figure of ‘the reporter on canvas’, Mr Rumble. His studio ‘was a circus in which the man of the hour, and still more the woman, leaped through the hoops of his showy frames almost as electrically as they burst into telegrams and “specials.” He pranced into the exhibitions on their back’. Rumble profits from his sitters, who serve as ‘a hoarding for pictorial posters’ (T, 9: 104–5). In turn, their brand marketing of themselves benefits from his boosting of their ‘circulation’. Since 1859 Millais had been cashing in on the popular demand for prints by turning out paintings to a formula for reproduction.39 In 1885, however, he heralded the final stage in the commodification of painting when he accepted a commission from the soap manufacturer, Thomas Barratt. The resulting painting, Bubbles, was then utilised as an advertisement for Pears’ Soap. Millais had no objection to lending a touch of class to the marketing campaigns of consumer capitalism, unlike Frith who, when he sold the copyright of The New Frock (1889), did not foresee that, in the ultimate form of mass reproduction, it would be replicated on Sunlight soap wrappers.40 James would surely not have been surprised when in the 1890s a photograph of Lillie Langtry was also used to sell soap.41 If Millais was a byword for the commercialisation of painting, his literary counterpart was Trollope. His Autobiography (1883), in which he balanced his literary and financial accounts, aroused James’s indignation (L, III, 14), which was also expressed in essays criticising the ‘business-like’ routine and facile overproduction of Trollope’s ‘ultimate compositions’, some of which ‘betray the dull, impersonal rumble of the mill-wheel’ (LC1, 1331, 1335, 1345). Trollope is parodied in St George’s workmanlike endeavours between ten and one every morning and in his wife’s wish that Fancourt would make him ‘write a few’ as ‘He has been of an indolence this year!’ His disciple Overt is disconcerted by her incomprehension of ‘what it was to produce one perfect work of art’ and wonders ‘How in the world did she think they were turned off?’ (220). His paraphrase of her attitude recalls Holker’s disingenuous cross-examination of Whistler – ‘How long do you take to knock off one of your pictures?’ – and reviews accusing sensation novelists and Trollope of literary ‘manufacture’.42



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James was responsive to this ‘observed reality’ because of alarming fluctuations in his literary earnings and reputation. In 1884 he visited the studios of Millais and Leighton and was ‘impressed, as usual, with the gorgeous effect of worldly prosperity & success that both of these gentlemen present. I suppose it is the demon of envy – but I can’t help contrasting the great rewards of the successful painter . . . with the so much more modest emoluments of the man of letters. And the painters who wallow in gold are – some of them! – so shockingly bad!’43 The ‘demon of envy’ would return with a vengeance in 1887 when James’s literary income plummeted. His last two novels had been commercial failures; despair that the serial publication, on which he depended for the bulk of his earnings, would also dry up led James early in 1888 to turn to a literary agent.44 St George has no such troubles. He exemplifies in literature the spirit of a plutocratic ‘age in which society . . . is a great drawing-room with the City for its antechamber’ (218). It is therefore appropriate that he looks like ‘a lucky stockbroker’ (222), a City book-keeper or ‘a clerk in a countinghouse’ (218, 258). Like Trollope, he is a literary accountant concerned less with books than book-keeping. Through his commodity production he is also involved in what Ruskin had criticised as ‘the confusion between art and manufacture’. His artefacts are those of a ‘successful charlatan’: what he dismissively terms ‘carton-pierre’, ‘Lincrusta-Walton’ and ‘brummagaem’ (sic) (262–3). ‘Brummagem’ (i.e. made at Birmingham) connoted, with reference to the plated and lacquered wares manufactured there, ‘Counterfeit, sham, not genuine; of the nature of a cheap or showy imitation’ (OED). Carton-pierre was ‘A kind of papier mâché to imitate stone or bronze’ (OED), while ‘Lincrusta-Walton’ (a special type of thick wall-paper patented in 1882) recalls the scornful suggestions that Whistler’s Nocturnes were indistinguishable from high-class wallpaper. St George’s counsel that if Overt hopes to be ‘saved’ (262) he must devote himself to the religion of Art (239, 262, 270–1) anticipates The Tragic Muse, whose main characters must likewise choose between ‘God’ and ‘Mammon’, or everything connoted by ‘the world’.45 The ambitious actress Miriam Rooth declines Peter Sherringham’s patriarchal proposal that she relinquish centre stage for a subordinate role as a diplomat’s wife. Instead, like Whistler and Wilde, she realises the marketing potential of ‘a producer whose production is her own person’ and marries an impresario who will manage her career and (like Langtry) her self-promotion as a celebrity amid ‘the colossal, deafening newspaperism of the period’.46 By contrast, Nick Dormer resists the pressure of his mother and sister Grace to follow his father into Parliament and to salvage their reduced finances through a mercenary marriage to Julia Dallow, who (like Trollope’s heroines) wants to use him as the vehicle for her political ambition. He also sacrifices a large legacy contingent on this marriage and his making a parliamentary career, in order to pursue his vocation as a painter.



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But what is apparently a clear-cut choice for Overt is blurred by St George’s duplicity. Criticism has focused on the ambiguity of this apparent volte face, which casts into doubt the disinterestedness of St George’s advice.47 What it has neglected is the equally fascinating ambiguity of Overt’s erotic relationships with St George and Marian Fancourt and the sexuality which he is apparently unable to live out. St George is described as ‘the head of the profession’ (256); there is thus an Oedipal element in Overt’s relinquishment of the attachment which his ‘father’ prohibits. There is, however, also a homoerotic aspect to Overt’s adherence to St George rather than Fancourt, rendering his gender identity a complicated tangle, whose intricacies reveal the characteristics of James’s erotic imagination. Overt’s first sight of Fancourt is of a woman whose appearance signals her allegiance to Aestheticism: ‘a tall girl, with magnificent red hair, in a dress of a pretty grey-green tint and of a limp silken texture’ (220). Her father treats her as a decorative object (221), but Overt is more attracted by her intellectual acuity (251) and unconventional self-possession, resembling that of the ‘Glorified Spinster’ of the same year: She came and went without the clumsiness of a chaperon; she received people alone and, though she was totally without hardness, the question of protection or patronage had no relevancy in regard to her. She gave such an impression of purity combined with naturalness that, in spite of her eminently modern situation, she suggested no sort of sisterhood with the “fast” girl [i.e. ‘the Girl of the Period’]. (252–3) His approval is, however, revealingly tempered with reservations, suggesting the insecurity which her self-assurance provokes in him. Initially, he had tried to express his admiration for the possibilities of ‘life’ she represents by voicing the Aesthetic shibboleth that being an artist is ‘so poor’ ‘compared with being a person of action – as living your works’ (227). But his second-hand Paterisms come across as an intellectual pose that carries no real conviction. Whereas St George’s response to Fancourt is unequivocally erotic, Overt’s is inhibited: ‘the modern reactionary nymph, with the brambles of the woodland caught in her folds and a look as if the satyrs had toyed with her hair, was apt to make him uncomfortable’ (226). There is no Dionysian abandon in Overt. His sexual discomfort is made more explicit in the New York edition, where ‘was apt to make him uncomfortable’ is revised to ‘made him shrink not as a man of starch and patent leather, but as a man potentially himself a poet or even a faun’. He has, it seems, potential but not potency. He believes that what he wants is the lifestyle of a heterosexual paterfamilias (265) and thus resists St George’s doctrine of artistic celibacy (268–9). His willingness to be persuaded that marriage is a clog to male creativity (264, 268) suggests, however, that St George is merely articulating doubts which Overt



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has not yet consciously formulated. When he learns of Fancourt’s marriage to St George he poses a pertinent question: ‘Why to him, why not to youth, to strength, to ambition, to a future? Why, in her rich young capacity, to failure, to abdication, to superannuation?’ (279). One answer is that Overt left her no alternative by fleeing from her to the continent for a crucial two years in which he has only once written to her. Why he did so may be because, as he suspects, ‘Nature dedicated him to intellectual, not to personal passion’ (284). His lack of self-knowledge perhaps blinds him, however, to another explanation. For it seems that Overt does have sexual feelings, only that he is unable to channel them towards a conventional heterosexual marriage, as he has not realised that he is attracted by men rather than women. If Overt’s pursuit of Fancourt is half-hearted because of his unconscious homosexuality, St George – despite an occasional camp playfulness towards Overt, the ‘cruel youth’ (239) – displays no confusion about his sexual orientation. He refers to himself self-deprecatingly as ‘a weary, wasted, used-up animal!’ (237), but can still respond to Fancourt’s charms, as the astonishing metaphors he uses in conversation with Overt indicate: ‘ “When you’re finished, squeezed dry and used up and you think the sack’s empty, you’re still spoken to, you still get touches and thrills, the idea springs up – out of the lap of the actual – and shows you there’s always something to be done” ’ (242). Fancourt is a woman who ‘enlarges everything she touches’ (243). Such extravagant double entendres are a feature of James’s late style, which sometimes replaces his earlier indirection with a grotesque blatancy or a camp playfulness which defies the reader to take these phrases literally. Fancourt ‘gives away because she overflows’ (243), a metaphor which is developed at tedious length in The Sacred Fount (1900), where one sexual partner is held to profit at the other’s expense, by a vampire-like absorption of the other’s vital energy. Having fatally depleted his first wife, St George certainly seems regenerated in various ways by his second marriage and Overt wonders whether Fancourt’s moderate fortune would enable St George ‘to cease to work, ungratefully, an exhausted vein [i.e. to give up having to write pot-boilers]. Somehow, standing there in the ripeness of his successful manhood, he did not suggest that any of his veins were exhausted’ (283). Overt must thus wait anxiously to see if ‘at the end of a year, St George should put forth something with his early quality’ (284): literally, or figuratively, the first offspring of his rejuvenating partnership. Overt is jealous not just of St George’s success with Fancourt but also of her as a rival to his intimacy with the Master (228–9, 231, 249). His rather cerebral feelings for her contrast with his arousal by St George’s self-revelations: [Overt] throbbed with the excitement of such deep soundings and such strange confidences. He throbbed indeed with the conflict of his feelings – bewilderment and recognition and alarm, enjoyment and protest and



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Overt’s excitement reflects his gratification in being entrusted with confidences which grant him a privileged glimpse behind the public mask of the author he most admires. The register suggests, however, that there is also a homoerotic subtext in this late-night tête-à-tête.48 That St George is supposed to nurse a ‘tragic secret’ (which arouses in Overt ‘tenderness’ and ‘a kind of shame in the participation’) is mystifying, given that the mediocrity of his recent bestsellers is common knowledge. One wonders, therefore, whether Overt is projecting onto St George a ‘tragic secret’ that he half-senses in himself, like James who had written four years earlier to John Addington Symonds, conveying his enjoyment of Symonds’s writings about Italy, for which he nourished ‘an unspeakably tender passion . . . for it seemed to me that the victims of a common passion should sometimes exchange a look’ (L, III, 30). If, as one conjectures, this was a tentative intimation of James’s own homoerotic feelings, it was typical of the necessary code of such declarations in being so calculatedly ambiguous in its reference as to enable him, should a more cautious mood counsel prudence, to distance himself from any compromising implications. Overt’s feelings for St George can be understood in terms of the emergent discourse of ‘Greek love’, like the apparently Platonic relationships of mentor and protégé that James cultivated after 1899 with Hendrik Andersen, Jocelyn Persse and Hugh Walpole. The classical authority of Plato’s Symposium lent support to late Victorian apologists for same-sex passion, such as Symonds, whose pamphlet A Problem in Greek Ethics (1873; privately printed in 1883) James read, perhaps as early as 1884, when he apparently gained hints about Symonds’s then covert homosexuality from Edmund Gosse (NB, 57). He made the tentative approach to Symonds that I quoted and imagined Symonds’s strained marriage in ‘The Author of “Beltraffio” ’.49 Gosse’s comments on this drew the following reply from James: ‘Perhaps I have divined the innermost cause of J.A.S.’s discomfort – but I don’t think I seize . . . exactly the allusion you refer to. I am therefore devoured with curiosity as to this further revelation. Even a post-card (in covert words) would relieve the suspense of the perhaps-already-too-indiscreet – H.J.’50 James and Gosse shared professional interests and an unacknowledged awareness of the sexual orientation which each sensed in himself and in the other, which formed a crucial subtext of their friendship. Caution was required to safeguard their public reputation and, in Gosse’s (like Symonds’s) case, to shield his family from scandal. Yet, despite his fear of publicity, James is breathlessly eager for ‘further revelation’, even though he acknowledges



assent, all commingled with tenderness (and a kind of shame in the participation,) for the sores and bruises exhibited by so fine a creature, and with a sense of the tragic secret that he nursed under his trappings. The idea of his being made the occasion of such an act of humility made him flush and pant. (266)


that he is ‘perhaps-already-too-indiscreet’. He would naturally welcome reassurance that he was not alone in his same-sex inclination. But there is also something voyeuristic in his attitude, and, I will argue later, in his literary imagination. A similar ambivalence is evident in James’s letter to Gosse following Wilde’s ‘exposure’ and arrest. On the envelope, alluding to Symonds, James wrote: ‘Quel dommage – mais quel Bonheur – que J.A.S. ne soit plus de ce monde’.51 His realistic fear of the increasingly intrusive practices of the New Journalism dated back to the scandalous press coverage to which his father had been subjected in 1874.52 Now in 1895, as his recourse to French to further disguise his already coded comment on ‘J.A.S.’ indicates, this anxiety was compounded by the fear of being hounded as a sexual ‘invert’. Two months earlier he had declined to write an appreciation of Symonds, deterred by Symonds’s desire to publicise in A Problem in Modern Ethics (1891) what was conventionally unspeakable: ‘There were in him – things I utterly don’t understand; and a need of taking the public into his intimissima confidence which seems to me to have been almost insane.’53 Now, as the case against Wilde gathered momentum, James returned to Gosse, in registered envelopes, Symonds’s defences of homosexuality. Fearing a witchhunt, he was getting rid of incriminating circumstantial evidence. The criminalisation of private homosexual activity under the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 led to its popular appellation as the ‘Blackmailer’s Charter’. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde of that year opens with Enfield’s recollection of Hyde trampling over the body of a girl of eight or ten, like the ‘Minotaur’ in Stead’s exposé who pursues child prostitutes in London’s ‘labyrinth’ of streets. He is forced to pay hush money to cover up this violence, which surely stands figuratively for sexual violation. The cheque is drawn by Jekyll, who, it is conjectured, is being blackmailed by Hyde for unspecified, possibly homosexual indiscretions. Wilde had fallen victim to what James called ‘a nest of almost infant blackmailers’ and he was determined not to emulate Wilde’s hubristic recklessness (L, IV, 12). James’s guardedness was, it seems, reinforced until the late nineteenth century by inhibitions about the physical and literary expression of sexuality. He had initially felt nauseated by the explicitness, ‘the monstrous uncleanness’ of French Naturalist fiction, ‘that ferociously bad smell which blows through L’Assommoir like an emanation from an open drain and makes the perusal of the history of Gervaise and Coupeau very much such an ordeal as a crossing of the Channel in a November gale’. In 1888 he had bridled at Maupassant’s reduction of human experience to the ‘carnal side of man’, and had written to Bourget: ‘your out-and-out eroticism displeases me as well as this exposition of dirty linens and dirty towels. In a word, all this is far from being life as I feel it, as I see it, as I know it, as I wish to know it.’54 But this fastidiousness was offset by a sometimes prurient curiosity and an increasing urge to test the boundaries of censorship. Victorian novelists



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had often resorted to allusion and innuendo to intimate what for a family audience could not be made more explicit, save in scandalous exceptions such as Wilkie Collins’s Basil (1852). James’s controversial themes from 1888 onwards locate him in an experimental tradition where, paradoxically, it was often women writers who set the pace. This extended from the thematisation of adultery, divorce and bigamy in the sensation novel of the 1860s to the deliberate provocations of ‘New Woman’ authors such as George Egerton and the bestselling Sarah Grand, with her outspoken criticism of the dire results of women’s sexual ignorance, particularly concerning venereal disease. These emergent signs of a greater permissiveness contrasted, however, with a backlash against manifestations of whatever might be construed as homosexuality. A foretaste of what was in store after Wilde’s arrest was provided by the conservative censure of the coded homosexual references in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890–1).55 James is rarely so ‘overt’. Instead, erotic feelings find an indirect outlet in his work in his fetishisation of writing itself as a form of self-exposure, which either mediates between the writer and his interpreter, or, as an embodiment of the author’s intimate ‘secret’, becomes a surrogate for the author’s inaccessible body, onto which the fantasies of the voyeuristic reader are projected. In ‘The Death of the Lion’ (1894) Neil Paraday reads out his scheme for a new book, like one of James’s own notebook entries, which ‘might have passed for a great gossiping, eloquent letter – the overflow into talk of an artist’s amorous plan’. Listening, the narrator feels as if he were ‘in close correspondence with him – were the distinguished person to whom it had been affectionately addressed. . . . I had never been so throbbingly present at such an unveiling’ (T, 9: 82–4). As in ‘The Lesson of the Master’ and ‘The Middle Years’ (1893), the fictional reader’s sympathy with the implied author develops into a homoerotic affection for his Platonic mentor. But if self-revelation to the initiated was the Jamesian ideal, he was conscious that publication courted less welcome forms of publicity. In various ways, James feared exposure. Whereas biographers had traditionally glossed over the dubieties of their subjects’ lives, by the late nineteenth century reticence had been supplanted by candid disclosure. James found such prurient revelations, like the intrusive ferreting of the New Journalism, fascinating but distasteful and threatening.56 Despite his own insatiable curiosity, he insisted in ‘The Death of the Lion’ and ‘John Delavoy’ that the author’s private life is irrelevant; the man is his works. But he had no illusions that what the mass reading public wanted was not the author’s difficult books but rather gossip or intimate biographical details and was careful to destroy any of his own private papers that he regarded as compromising. The narrator of ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ (1896) asks Vereker whether the meaning of his works is ‘a kind of esoteric message’; he replies that ‘it can’t be described in cheap journalese’ (T, 9: 283). The antithesis (as in James’s



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other tales) is between a voluntary, private ‘initiation’ to a young disciple or the select few, and gross publicity, in the form either of being turned into a ‘celebrity’ or of being traduced by incomprehending reviewers. ‘You’ll tell me then in the morning that you’ve laid me bare?’ Vereker jokes to the narrator puzzling over his books (285). By contrast in ‘The Death of the Lion’ the journalist narrator initially plans to ‘lay my lean hands’ on Paraday who ‘hasn’t been touched’ for, as his editor asks, ‘was not an immediate exposure of everything just what the public wanted?’ (T, 9: 77–9). The quest to uncover the author is the leitmotiv of ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, where critical attempts at ‘unveiling’ Hugh Vereker’s ‘mystery’ have failed, until George Corvick apparently intuits from his books the ‘secret’ of Vereker’s literary ‘passion’.57 To possess this, Gwendolen Erme is prepared to marry Corvick, who supposedly gives her ‘the satisfaction she desired’ (T, 9: 301) on their wedding night. The inquisitive narrator, debarred from access to this primal scene, which conflates textual and carnal knowledge, wonders: ‘had she seen the idol unveiled? Had there been a private ceremony for a palpitating audience of one? For what else but that ceremony had the previous ceremony [their marriage] been enacted?’ (305) After Corvick’s accidental death, the narrator unsuccessfully importunes his widow for the secret. She remarries and after her death he learns that her second husband seemingly also hadn’t been adjudged worthy of the secret, leaving both men ‘victims of unappeased desire’ (312, 315). This allegorical paper-chase recalls ‘The Aspern Papers’ (1888), whose voyeuristic narrator wants papers which, he suspects, record the poet Jeffrey Aspern’s liaison with Juliana Bordereau.58 (Her surname suggests that she is both woman and text.) To gain ‘possession’ of this titillating material (and thus vicariously of the lovers’ intimacies) he must, however, pay a price which, until it is too late, he regards as too high: marriage to a woman who is perhaps Aspern’s and Bordereau’s illegitimate daughter. The narrator in ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ also wonders whether ‘I should have to marry Mrs Corvick to get what I wanted. Was I prepared to offer her this price for the blessing of her knowledge?’ (306). In both tales what is connoted by ‘Aspern’ or ‘Vereker’ is variously ‘the man’ and ‘the books’: what both narrators desire is the the male author, whom they can approach only indirectly through a heterosexual marriage that is the involuntary condition for ‘initiation’ into the Master’s innermost secrets.59 This erotic investment in writing is a Jamesian obsession. It could be argued that what is going on in these tales is a sublimation of sexuality: both narrators are uninterested in the real thing rather than its evocation on paper, preferring textual to sexual passion. Alternatively, one might suggest that what is taking place is not sublimation but rather a displacement of sexuality: the writings which harbour the author’s ‘secret’ become a fetish which is eroticised, an ‘idol’ to be unveiled. The importance of this voyeurism for James’s imagination of late Victorian London is analysed in the



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following pages, in connection with the observant lower-class onlookers in The Princess Casamassima and ‘In the Cage’ who serve as his personae.

The Princess Casamassima has usually been discussed as a novel about the international anarchist movement. It should rather be seen as voicing the widespread middle-class trepidation that, stirred by socialist agitators, London’s artisans might join forces with the ‘residuum’ in a wide-based insurrection.60 It was written following a series of terrorist bombings in London in 1883–5; halfway through its serialisation, in February 1886 when the coldest winter for thirty years brought outdoor work to a standstill, the unemployed rioted in the West End. James later commented: ‘My scheme called for the suggested nearness (to all our apparently ordered life) of some sinister anarchic underworld, heaving in its pain, its power and its hate; a presentation not of sharp particulars, but of loose appearances, vague motions and sounds and symptoms, just perceptible presences and general looming possibilities’ (LC2, 1100). He evokes the foreboding of privileged Londoners confronting a largely unknown danger, which they inform with the deepest anxieties of their own ‘underworld’. In the early 1880s the selective view of East Enders promoted in Walter Besant’s influential All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882) was that they were ‘not poor and in misery, but for the most part fairly well off’; their real problem was allegedly the joyless monotony of their lives. Besant’s heiress heroine therefore employs the wealth of her family’s brewery to bring sweetness and light to Stepney by setting up a progressive dressmaking cooperative and building the fictional prototype of the People’s Palace, which will co-opt the respectable working class through paternalistic acculturation or ‘refinement’.61 The trade depression of the mid-1880s provoked gloomier assessments, however. Andrew Mearns’s The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Enquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor (1883) generated tremendous media interest, stimulating a plethora of further publications on the topic, and provoking the establishment in 1884–5 of a Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes.62 Such tracts, investigative reports and investigative journalism find an ironic echo in the questions Sholto poses to Muniment about ‘the state of the labour market at the East End’, ‘the terrible case of the old woman who had starved to death at Walham Green’, the ‘sanitary arrangements’ in a tenement, and so forth (N, 180, 182). Whereas such issues had aroused Ruskin’s moral indignation, Sholto’s inquiry merely subserves the Princess’s latest fad of ‘slumming’, rather than the idealistic soul-searching of her fictional predecessor, Besant’s dea ex machina.63 The credibility of a social conscience is further undermined by Lady Aurora. Her plainness and lack of a dowry mean that, at the age of thirty, her prospects in the marriage



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market are negligible. Instead, in seeking a meaningful vocation in social work, she epitomises a growing trend among upper-class and upper-middle-class women. Had James wished to treat such female philanthropists realistically, he could have created a character like the Fabian Beatrice Potter (Webb) who, in the mid-1880s, worked as a rent-collector in Whitechapel and wrote accounts of working conditions in the East End that were published in Booth’s survey of London labour and the London poor. But Aurora’s charitable activities are never described; instead, she remains a sentimental abstraction, whose involvement in social questions is largely reduced to a love-interest in that, like the Princess, she is infatuated by the agitator Muniment. The same applies to Hyacinth Robinson’s flirtation with radicalism, which is similarly inspired by his attraction to the charismatic Muniment. The novel alternates between two Londons: the one consciously apprehended, the other infiltrating itself into consciousness as it is overheard or looms out of the foggy obscurity. Passages of Impressionist light and colour evoke the consumer spectacle of the streets, the urban pastoral of Hyde Park, and the grimy magnificence and imperial grandeur of the river between Westminster and Greenwich. London is ‘the richest expression of the life of man’; its exhilarating vastness is conveyed in variegated social and architectural sweeps between Camberwell and Islington, and through west London districts from Marylebone and Paddington down to Pimlico.64 The energies of the metropolis are personified in the temperamentally and physically exuberant Millicent Henning. Her robustiness stands, however, in stark contrast to London’s diseased body politic (‘the monstrosity of the great ulcers and sores of London’) and to the disturbing ‘groan’ – the Bitter Cry of Outcast London – that is attributed to it (N, 241, 250). Unlike Ruskin, James offers no analysis of metropolitan ‘illth’. Instead, Hyacinth’s proletarian ‘London’ is a phantasmagoria of the middle-class fantasies which I discussed in Chapter 3: Bedraggled figures passed in and out, and a damp, tattered, wretched man, with a spongy, purple face, who had been thrust suddenly across the threshold, stood and whimpered in the brutal blaze of the row of lamps. The puddles glittered roundabout, and the silent vista of the street, bordered with low black houses, stretched away, in the wintry drizzle, to right and left, losing itself in the huge tragic city, where unmeasured misery lurked beneath the dirty night, ominously, monstrously, still, only howling, in its pain, in the heated human cockpit behind him. (N, 251) The chiaroscuro conveys a sense of latent menace, a fear of the destructive and self-destructive potential of the anonymous masses, and an existential vision of the abyss of streets beneath what later descriptions emphasize as the inscrutable night sky (N, 438, 513). The inductive progression from the fortuitously observed ‘whimpering’ alcoholic to the ‘howling’



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There were nights when every one he met appeared to reek with gin and filth, and he found himself elbowed by figures as foul as lepers. Some of the women and girls, in particular, were appalling – saturated with alcohol and vice, brutal, bedraggled, obscene. . . . he wondered what fate there could be, in the great scheme of things, for a planet overgrown with such vermin, what redemption but to be hurled against a ball of consuming fire. (N, 438) The urban fear of ‘contamination’ by ‘riff-raff’ culminates in the topical discourse of degeneration. The socialist characters postulate a melodramatic antithesis between ‘misery’ (a buzzword in pamphlets of the time) and ‘shameless satiety’ (N, 241, 250, 252, 438), reducing politics to a contest between the possessive greed of opposing egoisms, in keeping with their own self-interested pretence to a charitable or conspiratorial sympathy with the underclass. This failure to conceive what the legitimate aspirations of the underprivileged might be is underlined by their and James’s inability to imagine any alternative to the existing order that is not simply destructive. Instead, what we get through Hyacinth’s perceiving consciousness is an aesthetic revulsion against the ‘ugliness’ of working-class life. His handicraft as a bookbinder associates him by implication with the Arts and Crafts movement, but his cultivation of ‘beauty’ bears no resemblance to the Ruskin-inspired radicalism of William Morris (N, 228–9). His ‘slumming’ visits to working-class dwellings take place offstage; their squalor is indescribable (N, 358). By contrast, what is made visible is the affront to his ‘finest discriminations’ by the vulgar decor of pubs and the Princess’s lodgings in Madeira Crescent (N, 111–12, 375– 80). These anticipations of Fleda Vetch’s disgust in The Spoils of Poynton with the tasteless furnishings at Waterbath make clear that The Princess Casamassima is not a political novel. Instead, it voices the anxiety of a fastidious sensibility about the threats posed by Philistinism and Anarchy to the elitist Culture it holds so precious. It seems that, with an eye to the market, James simply appropriated modish themes as the background to Hyacinth’s aesthetic ‘adventure’. Although, like his French Naturalist confrères, he did engage in documentary research, visiting Millbank Prison and reading works on the international anarchist movement, his interest was not in radicalism or ‘misery’ but in the response to these of an atypical working-class figure whom he endowed with a sensibility like his own. From the outset it is clear that, despite Hyacinth’s intermittent



city has a plausibility otherwise lacking in Hyacinth’s impressionistic social analysis. James focuses selectively on the skilled working classes. When the ‘populace’ do emerge, they appear to Hyacinth, as in James’s notebooks and essays on London, as nightmarish embodiments of degradation:


delusion that he can identify with the populace, he is at heart a patrician aesthete. What is interesting, in the context of James’s imagination of London, is the emotional situation he represents. In A Small Boy and Others (1913) the self-image which James traces back or projects onto his childhood self is of someone ‘in whom contemplation takes so much the place of action’: ‘there was the very pattern and measure of all he was to demand: just to be somewhere – almost anywhere would do – and somehow receive an impression or an accession, feel a relation or a vibration’ (A, 17). Similarly, by class, by ethnicity and by virtue of his effeminate delicacy, Hyacinth is an outsider in London, seemingly condemned to be a mere onlooker ‘at the good things of life only through the glass of the pastry-cook’s window!’ (N, 296).65 This transparent barrier anticipates the wire cage through which the telegraphist in ‘In the Cage’ yearns for the satisfactions beyond her reach. Hyacinth’s sense of exclusion and of disinheritance leads to the desire to be ‘initiated’, to fulfil the cravings of the ego for ‘freedom and ease, knowledge and power, money, opportunity and satiety’ (N, 119–20; LC2, 1087). Like the telegraphist, he inhabits two worlds: that of ‘his work-a-day life’, and that of ‘his divination and his envy’ (LC2, 1088). In both cases, the emphasis falls on the latter, fantasy world where desire is satisfied through ‘gratification of the visual sense’: though he lived in Pentonville and worked in Soho, though he was poor and obscure and cramped and full of unattainable desires, it may be said of him that what was most important in life for him was simply his impressions. They came from everything he touched, they kept him thrilling and throbbing during a considerable part of his waking consciousness . . . Everything in the field of observation suggested this or that; everything struck him, penetrated, stirred; he had, in a word, more impressions than he knew what to do with – felt sometimes as if they would consume or asphyxiate him. (N, 112) The register suggests a sexual arousal: Hyacinth is ‘penetrated’ and ‘stirred’, overwhelmed by an orgasmic onrush of sensations which result from, and are a projection of, his own unrestrained appetite for stimulation. His ‘speculative culture’ epitomises the pursuit of momentary sensations and exquisite passions of the Paterian aesthete, who seeks to get ‘as many pulsations as possible into the given time’, for ‘To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life’.66 But the Paterian ‘appreciation’ to which James and his atypical working-class protagonists devote themselves is not merely a passive surrender to sensuous gratification. Through ‘the visual sense’ the ostensibly powerless Jamesian aesthete compensates and indulges his or her imperious ‘appetite’ for ‘possession’ (LC2, 1091, 1169).



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This is particularly evident in the case of the telegraphist at the centre of ‘In the Cage’ (1898).67 As many critics have noted, there is an implicit analogy between the novelist and the telegraphist. Like James and his other fictional readers of fetishised texts, she pieces together narratives from the suggestive données she gleans from telegrams or from observing fashionable society, filling out these ‘impressions’ and ‘divinations’ by projecting herself into people who become characters in her internal drama. Although socially and economically a marginal figure, her surreptitious, unsuspected knowledge gives her an exhilarating sense of power over the ‘secrets’ of other lives. Secure in her private conviction of superiority, she thus lives most intensely in a virtual reality that compensates for her sense of exclusion and, in its controllability, is less risky than the real thing. But why should James project this into a telegraphist, aside from the banal reason that his contact with the lower classes was restricted to those whom he encountered as servants (‘Brooksmith’ (1891)), or service sector workers, for example in the ‘postal-telegraph office’ in his ‘immediate neighbourhood’ (LC2, 1168)? Eric Savoy’s answer is that the telegraphist’s fantasies of blackmail should be linked to the ‘homosexual panic’ provoked by the scandalous revelations of the telegraph boys involved in the Cleveland Street brothel, which James displaced into the context of heterosexual transgression.68 By ignoring James’s other works and his earlier responses to sexual scandals and journalistic ‘exposure’, Savoy’s monocausal approach overemphasises the representative significance of Cleveland Street, relying on tenuous argumentative links. Thus, he makes the bald statement that the Post Office was ‘an institution associated with casual prostitution’, supporting this absurd generalisation by misreadings of the telegraphist’s suicidal deliberations by the Paddington canal as prostitutional loitering and of her rendezvous with Everard in Hyde Park as prospective prostitution rather than a sexual adventure. His equally unsubstantiated assertion that telegraphy caused a ‘class panic’ because (quoting John Carlos Rowe) ‘the secret world of the ruling class was now open to view’ is refuted by the blithe frequency with which the upper classes telegraph in other Jamesian fiction of this period.69 The suggestion that the ‘world of the ruling class’ had once been ‘secret’ overlooks the knowledge which for centuries servants had inevitably acquired of their employers’ intimate affairs, purveyed as aristocratic scandal in graphic satire and salaciously reported criminal conversation trials. In ‘In the Cage’ the person at the centre of these networks of knowledge turns out to be the butler Drake, for ‘A good servant . . . doesn’t need to be told!’ (241). Although we never learn the source of the incriminating tip-off to Bradeen, if there is a potential blackmailer, it seems it is Drake, whom ‘Her ladyship’s too glad to get’ ‘at any price’ (237). Conversely, given that, as Everard realises, transcriptions of all telegrams are held ‘on file’, Savoy’s attempt to elevate the ‘juridical’ importance of the telegraphist’s recall of their wording is unfounded and as melodramatic as her own ‘vision’ of the ‘chamber of



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justice’ where she would heroically provide not damning evidence but an ‘alibi’ (225). Interpretive guidance is offered by James’s other fiction between 1896 and 1899, which is linked by recognisably similar preoccupations. According to his Preface, the tale ponders ‘what it might “mean” ’ for ‘young officials of either sex to be made so free, intellectually, of a range of experience otherwise quite closed to them’ (LC2, 1168). The telegraphist’s ignorance of Everard’s milieu is exemplified by her interpreting his pseudonym ‘the Pink ’Un’ as alluding to his complexion (152), rather than to The Sporting Times, implying that gambling is one cause of his ‘debts’ (238). But she is not, I believe, the object of James’s irony. Instead, ‘In the Cage’ resembles What Maisie Knew (1897) and The Awkward Age as narratives concerned with an impressionable young female’s problematic ‘knowledge’ of the transgressive upper-class sexuality which surrounds her in London, just as the telegraphist’s bookish, possibly unreliable imaginings can be related to those of the governess in ‘The Turn of the Screw’ (1898). In contrast to Savoy’s, I would propose a ‘queer’ reading focused on James’s erotic imagination. The ‘cage’ of the title is literally the wire lattice which separates her post office from the grocery section of the shop and the telegraphist from her customers. Metaphorically, it represents the economic necessity which determines the characters’ actions and also the various barriers between lovers whose desires are transgressive. Everard and Lady Bradeen, like others in Mayfair, conduct their adulterous affair through coded telegram messages which pass over the voyeuristic telegraphist’s counter and allow her to participate vicariously in their liaison. Their subterfuge forces them to adopt aliases, just as, for a long time, the telegraphist disguises her emotional infidelity from her fiancé and her colleagues in the post office. Passion, it seems, must be kept secret, but the pressure of constraints or self-imposed restraint heightens its intensity. It is significant that the telegraphist not only hesitates to voice her yearning for Everard – ‘supplicating back, through the bars of the cage’ (239) – but also draws back from its consummation. She feels that the romantic idealism of their relationship would be sullied, made ‘horrid or vulgar’ (193), if physical reality intruded. Her feelings perhaps dramatise James’s own homoeroticism, legitimised for publication through the adoption of a female point of view. In both The Spoils of Poynton (1896–7) and ‘In the Cage’ the central consciousness is an outsider who adores with self-dramatising devotion an apparently unavailable man, whom she makes her protégé. Everard is described as ‘very tall, very fair’, Owen Gereth as ‘absolutely beautiful and delightfully dense’ (SP, 10): both resemble the kind of upper-class Englishman who attracted James’s ‘Greek love’. Both appreciatory observers are tempted to extend their imaginary acts of appropriation into the real thing. But in the end the telegraphist refuses to follow the siren voices of her alter ego, ‘the bad girl’; Fleda Vetch flatters herself that she is no ‘horrid mean



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girl’ and maintains her distinction from ‘one of those bad women in a play’ (SP, 79, 127). Each renounces the material and sensual ‘spoils’, enabling her beloved to marry her female rival whom he doesn’t love but to whom he is compromisingly bound. Confinement within the cage may thus also be interpreted as an entrapment by libidinous desires which one cannot or dare not live out, as Fleda holds her clandestine understanding with Owen in ‘the cage of her own passion’ (SP, 79). In its early stages their relationship is restricted to his fleeting visits to the post office and to her imaginative amplification of these. He takes no particular notice of her, the businesslike distance between them being reinforced by their social disparity, but her physical consciousness of his presence and every move is conveyed in passages charged with erotic intensity and sexual innuendo: the sense of every syllable he despatched was fiercely distinct; she indeed felt her progressive pencil, dabbing as if with a quick caress the marks of his own, put life into every stroke. He was there a long time – had not brought his forms filled out, but worked them off in a nook on the counter; and there were other people as well – a changing, pushing cluster, with every one to mind at once and endless right change to make and information to produce. But she kept hold of him throughout; she continued, for herself, in a relation with him as close as that in which, behind the hated ground glass, Mr Buckton luckily continued with the sounder. (149) These reflections veer so disconcertingly in register that it is difficult to keep track of what emanates from an authorial voice and what is coloured by the telegraphist’s own idiom. The Latinate ‘progressive’ in line two, and the syntactically elaborate parallelism of the final sentence are quintessentially Jamesian. They introduce an intellectual, distancing element at odds with the steamy excitement of ‘dabbing as if with a quick caress the marks of his own, put life into every stroke’. One should presumably link this overwritten, mildly pornographic phrase with the telegraphist’s ha’penny novels, indicating how they have shaped her imagination. But given that ‘In the Cage’ often resorts to a mannered indirection or euphemism to contain its explosive sexual material, it is tempting to see the stylistic instability as enacting not just the telegraphist’s but also James’s struggle between explicitness and selfrestraint. As another example, take the telegraphist’s observation of Lady Bradeen, from whose body she tries to infer the traces of Everard’s sexual contacts: The girl looked straight through the cage at the eyes and lips that must so often have been so near his own – looked at them with a strange passion that, for an instant, had the result of filling out some of the gaps, supplying



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the missing answers, in his correspondence. Then, as she made out that the features she thus scanned and associated were totally unaware of it, that they glowed only with the colour of quite other and not at all guessable thoughts, this directly added to their splendour, gave the girl the sharpest impression she had yet received of the uplifted, the unattainable plains of heaven, and yet at the same time caused her to thrill with a sense of the high company she did somehow keep. She was with the absent through her ladyship and with her ladyship through the absent. (180) The narrator starts by identifying with the telegraphist’s yearning gaze, from which he then distances himself in the analytical commentary that follows, only to slip back into her point of view and conclude with phrases that again reproduce the register of popular romance. What excites her is a heady mixture of ambition and sexual desire. Her impressions alternate between gushy exaltation and coy suggestiveness of sexual arousal. The demureness is in keeping with her ha’penny novels. But the passage contains another voice too: that of the narrator, whose cerebral style the reader must decode in order to appreciate what is both revealed and concealed. Rarely can something as erotic in its implications as her voyeuristic fantasy in which each lover alternately gives her access to the other’s body have been expressed with such deliberate obliquity. Despite such frissons, the tantalising proximity but unattainability of what she desires is intolerable; she must meet him outside the professional constraints of the cage. After her infatuation has led her to make repeated detours past his apartment, one August evening she sees him emerge from the vestibule. He is evidently at a loose end in the deserted, post-Season metropolis and, she realises, on the lookout for any attractive young woman who might divert him. Once he recognises her, her concern is to preserve her reputation and her self-respect: her exclamation ‘Oh, I don’t take walks at night!’ (187) signals that he should not think of her as ‘the very shopgirl at large that she hugged the theory she was not’ (188). The Victorian male assumption that milliners and shopgirls were promiscuous and sexually available forms the subtext of their encounter. Her need to distance herself from any imputation of fastness presumably reflects her intuition that he may be a womaniser and her fervent hope that this may not turn out to be the case, but also her own imagination of their meeting, which was premeditated on her part, as a kind of assignation. She is thus relieved and pleased that he takes no liberty and wonders ‘whether people of his sort still asked girls up to their rooms when they were so awfully in love with other women’, realising intuitively ‘that people of her sort didn’t, in such cases, matter – didn’t count as infidelity, counted only as something else: she might have been curious, since it came to that, to see exactly what’ (188). Later, after they have sat down together in Hyde Park, this awkwardness



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again surfaces in her self-conscious awareness that in the deepening twilight ‘there were other couples on other benches, whom it was impossible not to see, yet at whom it was impossible to look’ (190–1). In this complex scene the reader too is trapped within the ‘cage’ of the telegraphist’s construction of reality. What is clear, to both reader and telegraphist, is the discrepancy between the sexual implications of their situation and the idealised image of Everard and the refined self-image which she struggles to preserve. What is unclear – given Everard’s elliptical utterances and the questionable reliability of her observations and conjectures – is whether to some degree he reciprocates her feelings. Savoy suggests that, following the telegraphist’s intimidating revelation to Lady Bradeen that she is party to their secrets (180–3), Everard’s aim is to sound out her knowledge and her possible intention of blackmail. But if this were a major concern, would he not have actively sought a meeting with her instead of this, for him, fortuitous encounter? I believe James’s focus lies instead on the telegraphist’s inner drama. One important theme is her ‘testing him with chances he didn’t take’, pleased that he ‘didn’t seize the opportunities into which a common man would promptly have blundered’. Thus she puts a positive gloss on his not inviting her to supper, which would not only have been a crass seduction ploy but also have implied that he saw her as the kind of ‘barmaid’ or ‘shopgirl’ who might be amenable to such overtures (189). Later, when he does make an appeal of this kind, and even places his hand on hers, she rejects it, just as she resists his final attempts to take her hand and to see her home (192, 199). Mudge’s later incredulity that Everard did not pursue her sexually (205–6) indicates the ‘vulgar’ expectations she consciously opposes. In her eyes, the ‘beauty’ of her climactic declaration that ‘I’d do anything for you’ is that ‘the place, the associations and circumstances’ perfectly ‘make it sound what it was not’. It was ‘as if they had been on a satin sofa in a boudoir’ (194), with the difference that she is determined to avoid a physical consummation of this novelistic fantasy. Instead, expressing the self-sacrificial ideal of the ‘lady-telegraphist’, she will, like a female courtly lover, continue to worship him from afar (173–4). The generic instability of this tragi-comic scene corresponds to the tangled emotions involved. A humorous note is introduced by Everard’s obtuseness and the boyish unselfconsciousness of his egoistic satisfaction at her devotion to him. This jars, however, with the pathos of what, in her emotional neediness, the telegraphist projects into him – particularly if one recognises a structural similarity between this scene and Laura Wing’s self-exposure to the bewildered Wendover in ‘A London Life’. Wounded by the realisation that he has no conception of the depth of her attachment, as he looms larger in her imagination than she in his, she struggles to hold on to what increasingly seems a delusion, ignoring his reiterated plea to ‘See here – see here!’ (199). There is a close parallel with Owen Gereth’s cryptic farewell to



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Fleda Vetch in Kensington Gardens: ‘I want you to understand, you know – I want you to understand’ (SP, 49–50). How one interprets Everard’s oracular phrase determines one’s interpretation of the confused actions which follow. Was it, however ineffectually, intended as a romantic protestation, as the telegraphist later inclines to believe: ‘She seemed, whatever it was, perfectly to see it now – to see that if she should just chuck the whole thing, should have a great and beautiful courage, he would somehow make everything up to her’ (210). What passed between them in the Park has transformed their relationship: now, as he hovers agitatedly in the post office, wanting but unable to communicate something privately to her, and they exchange furtive glances and feign indifference in front of the staff and customers, it is indeed as if they have a liaison. Thus, for example, he slips her a telegram, which he immediately retracts, comprising only two words: ‘Absolutely impossible’ (215). She decodes this ‘abject little exposure of dreadful, impossible passion’ (216) as meaning that his affair with Lady Bradeen is absolutely impossible until he has settled matters at the post office. But it subsequently seems that it might be their affair which is absolutely impossible, as he cannot free himself from the pull of Lady Bradeen. Everard’s overwrought behaviour may, however, be interpreted as caused not, or not only, by the triangular relationship with her in which the telegraphist presumes that he, like herself, is involved. Instead, he may simply be alarmed by the escalating crisis in his adulterous liaison, as it seems that Lady Bradeen is now pregnant (cf. 239–40). Her imagined grand passion excites and terrifies her; she is tempted to throw herself at him but, frightened of the consequences, so that paradoxically ‘to be in the cage had suddenly become her safety, and she was literally afraid of the alternate self who might be waiting outside. He might be waiting; it was he who was her alternate self’ (213–14). This inner conflict is acted out in her vacillation between what is represented by Mudge and Everard, onto whom she projects contradictory aspects of her personality and with whom she plots generically different lives. Initially she had recoiled from the oppressive finality of her ‘contracted future’ in Chalk Farm, in a marriage of convenience imagined as scarcely more appealing than the Naturalist narrative of her family’s decline into shabby gentility and alcoholism. Nevertheless, when, in her final disillusionment, she draws back from the extravagant gesture of a Liebestod (despite her earlier view that her evening rendezvous with Everard had established ‘on the part of each a consciousness that could end only with death’ (209)), her decision is an acceptance of the reality principle. Depending on one’s perspective, this is a belated acknowledgement of Mudge’s resourcefulness and ‘redemptive’ potential, the defeat of a ‘trapped creature’, or a pragmatic acquiescence in the dictates of the social Darwinist ‘race for life’ (161).70 By contrast, she plots her relationship with Everard alternately as a romance or a melodrama. In the former, like Mrs Jordan, she speculates that



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her upper-class ‘connection’ might culminate in marriage. In the latter, she figures as the passionate, reckless ‘bad girl’, who profits imaginatively from her voyeuristic power over him. But although she fantasises that this ‘bad girl’ might blackmail him, she is reluctant to name ‘the purchasing medium’ which wouldn’t ‘be anything so gross as money’ (176). The linguistic elusiveness of her musings reflects her evasiveness towards her desires. Some indications are offered in the Park scene by the metaphor she applies to Everard’s remark about ‘the trouble you so often take for me’: ‘for herself, the trouble she had taken could only, in these fleeting minutes – they would probably never come back – be all there like a little hoard of gold in her lap. Certainly he might look at it, handle it, take up the pieces. Yet if he understood anything he must understand all’ (190). Earlier, as the gold sovereigns and the transgressive telegrams passed across her counter, the telegraphist had reflected bitterly on ‘the golden shower flying about without a gleam of gold for herself’ (154). The immediate referent is to the thoughtless extravagance of the rich, but the metaphor surely also recalls Danaë’s impregnation by Zeus in the guise of a shower of gold. This sexual connotation is now taken up in the ‘little hoard of gold in her lap’ which Everard might look at and handle, as she mentally prepares to reveal all to him. It also represents what she takes to be her accumulated credit with him, despite her explicit ‘horror’ of ‘having seemed to hang about for some reward’ (190). Her emotional state resembles not that of a blackmailer but rather the Victorian stereotype of the lower-class mistress or sweetheart who stands in the way of a dynastic or mercenary marriage and must, in his best interests, relinquish her lover. It is in keeping with the logic of this novelistic fantasy that later ‘the frenzy of her imagination’ gives her the ‘vision’ of Everard’s trying to slip her sovereigns over the post office counter – not blackmail but the kind of payment conventionally made to a former or prospective mistress. In her high-minded decline of any ‘reward’ other than moral satisfaction, the telegraphist recalls Fleda Vetch. She also resembles Fleda in that the subjective nobility of her sacrifice is appreciated neither by Everard nor Mudge, just as Mrs Gereth cannot comprehend Fleda’s quixotic renunciation of Owen. I have argued that interpretations must locate ‘In the Cage’ not only in the discursive and physical spaces of late Victorian London but also within the imaginative preoccupations of James’s œuvre as a whole. The epistemological uncertainties of his late work demonstrate with unusual clarity the ineluctable subjectivity of all constructions of ‘London’. They also herald the increasing solipsism of High Modernist representations of that ‘Unreal City’. But those, alas, lie beyond the bounds of this study.



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Place of publication is London, unless otherwise indicated.

Preface 1. By contrast, Julian Wolfreys’s deconstructionist Writing London: The Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to Dickens (Basingstoke, 1998) is concerned exclusively with the textual ‘London’. 2. On this distinction, see Malcolm Waters, Modern Sociological Theory (1994). Anthony Giddens’s theory of ‘structuration’ seems to me a more appropriate model. 3. Don Slater, Consumer Culture and Modernity (Cambridge, 1997), p. 84; my previous sentence draws on pp. 16–24, 83ff. 4. Amanda Anderson critiques the inconsistencies of Armstrong, Poovey and Langland in ‘The Temptations of Aggrandized Agency: Feminist Histories and the Horizon of Modernity’, VS, 43 (2000–1) 43–65. 5. John Tosh, ‘What Should Historians do with Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth-Century Britain’, History Workshop Journal, 38 (1994) 179–202; 198.

1


1. Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance (Oxford, 1989); Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, 1998), pp. 281–2, 290–1. 2. On Vauxhall as an ‘early-modern consumer wonderland’, see Miles Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies, 1680–1780 (New York, 1998), Ch. 4. 3. Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker [1771], ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth, 1975), pp. 119–20; cf. pp. 65–6. 4. Diana Donald, The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III (New Haven, 1996), pp. 78–85. 5. Amanda Foreman, ‘A Politician’s Politician: Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and the Whig Party’, in Gender in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (Harlow, 1997), pp. 183–7; Donald, The Age of Caricature, pp. 124–8. 6. Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter, p. 230; M. Dorothy George, Hogarth to Cruikshank: Social Change in Graphic Satire (1967), p. 77; Donald, The Age of Caricature pp. 133–9, 230–1. 7. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, 3rd edition [1799], ed. R.W. Chapman and J.D. Fleeman (Oxford, 1970), pp. 959–60. 8. Smollett, Humphry Clinker, p. 118. The discursive context is discussed in John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought (Baltimore, 1977), pp. 90–100. 9. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 5th edition [1789], ed. Edwin Cannan, 2 vols. (1904; rpt. Chicago, 1976), II, p. 317. 10. William Hazlitt, ‘On Thomson and Cowper’ (1818), in Lectures on the English Poets, and The Spirit of the Age (1955), pp. 101–2. 250



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11. Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (1994), pp. 261–5; 1805 Prelude, VII, 630–3, in William Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (New York, 1979). 12. ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’, in William Wordsworth, The Poems, ed. John O. Hayden, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth, 1977), I, pp. 574–5; compare ‘[St Paul’s]’ (1808), pp. 798–9. 13. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France [1790], ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth, 1978), pp. 160–1. 14. John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (1997), pp. 387–8; Stephen Inwood, A History of London (1998), pp. 303–4. 15. See works in the Guildhall collection by Rowlandson, George Woodward, Robert Dighton and M. Egerton. 16. Compare Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England [1845], in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 4 (1975), p. 329; Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (1840), in The Portable Poe, ed. Philip Van Doren Stern (Harmondsworth, 1977), p. 108. 17. Louis Hawes, Presences of Nature: British Landscape 1780–1830 (New Haven, 1982), pp. 100–3, 193–4. 18. The Paintings of J. M. W. Turner, ed. Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, revised edition ( New Haven, 1984), No. 97. 19. ‘London’, in Nineteenth-Century Women Poets, ed. Isobel Armstrong and Joseph Bristow with Cath Sharrock (Oxford, 1996), pp. 65–6. 20. Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), pp. 117–27. 21. Ralph Hyde, Panoramania! (1988); Stephan Oettermann, Das Panorama (Frankfurt a.M., 1980); Heinz Buddemeier, Panorama, Diorama, Photographie (München, 1970). 22. On the first point, see London – World City 1800–1840, ed. Celina Fox (New Haven, 1992), pp. 35–6, 51, 56–7. 23. Getting London in Perspective, ed. Ralph Hyde, John Hoole and Tomoko Sato (1984), No. 12 and p. 17. 24. London – World City, ed. Fox, Nos. 5, 6. 25. Ibid., Nos. 117, 118; Mireille Galinou and John Hayes, London in Paint: Oil Paintings in the Collection at the Museum of London (1996), pp. 201–3. 26. See London from the Roof of the Albion Mills: A Facsimile of Robert and Henry Aston Barker’s Panorama of 1792–3. Introduction by Ralph Hyde. Keys by Peter Jackson (1988). The Eidometropolis is discussed in Hyde, Panoramania, pp. 67–8, and London – World City, ed. Fox, No. 230. 27. London – World City, ed. Fox, p. 54; Hyde, Albion Mills Facsimile, n.p. 28. The cartoon is reproduced in London – World City, ed. Fox, p. 55. 29. Robert Southey, Letters from England [1807], ed. Jack Simmons (1951), p. 408. 30. Ibid., p. 153. 31. On the contrast between ‘voyeurs’ and ‘walkers’, see Michel de Certeau’s influential The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, 1984), Ch. 7. 32. Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity, Chs. 3, 5, and 6; John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (1989), Ch. 8. 33. Inwood, History of London, pp. 376–9, 594–7. 34. ‘Wakefield’, in Nathaniel Hawthorne, Tales and Sketches ( New York, 1982), pp. 290–8. 35. For reproductions, see London – World City, ed. Fox, pp. 22, 27, 30, 31, 36, 101–2, 169, 187.



Notes


36. George, Hogarth to Cruikshank, pp. 166–9. 37. Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles: Society, Etiquette and the Season (1973), p. 23; George, Hogarth to Cruikshank, pp. 163–4. 38. Donald J. Olsen, The Growth of Victorian London (Harmondsworth, 1979), pp. 245–6. 39. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 [1992] (1996), pp. 226–30, 246–7. On the improvisation and pragmatic compromise involved, however, see J. Mordaunt Crook’s revisionist essay in London – World City, ed. Fox, pp. 77–96. 40. Nash (1812), quoted in ‘The Objects of Street Improvement in Regency and Early Victorian London’, in H.J. Dyos, Exploring the Urban Past, ed. David Cannadine and David Reeder (Cambridge, 1982), p. 82. 41. See John Summerson, Georgian London, revised edition (Harmondsworth, 1978). 42. Reproductions from the former are in London – World City, ed. Fox, pp. 84–90. 43. Thomas Shepherd and James Elmes, London and its Environs in the Nineteenth Century [1829] (1983), pp. 1, 36. 44. Alex Potts, ‘Picturing the Modern Metropolis: Images of London in the Nineteenth Century’, History Workshop Journal, 26 (Autumn 1988) 28–56; 52, 56, 50, cf. 37; third quotation from Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (Ithaca, NY, 1995), p. 23, paraphrasing Will Vaughan. 45. Compare Gavin Stamp, The Changing Metropolis: Earliest Photographs of London 1839–79 (Harmondsworth, 1986), pp. 65, 93, 96, 109–11, 114, 136, 176; Mike Seaborne, Photographers’ London 1839–1994 (1995), pp. 47, 74, 77. 46. Penelope J. Corfield, ‘Walking the City Streets: The Urban Odyssey in EighteenthCentury England’, Journal of Urban History, 16 (February 1990) 132–74; 154–5. 47. G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 1992), Ch. 2; Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford, 1994), pp. 20–35. 48. On plebeian culture, see Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, 1995). 49. In the Guildhall Library collection. 50. L.D. Schwarz, London in the Age of Industrialisation (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 85–7, 94, 102.

2

Gendered London

1. Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (Oxford, 1981), pp. 50–1. 2. Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm (Oxford, 1992), pp. 220–4. See Stewart Crehan, Blake in Context (Dublin, 1984); Michael Ferber, The Social Vision of William Blake (Princeton, 1985); Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld (Cambridge, 1988), and E.P. Thompson, Witness against the Beast (Cambridge, 1993). 3. William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice [1793; 3rd edition 1798], ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth, 1976), p. 182; cf. pp. 148–9, 580–1. 4. The Poems of William Blake, ed. W.H. Stevenson (1971), pp. 60–1, 216, 219. Subsequent references to Blake’s prophetic books in this edition use the following abbreviations: FZ (Four Zoas), J ( Jerusalem), MHH (Marriage of Heaven and Hell), M (Milton), U (Urizen). The influence on his early work of the neighbourhoods in which Blake lived is traced in Stanley Gardner, The Tyger, the Lamb, and the Terrible Desart (1998). 5. Poems, pp. 212, 146, 216–17, 172–86. 6. Blake, Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford, 1979), p. 393.



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253

7. Revelation 13: 16–17. See Thompson, Witness, pp. 179–83, 189–90. 8. My interpretation is inevitably partial, given the recalcitrant idiosyncrasies of Blake’s syncretic imagination and at times arcane sources. For an overview, see Leslie Tannenbaum, Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies (Princeton, 1982) and the edition of The Book of Urizen by Kay Parkhurst Easson and Roger R. Easson (1979), pp. 94–7. 9. Paradise Lost, VII, 211–12, 224–37, in The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (1968), pp. 787–9. What Milton referred to as Christ’s ‘golden compasses’ appear in FZ, II, 239, 351–2. 10. Blake, ‘To Nobodaddy’, Poems, p. 155. 11. Urizen’s attempt to kill Fuzon is described in the Book of Ahania, 1–131, in Poems, pp. 269–74. Earlier, in Urizen Ch. VII, Los binds Orc, in a typological parallel to Laius and Œdipus, to Abraham and Isaac, and to Zeus and Prometheus. The link between these œdipal anxieties and revolutionary politics is indicated in Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789–1820) (New Haven, 1983), p. 24. 12. FZ, VIIa, 27–39; cf. Ahania, 103–29. 13. This final rejection of the revolutionary violence which up to the end of FZ Blake had envisaged as the agent of social transformation is not a repudiation of his earlier radicalism. Instead, the struggle of the prophet-artist Blake/Los to overcome his vengeful Spectre (or integrate this aggression), which is paralleled by a plea for moderation in peace treaties with France, acknowledges that, without a change of heart to break the cycle of retaliation, one form of tyranny will merely be replaced by another. 14. J, 32. 23–4, 24. 23–5; cf. 4. 26–5. 15, 10. 7–16, 28, 29. 15. Christopher Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England (1971), pp. 114–15. On late eighteenth-century millenarianism, see Clarke Garrett, Respectable Folly (Baltimore, 1975) and J.F.C. Harrison, The Second Coming (1979). 16. J, 27, 16. 28ff., 71.1–72.31; M, 1, 6. 17. See The London Encyclopaedia, ed. Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert (1987). 18. J, 24. 31–5; 45. 14–28; 83. 87–84. 12. 19. J, 34. 54–35. 3; 12. 15; cf. 37. 15–20. 20. L.D. Schwarz, London in the Age of Industrialisation (Cambridge, 1992), Ch. 7; Iorwerth Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London (Baton Rouge, 1979), Chs. 4, 11. 21. Schwarz, London in the Age of Industrialisation, p. 204. 22. Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, 1995), pp. 119–31. 23. On Blake’s depictions of women, see the essays by Susan Fox and Alicia Ostriker in Essential Articles for the Study of William Blake, 1970–1984, ed. Nelson Hilton (Hamden, Conn., 1986); and the bibliographical survey in Helen P. Bruder, William Blake and the Daughters of Albion (Basingstoke, 1997). 24. Revelation, 17:5, FZ, VIII, 318, J, 75. 1, 18–20. On ‘maternal/Humanity’ and Deism, see J, 66. 1–15, 90. 65–6, 93. 18–26. 25. Compare my comments on Wollstonecraft in Chapter 7. 26. Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (1950), p. 216. 27. For debate on this point, see the references in Chapter 8, nn. 13–19. 28. On the latter, see Clark, Struggle for the Breeches, pp. 51–2, 55–7. 29. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater [1821], ed. Alethea Hayter (Harmondsworth, 1975), p. 50.



Notes


30. Charles Lamb, letter 15 February 1802, in The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. Edwin W. Marrs, Jr. (Ithaca, NY, 1975–), II, p. 57. 31. Don Juan, XI, 30, cancelled stanza, in Lord Byron: Don Juan, ed. T. G. Steffan, E. Steffan and W. W. Pratt (Harmondsworth, 1977), p. 696. 32. Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford, 1994), p. 90. 33. Lamb, Letters, II, pp. 57–8. 34. Lamb, Letters, I, p. 267. 35. Ibid., p. 248; cf. Boswell, London Journal, pp. 227, 237, 255. 36. Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy [1768], ed. Graham Petrie (Harmondsworth, 1975), pp. 73–8, 89–92, 115–18, 120–2. 37. M. Dorothy George, Hogarth to Cruikshank: Social Change in Graphic Satire (1967), fig. 65. 38. For reproductions, see Susan P. Casteras, Images of Victorian Womanhood in English Art (Rutherford, 1987) fig. 112; and Celina Fox, Londoners (1987), p. 167. Although Hunt’s painting is signed and dated 1881, the costume depicted is of the period 1858–60. 39. Penelope J. Corfield, ‘Walking the City Streets: The Urban Odyssey in EighteenthCentury England’, Journal of Urban History, 16 (February 1990), pp. 138, 164. Diana Donald, The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III (New Haven, 1996), p. 224 lists prints depicting aristocratic rakes. 40. Boswell, London Journal, pp. 64–5; references below to pp. 230–1, 241, 255–6, 272–3, 280, 332–3. 41. Byron, Don Juan, XII, 46. 42. 1805 Prelude, VII, 634–42. 43. For alternative interpretations, see Lawrence Kramer, ‘Gender and Sexuality in The Prelude: The Question of Book Seven’, ELH, 54 (Fall 1987) 619–37; and Mary Jacobus, Romanticism, Writing and Sexual Difference (Oxford, 1989), pp. 206–23. 44. Cf. OED ‘gay’ adj. 2. 45. John Worthen, The Gang: Coleridge, the Hutchinsons and the Wordsworths in 1802 (New Haven, 2001), pp. 121–4, 225–34. 46. That his poetry in the 1790s dwells frequently on the fate of abandoned women, is a critical commonplace. 47. De Quincey, Confessions, p. 65. 48. Wordsworth was seven when his mother died and he was separated from his sister, Dorothy, whom he did not see again for nine years. The traumatic impact on Wordsworth of his mother’s death is the theme of Richard J. Onorato, The Character of the Poet: Wordsworth in ‘The Prelude’ (Princeton, 1971), with whose interpretation of the child at Sadler’s Wells I concur. 49. William Wordsworth, The Poems, ed. John O. Hayden, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth, 1977), I, p. 364. 50. 1799 Prelude, II, 267–310; The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (New York, 1979), pp. 20–1. 51. Clark, Struggle for the Breeches, pp. 48–62; Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society (Cambridge, 1980). 52. ‘Jenny’, in Rossetti’s Poems, ed. Oswald Doughty (1961), pp. 67–8. 53. See Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur (New York, 1976); Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley, 1978); Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, Mass., 1982); Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love ( New York, 1988).



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54. Elisabeth Badinter, Die Identität des Mannes (München, 1993), Erster Teil; Chodorow, Reproduction of Mothering, Ch. 11. 55. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather (New York, 1995), p. 29. The equivalent in orthodox Judaism would be infant circumcision, excising the fleshly trace (the vagina-like foreskin) of an original bisexuality (Badinter, Die Identität des Mannes, p. 71). 56. Quoted in Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989), p. 606. 57. On ‘hegemonic masculinity’, see Tim Carrigan, Bob Connell and John Lee, ‘Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity’, in The Making of Masculinities, ed. Harry Brod (Boston, 1987), pp. 91–5, and Connell’s later work. 58. Leonore Davidoff, ‘Class and Gender in Victorian England’, in Sex and Class in Women’s History, ed. Judith L. Newton, Mary P. Ryan and Judith R. Walkowitz (1983), pp. 23–30. 59. Theresa McBride, ‘ “As the Twig is Bent”: the Victorian Nanny’, in The Victorian Family: Structure and Stresses, ed. Anthony S. Wohl (1978), p. 51. 60. Sigmund Freud, Briefe an Wilhelm Fließ 1887–1904, ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Frankfurt a.M., 1986), pp. 290, 288. 61. McClintock arrives at similar conclusions in Imperial Leather, Ch. 2. On Munby, see Derek Hudson, Munby: Man of Two Worlds (1974); Davidoff, ‘Class and Gender’, pp. 30–64; and McClintock, Imperial Leather, Chs. 2 and 3. Victorian marriages could, however, be sexually much more passionate than the façade of propriety suggested. See Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, vol. 1, The Education of the Senses (New York, 1984); Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality. 62. Quoted in McClintock, Imperial Leather, p. 87, from Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny (1972), p. 78. 63. Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, 1998), Ch. 7. 64. Even conservative commentators regarded this as self-evident. See Hannah More, ‘The White Slave Trade’ (1805), in Women’s Writing, 1778–1838, ed. Fiona Robertson (Oxford, 2001), pp. 157–62. 65. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, pp. 600–7; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (1996), pp. 254–6, 260–3. 66. G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago 1992), Ch. 1. 67. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (1987). 68. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass., 1990). 69. On this final point, see Jeff Nunokawa, The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel (Princeton, 1994). 70. See John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, 1999), Chs. 1 and 2, and pp. 68, 80–1, 86–9, 93. 71. Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago, 2000), pp. 236–7, 251, and Ch. 13. 72. Amanda Vickery, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History’, Historical Journal, 36.2 (1993) 383–414. The following sentence is based also on her Gentleman’s Daughter. 73. Clark, Struggle for the Breeches, p. 199. 74. McClintock, Imperial Leather, pp. 153–4, 161–5; Vickery, ‘Golden Age’, p. 389.



Notes

3


Capital City

1. See John R. Kellett, Railways and Victorian Cities (1979); and T.C. Barker and Michael Robbins, A History of London Transport, vol. 1 The Nineteenth Century (1963). On the dynamics of metropolitan expansion, see H.J. Dyos and D.J. Reeder, ‘Slums and Suburbs’, in The Victorian City: Images and Realities, ed. H.J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, 2 vols. (1973), pp. 359–86. 2. Kellett, Railways and Victorian Cities, p. 327. 3. DS, pp. 120–2, 289–90. 4. David Kynaston, The City of London, 3 vols. (1994–9), I, pp. 151–4; Norman Russell, The Novelist and Mammon (Oxford, 1986), pp. 31–3. 5. Kellett, Railways and Victorian Cities, pp. 326–37, 293; Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London (Harmondsworth, 1984), passim. 6. Stedman Jones, Outcast London, pp. 167–9. 7. P.J. Waller, Town, City, and Nation: England 1850–1914 (Oxford, 1983), p. 28; Kellett, Railways and Victorian Cities, p. 299. 8. John Summerson, The Architecture of Victorian London (Charlottesville, 1976), pp. 16–17, 19–21. 9. David Morier Evans, The City; or, The Physiology of London Business (1845), quoted in Kynaston, City of London, I, p. 140. 10. Francis Sheppard, London 1808–1870 (1971), pp. 8–10. 11. John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, 29 (May 1873), in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (1903–12), XXVII, pp. 528–30. Compare Works, XXXIV, pp. 265–9, lamenting the urbanisation of Croxted Lane, and XXVIII, p. 655 which, like Praeterita, Ch. II, deprecates the excursionist squalor which the Crystal Palace has brought to Dulwich. 12. On the final point, see the essays by Keith Hanley and David Carroll in Ruskin and Environment, ed. Michael Wheeler (Manchester, 1995), pp. 10–37, 58–75. Ruskin also fulminates against the unsightliness of London’s suburban approaches in Works, XIX, p. 362 and XX, pp. 112–13. 13. Quoted in Ruskin, Munera Pulveris (1862–3, 1872), Works, XVII, p. 233. 14. F.M.L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society (1988), pp. 330–2. 15. Philip Collins, Dickens and Crime, 3rd edition (Basingstoke, 1994), p. 5. 16. Louis James, Fiction for the Working Man (1963; Harmondsworth, 1974), pp. 14–31; Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader (Chicago, 1963), pp. 332–9; Patricia Anderson, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture 1790–1860 (Oxford, 1991). 17. Stedman Jones, Outcast London, pp. 241–70, 183–8. 18. Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England (1978). 19. F.M.L. Thompson, ‘Town and City’, in The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750–1950, ed. F.M.L. Thompson, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1990), I, pp. 1–86; pp. 55–60. 20. W.D. Rubinstein, ‘Wealth, Elites and the Class Structure of Modern Britain’, Past and Present, 76 (August 1977) 112. 21. Thompson, Rise, pp. 172–4, and ‘Town and City’, pp. 63–4. 22. Quotations from ‘Mending Wall’, in The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (1971), pp. 33–4. 23. The seminal treatment of this topic is Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986). 24. See ‘Precautions against Cholera’, ILN, 23 (22 October 1853) p. 352; and Andrew Sanders, Charles Dickens, Resurrectionist (New York, 1982), pp. 10–14.



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25. Stedman Jones, Outcast London, p. 26. 26. Compare Dickens, OT, p. 136, and his polemic against Smithfield, ‘A Monument of French Folly’, Household Words, 8 March 1851, in The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’s Journalism, ed. Michael Slater et al., 4 vols. (1994–2000), II, pp. 327–38. 27. On dung, dust and street mud, see Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols. [1861–2] (New York, 1968), II, pp. 185–202. 28. Gertrude Himmelfarb, ‘The Culture of Poverty’, in The Victorian City, ed. Dyos and Woolf, p. 719. 29. George Godwin, London Shadows: A Glance at the ‘Homes’ of the Thousands (1854), quoted in Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (1991), p. 37. 30. The Evangelical and Oxford Movements, ed. Elisabeth Jay (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 100–1. On ‘contagion’ in BH, see Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (Ithaca, NY, 1995), Ch. 3. 31. Himmelfarb, ‘The Culture of Poverty’; see also ‘The Slums of Victorian London’, in H.J. Dyos, Exploring the Urban Past, ed. David Cannadine and David Reeder (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 129–53. 32. Stedman Jones, Outcast London, Part III; W.J. Fishman, East End 1888 (1988), pp. 52–4. 33. The People of the Abyss, in Jack London, Novels and Social Writings, ed. Donald Pizer (New York, 1982), p. 31; cf. p. 28. Subsequent page references are given in my text. To perceive London’s melodramatic heightening, contrast his probable source, Llewellyn Smith, quoted in Stedman Jones, pp. 131–2. 34. The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (1969), pp. 1367–8. 35. Similar statements had been made by Dr Letherby, the Medical Officer to the City of London (‘The Plague-Spots of Great Cities’, ILN, 30 (18 April 1857) 351–2) and by Sir John Simon in 1865 in his medical officer’s report to the Privy Council. See also Françoise Barret-Ducrocq, Love in the Time of Victoria (1991), pp. 15–24; and Anthony S. Wohl, ‘Sex and the Single Room: Incest among the Victorian Working Classes’, in The Victorian Family, ed. Anthony S. Wohl (1978), pp. 197–216. As Freud discovered in 1897, however, when he felt compelled to revise his ‘seduction theory’, the unconscious makes no distinction between fantasy and actual events (Sigmund Freud, Briefe an Wilhelm Flieβ, ed. Jeffrey Masson (Frankfurt a.M., 1986), pp. 283–4). From Freud’s self-analysis and his clients’ memory retrieval one might conclude that incest was as widespread in bourgeois Vienna or London as in working-class London, and that the middle-class obsession with working-class sexuality also involved the projection of their own œdipal fantasies. 36. Fishman, East End 1888, p. 303. 37. Page 165. The references are to tragic cases detailed elsewhere in London’s text. 38. ‘Invention about 1880 of the term “East End” was rapidly taken up by the new halfpenny press, and in the pulpit and the music hall’. The Nineteenth Century, XXIV (1888) 262, quoted in Fishman, East End 1888, p. 1. 39. Arthur Morrison, Tales of Mean Streets [1894], ed. Michel Krzak (Woodbridge, 1983), pp. 19–21. 40. Arthur Morrison, A Child of the Jago [1896], ed. Peter Miles (1996), p. 11. 41. Subsequent footnote references are to stories in Tales of Mean Streets. 42. Compare the frustrated attempts to earn money through piano lessons or shirtmaking in ‘Behind the Shade’; or, in ‘ “All that Messuage” ’, old Jack’s ostracism as a supposed exploitative capitalist landlord, compounded by his blacklegging as he struggles to meet his mortgage repayments. Similarly, in Jago, Weech the fence selfishly destroys Dicky’s attempt to make an honest living.



Notes


43. A legacy is drunk away in ‘Squire Napper’; in ‘ “All that Messuage” ’ the fatal house purchase seals old Jack’s downfall. 44. Morrison’s comment, from an interview in 1900, is quoted in Jago, p. 241. Genteel pretensions are treated satirically in ‘In Business’ and pathetically in ‘Behind the Shade’; in Jago the boilermaker’s daughter, Hannah Perrott’s degradation is confirmed by her gradual assimilation to the ‘low’ ways of the slum. 45. ‘To Bow Bridge’, ‘Squire Napper’, ‘Lizerunt’. More frequently Morrison, like Gissing, depicts domineering wives and uxurious, hen-pecked husbands: see ‘That Brute Simmons’, ‘ “A Poor Stick” ’ and ‘In Business’. 46. ‘Lizerunt’, ‘Without Visible Means’, ‘A Conversion’, Jago passim. 47. See ‘The Red Cow Group’, which anticipates the revolutionaries of Conrad’s The Secret Agent; ‘ “All that Messuage” ’ and ‘Without Visible Means’. 48. In Jago, however, the commonsensical, muscular Christianity of Father Sturt (based on Morrison’s friend, Revd. Jay, Vicar of Holy Trinity, Shoreditch) succeeds in redeeming Kiddo Cook. 49. Peter Mills records this critical debate in Jago, pp. 218–20, 232–8. 50. Ibid., pp. 226, 228–9. 51. Ibid., pp. 140–1. 52. Spectator, 9 March 1895, quoted in Jago, pp. 218–19. 53. On alarmism, see Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (1992), pp. 28–38; P.J. Keating, ‘Fact and Fiction in the East End’, in The Victorian City, ed. Dyos and Woolf, pp. 595–7. 54. Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, I, in Into Unknown England 1866–1913, ed. Peter Keating (Manchester, 1976), pp. 113–24. 55. Latter-Day Pamphlets [hereafter LD], No. I The Present Time [1 February 1850], p. 25, in Thomas Carlyle’s Works, The Standard Edition, 18 vols. (1904), vol. III. 56. Past and Present [1843] [hereafter PP] in Works, III, pp. 116, 127. 57. PP, pp. 115–16; ‘Signs of the Times’ [1829], in A Carlyle Reader, ed. G.B. Tennyson (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 46–9; LD, pp. 221–2. 58. ‘Hudson’s Statue’ [1 July 1850], in LD, p. 221; cf. pp. 220–2, 227–8, 237–9. 59. ‘Chartism’ [1839], in Works, VII, p. 292, cf. pp. 293, 297; PP, pp. 28, 124, 157, 159. 60. For the rise and fall of the notion of ‘Captains of Industry’, see PP, pp. 227–32; LD, pp. 30–9; ‘Shooting Niagara: And After?’ [August 1867], in Works, VII. 61. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto [1848], trans. Samuel Moore [1888], ed. A.J.P. Taylor (Harmondsworth, 1973), p. 82. 62. Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 101–14, 419–20. 63. L.D. Schwarz, London in the Age of Industrialisation (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 56–7. 64. Stedman Jones, Outcast London, Ch. 2; Schwarz, ibid., Ch. 4. 65. On London’s casual labour market, see Mayhew, II, pp. 297–307, 311–17, 323–7. 66. The Unknown Mayhew: Selections from the Morning Chronicle 1849–1850, ed. E.P. Thompson and Eileen Yeo (1971), pp. 196–223. 67. Mayhew, II, p. 304. The ‘silent system’ in Victorian prisons combined strictly enforced silence with a punitive regime, intended as a deterrent. The alternative was the ‘separate system’, where a limited period of solitary confinement was coupled with training for a trade. 68. Mayhew, III, pp. 223–31; p. 230. 69. Unknown Mayhew, pp. 349–55. 70. ‘Shooting Niagara’, pp. 614–16. 71. Compare Ruskin, Works, XII, p. 430. 72. Stedman Jones, Outcast London, pp. 241–61.



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73. J.H. Stallard, London Pauperism among Jews and Christians (1867), quoted in W.L. Burn, The Age of Equipoise (1968), p. 122. 74. Fors Clavigera, 4 (April 1871), in Works, XXVII, p. 67. 75. Stedman Jones, Outcast London, pp. 19–32, 99–126, 152–4; C.H. Lee, ‘Regional Growth and Structural Change in Victorian Britain’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, 34 (1981) 448–52; W.D. Rubinstein, Capitalism, Culture, and Decline in Britain 1750–1990 (1993). 76. Works, VII, pp. 403, 408, 437, 376. 77. Fors Clavigera, 2 (February 1871) and 24 (December 1872), in Works, XXVII, pp. 42, 431. The Morning Post report on the inquest into the death ‘from want of food and the common necessaries of life; also through want of medical aid’ of Michael Collins, who lived with his wife and son in a room at 2 Cobb’s Court, Christ Church, Spitalfields, is printed in red ink in Sesame and Lilies (1865). See Works, XVIII, pp. 90–3. Friedrich Engels (The Condition of the Working-Class in England [1845], in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 4 (1975), pp. 334–5) had summarised reports of similar misery. Ruskin’s self-condemnation as a ‘usurer’ is in Works, XXVIII, pp. 138–9. In John Ruskin, Social Reformer (1898), pp. 148–51, J.A. Hobson indicates Ruskin’s failure, in condemning interest per se, to distinguish money-lending from investment with a productive character. 78. Fors Clavigera, 44 (August 1874), in Works, XXVIII, p. 137. Cf. Works, XVIII, p. 406, and XIX, p. 210. 79. ‘Illth’ is Ruskin’s coinage in Unto this Last [1860; published 1862 in book form], in Works, XVII, p. 89; cf. pp. 105, 275–8. Subsequent page references to Unto this Last and Munera Pulveris [1862–3; revised as book, 1872] are to this volume and are given directly in the text. On Ruskinian economics, see James Clark Sherburne, John Ruskin or the Ambiguities of Abundance (Cambridge, Mass., 1972); and P.D. Anthony, John Ruskin’s Labour: A Study of Ruskin’s Social Theory (Cambridge, 1983). 80. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan, 2 vols. (rpt. Chicago, 1976), I, pp. 294ff., 306; II, p. 120. 81. Ruskin’s notion of ‘labour’ as distinct from ‘opera’, i.e. enjoyable, creative work, is similar to the early Marx’s concept of alienated labour. 82. I am grateful to Hans Christoph Binswanger for drawing this to my attention. See Aristotle, Politics, I, Chs. 8–10. My summary has benefited greatly from the notes in Aristoteles, Politik, Buch I, trans. and ed. Eckart Schütrumpf (Berlin, 1991). By contrast, in John Ruskin’s Political Economy (2000), Chs. 4 and 5, Willie Henderson discusses the influence of Plato and Xenophon. 83. Ruskin defines ‘economy’ in this Greek sense in Works, XVI, p. 19. 84. Aristotle apparently overlooked the increase in utility to consumers that results from the efficient distribution of products. 85. Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford, 1977), pp. 445–51; Das Kapital, 4th edition [1890] (Berlin, 1972), I, pp. 161–70. Marx cites Aristotle, ibid., pp. 167, 179. 86. The insufficiency of Marx’s labour cost theory of value does not, I believe, invalidate his ethical argument. 87. Marx, Selected Writings, pp. 354, 365–8, 374–7, 393–4, 508–10, 515–18. 88. Kapital, I, p. 247. 89. Ibid., pp. 258, 168, 280. Ruskin makes a similar point in Works, XVII, pp. 264–5. 90. Ibid., pp. 253, 281. 91. Don Slater, Consumer Culture and Modernity (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 100, 105. 92. Compare Unknown Mayhew, pp. 428–35.



Notes


93. Kapital, I, pp. 269–70. Compare the first-hand comments on sweated female tailoring in Mayhew, II, pp. 314–15. 94. Kapital, I, pp. 263–6. 95. Works, XVIII, p. 107. 96. Cf. p. 219; and Works, XVI, pp. 401–2. 97. Works, XI, pp. 226–30, X, pp. 192–8, 200–2. His criticism was anticipated by Smith, II, pp. 302–4. 98. Pages 86–9, 98–9, 113, 151–2, 154, 167, 269, 275; Works, XVI, pp. 48–53. 99. See Sherburne, John Ruskin; Ruskin and Environment, ed. Wheeler; and Jeffrey L. Spear, Dreams of an English Eden (New York, 1984). 100. Walden (1854), in The Portable Thoreau, ed. Carl Bode (Harmondsworth, 1981), p. 286.

4


1. For surveys, see Philip Collins, ‘Dickens and London’, in The Victorian City: Images and Realities, ed. H.J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, 2 vols. (1973), pp. 537–57; Alexander Welsh, The City of Dickens (1971; Cambridge, Mass., 1986); F. S. Schwarzbach, Dickens and the City (1979); Andrew Sanders, Dickens and the Spirit of the Age (Oxford, 1999), Ch. 3; Efraim Sicher, Rereading the City/Rereading Dickens: Representation, the Novel, and Urban Realism (New York, 2003). John Forster’s first-hand Life is indispensable, as is Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens (1990). 2. The Observer (8 May 1836), quoted in John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson, Dickens at Work, 2nd edition (1968), p. 57. 3. ‘Branch’ in this sense dates from 1817 (OED). Fraudulent insurance promoters of this period are discussed in Norman Russell, The Novelist and Mammon (Oxford, 1986), pp. 86–99. 4. The original opening of ‘The Prisoners’ Van’, later excised from SB, quoted in Butt and Tillotson, Dickens at Work, p. 44. 5. Pierce Egan, Life in London; or, the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq. and his Elegant Friend Corinthian Tom, Accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis, 2nd edition (1822), pp. 23–4. 6. Dana Brand, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 14–63. 7. On urban legibility, see Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (1960; Cambridge, Mass., 1985). On the symbolic order of city spaces, see David Harvey, The Urban Experience (Oxford, 1989), pp. 248–52. 8. Dana Arnold’s otherwise perceptive account of city planning in Re-presenting the Metropolis: Architecture, Urban Experience and Social Life in London, 1800–1840 (Aldershot, 2000) overstates the degree of self-conscious coordination on the part of hypostasised but undocumented class interests. 9. See Juliet John, Dickens’s Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture (Oxford, 2001). 10. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836), Ch. IV ‘Language’, in Selected Essays, ed. Larzer Ziff (Harmondsworth, 1982), pp. 54–5, 50. 11. Compare De Quincey’s futile quest for the prostitute Ann: ‘If she lived, doubtless we must have been sometimes in search of each other, at the very same moment, through the mighty labyrinths of London; perhaps even within a few feet of each other – a barrier no wider in a London street, often amounting in



260

12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33.

261

the end to a separation for eternity!’ (Confessions of an English Opium Eater [1821], ed. Alethea Hayter (Harmondsworth, 1975), p. 64). The geographical restriction is noted in J.C. Reid, Bucks and Bruisers: Pierce Egan and Regency England (1971), p. 68. J. Hillis Miller, ‘The Fiction of Realism: Sketches by Boz, Oliver Twist, and Cruikshank’s Illustrations’ in Dickens Centennial Essays, ed. Ada Nisbet and Blake Nevius (1971), p. 96. OCS, p. 222; DC, p. 759; PP, p. 235. The OED cites Tindale’s 1526 translation of 2 Corinthians xiii. 5: ‘Knowe ye not . . . how that Jesus Christ is in you excepte ye be castawayes’. Compare Cowper’s famous poem ‘The Castaway’ (1799), the OED quotations from Scott (1818) and Southey (1829), and also Augusta Webster’s poem ‘A Castaway’ (1870). Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford, 1994), p. 89. Lynda Nead also discusses this passage and its accompanying engraving in Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian England (Oxford, 1988), pp. 125–8. Philip Collins, Dickens and Crime, 3rd edition (Basingstoke, 1994), Ch. 4. ‘A Sleep to Startle Us’ (13 March 1852) in The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’s Journalism, ed. Michael Slater et al. (1994–2000), III, p. 50. ‘An Unsettled Neighbourhood’, Household Words, 11 November 1854, ibid., pp. 241–7. OCS, pp. 170–3. Cruikshank’s London Going Out of Town – or – The March of Bricks & Mortar!, is reproduced in Felix Barker and Peter Jackson, London: 2000 Years of a City and its People (1983), p. 294. Compare the no man’s land, presumably up the Finchley Road, inhabited by the Carkers in DS, pp. 554–5. OT, p. 59 and Chs. 10 and 15; DS, p. 132. ‘Gone Astray’, Household Words, 13 August 1853, in Dickens’s Journalism, III, p. 158. John Ruskin, Complete Works, ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (1903–12), XVIII, p. 122. Catherine Waters, Dickens and the Politics of the Family (Cambridge, 1997) discusses the ambivalence of Dickens’s attitudes to the home and to domestic ideology. SB, p. 78; compare the ‘poor little drudge’ of Dickens’s autobiographical fragment (Life, I, p. 51). George Eliot, Middlemarch [1871–2], ed. W.J. Harvey (Harmondsworth, 1974), p. 460. BH, p. 97. Bone-grubbers and rag-gatherers are described in Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols. [1861–2] (New York, 1968), II, pp. 138–42. The narrator explicitly associates Mrs Brown with witchcraft on pp. 566–7. Compare Little Nell’s encounter at a racecourse with a fallen woman (like that of another child-woman, Little Dorrit, with a prostitute), which suggests the streetwalker both might have become: OCS, pp. 213–14; LD, pp. 217–18. The parallel is reinforced by Mrs Skewton’s and Edith’s recognition in Florence (like Mrs Brown’s earlier) of Edith’s former innocence, prior to her decline into marital prostitution (pp. 505, 514) and by Mrs Skewton’s and Edith’s encounter with their lower-class ‘shadows’ (pp. 662–5). Characteristically, there is a class element in David’s anxieties. The dealer’s reiterated curse ‘Oh goroo’, ‘goroo’, combines ‘ogre’ with the ‘vulgar’ Cockney ‘Oh gor’. On Dickens’s ogres and fascination with cannibalism, see Harry Stone, The Night Side of Dickens: Cannibalism, Passion, Necessity (Columbus, 1994).



Notes


34. Mayhew, London Labour, II, p. 110. 35. BH, p. 683; cf. ‘A December Vision’, Household Words, 14 December 1850, in Dickens’s Journalism, II, pp. 305–9. 36. Compare David Copperfield’s attempt to ‘rub off’ Uriah Heep’s hand (DC, p. 281). 37. Barnaby Rudge [1841], ed. Gordon Spence (Harmondsworth, 1977), p. 373. Such clothes were a traditional perquisite of the executioner. 38. See The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell (New York, 1987), pp. 115–204. 39. On this recycling, see Catherine Gallagher, ‘The Bio-Economics of Our Mutual Friend’, in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, vol. 3, ed. Michel Feher (New York, 1989); and Michal Peled Ginsburg, Economies of Change: Form and Transformation in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Stanford, 1996), Ch. 7. 40. ‘Of the Street-Finders or Collectors’, Mayhew, London Labour, II, pp. 136–81, provides an essential gloss on OMF. 41. Ibid., pp. 159, 171; quotation about ‘sewage’, p. 136. 42. Committal from The Burial of the Dead in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. 43. Imagery of petrification is also applied to Florence Dombey (DS, pp. 393–5, 741) and to Arthur Clennam and Flora Finching, the ‘statue bride’ (LD, p. 331); similarly, Mrs Steerforth in her self-righteous pride is ‘like a stone figure’ (DC, pp. 870, 873). Dickens clearly associated ice and stone. The Dombeys are often described as frozen, while for Mrs General ‘retirement for the night was always her frostiest ceremony, as if she felt it necessary that the human imagination should be chilled into stone to prevent its following her’ (LD, p. 669). 44. Compare Ginsburg’s account of the implosion of another hoarder, Krook. 45. There is a similar therapeutic pattern with Esther Summerson in BH, and in GE where the relationship between Pip and Magwitch enables both to overcome their feelings of guilt towards the natural father and the natural child whom they never knew, and where, during Pip’s regression in illness to a helpless child, Joe has the chance to become the father to Pip that he was unable to be during Pip’s actual childhood. 46. In ‘Good Mrs Brown’s Connections: Sexuality and Story-telling in Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son’, ELH, 58 (1991) 405–26, Joss Lutz Marsh suggests that Mrs Brown is modelled on her procuress namesake in John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. 47. Like Steerforth’s ‘playthings’, Marwood has been Carker’s ‘short-lived toy’ (DS, pp. 847–8). 48. DS, p. 865. For Carker’s literary pornography and Etty-like paintings, see p. 554. 49. Lady Honoria Dedlock’s alter ego is the passionate Hortense, in whose clothes she dresses when Jo shows her her lover’s lodgings and grave. It is Hortense who asks maliciously apropos of her mistress Honoria: ‘Can you make a honourable lady of Her?’ (BH, p. 799). 50. Her masochism is emphasised in incidents on pp. 653, 692. 51. On gender relations in DS, compare Helene Moglen, ‘Theorizing Fiction/ Fictionalizing Theory: The Case of Dombey and Son’, VS, 35 (1991–2) 159–84. 52. My discussion of capitalism in DS draws on Robert Clark, ‘Riddling the Family Firm: The Sexual Economy in Dombey and Son’, ELH, 51 (1984) 69–84. 53. Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth, 1962), I, p. 208. 54. This latter point is made by Marsh, ‘Good Mrs Brown’s Connections’. 55. OMF, pp. 776, 867, 767. In an earlier version of this symbolic pattern, the murderer Jonas Chuzzlewit is likewise witnessed sinking a bundle at London Bridge (MC, p. 748).



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56. OMF, p. 453; this is what Riderhood cynically recommends (p. 872). Charley Hexam plans for himself a similar marriage of convenience (p. 781). 57. DC, pp. 350, 353–6, 493. 58. DC, pp. 785–91, 350. Anorexia nervosa was first diagnosed in 1873–4 by Lasègue and Gull. It is possible, however, that before this nosological category was established earlier cases went unrecognised. See Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease (Cambridge, Mass., 1988); and Tilman Habermas, Zur Geschichte der Magersucht: Eine medizinpsychologische Rekonstruktion (Frankfurt a.M., 1994). 59. Charles Dickens, The Public Readings, ed. Philip Collins (Oxford, 1975), pp. 465, 483. 60. Compare Julian Moynahan, ‘The Hero’s Guilt: The Case of Great Expectations’, Essays in Criticism, 10 (1960) 60–79; and Alexander Welsh, From Copyright to Copperfield: The Identity of Dickens (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), pp. 147–8. 61. The argument in this sentence derives from Gail Turley Houston, Consuming Fictions: Gender, Class, and Hunger in Dickens’s Novels (Carbondale, 1994). 62. On sexuality as the weapon against oppression of Dickens’s dark women, see Moglen, ‘Theorizing Fiction’, pp. 170–1. 63. Compare, for example, in LD Harriet Beadle’s penitent return to the patriarchal fold, having rejected the criticisms of her alter ego, the Self-Tormentor Miss Wade. 64. On Dickens and women, see Michael Slater, Dickens and Women (1983); Patricia Ingham, Dickens, Women, and Language (1992); Waters; Hilary M. Schor, Dickens and the Daughter of the House (Cambridge, 1999). 65. George Robb, White-Collar Crime in Modern England (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 24–6; Barbara Weiss, ‘Secret Pockets and Secret Breasts: Little Dorrit and the Commercial Scandals of the Fifties’, Dickens Studies Annual, 10 (1982) 67–76. 66. See the subtitle to Mayhew’s London Labour. 67. Compare Trollope’s apostrophe in The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson [1861–2], ed. N. John Hall (Oxford, 1992), p. 12 – ‘O Commerce, how wonderful are thy ways, how vast thy power, how invisible thy dominion! . . . Thou art our Alpha and our Omega, our beginning and our end . . . We are built on thee, and for thee, and with thee. To worship thee should be man’s chiefest care, to know thy hidden ways his chosen study’ – with the similar apostrophe to ‘Shares’ in OMF, p. 160, and ‘A.D. had no concern with anno Domini, but stood for anno Dombei – and Son’ (DS, p. 50). Clough’s equally ironic ‘The Latest Decalogue’ dates from 1862. 68. ‘A Slight Depreciation of the Currency’, Household Words, 3 November 1855, in Dickens’s Journalism, III, p. 333. 69. Thomas Carlyle, Works, The Standard Edition, 18 vols. (1904), III, pp. 238–9. 70. Dickens’s notorious comments on Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop (RA 1850) are reprinted in Dickens’s Journalism, II, pp. 242–8. 71. See Hans Christoph Binswanger, Money and Magic: A Critique of the Modern Economy in the Light of Goethe’s ‘Faust’ (Chicago, 1994). 72. David Morier Evans, The History of the Commercial Crisis, 1857–58, and the Stock Exchange Panic of 1859 [1859] (New York, 1969), pp. 64, 68, 81–2. 73. The assessment of The Annual Register, or a View of the History and Politics of the Year 1857 (1858). 74. Punch, 34 (9 January 1858) 18–19. 75. Russell, The Novelist and Mammon, pp. 132–9. There is a complication: the novel is explicitly set ‘Thirty years ago’. Dickens seems to have been reliving the financial



Notes

76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81.

5

Imagining London, 1770–1900 crash of the later 1820s and the tribulations of his father who in 1824 was imprisoned, like Dorrit, in the Marshalsea. Evans, The History of the Commercial Crisis, pp. 73–4, 77–8. Household Words, no. 404 (19 December 1857) 1–4. Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation 1830–1864 (Chicago, 1995), p. 157. David Kynaston, The City of London, 3 vols. (1994–9), I, pp. 220–5; Robb, White-Collar Crime, pp. 70–1 and Ch. 5; Michael Cotsell, ‘The Book of Insolvent Fates: Financial Speculation in Our Mutual Friend’, Dickens Studies Annual, 13 (1984) 125–42. OMF, pp. 244, 126, 351, 524, 191. Lisa Surridge puts a Foucauldian spin on this in ‘ “John Rokesmith’s Secret”: Sensation, Detection, and the Policing of the Feminine in Our Mutual Friend’, Dickens Studies Annual, 26 (1998) 265–84.


1. For surveys of Victorian representations of London, see Victorian Artists and the City, ed. Ira Bruce Nadel and F.S. Schwarzbach (New York, 1980); E.D.H. Johnson, ‘Victorian Artists and the Urban Milieu’, in The Victorian City: Images and Realities, ed. H.J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (1973), pp. 449–74; Alex Potts, ‘Picturing the Modern Metropolis: Images of London in the Nineteenth Century’, History Workshop Journal, 26 (Autumn 1988) 28–56; Mireille Galinou and John Hayes, London in Paint: Oil Paintings in the Collection at the Museum of London (1996). 2. Will Vaughan, ‘London Topographers and Urban Change’, in Victorian Artists and the City, ed. Nadel and Schwarzbach, pp. 63, 68. 3. Ibid., pp. 60, 76. 4. When British artists did turn to the Embankments, as in John O’Connor’s The Embankment (RA 1874), they remained firmly in a topographical tradition. 5. Donald J. Olsen, The Growth of Victorian London (Harmondsworth, 1979); and The City as a Work of Art (New Haven, 1986). See Getting London in Perspective, ed. R. Hyde, J. Hoole and T. Sato (1984), pp. 30–1, 56–7 and front cover; and London – World City 1800–1840, ed. Celina Fox (New Haven, 1992), no. 155, for illustrations of sublime but unrealised projects to transform the riverside. 6. ‘The Boiled Beef of New England’ (1863), in Dickens, Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’s Journalism, ed. Michael Slater et al. 4 vols. (1994–2000), IV, p. 279. 7. Getting London in Perspective, pp. 32, 60–1. 8. Henry C. Selous’s painting of the opening ceremony is reproduced in Felix Barker and Peter Jackson, London: 2000 Years of a City and its People (1983), p. 283. Thomas Colman Dibdin’s Crystal Palace in Hyde Park (1851) is cat. no. 90 in Galinou and Hayes, London in Paint. The two royal commissions by James Duffield Harding and William Wyld are cat. nos. 300 and 1050 in Oliver Millar, The Victorian Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen (Cambridge, 1992). 9. Jonathan Richardson (1719), quoted in Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), p. 170. 10. Ronald Paulson, Emblem and Expression (1975); John Dixon Hunt, The Figure in the Landscape (Baltimore, 1976). 11. On changing attitudes to narrativity in painting, see Wendy Steiner, Pictures of Romance (Chicago, 1988), Ch. 1. 12. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (1966), p. 62.



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13. Helsinger, Ruskin, Ch. 3, illuminates the continuing importance in early nineteenth-century England of excursive vision. 14. Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford, 1974), p. 268; Richard D. Altick, Paintings from Books (Columbus, 1985), pp. 82–5. 15. Altick, Paintings from Books, pp. 62–3. 16. Graham Reynolds, Victorian Painting (1966), p. 14; Altick, ibid., p. 92. 17. John Brewer, ‘Cultural Production, Consumption, and the Place of the Artist in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Towards a Modern Art World, ed. Brian Allen (New Haven, 1995), pp. 17–18. 18. Altick, Paintings from Books, p. 93. 19. Ibid., p. 64; Graham Reynolds, Paintings of the Victorian Scene (1953), pp. 9–10; John Steegman, Victorian Taste (1970), pp. 50–3. 20. Gerald Reitlinger, The Economics of Taste (1961), pp. 109–10. 21. George Eliot, Middlemarch [1871–2], ed. W.J. Harvey (Harmondsworth, 1974), p. 225. 22. Richard Redgrave 1804–1888, ed. Susan P. Casteras and Ronald Parkinson (New Haven, 1988), pp. 18–19, 111–14. 23. The Pre-Raphaelites, Tate Gallery catalogue (1984), no. 58; Christopher Wood, Victorian Panorama: Paintings of Victorian Life (1976), pls. 225, 226. 24. An exception to my generalisation is G.F. Watts’s The Seamstress (c. 1850), pl. 5 in Helene E. Roberts, ‘Marriage, Redundancy or Sin: The Painter’s View of Women in the First Twenty-Five Years of Victoria’s Reign’, in Suffer and Be Still, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington, 1973), pp. 45–76. On visual responses to Hood’s poem, see T.J. Edelstein, ‘They Sang “The Song of the Shirt”: The Visual Iconology of the Seamstress’, VS, 23 (1980) 183–210. 25. Wood, Victorian Panorama, pls. 36–40, 1. On the implicit censorship in Victorian painting, see Raymond Lister, Victorian Narrative Paintings (1966), pp. 10–13; Altick, Paintings from Books, pp. 98–102, 123. 26. Patrick Conner, Savage Ruskin (1979), pp. 29–31; George Landow, ‘There Began to Be a Great Talking about the Fine Arts’, in The Mind and Art of Victorian England, ed. Josef L. Altholz (Minneapolis, 1976), pp. 124–45. 27. Complete Works of John Ruskin, ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (1903–12), III, pp. 25, 27–34, 40. 28. Ibid., pp. 46, 620–6. 29. Ibid., pp. 159–64. 30. Ibid., p. 161; cf. pp. 294–5. In The Darkening Glass (1963), pp. 11–13, John Rosenberg likewise draws attention to the tour de force of painterly observation in Works, III, pp. 327–42. 31. Works, XII, pp. 319–27, 339–93; quotation from p. 339. 32. Review of Pre-Raphaelitism, November 1851, in Ruskin: The Critical Heritage, ed. J.L. Bradley (1984), p. 128. 33. Tim Hilton, John Ruskin: The Early Years 1819–1859 (New Haven, 1985), p. 152. 34. Works, XXXIII, pp. 272–3. 35. Works, III, pp. 259–72. 36. Allen Staley, The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape (Oxford, 1973); Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (2000), Chs. 4 and 5. 37. Quoted in Staley, Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, p. 64. 38. Ibid., p. 184. 39. Quoted in Works, XIV, p. 147. Similar comments in The Leader, 22 May 1858, are quoted ibid., p. xxv. 40. Works, XIV, pp. 47, 151–4.



Notes

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64.

65.

66.

67. 68. 69.

70.

Imagining London, 1770–1900 Works, XII, p. xxiv. Works, XIV, p. 237. Ibid., p. 22. Works, XII, pp. 159, 161–3, 388; V, pp. 62, 173, 186–8. The Pre-Raphaelites, pp. 176, 175. Review quoted ibid., p. 175. Ruskin: Critical Heritage, ed. Bradley, pp. 319–20. ‘Laura Savage’ [Frederick George Stephens], ‘Modern Giants’ Germ, 4 (May 1850), rpt. with Preface by Andrea Rose (Oxford and Birmingham, 1979), p. 170. On these, see Staley, Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, pp. 28–9, 37–43; Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition 1740–1860 (1987), pp. 174–80. The Pre-Raphaelites, p. 94. Ibid., p. 116. The Diary of Ford Madox Brown, ed. Virginia Surtees (New Haven, 1981), p. 144. See Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987), pp. 342–7 and pls. XXV, XXVI. The Pre-Raphaelites, no. 43. Wood, Victorian Panorama, pls. 187, 188. See John House, ‘London in the Art of Monet and Pissarro’, in Malcolm Warner et al., The Image of London (1987), pp. 73–98. Alan Bowness and Anthea Callen, The Impressionists in London (1973), p. 13. Wood, pp. 187–94, gives other examples of the vogue for seaside paintings. The Pre-Raphaelites, nos. 106, 103. Dickens, ‘The Tuggses at Ramsgate’, SB, pp. 346–9. Wood, Victorian Panorama, pls. 31, 180, 220, 222, 228. Conversely, Frith’s panoramic canvases were themselves translated or ‘realized’ into tableaux vivants in popular melodrama. See Martin Meisel, Realizations (Princeton, 1983), pp. 380–2. Mary Cowling, The Artist as Anthropologist: The Representation of Type and Character in Victorian Art (Cambridge, 1989). Ibid., p. 270; cf. pp. 250, 271. ‘Conventionalities’, Saturday Review, 9 December 1865, p. 723, quoted in Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago, 1988), p. 155. Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian England, (Oxford, 1988); Susan P. Casteras, Images of Victorian Womanhood in English Art (Rutherford, 1987), pp. 131–43. See Nead, ibid., and Casteras, ibid., for stereotypical illustrations of Thomas Hood’s poem ‘The Bridge of Sighs’ (1844), with its drowned harlot. The obsessive depictions of Ophelia and the Lady of Shalott also evoke the death by water of ‘compromised’ women. Nead, ibid., p. 48; Wood, Victorian Panorama, pls. 145–7. Art Journal (1858) 168, quoted in Nead, ibid., pp. 133–4. Keith Thomas, ‘The Double Standard’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 20 (1959) 195–216; pp. 209–12; Ursula Vogel, ‘Whose Property? The Double Standard of Adultery in Nineteenth-Century Law’, in Regulating Womanhood, ed. Carol Smart (1992), pp. 147–9, 160–5. Quotations from Hansard, 145, 147 (1857), in Gail L. Savage, ‘ “Intended Only for the Husband”: Gender, Class, and the Provision for Divorce in England, 1858–1868’, in Victorian Scandals, ed. K.O. Garrigan (Athens, Ohio, 1992), p. 14.



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71. The Athenaeum, 1 May 1858, quoted in Nead, Myths of Sexuality, p. 132. Compare George Moore’s polemic against the libraries’ censorship, Literature at Nurse, or Circulating Morals (1885). 72. Brown’s conscious intention was celebratory: the painting began as a ‘study from Emma with the head back laughing’. See his Diary, p. 78. 73. Jan Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood (1985), pp. 37–42. 74. In Thackeray’s The Newcomes (1853–5; rpt. 1908) the ‘wine-dealer’ and moneylender Mr Sherrick, who ‘has boxes at the Opera whenever he likes, and free access behind the scenes’ (p. 212) has a villa in Abbey Road, St John’s Wood, where Tissot would later live with his common-law wife. Frith likewise kept a mistress in St John’s Wood, as did Jolyon Forsyte, the underwriter cum amateur artist, in Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga. 75. The Pre-Raphaelites, no. 199. 76. Letter of 12 October 1853, quoted ibid., p. 121. 77. My biographical information comes from Marsh. 78. Works, XII, pp. 334–5. 79. The studies for Found (c.1858–9) are discussed in Virginia Surtees, The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882): A Catalogue Raisonné, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1971), no. 64 and pls. 65–76. 80. Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood, pp. 32–3. On the female model, see Paula Gillett, The Victorian Painter’s World (Gloucester, 1990), pp. 155, 182–5. 81. Gillett, ibid., p. 95. 82. Ibid., p. 269; W.J. Fishman, East End 1888 (1988), pp. 66–74; The Unknown Mayhew: Selections from the Morning Chronicle 1849–1850, ed. E.P. Thompson and Eileen Yeo (1971), pp. 120–5, 147–52, 178–80. 83. Quoted in Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood, p. 54. The fantasised ‘rescue’ of vulnerable, sometimes scantily clad women is a thematic preoccupation in Pre-Raphaelite painting. 84. OCS, p. 44. For tropes comparing fallen women with the Thames’s lack of ‘harm’ in ‘country places’ but metropolitan ‘defilement’, see DC, p. 749 and OMF, p. 567. 85. By contrast, the socioeconomic determinants of prostitution are emphasised in Augusta Webster’s dramatic monologue of a defiant courtesan, ‘A Castaway’ (1870), in Nineteenth-Century Women Poets, ed. Isobel Armstrong and Joseph Bristow with Cath Sharrock (Oxford, 1996), pp. 602–17. 86. Quoted in Galinou and Hayes, London in Paint, p. 309. 87. See Brown’s 1865 exhibition catalogue in Kenneth Bendiner, The Art of Ford Madox Brown (University Park, 1998), Appendix 3. 88. Helene E. Roberts, ‘Exhibition and Review: The Periodical Press and the Victorian Art Exhibition System’, in The Victorian Periodical Press, ed. Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff (Leicester and Toronto, 1982), p. 91; Wood, Victorian Panorama, p. 176. 89. See Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure and Parisian Society (New Haven, 1988), pp. 68–9. 90. Bracebridge Hemyng, ‘Prostitution in London’, in Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols. [1861–2] (New York, 1968), IV, pp. 234–5. 91. See two studies by Paul Hogarth entitled Arthur Boyd Houghton (1975) and (1981). 92. For reproductions, see Wood, Victorian Panorama, pl. 251; Celina Fox, Londoners (1987), p. 58; Cowling, The Artist as Anthropologist, pl. 225. 93. Hogarth, Arthur Boyd Houghton (1975), p. 8. 94. Osborn’s painting is discussed in Deborah Cherry, Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (1993), pp. 78–81.



Notes


95. ILN, 35 (23 July 1859) 92. 96. A point made by Olsen in The Growth of Victorian London and The City as a Work of Art. 97. See Kirk Varnedoe, Gustave Caillebotte (New Haven, 1987). 98. Two notable exceptions are George Clausen’s Schoolgirls (1880) and A Spring Morning, Haverstock Hill (1881), which juxtapose middle-class girls and women with working-class flower-sellers, a milk-seller, and street pavers. For reproductions, see Casteras, Images of Victorian Womanhood, fig. 24 and plate; Wood, Victorian Panorama, pl. 161. Compare also Edward Clegg Wilkinson’s Spring – Piccadilly (1887), in Wood, pl. 160; and Logsdail’s contemporaneous painting (figure 38 infra). At a more facile level, Augustus E. Mulready’s mawkish paintings of the haves and the have-nots offer a trite moral commentary on social inequalities. 99. Hard Times: Social Realism in Victorian Art, ed. Julian Treuherz (1987), p. 83. 100. H.J. Dyos and D.J. Reeder, ‘Slums and Suburbs’, in The Victorian City, p. 372. 101. Fildes was joining an artistic colony in the Melbury Road area, including Leighton, Watts and Marcus Stone. See Mark Girouard, Sweetness and Light: The ‘Queen Anne’ Movement 1860–1900 (1977; New Haven, 1984), p. 92. 102. Gillett, The Victorian Painter’s World, pp. 110–13, 118–19, 130. 103. Alexander Robertson, Atkinson Grimshaw (Oxford, 1988).

6


1. See Dianne Sachko Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 268–71. 2. Virginia Surtees, The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882): A Catalogue Raisonné, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1971), p. 92. 3. J.B. Bullen, The Pre-Raphaelite Body (Oxford, 1998), pp. 94–105. 4. Stephens, Athenaeum, 21 October 1865, quoted in The Pre-Raphaelites, Tate Gallery Catalogue (1984), pp. 209–10. 5. Ibid., p. 209. 6. Compare the remarks by George Rae and William Graham in Dianne Sachko Macleod, ‘Art Collecting and Victorian Middle-Class Taste’, Art History, 10 (September 1987) 339, 341. 7. Surtees, Paintings and Drawings of Rossetti, nos. 205, 224, 249; ‘Lilith (For a Picture)’, alternatively ‘Body’s Beauty’, sonnet LXXVIII from The House of Life, in Rossetti’s Poems, ed. Oswald Doughty (1961), p. 142. For Rossetti’s most haunting castration fantasy, see ‘The Orchard-pit’, p. 307. 8. On this topic, see Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (Oxford, 1986). There is an intriguing similarity in expression and attitude between Rossetti’s Lady Lilith (as altered in 1873) and the sulky wife in Orchardson’s Mariage de Convenance I (1883). But the woman’s passivity was only assumed; in Orchardson’s sequel, Mariage de Convenance – After (1886) she has left her husband, demonstrating the gap between patriarchal fantasy and real life. 9. See The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler, ed. Andrew McLaren Young, Margaret MacDonald, Robin Spencer, 2 vols. (New Haven, 1980) and the section ‘The Thames’ in Richard Dorment, Margaret MacDonald, et al., James McNeill Whistler (1994), pp. 98–108. 10. London – World City 1800–1840, ed. Celina Fox (New Haven, 1992), nos. 146, 389, 391; Mireille Galinou and John Hayes, London in Paint: Oil Paintings in the Collection at the Museum of London (1996), pp. 158–9.



268

269

11. Paintings by Sebastian and Henry Pether (1800–80) are in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Guildhall Museum and the Museum of London. 12. Allen Staley, The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape (Oxford, 1973), p. 110. 13. Robin Spencer, ‘The Aesthetics of Change: London as seen by James McNeill Whistler’, in Malcolm Warner et al., The Image of London (1987), pp. 49–72. There are French parallels. As T.J. Clark notes, in The Painting of Modern Life (1985), p. 163, the boys in Seurat’s Baignade à Asnières are swimming opposite the mouth of a grand égout collecteur. 14. Thomas Hardy, The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved and The Well-Beloved, ed. Patricia Ingham (Harmondsworth, 1997), p. 139. 15. The other main stylistic ingredient comes from the atmospheric Nocturnes that Whistler painted at Valparaiso in 1866. 16. John House, ‘London in the Art of Monet and Pissarro’, in Warner et al., The Image of London. 17. Jules Antoine Castagnary (April 1874), quoted in Richard Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism (Chicago, 1984), p. 3. The derogatory label ‘Impressionism’ itself was of course not coined until 1874. 18. Quotations from Whistler’s court testimony in Linda Merrill, A Pot of Paint: Aesthetics on Trial in Whistler v. Ruskin (Washington, 1992), pp. 149, 154; my emphasis. These were terms with specific connotations in French art discourse: ‘the impression took place in the spectator-artist, while the effect was the external event. The artistspectator therefore received an impression of the effect’ (Shiff, Cézanne, p. 18). 19. Ludovic Rodo Pissarro and Lionello Venturi, Camille Pissarro. Son Art – Son Œuvre, 2 vols. (Paris, 1939), nos. 105–16, 145. 20. The subjects of Pissarro’s paintings are identified by Martin Reid in ‘The Pissarro Family in the Norwood Area of London, 1870–1: Where Did They Live?’, in Studies on Camille Pissarro, ed. Christopher Lloyd (1986), pp. 55–64; and in ‘Camille Pissarro: Three Paintings of London of 1870–1’, Burlington Magazine, 119 (April 1977) 251–61. 21. For these paintings by Camille and Lucien Pissarro, see Warner et al., The Image of London, nos. 176, 177, 183, 184. 22. Pissarro’s The Crystal Palace, London, now in the Art Institute of Chicago, was, however, bought by one Charles Galloway of Thornyholme, Cheshire. See Kenneth McConkey, ‘Impressionism in Britain’, in Kenneth McConkey et al., Impressionism in Britain (New Haven, 1995), p. 209. 23. See Alan Bowness and Anthea Callen, The Impressionists in London (1973). 24. On the cultural amenities of later Victorian London, see Stephen Inwood, A History of London (1998), pp. 648–71. 25. Warner et al., The Image of London, p. 146. 26. For reproductions, see James Tissot, ed. Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz (Oxford, 1984) and Michael Wentworth, James Tissot (Oxford, 1984). 27. ‘The Royal Academy’, Athenaeum (30 May 1874) 738, quoted in Wentworth, James Tissot, p. 109. 28. Compared with the 2,500 great landowners in 1873 with rentals of over of £3,000, there were in 1850 under 2,000 businessmen with profits of £3,000. By 1880 there were over 5,000. And if 866 of the landlords had over £10,000 and 76 over £50,000, the corresponding figures for businessmen had risen from 338 to 987 and from 26 to 77 respectively. See Harold Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society (1972), p. 431. 29. Punch, 52 (27 April 1867) 176; 53 (13 July 1867) 14.



Notes


30. Punch, 59 (13 August 1870) 74; 65 (16 August 1873) 69; 60 (21 January 1871) 24; 58 (25 June 1870) 254. 31. David Kynaston, The City of London, 3 vols. (1994–9), I, p. 385. 32. Ibid., p. 381; W.D. Rubinstein, ‘Wealth, Elites and the Class Structure of Modern Britain’, Past and Present, 76 (August 1977) 114–15. 33. M.J. Daunton, ‘Financial Elites and British Society, 1880–1950’, in Finance and Financiers in European History, 1880–1960, ed. Youssef Cassis (Cambridge and Paris, 1992), pp. 138–9; Ranald C. Michie, The London Stock Exchange: A History (Oxford, 1999), pp. 99–101. 34. Y. Cassis, ‘Bankers in English Society in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Economic History Review, 38 (1985) 210–29; p. 225. 35. Albert M. Hyamson, ‘The First Jewish Peer’, in Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society (1951–2), quoted in Kynaston, The City of London, I, p. 252. 36. Kynaston, ibid., p. 382; Perkin, Origins, pp. 431–2. 37. Wentworth, James Tissot, pp. 97–8. 38. Ibid., from where The Times quotation infra is also taken. 39. The Complete Works of John Ruskin, ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (1903–12), XXIX, p. 161. What Ruskin implied by ‘coloured photographs’ is elucidated in Katharine Lochnan, ‘The Medium and the Message: Popular Prints and the Work of James Tissot’, in Seductive Surfaces: The Art of Tissot, ed. Katharine Lochnan (New Haven, 1999), pp. 8–10. 40. James Tissot, ed. Matyjaszkiewicz, p. 117. 41. On the character of the Grosvenor and its public, see Paula Gillett, The Victorian Painter’s World (Gloucester, 1990), pp. 229–41. 42. Wentworth, James Tissot, p. 148. ‘Fair Rosamund’ Clifford was Henry II’s concubine. See also Nancy Rose Marshall, ‘Image or Identity: Kathleen Newton and the London Pictures of James Tissot’, in Seductive Surfaces, ed. Lochnan, pp. 31–41. 43. See James Tissot, ed. Matyjaszkiewicz, no. 115, and Mary Pittaluga and Enrico Piceni, De Nittis (Milan, 1963), pls. XXV, XXII, XXIV and nos. 419, 321, 417 and 407. 44. See also Buckingham Palace, De Nittis, no. 366. 45. Art Journal, June 1879, cited in Mariella Basile Bonsante, ‘Immagini di Londra nella pittura di De Nittis’, in Rosanna Bossaglia et al., Giuseppe De Nittis: Dipinti 1864–1884 (Firenze, 1990), p. 53. 46. De Nittis, nos. 405–6, 425, 427–9, 461–3. 47. Compare De Nittis, no. 421 and Kirk Varnedoe, Gustave Caillebotte (New Haven, 1987). 48. Works, XXIX, p. 160. Ruskin had similarly lambasted paintings exhibited by Whistler in 1872: ‘I never saw anything so impudent on the walls of any exhibition, in any country, as last year in London. It was a daub professing to be a “harmony in pink and white” (or some such nonsense); absolute rubbish, and which had taken about a quarter of an hour to scrawl or daub – it had no pretence to be called painting. The price asked for it was two hundred and fifty guineas’ (Works, XXIII, p. 49). 49. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873; 6th edition, rpt. London, 1904), p. 138; Merrill, A Pot of Paint, p. 151. 50. Merrill, ibid., p. 145. 51. Works, X, pp. 215–16. 52. See ‘Ruskin’s Instructions to Defense Counsel’ (Merrill, A Pot of Paint, pp. 289–93), later revised in Works, XXIX, pp. 585–7.



270

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53. Gillett, The Victorian Painter’s World, pp. 54, 110–11. 54. The former was not a new charge. Twelve years earlier the ILN critic had set the terms of debate: ‘Mr. Whistler, in a view of “Battersea Bridge” (343) [presumably Brown and Silver: Old Battersea Bridge (1859–63)], with all its usual accompaniments of soot and fog, shows his unrivalled power of matching subtle hues and gradations; and renders these with a breadth singularly suggestive, but that approaches the ostentatious slovenliness which is so offensive in his figure-pictures’. See ‘Exhibition of the Royal Academy’, ILN, 46 (20 May 1865) 490. 55. Merrill, A Pot of Paint, p. 186. 56. Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘The “Cockney” and the Nation, 1780–1988’, in Metropolis London: Histories and Representations since 1800, ed. Gareth Stedman Jones and David Feldman (1989), pp. 274–5, 281, 289–90. 57. Comments by ‘Arry’s creator, E.J. Milliken, quoted ibid., p. 290. 58. ‘Une cause célèbre’, Punch, 75 (7 December 1878) 257; ‘Our Guide to the Grosvenor Gallery. (First Visit)’, Punch, 74 (22 June 1878) 285. 59. Merrill, A Pot of Paint, p. 292. The Times critic, Tom Taylor, also voiced the opinion that the Nocturnes ‘only come one step nearer pictures than delicately graduated tints on a wall paper would do’ (ibid., pp. 179, 180). 60. James, PE, p. 165; Merrill, A Pot of Paint, pp. 177, 243. 61. The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler, no. 178. 62. Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class, p. 278. 63. Merrill, A Pot of Paint, p. 170. 64. Ibid., p. 292. 65. Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class, pp. 232–3. 66. Robin Spencer, ‘Whistler’s Early Relations with Britain and the Significance of Industry and Commerce for his Art. Part II’, Burlington Magazine, 136 (1994) 673. 67. ‘Sensation Novels’, Quarterly Review, April 1863, rpt. in Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Aurora Floyd, ed. Richard Nemesvari and Lisa Surridge (Peterborough, 1998), p. 574; reviews from 1865 and 1866, cited in David Skilton, Anthony Trollope and his Contemporaries (1972; Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 54–6. 68. Merrill, A Pot of Paint, pp. 147, 157; cf. p. 145. 69. Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class, pp. 69–73, 249–50, 320–4. 70. Ibid., pp. 237–8; The Pre-Raphaelites, pp. 222–3. 71. Macleod, ibid., p. 309. 72. Agnew’s is illustrated in ibid., p. 235. 73. The extravagant decorations are described in Christopher Newall, The Grosvenor Gallery Exhibitions (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 11–13. 74. Works, XXIX, pp. 157–8, 161. 75. James McNeill Whistler, no. 33. 76. Merrill, A Pot of Paint, p. 167. 77. Acton, Prostitution [1857], 2nd edition, 1870, ed. Peter Fryer (New York, 1969), p. 47. 78. Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford, 1994), p. 98; James McNeill Whistler, pp. 132–5. 79. Mary Cowling, The Artist as Anthropologist (Cambridge, 1989), p. 245. 80. ILN, 44 (9 April 1864) 350. 81. Merrill, A Pot of Paint, p. 194. 82. The London Encyclopaedia (1987), ed. Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert, pp. 208–9. Since an earlier version of this Whistler section was published in 1997, Lynda Nead has also made some of the points in these last two paragraphs in her



Notes

83. 84.

85.

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102.

103. 104.

Imagining London, 1770–1900 wide-ranging discussion of Cremorne in Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, 2000), pp. 109–46. Merrill, A Pot of Paint, p. 168. Compare ‘Modern Aesthetics’, Punch, 72 (10 February 1877) 51. On the former, see Julie F. Codell, ‘Artists’ Professional Societies: Production, Consumption, and Aesthetics’, in Towards a Modern Art World, ed. Brian Allen (New Haven, 1995), pp. 169–87. See Impressionists in England: The Critical Reception, ed. Kate Flint (1984); McConkey, Impressionism in Britain; Alan Robinson, Poetry, Painting and Ideas, 1885–1914 (Basingstoke, 1985) [US: Symbol to Vortex (New York, 1985)], Ch. 2. Flint, ibid., pp. 36–7. Quoted in Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, p. 300. Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England (1978), pp. 80–1, 103–5. George Eliot, Selected Critical Writings, ed. Rosemary Ashton (Oxford, 1992), p. 346. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy [1869], ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge, 1960), p. 105; cf. pp. 76–7, 80–1. Bailey, Leisure and Class, p. 173. F.M.L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society (1988), p. 260. See Duranty’s La Nouvelle peinture (1876) in The New Painting: Impressionism 1874–1886, ed. Charles Moffett (Oxford, 1986), pp. 37–49; and Joris-Karl Huysmans’s reviews of 1879–80 in his L’Art moderne (1883; Paris, 1908), pp. 13–17, 89–91, 101–19, 137–8. By E.M. Rashdall and D.S. MacColl; see Impressionists in England, ed. Flint, pp. 80–1, 305–9, 116. Ibid., pp. 41–3. ‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’ (1886), lines 139–46, in The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (1969), pp. 1364–5. On the NVA, Vizetelly and censorship, see Peter Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875–1914 (1989; 1991), Ch. 4. Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800 (1981), pp. 87–9, 106–7. The loudest salvos in the skirmish over L’Absinthe are rpt. in Impressionists in England, ed. Flint, pp. 279–96. Frank Rutter, Art in My Time (1933), quoted in Flint, ibid., pp. 194–5. Kenneth McConkey, ‘The Bouguereau of the Naturalists: Bastien-Lepage and British Art’, Art History, 1.3 (1978) 371–82. See Dennis Farr, English Art 1870–1940 (Oxford, 1984); Wendy Baron, Sickert (1973); and Sickert: Paintings, ed. Wendy Baron and Richard Shone (New Haven, 1992). The ‘London Impressionists’ are discussed by Anna Gruetzner Robins in ‘The London Impressionists at the Goupil Gallery: Modernist Strategies and Modern Life’, in McConkey, Impressionism in Britain, pp. 87–96; and in ‘Britischer Impressionismus: “Magie und Poesie des alltäglichen Lebens” ’, in Impressionismus: Eine internationale Kunstbewegung 1860–1920, ed. Norma Broude (Köln, 1990), pp. 70–91; and by Kenneth McConkey, British Impressionism (Oxford, 1989), pp. 84–92. Christopher Wood, Victorian Panorama: Paintings of Victorian Life (1976), p. 150; Celina Fox, Londoners (1987), p. 266. Walter Sickert, ‘Modern Realism in Painting’ (1891), in Jules Bastien-Lepage and His Art, ed. A. Theuriet (1892), rpt. in Sickert: Paintings, ed. Baron and Shone, pp. 87–90.



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105. Charles W. Furse, ‘Impressionism – What It Means’ (1892), in Impressionists in England, ed. Flint, pp. 107–12. Furse’s comments are located within the English debate about Impressionism in Robinson, Poetry, Painting, and Ideas, Ch. 2. 106. The latter two works are reproduced in Warner et al., The Image of London, pp. 178–9. 107. Preface rpt. in Sickert: Paintings, ed. Baron and Shone, pp. 58–9. 108. Sickert, ‘Where Paul and I Differ’, Art News, 10 February 1910, quoted in Baron, Sickert, p. 11. 109. Compare his comments on the tradition represented by Millet, and later Degas, in Sickert: Paintings, ed. Baron and Shone, p. 48. 110. See, for example, L’Etoile (c. 1878) and The Curtain (c. 1880). 111. Sickert: Paintings, ed. Baron and Shone, p. 96. 112. Baron, Sickert p. 30. 113. On the ‘Glorified Spinster’, see Chapter 8. 114. Cited in Anna Gruetzner Robins, ‘Sickert “Painter-in-Ordinary” to the Music Hall’, in Sickert: Paintings, ed. Baron and Shone, pp. 13–24; p. 13. 115. Review quoted ibid., p. 15. 116. See Penny Summerfield, ‘Patriotism and Empire: Music-Hall Entertainment 1870–1914’, in Imperialism and Popular Culture, ed. J.M. Mackenzie (Manchester, 1986), pp. 22–3. 117. On the LCC’s measures, see Penelope Summerfield, ‘The Effingham Arms and the Empire’, in Popular Culture and Class Conflict 1590–1914, ed. Eileen Yeo and Stephen Yeo (Brighton, 1981), pp. 216–20; and Susan Pennybacker, ‘ “It was not what she said but the way in which she said it”: The London County Council and the Music Halls’, in Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure, ed. Peter Bailey (Milton Keynes, 1986), pp. 118–40.

7


1. George Levine, ‘Can You Forgive Him? Trollope’s “Can You Forgive Her?” and the Myth of Realism’, VS, 18 (September 1974) 5–30; p. 7; John Hagan, ‘The Divided Mind of Anthony Trollope’, NCF, 14 (1959–60) 1–26. 2. Robert Tracy, Trollope’s Later Novels (Berkeley, 1978); Juliet McMaster, Trollope’s Palliser Novels: Theme and Pattern (Basingstoke, 1978). 3. James Kincaid, The Novels of Anthony Trollope (Oxford, 1977). 4. John Halperin, Trollope and Politics: A Study of the Pallisers and Others (Basingstoke, 1977), pp. 38–45; David Aitken, ‘Anthony Trollope on “the Genus Girl” ’, NCF, 28 (1973–4) 417–34. 5. Jane Nardin, He Knew She Was Right: The Independent Woman in the Novels of Anthony Trollope (Carbondale, 1989), p. 18. 6. Ibid., p. 210 and passim; Deborah Denenholz Morse, Women in Trollope’s Palliser Novels (Ann Arbor, 1987). 7. Nardin, He Knew She Was Right, p. 177. 8. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977). 9. Bill Overton, The Unofficial Trollope (Brighton, 1982), p. 2 and passim. 10. Trollope, The Three Clerks, ed. Graham Handley (Oxford, 1989). 11. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene [1596], ed. A.C. Hamilton (1980), II. vii. 24. 12. Virgil, Aeneid, VI, 126. ‘Easy is the slope of hell’ later provides the title of Ch. XXIX, where it is twice reiterated on p. 352. Paradise Lost, I, 684–92, in The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (1968), p. 501.



Notes


13. Trollope, Doctor Thorne [1858], ed. David Skilton (Oxford, 1980), pp. 12–13. 14. Trollope, The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson [1861–2], ed. N. John Hall (Oxford, 1992). 15. The Unknown Mayhew: Selections from the Morning Chronicle 1849–1850, ed. E.P. Thompson and Eileen Yeo (1971), pp. 201–2, 216–17, 221–3, 436–7. 16. Alison Adburgham, Shops and Shopping 1800–1914 (1964), pp. 142–3. 17. John Sutherland discusses sources for Melmotte in his edition of The Way We Live Now (Oxford, 1982), pp. xvii–xxi, and in TLS, 4 August 1995. Subsequent page references are to this edition. 18. This scam had been pioneered by railway promoters in the 1840s. 19. Trollope was incensed by Peel’s about-turns on Catholic emancipation and the Corn Laws and by the Tories’ passing of the 1867 Reform Act to dish the Whigs. 20. Halperin, Trollope and Politics, pp. 46–8. 21. J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge, 1985). 22. See note 13 above. 23. See J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History and The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, 1975), on which my summary is based. 24. In ‘Land, Money, and the Jews in the Later Trollope’, SEL, 32 (1992) 765–87, Paul Delany reaches similar conclusions by a somewhat different route. 25. Robin Gilmour, The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (1981). 26. On Trollope’s social beliefs and his ideal of the gentleman, see Tracy, Trollope’s Later Novels, pp. 70–105. 27. Review of Lotta Schmidt and Other Stories, 21 September 1867, in David Skilton, Anthony Trollope and his Contemporaries (1972; Basingstoke, 1996), p. 22. 28. Trollope: The Critical Heritage, ed. Donald Smalley (1969), pp. 407–9. 29. Ibid., pp. 397–400, 419–23. 30. Trollope, An Autobiography [1883], ed. Michael Sadleir, Frederick Page and P.D. Edwards (Oxford, 1980), p. 360. 31. Ranald C. Michie, The London Stock Exchange: A History (Oxford, 1999), pp. 102–3. 32. Donald J. Olsen, The Growth of Victorian London (Harmondsworth, 1979), p. 119. 33. His prejudices are most apparent in his virulent attacks on Disraeli. It seems that in private life (as in his friendship with the Rothschilds) and in his fiction (e.g. his positive characterisation of Brehgert and Mme Max Goesler) Trollope’s tolerance towards individuals could transcend his mistrust of Jews in general, apparent enough in the racist descriptions of Rev. Joseph Emilius, the converted Jew. Like Disraeli, Emilius had, in Trollope’s view, reduced his religious affiliation to a matter of expediency: a ‘dishonesty’ of which Melmotte is also guilty. See also Jonathan Freedman, The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary AngloAmerica (Oxford, 2000), pp. 73–88. 34. I, pp. 31, 36, 117, 138–9, 141, 146, 153. Although Lopez is assumed to be Jewish, the narrator never explicitly states this; Lopez’s business partner, Sexty Parker, also sees no trace of Jewish ethnicity (II, p. 58). 35. This allusion to Hamlet is repeatedly applied to Grey and Vavasor in CY. 36. For what is meant by this, see I, pp. 293, 352–4, 369–71, 374, 378; II, pp. 65–9. 37. PR, II, pp. 248–53; The Prime Minister [1875–6] (Oxford, 1973), I, p. 371; II, pp. 61–2. 38. Manliness and Morality: Middle-class Masculinity in Britain and America 1800–1940, ed. J.A. Mangan and James Walvin (Manchester, 1987), pp. 1–4, 102–4. 39. Compare similar comments in Autobiography, pp. 357–60, and The Duke’s Children [1879–80] (Oxford, 1973), p. 3. There is a similar contrast between Chiltern and Finn, who has a more differentiated personality but cannot cope with the



274

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59.

60.

61. 62. 63. 64.

275

mudslinging of political opponents and the gutter press (PR, II, p. 250). Fawn, who lacks Palliser’s principled idealism and the integrity that Finn has acquired by the end of PF, is a weaker version of this character type. Compare EuD, pp. 180, 303, 538. In Women, Marriage and Politics 1860–1914 (Oxford, 1986), Pat Jalland analyses the aspirations and accommodations of their real-life counterparts. McMaster, Trollope’s Palliser Novels, p. 122, makes the latter point. Tracy, Trollope’s Later Novels, p. 51. The Way We Live Now, I, p. 34. Gatherum’s construction is described in Doctor Thorne, Ch. XIX, and referred to in CY, I, p. 191. John Hagan, ‘The Duke’s Children: Trollope’s Psychological Masterpiece’, NCF, 13 (1958–9) 1–21, remains the seminal account. On Trollope’s and James’s treatments of the ‘international’ theme, see Halperin, Trollope and Politics, pp. 247–54. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray (Oxford, 1991), pp. 515–16. Punch, 21 (1851) 189, 192, 203–6, 208. The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’s Journalism, ed. Michael Slater et al., 4 vols. (1994–2000), III, pp. 42–9. BH, pp. 478–9. Letter, March 1854, quoted in Charles Dickens: A Critical Anthology, ed. Stephen Wall (Harmondsworth, 1970), p. 95. Punch, 30 (8 March 1856) 98. Punch, 33 (3 October 1857) 140–1. On this 1857 controversy, see Harriet Martineau, ‘Female Industry’, Edinburgh Review, 109 (1859) 293–336, in ’Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors’: Victorian Writing by Women on Women, ed. Susan Hamilton (Peterborough, 1995), pp. 29–70; pp. 46–7. Compare ‘ “Rotten-Row.” – Painted by G.H. Thomas’, ILN, 40 (17 May 1862) 516; and Eric Trudgill, Madonnas and Magdalens (1976), pp. 179–81. This point is made in Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Aurora Floyd, ed. Richard Nemesvari and Lisa Surridge (Peterborough, 1998), pp. 24–6. William Fraser Rae’s review is quoted ibid., p. 587. Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford, 1994), Ch. 4. Woman’s Mission is discussed in The Woman Question, ed. Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Robin Lauterbach Sheets and William Veeder, 3 vols. (Manchester, 1983), I, pp. 3–14. Ibid., pp. 14–20. Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays, pp. 499–501, made the same point in characterising marriage as ‘Hobson’s choice’ for women. ‘Queen Bees or Working Bees?’, Saturday Review, 12 November 1859, quoted in Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago, 1988), p. 154. Quoted in Woman Question, II, p. 148. For other contemporary comparisons of marriage to prostitution, see Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England, 1850–1895 (Princeton, 1989), pp. 60–2. [George Drysdale], The Elements of Social Science [1854/5, 1860], 23rd edition (1884), p. 357. See pp. 355–7, 364–6, 402–5. Fraser’s Magazine, 65 (1862) 594–606. Jalland, Women, Marriage and Politics, pp. 254–5; Poovey, Uneven Developments, p. 4. Patricia Branca, Silent Sisterhood: Middle-Class Women in the Victorian Home (1975), pp. 3–4.



Notes


65. Poovey, Uneven Developments, pp. 149–63. 66. W.R. Greg, ‘Why Are Women Redundant?’, National Review, 14 (1862) 434–60. 67. Contemporary articles exposing this contradiction are cited in Poovey, Uneven Developments, pp. 157–8, 236. 68. William Acton, Prostitution, [1857], 2nd edition, 1870, ed. Peter Fryer (New York, 1969), pp. 74, 121–5, quoting a letter and editorial commentary in The Times, May 1857. 69. Poovey, Uneven Developments, pp. 76, 224. 70. Keith Thomas, ‘The Double Standard’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 20 (1959), p. 212. 71. On the husband’s right to his wife’s body, see Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law, Ch. 6. 72. Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on The Laws of England [1765–9], 19th edition (1836), I, p. 442. 73. This simplifies somewhat the legal complexities. For more details see Joan Perkin, Women and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century England (1989), pp. 10–19. 74. Perkin, Women and Marriage, p. 66. The economics of settlements and trusts are discussed in ibid., pp. 65–7, 70–2; and Jalland, Women, Marriage and Politics pp. 58–60. Poovey, Uneven Developments, pp. 71–2, emphasises the shortcomings of equity provisions. 75. Perkin, Women and Marriage, pp. 301, 304–6; Woman Question, II, pp. 21–2; Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law, Chs. 2 and 4. 76. Frances Power Cobbe, ‘Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors’, Fraser’s Magazine, 78 (1868) 777–94; pp. 780, 788. 77. Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Miriam Brody Kramnick [1792] (Harmondsworth, 1985), pp. 83–4, 100. Compare the comments on ‘power’ and ‘influence’ of Marion Reid and John Stuart Mill, in Woman Question, I, pp. 15–16 and II, p. 43. 78. Cicely Hamilton, Marriage as a Trade (1909), quoted in Carol Dyhouse, Feminism and the Family in England 1880–1939 (Oxford, 1989), p. 152. Little had changed since Wollstonecraft’s similar observation (p. 147). 79. Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays, pp. 496–7. 80. Henry James, ‘Modern Women’, Nation, 22 October 1868, in LC1, p. 22. 81. Autobiography, pp. 353–6. 82. See Duke’s Children, PF and PR. 83. Jalland, Women, Marriage and Politics, pp. 22, 79. 84. Greystock and Herriot debate this point in EuD, Ch. 24. 85. Greg, ‘Why are Women Redundant?’, p. 460; cf. pp. 446–50. 86. Eliza Lynn Linton, ‘The Girl of the Period’, Saturday Review, 25 (1868) 339–40. 87. Norton’s plight is described in her polemics, English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century (1854) and A Letter to the Queen on Lord Chancellor Cranworth’s Marriage and Divorce Bill (1855); see also Poovey, Uneven Developments; Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law; Perkin, Women and Marriage. 88. Norton, English Laws, p. 2; A Letter, pp. 98–9, cf. pp. 171–5. In A Plain Letter to the Lord Chancellor on the Infant Custody Bill (1839) Norton had made clear (pp. 5–7) that she accepted male ‘authority’ but not male ‘oppression’. 89. Compare her jaundiced comments to Hetta on II, pp. 322–6. 90. Brown, Jones and Robinson is full of such misogynistic anxieties. There is a similar passage on the engaged man’s ‘clipped wings’ in EuD, p. 204.



276

Notes

In the Cage

1. ‘Lady Barberina’, T, 5, pp. 195–301, is a further response to Trollope. Through the misunderstandings between Lemon and his wife’s family over her marriage settlement, his profession and his money from ‘trade’, it engages with the topical debate about what constitutes a ‘gentleman’. Just as Trollope’s bounder Lopez arouses xenophobic anxieties about miscegenation, so ‘Lady Barberina’ is concerned with ‘breeding’. But James reverses the perspective: it is the foreigner, Lemon, who applies eugenic criteria to ‘the intermarriage of races’. 2. I discuss these tales in ‘Social Spaces in Some Early Tales by Henry James’, in The Space of English, ed. David Spurr and Cornelia Tschichold (Tübingen, 2004). 3. Parenthetic references to ‘A London Life’ are to T, 7, pp. 87–212. 4. CTW, pp. 144–7; L, II, pp. 197, 261; III, pp. 66–7, 251–2. 5. A, p. 175; CTW, pp. 15, 29–30, 35, 112–21. 6. L, III, pp. 66–7, 98–9, 115–16, 146–7. 7. As Heath Moon proposes in ‘James’s “A London Life” and the Campbell Divorce Scandal’, American Literary Realism, 13 (1980) 246–58. 8. Fleda Vetch in SP, who half-hopes to earn her living as a painter, has as little chance of economic self-sufficiency. 9. ‘Marriage’, Westminster Review, 130 (August 1888) 186–201. 10. Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (1992), pp. 167–8. 11. (Alice) Mona Caird, ‘Marriage’, pp. 189–95, quotation from p.195; The Morality of Marriage and Other Essays on the Status and Destiny of Woman (1897), pp. 41–91. 12. Morality of Marriage, pp. 98–9. 13. On independent women in late Victorian London, see Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (Chicago, 1985); Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, Ch. 2 and passim; Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (Ithaca, NY, 1995), Chs. 6 and 7. 14. ‘The Glorified Spinster’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 58 (1888) 371–6; Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, pp. 63–5. 15. Lynne Walker, ‘Vistas of Pleasure: Women Consumers of Urban Space in the West End of London 1850–1900’, in Women in the Victorian Art World, ed. Clarissa Campbell Orr (Manchester, 1995), pp. 70–85; Stephen Inwood, A History of London (1998), pp. 650–1; Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, p. 261; Mica Nava, ‘Modernity’s Disavowal: Women, the City and the Department Store’, in Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity, ed. Mica Nava and Alan O’Shea (1996), pp. 38–76; Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton, 2000). 16. On what was involved here, see Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, pp. 50–2; Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford, 1994), pp. 96–7, 120–2; Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian England (Oxford, 1988), pp. 179–81; and Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, 2000), pp. 62–79. 17. Judith Walkowitz, ‘Going Public: Shopping, Street Harassment, and Streetwalking in Late Victorian London’, Representations, 62 (Spring 1998) 1–30. 18. Dickens’s Dictionary of London 1888 (Moretonhampstead, 1993), p. 144.



8

277


19. An American reviewer of ‘Daisy Miller’ commented: ‘A few dozens, perhaps a few hundreds, of families in America have accepted the European theory of the necessity of surveillance for young ladies, but it is idle to say it has ever been accepted by the country at large. In every city of the nation young girls of good family, good breeding, and perfect innocence of heart and mind, receive their male acquaintances en tête-à-tête, and go to parties and concerts with them, unchaperoned.’ See [John Hay], Atlantic Monthly, 43 (March 1879) in Henry James: The Contemporary Reviews, ed. Kevin J. Hayes (Cambridge, 1996), p. 69. 20. In The Reign of Wonder (1965; Cambridge, 1977), pp. 272–3, Tony Tanner also emphasises the symbolic importance of this scene. 21. On scenic form, see Emrys Jones, Scenic Form in Shakespeare (Oxford, 1971). 22. For these and related images, see Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure and Parisian Society (New Haven, 1988), pp. 92, 96–103. 23. On the contrasting American conventions, see ‘The Point of View’, T, 4, pp. 480–2. 24. On the social context, see Elizabeth Owen, ‘The Awkward Age and the Contemporary English Scene’, VS, 11 (1967–8) 63–82. 25. Unsigned review in Athenaeum, May 1899, in Henry James: The Critical Heritage, ed. Roger Gard (1968), p. 290. 26. Stead’s exposé was first published in July 1885 in The Pall Mall Gazette, favourite reading in the London Clubs that James frequented. It is reprinted in The Metropolitan Poor: Semi-Factual Accounts, 1795–1910, ed. John Marriott and Masaie Matsumura, 6 vols. (1999), III, pp. 2–55; my quotations are from pp. 10, 15, 18, 21. 27. The affront to bourgeois morality constituted by Nanda’s reading of Zola is indicated by the fact that in the published version of Beardsley’s The Toilette of Salome (1894), Salome’s bookshelf contains Zola’s Nana, in addition to Manon Lescaut and the Marquis de Sade. In the unpublished version, Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal stands beside an apocryphal novel that Beardsley attributes to Zola: La Merde. 28. Anne T. Margolis, Henry James and the Problem of Audience (Ann Arbor, 1985), pp. 110–12, 118–43. 29. See contemporary reviews in Hayes, pp. 238–4, 288–9, 295, 297 (quotation from p. 288), and in James: Critical Heritage, ed. Gard, pp. 272–3, 276. 30. On this aspect of ‘The Turn of the Screw’, see James’s Preface in LC2, pp. 1187–8, and reviews in Henry James, ed. Hayes, pp. 304, 307–8, and in Deborah Esch and Jonathan Warren’s Norton Critical edition (New York, 1999), pp. 149, 155–6. For AA, see Henry James, ed. Hayes, pp. 318–20, 322, and James: Critical Heritage, ed. Gard, p. 282. 31. William Lyon Phelps, ‘Henry James’, Yale Review ( July 1916), in Turn of the Screw, ed. Esch and Warren, p. 157. 32. Henry James, ed. Hayes, p. 289. 33. Michael Anesko, ‘Friction with the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (New York, 1986). 34. On James’s responses to these issues, see Richard Salmon, Henry James and the Culture of Publicity (Cambridge, 1997). 35. Page references in my text are to T, 7, pp. 213–84. 36. Paula Gillett, The Victorian Painter’s World (Gloucester, 1990), pp. 12, 15. 37. Ibid., p. 243; L, III, p. 107. 38. PE, p. 169. On Langtry’s early career in London, see Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (Harmondsworth, 1988), pp. 106–12. 39. Dianne Sachko Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 190, 195, 268.



278

279

40. Ibid., pp. 341–4. 41. Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford, 1986), p. 85. 42. See Chapter 6. 43. Letter to Grace Norton, 29 March 1884, quoted in Leon Edel, The Life of Henry James, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth, 1977), I, pp. 716–17; and Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius: A Biography (1992), p. 271. 44. On James’s financial anxieties in the later 1880s, see Anesko, ‘Friction with the Market’, pp. 119–39. 45. N, pp. 987, 1170; cf. Matt 6: 24. 46. N, pp. 1091–2, 1218–20. Compare also the publicity machinery of posters and photographs that accompanies Verena Tarrant’s lecture tours in The Bostonians (1885–6). 47. Shlomith Rimmon, The Concept of Ambiguity – the Example of James (Chicago, 1977), Ch. 3. 48. Compare James’s account of how the ‘curiosity’ about Hugh Vereker of the narratorcritic of ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ is increasingly aroused and begins to emerge ‘from the limp state’, ‘vaguely to throb and heave, to become conscious of a comparative tension’ (LC2, 1235). 49. On James and Symonds, see John R. Bradley, Henry James’s Permanent Adolescence (Basingstoke, 2000), Ch. 4. 50. Selected Letters of Henry James to Edmund Gosse 1882–1915, ed. Rayburn S. Moore (Baton Rouge, 1988), pp. 31–2. 51. L, IV, pp. 9–10. James’s responses to Wilde are discussed in Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford, 1990), Ch. 4; and Hugh Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 126–34. 52. Alfred Habegger, Henry James and the ‘Woman Business’ (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 54–62. 53. Kaplan, Henry James, pp. 403–4; Edel, The Life of Henry James, II, p. 192. 54. For his views on Zola in 1878 and 1880, see LC2, pp. 862–70. By 1903, however, he had revised his opinion of L’Assommoir (pp. 880–1). His strictures on Maupassant on pp. 528, 531, 547–9 resemble those of 1901 on Matilde Serao (pp. 963–7). The comments to Bourget are in Edel, II, pp. 48–9. 55. Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Vyvyan Holland (1966), p. 117. See Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities (1993), pp. 121–5; Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (1981), pp. 109, 113–14. On the wider context, see Neil Bartlett, Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde (1988); and Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (1994). 56. See Salmon, Henry James and the Culture of Publicity, Ch. 3. 57. T, 9, pp. 273–315; pp. 276, 283, 281. 58. T, 6, pp. 275–382. 59. This is also true to some extent of ‘John Delavoy’ (1898). 60. Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London (Harmondsworth, 1984), pp. 222–5, 281–96. 61. Walter Besant, All Sorts and Conditions of Men [1882], ed. Helen Small (Oxford, 1997), pp. 69–71, 83–6, 174–6. 62. The Bitter Cry of Outcast London is reprinted in Marriott and Matsumura, VI, pp. 80–100. For related publications in 1884–6, see III, pp. 56–124; VI, pp. 101–253.



Notes


63. The OED first records the verb ‘slum’ in this sense from 1884. The New York Times reviewed The Princess Casamassima under the title ‘A “Slumming” Romance’; see Henry James, ed. Hayes, pp. 178–81. 64. See N, pp. 57–8, 397, 545, 438, Chs. 11 and 41. The topography of The Princess is covered in Charles R. Anderson, Person, Place, and Thing in Henry James’s Novels (Durham, NC, 1977), pp. 124–72, and John Kimmey, Henry James and London (New York, 1991), pp. 87–105. 65. In autobiographical writings James applied the ‘window’ image to his own experience, as Anderson, pp. 126–9, remarks. 66. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry [1873] (1904), pp. 236–8. 67. T, 10, pp. 139–242. 68. Eric Savoy, ‘ “In the Cage” and the Queer Effects of Gay History’, Novel, 28 (1995) 284–307; references below to pp. 288–9, 292. On the Cleveland Street scandal, see Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society; and Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side. 69. Compare John Carlos Rowe, The Other Henry James (Durham, NC, 1998), pp. 165–6. 70. For the first view, see Joel Salzberg, ‘Mr Mudge as Redemptive Fate: Juxtaposition in James’s In the Cage’, Studies in the Novel, 11 (1979) 63–76; and Carren Kaston, Imagination and Desire in the Novels of Henry James (New Brunswick, 1984), pp. 108–20. For the second, see L.C. Knights, Explorations (1946), pp. 155–69.



280

Page numbers in italics indicate passages which include illustrations Ackermann, Rudolph, 13–14, 17 Ackroyd, Peter, 260 Acton, William, 172, 204–5, 206–7 Adburgham, Alison, 274 advertising, 17, 17–18, 49, 50, 139, 155, 156–7, 165, 169, 173, 189–90, 197, 228, 230–1, 232 Agnew and Son, Thomas, 151, 153, 161, 171 Aitken, David, 273 Albert, Prince, 18, 201 Alexander, W.C., 170 Alma-Tadema, Sir Lawrence, 153 Altick, Richard, 251, 256, 265 Andersen, Hendrik, 235 Anderson, Amanda, 250 Anderson, Charles R., 280 Anderson, Patricia, 256 Anesko, Michael, 278, 279 Anthony, P.D., 259 Aristotle, 69–70, 192, 194 Armstrong, Isobel, 251, 267 Armstrong, Nancy, xvi, 250 Arnold, Dana, 260 n. 8 Arnold, Matthew, 149, 175, 219, 241 Austen, Jane, 193, 201 Badinter, Elisabeth, 255 Baedeker, Karl, 161, 184–5 Bailey, Peter, 256, 272, 273 Baillie, Joanna, 9 Baring, Edward (‘Ned’), 163 Barker, Felix, 261, 264 Barker, Robert, 10–11 Barker, T.C., 256 Barker-Benfield, G.J., 252, 255 Barnes, E.C., 33 Baron, Wendy, 180, 183, 272, 273 Barratt, Thomas, 231 Barret-Ducrocq, Françoise, 257 Bartlett, Neil, 279 Barwell, Frederick Bacon, 137

Basile Bonsante, Mariella, 270 Bastien-Lepage, Jules, 178 Baudelaire, Charles, 81, 278 n. 27 Baum, John, 173 Bazalgette, Joseph, 54 Beardsley, Aubrey, 278 n. 27 Bendiner, Kenneth, 267 Benjamin, Jessica, 254 Bentham, Jeremy, 12 Bermingham, Ann, 266 Besant, Walter, 56, 239 Bessborough, Lady, 2 bills of exchange, xv, 112, 115–20, 197 Binswanger, Hans Christoph, 259, 263 n. 71 Blackstone, Sir William, 207 Blake, William, 11, 20–30, 91; ‘London’, 21–2; Urizen, 21–6, 39; Jerusalem, 26–30 Blechen, Carl, 135 Bloomerism, 200, 203–4, 206, 215 Bodichon, Barbara, 204, 205, 206 Booth, Charles, 58, 60–1, 143–4, 240 Borsay, Peter, 250 Boswell, James, 31, 33, 34–5, 250 Bourget, Paul, 236 Bowness, Alan, 266, 269 Boyce, George Price, 143, 155 Boys, Thomas Shotter, 18–19 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, 204 Bradley, J.L., 265, 266 Bradley, John R., 279 Branca, Patricia, 275 Brand, Dana, 260 Brett, John, 132–3 Brewer, John, xv, 251, 265 Bright, John, 162 Bristow, Joseph, 251, 267 British Institution, 146 Brown, Emma (née Hill), 140–1 Brown, Ford Madox, 107, 131–2, 133–5, 137, 140–1, 145–6 Bruder, Helen P., 253 281



Index


Brumberg, Joan Jacobs, 263 Brunel, Isambard Kingdom, 125 Buddemeier, Heinz, 251 Bullen, J.B., 268 Burdett-Coutts, Angela, 143 Burke, Edmund, 6, 37, 193 Burn, W.L., 259 Burne-Jones, Edward, 153, 172 Burney, Frances, 41–2 Butler, Marilyn, 252 Butt, John, 260 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 32, 35 (quoted), 108, 198, 210 Caillebotte, Gustave, 149, 165 Caird, Mona, 220–1 Callen, Anthea, 266, 269 Camden Town Group, 151, 160 Campbell, Lord Colin and Lady, 219, 220 Campbell, Lord Walter, 162 Canaletto, Antonio, 130 capitalism (see also commodification; consumerism/consumption; financial markets; speculation; value), 17, 43, 44, 45, 61–75, 82, 83–4, 85, 87–8, 91, 95–102, 104–6, 111, 114, 120–3, 137, 152–4, 155–6, 173, 188–98, 200–2; commercial, xv, xvi, 1–3, 10–11, 13–15, 17–19, 21, 31–4, 41, 77–8, 102, 104–5, 188–90, 229–32; ‘gentlemanly’, 162–3, 172, 191, 195; unregulated, see laissez-faire Carlyle, Thomas 61–2, 63–4, 65, 66, 74, 113, 145, 193 Caroline, Queen, 49, 214 Carrigan, Tim, 255 Carroll, David, 256 Carus, Carl Gustav, 135 Cassatt, Mary, 176, 225 Cassis, Youssef, 270 Casteras, Susan P., 254, 265, 266, 268 Certeau, Michel de, 251 n. 31 Chant, Mrs Ormiston, 185 charity see poverty Charlotte, Queen, 7 child-rearing practices, 20, 35, 39–41, 42–3 Cherry, Deborah, 267 Chodorow, Nancy, 254 chrematistics, 70, 190, 192 Churchill, Lord Randolph, 202

circulation, 4, 41, 43, 44, 45–6, 67, 70–1, 73, 77–8, 82, 99–100, 102, 104, 105, 112, 115–18 Clark, Anna, 252, 253, 254, 255 Clark, Robert, 262 Clark, T.J., 269, 272 classical republicanism, discourse of, 43, 192 Claude Lorrain (Claude Gellée), 8, 126, 130, 131 Clausen, George, 268 n. 98 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 263 n. 67 Cobbe, Frances Power, 206, 208–9 Codell, Julie F., 272 Cohen, Ed, 279, 280 Collet, John, 33 Colley, Linda, 43, 252, 255 Collins, Charles Allston, 135 Collins, Philip, 256, 260, 261 Collins, Wilkie, 155, 237 Colquhoun, Patrick, 13 commodification, 21, 32–5, 38, 41, 77, 81, 88, 94–100, 103–5, 120–3, 143–5, 149, 152–4, 167–73, 206–7, 210–13, 220, 228, 229–32 Connell, Bob, 255 Conner, Patrick, 265 Conrad, Joseph, 13, 258 n. 47 Constable, John, 133, 136, 160, 178 constructions (see also ‘London’, imaginary; women, fantasies about) of femininity, xvi, 6, 20, 28–9, 42–4, 52, 92, 103, 107, 108, 110–11, 123, 138–45, 177, 193, 199–200, 203–9, 211–17: ‘fallen woman’, xvi, 35–8, 52, 87, 88, 103, 104, 107–8, 138–44, 164, 217, 262 n. 49, 267 n. 84; ‘Girl of the Period’, 211, 233; ‘Glorified Spinster’, 183, 219, 221–2, 233; New Woman, 52, 219, 237 of masculinity (see also stroller, male), xvi, 17, 20, 21–6, 28–30, 33, 39, 40–1, 42, 52, 110–11, 193, 198–200, 203–4, 209, 211–12, 235 of the working classes (see also contagion/contamination; poverty), 1, 3–4, 5, 6–7, 12–13, 15–17, 29, 45, 49–61, 71–2, 87–8, 94, 117, 125, 145–7, 149–51, 175–6, 179, 198, 239–41, 257 n. 35



282

consumerism, consumption, xv, xvi, 1, 3, 13–15, 17–19, 20, 28, 31–3, 41, 44, 45, 48, 62, 68–9, 70–4, 78–9, 85, 94–9, 104–5, 105, 111, 151, 161, 167, 168, 175, 222 contagion/contamination, xvi, 38, 47, 52–6, 74, 88–9, 90, 98, 123, 177, 196, 241, 267 n. 84 Corfield, Penelope J., 252, 254 Cornforth, Fanny, 143–5 Cotsell, Michael, 264 Courbet, Gustave, 133, 154 coverture, xvi, 123, 207–9, 213–15 Cowling, Mary, 266, 267, 271 Cozens, John Robert, 8 Crehan, Stewart, 252 Crook, J. Mordaunt, 252 crowds, 1–8, 15–18, 31, 49, 55, 81, 82–3, 91, 135–6, 137, 145–9, 165, 168, 175, 241 Cruikshank, George, 5, 7–8, 91, 92, 177 Cubitt, Thomas, 87 Dance, George, the Younger, 10 Daniell, William, 10 Daumier, Honoré, 149 Daunton, M.J., 270 Davidoff, Leonore, 252, 255 Degas, Edgar, 129, 149, 177–8, 180–1, 183–4 Delany, Paul, 274 Denenholz Morse, Deborah, 273 Denis, Maurice, 183 De Nittis, Giuseppe, 124, 164–7 department stores, xv, 91, 190, 222, 277 n. 15 De Quincey, Thomas, 31 (quoted), 36–7, 260 n. 11 Devonshire, Duchess of, 2 Dibdin, Thomas Colman, 264 Dickens, Charles, Jr, 222 Dickens, Charles, xvi, 37, 46, 54, 65–6, 76–123, 125, 143, 190, 197, 203, 257; Barnaby Rudge, 98, 122; Bleak House, 54, 90, 92, 94, 95–7, 99, 100, 104, 110, 111, 113, 203, 212; David Copperfield, 87–9, 93, 94–5, 101, 103, 106, 108–9, 123, 143, 267 n. 84; Dombey and Son, 46, 76, 85, 87, 91, 92, 93–4, 95, 99, 101, 103–6, 108,

283

110, 111, 112, 119; Great Expectations, 85, 92, 96–8, 100, 101–2, 111–12, 123; Hard Times, 111; Little Dorrit, 65–6, 90, 100, 101–2, 110–12, 113–14, 115, 118, 173, 191, 201; Martin Chuzzlewit, 93, 100, 108, 109, 111, 112, 114; The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 101, 109; Nicholas Nickleby, 84, 110, 111; The Old Curiosity Shop, 80, 83–6, 87, 91, 98, 100, 103, 107, 108, 144–5; Oliver Twist, 77, 87, 91, 94, 100, 101, 109–11; Our Mutual Friend, 84, 88, 90, 99–101, 101, 106–8, 109, 120–3, 161, 267 n. 84; The Pickwick Papers, 87, 92; Sketches by Boz, 77–9, 80, 82–3, 92–3, 137, 189; A Tale of Two Cities, 100 Dickens, John, 93 Dighton, Robert, 251 n. 15 Dijkstra, Bram, 268 Dilke, Sir Charles, 219 Dinnerstein, Dorothy, 254 Disraeli, Benjamin, 191, 274 n. 33 Donald, Diana, 250, 254 Doré, Gustave, 175 Dorment, Richard, 268 Drysdale, George, 205–6 Duranty, Edmond, 176 Dyce, William, 137 Dyhouse, Carol, 276 Dyos, H.J., 252, 256, 257, 258, 260, 264, 268 Edel, Leon, 279 Edelstein, T.J., 265 Edgeworth, Maria, 43 Edward VII, King (as Prince of Wales), 220, 230 Egan, Pierce, 17, 77, 79 (quoted), 82 Egerton, George, 237 Egerton, M., 251 n. 15 Egg, Augustus, 138–40 Egley, William Maw, 137, 149 Eidophusikon (Loutherbourg), 9 Eliot, George, 65–6, 93, 128, 175, 202 Ellmann, Richard, 278 Elmes, James, 15 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 81 Engels, Friedrich, 251, 259 n. 77



Index


Ensor, James, 181 Esch, Deborah, 278 Etty, William, 153, 262 n. 48 Farr, Dennis, 272 Feary, John, 8 feme sole, 207–8, 211 (see also coverture) Ferber, Michael, 252 Fielding, Henry, 13 Fildes, Luke, 150–1 financial markets, xv; credit, xv, 47, 65, 83–4, 93, 104, 112–21, 163, 170, 189–90, 192–4, 197, 210; financial fraud, xv, 63–4, 65, 78, 102, 112–20, 173, 175, 188, 190–1; share dealing, xv, 46, 61, 65, 105, 120, 162, 163, 170, 188, 190–1, 193 Financial Revolution, xv, 114, 192 Fishman, W.J., 257, 267 Flaxman, John, 20 Flint, Kate, 272, 273 Ford, Ford Madox, 194 Forster, E.M., 194 Forster, John, 260 Fox, Celina, 251, 252, 254, 264, 267, 268, 272 Fox, Charles James, 2 Fox, Susan, 253 Foreman, Amanda, 250 Foucault, Michel, xiv, xvi, 12–13, 264 n. 81 Freedman, Jonathan, 274, 279 Freud, Sigmund, 40, 99, 257 n. 35 Friedrich, Caspar David, 135 Frith, William Powell, 125, 127–8, 129, 137, 143, 145, 147, 169, 170, 171, 231, 266 n. 61, 267 n. 74 Frost, Robert, 52 (quoted) Fry, Roger, 129, 130 Furse, Charles, 179 Fuseli, Henry, 20 Gagnier, Regenia, 279 Galinou, Mireille, 251, 264, 267, 268 Gallagher, Catherine, 262 Gard, Roger, 278 Gardner, Stanley, 252 Garrett, Clarke, 253 Gaskell, Philip, 265 Gathorne-Hardy, Jonathan, 255 Gay, John, 7

Gay, Peter, 255 George IV, 15; (as Prince of Wales), 2, 3, 42; (as Prince Regent), 15, 128, 201 George, M. Dorothy, 250, 252, 254 Giddens, Anthony, 250 Gillett, Paula, 267, 268, 270, 271, 278 Gilligan, Carol, 254 Gillray, James, 31–2, 33–4, 43, 126 Gilmour, Robin, 274 Ginsburg, Michal Peled, 262 Girouard, Mark, 268 Girtin, Thomas, 10 Gissing, George, 58, 106, 220, 222, 258 n. 45 Gladstone, William Ewart, 201 Glyn, George Carr, 163 Godwin, George, 257 Godwin, William, 13, 21 Gosse, Edmund, 235–6 Graham, William, 171, 268 n. 6 Grand, Sarah, 237 Grant, Albert, 120 Graves, Robert, 262 Great Exhibition, 19, 125, 161 Greg, W.R., 206–7, 210–11 Greenberg, Clement, 129, 152 Greenspan, Alan, 116 Grieve, Alastair, 153 Grimshaw, Atkinson, 151 Grossmith, George and Weedon, 48 Grosvenor Gallery, 151, 163–4, 172, 178, 201, 230 Gruetzner Robins, Anna, 184, 272, 273 Guest, Harriet, 43, 255 Habegger, Alfred, 279 Habermas, Jürgen, 41 Habermas, Tilman, 263 Hagan, John, 186, 273, 275 Halperin, John, 273, 274, 275 Hamilton, Cicely, 276 Handel, George Frederick, 2 Hanley, Keith, 256 Harding, James Duffield, 264 Hardy, Thomas, 106, 156 Harrison, J.F.C., 253 Harvey, David, 260 Haussmann, baron Georges Eugène, 124 Hawes, Louis, 251 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 13 Hay, John, 278



284

Index

‘illth’, 67, 74–5, 95, 240 Impressionism: French Impressionism, 124–6, 131, 133–4, 136–7, 149, 151, 152, 157–61, 170–1, 174–9, 183, 218, 240; ‘London Impressionists’, 151, 178–80, 183

‘improvement’, see manners, reformation of Ingham, Patricia, 263 Inwood, Stephen, 251, 269, 277 Jackson, Peter, 251, 261, 264 Jacobus, Mary, 254 Jalland, Pat, 275, 276 James, Alice, 220 James, Henry, xvii, 169, 170–1, 172, 202, 209 (quoted), 218–49; ‘The Aspern Papers’, 238; The Awkward Age, 219, 227–9, 244; The Bostonians, 227, 279 n. 46; ‘Daisy Miller’, 222, 226, 227; ‘The Death of the Lion’, 231, 237, 238; ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, 237–8; ‘In the Cage’, 229, 242, 243–9; ‘An International Episode’, 218–19, 222; ‘John Delavoy’, 237; ‘The Lesson of the Master’, 230–5, 237; ‘A London Life’, 219–27, 229, 230–1, 247; ‘The Middle Years’, 237; The Portrait of a Lady, 227; The Princess Casamassima, 218, 239–42; The Sacred Fount, 228, 234; ‘The Siege of London’, 219, 225; A Small Boy and Others, 242; The Spoils of Poynton, 201, 241, 244–5, 247–8, 249; The Tragic Muse, 222, 232; ‘The Turn of the Screw’, 229, 244; What Maisie Knew, 229, 244 James, Louis, 256 Jameson, Anna, 129 Jay, Elisabeth, 257 Jerome, Jenny, 202 Jerrold, Blanchard, 175 John, Juliet, 260 Johnson, E.D.H., 264 Johnson, John, 87–8 Jones, Emrys, 278 Jones, Samuel Loyd, 163 Jones, Thomas, 135 Kandinsky, Wassily, 183 Kaplan, Fred, 279 Kaston, Carren, 280 Keating, Peter J., 258, 272 Keats, John, 40–1 Kellett, John R., 256 Kimmey, John, 280 Kincaid, James, 186, 273



Hayes, John, 251, 264, 267, 268 Hayes, Kevin J., 278, 280 Hayman, Francis, 2 Hays, Mary, 44 Hazlitt, William, 4 Heath, William, 17 Helsinger, Elizabeth K., 264, 265, 275, 276 Hemyng, Bracebridge, 267 Henderson, Willie, 259 Herbert, Robert L., 267, 278 Herkomer, Hubert, 150 Hesperides, garden of, 48, 61, 66 Hibbert, Christopher, 253, 271 Hicks, George Elgar, 137, 145 Hiffernan, Jo, 172 Hill, Christopher, 253 Hilton, Tim, 265 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 257 Hobson, J.A., 259 Hogarth, Paul, 267 Hogarth, William, 33, 41, 78, 89, 92, 126, 129,147 Holker, Sir John, 168, 171, 172, 173, 231 Holl, Frank, 150 Hollingshead, John, 119–20 homosexuality, 52, 177, 233–8, 243–5 Hood, Thomas, 57, 71, 129, 266 n. 66 Hoole, John, 251, 264 Horwood, Richard, 12 Houghton, Arthur Boyd, 147–9 House, John, 266, 269 Houston, Gail Turley, 263 Hudson, Derek, 255 Hudson, George, 61, 113, 118 Hughes, Arthur, 135 Hunt, Charles, 33 Hunt, John Dixon, 264 Hunt, William Holman, 107, 129, 131–2, 137, 140, 141–3, 144, 171 Hutchinson, Mary, 36 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 176 Hyamson, Albert M., 270 Hyde, Ralph, 251, 264

285


Klein, Melanie, 98; 85–7, 89–90, 100–12, 262 n. 45 (Kleinian interpretative framework) Knights, L.C., 280 Knowles, Kaye, 164 Kramer, Lawrence, 254 Kynaston, David, 256, 264, 270 labour market, xv, 10–11, 16–17, 20, 28–9, 45, 47, 55, 57, 59, 60, 62–3, 64, 65, 71–4, 113, 143–4, 145–6, 150–1, 189, 239 Lacan, Jacques, xiv laissez-faire, xv, 13, 45, 46–8, 61–4, 66–7, 69–75, 112, 120, 175, 188, 193, 206 Lamb, Charles, 31–4 Landow, George, 265 Langford, Paul, xv, 255 Langland, Elizabeth, xvi, 250 Langtry, Lillie, 230, 231, 232 Laqueur, Thomas, 255 Lauterbach Sheets, Robin, 275, 276 Lawrence, D.H., 74 Lear, Edward, 141 Lee, C.H., 259 Lee, John, 255 Leighton, Sir Frederic, 153, 232, 268 leisure, commercialised, 1–3, 6–7, 20, 41–2, 48, 137, 161, 172–3, 175–6, 177–8, 180–5 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 126–7 Levin, Phoebus, 167–8, 172–3 Levine, George, 186, 273 Lewis, Sarah, 203, 205, 211 Leyland, F.R., 169 Lindsay, Sir Coutts, 167, 172 Linnell, John, 160 Linton, Eliza Lynn, 211 Lister, Raymond, 265 Lochnan, Katharine, 270 Locke, John, 42 Logsdail, William, 178–9 ‘London’, imaginary (see also constructions; contagion/contamination; psychoanalysis; women, male fantasies of) xiv, 80–2 (defined) London: suburbs, 45–6, 47, 48, 52, 123, 125, 133–5, 160–1, 256 nn. 11–12; Adelphi, 46, 138–9, 155; Albion Mills, 10–11; Bartholomew Fair,

6–7, 14; Battersea, 155–6, 157–8, 179; Blackfriars, 10–11, 87, 143–4; Camden Town, 46, 85, 90, 91, 184; Carlton House, 15, 201; Carlton Terrace, 18, 201; Chelsea, 16, 46, 142, 151, 154, 155, 157, 159, 173, 179; City of London, xv, 8, 14, 31–2, 45, 47, 49, 78–9, 90, 113, 165–6, 189; Clerkenwell, 16, 58; Covent Garden, 14, 33, 42, 47, 87, 145, 224–6; Cremorne, 167, 168, 172–3; Crystal Palace, 48, 125, 160, 256 n. 11, 264 n. 8; Dulwich, 160, 256 n. 11; East End, 47, 51, 56–60, 62, 64, 65, 82, 88, 175, 239–40, 257 n. 38; Finsbury, 117; Fleet Prison, 17, 90; Fleet Street, 15–16, 79; Green Park, 135–6, 159, 164; Greenwich, 8–9, 9, 240; Hampstead, 9, 133–5, 145, 160; Highgate, 9, 141; Hyde Park, 14, 17, 27, 49, 58, 135–6, 146–7, 175, 204, 240, 243, 246–7; Islington, 26, 47, 57, 165, 184, 240; Kensington, 14, 45, 150–1, 160, 221, 248; King’s Bench Prison, 89; Ludgate Hill, 15–16; Marble Arch, 17–18, 27; Mile End, 60, 66–7, 198; Millbank Penitentiary, 12, 87–8, 188, 241; Newgate Prison, 82, 98; Paddington, 27–8, 45, 125, 240, 243; Pentonville, 34, 47, 156–7, 242; People’s Palace, 58, 175, 239; Piccadilly, 5, 7–8, 82, 165; Ranelagh, 1, 14, 41; Regent Street, 15, 125, 169, 222; Regent’s Park, 15, 47, 124, 135; Sadler’s Wells, 10, 36–7; St James’s, 14, 18, 32, 112, 201; St John’s Wood, 26, 45, 141–2, 163–4, 183, 267 n. 74; St Pancras, 47, 156–7; St Paul’s Cathedral, 5, 8, 10, 11–12, 16, 49, 50, 166; Smithfield, 35, 53, 98, 191; Soho, 15, 42, 47, 242; Southwark, 8, 10, 16; Spitalfields, 28–9, 259 n. 77; Strand, 15, 31, 79, 87; Toynbee Hall, 58, 59, 175; Trafalgar Square, 17–18, 55, 125, 156, 165, 179; Tyburn, 27–8; Vauxhall Gardens, 1–3, 7, 14, 41; Wapping, 85, 86, 88, 172; West End, xvi, 1, 6, 15, 17–19, 31, 33–4, 47, 49, 52, 55, 58, 62, 71, 82, 113, 120, 165,



286

169, 179, 198, 219, 222, 239, 244; West Ham, 53; Westminster, 8, 14, 159, 165–7, 240; Whitechapel, 60, 65, 175, 198, 240 London, Jack, 56–8 Louise, Princess, 162 Loutherbourg, Philippe de, 9 Lynch, Kevin, 260 McBride, Theresa, 255 McCalman, Iain, 252 McClintock, Anne, 255 MacColl, D.S., 178 McConkey, Kenneth, 269, 272 MacDonald, Margaret, 268 Macleod, Dianne Sachko, 268, 271, 278 McMaster, Juliet, 273, 275 Maitland, Paul, 179–80 Malthus, Thomas, 50 Mammonism, 48, 61, 112–14, 188, 232, 263 n. 67 Manet, Edouard, 146, 147, 149, 174, 177, 181 Mangan, J.A., 274 manners, reformation of, 1, 7–8, 17, 31, 41, 49–52, 146, 175, 184–5 Mansel, H.L., 170 marginal utility, 67, 74, 173 Margolis, Anne T., 278 marriage: marriage market, xvi, 2, 20, 34–5, 41–2, 121, 190, 207–8, 210–11, 212–14, 218–29, 239–40; mercenary, 121, 123 (see also prostitution, ‘respectable’/marital) Marriott, John, 278, 279 Marsh, Jan, 267 Marsh, Joss Lutz, 262 Marshall, Nancy Rose, 270 Martineau, Harriet, 275 Marx, Karl, 61–2, 67, 68, 69, 70–3, 198 Mason, Michael, 252, 254, 255, 261, 271, 275, 277 Matsumura, Masaie, 278, 279 Matyjaszkiewicz, Krystyna, 269, 270 Maupassant, Guy de, 236 Maurice, F.D., 146 Mayhew, Henry, 55, 62–3, 74, 82, 99–100, 113, 144, 257, 259–60 nn. 92–3, 261 n. 29, 262 passim, 267, 274 Mearns, Andrew, 239

287

Mee, Jon, 252 Meisel, Martin, 266 Merrill, Linda, 269, 271, 272 Miall, Edward, 54–5 Michie, Ranald C., 270, 274 migrants, xv, 1, 3–4, 45, 49, 51–2, 56, 76, 85, 90–2 Mill, John Stuart, 111, 203, 209, 215, 275 n. 58, 276 n. 77 Millais, John Everett, 114, 130, 132–3, 133, 134, 141, 230–1, 232 millenarianism, 21, 26–7, 29 Millar, Oliver, 264 Miller, Annie, 141–3, 144 Miller, J. Hillis, 83, 261 milliners, 33, 41, 58, 62, 146–7, 246; sempstresses, 33, 57, 58, 71–2, 143–4 Milton, John, 9, 21, 23, 188 mobility (see also London, suburbs; women, mobility of ): social mobility, 2–3, 13–15, 17–19, 44, 45, 48, 52, 56, 59, 60, 77, 78–9, 82, 85–9, 92–4, 103, 106–8, 121, 123, 128, 138–43, 151, 153, 161–4, 169–72, 175–6, 191–2, 193–202, 241–2, 248–9 Moffett, Charles, 272 Moglen, Helene, 262, 263 Monet, Claude, 124, 125, 135–6, 154, 157–9, 165, 178, 218 monied interest, xv, 2, 188, 192–4, 194–5, 196, 198 Montagu, John, 5th Earl of Sandwich, 33 Moon, Heath, 277 Moore, Albert, 153, 157 Moore, George, 178, 267 More, Hannah, 255 Morelli, Giovanni, 81 Morier Evans, David, 256, 263, 264 Morris, William, 74, 169, 241 Morrison, Arthur, 56, 58–60 Moynahan, Julian, 263 Mulready, Augustus E., 125, 268 n. 98 Munby, Arthur, 40 Munch, Edvard, 181 Münter, Gabriele, 183 Nadel, Ira Bruce, 264 Nardin, Jane, 273 Nash, John, 14–15, 17, 47, 82 Nava, Mica, 277



Index


Nead, Lynda, xvi, 138, 261, 266, 267, 271–2, 277 Nemesvari, Richard, 271, 275 Newall, Christopher, 271 Nord, Deborah Epstein, xvi, 15 (quoted), 252, 257, 277 Norton, Lady Caroline, 214–15 Nunokawa, Jeff, 255 O’Connor, John, 156–7, 264 n. 4 Oettermann, Stephan, 251 Ogborn, Miles, 250, 251 Olsen, Donald J., 252, 264, 268, 274 Onorato, Richard J., 254 Orchardson, Sir William, 149, 268 n. 8 Osborn, Emily, 149 Ostriker, Alicia, 253 Overton, Bill, 187, 273 Owen, Elizabeth, 278 painting, 2–3, 8–11, 49–50, 124–85; ‘modern’ (see also Impressionism), xvii, 126, 129–38, 149, 150–1, 152–7, 167, 173–4, 185; Pre-Raphaelite, 130–5, 140–5, 145–6, 151, 152–4 panoptic view, 12–13, 76, 80–2 panorama, 1, 9–13, 16, 124, 135 Parkes, Bessie, 206 Parkinson, Ronald, 265 Parry, John Orlando, 49–50 Pater, Walter, 167, 233, 242 Paulson, Ronald, 253, 264 Pennybacker, Susan, 273 Perkin, Harold, 269, 270 Perkin, Joan, 276 Perry, Lara, xvii Persse, Jocelyn, 235 Peters, David Corbett, xvii Pether, Henry, 155–6 Phelps, William Lyon, 278 Philistines, 129, 162, 171, 173, 175, 241 Piceni, Enrico, 270 Pissarro, Camille, 125, 136, 157, 158, 159, 160–1 Pissarro, Lucien, 160 Pitt, William, 28 Pittaluga, Mary, 270 plutocracy, xv, 65, 90, 113, 119–20, 120–1, 161–5, 167, 172, 186, 191–5, 201–2, 232

Pocock, J.G.A., 192, 274 Poe, Edgar Allan, 251 Pollard, James, 125 Poovey, Mary, xvi, 250, 264, 266, 275, 276 Porter, Roy, xv Potter, Beatrice (Webb), 240 Potter, John Gerald, 170 Potts, Alex, 15 (quoted), 252, 264 Poussin, Nicolas, 126 poverty (see also labour market), 14, 16–17, 46–7, 52, 53–4, 60–1, 64–7, 74, 92–4, 145–6, 147, 150–1, 239–40 pre-Oedipal mother, see psychoanalysis Prettejohn, Elizabeth, 265 prints, 1, 5, 7–8, 10–11, 13–19, 20–6, 31–4, 71–2, 85–6, 95–7, 116–17; satirical, 5, 7–8, 17, 31–4, 43, 49, 71–2, 91, 92, 116–17, 126, 243; topographical, 1, 10–11, 13–19 property market, xv, 15, 18, 27, 45–8, 49, 52, 55–7, 63–4, 66–7, 83, 87–8, 90–1, 119–20, 239 prostitution, 21, 31, 32, 33–8, 52, 54–5, 78–9, 87–9, 94, 110, 138, 141, 143–5, 172–3, 177, 177–8, 183–5, 204, 205, 228, 236, 243, 261 nn. 31–2; ‘respectable’/marital, xvi, 34–5, 94, 103–4, 205–7, 211, 221 Prothero, Iorwerth, 253 psychoanalysis (see also Klein, Melanie): object relations, xiv, xvi, 21–3, 29–30, 39, 85–7, 89–90, 91, 92, 98, 98–9, 101–2, 110, 208–9; pre-Oedipal mother, 30, 32, 35, 36–41, 101 Pugin, Augustus Charles, 14 Quilter, Harry, 220 Quilter, William, 170 Radcliffe, Mary Ann, 205 Rae, George, 268 Rappaport, Erika Diane, 277 Read, Benjamin, 17–18 Redfern, Annie, 66–7 Redgrave, Richard, 129 Reeder, D.J., 256, 268 Reid, J.C., 261 Reid, Marion, 205, 276 n. 77 Reid, Martin, 269 Reitlinger, Gerald, 265



288

Renoir, Auguste, 225 ‘residuum’ the (see also constructions of the working classes) 53, 54–5, 99–100 Reynolds, G.M., 51 Reynolds, Graham, 265 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 127, 130, 152 Ricardo, David, 68 Richardson, Jonathan, 264 Rimmon, Shlomith, 279 Ritchie, John, 135–6, 146–7 Robb, George, 263 Robbins, Michael, 256 Roberts, Helene E., 265, 267 Robertson, Alexander, 268 Robertson, Fiona, 255 Robinson, Alan, 272, 273, 277 Robinson, Mary (‘Mary of Buttermere’), 36–7 Robinson, Mary ‘Perdita’, 2, 3, 42 Rosenberg, John, 265 Rossetti, Christina, 143 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 38, 132, 141, 143, 144, 152–4, 171, 230 Rossetti, William Michael, 133 Rossiter, Charles, 149 Rothschild, Lionel, 163 Rothschild, Nathan, 163 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 42, 209 Roussel, Theodore, 179 Rowe, John Carlos, 243, 280 Rowlandson, Thomas, 2–3, 14, 251 n. 15 Royal Academy, 2, 10, 20–1, 124, 127, 130, 131, 132, 138, 140, 143, 146, 149, 150, 154, 159, 172, 178 Rubinstein, W.D., 256, 259, 270 Ruskin, John, 43, 48, 62, 63, 65, 66–70, 73–5, 91–2, (quoted), 95, 126, 129–34, 137, 138, 143, 146, 151, 164, 167–74, 185, 190, 198, 200, 230, 232, 239, 240, 241 Russell, Norman, 256, 260, 263 Rutter, Frank, 177–8 Sadleir, John, 118 Salmon, Richard, 278, 279 Salzberg, Joel, 280 Samuel, George, 8 Sanders, Andrew, 256, 260 Sato, Tomoko, 251, 264 Savage, Gail L., 266

289

Savory, Hester, 34 Savoy, Eric, 243–4, 247, 280 Schor, Hilary M., 263 Schwarz, L.D., 252, 253, 258 Schwarzbach, F.S., 260, 264 Scott, Sir George Gilbert, 156 Seaborne, Mike, 252 ’Season’, London, 35, 62, 71–3, 161, 210, 222, 246 Sekora, John, 250 Selous, Henry C., 264 Sennett, Richard, 251 Settlement movement, 51, 59, 65 Seurat, Georges, 269 n. 13 Shanley, Mary Lyndon, 275, 276 Shaw, George Bernard, 40, 56, 222 Shaw, Norman, 151 Sheepshanks, John, 129 Shelley, Mary, 23, 98 Shepherd, Thomas Hosmer, 15–17 Sheppard, Francis, 256 Sherburne, James Clark, 259, 260 Shiff, Richard, 269 Sholl, Samuel, 29 Shone, Richard, 272, 273 Showalter, Elaine, 255 Sicher, Efraim, 260 Sickert, Walter, 152, 178, 178–9, 180–5 Siddall, Elizabeth, 144 Sinfield, Alan, 279 Sisley, Alfred, 161 Situationism, 12 Skilton, David, 271, 274 Slater, Don, 250, 259 Slater, Michael, 263 Smalley, Donald, 274 Smith, Adam, 4, 67, 68, 69, 100, 260 n. 97 Smollett, Tobias, 2–3, 7 Society, London, 14, 43, 71, 113, 120–1, 122, 149, 162–4, 172, 191–202, 210–11, 219–29 Society of British Artists, 128 Solomon, Abraham, 129 Southey, Robert, 11–12 Spear, Jeffrey L., 260 speculation: in art market, 127–8, 153–4, 167–8, 170–2, 270 n. 48; building (see property market); financial, 61, 63–4, 113–14, 115–16, 118–20, 163, 193, 197, 199



Index


Spencer, Robin, 155–6, 268, 269, 271 Spencer-Stanhope, John Roddam, 143–5 Spenser, Edmund, 188 Staley, Allen, 132, 265, 266, 269 Stallard, J.H., 259 Stallybrass, Peter, 256 Stamp, Gavin, 252 Starr, Sidney, 183 Stead, W.T., 57, 60, 177, 228, 236 Stedman Jones, Gareth, 256, 257, 258, 259, 271, 279 Steegman, John, 265 Steiner, Wendy, 264 Stephens, F.G., 133 (quoted), 153 Sterne, Laurence, 33 Stevens, Hugh, 279 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 13, 236 Stoker, Bram, 198 Stone, Harry, 261 Stone, Marcus, 268 stroller, male, 31–4, 35–8, 41, 41–2, 78–83, 92, 107–8, 147, 246 sublime, the, 8–12, 127, 135, 264 n. 5 Summerfield, Penny, 273 Summerson, John, 252, 256 Surridge, Lisa, 264, 271, 275 Surtees, Virginia, 266, 267, 268 Sutherland, John, 274 sweated labour, see labour market Swift, Jonathan, 7, 59, 121 Symonds, John Addington, 235–6 Tannenbaum, Leslie, 253 Tanner, Tony, 278 Tanqueray, The Second Mrs (Pinero, Arthur Wing), 216 Taylor, Tom, 271 n. 59 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 56–7, 151, 177 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 267 n. 74 Thomas, Keith, 266, 276 Thompson, E.P., 252, 253 Thompson, F.M.L., 256, 272 Thomson, John, 58 Thoreau, Henry David, 75 Tillotson, Kathleen, 260 Tissot, James, 149, 151, 161–2, 163–5, 172, 174, 183, 186, 267 n. 74 Topham, Major Edward, 2 Tosh, John, xvi, 250, 255 Townsend, Meredith, 196

Tracy, Robert, 273, 274, 275 transportation, xv, 5, 15–16, 27, 45–8, 90, 125; omnibus, 45–6, 137, 183; railway, 46–8, 55, 61, 65, 90, 105–6, 125, 137, 160–1; trams, 46, 55, 157; underground, 46, 125 Treuherz, Julian, 268 Trollope, Anthony, xvii, 120, 161–2, 170, 186–217, 219, 220, 223, 231, 232, 263 n. 67, 277 n. 1; Can You Forgive Her?, 191, 199, 200; The Duke’s Children, 200, 202, 210; The Eustace Diamonds, 213; Phineas Finn, 199, 210; Phineas Redux, 199, 210; The Prime Minister, 191, 194–202; The Struggles of Brown, Jones and Robinson, 189–90, 196, 197, 276 n. 90; The Three Clerks, 188, 191, 193, 197; The Way We Live Now, 120, 173, 187, 188, 190–4, 196, 197, 201, 203, 204, 210–17, 219 Trudgill, Eric, 275 Turner, Joseph Mallard William, 8–9, 66, 130, 131, 136, 160–1, 178 Tyers, Jonathan, 2 Urania Cottage, Shepherd’s Bush, 89, 143 Vallon, Annette, 36 value, xv, 61, 67–9, 73, 74–5, 190, 192; exchange-value (see also commodification; marital prostitution; marriage market), 62, 68–9, 70, 73, 74–5; social exchange-value, xv, 120–1, 186, 190, 193; labour theory of, 67–8, 70, 71–3, 168, 171, 173, 194, 259 n. 86; value judgements, 122–3, 173, 186, 195–202 Varnedoe, Kirk, 268, 270 Vaughan, Will, 252, 264 Veeder, William, 275, 276 Vicinus, Martha, 277 Vickery, Amanda, xvi, 250, 255 Victoria, Queen, 18, 163, 201 Vizetelly, Henry, 177 Vogel, Ursula, 266 Wakefield, Priscilla, 205 Walker, Lynne, 277



290

Walkley, Mary Anne, 71 Walkowitz, Judith R., 254, 258, 277 Waller, P.J., 256 Walpole, Hugh, 235 Walpole, Spencer, 139 Walters, Catherine, 204 Walvin, James, 274 Warner, Malcolm, 266, 269, 273 Warren, Jonathan, 278 Waters, Catherine, 261, 263 Waters, Malcolm, 250 Watts, George Frederick, 265, 268 Waugh, Fanny, 143 Webster, Augusta, 261, 267 Weeks, Jeffrey, 272, 279, 280 Weinreb, Ben, 253, 271 Weiss, Barbara, 263 Wellington, Duke of, 17–18 Wells, H.G., 55, 59, 198 Welsh, Alexander, 260, 263 Wentworth, Michael, 269, 270 Wheatley, Francis, 21, 125 Wheeler, Michael, 256, 260 Whistler, James McNeill, 151, 152, 153, 154–9, 164, 167–74, 179–80, 183, 184, 185, 186, 231, 232 White, Allon, 256 Wilde, Oscar, 13, 164, 232, 236, 237 Wilkes, John, 13 Wilkinson, Edward Clegg, 268 Williams, Raymond, 187, 273 Wilson, Elizabeth, 257 Winch, Donald, 258 Winnicott, D.W., 110

291

Wohl, Anthony S., 257 Wolff, Michael, 256, 257, 258, 260, 264, 267 Wolfreys, Julian, 250 Wollheim, Richard, 266 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 30, 43, 43–4, 209, 215 women (see also constructions of femininity; marriage; prostitution): agency of, xvi, 2, 20, 28–9, 41, 42, 43–4, 106, 107, 123, 142–3, 199–202, 206, 208, 211–17, 221–3, 227, 233, 240; constraints imposed upon: economic, xvi, 20, 34–5, 41, 43–4, 57, 123, 202–3, 205–15, 220, 221; legal (see also coverture), xvi, 20, 43, 138–9, 203; male fantasies about, 20, 21–3, 29–30, 31–3, 36–41, 142, 153, 209, 212, 216–17, 246; mobility of, xvi, 16–17, 18, 20, 31–4, 41–2, 93–4, 146–9, 183, 221–3, 224, 227, 233 Wood, Christopher, 265, 266, 267, 268, 272 Woodward, George, 251 n. 15 Wordsworth, William, 4–7, 35–8 Worthen, John, 254 Wratislaw, Theodore, 202 Wyatt, Sir Matthew Digby, 125 Wyld, William, 264 Young, Andrew McLaren, 268 Zola, Emile, 176, 177, 236, 278 n. 27



Index

Imagining London, 1770-1900

Imagining Jesus, imagining Jews

Imagining Objects and Imagining Experiences

Imagining Ajax

Imagining numbers

Imagining Possibilities

Imagining Ajax

London

London!

London, Bloody London

London

London

Images, Supposing, and Imagining

Imagining the State

Visualizing and Imagining Seeing

Imagining and Beleiving

Imagining the End

Imagining Transatlantic Slavery

Imagining and the Image

Imagining the Balkans

Imagining Reality (Special Edition)

Imagining Sustainable Food Systems

Re-imagining Educational Leadership

Imagining the Impossible

Imagining Native America in Music

London Falling

London Bridges

London Transports

London Bridges

London Bridges

Imagining London, 1770-1900

Imagining Jesus, imagining Jews

Imagining Objects and Imagining Experiences

Imagining Ajax

Imagining numbers

Imagining Possibilities

Imagining Ajax

London

London!

London, Bloody London

London

London

Images, Supposing, and Imagining

Imagining the State

Visualizing and Imagining Seeing

Imagining and Beleiving

Imagining the End

Imagining Transatlantic Slavery

Imagining and the Image

Imagining the Balkans

Imagining Reality (Special Edition)

Imagining Sustainable Food Systems

Re-imagining Educational Leadership

Imagining the Impossible

Imagining Native America in Music

London Falling

London Bridges

London Transports

London Bridges

London Bridges

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