Abstract
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 child-rearing 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.
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Notes
Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (Oxford, 1981), pp. 50–1.
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)
E.P. Thompson, Witness against the Beast (Cambridge, 1993).
William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice[1793; 3rd edition 1798], ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth, 1976), p. 182; cf. pp. 148–9, 580–1.
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).
Blake, Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford, 1979), p. 393.
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 Urizenby Kay Parkhurst Easson and Roger R. Easson (1979), pp. 94–7.
Urizen’s attempt to kill Fuzon is described in the Book of Ahania, 1–131, in Poems, pp. 269–74. Earlier, in UrizenCh. VII, Los binds Ore, in a typological parallel to Laius and Œdipus, to Abraham and Isaac, and to Zeus and Prometheus. The link between these oedipal anxieties and revolutionary politics is indicated in Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789–1820) (New Haven, 1983), p. 24.
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).
See The London Encyclopaedia, ed. Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert (1987).
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.
Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, 1995), pp. 119–31.
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).
Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (1950), p. 216.
Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater[1821], ed. Alethea Hayter (Harmondsworth, 1975), p. 50.
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.
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.
Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford, 1994), p. 90.
Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy[1768], ed. Graham Petrie (Harmondsworth, 1975), pp. 73–8, 89–92, 115–18, 120–2.
M. Dorothy George, Hogarth to Cruikshank: Social Change in Graphic Satire (1967), fig. 65.
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.
Penelope J. Corfield, ‘Walking the City Streets: The Urban Odyssey in Eighteenth-Century 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.
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.
John Worthen, The Gang: Coleridge, the Hutchinsons and the Wordsworths in 1802 (New Haven, 2001), pp. 121–4, 225–34.
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.
William Wordsworth, The Poems, ed. John O. Hayden, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth, 1977), I, p. 364.
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.
Clark, Struggle for the Breeches, pp. 48–62; Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society (Cambridge, 1980).
‘Jenny’, in Rossetti’s Poems, ed. Oswald Doughty (1961), pp. 67–8.
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).
Elisabeth Badinter, Die Identität des Mannes (München, 1993), Erster Teil; Chodorow, Reproduction of Mothering, Ch. 11.
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).
Quoted in Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989), p. 606.
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.
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.
Theresa McBride, ‘“As the Twig is Bent”: the Victorian Nanny’, in The Victorian Family: Structure and Stresses, ed. Anthony S. Wohl (1978), p. 51.
Sigmund Freud, Briefe an Wilhelm Fließ 1887–1904, ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Frankfurt a.M., 1986), pp. 290, 288.
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.
Quoted in McClintock, Imperial Leather, p. 87, from Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny (1972), p. 78.
Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, 1998), Ch. 7.
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.
Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, pp. 600–7; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (1996), pp. 254–6, 260–3.
G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago 1992), Ch. 1.
Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (1987).
Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).
On this final point, see Jeff Nunokawa, The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel (Princeton, 1994).
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.
Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago, 2000), pp. 236–7, 251, and Ch. 13.
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.
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© 2004 Alan David Robinson
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Robinson, A. (2004). Gendered London. In: Imagining London, 1770–1900. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230596924_2
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