Abstract
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-fairecapitalism.
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Notes
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.
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.
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.
Kellett, Railways and Victorian Cities, pp. 326–37, 293; Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London (Harmondsworth, 1984), passim.
P.J. Waller, Town, City, and Nation: England 1850–1914 (Oxford, 1983), p. 28; Kellett, Railways and Victorian Cities, p. 299.
John Summerson, The Architecture of Victorian London (Charlottesville, 1976), pp. 16–17, 19–21.
David Morier Evans, The City; or, The Physiology of London Business (1845), quoted in Kynaston, City of London, I, p. 140.
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.
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.
Quoted in Ruskin, Munera Pulveris (1862–3, 1872), Works, XVII, p. 233.
F.M.L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society (1988), pp. 330–2.
Philip Collins, Dickens and Crime, 3rd edition (Basingstoke, 1994), p. 5.
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).
Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England (1978).
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.
W.D. Rubinstein, ‘Wealth, Elites and the Class Structure of Modern Britain’, Past and Present,76 (August 1977) 112.
Quotations from ‘Mending Wall’, in The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (1971), pp. 33–4.
The seminal treatment of this topic is Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986).
See ‘Precautions against Cholera’, ILN, 23 (22 October 1853) p. 352; and Andrew Sanders, Charles Dickens, Resurrectionist (New York, 1982), pp. 10–14.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Stedman Jones, Outcast London, Part III; W.J. Fishman, East End 1888 (1988), pp. 52–4.
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.
The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (1969), pp. 1367–8.
Arthur Morrison, Tales of Mean Streets[1894], ed. Michel Krzak (Woodbridge, 1983), pp. 19–21.
Arthur Morrison, A Child of the Jago[1896], ed. Peter Miles (1996), p. 11.
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.
Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, I, in Into Unknown England 1866–1913, ed. Peter Keating (Manchester, 1976), pp. 113–24.
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.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto[1848], trans. Samuel Moore [1888], ed. A.J.P. Taylor (Harmondsworth, 1973), p. 82.
Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 101–14, 419–20.
L.D. Schwarz, London in the Age of Industrialisation (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 56–7.
The Unknown Mayhew: Selections from the Morning Chronicle 1849–1850, ed. E.P. Thompson and Eileen Yeo (1971), pp. 196–223.
J.H. Stallard, London Pauperism among Jews and Christians (1867)
Quoted in W.L. Burn, The Age of Equipoise (1968), p. 122.
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).
‘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 Lastand 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).
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.
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.
Don Slater, Consumer Culture and Modernity (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 100, 105.
See Sherburne, John Ruskin; Ruskin and Environment, ed. Wheeler; and Jeffrey L. Spear, Dreams of an English Eden (New York, 1984).
Walden (1854), in The Portable Thoreau, ed. Carl Bode (Harmondsworth, 1981), p. 286.
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© 2004 Alan David Robinson
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Robinson, A. (2004). Capital City. In: Imagining London, 1770–1900. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230596924_3
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