Daunton M. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840-1950
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positives and categorical exclusions.
5
Maps for tourists, travellers and business
people needed to show transport routes, shopping streets, civic or governmen-
tal amenities, trading halls, religious edifices and centres of entertainment and
leisure. These were the features highlighted by vignettes in the borders of street
plans, emphasised or labelled in the all-inclusive sweep of panoramic views, and
listed and illustrated systematically in town directories, railway guides and guide
books. Factories, warehouses and showrooms might be of interest as tourist
attractions, architectural features or for business inquiries. There was no need to
show back courts, low lodging houses or small-scale workshops. A railway
station, a bank, an arcade, a town hall, a cathedral, a theatre and a park – these
were the defining aspects of most cities as represented for purposes that we can
imagine falling somewhere between those represented today by a city’s tourist
board and the chamber of commerce. These were the functional components of
the topographical grammar of the city and it becomes easy to recognise them in
all sorts of topographical work, whether watercolour views for a private album,
sets of engraved or lithographic prints published for collectors, or even in the
paintings of specific cities that regularly appeared in public exhibitions.
6
We find
that fine art forms are closely related to the more ephemeral images of the city
produced for orientation, promotion or souvenir. Once the component parts
have been recognised it is easier to appreciate the emphases; to understand the
grammar of topography.
It made a considerable difference whether the array of significant routes and
locations was centred on a church, for example, or an exhibition hall. The selec-
tion of St Paul’s Cathedral as the vantage point for Hornor and Parris’ panoramic
view of London (exhibited from at the Colosseum, Regent’s Park) lent an
air of blessedness and authority to the view, but, beyond that, it put the City and
the commercial world at the centre rather than the court and the fashionable
West End. An aquatint of offered a fish-eye rendering of the panorama
(Plate ).
7
This anonymous print translated the large-scale popular installation
into a two-dimensional format, adding a spin as the whole now suggests an orb
that is both globe and eye. Clear lines of roads and river describe a whorl as they
curve out from the centre to the margins. Just as London’s commerce reaches to
distant shores so the city spreads to the distant reaches of the globe. We are given
the impression that city is in motion and that, as an eye, it consists of the essence
of visibility. Nothing is assumed hidden or inaccessible. The sentient city is the
Caroline Arscott
5
On the ideological basis of map-making see J. B. Harley, ‘Maps, knowledge, and power’, in D.
Cosgrove and S. Daniels, eds., The Iconography of Landscape (Cambridge, ), pp. –.
6
William Boyne of Leeds collected prints and watercolours for his () grangerised edition of an
earlier history of Leeds: R. Thoresby and T. Whitaker, Ducatus Leodiensis, nd edn (); gran-
gerised edition, Leeds City Reference Library.
7
R. Hyde, The Fish-Eye View of London (London, ), reprinted from The Map Collector ( June
); Barbican Art Gallery, Panoramania!, exhibition catalogue (London, ); on the associa-
tions of St Paul’s Cathedral see S. Daniels, Fields of Vision (Cambridge, ), ch. .
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
centre of knowledge and dynamism. The Church, with its links to the state,
presides.
A comparison can be drawn between this and the painting of by Niels M.
Lund, The Heart of the Empire (Plate ). Here St Paul’s sits at the centre of an urban
environment that fills the picture space and, once again, the inference is that this
city is so massive that it extends to the ends of the earth.
8
Yet here the power is
vested not in clarity and living energy but in the somewhat grim compression of
volumetric blocks of commercial, official and public premises. The view is taken
from the roof of the Royal Exchange and we see Mansion House to the left.
Where the buildings give way to the space of the intersection the vistas are not
open; the space is crammed with minute dots of pedestrians and traffic. Birds fly
up, and smoke blows sideways to fill the intervening space. Even the sky seems
dense and heavy with smoke and massing cloud. It seems that the theme of the
picture is the relationship between power and accumulation. The concentration
of physical matter echoes the accumulation of capital. The wealth and influence
of London and the nation are memorialised in a stern, insistent rhetoric.
These wide-ranging views of the city should be related to the systems of
mapping that were developed in the nineteenth century. The spotty topograph-
ical lexicon that I have described gave way, as the century progressed, to a more
inclusive vision. Street maps and atlases of the metropolis started to cater to
strangers, in considerable detail, in , at the moment when floods of visitors
came to see the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace.
9
The latter half of the nine-
teenth century saw governmental efforts to monitor the population in new and
more sophisticated ways. As the Ordnance Survey produced its large-scale maps,
a total and consistent ground survey of urban areas was available at a scale that
permitted the noting of every lamp post and garden wall. Non-governmental
investigations also found new ways of charting the spatial distribution of many
elements of urban existence. Charles Booth’s survey of London, Life and Labour
of the People in London, presents an ambitious empirical framework for the appre-
hension of the total city.
10
Sets of maps that were issued with Booth’s survey offer
an extraordinarily inclusive cross-referencing of urban features, in an effort to
map, analyse and indicate the potential for social intervention. A picture such as
Lund’s The Heart of the Empire assumes the existence of a density of data that can
be implied even when it is not systematically noted.
In this context the artistic project of totalising the city took on a different
quality. A concentric city of special features was giving way to a city to be under-
stood as a conglomerate. Previously, the centre could embrace and energise the
The representation of the city in the visual arts
18
See Daniels, Fields of Vision, pp. –; and Barbican Art Gallery, The Image of London:Views by
Travellers and Emigrées, exhibition catalogue (London, ), p. .
19
H. J. Dyos, ‘A guide to the streets of Victorian London’, in D. Cannadine and D. Reader, eds.,
Exploring the Urban Past (Cambridge, ), pp. –.
10
C. Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, vols. (London, –).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
periphery, now, at the turn of the century, the centre was felt to be compressed
by the sheer burden of its annexations. The urban was experienced as a contin-
uum. Consequently, it also became possible to experience a decentred city. In the
late Victorian and Edwardian period the peripheral could typify the urban in a
new way. Suburbs could be invoked, not as semi-rural retreats, but as the recur-
rent, sometimes dreary setting of quotidian city life. We can explore this point
by comparing two very different views of north London localities. Ford Madox
Brown completed his An English Autumn Afternoon in (Plate ). A young
couple and their dog are seated in the foreground, and beyond them stretches a
vista of gardens and fields between the vantage point of Hampstead and Highgate
Village in the distance. It is a modest subject. When he was criticised for the
scene’s lack of drama or notable features Brown declared that he painted the view
just because it lay outside his window.
11
Amongst the variegated colours of
foliage, patches of bonfire smoke and tiled roofs, Brown deliberately stresses the
rectangles of gardens, neat paths and cultivated plots. The scene is not one of
streets and rows of houses, but nor is it wild or natural. This suburban fringe is
frankly artificial; the couple are settling to confined domestic existence like the
doves whose manmade dovecote resembles the dwellings that we glimpse in the
vicinity. The suburban environment is one in which the town can take pleasure
in aspects of nature but the sway of the town is cheerfully asserted. The sensibil-
ity of many of the subjects completed by the artist W. R. Sickert from the s
and by his companions in the Camden Town Group from can be seen to
be completely different. These late Victorian and Edwardian views resemble
Brown’s in that they take for their subject the immediate and unremarkable envi-
ronment of the artist’s dwelling or studio. Mornington Crescent was hardly rustic
by the s, and was arguably urban rather than suburban, but, unlike the City
or the West End, it could not be taken as emblematic of London as the centre of
fashion and power. Fairly leafy and somewhat shabby, the setting of Spencer
Gore’s Mornington Crescent of is presented as one aspect of the urban con-
tinuum (Plate ). In comparison with the centrifugal optimism of Brown’s sub-
urban scene this is a subdued, even resigned work, that takes its place among the
renderings of bedsits, teashops and street corners, quietly enjoying beauty where
it presents itself, but not making any great claims.
12
I have taken examples from each end of the period covered by this chapter to
show that, throughout the period, the city could be the occasion of gentle obser-
vation just as much as of grand statements. However the ethos of the mid-
nineteenth century was very different from that of the early twentieth century,
and I have tried to draw attention to a decided change in inflection, discernible
after .
Caroline Arscott
11
Tate Gallery, The Pre-Raphaelites, exhibition catalogue (London, ); T. Newman and R.
Watkinson, Ford Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelite Circle (London, ), p. .
12
W. Baron, The Camden Town Group (London, ).
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(iii)
In this section of this chapter I wish to explore ways in which the river was used
as a motif of the city’s potential for good and evil. In most industrial cities the
main river or canal could figure as a gleaming highway or as a black stream of
filth. London’s Thames was the quintessential locus for these competing mean-
ings. It was a favoured access route into the city, carrying a huge amount of
traffic, and could be seen to unite the disparate faces of the city. Both the Pictorial
Times and the Illustrated London News issued panoramic views of London in ,
based on views along the Thames. The Pictorial Times’ was updated and reissued
by Cassell’s Illustrated Family News in .
13
Pleasure traffic mixes with commer-
cial traffic the length of the panorama; coal and hay barges, paddle steamers,
dredgers and rowing boats, ferries and sporting eights at the Westminster end are
joined by masses of shipping below London Bridge. The variety and liveliness
of the activity corresponds to the range of monuments and facilities picked out
on the Middlesex side, where churches are slotted in alongside warehouses, fac-
tories, markets and government offices in a surprisingly non-hierarchical mix.
Tricks of scale and lighting are not used to emphasise the centres of power. The
river, calm and glassy at Westminster and brisk and choppy at The Isle of Dogs,
seems to allow unimpeded access for one and all to the fun and the business of
the metropolis. The democratic constituency of the illustrated press was being
appealed to and pictured in this way. This presentation of the Thames is the key
to many lively river scenes produced in a fine art context, in either oils or water-
colour, such as those by James Wilson Carmichael, Joseph F. Ellis, Henry
Dawson, Richard Drabble, James Barker Pyne and David Roberts.
14
The mood
can vary from the placid to the frenetic but in every case the river caters to
various social classes and brings together the grand and the quotidian in a pleas-
antly haphazard way. William Parrott’s series of twelve lithographs, London from
the Thames (), follows this formula and offers an exceptionally busy and
cheerful vision of the city.
15
For instance, in the plate showing Southwark Bridge
and St Paul’s, lots of paddle steamers, large and small, cluster round the Old Swan
Steps landing stage, emitting little puffs of smoke and visibly churning the water,
while hundreds of tiny figures in neat coats and bright shawls stream down the
walkways, crowd on to the landings and pack themselves on to the steamers,
The representation of the city in the visual arts
13
R. Hyde, introductory notes to Grand Panorama of London from the Thames, facsimile, Guildhall
Library, Corporation of London, n.d.
14
For example, J. W. Carmichael, The Pool of London (c. ), J. F. Ellis, St Paul’s Cathedral and the
Thames (before ), H. Dawson, The New Houses of Parliament (), R. Drabble, Westminster
and the Houses of Parliament (exhibited Royal Academy ), J. B. Pyne, View of London from
Blackfriars Bridge (c. ), D. Roberts, The New Palace of Westminster, being No. of a Series of Views
of London on the River Thames (exhibited Royal Academy ).
15
W. Parrott, London from the Thames (), twelve plates without letterpress, details in B. Adams,
London Illustrated – (London, ), pp. –.
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which take off in procession into the clear water under the central arch of the
bridge (Plate ). Masts cut across warehouse façades, plumes of smoke from a
steamer cut across the span of the bridge, a tall chimney cuts across the colon-
naded side of the cathedral and another, beside it, gives out an energetic plume
of smoke that bulks almost as large as the dome of St Paul’s. In this context the
factories and chimneys of the Surrey side are not alien to the solemn monumen-
tality of St Paul’s, but are incorporated into the overall picture of a working city
that routinely takes on a carnival air.
Later in the century the Thames comes to figure more ambiguously as an
amalgam of the debased and the aesthetic. When it provides the setting for the
final scene in Augustus Egg’s tripartite series, known as Past and Present (),
the river stretches ahead of the outcast adulterous wife, who crouches under a
bridge among the debris and wrecked boats of the muddy shore (Plate ). The
landing stage is deserted and the factories across the water stand dark and out of
action. This is the lowest point of the city and she can only descend further by
sinking to her death beneath the water. Yet a twinkling light fixed to the arch,
and the radiant moon beyond, draw her gaze upwards; the effect of the light is
to transform the grim industrial scene, to cast a golden sheen on the sewer/grave
of the river and to illuminate the vaulting of the arch, rendering it somewhat
church-like. Beauty can replace horror, just as grace can redeem sin.
16
Egg’s
ability to find an elevated aspect when confronting the sleaziest side of the city
is taken up by Whistler in his Thames Set etchings (produced –, published
as a set ) and in his Nocturnes of the s.
17
Whistler was a pioneer in the
transformation of artistic priorities in this period. There was a shift away from
the moral and didactic and towards the formal and aesthetic. This was realised
most completely in vanguard circles of the Aesthetic movement, but its effects
were felt throughout the art world in the later Victorian period. Whistler
explained that this Aesthetic attitude freed the artist from the slavish copying of
the natural scene.
The artist’s responsibility was not to bear witness to preordained truths, but to
seek out beauty, and to use manipulation and selection to convey that beauty.
18
The Nocturnes consist of twilight or night-time views of the river where radical
simplification of form is achieved through the elimination of detail and the
restriction of palette (Plate ). However, they share traits with the much more
Caroline Arscott
16
See L. Nead, Myths of Sexuality (Oxford, ), ch. .
17
K. A. Lochnan, The Etchings of James McNeill Whistler (New Haven, ); Tate Gallery, James
McNeill Whistler, exhibition catalogue, text by R. Dorment et al. (London, ).
18
‘To say to the painter, that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player, that he may sit
on the piano’; J. A. M. Whistler, Ten O’Clock Lecture, , reprinted in J. A. M. Whistler, The
Gentle Art of Making Enemies, nd edn (London, ), p. . For the transition to Aesthetic
Movement attitudes see L. Merrill, ‘A Pot Of Paint’: Aesthetics on Trial in Whistler v. Ruskin
(Washington, ), and E. Prettejohn, Rossetti and his Circle (London, ).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
detailed scenes of wharfside activity of Whistler’s earlier Thames Set etchings
(Plate ). Both stress the grimy, industrial aspect of the river: whether factories
and the rough and rowdy entertainment of Cremorne Gardens to the west of
the city, or shipping and warehousing to the east. The etchings produce an
overall sense of rhythm and design in the composition through their use of
abrupt perspective and unusual viewpoints. I would suggest that the sense of the
dreary and polluted aspect of the city is crucial to all this work by Whistler. His
art effects a transformation into beauty but not an elimination of the dross. The
example of the balance and resolution of the Nocturnes was decisive upon later
artists’ engagement with equivalent material. John Atkinson Grimshaw’s moon-
light scenes on the Thames of the s display a degree of aesthetic serenity
that is lacking in his earlier, more agitated dock and street scenes of Leeds,
Liverpool and Glasgow.
19
William Wyllie, an artist who specialised in river and
shipping themes from the s and gained success and recognition in the s,
produced work that was more conventional in format, yet, nevertheless, has
some affinities with the paradoxical exquisiteness of Whistler’s Thames views.
Wyllie’s Toil, Glitter, Grime and Wealth on a Flowing Tide () plays on the con-
trast between the sooty blackness of coal barges and steam tugs and the golden
illumination of the pulsating river that bears this filthy traffic (Plate ). The title
makes explicit the kinship between wealth and dirt. Here the gleaming river and
murky sky are not the elements that veil or compensate for the squalor of mod-
ernity: the poetry that cloaks life and allows an escape into aesthetic contempla-
tion.
20
Instead, they are alternate versions of the same vital substance.
We have seen that the river can be seen to offer means of access and connec-
tion on one hand, and, on the other, the chance for tranquil contemplation
within the city. The motif of the city street presented some analogous oppor-
tunities for the artist in terms of celebratory presentation of bustle and inter-
change, but it rarely figured as the setting for abstracted aesthetic musing. The
street was almost invariably associated with its traffic and with a press of popu-
lation. Thomas Hosmer Shepherd’s steel engraved collections of views of met-
ropolitan sites emphasise the splendid new developments and architectural
achievements of the modern city by selecting the largely neoclassical schemes
and new buildings. The prints depict their façades with crisp detail, and, at the
same time, indicate an active throng at street level. Shepherd creates a complex
sense of the city’s criss-cross routes; the socially diverse crowd hurries in all
The representation of the city in the visual arts
19
A. Robertson, Atkinson Grimshaw (Oxford, ); Richard Green Gallery, Atkinson Grimshaw,
exhibition catalogue (London, ); Richard Green Gallery, John Atkinson Grimshaw, exhibition
catalogue (London, ).
20
For the idea of the poetic veil over the city see Whistler, The Gentle Art, p. . Wyllie is dis-
cussed by W. Vaughan in I. B. Nadel and F. S. Schwarzbach, eds., Victorian Artists and the City
(Elmsford, N.Y., and Oxford, ), pp. –.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
directions (Plate ).
21
Thomas Shotter Boys, in the coloured lithographs of
London As It Is (), articulates similar components to a rather different effect.
His neoclassical elevations are stretched to a startling height and are bathed in
clear, even light (Plate ).
22
The city we are shown is certainly new and grand,
the streets seem extraordinarily wide, but the pedestrians are not participants in,
and beneficiaries of, the industrial and commercial dynamism in quite the same
way that they are in Shepherd’s views. The façades are very often angled so
sharply that the architectural detail is compressed rather than laid out as an
accessible and comprehensible system. Construction workers and their para-
phernalia often block access for middle-class pedestrians, and the visual arrange-
ment of perspectival depth also involves barriers which block imaginative access
for middle-class viewers of the plates. Consequently, the city is presented as a
clean, beautiful modern environment and a source of pride, but also, in part, as
a troubling and potentially hazardous space.
(iv)
The s saw the development of a form of genre painting that took as its
subject the urban crowd. William Powell Frith, George Elgar Hicks and William
Maw Egley produced multi-figure scenes that aimed to encompass the full range
of social types and to evoke the unprecedented, impersonal crush of modern
public places.
23
Human life and comic interaction took precedence over topo-
graphic presentation in these genre scenes, though the sites selected, for instance
the General Post Office, Billingsgate Market and Paddington Station, were land-
marks and tourist attractions in their own right, remarkable for the sheer quan-
tity of business transacted and the startlingly modern technologies employed.
The comedy depended on the frisson of excitement that unregulated social
mixing inevitably produced. In these situations social contact and observable
social conduct could move beyond the parameters of polite bourgeois interac-
tion. Bourgeois behaviour might stray into the improper; working-class activity
might be gross or criminal. Bourgeois bodies might be squashed, jostled, dirtied
or infected. The example of Egley’s Omnibus Life in London () shows how
these serious matters could produce a sort of muffled comedy (Plate ). In this
Caroline Arscott
21
T. H. Shepherd, Metropolitan Improvements (London, –); T. H. Shepherd, London in the
Nineteenth Century (London, –); T. H. Shepherd, The World’s Metropolis, or Mighty London
(London, ). The emphasis on cross-cutting routes has been pointed out and discussed in rela-
tion to a notion of the industrial sublime by A. Potts, ‘Picturing the modern metropolis: images
of London in the nineteenth century’, History Workshop Journal, (), pp. –. See also
J. F. C. Phillips, Shepherd’s London (London, ).
22
J. Roundell, Thomas Shotter Boys (London, ).
23
E. D. H. Johnson, Paintings of the British Social Scene from Hogarth to Sickert (London, ); M. C.
Cowling, The Artist as Anthropologist (Cambridge, ); Geffrye Museum, George Elgar Hicks:
Painter of Victorian Life, exhibition catalogue (London, ).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
picture the interior of an omnibus and its passengers are shown from the driver’s
end of the vehicle. In a constrained space various types are squashed close
together: old and young, fat and thin, ladies and gentlemen, upper-middle-class
and lower-middle-class figures. The viewer is encouraged to surmise that the
contrasts extend to moral qualities too, and contemporary reviewers were ready
to speculate as to the mingling of the foolish and the wise, the virtuous and the
vicious, the honest and the criminal. The bus passengers do not communicate,
they just stare rather suspiciously; their tension communicates itself to the
picture’s viewer but it also piques his or her sense of humour. The bus is already
packed and yet more people want to get on. The final straw has to be the impos-
sibility of accommodating the bulky crinoline of the fashionable young lady at
the door. The sheer absurdity of the proposition allows the tension to be released
in laughter.
24
A decade or so later, the balance between anxiety and comedy was reversed.
In the s state policy concerning vagrancy and crime was being toughened
up. There was a renewed effort to control urban populations, to limit workhouse
expenditure, to identify perpetrators and punish crime. The phenomenon of
city crowding, in these circumstances, tended to produce revulsion rather than
amusement. With London: A Pilgrimage (), Gustave Doré and Blanchard
Jerrold collaborated to produce a lavish publication, copiously illustrated by
Doré’s expressive woodcuts. London appears to be a place thronging with souls,
a secular version of Dante’s or Milton’s heavenly or demonic realms.
25
Often the
replication of figures in Doré’s plates is macabre, whether in the wraithlike
hordes of upper-class horse riders in the park, or the bulging proliferation of tot-
tering infants in the streets of the slums. In ‘Dudley Street, Seven Dials’ in par-
ticular, these children seem to exist as unnaturally animated matter, rather than
healthily burgeoning life (Plate ). It appears that they have not been born, but
have been reanimated in a godless resurrection from the tomb-like cellars. These
cellars seem to announce their multiple interments by the fringe of sagging
second-hand shoes arranged around every opening. London: A Pilgrimage offers
a bleak vision, leavened by touches of humour or sentiment, and by the stub-
born optimism of Jerrold’s text. Where east end and west end are seen to mingle,
as at the Boat Race, the anxiety is intense. In ‘The River Bank – Under the
Trees’, dozens of ladies and gentlemen are gathered. Against a dark background
the light catches the spectators. In the dark, upper part of the picture several
working-class boys and a bearded man cling on to the overhanging branches,
inches away from the middle-class crowd below. The viewer is acutely aware of
The representation of the city in the visual arts
24
See C. Arscott, ‘Modern life subjects in British painting –’ (PhD thesis, Dept of Fine Art,
Leeds University, ); S. P. Casteras, ‘Seeing the unseen: pictorial problematics and Victorian
images of class, poverty, and urban life’, in C. T. Christ and J. O. Jordan, eds., Victorian Literature
and the Victorian Visual Imagination (Berkeley, ), pp. –.
25
Doré had illustrated Milton’s Paradise Lost in .
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
their lurking presence, but the figures on the ground appear unaware of the
proximity.
26
Throughout the Victorian period, and especially before , urban settings
provided the scenarios for sentimental dramas around the themes of poverty,
charity and vice. The campaigning rhetoric of George Cruikshank’s print series,
The Bottle () and The Drunkard’s Children (), located the evils of drunk-
enness, improvidence, violence and prostitution in the working-class dwellings
and resorts of the city. Starvation, murder and madness unfold in mean rooms,
shabby saloons and, eventually, in the final plate of The Drunkard’s Children, the
gin-mad, prostitute daughter flings herself from a Thames bridge (Plate ).
27
The propagandistic narrative was reversed in the before-and-after photographs
that Dr Barnardo staged to attract support for his Home for Destitute Children
from . Wild street children are shown cleaned up, modest and contained,
ready to take up useful employment.
28
The emotional landscape remained the
same, however, and the highs and lows of the heart-rending and alarming poor
proved a powerful resource for fine art. The genre paintings of Augustus
Mulready show street-children as doe-eyed victims of circumstance, cowering
in the gutter and mutely appealing for sympathy. Mingled responses of horror,
erotic involvement, moral indignation and resolve to intervene charitably are
mobilised in these apparently simple pictures.
29
We have seen how the desolation of the Thames-side setting amplified the
anguished finale of Egg’s Past and Present. Dante Gabriel Rossetti worked on his
major modern-life painting Found over an extended period (commenced ,
unfinished) (Plate ). It shows a woman who has become a prostitute sliding to
the city pavement as she shrinks from an encounter. The country drover who
has recognised her is a suitor from her virtuous rustic past. Like Egg, Rossetti
was concerned to problematise the straightforward response of disgust and con-
demnation that the figure of the fallen woman was likely to provoke, but the
image does not avoid the distasteful. The gutter, the city churchyard, the Thames
bridge in the background, and even the allusion to the city cattle-market,
combine to evoke the noisome environmental nuisances that campaigners for
health and sanitation were endeavouring to redress. The woman with her fluid
lines is the embodiment of effluent. Her proximity to the gravestones, the ghastly
colour of her face and the identification between her and the tethered calf
Caroline Arscott
26
On Doré see I. B. Nadel, ‘Gustave Doré: English art and London life’, in Nadel and Schwarzbach,
eds., Victorian Artists, pp. –; G. Pollock, ‘Vicarious excitements: London: A Pilgrimage by
Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold, ’, New Formations, (), –.
27
Manchester City Art Galleries, Hard Times:Social Realism in Victorian Art, exhibition catalogue, text
by J. Treuherz (Manchester, ); R. L. Patten, George Cruikshank: Life,Times and Art, vol.
(Cambridge, ).
28
National Portrait Gallery, The Camera and Dr. Barnardo, exhibition catalogue, text by V. Lloyd and
G. Wagner (Hertford, ); J. Tagg, The Burden of Representation (London, ), ch. .
29
C. Fox, Londoners (London, ).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
heading for slaughter put her on the side of death. None the less, there is a lyr-
icism and life in the gentle floweriness of her dress, the soft curl of her hair, the
tender colours of the dawn and the strong yet gentle grasp of the man.
Repugnance, pity and love are aroused all at once. The city offers motifs that
reach the extremes of loathsomeness, but they are presented in an emotional and
ethical or religious framework that tempers distress.
30
A heightening of beauty could be a signifier of emotional affect or religious
significance or, in the revised conditions of the latter part of the nineteenth
century, it could indicate an unmoralisable general spirituality, associated with
the aesthetic. Thomas Annan’s photographs of Glasgow (–) are haunting
images of disease-ridden crumbling alleyways destined for demolition. The
conundrum is the way the stained, seeping, closely spaced walls, signifiers of
overcrowding, foul air, sewage and disease, are rendered in visually arresting form
(Plate ).
31
The many similar closes generate varied compositions which
balance blocks and patches of light and dark, the reflective and matt, and, above
all, differentiate the textures of the stonework that dominates the environment.
The set of photographs constitutes an investigation of the relationship between
randomness and pattern and of that between presence and absence. These issues
are explored in three different frameworks: first in a historic framework, in the
collection’s reference to improvement, which involves the repatterning of the
environment and the physical displacement of people, secondly in a framework
of the self-referential, in the photographs’ reflexive consideration of the techno-
logical aspects of the photographic process and finally in a framework of the aes-
thetic, in the pictures’ exploration of form. Annan did not intend these images
to be reproduced; they were to be a unique record for the corporation. Public
interest in them was strong enough to convince him that the set was worthy of
publication and they survive as an outstanding example of the intersection
between the depiction of horrors and the perception of beauty in the city.
32
The working-class population of the city appears regularly in the staffage of
the topographical work I have discussed, and is usually accorded a minor role in
genre subjects. Transport workers, street vendors, servants, delivery men and
building workers appear alongside beggars, thieves, prostitutes and urchins as
presences on the margins of visibility in middle-class zones. Their presence,
The representation of the city in the visual arts
30
A. I. Grieve, The Art of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: . Found, .The Pre Raphaelite Modern Life Subject
(Norwich, ); Nead, Myths of Sexuality.
31
There is a discussion of the omission of solid excrement and the depiction of liquid waste in these
images in E. Handy, ‘Dust piles and damp pavements: excrement, repression and the Victorian
city in photography and literature’, in Christ and Jordan, eds., Victorian Literature, pp. –.
32
T. Annan, Photographs of Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow, Taken –, Glasgow, City
Improvement Trust, /; T. Annan, Old Closes and Streets, a Series of Photogravures, –,
Glasgow, James Maclehose, . On Annan see A. V. Mozley’s introduction to T. Annan,
Photographs of the Old Closes etc. (New York, ); and S. Stevenson, Thomas Annan –
(Edinburgh, ).
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