Daunton M. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840-1950
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though understated, was crucial to definitions of the modern urban. The focus
on centre-stage destitute or fallen characters as the objects of moral concern was
something of a novelty in the Victorian period, and there was an understanding
that, with these subjects, the essence of the contemporary was being addressed.
Prostitution was referred to as the ‘great social evil’, such themes constituted the
‘modern moral subject’. Even newer and more unusual was the directing of
attention to proletarian, or lumpen, figures as workers or as occupants of their
own areas. Annan’s inclusion of ranks of slum dwellers in his photographs, and
Doré’s depiction of East End enclaves followed on from avenues of social report-
age that had been opened up by government investigations and journalistic
surveys. Among the many middle-class exposés of industrial and urban condi-
tions Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor was particularly
influential. Mayhew’s attention to the individuals encountered in his survey of
street folk was exceptional. The apparently verbatim interviews and the indivi-
dualised depictions in the engraved illustrations gave unparalleled representa-
tional presence to inferior social ranks. It became possible to present working
people as genre figures in the visual arts without relying entirely on comic
stereotypes of clumsy buffoonery.
Manual labour featured in Ford Madox Brown’s Work (Plate ). In this highly
finished painting, a group of navvies engaged in excavation and construction
work in connection with the water supply is placed at the centre of the compo-
sition and functions as the central example of healthy, moral, purposeful effort.
Representative figures from the other ranks of society are arranged around this
central motif. We are invited to consider the kind of work these other figures
do or do not do, and they are implicitly compared to the reference point of the
navvies.
33
William Bell Scott’s Iron and Coal () is another work which
includes active, muscular industrial workers as central figures (Plate ). This was
the final canvas in a series produced as a decorative scheme for Wallington Hall
and the theme of the history of the North-East runs through to this modern
scene. The scale and might of the characteristic industries of Newcastle is
emphasised and so the labourers figure more as allegorical embodiments of that
general industrial achievement than as individually moralised characters.
34
By
contrast the factory workers of Eyre Crowe’s The Dinner Hour,Wigan () are
subject to our moral scrutiny (Plate ). We are shown young women operatives
gathering in the yard outside the factory in one of their breaks.
35
The space is
hemmed in by the towering walls of the surrounding factories. The stark red-
brick environment is relieved by the bright costumes and graceful movements
Caroline Arscott
33
Brown’s pamphlet, produced for the exhibition of this picture, made the comparison explicit.
34
On the allegorical status of this image see P. Usherwood, ‘William Bell Scott’s Iron and Coal:
northern readings’, in Laing Art Gallery, Pre-Raphaelites: Painters and Patrons in the North East, exhi-
bition catalogue (Newcastle, ), pp. –.
35
See Manchester City Art Galleries, Hard Times.
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of the young women, and our first impression is that this is a harmonious, well-
fed, neatly dressed, attractive group of workers. The winning glance of the dark-
haired beauty in the foreground could be assimilated to this generally favourable
view of the benefits of the factory system, except that some of the less promi-
nent figures, partly hidden behind the low wall, or else on the extreme edge of
the picture, or in the shaded yard in the background, are engaged in dubious
activities. A bottle of strong drink consumed, a transaction with a man, a
meeting with a lover – all these scarcely decipherable motifs raise doubts about
the moral health of the personnel and the suitability of paid work, large-scale
workplaces and the urban environment itself for vulnerable, perhaps flighty,
young women. Certainly, the vigilance of the tiny figure of the policeman in
the road at the back is advisable. However, the picture does not convince us that
his efforts are sufficient to seal off the workplace from the dangerous currents of
the city. The women’s beauty, then, is no longer simply a delight and a reassu-
rance, it is also a source of anxiety.
In , Adolphe Smith and John Thomson published a series of photographs
of workers and the poor on the streets of London entitled Street Life in London.
36
They were, they said, producing an update on Mayhew’s work, and Smith’s text
develops the personal stories of the people photographed by Thomson. In these
stories we learn of the mutable fortunes of the characters and of the illusory or
ephemeral quality of the goods that they trade: water-ice, advertising placards,
patent medicines (Plate ). The shots are taken out of doors and, while the main
character may be posed and centred, additional figures and details creep into the
composition, destabilising and blurring the arrangement. There is a strong sense
of an environment in flux, and lives subject to uncontrollable forces. The themes
of presence and absence that we discerned in Annan’s photographic work appear
here too, but the human life of the city, rather than the physical environment, is
the major focus. The most prominent figure in the first picture of the book,
‘London Nomades’, is a woman on the steps of the van (Plate ). We learn from
the text that, two weeks after the photograph had been taken, she was found
mysteriously murdered. We have to conclude that the evidence of our eyes, or
the indexical record of the photograph, will not provide an adequate empirical
basis for grasping the city. At this point, viewers could not rely, as the viewers of
the s and s had done, on moral judgements based on careful looking
and firm categorisation.
37
Smith and Thomson’s work can be taken as a marker
which indicates a loss of confidence with regard to the modern city.
The representation of the city in the visual arts
36
Street Life in London initially appeared in as a part-work and, later that year, as a bound
volume.
37
This kind of controlling vision has been associated with Foucault’s notion of surveillance and the
operations of the panopticon; M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish:The Birth of the Prison, trans. A.
Sheridan (Harmondsworth, ). See G. Pollock, ‘Power and visibility in the city’ (review
article), Art History, (), –; Tagg, The Burden of Representation; and T. Bennett, The
Birth of the Museum: History,Theory, Politics (London and New York, ).
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The impulse to control unruly phenomena and potentially dangerous popu-
lations through vigilant looking and effective categorisation did not vanish. The
pictures produced in the latter part of the nineteenth century are characterised,
rather, by a partial thwarting and a gradual diminution of that impulse. The
move to an aesthetic framework for the apprehension of modernity gave works
a melancholy cast, because the perception of beauty involved the renunciation
of interpretation and control. There was a submerged appreciation of the losses
that were entailed and, one might hypothesise, an acknowledgement that the
massive proportions of the city, its sheer extent and complexity, had forced this
abdication. The change of mood can perhaps be demonstrated by comparing
two works by John O’Connor, one from the s and one from a decade later.
The Embankment () is a bright sunny view from the promenade at Somerset
House, where a nursery maid is taking the air with her charges (Plate ). We
look down the newly built embankment towards Cannon Street Station and St
Paul’s Cathedral. It is a bright and lively prospect. A detachment of red-coated
soldiers march in neat formation, their bayonets glistening in the light. The light
also catches the regularly placed, new street lights. The even, uncongested road
stretches in a broad ribbon, leading the eye to a skyline that combines order and
tradition in the Temple, state and spiritual authority in St Paul’s and the techno-
logical present and future in the gasometers (echoing the shape of St Paul’s), the
smoking factory chimneys, the steaming railway train and the shining, new
railway shed. The fresh greenery of the young saplings and the glistening surface
of the river produce an extremely pleasant animation in the scene. The picture
manages to yoke together a series of apparently opposing terms: the lowly and
the grand, peace and military preparedness, the past and the future, leisure and
employment, freedom and order, the particular and the general, and the natural
and the manmade. The mood of the picture is so buoyant that the opposing
terms are not felt as sources of stress and potential rupture but as energising
differentials. The atmosphere of From Pentonville Road Looking West: Evening
() is, by contrast, contemplative and melancholy (Plate ). The view is
taken from a deserted rooftop on a damp and smoky evening as crowds of tiny
figures pack on to buses and hurry home along the street. They mainly head
downhill, westwards, towards the setting sun which illuminates the mist around
St Pancras, creating a glorious golden haze. In this romantic light the gothic pin-
nacles of the St Pancras frontage give it the appearance of a great cathedral,
despite the fact that it is just a station hotel. The railway shed extends across the
canvas, barely delineated and becoming ever fainter, but apparently extending
into infinity. The bare autumnal branches of the tree, the bell-tower of a church
and a jumble of empty and abandoned crates and baskets feature prominently at
viewing level. All these things combine to suggest the passing of time, loss and
the flight of the soul. We can therefore understand the evening rush of the city
folk as standing for something beyond their daily routine. They can be viewed
Caroline Arscott
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
as humanity in general, rushing towards death, with their immortal fate ahead
of them. The particular circumstances of the street: the mean shops and houses,
the higgledy-piggledy chimneys, the pasted-over advertising notices, the Daily
News prominent among them, all these things stand for the diurnal and are ren-
dered insignificant in the light of eternity. The balanced polarities of O’Connor’s
earlier picture are torn apart. The symbolic presentation of the railway station as
a gate to the afterlife is most unusual (though one thinks of the idea of the glory
train) but the register of representation is entirely typical of the late nineteenth
century. Modernity no longer lends itself to being experienced as an integrated
phenomenon. The particular cannot easily be related to the whole; the city is
experienced as random and unstable. The particular always threatens to stand as
the banal and meaningless rather than the typical and informative. There is a
sundering of the fragment from the totality.
38
(v)
In the final section of this chapter I wish to explore a further aspect of the city.
Alongside the monumental fabric and the accumulation of slums and social
problems, and interwoven with the city of congested traffic and drudgery, was
the glittering city devoted to leisure and consumption. Upbeat images of shop-
ping and middle-class leisure abound in the early Victorian period. The forma-
tive book of views by T. H. Shepherd, Metropolitan Improvements (–),
focused on Regent Street as the key part of what was to be the most splendid
and ambitious building scheme for half a century. Shepherd produced images of
Regent Street throughout his career and, in the Victorian period, the locale
became a ubiquitous setting for images of fashionable display and luxurious con-
sumption. In , George Sidney Shepherd, the younger brother of Thomas,
produced ten views for a large lithographic volume published by Ackermann,
one of which was a view of Regent Street. Fashionably dressed bourgeois figures
stand watching the display of ceremonial troops that ride past. The rival attrac-
tion is the prominent window of Ackermann’s own print shop on the left where
a multitude of brightly coloured views tempts the gathered ladies and gentle-
men. It quite eclipses the Lace Warehouse two doors down. William McConnell
and George Augustus Sala introduced Regent Street into the series of comic
engravings by McConnell that illustrate the volume Twice Round the Clock, or the
Hours of the Day and Night in London () (Plate ).
39
The pretensions of self-
important carriage folk are gently satirised and the slightly alarming press of the
city crowd is registered. Typically for the late s, the crowd, which is mainly
The representation of the city in the visual arts
38
This might be thought to presage some of the features of the postmodern. See F. Jameson,
Postmodernism, or, the Cultural logic of Late Capitalism (London, ).
39
See P. Collins’ introduction to G. A. Sala, Twice Round the Clock, or the Hours of the Day and Night
in London (London, ; repr., Leicester, ).
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composed of prosperous and respectable people, also includes a suspicious-
looking street-vendor selling dogs, a blind beggar in the thick of the crowd and,
on the right, a prostitute addressing a moustachioed man. In the accompanying
text, Sala lists the huge variety of the street’s luxury shops and notes the cachet
given by their aristocratic patrons. His conclusion is that ‘Regent Street is an
avenue of superfluities – a great trunk road in Vanity Fair.’
40
This pulsing centre
of fashion and upmarket retail activity inspires awe and promises pleasure, but
pleasure, it seems, is not without its moral and physical dangers.
Ten years later we see Jacques Joseph Tissot, a specialist in the depiction of
urban leisure, embarking on scenes of London life.
41
Tissot spent eleven years in
London from and produced scenes of boating and picnicking, parties and
balls, with figures lounging and chatting. The settings are the streets, drawing
rooms and gardens of the city. These pictures show spacious and comfortable
environments. Society beauties show off extravagantly gorgeous dresses and
indulge in flirtation and dreamy silence. There is still room for social satire,
though, for the most part, it does not play on the uncomfortable contrasts
between respectable folk and the low-life characters around them, as it does in
McConnell’s engravings. The city induces less a sense of thrill and panic than a
sense of alienation and boredom. In these social situations the atmosphere is
heavy with innuendo, but the exact terms of the awkwardness, resentment or
invitation are hard to decipher because this is a world of muffling upholstery and
shining surfaces in which signals vanish or distort. An example of a picture that
produces this kind of unease is Tissot’s London Visitors (c. ) in which the
severe classical lines of the portico of the National Gallery in London provide
the chilly setting for a handful of figures (Plate ). A woman at the exit on the
left is being shown the way by a uniformed schoolboy and, in the foreground,
his classmate stands on the steps on the right and stares out towards Trafalgar
Square. Behind this boy is a couple. The woman gestures to the right with her
umbrella or parasol and her companion leafs through his guide book. The viewer
is struck by the way in which this woman’s gaze does not follow her gesture.
Instead she glances sideways and down the steps, without moving her head,
apparently covertly looking in the direction of the viewer, or past the viewer to
the left. The picture gives us a huge blank space on the left; the bare stone is grey
and unyielding. Two versions of the city are superimposed here. In one the
tourist sites are linked in logical order and the city is predictable and navigable
with the aid of guides. In the other, represented by the gaze to the right, the
environment appears inaccessible and even bewildering. Importantly, it contains
the promise of sexual adventure. We assume that the lady’s transgressive glance
Caroline Arscott
40
Ibid., p. .
41
See N. Marshall, ‘“Transcripts of modern life”: the London pictures of James Tissot –’
(PhD thesis, Department of History of Art, Yale University, ).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
has been drawn by a gentleman because there, on the empty steps, lies a cigar
stub.
In the s W. R. Sickert started to produce a series of paintings of music
hall subjects.
42
These represent a major shift from the territory of Tissot’s scenes
of middle-class leisure. The music hall provided mass entertainment. Middle-
class visitors would have been in the minority. Themes of alienation and inde-
cipherability persist in this body of work, but they are worked through in
relation to commercialised popular entertainment. These are, inescapably,
scenes of city life and at this juncture urban life appears claustrophobic and
joyless rather than seductive and thrilling. Very often the audience members
appear blank and drab in comparison to the gaudy surroundings and the colour-
ful spotlit stage performers. Sickert uses complex compositional systems involv-
ing mirrors and deceptive perspectival effects. The painting The P.S.Wings in an
O.P. Mirror (c. ) is a condensed example of these features (Plate ). We
assume that the audience is assembled to watch the performance to the rear of
the picture. Perplexingly, the spectators stare past the singer, while she projects
into an unpeopled space above their heads. This seems very odd and produces
an acute sense of dislocation. The puzzle can be resolved when we realise that
this is a transverse image of the stage, seen in a mirror hanging to the left of the
row of seats. None the less, the sense of dislocation remains because the spec-
tators appear so shabby and grim; their gazes are fixed, their faces expression-
less. This is absorption and, perhaps, intense excitement, but the spectacle seems
to drain life and colour from the spectators. Sickert returned to this theme
throughout his career. The music hall images take their place alongside his
Mornington Crescent interiors of the s and s and the quietistic urban
landscapes of the Camden Town school of the s as some of the most com-
pelling visions of modern city life at a moment when straightforward, optimis-
tic celebration had ceased to be an option. At this point observation is
aesthetically framed. In other words, Sickert was seeking beauty in the every-
day rather than, on the one hand, selecting elevated subject matter which might
be thought to bear with it a guarantee of its value as art, or, on the other hand,
attending to the everyday primarily as a record maker or documentarist.
Whistler felt that a veil had to be drawn over the city to render it beautiful.
Sickert was prepared to find beauty without drawing a veil. The attention to
banal surroundings is exercised from the protected vantage point of art. This
makes it possible to view the sad, the impoverished and the seamy aspects of
the city with a degree of detachment. The middle-class viewer willingly opens
himself or herself up to the mood; he or she even empathises with the alien-
ated social specimens on display. In this way, the turn-of-the-century viewer is
The representation of the city in the visual arts
42
See A. G. Robins, ‘Sickert “painter-in-ordinary” to the music-hall’, in Royal Academy of Arts,
Sickert: Paintings, exhibition catalogue (London, ), pp. –.
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able to identify with the social other because it is understood that no harm will
ensue, since this is the realm of art.
(vi)
The music hall was the forerunner of, and closely entwined with, the most
significant mass entertainment phenomenon of the twentieth century, the
cinema. The Lumière Brothers in Lyons demonstrated the cinematographe in
. Early cinematic reels showed horses and carriages moving in the streets of
Leeds. The excitement of the new form of representation was allied to the range
of sights and entertainments available in the urban centres: traffic, eminent magi-
cians and prize fights, for example. Soon these themes were supplemented by
the whole range of fictional genres from the Biblical epic to the western.
Experiments in France, England and the United States refined and advanced the
technologies to the point that multi-reel features with continuous narrative, and
such editing methods as close-ups and dissolves, were being produced in the
s. Political tensions in Europe and the outbreak of war in meant that
the initiative in cinema shifted to the United States.
The First World War redrew the social map of Europe, and with it the social
conventions and patterns of cultural consumption. The pre- period was one
in which the visual arts were relatively unified, in so far as the extensive middle-
class public enthusiastically attended fine art exhibitions, purchased prints and
pored over illustrated books and journals. The social groups addressed and the
modes of reception required were comparable for diverse forms of visual repre-
sentation. The gap between high and low art was relatively small and, among the
bourgeoisie, there was considerable optimism concerning the social gains that
could be made by encouraging the lower middle class and the working class to
view fine art. The later Victorian period was marked by a polarisation within
cultural production. Elite culture became walled around by specialist critical
terms and the provision of entertainment for a working-class audience (which
now had significant disposable income) became big business. The twentieth
century saw the full-scale development of a culture industry and the increasing
marginalisation of fine art production. Except in phases of heightened political
consciousness the avant-garde practices of continental and British art movements
were inaccessible to general audiences and deliberately restricted themselves to
selected consumers. The texture of urban life, the pressure and pace and discon-
tinuities of modernity and the delirium and despair to be found in the city were
central themes of modernist art, surfacing, for example, in the abstraction of the
Vorticists. As we have seen, they were also themes that ran through the topo-
graphical and anecdotal work of the Victorian period.
The modern city was an important motif in Victorian and Edwardian art.
Across the period there were major shifts in artists’ responses to urban phenom-
Caroline Arscott
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ena, most notably, as I have demonstrated, a broad shift from expansive optimism
to an inward-looking melancholy. Integrative vision gives way to fragmentary
perception. The relationship of the middle-class viewer to other social orders in
depiction also changed. Nineteenth-century viewers were particularly sensitive
to situations that involved the mixing of different social classes. Spaces of the city
might expose bourgeois figures to damaging or polluting contact with working-
class inhabitants. The background to this sensitivity was an abiding anxiety con-
cerning insurgent working-class populations. It might be argued that outright
fear gave way, at the end of the century, to distaste tinged with pity for the mass.
An artist like Sickert depicted working-class and lower-middle-class figures pas-
sively packed into the commercial facilities of the turn-of-the-century city.
Earlier, mid-Victorian viewers had been attuned to a mingling of fear, disgust
and sympathy, a vacillation between condemnation and the impulse to charita-
ble intervention. The turn-of-the-century viewer was not barred from emo-
tional affect, but was, nevertheless, less immediately driven to consider active
intervention. We can discern a curious symmetry between the pictorial subject
and the picture viewer. The draining of life and energy from the lower-class sub-
jects of the picture (blank consumers subjected to entertainment), is mimicked
by the resigned aestheticism of the high-art picture viewer.
At each historical moment urban experience had to be processed and assim-
ilated. In the industrial era the modern city was recurrently experienced as
gigantic, unprecedented and verging on the overwhelming. In retrospect the
cities of the s might seem fairly contained and manageable, but the early
Victorians had to find terms and images to express the astonishing immensity
and complexity of the city just as the late Victorians and the Edwardians had to.
In this survey of visual imagery I have drawn attention to the constant reregis-
tration of the city’s wonders and horrors.
The representation of the city in the visual arts
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·
·
Epilogue
T
volume of the Cambridge Urban History comes to a close
around . It has explained how crisis and rupture in the second
quarter of the nineteenth century were resolved in the later nineteenth
century, through the creation of voluntary associations and an active municipal
culture to deal with problems of ‘free riders’ and urban diseconomies, and to
provide large-scale investment in the urban infrastructure. During much of this
period, cities had powerful external economies, and allowed firms to operate
with relatively weak internal systems of management. They accumulated con-
siderable amounts of ‘social capital’ – webs of interconnections and sociability –
which contributed to economic efficiency, social stability and political
effectiveness. But the importance of cities slowly started to decline in the twen-
tieth century. The power of the central state increased, taking an ever greater
role in providing welfare and in offering financial assistance for local services.
Municipal enterprises were nationalised, and local democratic control surren-
dered. Industrial concerns developed internal management systems, and were
more concerned with national politics than with the municipality, with institu-
tional investors in London than with networks of local reputation.
After , it might be argued, an urban history of Britain is no longer fea-
sible, and the urban variable lost any explanatory force it might once have pos-
sessed. On such an argument, there is no place for an urban history of Britain
after : Britain is an urban nation, and a separate urban history is no longer
realistic. But should we so easily dismiss a continued interest in the history of
British cities in the second half of the twentieth century and into the new mil-
lennium? Many of the issues considered in the present volume are in fact highly
pertinent for the second half of the twentieth century. From the s, British
towns and cities underwent rapid change, introducing new variations on the
debates of the previous hundred years. A sense of locality, the nature of the
ecology of the city and the way that processes intersect to create a balance of
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