Abstract
In 1862, at a point shortly after which this book concludes, Charles Baudelaire asks a rhetorical question in the dedication to Arsène Houssaye which prefaces Le spleen de Paris:
Quel est celui de nous qui n’a pas, dans ses jours d’ambition, rêvé le miracle d’une prose poétique, musicale sans rythme et sans rime, assez souple et assez heurtée pour s’adapter aux mouvements lyriques de l’âme, aux ondulations de la rêverie, aux soubresauts de la conscience?
Which of us has never imagined, in his more ambitious moments, the miracle of a poetic prose, musical though rhythmless and rhymeless, flexible yet strong enough to identify with the lyrical impulses of the soul, the ebbs and flows of revery, the pangs of conscience?
He then responds immediately to this question in the following manner:
C’est surtout de la fréquentation des villes énormes, c’est du croisement de leurs innombrables rapports que naît cet idéal obsédant.
The notion of such an obsessive ideal has its origins above all in our experience of the life of great cities, the confluence and interactions of the countless relationships within them. 1 (emphases added)
Now let me call back those who introduced me to the city.
Walter Benjamin
London must ever have a great illustrative and suggestive value … it is the single place in which most readers, most possible lovers, are gathered together.
Henry James
I saw and felt London at last.
Charlotte Brontë
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Notes
Charles Baudelaire, The Poems in Prose and La Fanfarlo, introd. and trans. Francis Scarfe (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1989), pp. 24, 25.
Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1992) trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995).
Hana Wirth-Nesher, City Codes: Reading the Modern Urban Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Wirth-Nesher’s chapter on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is particularly informative about modernist representations of the city and the experience of being one of its inhabitants.
Richard Jefferies, ‘The Lions in Trafalgar Square’, in Richard Jefferies, The Toilers of the Field (1892) (London: Longmans Green, 1894; pp. 321–7), pp. 326–7.
Arthur Symons, ‘London: A Book of Aspects’, in Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands (London: Collins, 1918), p. 155.
Jonathan Raban, Hunting Mr Heartbreak (1990) (London: Picador, 1991), pp. 357–8.
Alan Sandison, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Appearance of Modernism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996). Sandison points to a quality of city-writing in Stevenson which distinguishes the writers being read in this book and those of the second half of the nineteenth century. From Blake to Dickens, the concern is with the city as city. As we move into the second half of the century, let us say from Wilkie Collins and Anthony Trollope onwards, it is arguable that the writing of the city assumes an ever greater function not only as backdrop or stage, but as psychic context. Certainly, Sandison reads Stevenson’s London as a mediator and corollary of Jekyll/Hyde’s personalities, where the urban proximity of urbanity and squalor reflect the dual character of the narrative’s principal agents. Similarly, Oscar Wilde writes the London of The Picture of Dorian Gray, while Arthur Conan Doyle works this London also. Henry James in The Princess Casamassima and Joseph Conrad in The Secret Agent both make explicit the relationship between character or psyche, and space or site. Clearly such gestures anticipate modernist novels such as Mrs. Dalloway or Ulysses, or T.S. Eliot’s London in The Waste Land. Although Dickens could be said to have begun the exploration of such relationships, however tentatively, in Oliver Twist, we would argue that around the middle of the century — let us call this moment ‘after Dickens’ as an imprecise phrase which gestures towards aesthetic redirection — there occurs something akin to an epistemic shift in the comprehension of the uses of the city in writing. The writers of this study are fascinated with exploring London itself through the written trace, whereas those who come after tend to employ stock images of the city without necessarily allowing it to transform their texts.
Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (1956) introd. Kenneth Ramchand (London: Longman, 1994), p. 23.
J.B. Priestley, Angel Pavement (1930) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. 14–16, 21.
Richard Jefferies, ‘A Wet Night in London’, in Richard Jefferies, The Open Air (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1914), pp. 250–6.
Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848) ed. Edgar Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 114, 115.
Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (1981) trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), p. 2.
See also Geoff King, Mapping Reality: An Exploration of Cultural Cartographies (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996).
Mark Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 106.
Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 105.
Matthew Arnold, ‘West London’, in The Poems of Matthew Arnold, 2nd ed., ed. Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1979), p. 526. See also ‘East London’, p. 525. I discuss both poems at length in my Being English: Narratives, Idioms, and Performances of National Identity from Coleridge to Trollope (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 35–54.
Peter Ackroyd, Milton in America (London: Sinclair Stevenson, 1996). Curiously, Milton’s interior monologue, in which there are memories of London on the first page (p. 5), bears a resemblance to Blake’s city-scenes, in their abrupt, staccato delivery of proper names.
Greg Williams, Diamond Geezers (London: Fourth Estate, 1997). Two examples of Williams’ response to the trace will suffice: And this was February, maybe not the coldest but certainly the bleakest month of the year: the month when the sky was so low across London that it looked like it had fallen from above and settled on the rooftops … (p. 15) Russell thought it best not to wake him and slipped quietly out the front door, making sure that it was locked behind him, and into the London babble. (p. 24) The effect of writing the city combines with city writing to produce a doubling, haunting effect. It is impossible to decide, strictly speaking, whether these passages are responses to the city or to the traces of the city already inscribed in others’ texts. What we may propose is that Williams’ text effectively ensures that the city can only be understood as being always and only comprehensible as the disseminated trace, prior to any supposed reality on which we may choose to speculate.
Charlotte Riddell, Mitre Court. A Tale of the Great City (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1885), p. 60. Charlotte Riddell wrote over 50 novels and collections of short stories, many set in London. In Mitre Court and other novels of the 1880s, such as George Geith of Fen Court (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1886) and The Government Official (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1887), she bemoans the indiscriminate, often wholesale, architectural destruction of ‘beautiful’ buildings in favour of ‘mere aggregation[s] of offices and warehouses’ (Mitre Court, p. 68) brought about through the vested interest of businessmen who allegedly have the ear of politicians and can bring about Acts of Parliament for the purpose of urban planning (Mitre Court, pp. 51–2; Government Official, p. 1). Another favourite theme of Riddell’s is that of being able hide oneself in London more completely than in the country. Interestingly, Riddell’s London, compared with contemporaries such as Bram Stoker, Richard Jefferies, R.L. Stevenson, and Oscar Wilde, is not a place of exotic and dangerous proximity, a place where the monstrous which the city embodies is always likely to overwhelm us. Riddell’s vision of London is more akin to descriptions of late nineteenth-century New York as found, for example, in novels by Horatio Alger. I am very grateful to Helen Debenham for mentioning Riddell in a passing email message.
M. Christine Boyer, The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), pp. 279–80. See also her study of cyberspace and its possible relation to the urban imaginary, Cybercities: Visual Perception in the Age of Electronic Communication (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), particularly Chapter 2, ‘Labyrinths of the Mind and the City — Real and Virtual’, pp. 45–72.
Nicholas Royle, After Derrida (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 2–5.
Carol L. Bernstein, The Celebration of Scandal: Toward the Sublime in Victorian Urban Fiction (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), p. 172.
Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), p. 48.
H.G. Wells, Love and Mr Lewisham (1900) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1946), p. 236.
Neil Hertz, The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 55.
On this relationship see Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: New Left Books, 1973), pp. 128–31. The epigraph to Ch. 3, below, is taken from this discussion (p. 131).
Bernard Tschumi, Event-Cities (Praxis) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), p. 157.
Henry James, ‘London’, in London Stories and Other Writings, ed. David Kynaston (Padstow: Tabb House, 1989; pp. 241–70), p. 261.
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© 1998 Julian Wolfreys
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Wolfreys, J. (1998). Introduction: imagining London or, Rainbird was sure of it. In: writing London. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230372177_1
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