Anglo American Conference of Historians 2009: Cities
Institute of Historical Research, 2 - 3 July 2009
Imagining the City I
Chair: Vivian Bickford-Smith (Centre for Metropolitan History, IHR/University of Cape Town)
The papers in this panel are concerned with cities, or parts of cities, of the British imagination in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using a variety of literary and visual sources, they each explore and analyse the content and consequences of imagined urbanities. The cities of the imagination examined are: 'imaginative' versions of Rome in the eighteenth century that shaped the expectations and perceptions of British visitors and the consequences of expectations dashed; representations of exuberant London 'low life', and what explains them, before the 'discovery of the East End' in anxious Victorian imagination in the mid-nineteenth century; and the changing nature of that East End discovered in literature and social survey during the late nineteenth century, not least in the novels of George Gissing, and how his perceptions related to 'real' social geography.
Abstracts
The British imagination and the experience of Rome in the eighteenth century
Rosemary Sweet (CUH, University of Leicester)
In 1732 Joseph Spence wrote home to his mother from Rome explaining that one of the great pleasures of being at Rome was that ‘you are continually seeing the very place and spot of ground where some great thing or other was done, which one has so often admired before in reading their history’. For British travellers in the eighteenth century Rome embodied three of the most important narratives of European history. The first was the rise and fall of Rome: a story which offered models of political virtue, statesmanship and military prowess and illustrated the inevitable ill consequences of hubris, luxury and aggrandisement of power. The second was the story of the recovery of the arts and the rebirth of civilisation, evident in the art and architecture of the high Renaissance; the final narrative, one which only began to feature significantly towards the end of the eighteenth century, was that of the history of the Christian Church: Rome as the first centre of Christianity was, of course, central to this account. A voyage to Rome offered the opportunity to illustrate these narratives; to bring a physical reality to scenes which commanded such a powerful imaginative hold in British culture. This paper will explore the shifting balance between each of these ‘imaginative’ versions of Rome in shaping the expectations, and in turn the perceptions, of British visitors to the city. But it will also consider the consequences of Rome’s failure to live up to visitors’ preconceptions. Disappointment could be as powerful a determinant upon the way in which the city was perceived as heightened expectations.
Imagining low life before the East End's invention, c.1780s to 1840s
Vic Gatrell (University of Cambridge)
This paper looks at East London life before Victorian observers 'invented', 'ideologically constructed', 'mythicised', or 'problematised' the 'East End' (as the fashionable phrases nowadays go). It sets aside the Victorian judgements and anxieties through which many historians still filter their views of East London and, without denying its deprivations, it speculates how best we might treat its 'low life' in its own and more positive terms.
Recalling Dr Johnson's advice to Boswell in 1783 to go with curious eye and philosophic mind to Wapping the better to measure London's 'wonderful extent and variety', the paper focuses on the century after 1750 or so, to wonder what it was that outsiders were responding to when they described East Enders as 'happy', and allowed them their own exuberant vitality.
Imagining the East End in literature and social survey, 1880-1900
Richard Dennis (UCL)
This paper will explore the emergence of 'East End' as a category of description and analysis in fiction and social scientific discourse.
Where, exactly (or even approximately!), was the 'East End' and what were its social, cultural and geographical attributes? The paper will pay particular attention to the writings of George Gissing, whose reputation as a novelist of slum life has often led to his being associated with the East End; to the relationship between Gissing and other 'East Enders', such as Arthur Morrison, Walter Besant and the Rev. Osborne Jay; and to the parallels and interactions between Gissing's fiction and Charles Booth's Labour and Life of the People and the associated 'Descriptive Map of London Poverty 1889'. Of special interest is Gissing's early novel, The Unclassed. In its first edition as a three-volume novel (1884), the slums that play a prominent role in The Unclassed were situated in Westminster, but by 1895, in revising – mainly abridging – the novel into a single volume, Gissing relocated the slums to the East End, reflecting shifts in both popular perceptions of the East End and 'real' ongoing changes in the geography of poverty in London in the 1890s that are also revealed by the 1898–99 revised edition of Booth's poverty maps.
