Anglo-American Conference of Historians 2009: Cities
Institute of Historical Research, 2 - 3 July 2009
Mentalities and urban culture in nineteenth-century London
Chair: James Moore (Centre for Metropolitan History, IHR)
Abstracts
Reshaping the mental lines of nineteenth-century London: associations, societies and coteries, 1815–1914
William Lubenow (Richard Stockton College)
Following the collapse of the fiscal-military-confessional state and the ending of the ‘old corruption’ associations, societies and coteries in London reshaped the mental life of the metropolis. Some, such as the Society of Dilettanti, the Royal Society of London and the Society of Antiquaries, though founded earlier, remodeled themselves and enjoyed a new era of cultural power and influence. New societies, such as the Metaphysical Club, the Synthetic Society and Bloomsbury, filled mental voids in the period before the Great War. This paper examines the membership of these associations and demonstrates the ways in which they formed charismatic systems for the reconfiguration of mental life.
John Wingfield and the language of desperation:
a case study of urban culture in the working class of late Victorian
London
Peter Andersson (Lund University)
The research regarding urban history that focuses on the mentalities and cultures of urban residents has mostly been concerned with this topic on the level of urban planning or the mental world of the bourgeoisie as expressed in literature or journalism. The thesis on which I am currently working endeavours to find the lost voices of the European metropolis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by tracing individuals and reconstructing their cultural surroundings. Building on the theoretical work of Marshall Berman and Richard Sennett on the impact of urban culture on mentalities and social life, I will try to approach the conclusions of former works with a critical eye by relating them to source material not often represented in urban history, including diaries, autobiographies, interviews and court records.
This paper is based on one of the chapters in this planned thesis, which delves into a case of domestic murder in the records of the Old Bailey. John Wingfield, an out of work labourer, was seen by several witnesses on a night in 1880 stabbing his former wife repeatedly in the face and head on a street in the London district of Kilburn. When confronted by the witnesses, he frantically raged about how the mother of his children had been seen visiting a music hall. Explaining his behaviour with the terminology of moral decay and the sinful ways of the city life, what sort of cultural context is best applied to his words? In what way was this tragedy a consequence of the desperation and cultural stress of the modern metropolis, and to what extent is the terminology with which Wilson motivated his actions an application of a bourgeois mentality on working-class conditions?
By using this incident as a gateway into a time period, in much the same way as Alain Corbin studied the world of nineteenth-century rural France by piecing together the existence of a forgotten man in The Life of an Unknown, we might be able to discern a discourse of urban culture different from that of the middle class thoroughly mapped out elsewhere.
This paper is meant as one part of a larger whole in which the lives of individuals shaped by modernity and the metropolitan culture are noted, and my ambition is to write urban history in a new way in which generalisations about the urban experience stand side by side with an affirmation of the individual as a factor in history.
Invisible geographies: urban folklore and the re-reading of nineteenth-century urban space
Karl Bell (University of Portsmouth)
This
paper explores the use of urban folktales in mapping out an imaginative
cultural space shaped and shared between tellers and listeners/readers.
It will argue that urban legends offered a way of re-reading the city,
‘memories’ of (usually) macabre events hollowing out or overlaying the
practical meaning of a location and charging it with supernatural or
moral significance. The paper argues that this led to the creation of
an alternative mental geography of the city which challenged and
disrupted its utilitarian functionalism. This enabled a tacit influence
over, or an empowering reclamation of, an increasingly anonymous
environment as it was enveloped into oral or written narratives. The
paper will draw upon examples from nineteenth-century Norwich and
Manchester.
It will also consider urban folktales as mnemonic ‘memory palaces’, a
means of collectively retaining memories of the changing urban
landscape. Within such stories were community memories of people and
incidences. While these tales may not have been particularly true or
accurate, they were woven together to generate or sustain a sense of
the past city and neighbourhood parameters, reinforcing a sense of
group identity within developing urban communities.
The paper will conclude by arguing that ghost tales best embodied this
blurring and fusing of the past and present, providing a vehicle
through which to voice opposition to the progressive sprawl of
developing cities. Through these transgressive acts of the collective
imagination physical space became re-enchanted and reconfigured into a
supernatural terrain. Urban ghost stories can thus be interpreted as a
force of conservative resistance but ultimately they provided
imaginative ways of accepting and reflecting upon temporal and spatial
change in the urban environment.
