The London Journal

Volume 25 No.1 2000

ABSTRACTS

The influential work of Jürgen Habermas has elicited a growing interest in the function of coffee houses in the construction of a 'bourgeois public sphere' in eighteenth-century England. Much remains to be discovered, however, about the nature and influence of coffee houses and their popular literary output. This survey examines the relationship between an early coffee house periodical, John Dunton's Athenian Mercury (1691-1697), and its readers. It uses textual evidence and a range of contextual information to test the accuracy of a contemporary engraving, the 'Emblem of the Athenian Society' (1692), which depicts the periodical's authors receiving letters from a socially diverse group of readers. This paper argues that the 'Emblem' was largely accurate, and that the Athenian Mercury's core readership was among men and women of the middling sort. The influence of Dunton's periodicals, it is argued, extended far beyond the coffee houses into wider metropolitan society and the provinces. The encouragement that the Athenian Mercury lent to the education of the middling sort was the key to its popularity, and contributed to the rise of an increasingly 'democratic' public sphere.

This study considers the ways in which a group of paintings and illustrations in the 1890s and 1900s represented urban 'types', especially women, in terms which effectively displaced contemporary middle-class anxieties about racial degeneration, deprivation and the problems of modern life. London provided the real text for those who wished to depict the shifting experiences of modern life. In this depiction, the 'cockney' coster girl came to occupy a central role, drawing on traditions of representation that included Hogarth as well as other artists. Depite fears about racial degeneration, coster girls were represented neither as feeble or degenerate. Although often depicted as bawdy, they were not seen as threatening. At the same time, parallels with traditional representations of London street life emphasised how the cockney 'type' persisted despite a rapidly changing urban environment. By insisting on past conventions it was possible for artists and spectators to overlook actual diversity and poverty, both of which constituted the new geographies of late nineteenth-century London.

Taking as its focus the use of London's urinals by men seeking men, this article explores the relationship between social behaviour and public space. Neither fully public nor fully private the urinal occupied a twilight zone in the wider urban landscape. In the social and sexual practices, surveillance and reconstruction of public urinals differing concepts of sexuality were played out in a conflict between homosexual men and public authorities. In defining and policing appropriate forms of behaviour in the urinal, the police and municipal bureaucracies attempted to regulate behaviour and construct a public city around heterosexist practices and assumptions. In contrast homosexual men sought to control the potentially private spaces provided by the urinals. The conflict over London's urinals made them a highly charged signifier in the articulation of masculinity and heterosexuality.