Virtual environments in the nineteenth century: the spectacle of old London

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article considers the appeal of immersive recreations of old London for nineteenth-century audiences. When discussed by scholars now, they are most often presented as conduits of official ideology engaged in promoting a triumphalist narrative of bourgeois ascendance. Here, I explore their appeal to popular audiences, arguing that they presented a more ambivalent set of meanings than is generally recognised and highlighting instances in which the beholders’ experience departed from the stated intentions of the makers or organisers. The article draws out the pervasiveness of the riverside motif, which I argue carried a subtext of yearning for a lost harmony between urban and natural environments in the modern metropolis. The immersive illusionism of these reconstructions has been associated with the idea of “passive” spectatorship in which the viewer is enthralled and their critical faculties dulled or immobilised. I argue against this that the immediacy of old London attractions allowed them to become part of the dream geography of modern spectators severed from their own past. As “mind’s eye” images, they functioned as phantasmagoric interstitial spaces that could be called upon to inform and transform the real urban environment, and in which emotions such as loss, trauma and desire could be worked out through the free play of the imagination.