Postwar London Research Articles

Mrs. Dalloway's Postwar Elegy: Women, War, and the Art of Mourning

Six weeks after Mrs. Dalloway appeared, its author speculated on "a new name" for her novels: "A new ___ by Virginia Woolf. . . . Elegy?" 1 In modernizing the elegy by adapting its poetics to prose fiction and its work of mourning to postwar London's post-theological cosmos in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Woolf moves beyond what Alex Zwerdling calls her "satiric elegy," Jacob's Room (1922), to discover and explore the genre's full profundity, complexity, and power. 2 This communal elegy [End Page 125] unseals "a well of tears"--for the survivors no less than the war dead--and enters into colloquy with the pastoral elegy from the Greeks through Shakespeare to Shelley in search of consolations for "This late age of the world's experience." 3 In making Clarissa Dalloway its central elegiac consciousness and in transposing certain gender-inflected conventions to feminine registers, furthermore, the novel embraces the terrible losses that the war inflicted on "poor devils, of both sexes" and critiques the warmaking society that Three Guineas (1938) figures as "a father." 4 But what distinguishes Mrs. Dalloway as a war elegy is its discovery of the genre's deep resources for dramatizing and mediating violence both psychic and social: the violence of war and of everyday death; the violence of everyday life; and the violence intrinsic to mourning, the grief-driven rage that threatens to derail the mourner's progress toward acceptance and consolation. In making the elegy a field for confronting the violence that had devastated Europe and still loomed as a threat to its future, Mrs. Dalloway joins the internationalist contributions of Woolf's Bloomsbury contemporaries John Maynard Keynes and Sigmund Freud to postwar debates about Europe's future. Its characters' struggles animate Keynes's prophetic castigation of the Peace as war by other means and anticipate Freud's arguments against class oppression, and for the consolations of science, philosophy, and art over "religious illusion," for a civilization that must manage but can never eradicate the aggression that imperils it from within. 5

Faith in the Metropolis: Opinion Polls and Christianity in Post-War London

Faith in the Metropolis: Opinion Polls and Christianity in Post-War London

Faith in the Metropolis: Opinion Polls and Christianity in Post-War London

Faith in the Metropolis: Opinion Polls and Christianity in Post-War London

After the Nakba: An Experience of Exile in England

The year 1998, the fiftieth anniversary of the fall of Palestine, occasioned an outpouring of eyewitness and other accounts of the events of 1948. But relatively few accounts exist of how the displacement affected people's lives in the immediate wake of the exodus from Palestine. The following is one such account, a memoir of the author's early experience in postwar London.

The significance of post-war London reconstruction plans for East End industry

Jeffrey Diefendorf has shown that during and after the Second World War there were potential conflicts in many European cities between the aim of physical reconstruction and the need to rebuild local and national economies. In London, as elsewhere, these conflicts came to be reflected in the reconstruction plans that were prepared. This paper examines the relationship between planning and industry in London between 1940 and 1955 and analyses the role of large-scale redevelopment areas in the physical and economic reconstruction of London. The issues are explored with special reference to London's industrial East End. The nature of the conflicts over reconstruction in London and the manner in which they were expressed and resolved can inform understanding not only of planning in a major metropolis but also of the broader processes at work in the political and institutional structures of local and national government. The emergence of national concern about London's growth in the interwar period, both in terms of population and employment is sketched, and national policy responses to accelerating metropolitan expansion are outlined. The impact of the Second World War on London's physical and economic structure and the role envisaged for large-scale redevelopment areas in plans for reconstruction are then discussed. The relative weight given to industrial and social objectives in reconstruction areas (termed Comprehensive Development Areas after 1947) [1] is assessed and the problems and opportunities posed by the particular character of London's East End are reviewed. Focus is on planning priorities within the Stepney/Poplar Reconstruction/Comprehensive Development Area, and the significance of political and fiscal considerations in determining policy, particularly from the viewpoint of the planning authority, the London County Council (LCC).

Appropriate Geography: Patrick Abercrombie and the Energy of the World

For one notionally held so high in the history of planning, Patrick Abercrombie's work has received meagre detailed attention. Aside from his assured presence in more general texts as the replanner of post-war London, Abercrombie has rarely been the object of discussion.1 And although his planning reports and his 1933 textbook Town and Country Planning have found a niche in history's annals, other sides to his work in urban and rural design are less known. In this essay I want to consider two of these other aspects of Abercrombie; his attention to the Chinese environmental philosophy of Feng Shui,2 and his early interest in the Belgian modernist poet Emile Verhaeren. Both of these byways in Abercrombie's work point to bigger ecological themes of energy and order, and of the relation between environmental thought and modernism. I will take Feng Shui and Verhaeren in turn, then consider how such seemingly divergent interests can take their place in the same imaginative geographical scheme of things, and in conclusion bring out some more general points on the implications of these stories of Abercrombie for our histories of modern-

A Surgical Curtain Call

In early 1952, Margot Fonteyn was recovering from a leg injury that had threatened her career. Already famous at 33, she felt her future uncertain as she fought her way back through physiotherapy and exercise. Fonteyn, after her recent close contact with surgeons, was fascinated by the many aspects of their work and the manner in which they trained for their careers. She understood intuitively the linkage between their daily grind, which she saw as equivalent to her repetitious exercises at the barre, and their preparations for major performances with death as the audience, which tested their stamina, inner resources, surgical choreography, and confidence born of training. She was convinced that surgery could not be dissociated from theater and a sense of grace. I was a resident when I met Margot Fonteyn on a foggy Sunday afternoon in what was still a depressed postwar London. How we both arrived at

The dwarfs: a novel

Harold Pinter's first and only novel, written in the early 1950s before he began writing plays. The novel is set in post-war London's East End, a landscape of bomb-sites, and describes the lives of four young Londoners whose energy and humour lift them above the routine austerity of the time.

John Bartlet Brebner

The death of John Bartlet Brebner removes from the community of Anglo-American historical scholarship a beloved and respected figure who will be especially mourned in the British Association for American Studies, not only because many of us were fortunate enough to come within the circle of his friendship, but because he was, in a sense, the Association's prophet.“Bart” Brebner was one of those rare individuals whose academic interests and personal career are so satisfyingly interwoven as to result, not only in sound learning, but in wisdom; and he was one of a very small number to acquire such stature in the field of North Atlantic history. Born a Canadian of Scottish ancestry, the son of the Registrar of Toronto University, he served during the 1914–18 War in the British Army. As an ex-serviceman, he went up to St. John's College, Oxford where he read history with G. N. Clark, rowed in the first eight, and saw something of the world of post-war London. After returning to the University of Toronto, one of a distinguished vintage, of young graduate students and lecturers which included Lester Pearson and D. G. Creighton, he joined the staff at Columbia University in 1927; and from this New York vantage point he mastered the broad sweep of Atlantic history.