Streets Of London Research Articles

The Fortunate Flâneuse

The nineteenth century was a period of extraordinary change, and the built structure of cities became a representation of progress. As a consequence the city and the idea of the city became important points of exploration in Victorian life and literature. According to Lynda Nead, an authority on nineteenth-century visual culture, an urban ‘subjectivity was not already in place when men and women occupied the streets of Victorian London, but was formed through the encounters, interactions and experiences of that occupation’ (‘Mapping the Self’ 167). The Australian colonies took part in this urban transformation, developing their own self-regarding subjectivities as they metamorphosed from ‘villages’ to sophisticated metropolitan centres. Like other new world societies they were subject to ‘swift population growth, ostentatious prosperity and boundless optimism’ (Proudfoot viii). While the largest colonial cities could not match London’s sheer size, they were not so far behind Glasgow, say, or Liverpool. Their prosperity and adoption of the latest technologies meant that their urban centres formed with dramatic speed.

On Beyond Fifty

This issue marks the happy completion of fifty years of The Chaucer Review: A Journal of Medieval Studies and Literary Criticism. As we mark this milestone, the journal is now poised for its next half-century by changing over to a new schedule for each volume's quarterly issues. beginning with Volume 51, a year's worth of The Chaucer Review will be issued in January, April, July, and October (the calendar year), instead of in July, October, January, and April (the academic year). To allow this change to begin, Volume 50 has been produced in two double issues, 50.1/2 (July 2015) and the present one, 50.3/4 (October 2015). The next issue, Volume 51, Issue 1, will be out in January 2016.The first issue of The Chaucer Review appeared in Summer 1966 and was edited by Robert Worth Frank Jr. and Edmund Reiss. Bob Frank continued as its indefatigable editor until 2002 (issue 36.4), and during his thirty-six-year tenure the journal acquired its well-earned status as a premier journal of medieval studies. As editors since 2002, we have striven to maintain the journal's traditions and special place of service as a spur to scholarly advancement in the Chaucerian community.We've taken care, when it has fallen to us, to steer The Chaucer Review through major milestones, namely its fortieth anniversary in 2006 and, now, its fiftieth. To commemorate the forty-year mark, an edited collection was published separately, Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches (Penn State UP, 2009), with new essays by John M. Bowers, Glenn Burger, Ardis Butterfield, Robert R. Edwards, Simon Horobin, Steven Justice, Laura Kendrick, Kathy Lavezzo, Seth Lerer, A. C. Spearing, and Karla Taylor. With unflagging support from Penn State University Press, the journal's publisher since its inception, we anticipate another volume of essays to be released at the fifty-year mark in 2016: Chaucer: Visual Approaches, with contributions by Jessica Brantley, Joyce Coleman, Carolyn P. Collette, Alexandra Cook, Maidie Hilmo, Laura Kendrick, Ashby Kinch, Martha Rust, Sarah Stanbury, Kathryn R. Vulić, and ourselves.Meanwhile, special sessions have been planned to mark the milestone at the International Congress of Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, in May 2016, and at the New Chaucer Society Meeting, Queen Mary University, London, in July 2016. We warmly invite you to join us at these sessions.And with Chaucer Review 51.1 and onward, readers can expect to see the continuance of a tradition we've begun as editors: a now-and-again issue organized upon a special topic. Since 2005, the journal has released six special issues: (1) Chaucer and Aesthetics, 39.3 (Jan. 2005); (2) The Legacy of New Criticism: Revisiting the Work of E. Talbot Donaldson, 41.3 (Jan. 2007), edited with Bonnie Wheeler and Carolynn Van Dyke; (3) Time, Measure, and Value in Chaucer's Art and Chaucer's World, 43.4 (Apr. 2009), edited with Carolyn P. Collette and Nancy Mason Bradbury; (4) Studies in Middle English Poetry in Honor of C. David Benson, 46.1/2 (Apr. 2011), edited with Daniel Donoghue, James Simpson, and Nicholas Watson; (5) Medieval English Manuscripts: Form, Aesthetics, and the Literary Text, 47.4 (Apr. 2013), edited with Arthur Bahr and Alexandra Gillespie; and (6) Thinking Historically after Historicism: Essays in Memory of Lee Patterson, 48.4 (Apr. 2014), edited with Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington.Another special issue will appear in The Chaucer Review 51.1 (Jan. 2016), addressing the topic of Women's Literary Culture and Late Medieval English Writing. With guest editors Liz Herbert McAvoy and Diane Watt, it will include the following essays and authors: “Affective Reading: Chaucer, Women, and Romance” (Corinne Saunders); “Small Consolation? Goscelin of St. Bertin's Liber confortatorius and the Middle English Pearl” (Diane Watt); “The Sea Ground and the London Street: The Ascetic Self in Julian of Norwich and Thomas Hoccleve” (Amy Appleford); “‘O der lady, be my help’: Women's Visionary Writing and the Devotional Literary Canon” (Liz Herbert McAvoy); “Chaucer, the Chaucerian Tradition, and Female Monastic Readers” (Nancy Bradley Warren); and “‘The details of life and the pulsings of affect’: Virginia Woolf's Middle English Texts” (Marea Mitchell). Planned for the following year will be another, much-anticipated special issue on Chaucer's Legend of Good Women.We thank the Penn State University Press for its remarkable level of loyal support for the journal, lasting now for fifty years. We gratefully acknowledge Editor Kendra Boileau, editorial assistant hannah hebert, the wonderful staff of the Journals Department—Diana Pesek, Julie Lambert, Rachel Ginder, Heather Smith, and Astrid Meyer—and Sales and Exhibit Manager Kathleen Scholz-Jaffe. We thank our academic institutions, Kent State University and Eastern Illinois University, for the kinds of basic support that make our editing work possible and enjoyable. And most of all we thank the contributors, reviewers, readers, and subscribing libraries who keep this journal a vibrant and viable voice for the community of medievalists.

Fuel emissions optimization in vehicle routing problems with time-varying speeds

The problem considered in this paper is to produce routes and schedules for a fleet of delivery vehicles that minimize the fuel emissions in a road network where speeds depend on time. In the model, the route for each vehicle must be determined, and also the speeds of the vehicles along each road in their paths are treated as decision variables. The vehicle routes are limited by the capacities of the vehicles and time constraints on the total length of each route. The objective is to minimize the total emissions in terms of the amount of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) produced, measured by the equivalent weight of CO2 (CO2e).A column generation based tabu search algorithm is adapted and presented to solve the problem. The method is tested with real traffic data from a London road network. The results are analysed to show the potential saving from the speed adjustment process. The analysis shows that most of the fuel emissions reduction is able to be attained in practice by ordering the customers to be visited on the route using a distance-based criterion, determining a suitable path between customers for each vehicle and travelling as fast as is allowed by the traffic conditions up to a preferred speed.

From There to Here: Canadian Stage’s Production of London Road

The award-winning verbatim musical London Road received critical praise and audience interest when it was first produced in London by the National Theatre in 2011. What might a transplanted British verbatim concoction tell a post-colonial Canadian audience about their own localized concerns and prejudices?

The Companion to Dombey and Son by Trey Philpotts (review)

Reviewed by: The Companion to Dombey and Son by Trey Philpotts Robert R. Garnett Trey Philpotts. The Companion to Dombey and Son. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2015. Pp. xiv +575. $120.00; £75.00 Like the children of Dombey and Son’s philoprogenitive Mr. and Mrs. Perch, books on Dickens arrive steadily, with a spate since Dickens’s 2012 bicentennial. Few can be more welcome than the latest volume in The Dickens Companion series. Next to the (also ongoing) Pilgrim Letters project, the Companions series ranks as the most valuable new scholarly resource for Dickens scholarship. Trey Philpotts’ Companion to Dombey and Son is particularly welcome for several reasons. The tenth volume to appear, it’s the first addition in a decade, since Philpotts’ own earlier contribution, The Companion to Little Dorrit (2004), and Dickens scholars can only hope that future Companions (to the five novels not yet “companioned”) arrive at shorter intervals (and that Trey Philpotts does not have to produce all of them). There’s a good reason that these works appear at wide intervals. With over 500 pages of detailed and often extensive annotations, The Companion to Dombey and Son is not only an encyclopedia of mid-century Victorian culture, but also a tour of the baroque palace of Dickens’s mind, as well as a reminder that even palaces have lumber rooms. Samuel Johnson boasted that in compiling his great English dictionary, he had singlehandedly accomplished what it had taken forty members of the French Academy forty years to complete for their own language. In locating sources and analogues for thousands of Dombey references, allusions, parallels, sources and cultural context, Trey Philpotts has performed a nearly Johnsonian feat. Since the series’ inception the Companions have grown longer and more comprehensive. The Companion to Dombey and Son is almost twice as long as the earlier Companions to Our Mutual Friend (1986) and Bleak House (1988). Perhaps this is due to the growing ambition of the volumes’ authors; and perhaps the rise of the worldwide web with its online texts and mountains (and dustheaps) of data and information has made it possible to expand the scope of the Companions. It may be, as well, that the internet has made it necessary for reference volumes like the Companions to justify themselves with deeper and more extensive annotation. Wikipedia can provide quick undergraduate-level glosses to many issues and allusions in Dickens, but the Companion to Dombey goes far deeper into such sources than anything [End Page 255] available on the internet. Computers may be able to defeat grandmasters at chess, but not yet at diligent and intelligent scholarship. Roughly speaking, the Companion to Dombey provides two overlapping kinds of information. It is, first, a mine of information about mid-nineteenth century English conditions and culture, from the mean streets of London – with, for example, over twenty-five citations of Henry Mayhew’s 1851 London Labour and the London Poor – to the latest in scientific (and pseudo-scientific) knowledge and technology: most famously, the revolutionary advent of the railroad. With profound and analogous revolutions in our own time – both technological and cultural – the England of the 1840s diminishes from our view like a scene rapidly receding through the wrong end of a telescope. Dickens, we may hope, is not for an age but for all time, but he does not float above his age; he was deeply, enthusiastically, and angrily immersed in it, and Philpotts helps us visit the material circumstances and intellectual climate in which he lived and from which he inhaled his assumptions. The Companion takes us into food and cookery, buildings, medicine, empire, decoration, transport, schools, and more. This was the public world of Dickens. More idiosyncratic are allusions and references, often fragmentary, which take us into his private experience and reading. A good example is Captain Cuttle, initially a minor comic character who grew in Dickens’s fancy and sympathy until he comes to dominate large stretches of the later chapters. Cuttle’s strange nautical jargon – as obscure to us, probably, as to the baffled Mr. Toots – and his habit of mixing and muddling quotations must have presented a particular challenge to Philpotts, who has nonetheless managed...

The Nurse’s War Allingham Merryn The Nurse’s War 384pp £4 Mira 978-1848453807 1848453809

In 1941, nurse Daisy Driscoll witnesses the trauma of the second world war on the rubble-strewn streets of London’s east end.

Active Biomonitoring of Heavy Metals and PAHs with Mosses and Lichens: a Case Study in the Cities of Naples and London

Mosses and lichens are widely used to detect changes in the environmental concentrations of potential contaminants. Several studies have shown the usefulness of transplanted mosses and/or lichens to monitor air depositions of inorganic and organic pollutants at different scales. Here, we present the results of a biomonitoring study carried out in two cities, London (United Kingdom) and Naples (Italy), using four biomonitors (two lichens and two mosses). The lichens, Pseudevernia furfuracea (L.) Zopf var. furfuracea and Parmelia sulcata Taylor, and mosses, Sphagnum capillifolium (Ehrh.) Hedw. and Hypnum cupressiforme Hedw., were exposed in bags in urban streets of Naples and London and in semi-rural and rural areas. Samples were analysed for Cd, Cr, Cu, Fe, Ni, Pb, V and Zn by atomic absorption spectrometry after acid digestion and for 16 EPA polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) by gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry after matrix solid-phase dispersion. For heavy metals, the comparison between the selected mosses indicated that, in all exposure sites, S. capillifolium had a better accumulation performance than H. cupressiforme, whereas for the lichens, it was P. furfuracea which accumulated higher concentrations of metals. Also for total PAHs, S. capillifolium showed a good accumulation capability compared to the other biomonitors investigated, especially compared to H. cupressiforme. It was observed an increasing heavy metal and PAH uptake by biomonitors from rural to urban sites, in both cities.

The Transfigured Phenomena of Domesticity in the Urban Interior

This paper reconsiders a refurbished London street, Bermondsey Street, as an interior where objects of memories are curated into a reconstructed atmosphere of domesticity.The study argues that as our experience of the city becomes increasingly transient, the notion of inhabiting shifts to a wider and more fragmented context, and our ability to integrate with the urban environment becomes eroded. Bermondsey Street, however, presents a distinctive experience where the phenomena of intimacy and familiarity converge across space and time to provide a more stable form of inhabitation. In order to understand how these phenomena occur and how the experience of the urban interior manifests itself in our consciousness, the study follows the Husserlian phenomenological method of intentionality whereby the urban interior of Bermondsey Street becomes the intentional object. It also places the reflective gaze of the phenomenologist in ‘epoche?’, a phenomenological method of reduction that suspends normality. In doing so, the phenomenologist is able to access the points of reference that reveal the affective qualities of the intentional object in our consciousness.While the discursive and theoretical content of the study is expressed in the body of text, the phenomenological narrative is bracketed and illustrated as a meditative journey; a recollection of memories of the homely, initiated by the encounter between consciousness and the way the interior animates imagination. Thus, in ‘epoche?’, the reflective gaze of the phenomenologist transcends normality to reveal the underlying structure of the phenomena and the intentionality of the subjective experience.

The use of non-adult vertebral dimensions as indicators of growth disruption and non-specific health stress in skeletal populations.

ABSTRACTObjectiveTraditional methods of detecting growth disruption have focused on deficiencies in the diaphyseal length of the long bones. This study proposes the implementation of vertebral measurements (body height and transverse diameter of the neural canal) from non‐adults (0–17 years) as a new methodology for the identification of growth disruption.MethodsMeasurements of vertebral body height and transverse diameter were taken from 96 non‐adult skeletons and 40 adult skeletons from two post‐medieval sites in England (Bow Baptist, London and Coronation Street, South Shields). Non‐adult measurements were plotted against dental age to construct vertebral growth profiles through which inter‐population comparisons could be made.ResultsResults demonstrated that both sites experienced some growth retardation in infancy, evident as deficiencies in transverse diameter. However, analysis of vertebral body height revealed different chronologies of growth disruption between the sites, with a later age of attainment of skeletal maturity recorded in the Bow Baptist sample.DiscussionThese vertebral dimensions undergo cessation of growth at different ages, with transverse diameter being “locked‐in” by ∼1–2 years of age, while vertebral body height may continue to grow into early adulthood. These measurements can therefore provide complementary information regarding the timing of growth disruption within archaeological populations. Non‐adult vertebral measurements can increase our osteobiographical understanding of the timings of episodes of health stress, and allow for the analysis of growth when other skeletal elements are fragmentary. Am J Phys Anthropol 158:155–164, 2015. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The streets for the people: London's street markets 1850–1939

ABSTRACTThis article analyses London's street markets in the years between 1850 and 1939. It shows how this was a period of significant growth for street markets, with both steeply increasing numbers of markets and a steady increase in the number of stalls overall. These markets were informal and unauthorized for much of the period under discussion; the administrative/local government context was complex, and competing authorities (the City of London, London County Council, metropolitan boroughs and national government) hesitated in regulating the organic growth of street market trading, while also recognizing the contribution it made to bringing cheap food and commodities to the population of London. It will be argued that the street market, far from being merely the survival of a primitive form of retail, flourished in response to modernity in London. It should be analysed alongside other developing forms of retail, and considered for its contribution to the culture and material culture of the city.

A cold supergene zinc deposit in Alaska: The Reef Ridge case

The Reef Ridge deposit is a typical supergene “nonsulfide” zinc mineralization, located in the Yukon-Koyukuk region of west-central Alaska (USA). It is hosted in sedimentary rocks of the Farewell terrane, a continental fragment sandwiched between the Siberian and Laurentian cratons during the early Paleozoic. The mineralization occurs in Lower–Middle Devonian shallow-water dolomite of a Paleozoic carbonate platform succession belonging to the Nixon Fork tectonic unit. The mineralization consists of oxidized minerals associated with minor remaining sulfides (pyrite/marcasite and sphalerite). In the oxidation zone, smithsonite is the predominant mineral, mixed with Fe-(hydr)oxides (goethite and hematite). A complete petrographic and mineralogical study was performed. Samples were analyzed by X-ray diffraction, inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometry and emission spectrometry, energy dispersive scanning electron microscopy, and QEMSCAN ® (quantitative evaluation of minerals by scanning electron microscopy). The most abundant mineral in the nonsulfide ore is smithsonite. Similar to other nonsulfide Zn deposits worldwide, the first generation of smithsonite has replaced both primary sphalerite and the host carbonates. A second smithsonite generation precipitated as cement in vugs, cavities, and fractures. Minor zinc amounts also occur in the Fe-(hydr)oxides, and zinc traces have been identified in clay minerals. The carbon and oxygen isotope values of smithsonite at Reef Ridge vary from −0.7 to 2.1‰ relative to Vienna Peedee belemnite (VPDB) and 19.1‰ to 21.9‰ relative to Vienna standard mean ocean water (VSMOW). The δ 13 C values are similar to those of the host rock, suggesting that the predominant carbon source for smithsonite was the host carbonates, with only a limited contribution from organic carbon. The oxygen isotope ratios of Reef Ridge smithsonite are more depleted in 18 O compared to supergene nonsulfides from other parts of the world formed under warm-humid, temperate, or semiarid climates. The oxygen isotope fractionation between water and smithsonite, which relates the δ 18 O value of the mineralizing solution, the formation temperature of smithsonite, and its δ 18 O composition, indicates that the δ 18 O composition of Reef Ridge smithsonite is related to very low formation temperatures (~10 °C), and strong depletion in 18 O of the precipitating waters. The δ 18 O smithsonite composition, the strong 18 O depletion, and the relationship of the formation of the Reef Ridge nonsulfide deposit with the development of the Sleetmute upland surface (which started in the Late Tertiary and continues to the present) indicate that the formation of the Reef Ridge nonsulfide deposit is probably related to cold/humid weathering episodes during a period comprised between Late Tertiary and Holocene. The “traditional” interpretation on the genesis of Zn nonsulfide deposits in warm-humid, temperate, or semiarid conditions should be questioned where other climate zones are indicated.

The cultural uses of the A-Z London street atlas: navigational performance and the imagining of urban form

For a decade from the late 1990s, the A-Z London street atlas became a recurrent motif within art works and popular media texts. This essay collates and explores these cultural responses to the atlas, to consider what this might reveal about the affective dimensions of ordinary urban way-finding. There were three persistent motifs that ran through these diverse works: a basic fascination with the destruction of the atlas, the foregrounding of a stoic or heroic pedestrian figure, and the attachment of the atlas to a projected network of mobile individuals that connected on the streets at random times and places. An interrogation of these tropes reveals how the A-Z became a means to explore the terms of an expanded pedestrian experience, as well as a possible configuration of metropolitan movement and contact. Furthermore, the popularity of these texts points to an excess of affect that might have become embedded within acts of A-Z way-finding. Using, owning or being seen with the atlas briefly became a potential mechanism for imagining one’s contribution to a mobile metropolitan community. Hence, this essay is both a focussed exploration of street-atlas poetics and an attempt to think more deeply about the cultural dynamics of everyday urban navigation.

Local and regional components of aerosol in a heavily trafficked street canyon in central London derived from PMF and cluster analysis of single-particle ATOFMS spectra.

Positive matrix factorization (PMF) has been applied to single particle ATOFMS spectra collected on a six lane heavily trafficked road in central London (Marylebone Road), which well represents an urban street canyon. PMF analysis successfully extracted 11 factors from mass spectra of about 700,000 particles as a complement to information on particle types (from K-means cluster analysis). The factors were associated with specific sources and represent the contribution of different traffic related components (i.e., lubricating oils, fresh elemental carbon, organonitrogen and aromatic compounds), secondary aerosol locally produced (i.e., nitrate, oxidized organic aerosol and oxidized organonitrogen compounds), urban background together with regional transport (aged elemental carbon and ammonium) and fresh sea spray. An important result from this study is the evidence that rapid chemical processes occur in the street canyon with production of secondary particles from road traffic emissions. These locally generated particles, together with aging processes, dramatically affected aerosol composition producing internally mixed particles. These processes may become important with stagnant air conditions and in countries where gasoline vehicles are predominant and need to be considered when quantifying the impact of traffic emissions.

The Political Economy of the Street and its Discontents

ABSTRACTAt mid-century, British journalists and reformers warned that beggars menaced the country's economic and political health, and nowhere more so than in the streets of London. At first glance, the cultural and institutional history of the period yields the impression that British society had ceased to view mendicants as legitimate objects of charity. Yet, an examination of other sources from Victorian London demonstrates that many Britons continued to tolerate, support or even protect beggars. Such actions demonstrate the continued power of appeals to the emotions and older traditions of charity despite the country's transition to an urban-industrial society informed by the doctrines of classical political economy.

Academic Underachievement in Children with Active Epilepsy.

Investigators from Lingfield, Surrey, UK; University of Gothenburg, Sweden; Great Ormond Street Hospital, London, UK, and other centers, conducted psychological assessment including measures of IQ, working memory and processing speed in 85 (74%) of 115 school aged children with active epilepsy (a seizure in the past year and/or on AEDs) from a population-based sample, without exclusion for intellectual deficiency.

The Street Theatre of State: The Ceremonial Opening of Parliament, 1603–60

This article revisits a fairly familiar topic – early modern ceremonial relating to the state opening of parliament – in order to analyse both new evidence and neglected themes. Thus, while it examines the projection of political authority, and the grandeur of state, it also addresses the audiences for, and popular reactions to, such events, and supplements treatment of James I and Charles I with observations regarding Oliver Cromwell and Richard Cromwell during the protectorate. This involves challenging claims that have repeatedly been made about the ‘monarchical’ style of Cromwellian regimes, but it also involves emphasizing that different rulers and regimes thought carefully about how best to ensure that their approach to ceremonial accurately reflected their governmental style, and about how to take account of audiences and the political mood on the streets of London. Indeed, the article emphasizes the degree to which Charles I sought to balance the desire to project regal authority with concerns about decorum and disorder, while Cromwellian protectors were more preoccupied with the need to balance grandeur with a civic plain‐style.

Pastoral imagery in The Merchant of Venice

This essay examines the range of reference that lies behind two particular passages in Shakespeare’s play, The Merchant of Venice: in 1.3, Shylock’s invocation of an episode from the thirtieth chapter of Genesis, “When Jacob grazed his Uncle Laban’s sheep,” and at the crisis of the contest between Shylock and Antonio, in 4.1, Antonio’s rather puzzling line of resignation, “I am the tainted wether of the flock.” Through a consideration of contemporary biblical commentary, literary, religious, and political allegory, in addition to a range of allied visual material, the essay seeks to widen the context of reception of the play by its first audiences. Not only were they familiar with pastoral tropes and visual signs to do with civic, national, and religious order, often presented in the streets of London, but also with a moralized line of interpretation of the Jacob legend through the popular media of illustrated catechisms, and prints deriving from them. As illustrated exempla of the commandments both Jacob and Daniel, the last invoked as a model of the good judge in 4.1 of the play, were familiar referential figures in the 1590s. The essay concludes with a consideration of the allegory of the fourth act, suggested by Antonio’s line, the denigration of Shylock as “wolvish,” and by Portia’s position as the invoker of mercy, once more connected with contemporary iconography.

Representing the Poor: Charles Lamb and the Vagabondiana

RECENT CRITICISM HAS OFTEN PAIRED CHARLES LAMB'S complaint of Decay of Beggars in Metropolis, published in character of Elia in May 1822 issue of London Magazine, with John Smith and Francis Douce's Vagabondiana. Yet while Simon P. Hull and Gregory Dart only briefly evoke how Lamb's essay to owe to earlier work, a comparison between two publications merits a more sustained attention than hitherto available. (1) Under close analysis, sophistication of both works' engagement with pressing contemporary problem of how to represent--both politically and aesthetically--the urban poor, and beggars in particular, soon becomes apparent. While Vagabondiana mobilizes parliamentary rhetoric, techniques of both antiquarian and catalogue literature, and picturesque mode in an effort to reassure its readers, Lamb takes same approaches and pushes them to their extreme, revealing both their limits and, most disturbingly of all, those of his readership as well. Vagabondiana; or of Mendicant Wanderers through Streets of London; with Portraits of most Remarkable, Drawn from Life by John Thomas Smith, Keeper of Prints in British Museum was published in 1817. Its title begins work's careful engagement with its subject matter. The offer of Anecdotes of Mendicant Wanderers ... with Portraits of most Remarkable announces deliberate control over selected material, even as scrupulously refrains from using term beggar. The choice of wanderer over a word that makes a profession out of importunity, to mention emphasis on book containing only selected material, helps Smith and his collaborator, antiquarian Francis Douce, give a particularly charming turn to a normally grim aspect of contemporary life in capital. In 1817, two years after end of Napoleonic Wars and right in center of a post-war economic depression, government expenditure on poor relief was close to eight million pounds, (2) while streets of London were filled with destitute, (3) with as much as twenty percent of all outdoor poor in England to be found in capital. (4) The Vagabondiana responds to this context, and attendant interest in urban poor, yet this luxuriously presented book, as is clear from its full title, also aims to insulate its readership from harsher realities of situation. It seems to be a forerunner of a phenomenon Celina Fox finds in late nineteenth-century fiction, in which it was as if scenes of social distress could be tackled without allowing audience to feel a of reassuring emotions: of pathos, sympathy or charity, which left them feeling munificent rather than guilty. (5) The text of Vagabondiana concludes with a homily on charity, and its reassuring glow is all stronger for conceit with which work opens, one that might seem surprising in economic downturn of early nineteenth century: an announcement of imminent disappearance of its mendicant subject matter: Concluding, therefore, from reaction of that several curious characters would disappear by being either compelled to industry, or to partake in parochial rates, provided for them in their respective work-houses, occurred to author of present publication, that likenesses of most remarkable of them, with a few particulars of their habits, would be unamusing to those to whom they have been for several years. (6) Amidst reassuring talk of liberal parochial rates available in workhouses, crucial phrase here is double negative, not be unamusing, which recognizes potential for displeasure even as negates it. This phrase also defines reasoning behind title's insistence on only the most Remarkable subjects being included in work. The imminent vanishing of metropolitan beggars, repeated by Douce and Smith elsewhere, is part of same pattern: does deny existence of problem, but rather--through suggestion of their fast-approaching absence--opens up possibility of a change in attitudes from that which would consider them pests to something more benign, manifested in desire for artistic reproduction and preservation. …

Inhabiting Infrastructure: Exploring the Interactional Spaces of Urban Cycling

Contemporary cities are thick with infrastructure. In recognition of this fact a great deal of recent work within urban studies and urban geography has focused on transformations in the governance and ownership of infrastructural elements within cities. Less attention has been paid to the practices through which urban infrastructures are inhabited by urban dwellers. Yet in all sorts of ways infrastructures are realised through their use and inhabitation. This paper argues for the importance of attending to the ways that infrastructures are reinterpreted through use. Focusing on a case study of commuter cyclists in London, it explores the ways in which cyclists accommodate themselves to (and are in turn accommodated by) the infrastructural orderings of London's streets. Confronted by the obduracy of a road infrastructure designed primarily for motorised traffic, cyclists show a diverse range of approaches to negotiating movement through the city on bikes. The paper describes how this negotiation can be understood in terms of the more or less skilful processes of navigation, rule following, rule making, and rule bending. This involves a polymorphous mix of practices, some common to driving, others to walking, and yet others unique to cycling. In conclusion, the paper suggests that transformations of infrastructures found within cities need to be understood as much through emergent changes between their elements, and that close attention to how infrastructures come to be inhabited offers productive avenues for thinking about ways to improve them.

Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890–1945 by Anna Snaith

Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890-1945 by Anna Snaith Cambridge University Press, 2014. 278 pages Anna Snaith's Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890-1945, is a timely study that illuminates colonial women writers' foundational role in literary modernism and the ways in which their representations of London disrupt imperial claims to stability. Through her paradigm of the "voyage in," with its playful reversal of Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out (1915), Snaith focuses on the unprecedented mobility offered by the ship to demonstrate how colonial women writers shaped modernity: "These women were not coming to London solely to experience modernity, they were a constituent part of it" (26). Modernist Voyages is, in short, a story of reversals: a reversal of the traditional route of imperial expansion from London to the colonies, a reversal of London's assumed influence on colonial literary production, and a reversal of critical conversations and practices. Modernist Voyages participates in the "spatial turn" within the new modernist studies and yet distinguishes itself by restoring the issue of gender to current debates within the field. Feminist scholars of modernist literature, particularly Jane Garrity and Anne Fernald, have critiqued Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz for their dismissal of sexuality and gender as alternate modes of scholarship in "The New Modernist Studies" (2008). Snaith lends her voice to this debate and poignantly summarizes the problem: "It is as though that primarily recuperative project [on modernist women writers in the 1970s-1990s] is now complete, and critical momentum needs to look elsewhere" (10). Feminist recuperation and "critical momentum" are not mutually exclusive, and Snaith's refrain of "both ... and" attempts to address this impasse: these writers were both feminists and anticolonialists, a position that scholars consistently fail to appreciate. Snaith's deep historical research into the lives of these seven women--Olive Schreiner (South Africa), Sarojini Naidu (India), Sara Jeannette Duncan (Canada), Katherine Mansfield (New Zealand),Jean Rhys (Dominica), Una Marson (Jamaica), and Christina Stead (Australia)--raises provocative methodological questions as she gestures toward a more expansive understanding of literary modernism's terrains. Uniting the diverse cast of characters in Modernist Voyages are London and the sea, two settings whose importance raises them almost to the status of character in Snaith's work. In line with Henri Lefebvre's work on the social production of space, Snaith's spatial analyses of London trace different topographies that illuminate how various colonies subtend and haunt the unreal city, signaling London's inherent instability. Instead of reifying London's position as the facilitator of transnational modernism, then, Snaith's concentration on these writers' London years demonstrates how the imperial city fostered both their feminism and anti-imperialism, thus contributing to the destabilization of empire's ideology. London also epitomizes the criteria by which Snaith designates these writers as "modernist": "The combined focus on urbanism, capitalism and colonialism in their work constitutes a thoroughgoing consideration of the forms of modernity and its transnational manifestations" (8). In terms of recuperative praxis, finally, the focus on London introduces several writers into the broader category of transnational modernism. For instance, until now Sara Jeannette Duncan and Una Marson have primarily been discussed in the context of either Canadian or Jamaican literature, subordinating each writer's cosmopolitanism to her national origins. Snaith's remapping of London is compelling, but her emphasis on the sea as a facilitator of a distinctly feminist transnational modernism proves her most significant accomplishment. Employing Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia from "Of Other Spaces" (1984), she argues that the ship represents a place moving through a hegemonic space and creating a space of resistance. …