Victorian City Research Articles

David Churchill: Crime Control and Everyday Life in the Victorian City: The Police and The Public

David Churchill: Crime Control and Everyday Life in the Victorian City: The Police and The Public

The Victorian city and the Christian imagination: from gothic city to garden city

AbstractThis article discusses some of the ways in which ideas about the city influenced the thinking of British Christians from 1840 to the early twentieth century. First, it explores nonconformist conceptions of the city, suggesting that, although the urban environment offered favourable circumstances for nonconformist growth, a desire to return to, or incorporate elements of, rural life was rarely far away. It explores why, when the garden city movement began, it found such fertile soil among Christian thinkers. Secondly, it considers some of the biblical paradigms that shaped late Victorian thinking about the city. Preachers and writers moved seamlessly from their well-stocked religious imaginations to contemplating the practicalities of the city, and back again. It is argued that the Christian evocation of medieval cities, biblical cities and garden cities shaped in important ways the conceptualizations of the urban world.

Book Review: David Churchill, Crime Control & Everyday Life in the Victorian City: The Police & the Public

Book Review: David Churchill, <i>Crime Control &amp; Everyday Life in the Victorian City: The Police &amp; the Public</i>

Crime Control and Everyday Life in the Victorian City: The Police and the Public, by David Churchill

Crime Control and Everyday Life in the Victorian City: The Police and the Public, by David Churchill

David Churchill. Crime Control and Everyday Life in the Victorian City: The Police and the Public. Oxford. Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. 290. $81.00 (cloth).

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At Home in the Victorian City? Revisiting Thomas Annan and the Social Contexts of Early Urban Photography

Photographs of mid-Victorian cities evoke an unsettling perspective of modernity by calling attention to the spasmodic process of societal and environmental change in this period. Focusing on four diverse commissions undertaken by the professional photographer Thomas Annan in Glasgow in the latter half of the nineteenth century, this article explores intriguing exchanges between photography and other media in an enlarging Victorian print market. This material suggests that we have yet to fully appreciate the ways in which photography participated in the often-fraught public debate on urban space and civic identity in localised environments. The article also explores how recent interventions in digital humanities, particularly in the field of mapping technologies, have opened up new possibilities of animating and reexamining the remote, conventional and impersonal viewpoints that characterise photographic representations of metropolitan areas in this period.

Transoceanic Networks of Exchange: New Brunswick Lumber, Merchant Trade, and the Building of Victorian Britain

This article examines the links between the timber trade in New Brunswick and Victorian city building in the British Isles through the lens of the Carvills – three Irish merchant brothers who were engaged in the timber, iron, and shipping trades on both sides of the Atlantic. It considers the interrelationships between these various endeavours within the broader context of an industrial age. While offering insight into one merchant family business, this article also discusses the impact of the New Brunswick lumber trade on the material culture of a growing industrial Britain – particularly during the first half of the 19th century.

Vincent J. Scully Jr. (1920–2017)

Although Vincent Scully's subjects as an architectural historian ranged from Greek temples to the pueblos of the American Southwest, from Park Avenue towers to French classical gardens, it is impossible to think of him without talking first about New Haven, Connecticut, the small northeastern city where he was born on 21 August 1920, the only child of a father who sold Chevrolet automobiles and a mother who was an aspiring opera singer. It was in New Haven that Scully received his formal education, first at Hillhouse High School and then at Yale University, where he earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees and would teach for almost all of his career; it was also in New Haven where he formed his notion of what a city was. The city's famous “nine squares” plan led Scully to think about grids as shapers of cities, as its Victorian Gothic city hall by Henry Austin and its classical post office by James Gamble Rogers led him to think about architecture as civic symbol; similarly, its neighborhood parks and central green led him to think about public space, and its enormous rock outcroppings made him aware of the relationship of landscape to urbanism. New Haven was also the place that shaped his views, increasingly vocal as he grew older, about the failings of urban renewal, modern architecture, and autocratic planning; the incursion of highways into the city's central core (which he would always call “connectors,” using the local parlance) became his model of how not to treat a city. Vincent Scully (photo, Michael Marsland/Yale University). Scully spent almost all of his academic career at Yale, retiring as Sterling Professor of the History of Art in 1991 and continuing to teach as an emeritus professor until 2009, when he was eighty-nine years old. While he …

Urban Redevelopment and Modernity in Liverpool and Manchester, 1918–39, by Charlotte Wildman

In a spirited re-reading of regional modernity, Charlotte Wildman dispenses with traditional images of decay, depression and the dole forever associated with inter-war Liverpool and Manchester. Without denying the economic, social and political turbulence of the times, Wildman shows how local politicians, business figures and religious leaders responded to adversity in dynamic and innovative ways. Under their aegis, and with the support of the local press, civic boosterism became the order of the day in both cities. Largely successful, if obscured from later view by the fixation on poverty and distress, this reformulation of the Victorian city allowed more inclusive and ‘demotic’ forms of urban culture. With modernist fervour, urban redevelopment extended from re-designed town centres (best exemplified by the new Manchester Central Library and the extension to the Town Hall) to ambitious (if incomplete) major housing provision in new suburbs, accessible by boulevard-style ring roads. In the process, localism acquired an enhanced relevance and a dual purpose: to attract much-needed inward investment while encouraging civic patriotism and citizenship among the inhabitants in troubled times. In arguing the case, Wildman deploys the spatial turn, the ‘cultural-historical framework’ and other fashionable historiographical developments to underscore some key points: the reciprocal relationship between identities and urban space; the intersection of class with other forms of collective identity; and the continued resonance of religion. The strongest sections of the book deal with gender and religious selfhoods, showing how Catholic women balanced and adjusted their faith with emerging opportunities in urban consumer culture, leisure and employment.

Repairing the Disjointed Narrative of Ballarat's Theatre Royal

Repairing the Disjointed Narrative of Ballarat's Theatre Royal

Class without Conflict: Popular Political Continuity in Late Victorian Bristol, 1867–1900

This article incorporates the political practice of working-class radicalism into the wider evolution of labour politics in British society. Its chief focus is upon the political language, culture and ideology of working-class activists in a provincial Victorian city – Bristol – between 1867 and 1900. It considers the way working-class radical and labour activists articulated their understandings of ideology and the social order around them, and examines how these conceptions changed in response to wider political and industrial developments. Its central aim is to demonstrate that, contrary to the prevailing historiography on nineteenth-century popular politics, a non-conflictual sense of class could play a crucial and consistent role in working-class radical and labour politics at a local level. For, in Bristol, working-class radicals and their labour successors did not see themselves as part of a trans-class movement of ‘the people’, but as organic representatives and spokespersons of ‘their class’. By engaging with the ongoing historiographical debates about continuity and change, this article suggests that there may be a place for class in the ‘continuity thesis’ of nineteenth-century popular politics.

‘A Still Ecstasy of Freedom and Enjoyment’: Walking the City in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

This article situates Charlotte Bronte’s writing within the context of mid-nineteenth century discourses of gender and travel, and posits that Bronte contributes to the discursive construct of the flâneuse through her writing about women walking the city in her letters from Belgium and in the novel Villette (1853). Through a critical framework drawing together literary historicism on women in the Victorian city and mobilities theories of embodied and sensory movement, the analysis reveals how Bronte foregrounds the experience of the body in her writing of women walking, and uses this as a mode through which to explore gendered discourses of mobility, and especially women’s urban walking. It argues that Bronte offers a new model of female urban spectatorship which privileges the body of the flâneuse as the prime site of knowing the city; this positively reconfigures the possibilities for autonomy and agency that urban walking affords, while at the same time making the body a site through which ambivalence about women’s mobility is expressed. The article reveals Charlotte Bronte to be a writer actively engaged with discourses of mobility and modernity that have been overlooked in her work, and situates Bronte as a significant contributor to debates about women and the city. It advances literary histories of city walking by locating Villette as a key participant within the field, and contributes to Bronte studies by revealing new perspectives on the significance of women’s travel in her works.

Unbuilding the City: Writing Demolition

Unbuilding the City: Writing Demolition

The political origins of inequality: why a more equal world is better for us all

Inequality is the defining issue of our time. But it is not just a problem for the rich world. It is the global 1% that now owns fully half the world's wealth-the true measure of our age of inequality. In this historical tour de force, Simon Reid-Henry rewrites the usual story of globalization and development as a story of the management of inequality. Reaching back to the eighteenth century and around the globe, The Political Origins of Inequality foregrounds the political turning points and decisions behind the making of today's uneven societies. As it weaves together insights from the Victorian city to the Cold War, from US economic policy to Europe's present migration crisis, a true picture emerges of the structure of inequality itself. The problem of inequality, Reid-Henry argues, is a problem that manifests between places as well as over time. This is one reason why it cannot be resolved by the usual arguments of left versus right, bound as they are to the national scale alone. Most of all, however, it is why the level of inequality that confronts us today is indicative of a more general crisis in political thought. Modern political discourse has no place for public reason or the common good. Equality is yesterday's dream. Yet the fact that we now accept such a world-a world that values security over freedom, special treatment over universal opportunity, and efficiency over fairness-is ultimately because we have stopped even trying in recent decades to build the political architecture the world actually requires.Our politics has fallen out of step with the world, then, and at the every moment it is needed more than ever. Yet it is within our power to address this. Doing so involves identifying and then meeting our political responsibilities to others, not just offering them the selective charity of the rich. It means looking beyond issues of economics and outside our national borders. But above all it demands of us that we reinvent the language of equality for a modern, global world: and then institute this. The world is not falling apart. Different worlds, we all can see, are colliding together. It is our capacity to act in concert that is falling apart. It is this that needs restoring most of all.

London cabs, Wilkie Collins and The Woman in White

For all its industrial and technological heat, Victorian Britain remained a largely horse-drawn society. Focusing on the use of horse-drawn vehicles in Wilkie Collins’ 1860 novel The Woman in White, this essay explores representations of city space, intra-urban mobility, connectivity and public transport in popular nineteenth-century fiction. Cabs, I argue, represent intriguing and paradoxical spaces, poised between public and private, continually on the move in the static city. I ask how literary figurations of horse cabs focus and negotiate anxieties associated with travel within Victorian cities. I also suggest that cabs – vehicles for the fast and disreputable – articulate new ways of occupying space.

Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music (BIFEM) 2015

Each September, contemporary music enthusiasts, composers, scholars and performers from around Australia migrate toward the Victorian regional city of Bendigo for BIFEM, a remarkable music festival now in its third year. The festival has established itself as an annual event of unparalleled significance in Australia – not only as a forum for the presentation of exciting and little-heard music, but as a gathering of like-minded peers. A high proportion of the audience consists of musicians and composers, so informal conversations between concerts are almost as stimulating as the programmed forums and workshops that take place during the festival. In 2015, over the weekend 4–6 September, almost every work in the programme was an Australian premiere, which gives some further evidence of the importance of the festival to the nation's cultural ecology.

Please Remember, You Are Dealing with a Spatial Form

Please Remember, You Are Dealing with a Spatial Form

Review: Paradise Planned: The Garden Suburb and the Modern City, by Robert A. M. Stern, David Fishman, and Jacob Tilove

Robert A. M. Stern, David Fishman, and Jacob Tilove Paradise Planned: The Garden Suburb and the Modern City New York: Monacelli Press, 2013, 1,072 pp., 3,000 b/w illus. $95, ISBN 9781580933261 The garden city movement is almost synonymous with modern planning history, and it has attracted a sizable literature documenting and examining its many environmental, social, and design implications.1 The late Peter Hall cast the garden city as “the most important response to the Victorian city,” noting that it “reverberated around much of the world” and in so doing acquired guises “that made it sometimes well-nigh unrecognizable.”2 The most prolific manifestation—the antithesis of Ebenezer Howard’s initial aspirations toward a new urban system of community-controlled decentralized self-contained towns—was the garden suburb. Paradise Planned aims to be the definitive “comprehensive monographic treatment of the garden suburb” in all its variegated forms in order to demonstrate its “enduring value and appeal as an attainable, inhabitable arcadia for everyman” (12). The book’s subplot is concerned with helping to “reconceptualize the planning and design” of suburban development (15). The authors have not skimped in doing justice to these aspirations. This is a behemoth of a book. It is not a volume for the fainthearted at around one thousand pages with more than 350,000 words of text; upward of three thousand images (with three hundred photographers acknowledged); a listing of some one thousand separate “sources” comprising journals, books, individuals, libraries, archives, and websites; eighty-seven pages of dense, small-font endnotes; and a fourteen-page index. In hardcover royal quarto format it weighs in at around 12 pounds (5 kilograms). But the most astounding metric of all is the official list price of just U.S.$95.00, making it a value-laden return on investment. Robert A. M. Stern has made a habit of historic blockbusters. This book joins the serried ranks of his multivolume paean to New York ( New York 1880 , 1900 , 1930 , 1960 , and 2000 ) and more than fills the interregnum until the inevitable sixth …

Streetlife in Late Victorian London: The Constable and the Crowd

The study of Victorian cities helped foster the emergence of social history after 1945. From Asa Briggs to Tristram Hunt, historians demonstrated how cities became sources of antagonism but also machines in which commerce could thrive, the disorderly forces of dirt and disease could be overcome, and modern understandings of class society could emerge.1 Urban history also provided ample opportunity for dialogue with sociologists and others about the new ways of living that cities created and their networks of power and sociability. There was no shortage of sources but it was common to ransack investigators like Henry Mayhew and novelists who could recreate the maelstrom of nineteenth-century city life. There was, however, another figure who observed the Victorian city and indeed was paid to do it: the humble police constable. His notebooks and other police records make possible a different kind of urban history from below. This is the starting point for Peter K. Andersson's important book about street life in the later nineteenth century. Whilst his book can profitably be read by historians of crime, Andersson rightly spots that police records give us an effective point of entry into exploring quotidian behaviour. The book becomes a study of the ‘etiquette of street life’ (p. 204). Andersson deliberately focuses on the mundane and the ordinary, the patterns of behaviour evident as Victorians went about their daily business. The obvious objection to this source material would be that police records deal mainly with flashpoints and moments of conflict, which can skew the way we think about ordinary life. Andersson, however, argues convincingly that such records offer clues about social codes and notions of what was acceptable in human interactions. In the Victorian city, people could not always walk where they liked or behave as they pleased. They had to negotiate a series of social expectations.

Reading Constellations: Urban Modernity in Victorian Fiction by Patricia McKee (review)

Reviewed by: Reading Constellations: Urban Modernity in Victorian Fiction by Patricia McKee Sean Grass Patricia McKee. Reading Constellations: Urban Modernity in Victorian Fiction. Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 2014. Pp. ix + 184. $65.00. A book that takes on capitalism, history, modernity, Walter Benjamin and three major nineteenth-century novelists ought to make for a provocative study. Patricia McKee’s Reading Constellations mostly meets this expectation, tracing its argument about the spatial and temporal disjunctions of the Victorian city from Charles Dickens’s London to Thomas Hardy’s Christminster and back to London again in Henry James’s “In the Cage.” As McKee writes in her first chapter, “My study of Dickens, Hardy, and James uses the work of Benjamin to clarify their undermining of presumptions of improvement and to elaborate the disputed and distracted urban modernities of their fictions: the progress characters dream of and the history that gets in its way” (2). She begins by discussing Benjamin’s concept of the “constellation” – developed in his posthumously published The Arcades Project – which, she argues, “refigure[s] history” by rejecting [End Page 159] the possibility of linear development and instead seeing ideas and events as “heterogeneous, discontinuous, in tension” (2). Key to her argument is her assertion that any moment is always both past and present, every spatial and temporal location interpenetrated by other spaces and other times. Thus, she explains, Dickens’s Charing Cross is never merely the Charing Cross of the present moment; rather, it is interlaced with other significations and tensions, whether from his miserable childhood memories of London or his awareness of a historical sweep that includes the Wyatt Rebellion at Charing Cross in 1554 and the execution of the regicides there a century later. For McKee – and, she argues, for Dickens, Hardy, and James – the Victorian city appears through the effects of constellations and their close corollary “colportage,” which together render “the single moment and the contained space dialectical,” defeating and defying the possibility of progress or succession (23). Certainly such effects are present in Dickens from the time of The Pickwick Papers’ interpolated tales, replete as they are with reminders of past violence, misery and madness that disrupt the lighthearted present-tense in which the Pickwickians move. But McKee is interested here in Dickens’s last two completed novels, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend, with their aggressive but nuanced critiques of capitalism and the modernizing city. The two chapters that discuss these novels will be of greatest interest to Dickens scholars. Chapter 2, “Great Expectations: The Narrative Winks,” argues that the Victorian city is characterized by what McKee calls an “urban unconscious,” a “phantasmagoria” in which “simulations of capitalism are haunted by what has been left behind” (37). One effect of this condition is the novel’s repeated interruption of Pip’s forward progress, by which McKee means both his narrative and his attempts to become a gentleman. Drawing from scenes early in the novel – the Christmas dinner, for instance, and Mr. Jaggers’s dismantling of Mr. Wopsle’s “performance” of the trial for murder described in the newspaper – McKee shows how interruptions play significant roles in developing alternative narratives that allow competing visions of Pip, or crime, or guilt to enter the novel. More to the point, she argues, the ways in which such interruptions create dialectical images underscore the novel’s investment in fragmented selves and elide the “missing scenes of violence” that haunt the novel’s periphery (60). She writes, “what really happened with Orlick at the forge, what happened when Pip, as a baby, was left with his sister, what happened on the prison ship, what happened to Miss Havisham at Compeyson’s hands?” (60). In her view, the narrative “winks” at this heap of wrongdoing, short-circuiting and misdirecting attempts at retribution even as it invokes explicitly the revenge plots of Hamlet and Frankenstein. The result is a novel that appears as constellation, as colportage, denied the linearity and completion that Pip pretends to achieve. [End Page 160] Chapter 3, “London Looking Backward: Our Mutual Friend,” approaches the terrain of the Victorian city from another angle, focusing primarily on “the passages in Dickens’s London through which its...