Abstract
Some French thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, including Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère, are dubbed ‘moralists’ because they considered, in a more or less essayistic form, actual human behaviour, that is to say, the ‘disguises’ and ‘vanities’ of their contemporaries, rather than measuring people’s actions against absolute moral standards, as moral philosophers would. Reflecting on the mores of the age was, however, not a prerogative of these essayists. My discussion of the ‘moralist tradition’ therefore refers to the reflection on mores and their depiction in a more cornprehensive sense and attempts to indicate the scale on which sketches adapted this heritage to new needs.
The general Purpose of this Paper, is to expose the false Arts of Life, to pull off the Disguises of Cunning, Vanity and Affectation, and to recommend a general Simplicity in our Dress, our Discourse, and our Behaviour.
Richard Steele, The Tatler1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See p. 82. The year in which the Microcosm started to appear, 1808, also saw the publication of ‘a three-volume pastiche on contemporary manners’ called Asmodeus or The Devil in London. A Sketch by Charles Sedley. See Michael Sadleir, Bulwer and His Wife. A Panorama 1803–1836 (London: Constable, 1933), p. 299, note 1. Sadleir here curiously refers to the form in which the ‘satirical commentary’ is presented as ‘dialogues between Asmodeus and the Devil’.
See Ursula E. Koch, Der Teufel in Berlin (Cologne: Informationspresse — Leske, 1991), p. 31 and note 22: ‘Der Autor diente dem in Berlin zu Besuch weilenden “Teufel” als fiktiver Fremdenführer und beschrieb in Form satirischer Dialoge, unter stetigen Hinweisen auf Wien, London und Paris “alle Gegenstände und Erscheinungen des bürgerlichen Lebens, in bunter Reihe wie ein Maskenzug im Karneval’”. Koch here quotes a ‘programmatic statement’ relating to Der hinkende Teufel.
See Karlheinz Stierle, Der Mythos von Paris (Munich, Vienna: Hanser, 1993), pp. 143–4.
See Walter Benjamin, ‘Das Passagen-Werk’, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1991), V, 1–2 (V,l, 87 and 103).
‘Asmodée est partout; Asmodée n’est plus quelqu’un, Asmodée c’est tout le monde.’ Jules Janin, ‘Asmodée’, in Paris, ou Le Livre des Cent-et-un, 15 vols (Paris: Ladvocat, 1831–4), 1, 1–15 (p. 14).
‘Da finden wir denn ohne Schwierigkeit — denn der Leser und ich sind ein Paar Lavaterianer — die Physiognomien der einzelnen Stände und Klassen gleich auf den ersten Blick aus der Gesamtmasse heraus.’ C.F. Langer, ‘Wiener Carnevals-Freuden. I. Oeffentliche Bälle und Redouten’, in Wien und die Wiener, in Bildern aus dem Leben (Pesth: Heckenast, 1844), pp. 383–99 (p. 389).
See ibid., pp. ix-x and Roland Chollet, Balzac journaliste. Le tournant de 1830 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1983), pp. 514–15.
See Sadleir (note 3), p. 299, n. 1; also Graham Everitt, English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century, 2nd edn (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1893), p. 357;
Celina Fox, Graphic Satire in England during the 1830s and 1840s (New York: Garland, 1988), p. 82.
On Die Singekränzchen’ as an Asmodean sketch see my own essay, ‘Physiologien aus der unsichtbaren Hauptstadt’, in Karl Gutzkow. Liberalismus — Europäertum — Modernität, ed. by Roger Jones and M. Lauster (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2000), pp. 217–54 (pp. 240–5).
See Robert L. Patten, George Cruikshank’s Life, Times, and Art, 2 vols (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), I, 353–4.
‘A vrai dire, toute cette ardeur généalogique n’est là que pour redorer le blason d’une littérature issue du journal […]’. Ségolène Le Men, ‘Peints par euxmêmes…’, in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes. Panorama du XIX’ siècle (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1993), pp. 4–46 (p. 32).
This is an ironic reversal of La Bruyère’s apodictic statement at the beginning of the first chapter of Les Caractères that everything has been said about the seven thousand years and more since human beings began to think; see [Jean de] La Bruyère, Les Caractères de Théophraste traduits du grec avec Les Caractères ou les Mceurs de ce siècle, ed. by R. Garapon (Paris: Gamier, 1990), p. 67.
See headings of chapters 1 and 4 in: Louis Sébastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris. Nouvelle édition, 12 vols (Amsterdam, 1782–8; repr. Genève: Slatkine, 1979), I, 1 and 17.
See Christoph Strosetzki, Balzacs Rhetorik und die Literatur der Physiologien (Mainz: Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur; Stuttgart: Steiner, 1985).
The fact that looking out for the ‘Postman’ may serve as a pretence for eavesdropping on conversations in the coffee-house is due to the reliance of the developing postal service on places such as Will’s, from which patrons would collect their mail. See John and Linda Pelzer, ‘Coffee Houses in Augustan London’, History Today, 32 (October 1982), 40–7 (p. 41); Jenny Uglow, Hogarth. A Life and a World (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), p. 22.
See Peter Ackroyd, London. A Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000), chapter ‘London as theatre’, pp. 147–98.
Sean Shesgreen, Images of the Outcast. The Urban Poor in the Cries of London (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 2.
The young artist chose to spell his name Chevallier with a single ‘1’, before eventually adopting ‘Gavarni’ as his pseudonym. See Edmond and Jules Goncourt, Gavarni. L’Homme et l’ceuvre (Paris: Fasquelle, 1925), p. 41.
An Old Playgoer, ‘The Orange-Girl’, in Gavarni in London, ed. by Albert Smith (London: Bogue, 1849), pp. 46–7. See also my discussion of this sketch in Chapter 6, p. 243.
See Raymond Manevy, La Presse française de Renaudot à Rochefort (Paris: Foret, 1958), p. 157.
‘Avant la loi contre les crieurs publics on remarquait, parmi ceux qui servaient d’organes à la démocratie, les hommes au large chapeau tricolore, à la blouse bleue lisérée d’écarlate, annonçant d’une voix grave et accentuée: / Le Populaire, journal rédigé dans l’intérêt du peuple français par M. Cabet, député, aujourd’hui exilé, par suite d’une rigoureuse condamnation. / Près des crieurs du Populaire circulaient incessamment ceux du journal le Bon Sens, reconnaissables à leurs blouses rouges, qui leur valurent de la part d’un député-magistrat très enclin à l’hyperbole, l’étrange épithète d’émissaires de Satan.’ Henry Martin, ‘Les Cris de Paris’, in Nouveau Tableau de Paris au XIX e siècle, 7 vols (Paris: Madame Charles-Béchet, 1834–5), III (1834), 157–72 (pp. 168–9).
William Makepeace Thackeray, ‘Before the Curtain’. Prologue of Vanity Fair. A Novel Without a Hero, in The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray […], 26 vols (London: Smith, Elder, 1910–11), I (1910), lii–lv (pp. lii-liv).
See Judith Wechsler, A Human Comedy. Physiognomy and Caricature in Nineteenth-Century Paris (London: Thames & Hudson, 1982).
See Ursula Koch and Pierre-Paul Sagave, Le Charivari. Die Geschichte einer Pariser Tageszeitung im Kampf um die Republik (1832–1882) (Cologne: Informationspresse — Leske, 1984), pp. 16–17.
See pp. 198–200 of this study. Brian Maidment’s work on representations of the dustman in nineteenth-century graphic art reveals a related role of this figure, one at the bottom of the hierarchy of trades whose association with household rubbish and ashes gives him the status of an outsider who acts at once as an observer and as a ‘memento mori’ character. See Brian Maidment, Dusty Bob. A Cultural History of Dustmen 1790–1870 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).
‘[N]ous nous montrerons […] non pas seulement peints en buste, mais des pieds à la tête et aussi ridicules que nous pourrons nous faire. Dans cette lanterne magique, où nous nous passons en revue les uns et les autres, rien ne sera oublié, pas même d’allumer la lanterne […]’. Janin, ‘Introduction’ (note 27), p. xvi. The allusion is to a French proverb (‘He had forgotten nothing — except to light the lamp’) which derived from popular depictions of the magic lantern, showing an ape as its operator. See David Robinson, The Lantern Image. Iconography of the Magic Lantern 1420–1880 (London, Nutley: The Magic Lantern Society, 1993), p. 10.
See Ulrike Hick, Geschichte der optischen Medien (Munich: Fink, 1999), p. 171.
Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception. Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. 274.
Copyright information
© 2007 Martina Lauster
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lauster, M. (2007). The Devil in Europe: Sketches and the Moralist Tradition. In: Sketches of the Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230210974_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230210974_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-35571-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-21097-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)