Abstract
The deaths of Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson provided Victorian poetry with a symbolic sense of closure. Browning and Tennyson, as Isobel Armstrong has stated, ‘continued to write on questions central to the later part of the century until the end of their writing lives’ but by the time of their deaths, new poetries and poetic formations were already in place.3 Browning died on 12 December 1889. That same year, the avant-garde publisher T. Fisher Unwin published one of the most inventive and vanguard collections of lyrical poetry of the late nineteenth century, Amy Levy’s A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse.4 The collection included poems such as ‘London Poets’ and ‘Ballade of an Omnibus’, an inspiring celebration of modern urban mass transport.5 Indeed what was radically new about this collection was Levy’s recognition of the poetics of London and her innovative articulation of women’s experiences of urban life.
The first thing I saw on entering the Underground at 3 o’clock was Death of Robert Browning, and I wept.
Violet Hunt1
Tennyson is dead. We saw it in the Underground this morning.
Michael Field2
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Notes
Quoted in Robert Secor, ‘Robert Browning and the Hunts of South Kensington’, Browning Institute Studies. An Annual of Victorian Literary and Cultural History, ed. by William S. Peterson, Vol. 7 (1979), 130.
Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993), 479.
Amy Levy, A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1889).
Michael Field, Works and Days, British Library, Add. MS. 46780 f.89. Michael Field, Sight and Song (London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane at the Sign of the Bodley Head, 1892).
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’ in Notes to Literature, Volume One, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 46.
Margot Finn, ‘Sex and the City: Metropolitan Modernities in English History’, Victorian Studies 44:1 (2001): 25.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 117.
Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean. His Sensations and Ideas. Vol. II (London: Macmillan, 1885), 19.
Arthur Symons, ‘Mr. Henley’s Poetry’, The Fortnightly Review 52 (1892): 184. The essay was later reprinted as ‘Modernity in Verse’ in his Studies in Two Literatures (London: Leonard Smithers, 1897), 186–203.
Richard Le Gallienne, The Romantic ‘90s. Introduction by H. Montgomery Hyde (London: Putman, 1951), 122.
William Ernest Henley, London Voluntaries. The Song of the Sword, and Other Verses (London: David Nutt, 1893), Second edn revised; and his London Types. Quatorzains by W. E. Henley, Illustrations by W. Nicholson (London: Heinemann, 1898);
Ernest Rhys, A London Rose and Other Rhymes (London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane, 1894);
Arthur Symons, London Nights (London: Leonard Smithers, 1895);
Laurence Binyon, First Book of London Visions (London: Elkin Mathews’s hilling Garland, 1896) and his Second Book of London Visions (London: Elkin Mathews’s hilling Garland, 1899); and Alice Meynell, London Impressions. Etchings and Pictures in Photogravure by William Hyde and essays by Alice Meynell (London: Constable, 1898).
Alice Meynell, ‘November Blue’ in Alice Meynell, Later Poems (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1902), 26–7;
Lord Alfred Douglas, ‘Impression de Nuit: London’ in The City of the Soul (London: Grant Richards, 1899), 65;
A. Mary F. Robinson, ‘The Ideal’ in An Italian Garden. A Book of Songs (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1886), 11–12;
Rosamund Marriott Watson, ‘London in October’ and ‘A Song of London’ in Vespertilia and Other Verses (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1895), 44–6 and 41–2;
Amy Levy, ‘London in July’, ‘The Village Garden’ and ‘Ballade of an Omnibus’ in A London Plane-Tree, 18, 30–1, and 21–2;
John Davidson, Fleet Street Eclogues (London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane, 1893) and A Second Series of Fleet Street Eclogues (London: John Lane, 1896);
Oscar Wilde, ‘Symphony in Yellow’ in Oscar Wilde Complete Poetry, ed. Isobel Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 141–2; and
Arthur Symons, ‘In an Omnibus’ in Silhouettes (London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane, 1892), 26–7. A second version of this poem appeared in Silhouettes. Second Edition. Revised and Enlarged (London: Leonard Smithers, 1896), 21. In this version the poem is shorter and more critical in its treatment of women passengers.
Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 10.
R. K. R. Thornton (ed.), Poetry of the ‘Nineties (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970) and
G. Robert Stange, ‘The Frightened Poets’ in The Victorian City: Images and Realities, eds H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, Vol. 2 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 475–94.
William B. Thesing, The London Muse: Victorian Poetic Responses to the City (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982), 148.
W. E. Henley (ed.), A London Garland. Selected from Five Centuries of English Verse by W.E. Henley with Pictures by Members of the Society of Illustrators (London: Macmillan, 1895) and
Wilfred Whitten (ed.), London in Song (London: Grant Richards, 1898).
Frederick Locker-Lampson, ‘Piccadilly’ in London Lyrics (London: Chapman and Hall, 1857), 17–20.
Graham R. Tomson, ‘In the Rain’ in A Summer Night and Other Poems. With a Frontispiece by A. Tomson (London: Methuen, 1891), 10–12.
See Anna Adams (ed.), Thames: An Anthology of River Poems. Compiled by Anna Adams with a Preface by Ian Sinclair and Etchings by James McNeill Whistler (London: Enitharmon Press, 1999) and her London in Poetry and Prose. Drawings by Neil Pittaway (London: Enitharmon Press, 2003). It must be noted, however, that women poets’ responses to the urban experience during the twentieth century are well represented in the 2003 collection.
Talia Schaffer and Kathy Alexis Psomiades (eds), Women and British Aestheticism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 13.
Talia Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 6.
Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (London: Grant Richards, 1913), 127, 128.
See Bruce Gardiner, The Rhymers’ Club: A Social and Intellectual History (New York: Garland, 1988) and
Norman Alford, The Rhymers’ Club: Poets of the Tragic Generation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994).
For a study of literary salons see my ‘New Woman Poets and the Culture of the salon at the fin de siècle’, Women: A Cultural Review 10:1 (1999): 22–34. For a description of Paul Verlaine’s lecture at Barnard’s Inn see his ‘My Visit to London’, Savoy, ed. by Arthur Symons (2 April 1896): 119–35 and
Henri Locard, ‘Michael Field et la “lecture de Verlaine” à Barnard’s Inn’, Confluents 1 (1975): 91–101; for Walter Pater’s lecture on Mérimée see
Michael Field, Works and Days: From the Journal of Michael Field, ed. by T. & D. C. Sturge Moore (London: John Murray, 1933), 119–21. For (literary) clubs see Amy Levy ‘Women and Club Life’, The Woman’s World (1888): 364–7; and
Sheila E. Braine, ‘London’s Clubs for Women’ in George R. Sims (ed.), Living London, Vol. I. (London: Cassell, 1902), 114–18. For discussions about women writers and the British Museum Reading Room see Christine Pullen, ‘“Under the Great Dome”: Amy Levy, the New Journalism and the Poetic of “New Grub Street” ‘, paper delivered at the Conference Women’s Poetry and the Fin de Siècle. Institute of English Studies (14 June 2002) and Susan Bernstein, ‘Salon, Club, and Library Spaces as Heterotopias of Levy’s London’ paper delivered at INCS, Nineteenth-Century Worlds: Local/Global (10–12 July 2003).
Schaffer, Forgotten, 159–96. See also her ‘A Tethered Angel: The Martyrology of Alice Meynell’, Victorian Poetry, Special Issue Women Writers 1890–1918, 38:1 (Spring 2000): 49–61; and ‘Writing a Public Self: Alice Meynell’s “Unstable Equilibrium” ’ in Ann Ardis and Leslie W. Lewis (eds), Women’s Experience of Modernity, 1875–1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 13–30.
See, for example, Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (eds), Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre 1830–1900 (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1999).
Linda Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000).
Joseph Bristow, ‘“All out of tune in this world’s instrument”: The “minor” poetry of Amy Levy’, Journal of Victorian Culture 4:1 (1999): 76–103. Linda K. Hughes’ work on Graham R. Tomson (Rosamund Marriott Watson) includes ‘My Sister, My Self: Networking and Self-Promotion among Fin-de-Siècle Women Poets’, Paper delivered at the conference Rethinking Women’s Poetry 1730–1930 (Birkbeck College, University of London, 1995); ‘A Female Aesthete at the Helm: Sylvia’s Journal and “Graham R. Tomson”, 1893–1894’, Victorian Periodicals Review 29:2 (1996): 173–92; ‘A Fin-de-Siècle Beauty and the Beast: Configuring the Body in Works by “Graham R. Tomson” (Rosamund Marriott Watson)’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 14:1 (1995): 95–121; and ‘“Fair Hymen holdeth hid a world of woes”: Myth and Marriage in Poems by “Graham R. Tomson” (Rosamund Marriott Watson)’, Victorian Poetry 32 (1994): 97–120.
Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992); see also her (ed.), Victorian Women Poets: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
Yopie Prins, Victorian Sappho (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); see also her ‘A Metaphorical Field: Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper’, Victorian Poetry 33:1 (1995): 129–48; and ‘Sappho Doubled: Michael Field’, The Yale Journal of Criticism 8 (1995): 165–86.
See Marion Thain, Michael Field and Poetic Identity: With a Biography (London: The Eighteen Nineties Society, 2000). A biography of Mathilde Blind by James Diedrick is currently in preparation.
See also the soon to be published biography of Graham R. Tomson: Linda K. Hughes, Graham R. Rosamund Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2005).
See Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds (eds), Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995);
Isobel Armstrong and Joseph Bristow, with Cath Sharrock (eds), Nineteenth-Century Women Poets (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996);
Linda K. Hughes (ed.), New Woman Poets: An Anthology (London: The Eighteen Nineties Society, 2001).
R. K. R. Thornton and Marion Thain (eds), Poetry of the 1890s. Second Edition (London: Harmondsworth, 1997).
Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1973; rpt. Verso, 1997).
H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (eds), The Victorian City: Images and Realities, 2 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973);
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973).
Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1982), 15.
See Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 1995), 8.
Wendy Parkins, ‘Moving Dangerously: Mobility and the Modern Woman’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 20:1 (2001): 77. I would like to thank the anonymous reader for bringing this essay to my attention.
Miles Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies, 1680–1780 (New York: The Guildford Press, 1998), 5.
See also Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993) and
Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 6.
Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 16.
See Nead, Victorian Babylon, 70; Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 75–6;
Elizabeth Wilson, ‘The Invisible Flâneur’, New Left Review 191 (1992): 90–110.
Griselda Pollock, ‘Modernity and the spaces of femininity’ in Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988), 67.
See for example Janet Wolff, ‘The Culture of the Separate Spheres: The Role of Culture in Nineteenth-Century Public and Private Life’ in The Culture of Capital: Art, Power and the Nineteenth-Century Middle Class, eds Janet Wolff and John Seed (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 117–34. For an examination of the subject from an architectural point of view, see
Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
See among others Janet Wolff, ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity’, Theory, Culture and Society, 2:3 (1985), 37–46; and her ‘The Artist and The Flâneur: Rodin, Rilke and Gwen John in Paris’ in Tester, The Flâneur, 111–37;
Jenny Ryan, ‘Women, Modernity and the City’, Theory, Culture and Society, 11:4 (1994) 35–63;
Lynne Walker, ‘Vistas of pleasure: Women consumers of urban space in the West End of London, 1850–1900’ in Women in the Victorian Art World, ed. Clarissa Campbell Orr (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 70–85;
Deborah L. Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (London: Virago, 1991), 46.
Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (London: Virago, 1992).
Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 7.
A classic study of the subject is Alison Adburgham’s Shops and Shopping 1800–1914: Where, and in What Manner the Well-dressed Englishwoman Bought Her Clothes (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964).
For more recent discussions, see Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola (London: Methuen, 1985);
Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (London: Virago, 1985);
Lori Anne Loeb, Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 69.
Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). 70. Ibid., 3. 71. Rappaport does recognise, however, the panoramic possibilities that public transport could offer to women. See Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, 122–6. 72. Though historians have recognized the crucial role of public transport in the formation of the nineteenth-century metropolis, there are no equivalent studies in cultural criticism to date, especially in terms of gender. For an examination of the influence of the underground in late-Victorian theatre see
David L. Pike, ‘Underground Theater: Subterranean Spaces on the London Stage’, Nineteenth Century Studies 13 (1999): 102–38.
For an excellent study of the underground and inter-war England see Michael T. Saler, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
For a general introduction to travel and modernity see Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983).
For twentieth-century discussions of women, modernity and travel, see Gillian Beer, ‘The Island and the Aeroplane: The Case of Virginia Woolf’ in her Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), 149–78;
Rachel Bowlby, ‘“We’re Getting There”: Woolf, Trains and the Destinations of Feminist Criticism’ in her Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 3–15; and Parkins, ‘Moving Dangerously’, 77–92. There are, however, some excellent studies of railways in the nineteenth century.
A classic work is Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1986 new edn).
Two more recent studies of railways in nineteenth-and twentieth-century fiction and cinema that I have found especially useful have been Lynne Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Exeter: The University of Exeter Press, 1997) and
Ian Carter, Railways and Culture in Britain: The Epitome of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). 73.
Christoph Asendorf, Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and Their Perception in Modernity, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 57. 74. Nead, Victorian Babylon, 13. George Augustus Sala suggested that all London’s improvements in circulation should be put in place to allow London to become a modern capital. See his ‘Locomotion in London’, The Gentleman’s Magazine 236 (1874): 453–65. 75. Michael Field, Works and Days, British Library, Add. MS. 46781f.22v. Michael Field’s remarks were provoked by the theatre performance of Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder in London in (February 1893). 76. Ibid., Add. MS. 46788 ff.96v–97.
Michael Field, Long Ago (London: George Bell & Sons, 1889). The ‘lovely guide’ was Arthur Symons.
Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 7.
A classic study of the subject is Alison Adburgham’s Shops and Shopping 1800–1914: Where, and in What Manner the Well-dressed Englishwoman Bought Her Clothes (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964).
For more recent discussions, see Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola (London: Methuen, 1985);
Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (London: Virago, 1985);
Lori Anne Loeb, Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).
Though historians have recognized the crucial role of public transport in the formation of the nineteenth-century metropolis, there are no equivalent studies in cultural criticism to date, especially in terms of gender. For an examination of the influence of the underground in late-Victorian theatre see David L. Pike, ‘Underground Theater: Subterranean Spaces on the London Stage’, Nineteenth Century Studies 13 (1999): 102–38.
For an excellent study of the underground and inter-war England see Michael T. Saler, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
For a general introduction to travel and modernity see Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983).
For twentieth-century discussions of women, modernity and travel, see Gillian Beer, ‘The Island and the Aeroplane: The Case of Virginia Woolf’ in her Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), 149–78;
Rachel Bowlby, ‘“We’re Getting There”: Woolf, Trains and the Destinations of Feminist Criticism’ in her Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 3–15; and Parkins, ‘Moving Dangerously’, 77–92. There are, however, some excellent studies of railways in the nineteenth century.
A classic work is Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1986 new edn).
Two more recent studies of railways in nineteenth-and twentieth-century fiction and cinema that I have found especially useful have been Lynne Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Exeter: The University of Exeter Press, 1997) and
Ian Carter, Railways and Culture in Britain: The Epitome of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001).
Christoph Asendorf, Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and Their Perception in Modernity, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 57.
Ibid., Add. MS. 46788 ff.96v–97. Michael Field, Long Ago (London: George Bell & Sons, 1889). The ‘lovely guide’ was Arthur Symons.
T.C. Barker and Michael Robbins, A History of London Transport: Passenger Travel and the Development of the Metropolis. Volume 1: The Nineteenth Century (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1963), 1. My historical analysis of London transport in the nineteenth century is deeply indebted to Barker and Robbins’s magnificent and well-researched volume. This is by far the most comprehensive study of London’s transport system and more recent analyses of the matter are all based on this work.
General histories of London’s transport include Alan A. Jackson, Semi-Detached London: Suburban Development, Life and Transport, 1900–1939 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1973);
Charles F. Klapper, Roads and Rails of London, 1900–1933 (London: Ian Allan, 1976); and
Gavin Weightman and Steve Humphries, The Making of Modern London, 1815–1914 (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1983).
For more recent examinations see Theo Barker, Moving Millions: A Pictorial History of London Transport (London: London Transport Museum, 1990);
Sheila To-Day lor (ed.), The Moving Metropolis: A History of London’s Transport since 1800, Introductions by Oliver Green (London: Laurence King Publishing in association with London’s Transport Museum, 2001);
and Stephen Halliday, Underground to Everywhere: London’s Underground Railway in the Life of the Capital (Stroud: Sutton Publishing and London’s Transport Museum, 2001).
John R. Day, The Story of the London Bus: London and Its Buses from the Horse Bus to the Present Day (London: London Transport, 1973), 5.
Another good study of the London omnibus is London General, The Story of the London Bus 1856–1956 (London: London Transport, 1956).
Although later the service started to operate at 8 a.m., it made no difference because the working classes were long into work by that time. Roy Porter, London: A Social History (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994), 225.
L. C. B. Seaman, Life in Victorian London (London: B. T. Batsford Ltd, 1973), 58.
Yvonne Ffrench, The Great Exhibition: 1851 (London: The Harvill Press, 1950), 185. Barker and Robbins, History of London Transport, I: 61.
John R. Kellett, Railways and Victorian Cities (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 316–17.
See also John Hollingshead, Underground London (London: Groombridge and Sons, 1862), 203–12;
and Henry Mayhew, The Shops and Companies of London and the Trades and Manufactories of Great Britain, Vol. I (London: Strand, 1865), especially his section on ‘The Metropolitan Railway’, 142–53.
Christopher Hibbert, London: The Biography of a City (1969; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 184;
Donald J. Olsen, The Growth of Victorian London (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 299–308.
See for example Edwin Chadwick, Report to Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department, from the Poor Law Commissioner, On an Inquiry into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, House of Lords Sessional Papers, Session 1842, vols 26–8.
Both the drainage system and the underground railway had been built during the same period. The drainage system was constructed between 1859 and 1865, and the underground between 1860 and 1863. See Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman, London under London: A Subterranean Guide (London: John Murray, 1984).
Charles Klapper, The Golden Age of Tramways (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), 7–15.
Arthur Symons, London: A Book of Aspects (London: Privately Printed for Edmund D. Brooks, 1909). Rpt. in his Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands, Collins’ Kings’ Way Classics (London: W. Collins Sons & Co., 1918), 145. Subsequent citations refer to the Collins’ Kings’ Way Classics 1918 edition.
Charles Baudelaire, ‘Loss of a Halo’ in Paris Spleen 1869, trans. Louise Varèse (London: Peter Owen, 1951), 94.
Another interesting example is H. G. Wells’ dystopia The Time Machine (London: William Heinemann, 1895), 82. Here Wells presents the underworld people (or Morlocks) directly descending from passengers of the Metropolitan Railway in London.
See George Egerton, ‘A Lost Masterpiece: A City Mood, Aug. ‘93’, The Yellow Book vol. I (April 1894): 189–96;
Evelyn Sharp, ‘In Dull Brown’, The Yellow Book vol. VIII (January 1896): 181–200. I would like to thank the anonymous reader for drawing my attention to these two stories.
See James Harding, Artistes Pompiers: French Academic Art in the Nineteenth Century (London: Academic Editions, 1979).
For a historical description of the term, see Alain Rey (ed.), Le Robert. Dictionnaire Historique de la Langue Française (Paris: Le Robert, 1993), 1575.
Chris Jenks, ‘Watching your Step: The History and Practice of the Flâneur’ in Visual Culture, ed. Chris Jenks (London: Routledge, 1995), 146.
Henry Charles Moore, Omnibuses and Cabs: Their Origin and History (London: Chapman & Hall, 1902), 36–45.
Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 338.
J. Milner Fothergill, The Town Dweller: His Needs and his Wants (London: H.K. Lewis, 1889), 43.
Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993),
See also William Leiss, ‘Technology and Degeneration: The Sublime Machine’ in Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress, eds J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 145–64; and
Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
James Cantlie, Degeneration amongst Londoners (London: Field & Tuer, 1885), 24.
‘[T]he little old streets, so narrow and exclusive […] we lose our way in them, do we? –we whose time is money. Our omnibuses can’t trundle through them, can’t they? Very well, then. Down with them! We have no use for them’. Max Beerbohm, ‘The Naming of Streets’, The Pall Mall Magazine 26 (1902): 139.
Rosalind H. Williams, Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 23.
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 1995), 150.
Michel Serres, Atlas (Paris: Éditions Julliard, 1994) and his Les Cinq Sens. Philosophie des Corps Mêlés I (Paris: Grasset, 1985).
Michel Serres, Hermès IV: La Distribution (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1977), 200.
See Alan A. Jackson, London’s Local Railways (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1978) especially his chapter ‘Lines for Leisure’, 95–155.
Henry Charles Moore, ‘Tram, ‘Bus, and Cab London’ in Living London, ed. George R. Sims, vol. II (London: Cassell and Co., 1902), 97.
See Jonathan Riddell, Pleasure Trips by Underground (Harrow Weald: London Transport Museum and Capital Transport Publishing, 1998), 6–15.
John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, eds E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, vol. XXXVI (London: George Allen, 1903–12), 62.
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 14.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 132.
For Nietzsche, in ways which remind us of Ruskin, vision in modernity is problematic because transport and speed were creating what he considered a ‘partial’ and hence ‘inaccurate’ vision. Nietzsche was very distrustful of the sense of sight, and was terribly preoccupied with what he called ‘the immaculate perception’. For a study of Nietszche as an anti-ocularcentric philosopher see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 188–92.
Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 12;
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973), 252.
George Augustus Sala, Twice Round the Clock; or the Hours of the Day and Night in London (London: Houlston & Wright, 1859), 220.
Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, trans. D. Webb (Oxford: Polity, 1992).
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Vadillo, A.P. (2005). Introduction: Passengers of Modernity. In: Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287969_1
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