THE DEMOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION
AND THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY CITY
In this provocative book, Nicholas Daly tracks the cultural effects of
the population explosion of the nineteenth century, the ‘demographic
transition’ to the modern world. As the crowded cities of Paris,
London, and New York went through similar transformations, a set
of shared narratives and images of urban life circulated among them,
including fantasies of urban catastrophe, crime dramas, and tales of
haunted public transport, refracting the hell that is other people. In
the visual arts, sentimental genre pictures appeared that condensed
the urban masses into a handful of vulnerable figures: newsboys and
flower girls. At the end of the century, proto-ecological stories
emerge about the sprawling city as itself a destroyer. This lively
study excavates some of the origins of our own international popular
culture, from noir visions of the city as a locus of crime to utopian
images of energy and community.
nicholas daly is Professor of Modern English and American
Literature at the School of English, Drama and Film, University
College Dublin. He is the author of Modernism, Romance, and the
Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, 1999), Literature, Technology, and Modernity
(Cambridge, 2004), and Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s
(Cambridge, 2009).
cambridge studies in nineteenth-century
literature and culture
General editor
Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge
Editorial board
Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck, University of London
Kate Flint, Rutgers University
Catherine Gallagher, University of California, Berkeley
D. A. Miller, University of California, Berkeley
J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine
Daniel Pick, Birkbeck, University of London
Mary Poovey, New York University
Sally Shuttleworth, University of Oxford
Herbert Tucker, University of Virginia
Nineteenth-century British literature and culture have been rich fields for
interdisciplinary studies. Since the turn of the twentieth century, scholars and
critics have tracked the intersections and tensions between Victorian literature and
the visual arts, politics, social organization, economic life, technical innovations,
scientific thought – in short, culture in its broadest sense. In recent years,
theoretical challenges and historiographical shifts have unsettled the assumptions
of previous scholarly synthesis and called into question the terms of older
debates. Whereas the tendency in much past literary critical interpretation was
to use the metaphor of culture as ‘background’, feminist, Foucauldian, and other
analyses have employed more dynamic models that raise questions of power and
of circulation. Such developments have reanimated the field. This series aims to
accommodate and promote the most interesting work being undertaken on
the frontiers of the field of nineteenth-century literary studies: work which
intersects fruitfully with other fields of study such as history, or literary theory,
or the history of science. Comparative as well as interdisciplinary approaches are
welcomed.
A complete list of titles published will be found at the end of the book.
THE DEMOGRAPHIC
IMAGINATION AND THE
NINETEENTH-CENTURY CITY
Paris, London, New York
NICHOLAS DALY
University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom
Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.
It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence.
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107095595
© Nicholas Daly 2015
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2015
Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Daly, Nicola, 1965–
The demographic imagination and the nineteenth-century city : Paris, London, New York /
Nicholas Daly.
pages cm. – (Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture ; 97)
isbn 978-1-107-09559-5 (hardback)
1. Demographic transition – France – Paris – History 2. Demographic
transition – England – London – History. 3. Demographic transition – New York
(State) – New York – History. 4. Overpopulation – History. I. Title.
hb887.d35 2015
304.6′209034–dc23
2014034787
isbn 978-1-107-09559-5 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication,
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
Contents
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
page vi
vii
Introduction
1
1 Under the volcano: mass destruction
17
2 The streets of wherever: French melodrama and
Anglophone localization
46
3 The ghost comes to town: the haunted city
77
4 The frenzy of the legible in the age of crowds
107
5 Fur and feathers: animals and the city in an
Anthropocene era
148
Epilogue
189
Notes
Bibliography
Index
194
245
268
v
Illustrations
1.1 Joseph Mallord William Turner, Vesuvius in Eruption (painted
between 1817 and 1820). Courtesy of the Yale Centre for British
Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
1.2 L’ultimo giorno di Pompei (1825), Giovanni Pacini. Set by
Alessandro Sanquirico for 1827 production, La Scala, Milan.
Image © Christie’s Images Limited 2004.
1.3 The Last Days of Pompeii at Manhattan Beach, Harper’s Weekly,
July 25, 1885.
4.1 J. Wagner, detail from cover to Bill Stickers Beware
(1864).
4.2 Alfred Concanen, detail from cover to The Age of Paper
(1862).
4.3 Alfred Concanen, detail from frontispiece to Henry Sampson,
A History of Advertising (1874).
4.4 Augustus Mulready, Uncared For (1871), courtesy of Arthur
H. Berg. All rights reserved.
4.5 Augustus Mulready, Remembering Joys that have Passed Away
(1873), courtesy of the Guildhall Art Gallery, City of
London.
4.6 Augustus Mulready, A London Flower Girl, 1877.
Image © Bridgeman Images.
5.1 “The ‘Extinction’ of Species”, Punch, September 6,
1899.
5.2 G. F. Watts, A Dedication (1898–99), lithograph reproduced in
The Studio (1903).
5.3 William Spalding, cover for I Bought Her a Sealskin Jacket and
a Diamond Ring (c.1880). Gabrielle Enthoven Collection
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
vi
25
28
43
123
125
126
138
140
145
173
174
183
Acknowledgements
There can be very few lone researchers, and I am grateful to many people
for their assistance and encouragement.
I would first like to thank those who gave me a chance to develop some of
the ideas in this book at conferences and seminars over the last few years:
Claire Charlotte McKechnie and Emily Alder for Nature and the Long
Nineteenth Century at Edinburgh University; Margareth Hagen, Randi
Koppen, and Margery Vibe Skagen for The Human and its Limits at the
University of Bergen; Vike Plock and the 2010 conference of the British
Society for Literature and Science; the 2010 BAVS conference at the
University of Glasgow; Leah Price, John Plotz, and the History of the
Book/Victorian Studies Seminar at the Harvard Humanities Center; Suzy
Anger and the Northeast Victorian Studies Association; Dina Felluga for an
invitation to give a workshop at the joint BAVS/NAVSA/AVSA conference
in Venice, and Wendy Parkins for chairing that session; Will Tattersdill and
the research seminar at King’s College London; Jane Carroll and Trish
Ferguson for their Victorian Time conference at Trinity College Dublin,
and Trish again for an invitation to take part in her lecture series on Irish
literature at Liverpool Hope University; Ruth Livesey and the research
seminar at Royal Holloway; Eamonn Hughes, Stefanie Lehner, and the
IASIL board for an invitation to the 2013 conference at Queen’s University
Belfast; and Alberto Gabriele for an invitation to take part in the
Sensationalism and the Genealogy of Modernity symposium at Tel Aviv
University. This book would be a much poorer thing without the comments
and questions of participants in these diverse events.
I am also grateful to those who engaged with earlier written versions of
the arguments in this book: Andrew Miller and anonymous readers at
Victorian Studies for comments on material now contained in Chapter 1;
and Margareth Hagen, Randi Koppen, and Margery Vibe Skagen, who
gave me an opportunity to develop the arguments in Chapter 4 in their
edited collection, The Human and its Limits.
vii
viii
Acknowledgements
For advice on this project outside of those relatively formal settings I am
indebted to so many people that I fear I will leave out some of them
inadvertently. But in particular I would like to thank Martin Meisel for a
number of helpful suggestions for Chapter 1; Claire Connolly and
Stephanie Rains for sharing their knowledge of nineteenth-century
Ireland for Chapter 3; and Paul Young and Brian Murray for their
comments on Chapter 5.
I learn all the time from my colleagues in the UCD School of English,
Drama and Film, and in UCD more generally. For the last few years – a
particularly grim time for Irish academia, as for the country more
generally – having good colleagues has been even more important than
usual. But for this project I would especially like to thank my fellow
Victorianist Fionnuala Dillane for her editorial advice and support, as
well as John Brannigan, Anne Cleary, Luca Crispi, Mary Daly, Sharae
Deckard, Darragh Downey, Porscha Fermanis, Anne Fogarty, Hilary
Gow, Margaret Kelleher, Gerardine Meaney, James Ryan, Pauline
Slattery, and Harry White. Also at UCD, the participants in my
undergraduate seminar on melodrama and several cohorts of students in
our ma in Modernity, Literature and Culture have helped to shape this
project: their suffering has not been in vain.
In the wider Irish intellectual community I have also accumulated debts,
some of long standing. Chapter 1 might never have been written without
the conversations I have had over the years with Darryl Jones about “last
man” narratives, and many other aspects of popular culture. Chapter 3
owes a lot to the insights of Pat Coughlan into the work of J. S. Le Fanu
and much more besides. Aileen Douglas has given me shrewd advice on
research and scholarship over many fine dinners. Farther afield there are a
number of people whom I do not get to see very often any more, but who
have influenced this project: Nancy Armstrong and Len Tennenhouse;
Neil Lazarus; and Ray Ryan.
For their hospitality and friendship I would like to thank Peter and
Nicola Byrne, Jo McDonagh and Colin Jones, and David Glover, all in
London; Francis O’Gorman and Katy Mullin in York; Christine
Ferguson in Glasgow; Johan Mathisen and Rekha Menon in
Washington; Paige Reynolds and Mario Pereira in Providence; and
Catherine Kirwan, Fintan and Irene Murphy, John Walsh and Jacqui
Back, and Paul O’Donovan and Claire Connolly in Cork. For friendship
and hospitality closer to home I would like to thank Miriam O’Brien and
Brian Murphy, Michael Vallely and Margaret Kelleher, and Maggie
Kennedy and John Tarpey.
Acknowledgements
ix
For advice on and help with all aspects of the project I would like to
thank my editor at Cambridge, Linda Bree, and my assistant editor Anna
Bond, who has been a model of efficiency.
For their kind permission to reproduce images, I am grateful to Arthur
H. Berg, the Bridgeman Art Library, Christie’s New York, and the
Guildhall Art Gallery; and I would like to thank Bonhams and Hannah
Solomon of Christie’s for their assistance with permissions. I would also
like to acknowledge the NUI for providing financial support for image
reproduction through their Grants Towards Scholarly Publications.
This book could not have been written without libraries and librarians.
I would like to acknowledge my gratitude to the Bibliothèque nationale,
the British Library, the Harvard Theatre Collection of the Houghton
Library, the James Joyce Library, UCD, and the National Library of
Ireland.
My parents made it possible for me to be an academic. My father, Tim,
is no longer with us, but I hope my mother, Rita, sees the infrequent
appearance of volumes like this as some slight return for her support.
Special thanks too to Mike, Elsie, Kevin, and Rachel.
Stephanie Rains has not only advised on, but has had to put up with, all
stages of this project. And while our cat, Pola, has not offered any advice,
she has frequently reminded me that the world is not human-centered,
however much our numbers may grow. This book is dedicated to them.
Introduction
The demographic imagination emerged within modern culture as
populations exploded. That is to say, the polymodal narratives and images
of mass humanity with which this book is concerned appeared in the midst
of a demographic revolution: suddenly there were a lot more people.
Some aspects of nineteenth-century demographic change are very familiar to us, urbanization in particular. As early as 1851, the year of the Great
Exhibition, the majority of the British population was living in “the chief
towns or their immediate neighbourhood”, and the preamble to the 1861
census report observed that “the English nation then, without losing its
hold on the country … has assumed the character of a preponderating city
population”.1 By the end of century, the urban was overtaking the rural in
France and other European countries, as well as in the United States. But,
in addition to this much-adduced historical shift, something was happening at the level of population that was just as significant, a veritable
demographic revolution. Advances in medicine, sanitation, transport,
and agricultural productivity, as well as industrially driven prosperity,
inter alia, supported a dramatic increase in the population.2 In all parts
of Europe, life-expectancy rose across the whole period. In France, for
example, if you were born in 1800 you would be doing better than average
to live beyond the age of twenty-eight, but by 1910 you might reasonably
expect to reach fifty; in Britain in the same years average life-expectancy at
birth went from around thirty-six years to fifty-three. (In her longevity
Queen Victoria, born in 1819, was ahead of her time.) High infant mortality
skews these figures somewhat, but the general picture across the century is
clear: life for most people began to be longer and more predictable.
As Michael Anderson puts it, “people were no longer expected to die in
massive numbers from sudden and unpredictable causes.”3 Of course, the
First World War and, more particularly, the influenza epidemic of 1918,
might have seemed like a return to old times, demographically speaking, but
they were brief interruptions in the general pattern of growth.
1
2
Introduction
This demographic revolution is usually described with delightful
understatement by social geographers, economists, and historians as
the “demographic transition”. In the longer term it involved a shift in
Europe and North America from high fertility and high mortality to low
fertility (smaller family sizes) and low mortality (longer lives). But, across
the nineteenth century, as the birth rate remained high and mortality fell,
it meant a population explosion: there were not only more town- and
city-dwellers, but simply many more people. In the case of Britain, the
most urbanized territory in Europe, we wrongly picture an emptying
countryside. Richard Sennett, for example, evokes a “swath of desolate
fields and distressed villages” as the corollary of London’s phenomenal
growth.4 In fact, rural numbers were relatively stable, and were even
growing in some places, though not at the same spectacular rate as urban
ones. There were still more than seven million rural dwellers in Britain
in 1901, which roughly equals the number there were in 1801.5 If the
countryside seemed empty, it was because the towns and cities had
grown apace: London grew from under a million inhabitants in 1801
to 4.5 million in 1901 (though the Greater London population was
6.5 million), as the population of Britain went from 8.8 million to
more than 32 million. Paris and its environs had likewise surged from
just over 540,000 in 1801 to a million in 1851, to around 2.7 million at the
beginning of the twentieth century, though the national population
had increased relatively slowly, from 29 million to 38 million (France,
famously, was an early convert to fertility control).6 Urban life was
replacing rural life as the norm, then, against a background of growth,
sometimes massive growth, in overall populations. In Europe, Britain led
the way by almost quadrupling its numbers, but across the nineteenth
century the populations of Spain and Italy doubled, that of Germany
more than doubled, and Russia’s grew threefold. (Ireland, decimated by
famine and mass emigration, was a notable exception to this upward
trend.) In the early twentieth century, this phenomenal increase would
be seen by Ortega y Gasset as the “statistical fact” underpinning what
he termed the “revolt of the masses”:
The fact is this: from the time European history begins in the 6th Century
up to the year 1800 – that is, through the course of twelve centuries – Europe
does not succeed in reaching a total population greater than 180 million
inhabitants. Now, from 1800 to 1914 – little more than a century – the
population of Europe mounts from 180 to 460 millions! … In three
generations it produces a gigantic mass of humanity which, launched like
a torrent over the historic area, has inundated it.7
Introduction
3
More recent estimates suggest a shift from around 188 million to 458
million, but the dramatic shift is undeniable: an increase of almost 250
percent. One does not have to share Ortega y Gasset’s bleak analysis of
mass society to see that he had put his finger on a significant demographic
phenomenon, a transformation as dramatic in its way as the French or the
industrial revolution.8
Nor, as James Belich has shown recently, was this torrent of humanity
confined to Europe. Some of the most dramatic transformations were
taking place in the Anglophone settler colonies of the United States and
Australia, driven by recurring cycles of boom, bust, and export rescue.9
(The explosive population growth of Britain in the nineteenth century
seems all the more remarkable in the light of the numbers it exported in
these years, but in fact those emigrants were the basis of settler societies that
sent food and raw materials back to the motherland, sustaining population
growth.) In the United States, for example, by 1900 there were thirty-eight
urban centers of 100,000 or more, larger than any American town had been
at the beginning of the century, and the overall population had gone from
5.3 million to 76 million. Driven by immigration as well as by natural
increase, New York had grown even faster than London, but from a lower
base, from around 60,000 at the start of the century to more than 3 million
in 1900. As in Europe, the overall urban population of the United States
overtook the rural early in the twentieth century.10
Urban concentration, then, was part only of a wider demographic
revolution. But crucially it made that revolution dramatically visible:
whether in the New World or old, nowhere was the emergence of
Ortega y Gasset’s “statistical fact” more evident than in mushrooming
cities and towns. Robert Vaughan, writing in 1843, was already terming it
the “age of great cities”, and many later writers on both sides of the Atlantic
shared this view.11 From this perspective, London was the city of cities: in
1891, Sidney Webb observed that London had a larger population than
Ireland, and was roughly equivalent to Wales and Scotland combined;
there were more Londoners than Norwegians, Greeks, Australians, or
Swiss.12 By 1900, Greater London had a bigger population than the entire
United States could boast at the beginning of the century. Most of this
growth was due to natural increase – the outpacing of mortality by
fertility – rather than migration.13
Such extraordinary changes at the level of population produced the
cultural response that I am terming the demographic imagination. In
this light the explicit modernist hostility to the torrent of humanity that
John Carey describes in The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992) is just one
4
Introduction
facet of a wider cultural reaction, a reaction that begins well before
modernism, and that has no single politics. It would be possible, indeed,
to fold much nineteenth-century cultural production into the category of
the demographic imagination. It would include the industrial novels
and slum novels that deal with numbers directly, such as Mary Barton
(1848), and A Child of the Jago (1896), and regional novels of knowable
community that sidestep the demographic revolution, like Middlemarch
(1874). Another aspect is represented by the Victorian Robinsonades
and imperial adventure narratives that offer dreams of escape from the
overcrowded urban world, like The Coral Island (1858). In fine art we see
thinly peopled landscape paintings that deliberately eschew the human
herd (John Constable), as well as urban crowd scenes that seek to give the
masses a shape, however complicated (the panoramic works of William
Powell Frith, for example). On stage, we can see that melodrama, with its
thematics of the aleatory and its cities of lost children (Les Deux
Orphelines), is a form deeply marked by population increase, as much as
by political and social revolution.
For writers in all modes the demographic revolution exerted more subtle
pressures too. The Victorian orphan is a symbolic figure, and the isolation
of Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe, or the vulnerabiltity of Oliver Twist, or the
rootless social mobility of Becky Sharp cannot simply be read as reflecting
Victorian or even authorial realities: Lucy Snowe is not Charlotte Brontë.
At the same time, the sudden deaths of parents, siblings, and friends do
correspond with actuarial probabilities in the earlier part of the century:
Lucy Snowe is Charlotte Brontë, at least in part. Across the century ageing
and longevity become a recurring source of interest, anticipating our own
engagement with these topics, and, by the end of the century, in keeping
with demographic trends, we begin to find longer fictional lives; whole
families are no longer so easily swept away.14 Let us take a few well-known
instances of how actuarial realities began to register in imaginative form.
Greta Conroy’s working-class sweetheart, Michael Furey, might die young
in James Joyce’s “The Dead” (1914), but she herself lives to look back on his
death from adulthood; and Gabriel Conroy’s elderly aunts are a direct link
to the musical greats of another era. While it is a novel written under the
shadow of the First World War, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) also
allows us a glimpse of the new longevity. Mrs. Dalloway’s aunt, Miss
Helena Parry, is expected by Peter Walsh to be long dead, a figure from
“a different age”.15 However, when we finally reach Clarissa’s party towards
the novel’s end we discover that “Miss Parry was not dead; Miss Parry was
alive” (233), and still eager to discuss what Charles Darwin said about her
Introduction
5
book on the orchids of Burma, which “went into three editions before
1870” (235). Likewise, immediately after the further industrial slaughter of
the Second World War, the general expectation of greater life security is
discernible as a background assumption. In Elizabeth Taylor’s A View of
the Harbour (1947), for example, the retired Bertram Hemingway is the
most active – or meddling – character; he is paired off with the novel’s
divorced beauty, Tory, at the novel’s ending, marking the beginning a new
phase in both their lives. Earlier, as if in explicit acknowledgement of how
the narrative game has changed, Doctor Cazaubon has assured his novelist
wife, Beth – whose works are well known for their deathbed scenes and
funerals – that nobody need die of pneumonia these days.16 (Alexander
Flexing, Ernst Boris Chain, and Edward Abraham had received the Nobel
Prize two years before the novel appeared for their foundational work with
penicillin, which paved the way for modern antibiotics.)
Since then, the longer life has become the norm among the world’s more
affluent nations, and the literature and film of the twenty-first century has
responded. In recognition of changing demographics and the idea of a
“third age”, in 2006, the National Endowment for the Humanities in the
United States sponsored a series of lectures, screenings, and discussions in
fourteen states on “The Elderquest: The Emergence of the Cinema and
Literature of Age”.17 The material considered included work by Ingmar
Bergman, David Lynch, and Paule Marshall, all of whom have explored
longevity in fictional form. Aside from such explicit treatments, we can also
track the long revolution in life-span expectations through the changing
fantasies of our international popular culture. It is unlikely, for example,
that the tongue-in-cheek murders of Midsomer Murders (1996– ) would
have the same ironic appeal if life had continued to be quite as short for
most English people as it was in 1800. If the death rate in picturesque
English villages was as high as the series suggests, Midsomer might still
entertain as modern gothic, but it could scarcely fall into the category of
comfort television.18
Taken to mean all of the cultural reflexes of demographic change since
1800 – including explosive population growth, but also longer lives, smaller
families, and immigration – the demographic imagination threatens to
encompass far more than any academic monograph might reasonably
discuss, from Romantic poems of rural retreat to sprawling Victorian city
novels, to contemporary Hollywood yarns of invasion by zombies or aliens.
Here, on a more modest scale, I want to focus on the first phase of the
demographic imagination, the response to the unprecedented population
explosion of the nineteenth century. I will present five facets of the
6
Introduction
response to mass humanity, which could be labeled loosely as apocalyptic,
criminal, supernatural, visual, and proto-ecological. We will look at three
new genres (volcanic disaster narratives, crime dramas, urban ghost stories), consider how an established one changed (urban genre painting), and
conclude with the emergence of a new way of seeing human populations in
relation to other species (proto-ecological campaigns against animal
fashion). John Carey has argued that it was in hostile reaction to “the
masses” – or rather those that the intellectual minority perceived to be “the
masses” – that experimental modernism developed, particularly in Britain
in the aftermath of the universal education offered by the Education Act of
1870.19 I will be arguing that similar attitudes were in place long before
then. Some of the primary materials I discuss are relatively well known: for
example, Edward Lytton Bulwer’s (later Edward Bulwer Lytton) The Last
Days of Pompeii (1834), the crime dramas that followed the success of
Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris (1842–43), and the urban ghost stories
of J. S. Le Fanu and Henry James; others perhaps less so, such as the urban
genre paintings of Augustus Mulready, and the activities of the Plumage
League. This is for the most part a study of the nineteenth-century urban
imagination, then, but one that keeps Ortega y Gasset’s “statistical fact”
clearly in focus; it is not just city life that is registered, but the sheer pressure
of numbers everywhere.
This is not primarily a book about the representation – political and
aesthetic – of the crowd as a collective subject, nor one about literature
and the nineteenth-century public sphere, nor an account that charts the
relations of people to the body of the city. That ground has been covered by
others, and even by myself to some extent.20 Instead I want to explore the
ways in which the demographic imagination operates through cultural
forms that do not always foreground the crowd. In his essay, “On Some
Motifs in Baudelaire”, Walter Benjamin suggests that the Parisian crowd is
the necessary historical condition for Baudelaire’s urban lyrics: it does not
have to be explicitly mentioned in the poems to be the shaping force for the
urban experiences he describes.21 To some extent this is my model here: the
population explosion is not always directly evoked, but it underpins a
whole array of cultural forms.
The demographic imagination of the nineteenth century is mobile.
Many of the recurring motifs I discuss here, such as the volcanic disaster,
were “polymodal”, jumping the species barriers among popular
spectacle, opera, verse, prose fiction, and drama; fashion, the subject of
my last chapter, spans journalism, material culture, international
commerce, and the practices of everyday life. My approach, then, is
Introduction
7
perforce interdisciplinary. But if the materials I consider were no respecters
of generic boundaries, most of them were also mobile in a different sense,
in that they glided easily across national boundaries. At a time of
unprecedented urban growth it is, perhaps, not surprising that stories
and images of city streets became the stuff of national culture. But the
urban also trumped the national, and certain city motifs and materials,
from high and low culture alike, scaled linguistic and other cultural walls
with remarkable ease. This was an international (or, perhaps more accurately, transnational) urban culture: the crime dramas that drew crowds to
the Boulevard Saint-Martin also pleased in the Strand, and in the Bowery;
what chilled readers in Merrion Square might also produce a frisson in
Washington Square; the urban genre scenes that charmed the Royal
Academy likewise found favor in New York and Buffalo. Popular plays
and novels were translated, reprinted, and adapted, often with little financial benefit to their originators; and certain urban genre subjects – newsboys and flower-sellers, among others – were endlessly repainted. Across
the period I consider here, urban fashion too became increasingly transnational, and images, narratives, and material goods shuttled rapidly across
national borders: exotic feathers and furs found their way to Paris, London,
and New York. Transformed into chic feathered hats and sealskin coats
they soon moved on to other cities, abetted by a proliferation of Frenchinspired fashion magazines and newspaper columns. The proto-ecological
response to these animals fashions was also transatlantic, as we shall see.
Such mobility was in part possible because life in London or New York
was coming to resemble more closely life in Paris than life in the rural parts of
Britain or the United States. Nations had their differences, but, as populations burgeoned, the life of the modern city shared similar contours across
national borders, and we can see a convergence of what Pierre Bourdieu
terms habitus as rising populations dealt with similar experiences, as well as
shared fantasies of escape to the good life. Again, the numbers matter here:
London was the only world city of 1 million inhabitants in 1800, but by the
1850s Paris and New York had reached that size, and by 1890 they had been
joined by six other cities, including Chicago and Philadelphia; by 1920 there
were twenty.22 The largest cities were becoming very large indeed, in effect
becoming more like nations, city states in their economic power; imagined
communities with their own newspapers and news-cycles, they were also
attuned to what people were reading, watching, and wearing in the older
super-cities of London and Paris, which continued to offer models of urban
life. There was no single international urban culture, but there existed a
considerable degree of similarity among heterogeneous ones.
8
Introduction
We have long been aware of some aspects of this asymmetrical
cultural internationalism, which is rather different in kind to that sketched
in Pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters (2004). Where Casanova
argues that literary goods come to Paris to be consecrated, the nineteenthcentury circuits I wish to describe here have no single hub. Paris does
nonetheless loom large in terms of its influence on the transnational
demographic imagination. Some aspects of this hegemony are well
known. Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, Tom
Taylor, Edward Bulwer Lytton, and M. E. Braddon, among others, all
either wrote about Paris as a modern capital, or drew directly on French
literary models.23 For the most part, in the theater as in fashion, France’s
dominance was openly admitted. As Allardyce Nicoll put it in his 1946
History of Late Nineteenth-Century Drama, by 1850 English drama was “in
the midst of a free filching from the French”. This borrowing continued for
the rest of the century: he quotes Percy Fitzgerald’s gloomy comment from
1881 that “at this moment it may be said that the English stage is virtually
subsisting on the French”; and Edward Morton’s equally pessimistic
assessment from an article of July 1897 entitled “The French Invasion”:
“the [current] theatrical entertainment offered by the capital of the greatest
empire of the world includes one play, and only one, by an English
dramatist of note”.24 To some degree this was a result of the weakness of
international copyright, and Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby was
neither the first nor the last to find employment as a translator of French
plays for English managers. Charles Kean, for example, in his first three
years as actor-manager of the Princess’s Theatre bought eleven French
translations for a total of £1,135.25 Whatever entertained audiences at,
say, the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin could be quickly translated
and offered up at the Adelphi, or the Princess’s, or indeed Drury Lane,
and the same play would do good business in New York, or Boston,
or Philadelphia. While copyright, or its lack, contributed to this rapid
circulation, it would not have been feasible unless the urban themes and
situations worked for international audiences.
The French mise en scène could be retained, or it could be changed, or
“localized”, to appeal more directly to the English or American house.
Thus Adolphe d’Ennery and Eugène Cormon’s great urban melodrama Les
Deux Orphelines (1874) kept its Parisian setting when it emigrated to the
Union Square Theatre in New York as Jackson N. Hart’s The Two Orphans
(also 1874); but the Paris of Édouard Brisebarre and Eugène Nus’s Le
Retour de Melun (1860; staged as Léonard at the Théâtre de la Gaité
on December 31, 1862) easily became the London of Tom Taylor’s The
Introduction
9
Ticket-of-Leave Man (1863) at the Olympic in London and the Winter
Garden and other venues in New York that same year; and the Paris of
Brisebarre and Nus’s Les Pauvres de Paris (1856) became, in the dexterous
hands of Dion Boucicault, variously New York, Liverpool, or London, as
the venue required. As Boucicault said in a letter to the manager/dramatist
Edward Stirling, “I localize it for each town, and hit the public between the
eyes”.26 “Localization” is a term now used in information technology for
the adaptation of software to a regional national market; in the nineteenth
century it covered a different type of intellectual property.27 Termed “local
dramas” by reviewers, these city plays gave audiences the thrill of seeing sets
based on their own neighborhoods, and were a reliable box office draw.28
What worked for drama sometimes worked for fiction too: as Michael
Denning and Stephen Knight have shown, France exported Eugène Sue’s
bestselling Les Mystères de Paris to London, New York, Philadelphia,
Berlin, Madrid, Barcelona, and Naples. The titles that resulted included
George Lippard’s The Quaker City; or the Monks of Monk Hall (1844–45),
G. W. M. Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London (1844–46), Ramon de
Naverette’s Madrid y sus misterios, and “Ned Buntline”’s [Edward Zane
Carroll Judson’s] The Mysteries and Miseries of New York (1848).29
However, no monogenetic account of the demographic imagination can
really convince. Paris was not the only moveable feast: Anglophone
successes, for instance, were also translated into French, including
Dickens’s Oliver Twist, which became Ludovic Bernard’s Olivier Twist,
ou l’Orphelin du dépôt de mendicité (1841), and L. de Potter’s Le Juif de
Bethnal Green, ou les voleurs de Londres (1843–44); G. W. M. Reynolds’s
Mysteries of the Court of London (1848–56), originally inspired by French
models, was reimported as Les Mystères de la Cour de Londres (1866). Nor
was this cultural circulation confined to plays and novels, since operas,
ballets, and paintings could be equally mobile. To take one instance from
Chapter 1, Giovanni Pacini’s Italian opera, L’ultimo giorno di Pompei (1825)
seems to have inspired Thomas Gray’s American novel The Vestal, or, A
Tale of Pompeii (1830) and Edward Bulwer Lytton’s English novel The Last
Days of Pompeii (1834), which in turn formed the basis of transatlantically
successful Pompeian paintings, sculptures, firework spectaculars, and, by
the early twentieth century, films, including, with pleasing symmetry, the
Italian Gli Ultimi giorni di Pompei (1908). Individual performers and
sometimes entire companies circulated transatlantically too, from the
French actor Charles Fechter, to the dog acts of Blanchard and Cony, to
the acting companies of Dion Boucicault and Augustin Daly. Thus, if
certain visions of the teeming city circulated widely, this was because styles
10
Introduction
of performance, attitudes and affects, and modes of mise en scène were
transmitted as well as texts and images. Popular songs, melodies, and
dances crossed and recrossed the Atlantic as well as the English
Channel (or la Manche), as freely as did painters and sculptors, styles,
subjects, techniques.
In emphasizing the international or perhaps transnational dimension of
the demographic imagination I am following what has become in recent
years a distinct trend. Critics have been reading British culture “contrapuntally”, to use Edward Said’s famous term, for some time, and postcolonial studies have explored the imbrication of empire and the slave trade
in literary and cultural history. Said’s work, as well as Paul Gilroy’s
influential The Black Atlantic (1993), have underwritten new approaches
to cultural history that show the limits of national paradigms, as well as the
interconnectedness of freedom and exploitation. Tim Watson’s Caribbean
Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1780–1870 (2008), for
example, shows the centrality of the Caribbean in Britain’s imagining
of itself, even after the decline of the sugar trade, while also tracing
Caribbean inflections of colonial narratives.30 From a different perspective,
the work of Elaine Freedgood has allowed us to recover the way in
which the material culture of the English novel can lead us down long
metonymic threads to the global economy.31 Others have sought to use
cosmopolitanism as a way to think about culture flows that are not aligned
with nation and empire.32 Closer to my project here, there has also been an
awakening of interest in the transnational currents between Britain and
the United States, all the more surprising, perhaps in that Victorianists
and Americanists tend to be trained in separate cadres, attend different
conferences, and publish in different academic journals and series. But, as
John Picker notes in a recent review essay on transatlantic Victorianism,
after a period in which the field scarcely existed, there are now a number
of substantial studies, including Kate Flint’s The Transatlantic Indian,
1776–1930 (2008), Julia Sun-Joo Lee’s The American Slave Narrative and
the Victorian Novel (2010), and the collection edited by Meredith McGill,
The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange
(2008).33 These books address the crossings of texts, performances, and,
to a lesser extent, people in roughly the same period I consider.
In charting the cultural response to the demographic revolution, I have
laid out a slightly different transnational chart, in which the traffic between
Paris and London, and to a lesser extent that between Paris and New York,
features alongside Anglophone exchanges. Less work has appeared on these
circuits, though there are some notable exceptions, such as Margaret
Introduction
11
Cohen and Carolyn Dever’s edited collection of 2002, The Literary
Channel: The International Invention of the Novel.34 Dealing primarily
with the eighteenth century, it shows how the novel as a cultural form
takes shape through a long process of Anglo-French mutual influence,
involving translation, appropriation, imitation, and rejection, against a
backdrop of fierce political rivalry and recurring military conflict between
the two countries, which were still in the process of emergence as modern
nation states. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, Cohen and
Dever argue, the intimacy of the cross-channel zone was being replaced by
a more international novelistic world, in which American and Italian
models, inter alia, circulated. Nonetheless, as I hope to show, France
remained a major source for the demographic imagination, for narratives,
images, idées reçues, structures of feeling, and practices of city life, including
those of fashion.35
My concentration on London, Paris, and New York, with a glance at
other cities, including the one in which I live, Dublin, might suggest a
rather Eurocentric and metropolitan orientation. The latter may be true,
the former, I hope, less so, and issues of empire, colonization, race, and
ethnicity are part of the materials I consider. However, this is not a study of
empire, and the transnationalism deals more with cultural flows within
Europe, and from Europe, to Britain’s former colony, the United States;
sometimes cultural goods accompanied the tide of population that flowed
west in the same period, and sometimes they ran against that tide. The
principal aim is to track the circulation of the demographic imagination
among a number of cities with close cultural and economic ties, all of
which were undergoing dramatic growth at roughly the same time. A study
of a later period might look rather different: by 1920, for example,
Melbourne, Bombay, and Calcutta had joined the cities of a million plus.
There are also other limits to my transnationalism. My previous work
has been largely on British material, and this study does not entirely break
free of the gravitational pull of the literary and dramatic culture of London;
my linguistic limitations have meant that the French material treated here
is outweighed by the Anglophone. Nevertheless, I think that even such a
limited transnational approach is worthwhile. Perhaps the most obvious
point to make is that in the nineteenth century, as indeed at other times,
much of what occupies the hearts and minds of readers and audiences in,
say, London comes from elsewhere, and not always from the Anglophone
world. We have become accustomed to reading culture contrapuntally,
to read Englishness with Empire, Mansfield Park with the Mansfield
judgement. But I think we need also to consider more fully the extent to
12
Introduction
which nineteenth-century readers and playgoers – to say nothing of men
and women of fashion – were used to cultural goods that had come from
other metropolitan centers, and had either been localized for them, or
served up in their original form but in a new context. Understanding such
artifacts calls less for Said’s contrapuntal reading than for an awareness of
reception, repurposing, and “remediation”, and a sense of cultural forms as
being in constant motion.36
Five facets
In the chapters that follow, I pursue the demographic imagination across
the nineteenth century as it created a series of new genres, and transformed
older ones. The first three chapters discuss three new, highly mobile,
demographic genres: disaster narratives, crime stories, and ghost stories.
Disaster narratives imagine demographic revolution as a form of natural
catastrophe that destroys the city; crime stories offer an ideologically
loaded way of thinking about the swarming streets, and also imagine a
hero who can tackle the crowd by disaggregating it; ghost stories are less
optimistic, presenting modern urban life as a permanently unsettling state.
The fourth chapter shows how an existing artistic form – urban genre
painting – transformed itself by assimilating and transmogrifying mass
urban life, especially its visual flotsam and jetsam. Whatever their differences, all four of these cultural forms have the first, explosive phase of
the demographic transition – the demographic revolution as I am terming
it here – as their “political unconscious”, but they also turn it into aesthetic
pleasure: readers and viewers are pleasurably thrilled by urban destruction
and street crime, chilled by the ghostly, and even taught to find delight in
an aestheticized version of the visual chaos of the streets. The last chapter
returns us to the idea of disaster, finding in the reaction to mass
international fashion the roots of a new kind of apocalyptic narrative,
and the seeds of a form of ecological consciousness. Readers of anti-fashion
pamphlets, letters, and essays were asked to give up certain aesthetic
pleasures on ethical grounds, though we might assume that many found
new pleasure in forms of ethical solidarity.
Chapter 1 pursues a persistent strain of spectacle and narrative that
projects the demographic force of the masses onto the natural world, and
imagines the city’s volcanic end, like Pompeii in 79 ce. The disaster
narrative is polymodal: volcanic narratives/images had first developed as
a form of spectacular pyrotechnic display in the pleasure gardens of
London, and in the early nineteenth century several different cultural
Introduction
13
forms, including opera, fine art, and poetry, took up the idea of the city
devastated by ash and tephra. The most successful version of this story was
Edward Bulwer Lytton’s novel, The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), a melting
pot for earlier versions of the Pompeii story, including Italian, American,
and French ones. Notwithstanding the rich historical detail and footnoted
antiquarianism, it is readily apparent that Bulwer Lytton’s real target is the
present, with Pompeii doubling for London, and the volcano figuring
the barely contained energies of the masses, which seemed all the more
formidable in the wake of the 1832 Reform Bill. Ultimately, though, the
novel imagines the holocaust of the masses, and the survival of the elite few.
For the rest of the century the volcanic disaster made periodic reappearances in different media, before it was absorbed by early cinema; these
later versions of the narrative are sometimes rather more positive about the
surging populace than is Bulwer Lytton’s aristocratic fantasy.
In Chapter 2, the masses reappear as the “dangerous classes”, the
imagined root of urban crime. Where the 1830s were marked by fantasies
of the city destroyed, the following decade saw the appearance of a rather
different demographic motif: the teeming city as a mystery or crime to be
solved. Eugène Sue’s enormously successful feuilleton, Les Mystères de Paris
provided the framework for dozens of subsequent ideologically charged
visions of the metropolis as a locus of crime, in which an organized
underworld of thieves and thugs lurks just beneath the surface. Such a
place needs a new kind of hero to restore order, and in Les Mystères that
hero is Rodolphe, a prince in disguise, a dedicated crime-fighter who looks
forward not only to the amateur detective as literary protagonist but to
such later comic-book urban superheroes as Batman. Sue’s novel was
cumbersome when adapted for the stage, and it was d’Ennery and
Grangé’s highly derivative Les Bohémiens de Paris that provided the
armature of most English-language crime plays of this sort. Ultimately,
even more influential was Brisebarre and Nus’s Le Retour de Melun, which
introduced a police detective in the place of the aristocratic Rodolphe as a
friend to the good but wayward, and a scourge to real criminals. Adapted
by Tom Taylor as The Ticket-of-Leave Man, it helped to popularize the
stage detective, who would be a persistent feature of transatlantic drama
for the next 150 years, a recurring imaginary solution to the anonymity of
mass urban life.
The 1840s also saw the arrival of a more oblique engagement with
the torrent of urban humanity in the ghost story. Here the masses
take the form of the hell that is other people, and the shocks of
the disaster narrative are replaced by terror and unease. Like short
14
Introduction
fiction generally, the ghost story provided content for the mid-level literary
magazines that arrived in the 1860s with the appearance of the Cornhill,
Temple Bar, Belgravia, and their peers and rivals, including such American
magazines as Harper’s and the Atlantic Monthly. As a form, the ghost story
is distilled from the more expansive forms of eighteenth-and early
nineteenth-century gothic, though it also owes something to oral storytelling. It continued to bear the marks of these origins well into the
nineteenth century in terms of setting: remote country houses and quaint
rural inns were favored locations. One of the first writers to explore the
possibility of a more up-to-date urban supernatural was the Dublin author
and newspaper editor, J. S. Le Fanu. While his stories are often set in an
earlier Dublin, it is the bustling city of his own time, its fabric transformed
by speculative building and mass transport, that stirs his imagination, and
it is his fellow citizens who haunt the public spaces he describes. In such
stories as “The Watcher” (1847) and “Green Tea” (1869), the emotional life
of the urban pedestrian and commuter reappears in nightmarish form,
providing an influential direction for subsequent supernatural fiction,
including the stories of that most transatlantic and urbane of authors,
Henry James. In James’s late ghost stories urban haunting appears to be
related not just to the changing fabric of the expanding city but also to the
immigrants who had come to crowd the streets of his New York childhood.
The visual artists of the nineteenth century were not as ready as the
dramatists and fiction-writers to adopt the swarming streets as material,
and sparsely populated landscapes vastly outnumber the urban crowd
scenes among Victorian pictures. Such a focus on the pastoral was itself,
of course, conditioned by discomfort in the face of the urban world, and a
corresponding sense of an incompatibility between the modern and the
beautiful, notwithstanding the urban lives of most successful painters.
A few artists did try to adapt genre painting to deal with the thronged
streets, as I discuss in Chapter 4. One technique was to replace the urban
mass with a few synecdochic street characters: in the paintings of William
Powell Frith, George Clausen, Jules Bastien-Lepage, Gustave Doré,
Thomas Le Clear, and others, crossing-sweepers, flower sellers, and newsboys act as stand-ins for the masses. But the popular and fine art images of
this period also represent the demographic revolution metonymically, by
showing the transformation of the everyday visual environment by outdoor
advertising and mass journalism, the seemingly inevitable corollaries of
urban growth and anonymity. The age of crowds was also an age of paper,
as we see in comic and more serious images of this period, where the
writing on the walls becomes both a source of humor (in the work of Alfred
Introduction
15
Concanen or John Orlando Parry, for example) and a way of adding
nuance through background detail (as in Ford Madox Brown’s Work
[1852–65]). In the work of one artist in particular, Augustus Mulready
(grandson of the more successful William Mulready, RA), these textual
backdrops become a subject in themselves; Mulready uses the detritus of
the age of paper to add an ironic edge to his emotionally fraught street
scenes of the urban poor.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the crowded city was still seen by
many as a problem to be solved, though it was increasingly obvious that
urbanization was the way of the future. The scenes of modernity-as-disaster
that had beguiled the leisure hours of the citizens of the early nineteenth
century retained some of their enchantment, as indeed did narratives of
urban crime and urban haunting, and city genre scenes. But in this period
there was also a shift in the understanding of demography’s global impact.
As populations continued to soar, it became apparent that the consumer
power of this human torrent was likely to be fatal for other species. While
the population of most urban animals tended to grow alongside the
human, this was not true of wild species. When the fur or feathers of the
latter caught the fancy of massive urban populations – increasingly under
the sway of international fashion and advertising – their very survival was
in question. In the final chapter I look at city animals – living and dead –
and track the rise of something like a tentative ecological vision of the
modern world. At the end of this study the idea of cataclysm returns, but
this time the demographic imagination shades into a less fanciful
Anthropocene imagination; the teeming city itself might survive, but
only at a huge cost to the natural world outside it.37
These five chapters should be seen as series of case studies more than
an attempt to map in any comprehensive way the paths of demographically
shaped stories, performances, and pictures as they shuttled among the
burgeoning metropolises, carried on the tide of a nascent culture
industry. As far as possible, I have tried to give a sense of the range and
variety of the demographic imagination within my five categories. To this
extent this book is only at times a series of readings, and my approach in
places might seem closer to a low-tech version of the “distant reading”
advocated in Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a
Literary History (2005). However, I have wanted where possible to
suggest how “localization” changed these traveling narratives and images.
The convergence of urban experience I describe was always only partial; the
cultural artifacts that traveled among cities were never the same in any
two places, in that no two readers, reading formations, or audiences are
16
Introduction
ever alike, and, to paraphrase Walter Pater, it is only the roughness of the
eye of the cultural historian that makes them seem so. To this extent the
nineteenth-century globalization, or proto-globalization, of urban cultures
that I describe should not be seen only – or mostly – as some kind of
flattening of the local by the volcanoes of Paris or London. No doubt
this happened: successful and well-capitalized touring productions may
well have stifled local drama at times; dressmakers and milliners must
sometimes have wearied of Paris’s dominance; and some popular novelists
much have wished to escape the tyranny of the urban “mysteries” formula.
Occasionally we see active hostility to imported performers and texts, as in
the Monte Cristo riots at Drury Lane in 1848, and the Astor Place riot in
New York in 1849.38 But the nineteenth century was also clearly just as
much a period of cross-fertilization, and of cultural syncretism.
We begin with the imagination of disaster. In the early nineteenth
century, Ortega y Gasset’s “statistical fact” was beginning to register, and
for conservatives and radicals alike the volcano came to provide a useful
figure for the pent-up force of population. For some, it seemed only a
matter of time before nineteenth-century society would be swept away like
Pompeii; a few, indeed, seemed to hope for just that.
chapter 1
Under the volcano: mass destruction
On Sunday we were in Pompeii. Many a calamity has happened in the
world but never one that has caused so much entertainment to
posterity as this one.
Goethe1
The nineteenth-century city-dweller seems to have taken a peculiar pleasure in imagining his or her home destroyed by a variety of cataclysms: the
destructive forces of floods, fires, and earthquakes were always good box
office. This is evident in Richard Altick’s magisterial survey of popular
entertainment, The Shows of London (1978), but the same disasters were also
a recurring feature of the culture of the nineteenth century more generally,
appearing in narrative fiction, poetry, drama, opera, and fine art. Among
such entertaining horrors, images and narratives of death-dealing volcanoes exercised a particular fascination over a long period, from the late
eighteenth century into the twentieth, and it is these that I wish to focus on
here, as they become a particular mode for representing the teeming city.
While the earliest volcanic entertainments tend to represent regal or divine
power, over time a set of urban scenarios accrete around the volcano, and
become part of the demographic imagination. In radical and conservative
versions alike, the destructive power of the volcano is aligned with the
torrent of humanity, whether seen as the people or the mob.
In the volcano story – and volcano spectacle – all that is solid disappears
beneath fiery lava and pyroclastic ash; the city is not drowned as in the
biblical deluge, but incinerated. In general terms, all disaster narratives
turn on the annihilation of people and property; their structures are
characterized by the interruption of narrative continuity; and their philosophy tends to suggest the limitations of human powers and the inevitable
frustration of schemes and hopes. We are familiar with these narratives as a
component of our own international popular culture, with the disaster film
a particularly recognizable genre that has shed its B-movie connotations to
17
18
The Demographic Imagination
become a major strain of the big-budget Hollywood blockbuster (a term
with its own echoes of wholesale destruction). All such cultural goods share
a relatively under-theorized aesthetic element: the pleasure of the reader or
viewer in destruction – of people, of property, of hopes. While this pleasure
may have something in common with the pity and terror evoked by
Aristotelian tragedy, we might also speculate that pleasure in such scenes
is rooted in the subject’s aggressive drives, whether or not one sees that
aggression as the outward projection of an innate Freudian death drive. In
twentieth- and twenty-first-century disaster texts the interest resides in the
post-disaster society, or the family unit that survives, say, malevolent
weather, town-swallowing geological events, or nuclear Armageddon.2
This is often – but not always – true of the nineteenth-century volcano
story too, and individuals or groups escape volcanic disaster to form the
nucleus of a new society. The city, and the surging crowd, are destroyed,
and a more pastoral form of life can begin again.
The best-known of these tales of volcanic disaster is probably Edward
Bulwer Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), a novel that spawned
many imitations across a wide range of media. As we shall see, Bulwer
Lytton’s novel drew extensively on what was already a clearly defined
international narrative subgenre: even his title is derivative, echoing, for
example, Giovanni Pacini’s opera, L’ultimo giorno di Pompei (1825). But
Bulwer Lytton puts a distinctive stamp on the disaster narrative by grafting
on to the Pompeii story the associations of the volcano developed in,
for example, Daniel François Esprit Auber’s La Muette de Portici (1828),
in which the volcano represents the force of the people. Written in
the aftermath of the 1832 Reform Act, but also of turbulent events in
continental Europe, The Last Days of Pompeii registers social and political
change as natural disaster, and presents the energies of the urban masses as
purely destructive.
Before sketching the history of this volcano narrative, it is worth
pausing to consider its formal aspects. The volcano entertainment is
polymodal. As narrative device, theatrical special effect, and sublime
fine art spectacle, inter alia, it crosses not just genres and modes, but
media, spreading virally across such boundaries, and mutating as it goes.
This mobility brings with it certain theoretical difficulties and issues of
vocabulary for the cultural historian, some of which will already be
evident. For example, fine art paintings of volcanoes are not, of course,
disaster “narratives” in any real sense, but rather what we might term
“narrative images”, the action frozen at a particular point; firework
displays, even those with a narrative component, are a different kind of
Under the volcano
19
entity again. From the various perspectives of traditional literary analysis,
popular cultural studies, and structuralism, we could view the volcano
itself as a highly mobile topos; an unusual variety of popular hero, i.e., a
figure familiar to a wide audience without there being any single foundational text; or as a narrative actant or Barthesian seme. At different
moments the volcano’s representational adventures recall the “remediation” described by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin in their account
of the way rival media remodel each other’s content; and they recall as
well the shifting relationship of “illustration” and “realization” described
by Martin Meisel in his monumental account of the cross-play among
visual, narrative, and dramatic modes in the nineteenth century.3 Indeed,
the pictorialism and orientation toward “effects” that Meisel identifies in
nineteenth-century drama, fiction, and narrative poetry are distinct
features of the texts I survey here. However, while I want to keep some
of these possibilities in sight, I will suggest a different approach: following Anne Friedberg’s work on early cinema I will treat the volcano
narrative as a polymodal “commodity-experience”, a form of goods
aimed at the imagination through the senses, from three-dimensional
models to three-decker novels.4 In the late eighteenth century, the
volcano was a form of spectacular box office property that was exploited
in various ways, and the volcano narrative’s more high literary and
artistic appearances in the nineteenth century continued to be paralleled
by its perennial success as popular spectacle. Rather than thinking of
these modalities of the volcano narrative as radically different, I want to
suggest that for heuristic purposes we view its popular and high
cultural allotropes together, while bearing in mind their formal differences. In this light we might consider the volcano as a particularly
successful commodity-experience that in its different aspects captured
disparate but sometimes overlapping audiences, rather as Pirates of
the Caribbean, say, existed first as a Disneyland ride, and then as a
series of films, while also being simultaneously novelized and turned
into toys and video games.5 That some of the volcano narrative’s
allotropes are more complex than others and have different formal
features does not mean that they are incommensurable. We will encounter examples in which the erupting volcano is a subordinated part of a
more complex narrative or dramatic experience, but in all of them the
volcano is there as a smoldering presence from the start, and our pleasure
in other elements of our experience is both shadowed by and enhanced
by our knowledge that in the end it will explode and destroy the crowded
town beneath.
20
The Demographic Imagination
The early years: volcano shows
The volcano versus city narrative that Bulwer Lytton takes up has a
considerable prehistory. In fact, the volcano as entertainment erupts first
not onto the page or stage but within the specialized entertainment world
of pyrotechnics. The use of fireworks to mimic volcanoes begins at least as
early as the Renaissance, when, as Kevin Salatino notes, princes and other
powerful figures mounted firework spectaculars as emblems of their own
might.6 In written accounts of such spectacles, the ruler is identified with
the volcano’s power, but also with the Pythagorean flux of the four
elements – earth, water, air, and fire – and the renewal of the world, or
with the subduing of nature itself. Fireworks, volcanic or not, continued to
be used to mark royal or state events into the modern period: births,
birthdays, and marriages; military victories; and peace agreements, such
as that at Aix-La-Chapelle in 1749, which ended the War of the Austrian
Succession and was marked by firework displays all over Europe. In this
form fireworks were often under the purview of military ordnance and
served as a reminder to the populace of the state’s power; on the other
hand, perhaps because they might remind audiences of the potential of
explosives, such official entertainments tended to be cancelled when revolution was in the air.7 Pyrotechnics were also associated with various
festivals, from saints’ days in Italy and the annual pyrotechnic Girandola
at the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome, part of the Carnevale, to Guy Fawkes
night in Britain, with its lively commemoration of popish plots foiled.
Where such events involve the burning of effigies, as at Guy Fawkes, they
suggest some continuity with older, pagan harvest festivals and rituals, and
perhaps even with real or symbolic sacrifice to the gods; in this light it is
worth noting that the first use of fireworks on the British stage was
probably in the representation of Hell Mouth in medieval Mystery
Plays.8 Thus, when secular, commercial firework volcano shows appeared
first in Britain in the various pleasure gardens of the eighteenth century,
such as Marylebone in London, they came trailing earlier associations with
military firepower on the one hand, and with chthonic forces and ritual
burning on the other.
When the secular and commercial volcano shows appear, it is against the
backdrop of a new popular interest in actual volcanoes shaped by the
discovery of Pompeii, a series of eruptions in various parts of the world,
and the rise of modern volcanology. The impact of the excavation of the
ruins of Pompeii from the 1740s on was especially consequential. (The lost
city had indeed been “discovered” before, but major excavation began only
Under the volcano
21
in 1748.) In 79 ce, Vesuvius rained down tephra, ash, and other pyroclastic
particles on the unfortunate inhabitants of Pompeii – probably still
recovering from the earthquake of 62 ce–as well as on those of
Herculaneum and Stabiae. The towns and their inhabitants were both
destroyed and preserved by the volcano, and in the eighteenth century,
scholars, including Johann-Joachim Winckelmann, began to realize what
an extraordinary window onto the everyday life of the past they offered.
But, more than that, for the next century and beyond, Pompeii in particular provided both a way of thinking at one remove about urban life in the
present and a rich source for the material culture of that urban life.
Thinking of London, New York, or Paris in terms of Pompeii was part
of the familiar process by which the present imagined itself in the guise of
the imperial past, though Pompeii’s unique history gave such imaginings
a particularly teleological cast. The material culture that was unearthed
was disseminated by such figures as William Hamilton, British ambassador
to the court of Naples from 1764 to 1800, and sponsor of the influential
hand-colored illustrated book, Antiquités étrusques, grecques et romaines
(1767–76), edited by Pierre-François Hugues. Hamilton further stimulated
the British (and indirectly American) appetite for the lost city by shipping
quantities of antique artifacts, including some from Pompeii, to London,
where they were sold to collectors.9 As Colin Amery and Brian Curran Jr.
have described, flowing into an already powerful stream of neoclassicism,
the colorful remnants of the material world of Pompeii shaped everything
from the architecture of Robert and James Adam to the “Etruscan” pottery
of Josiah Wedgewood, who even christened his pottery “Etruria”.10 Thus,
out of the ashes of Vesuvius emerged a “Pompeian style”, which became
freshly calcified in such handbooks as John Goldicutt’s Specimens
of Ancient Decoration from Pompeii (1825) and Owen Jones’s Grammar
of Ornament (1856). It does not seem too far-fetched to speculate that those
who decorated their houses in Pompeian style must have occasionally
thought about the cataclysm that had overtaken the original followers
of such fashions.
The volcanic power that had destroyed and preserved Pompeii became a
focus of study in its own right in this period. While Vesuvius and Etna had
reawakened in the seventeenth century (Vesuvius in 1631 and 1694, Etna in
1669), modern geoscience and volcanology did not really appear until the
eighteenth century, stimulated by such events as the earthquakes at
Calabria (1783) and Lisbon (1755) and the major eruptions at Santorini
(1707), and Vesuvius itself (1737 and 1767).11 The Lisbon earthquake
resonated for a long time in the European imagination, since it had
22
The Demographic Imagination
destroyed a major European capital and been felt far beyond it; what the
earthquake left had been extensively damaged by fire, and the subsequent
tsunami had wreaked havoc along Atlantic coasts. The 1767 eruption, for
its part, was particularly important for volcano lore in Britain, as William
Hamilton (again) had witnessed it, and described it both in a letter to the
Royal Society in 1768 and in his later Observations on Mount Vesuvius,
Mount Etna, and other Volcanos (1772) and Campi Phlegraei (1776), which
featured dramatic illustrations of these “fields of fire” by the Italian artist
Pietro Fabris.
Vesuvius continued to be active in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, drawing scientific visitors, among others. In the
complex late-Enlightenment debates about the nature and age of the
earth, volcanoes – like earthquakes – were of interest to advocates of
Vulcanism or Plutonism (championed by James Hutton in Edinburgh),
who saw subterranean heat as the source of geological change, in contrast
to the Neptunists (championed by Abraham Gottlob Werner at Freiburg),
who favored the role of the oceans. Such debates took on national
contours: in Britain, volcanoes came to be associated through Hutton’s
work with theories of gradual, natural change, as opposed to diluvian
theories of sudden catastrophe.12 Insofar as they came to betoken
materialist rather than divine cosmologies, however, such gradualist
theories had radical overtones: this aspect of volcanic symbolism circulated
more widely in the 1830s and 1840s, when Charles Lyell’s Principles
of Geology (1830–33) and Elements of Geology (1838), and Robert
Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) all gave the
volcano renewed prominence in popular science.13
It is at this moment of historical self-consciousness and scientific interest
that the staging of volcanic eruptions for entertainment enters eighteenthcentury popular culture and develops into a commodity-experience that
lasts throughout the nineteenth century. As Richard Altick notes in his
The Shows of London, commercial volcanic spectacles appear first in the
1770s at the Georgian pleasure gardens, where Mount Etna enjoyed
particular popularity (96). In 1772, for the king’s birthday, Marylebone
Gardens offered “The Forge of Vulcan” on the side of Mount Etna, in
which a “mountain . . . appeared in eruption, with lava rushing down the
precipices”, the work of an Italian pyrotechnician, Giovanni Batista
Torre.14 Rockets fitted to ropes probably produced the main fire effects;
underlit and transparent troughs of water created the appearance of lava.
There was a revival of pyrotechnic volcanic entertainment at Ranelagh in
May of 1792: again, audiences saw the forge of Vulcan on the side of Mount
Under the volcano
23
Etna, with the Cyclops forging the armor of Mars to the music of
Christoph Gluck, Franz Joseph Haydn, Felice Giardini, and George
Frideric Handel. According to a contemporary account, “the smoke thickens, the crater on top of Etna vomits forth flames, and the lava rolls
dreadful [sic] along the side of the mountain. This continues with increasing violence till there is a prodigious explosion.”15 This show continued to
draw the crowds at Ranelagh for a number of years.
We might speculate that the appeal of such commercial pyrotechnics
was underwritten by new, non-volcanic forces: by 1792, the volcano could
register in a contained and ordered form both the fires of the French
Revolution and the seismic changes wrought by industrialization. Nature
here is the guise in which seismic social, technological, and political change
appears. The mythological materials used to structure the explosive son
et lumière suggest that the volcano show was never simply a firework
display, but was built into narratives (and accompanied by music) that
appealed to an educated audience; muted allegories of war and revolution
(Mars) or of industrial forces (the forge) might add a certain frisson, but
they were safely contained within a classical frame.
Indoors too the volcano was good box office from the second half of the
eighteenth century, when it appeared at the shifting boundary between
the educational and the entertaining. William Hamilton had pioneered the
indoor volcano show after a fashion, with a transparency of Vesuvius in
eruption painted by Pietro Fabris that he sent to the Royal Society in
1767.16 Following his example, but for more commercial than scientific
purposes, Hugh Dean put on a volcano spectacle that used transparencies
and sound effects in Great Hart Street, Covent Garden, in 1780. Torre, the
pyrotechnician we encountered earlier, had arrived in England with
the artist Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, who made use of the Bay of
Naples as spectacle in 1781 as part of his Eidophusikon (in effect a more
sophisticated version of Dean’s show) using transparent dioramic paintings
and changing lighting and sound effects.17 In a later version of the
Eidophusikon, unconnected to Loutherbourg, the “New Eidophusikon”
presented at Panton Street, a Vesuvian eruption also featured, until the
show burned down, though it is not clear if this was a result of the volcano
getting out of hand. Transparencies were not the only way of staging
disaster: elsewhere, cork models provided volcanic entertainment with an
educational gloss. In 1785, one such show, Richard Dubourg’s display of
models of classical sites, was destroyed by an out-of-control model
Vesuvius. But this did not discourage other showmen, and at a variety of
locations in the early 1800s Londoners could see Vesuvian eruptions as an
24
The Demographic Imagination
adjunct to scale-model displays of Roman buildings. (Curiously, these
appear to have been staged by another gentleman using the name
Dubourg.) At one such show, not only could the public see the flaming
lava sweep towards the coastal town of Portici, but, as Richard Altick notes,
they could smell “burning sulphur, and such other effluvia as volcanoes
usually emit” (The Shows of London, 96). Indeed, this show might be
thought of as an early version of the Sensorama, or of Smell-O-Vision,
or other synesthetic experiments of the latter half of the twentieth century:
while reduced in scale, this variety of the volcano show aimed at total
viewer immersion.
Mixed media
Volcanoes did not roar in popular spectacle alone. While they appear but
rarely in seventeenth-century painting, as Alexandra R. Murphy has
shown, eruptions feature frequently in fine art in the late eighteenth
century, when they come to provide a satisfying source of aesthetic thrills
for viewers schooled in the Burkean sublime.18 (We should not discount, of
course, the extent to which knowledge of Edmund Burke may also have
underwritten the popularity of firework shows and indoor volcano spectacles.) We see this aesthetic at work in such paintings as Joseph Wright of
Derby’s Vesuvius from Portici (c.1774–76) and Vesuvius in Eruption, with a
View over the Islands in the Bay of Naples (c.1776–80), two of the thirty or so
views of Vesuvius he was to paint over the course of his career, though he
missed an actual eruption on his only visit to Naples.8 Wright was not
entirely a pioneer in his Vesuvian studies: beginning with Claude Joseph
Vernet, French artists had begun to capture and interpret the volcano on
canvas, though in Vernet’s Vue de Naples avec le Vésuve (c.1748) Vesuvius is
a relatively minor feature. As Murphy traces, Charles-François Grenier de
Lacroix (known as Lacroix de Marseilles) and Vernet’s pupil Pierre-Jacques
Volaire, working in Naples from the 1760s, really created the vogue for
more dramatic Vesuvian art that harnessed fear in the service of pleasure.
Volaire’s large canvas (46 inches × 95⅝ inches), The Eruption of Vesuvius
(1771), now in the Art Institute of Chicago, shows his approach: a panoramic view depicts the fiery mountain towering in the background, more
steeply than it actually appears, while human figures are dwarfed in the
foreground, bathed in an eerie glow. Joseph Mallord William Turner’s
Vesuvius in Eruption (1817) is very much in the Volaire tradition, though, as
Murphy notes, he compresses the energy of the volcano into a small
watercolor, measuring just 11¼ inches × 15⅝ inches (see Figure 1.1).19
Under the volcano
25
Figure 1.1 Joseph Mallord William Turner, Vesuvius in Eruption (painted between
1817 and 1820).
Gallery collections and auction records suggest that such erupting
volcanoes remained a popular subject for artists from the late eighteenth
to the early twentieth centuries, presumably in part because even after the
vogue of the sublime had yielded to the more restrained pleasures of
the picturesque such paintings could be readily sold to the tourists, grand
and otherwise, who came to admire the Bay of Naples, to visit Pompeii and
Vesuvius, and to see the Pompeian treasures preserved in the Museo
Borbonico in Naples.20 A glance through twenty-first-century auction
catalogues makes it clear that vast numbers of these portable paintings
were produced with such titles as Naples, A Nocturnal View of the Bay, with
Vesuvius Erupting, and A Moonlit View of Vesuvius Erupting, often
attributed to the prolific Neapolitan School.21 At the end of the nineteenth
century, Edgar Degas’s Vesuvius (1890), pastel over a monotype print, is
one of the last representations of the volcano by a major artist, at least until
Andy Warhol in the 1980s, though Warhol’s subject might be taken to be
less the volcano itself than its myriad cultural images.22
It is in the early decades of the nineteenth century that the volcano
becomes more definitely part of an urban imaginary, and takes on a
historical aspect, with the mythological forge of Vulcan yielding to
26
The Demographic Imagination
anthropocentric narratives. We see the increasing dominance of Pompeii
in the volcano narrative as the antiquarian interest in its ruins shaded into a
Romantic fascination with the City of the Dead, a whole antique world
preserved by volcanic catastrophe like a fly in amber, or like the court of
Sleeping Beauty as the American author Thomas Gray (1803–49) suggested
in 1830 in his historical novel, The Vestal, Or a Tale of Pompeii.23 As I
suggested earlier, part of Pompeii’s appeal was that its historical otherness
did not prevent it from being a mirror in which nineteenth-century writers
liked to recognize their own society – a complex and pleasure-loving urban
world poised on the edge of cataclysmic change. Vesuvian narratives, that
is, belong in that category of nineteenth-century cultural artifacts that dress
modernity in classical garb, from the imperial sublime of Turner’s Dido
Building Carthage (1815) to the decidedly bourgeois Rome of Lawrence
Alma-Tadema’s An Earthly Paradise (1891).24 Identification with Pompeii
and its inhabitants sometimes took very direct forms, as with the visitors to
Pompeii in the 1830s who chose to dine among the ruins, or in at least one
case to live there for two weeks, wearing period costume and reading
classical texts.25 It is in this context, perhaps, that we should place
Herman Melville’s comments on the continuity of the living and the
dead when he visited the city: “Pompeii like any other town. Same old
humanity. All the same death (whether you be dead or alive). Like Pompeii
better than Paris. Silent as Dead Sea”.26 Pompeii’s end had inspired a
number of treatments in the previous century, such as Jacob More’s Mount
Vesuvius in Eruption: The Last Days of Pompeii (1780), but the early
nineteenth century brought greater interest in the historical disaster of 79
ce.27 Many representations henceforth focus less on the spectacle of the
volcano per se, and more on the collision of the volcano with the city, the
moment of destruction and preservation of an urban population. Treatments
of this type include John Martin’s high-Romantic painting, The Destruction
of Pompeii and Herculaneum (1821), an extraordinary vision that makes their
fiery end look like the end of the world itself. As with the concurrent wave of
Egyptomania, fed by Giovanni Battista Belzoni’s excavations and writings,
the interest in Pompeii glided amphibiously among the relatively exclusive
worlds of salon and gallery and the more inclusive commercial culture upon
which we have already touched: Martin’s painting was turned into a diorama
at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly in 1822 (the same year as another major
eruption of Vesuvius) and two years later visitors to Burford’s Panorama in
Leicester Square could see a View of the Ruins of the City of Pompeii and the
Surrounding Country. Like Egypt, the volcano story could be reworked into a
variety of commodity-experiences for disparate audiences.
Under the volcano
27
The immediate source for Martin’s apocalyptic canvas was in fact from
yet another medium, his friend Edwin Atherstone’s The Last Days of
Herculaneum (1821), a long narrative poem. In Atherstone’s turgid
eighty-eight-page epic we see for the first time a detailed verbal description of “the last days” of the city in 79 ce that combines a narrative of the
destructive force of Vesuvius with a series of vignettes of individuals
caught up in the holocaust. Here, in other words, the commodityexperience of the volcano takes on a new aspect; the “special effect”
begins to generate new kinds of narrative around itself. While owing
something to the Graveyard poets of the previous century, The Last Days
can be enrolled in that “School of Catastrophe” that Curtis Dahl identifies as an influential part of the literary and artistic culture of Britain
and America in these years, and which rejoices in the destruction of
property and human life.28 Thus, unlike most subsequent narrative
treatments, Atherstone starts with the disaster, and only in occasional
paralepses do we get a glimpse of the previous life of the city. The poem’s
real raison d’être seems to be its elaborate descriptions of unpleasant
deaths, and of people escaping one horror only to meet with another, a
technique recalling Charles Maturin’s gothic novel of the previous year,
Melmoth the Wanderer. Here is an example of Atherstone’s Grand
Guignol:
Where are now the hapless crowds
That lately fill’d the streets? – Look on the earth; –
There blacken’d corses lie by lightning singed: –
There, tumbling down the stream, a hideous head
Nods in its course: – there, underneath yon pile
Of levell’d walls, some mangled limb alone
Looks out in gore bedrench’d from the crush’d trunk
Hot welling: – and see there a head forth peeps: –
Thoughtful and calm it seems, though somewhat pale,
And lightly dash’d with blood: – you’d say it lived,
And matters deep was pondering . . .
...
but that, flat press’d
Beneath yon mountain load, – what once was limbs, –
Heart – lungs – flesh–nerves and bone – to form a man,
Now lies a crimson jelly – oozing slow,
And bubbling from beneath. –
The cameos of individuals – the Roman soldier who is briefly reunited by
the earthquake with his dead son, the paterfamilias who kills first his family
28
The Demographic Imagination
Figure 1.2 L’ultimo giorno di Pompei (1825), Giovanni Pacini. Set by Alessandro
Sanquirico for 1827 production, La Scala, Milan.
and then himself to save them from more excruciating deaths, the “youthful female, of a form / Perfect as beauty’s goddess”, singing lullabies to the
headless infant in her arms–seem to exist only to make the relentless
general horror more local and effective. Ultimately, in its chronicle of
death and destruction, Atherstone’s poem wearies as much as it horrifies,
and it runs out of steam early on: by the time the “all-destroying lava”
comes on page 83, everyone is already dead, except, that is, the one man
who escapes to tell the tale “and die / A maniac.”
The Pompeian volcano soon migrated back to Italy and to yet another
medium: the opera. On November 19, 1825, audiences at the Teatro San
Carlo in Naples enjoyed a musical disaster narrative, L’ultimo giorno di
Pompei, by Giovanni Pacini, an event-filled two-act opera that made use of
recent local excavations for its details, while also, no doubt, reminding
audiences of the theater’s destruction by fire in 1816. Two years later, La
Scala staged a spectacular production of the same piece (Figure 1.2), and in
1831 Pacini’s work reached London. L’ultimo giorno centers on the machinations of the tribune, Appio Diomede, whose advances are spurned by
Ottavia, the virtuous wife of the magistrate, Sallustio (the men’s names are
Under the volcano
29
derived from two historical Pompeians, Appius Diomedes and Sallustius,
whose houses had been well preserved). Falsely accused of adultery, she is
sentenced to death by live burial, but the volcano erupts at the crucial
moment as an act of divine intervention; Pubblio, Appio Diomede’s
minion, confesses his role in smearing Ottavia’s reputation, and the guilty
are immured in Ottavia’s place, she and her husband fleeing as the curtain
falls on the destruction of the city. Created by architect and scenographer
Antonio Niccolini, and later enhanced at La Scala by the elaborate scenic
paintings of Alessandro Sanquirico, the eruption, and the destruction of
the city, made for a grand operatic conclusion. According to a contemporary Neapolitan review: “l’ultima scena presentante un quadro grandioso
e desolante della città sotto la pioggia di lapilli in mezzo all’inondamento
delle fiamme di fuoco che traboccavano dal Vesuvio” [the final scene presents
a magnificent and distressing picture of the town under a shower of
volcanic stones, in the midst of the fiery flames that overflow
Vesuvius].29 The shower of volcanic stones was probably created by
using painted sponges, as we learn from later descriptions of volcanic
special effects, but it evidently created a spellbinding illusion.30 In
London, The Examiner, which also admired the accuracy in the reproduction of the streets of Pompeii at the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket,
proclaimed that “the eruption, with the falling temples, and showers of
ashes and fire, is the finest scene of the kind we ever witnessed”.31
Pacini’s opera is probably the first cultural artifact in which the eruption
of a volcano appears as a fully plot-subordinated “special effect” rather than
as the main attraction of the representation, as it had been in the fireworks,
the transparencies, the paintings, or even Atherstone’s poem. In this it
inspired many successors. These included a liberally adapted version of
December 8, 1828, The Earthquake; or The Spectre of the Nile (Adelphi), a
“Burletta Operatic Spectacle” that brought the conventions of melodrama to
plot elements derived from Thomas Moore’s The Epicurean (1827) and
special effects from Pacini. (In Moore’s novel, presented as a found manuscript, the Epicurean protagonist, Alciphron, falls in love with a priestess of
Isis, Alethe, who is secretly a Christian; they flee Memphis and the snares of
the Egyptian priesthood, but ultimately they cannot escape persecution.)
Calculated to capitalize on the vogue of all things Egyptian, additional
spectacle was provided by a moving panorama of the Nile. In the end, the
vengeful Egyptian sorcerer, Orchus, a priest of Osiris, is denied his prey, a
Christian maiden, by an earthquake and inferno, and the lovers escape – a
much more cheery ending than that of Moore’s novel.32 But, indicating the
portability of volcanic destruction as an effect, the first play on the London
30
The Demographic Imagination
stage inspired by Pacini’s ending was one that eschewed the classical past for
modern gothic. This was a liberal adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1818), Henry M. Milner’s Frankenstein; Or, The Man and the Monster (Royal
Cobourg: July 3, 1826), partly based on a French play, Le Magicien et le
Monstre. The final scene at Mount Etna shows “the Summit only of that
Volcano as seen on the Spot, with all the terrific appearances that attend its
awful Eruption, the first attempt ever made to display this tremendous
Spectacle on the Stage”. The monster is shown at bay, surrounded by soldiers
and armed peasants, and pursued by his own maker. Finally, like the
Empedocles of legend, “he leaps into the crater, now vomiting the burning
lava” (Act 2, Scene viii).33 Shelley’s Enlightenment parable here becomes a
spectacle of dangerous energies thwarted.
In a more direct line of descent, Pacini’s opera was a primary source for
what is probably the first novel to exploit fully the possibilities of Pompeii as
a narrative setting rich in dramatic irony, Thomas Gray’s The Vestal, or A
Tale of Pompeii, which also features a villain who schemes to have the object
of his lust buried alive when she refuses him, and a Vesuvian eruption as the
long-expected climax of the action. Gray, probably also borrowing from
Moore’s The Epicurean, introduces a significant innovation to the volcano
narrative by incorporating nascent Christianity: to do so, he transfers the
79 ce eruption to the second persecution of Christians under the reign of
Domitian in 95 ce. In Gray’s Pompeii, “we are transported at once from
modern times to the days of our Savior and of his apostles. The curtain that
separated the past from the present is taken away and we breathe and move
among realized dreams and fables” (The Vestal, vi). The novel takes the form
of a first-person account by a modern-day visitor to Italy who is given a
worm-eaten manuscript, a tale of Pompeii, by a Catholic priest (again, there
are echoes of Moore’s novel here, as well as of the gothic). Written mostly in
the first person, the manuscript tells the story of Lucius and his conversion to
Christianity when he meets Lucilla, a Vestal Virgin who secretly practices the
new faith. Through the machinations of Matho, her frustrated seducer,
Lucilla is buried alive, having been falsely accused of betraying her office
by letting the Vestal flame go out. Lucius rescues her from the tomb, and
they flee to safety, but when her mother, Favella, is taken to be punished in
her stead, Lucilla feels she must return to Pompeii, and Lucius follows.
Lucilla is imprisoned and faces death, but as Favella and the venerable
Christian Vitullius await their fate in the amphitheater, Vesuvius intervenes:
The terrible mountain had suddenly opened its abysses – it seemed to cleave
and be rent in various directions, and from every cleft burst torrents of
Under the volcano
31
flame, roaring and curling high in the air. From the centre of the crater, a
solid column of fire was seen shooting up into the very heavens, and falling
at last in showers of lava, melted stones, solid rock, ashes, cinders, boiling
water, and every variety of volcanic matter. Huge masses of stone, larger
than the temple of Isis, were hurled flying into the air as lightly as the pebble
from the shepherd’s sling. Rivers of liquid fire were seen pouring down its
sides in every direction. (176)
The volcano, with its biblical echoes (“pebble from the shepherd’s sling” is
a reference to David’s slaying of Goliath) is not so much a geological event
here as a punitive act of God. Yet there is no conventionally happy ending.
The divinely ordained eruption saves Lucilla and Lucius from being
devoured by the wild beasts of the amphitheater, but, while Vitullius
succumbs to the downpour of ash, the couple die because they refuse to
leave behind the elderly Favella. “The thick falling ashes closed over them,
as the waves of the sea close over their victims; and the unfortunate Lucius
and Lucilla lay side by side beneath that deadly and burning mass, their
arms twined around each other’s neck, united at last only in death” (182).
There is no providential escape for the virtuous. The volcano takes the lives
of the good minority and the wicked masses alike; in the novel’s Christian
scheme the good will be rewarded in the next life, not in this.
It was not long before the volcano narrative returned to poetry: elements
of Pacini, Moore, and Gray are recombined in the work of another
American, Sumner Lincoln Fairfield, whose long narrative poem of 1832,
The Last Night of Pompeii, again enfolds the destruction of the city in a
Christian moral schema that is presumably supposed to act as a warning to
the unrepentant masses in the present. At the climax of the action a noble
Pompeian virgin is about to be raped by a debauched priest of Isis when a
timely earthquake delivers her from his clutches; she flees the priest’s
subterranean lair only to find herself in the temple of Venus, where she
saves the Hebrew princess-turned-Christian convert Miriamne, who has
fallen into the power of the lascivious praetor Diomede. Meanwhile, Pansa,
Miriamne’s beloved, about to be devoured by a lion in the amphitheater,
commands the lion to kneel – and at that moment the eruption causes the
lion to do just that:
A roar, as if a myriad thunders burst,
Now hurtled o’er the heavens, and the deep earth
Shuddered, and a thick storm of lava hail
Rushed into air to fall upon the world.
And low the lion cowered, with fearful moans.
(162)
32
The Demographic Imagination
The crowd finally realizes the danger they are in, and suddenly all is chaos:
One thought, one action swayed the tossing crowd.
All through the vomitories madly sprung,
And mass on mass of trembling beings pressed,
Gasping and goading, with the savageness
That is the child of danger, like the waves
Charybdis from his jagged rocks throws down.
(166)
That “gasping and goading” crowd becomes a familiar element in
subsequent treatments of the volcano, as the focus switches from the divine
to more secular narratives. However, in Fairfield’s vision, the emphasis is
still on the providential: Pompeii is destroyed but the Christians escape
to freedom, brands plucked from the burning, and they go on to found a
small Christian community on the “Switzer hills” (200): the destruction
of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and the nearby towns becomes a parable and
the volcanic eruption simply God’s judgment on their wickedness: the
manners of the Pompeians, we are told, were such as can leave us with
“little regret and less astonishment at the terrible overthrow of cities as
excessive and not so venial in their crimes as Gomorrah” (43) – Fairfield
points to the pornographic material preserved in the Museo Borbonico as
evidence of Pompeian depravity. Presumably, readers in the present were
meant to search their consciences as to whether their own society was
any better. It is possible to place Fairfield, like Gray, within Curtis Dahl’s
morally didactic “American School of Catastrophe”, with Pompeii
standing in for the America of the present. The implicit Republican,
anti-city message resembles that of Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire
series (1833–36), in which an imaginary classical city stands in for an
urbanizing and increasingly commercial America. But their work also
draws heavily on the European material we have considered, and, as we
shall see, provides material for further European takes on the volcano, the
city, and the masses.
The fires of revolution
By the 1830s, the volcano narrative was available to the novelist, poet,
dramatist and composer, while continuing to circulate as a form of popular
pyrotechnic spectacle. Whatever their differences, all these forms built a
densely populated world in order to destroy it. In its more expansive forms
the volcano narrative increasingly drew upon philosophical and religious
Under the volcano
33
contexts: the eruption could function either as a providential holocaust
that devoured the wicked and spared the Christian and proto-Christian or
as a fiery cataclysm that tragically overtook all – though presumably the
converts would at least be spared the flames of eternal damnation for which
the volcano acted as worldly stand-in. But in this period the politics of the
volcano also became linked to the radical, and again opera led the way, this
time Daniel François Esprit Auber’s enormously successful La Muette de
Portici, with libretto by Germain Delavigne and Eugène Scribe. In 1828,
Paris descended on the Opéra to see La Muette, also known as Masaniello,
which is set in seventeenth-century Naples and in which the 1647 political
revolt led by the fisherman Masaniello against Spanish rule is conflated
with the 1631 eruption of Vesuvius. The story of Masaniello was well
known, even proverbial; this was the fourth opera based on it. In the
spectacular closing scene after Masaniello’s death and the failure of the
revolt, the heroine leaps to her death into a stream of lava; the crowd runs
across the stage as the ground quakes; and “on fait tomber du cintre, depuis le
Vésuve jusqu’au marches, des pierres de toute grosseur qui sont censées sortir du
cratère” [rocks of all sizes, which are supposed to come out of the crater, are
made to fall from the flies, from Vesuvius to the steps (i.e., of the palace)].34
By explicitly linking the volcano with the revolutionary masses Auber was
drawing on some highly charged, specifically French dramatic predecessors, since volcanic closure had featured in a French Revolutionary play,
P. Sylvain Maréchal’s Le Jugement dernier des rois; prophétie en un acte, en
prose (1793), in which various monarchs, including the Pope, are consumed
by volcanic fire, an effect produced every night with twenty pounds of
gunpowder, licensed by the Comité du salut public. The play assured
audiences that “Il vaut mieux avoir pour voisin / Un volcan qu’un roi”.35
But in its spectacular effects and in its mute female lead (Fenella, the sister
of Masaniello), Masaniello was also adapting the popular and melodramatic fare of the boulevard theaters.36 The “blow-up” ending, for example,
had long been a staple of melodrama in Britain and France, a famous early
instance being the exploding mill in Isaac Pocock’s The Miller and his Men
(1813). Jane Fulcher has argued that in the 1820s the Opéra, closely aligned
with the court of Charles X, strived to stage work that chimed with popular
feeling while toning down any revolutionary content, and thus sought to
use boulevard material shorn of its radicalism (The Nation’s Image, 11–46).
She suggests, however, that this strategy failed: the reaction of the audience
to La Muette de Portici, in part mediated by an increasingly restless press,
was to identify with the revolutionary crowd on stage rather than to enjoy
cathartic pleasure in the tragic demise of Masaniello. In this context, it is
34
The Demographic Imagination
clear that, as in Maréchal’s play, the volcano is the objective correlative for
the energies of revolution and of the crowd itself: the Opéra’s attempt to
manage public feeling had only served to fan the flames of popular unrest.
London audiences had seen an equestrian version of the Masaniello
story in 1822, Henry Milner’s Masaniello, Fisherman of Naples or Deliverer
of his Country (Surrey, 1822), which, as the title suggests, made it a story of
patriotic rebellion against oppressive Spanish colonialism.37 This play was
frequently revived; other versions of the story included a Drury Lane
production of 1825 that featured Edmund Kean, and which was censored
by the Lord Chamberlain’s office. Before Auber’s opera reached London,
audiences also had had the opportunity to enjoy a number of adaptations,
including a ballet, André Jean-Jacques Deshayes’s Masaniello, ou le Pêcheur
de Portici (King’s Theatre, 1829). Other Masaniellos that year included a
stage version at the Coburg Theatre, Masaniello, or the Dumb Girl of
Portici, and an equestrian version at Astley’s Amphitheater in Lambeth,
Masaniello, or the Revolt of Naples. But, as Jane Moody has shown in her
study of illegitimate London theater, it was the “legitimate” version of
Auber’s opera, James Kenney’s Masaniello, that attracted most controversy.
This was staged at Drury Lane on May 4, 1829, and broadly followed the
continental staging: it ends with Masaniello’s death in battle, leading his
troops against the Spanish, at which point “an eruption of Mount Vesuvius
conveniently occurs, and the piece concludes, leaving the combatants
enveloped in fiery mist”.38 When Kenney was later questioned about the
“revolutionary tendency” of Masaniello by the 1832 Parliamentary Select
Committee on Dramatic Literature, chaired by none other than Edward
Bulwer Lytton, he stressed that “the revolutionary fisherman is humiliated,
and a lesson is taught very opposite to a revolutionary one”, claiming,
rather fancifully, that it had been seen in France as a “satire on the mob”.39
Nonetheless, in October 1830, a radical newspaper, the Poor Man’s
Guardian, had taken advantage of a royal command performance of the
play to urge its readers to attend Covent Garden to protest for reform,
including the abolition of the House of Lords; like the people of Naples
they would “hurl any tyrant from his throne who neglected or abused the
interests of his people” (Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, 115). The play was
pulled from the programme. Elsewhere, there are a few references in the
reviews that suggest audiences also ignored Kenney’s political closure,
including an account of spontaneous applause at the popular resistance
on stage to the tax collectors.
We can see a number of local reasons for the radical resonance of what
Kenney chose to present to the Committee as a play with a “Tory moral”, as
Under the volcano
35
Moody puts it (115). Volcanic energies close to home included the recent
Tithe Wars in Ireland (1821–24), the campaign for Catholic Emancipation,
and the campaigns for reform in England itself that led to the 1832 Reform
Act. The association of volcanoes with popular revolt was already part of the
vernacular culture around “Captain Rock”, the name used in their written
warnings by those engaged in rural terrorism during the Irish Tithe Wars.
Fueled by anger in the face of poor harvests, unfair tithes, and Protestant
evangelicalism, the Rockite movement also drew on the millenarian feeling
created by the circulation in popular form of the eighteenth-century prophecies of “Pastorini” (Bishop Charles Walmesley). Local and world-historical
blend in the movement’s incendiary rhetoric. According to one Rockite
notice from north Cork, signed “The Fireman, General John Rock”, “If
this caution is not immediately complied with, Vesuvius or Etna never sent
forth such crackling flames as some parts of Donoughmore will shortly emit,
so that to a distant spectator the parish will seem a solid mass of fire”.40
But restless audiences and the Poor Man’s Guardian were probably
also responding to the fact that by October, 1830 Auber’s opera had
reputedly ignited the Belgian Revolution against William I, king of
the Netherlands. As the Examiner reported of Brussels, “a revolutionary
movement” had taken place on August 25 of that year. “An immense
crowd filled the theatre and its neighborhood, anxious to witness the
performance of La Muette de Portici [Masaniello]. During the play, symptoms of sedition appeared, and after it was over numerous groups
paraded the streets.”41 (The people, it appeared, had already been
agitated by events in France, where in July the Bourbon king, Charles X,
had fallen, albeit to be replaced by the constitutional monarch, LouisPhilippe, a scion of the cadet Orléans branch of the same dynasty.) If in
the early modern period the volcano was a convenient symbol of the prince’s
puissance, by the 1830s, it was aligned with the people. When the reign of
Louis Philippe was violently ended by the revolution of 1848, the seismic
political change of the year was registered obliquely at the Royal Cyclorama,
which treated audiences to daily performances of the Lisbon earthquake of
1755. As Thackeray described it in a tongue-in-cheek piece for Punch:
Convents and castles toppled down before our very eyes and burst
into flames. We heard . . . the groans of the miserable people being
swallowed up or smashed in the rocking, reeling ruins – tremendous
darkness, lurid lightning flashes, and the awful booming of thunderbolts
roared in our ears, dazzled our eyes, and frightened our senses, so that
I don’t know if I was more dead or alive when I quitted the premises.
(cited in Altick, The Shows of London, 158)
36
The Demographic Imagination
Lest audiences miss the political theme, one of the pieces of music (played
on a huge machine organ, the Apollonicon) used to cue reactions to the
unfolding images was, of course, Auber’s La Muette.42
The last days
By 1835, as suggested by the advertising posters depicted in John
Parry’s extraordinarily detailed painting The Poster Man, London
audiences could choose among rival Vesuvian spectacles, including
plays, firework spectaculars, and dioramas.43 That volcanoes continued
to enjoy such drawing power was due in no small part to the fact that
the previous year the prolific Edward Bulwer Lytton had penned what
would become one of the most popular narratives of the nineteenth
century, and a classic of the demographic imagination, The Last Days
of Pompeii. Bulwer Lytton’s novel brought together the Pacini and
Auber strands of volcano narrative, and it was to have an influence on
all subsequent volcanic entertainments – fictional, dramatic, operatic,
pyrotechnic, and filmic. Already known for his silver-fork novel,
Pelham (1828), and his Newgate novel, Paul Clifford (1830), for The
Last Days Bulwer Lytton put a recent trip to Italy to use to write a
historical tale set around the eruption of 79 ce. Fascinated by the
ruins of Pompeii and the artifacts preserved in the Museo Borbonico
at Naples, he was primed for his first encounters with Pompeii as a
window onto antiquity by William Gell, Naples resident and author
of the influential Pompeiana: The Topography, Edifices, and Ornaments
of Pompeii. (The novel is dedicated to Gell, who had also introduced
many other British visitors to Pompeii, including Walter Scott and
Bulwer Lytton’s friend, Marguerite Gardiner, Lady Blessington.)
Bulwer Lytton’s first sight of Pompeii was also colored by his encounter in Florence with Karl Briullov’s vast and dramatic painting, The
Last Day of Pompeii (1830–33). Briullov attempts to capture the very
moment of destruction: only partly visible in the background, the
volcano spews fiery lava and tephra, and belches the black smoke that
lours overhead, while in the brightly lit foreground people cower or
flee in terror, some laden with goods, others attempting to aid their
loved ones; the bodies of the dead and dying are everywhere; ash falls
from the sky, statues topple, and the city itself already looks like a
vast tomb. While Bulwer Lytton devotes considerable energy to capturing the details of everyday life in Pompeii in August, 79 ce, every
page moves us towards a Briullovian moment of disaster.
Under the volcano
37
The Last Days entertains us with a complicated narrative that
features the star-crossed lovers, Glaucus and Ione; the blind slave-girl,
Nydia, who loves Glaucus; and Arabaces, an Egyptian sorcerer and
voluptuary who desires Ione.44 There is also a subplot that involves
Lydon, a gladiator who fights to free his enslaved, Christian father. The
Last Days is a complex commodity-experience, and not only because of
Bulwer Lytton’s famously purple prose. Philosophically the novel concerns
the clash of rival faiths: that of the sorcerer Arbaces, that of the Athenian
Glaucus, and the new Christian faith of Olinthus. Bulwer Lytton was also
keen to produce a vivid yet footnote-laden account of everyday life in the
city of Pompeii itself, recalling Gell’s work, though also independent of
it.45 In this respect the novel recalls the nexus of entertainment and
education in such earlier volcanic entertainments as Dubourg’s classical
cork models and Burford’s Panorama.
But our readerly pleasure in the vivid detail of the physical and
philosophical world Bulwer Lytton has created is always predicated on
our knowledge that it is about to end. This, after all, is the crucial aspect of
the volcano narrative as commodity-experience, and indeed Bulwer
Lytton’s elaborate cork model is finally swept away in a tour-de-force
passage. Glaucus faces death in the Amphitheater for the murder of
Apaecides, brother of his beloved Ione, but the hungry lion he confronts
senses that something is wrong and retires to his cage. Thanks to Nydia, a
witness appears who clears Glaucus and reveals Arbaces as the true
murderer, and just as the bloodthirsty crowd turns on Arbaces the volcano
that has been smoldering ominously in the background since chapter 5 of
book 1 erupts at last:
At that moment they felt the earth shake beneath their feet; the walls of the
theatre trembled: and, beyond in the distance, they heard the crash of falling
roofs; an instant more and the mountain-cloud seemed to roll towards
them, dark and rapid, like a torrent; at the same time, it cast forth from
its bosom a shower of ashes mixed with vast fragments of burning stone!
Over the crushing vines – over the desolate streets – over the amphitheater
itself – far and wide – with many a mighty splash in the agitated sea – fell
that awful shower! . . . Each turned to fly – each dashing, pressing, crushing,
against the other. Trampling recklessly over the fallen – amidst groans, and
oaths, and prayers, and sudden shrieks, the enormous crowd vomited itself
forth through the numerous passages.46
Glaucus and Ione are guided away from the mindless crowd, and certain
death in the smoke-filled city, by the blind Nydia, whose knowledge of the
streets does not depend on sight. Having saved them, she selflessly drowns
38
The Demographic Imagination
herself, and Glaucus and Ione go to build a new life in Athens, where they
embrace the Christian faith.
As will be readily apparent, Bulwer Lytton draws not only on Gell,
Briullov, and his own experience of Pompeii, but on much of the other
Vesuvian material that we have encountered. Among the most obvious
sources are Pacini’s L’ultimo giorno, with its love triangle and climactic
eruption; Moore’s Epicurean with its clash of faiths; Gray’s The Vestal, with
its oppressed Christians, and amphitheater spectacle; Sumner Lincoln
Fairfield’s Last Night of Pompeii, with its seduction scene, cowed lion,
and Christian lovers who escape to worship their god elsewhere; and the
marriage of populace and volcanic energy in Auber’s La Muette de Portici,
or its various London imitations, with which we know Bulwer Lytton was
familiar as chair of the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature in 1832.
We might also deduce that Bulwer Lytton saw at least some of the popular
Vesuvian entertainments of London as well as John Martin’s apocalyptic
canvas. Several of these sources were recognized by the novel’s first
reviewers.47
Whether in spite of or because of the fact that in its composition it is
more puddingstone than pure basalt, The Last Days became Bulwer
Lytton’s most successful novel, a hit on the continent (the Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography mentions sixteen French impressions by
1864) as well as in Britain and the United States.48 For contemporary
readers part of its power lay in its ability to bring the city of the dead to
life.49 Indeed, the novel represents this necromancy as its mission. In its last
chapter, the narrator switches to the near past and describes the skeletons
that had been discovered at Pompeii in vaults and gardens, at the Temple
of Isis, and in the streets – all that remained of those who had been cut
down as they tried to hide from or flee the lethal power of Vesuvius. It was
these “bones and skeletons of those who once moved the springs of that
minute yet gorgeous machine of luxury and of life” that inspired him to put
flesh on history’s bones (The Last Days, vol. 3, 309).
There is no reason to doubt that Bulwer Lytton did indeed wish to bring
the dead city to life, to reanimate the skeletons, and to reassemble the
disjecta membra of a classical city. But in The Last Days the past is shadowed
by the present in various ways, most obviously by the metaleptic footnotes
and narratorial interjections that interrupt the narrative flow to anchor the
diegesis in the narrator’s own time. There are asides, for example, in which
the narrator tells us that certain textual details were inspired by items found
at Pompeii and seen by Bulwer Lytton at the Museo Borbonico in Naples,
and others that explain pieces of classical culture (e.g., vol. 1, 39). The
Under the volcano
39
pleasures of narrative immersion in the diegetic present, that is, are in
tension with the pleasures of heterodiegetic knowledge, or historical
perspective. Yet some narratorial interjections work to collapse past and
present by suggesting continuities between the classical past and modern
Italy. In the chapter that describes the meeting of Glaucus and his beloved
Ione with the Vesuvian witch, we are assured, “Perhaps in no country are
there seen so many hags as in Italy – in no country does beauty so awfully
change, in age, to hideousness the most appalling and revolting” (vol. 2,
135). Pleasures, too, arc across the centuries: the guests at Diomed’s lavish
banquet are entertained by “one of those nimble [tightrope] dancers for
which Pompeii was so celebrated, and whose descendants add so charming
a grace to the festivities of Astley’s or Vauxhall” (vol. 2, 240). In one of the
most curious of these moments, our narrator leaves off a critique of the
“unnatural and bloated” (vol. 1, 219) aspect of the Roman empire to make a
plea for the virtues of small states and launch a spirited attack on nationalism, and the unification of Italy (vol. 1, 220).50
These metalepses act as a series of hints that, notwithstanding its
attempts to bring ancient Pompeii to life, Bulwer Lytton’s novel also
provides a refracted version of London in 1834. In this respect it is hard
not to see it as a novel inspired by the Reform Act of 1832, with its picture of
a pleasure-seeking aristocratic class poised on the verge of extinction at the
hands of seismic forces. While Bulwer Lytton himself supported Reform,
Esther Schor has shown that by the 1830s his first-hand experience of
Italian popular nationalism had begun to change his mind about popular
energies, and the novel represents the crowd as heedless and bloodthirsty,
addicted to the gory pleasures of the amphitheater.51 If the novel never goes
as far as La Muette in paralleling crowd and volcano, it makes the link clear
in its most vivid section, the impassioned description of the eruption that I
have quoted: the panicked mob that “vomit[s] itself forth” from the
amphitheater is the human equivalent of the explosive ash and surging
lava vomited forth by the volcano – unstoppable, bloodthirsty, annihilating all in its path. Where La Muette represents this crowd as a positive
revolutionary force, The Last Days portrays it as blindly destructive. The
escape of the select few – Glaucus, Ione, and Nydia – from the volcano/
Demos in this light seems less of a narrative of providential Christianity
than one of aristocratic selection, since even the faithful slave Nydia is
ultimately disposed of.
Like other successful novels of the day, Bulwer Lytton’s novel was soon
adapted for the stage. If Bulwer Lytton’s novel, like many other volcano
narratives, is an exercise in dramatic irony that shows the futility of human
40
The Demographic Imagination
plans, his own literary property was reworked in ways he might not have
anticipated or approved: in Martin Meisel’s terms most of the adaptations
were more independent illustrations than realizations faithful to its
original.52 One of the first adaptations was that of J. B. Buckstone, The
Last Days of Pompeii; or, Seventeen Hundred Years Ago, a success at the
Adelphi, where it ran for an impressive sixty-four nights in 1834 – we see it
advertised in Parry’s London Street Scene as an “Extraordinary Hit.”
Mrs. Keeley, later to star in the infamous stage version of Jack Sheppard
in 1839, was much lauded as Nydia; Frederick H. Yates played the
villainous Arbaces with gusto, and Buckstone himself took the part of
Sallust. The play ends with the familiar “blow-up” ending of earlier
volcano plays, and Arbaces’s final speech of defiance is the cue for
Vesuvius to make its entrance (Act 3 Scene vi):
[At this moment, the fire breaks forth from the mountain, and the walls of
arena fall – everybody cries. The earthquake – the earthquake! – Arbaces is
killed by the falling of statue – all in confusion and screams till curtain falls
on a grand tableau.]53
The Times declared that “the scenery and dresses appeared to be new, and
were both appropriate and splendid, and the eruption of Vesuvius in the
last scene conveyed to the spectator a good idea of the terrors of that awful,
natural phenomenon” (December 14, 1834). The Morning Post for its part
exclaimed in a review reprinted in ads by the theater’s management that,
“On the boards of no theatre, whether major or minor, and by no manager,
great or small, could the numerous scenic incidents and complicated
mechanical effects of such a drama be more perfectly displayed than as
witnessed last night on the boards of the Adelphi Theatre, under the
superintendence of Mr. Yates.”54 Clearly the emphasis has shifted from
the philosophical concerns of the novel to spectacle and special effects.
Perhaps the most significant change is that the play rejects the aristocratic
and philosophical ethos of Bulwer Lytton’s novel, and switches much of
the interest away from the oppressed Christians and high-society world of
Glaucus and Ione, and onto the lowly gladiators. Lydon is now Nydia’s
brother; his death in the amphitheater becomes a major scene, and in this
respect the play inspired many subsequent treatments of the gladiator
theme.55 Soon after, the Bowery theater in New York hosted an
American version of The Last Days by Louisa H. Medina, which opened
in February of 1835 and ran for twenty-seven nights. Nick Yablon argues
that Medina’s version “rearticulat[es] Bulwer-Lytton’s narrative in the
language of radical republicanism for its urban working-class American
Under the volcano
41
audience”.56 But there is something of a puzzle here. The version of this
play printed by Samuel French is actually the same as the text of
Buckstone’s given in Dicks’ Standard Plays, down to the costume
directions. However, the scenic descriptions of Buckstone’s play given in
ads and the cast of characters do not quite correspond to the three-act
version, which suggests that either he shortened the play, and that Medina
simply copied that shorter version, or that the play in Dicks’ Standard Plays
is, in fact, Medina’s, not Buckstone’s.57
As one would expect, comic treatments followed too, including a
burlesque: Robert Reece’s Very Last Days of Pompeii (1850, but not
performed until 1872 at the Vaudeville Theatre on the Strand in
London). The climactic scene (scene 3 in the burletta) lays bare the devices
of the stage volcano. The thwarted Arbaces points to the volcano:
Arbaces. (rising)
Wretched Pompeians, accept my pity.
For see the avenging mountain –
[a Man is seen trying to light a squib at the top of mountain]
All. (laughing)
No, it don’t!
Glaucus.
Not till the tag is spoken, friend, it won’t.58
Clearly, for some, the stage-volcano had quite literally become a damp
squib and could only be made to work as parody.
But, for the most part, Bulwer Lytton’s The Last Days received more
respectful if not always faithful treatment in a variety of media. Among
them, many performers who drew on its popularity was the American
animal-tamer [Isaac A.] Van Amburgh, who for a period billed himself as
“The Brute Tamer of Pompeii” and who appeared at Drury Lane in London
and the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin in Paris on his European tours in
the 1830s and 1840s. Dressed in appropriate period costume, he restaged the
man versus beast confrontations of the amphitheater; lions and tigers were
cowed not by divine power but by the crowbar he wielded. At the other end
of the spectrum of commodity-experiences, the fine arts also responded to
the novel with enthusiasm on both sides of the Atlantic. American examples
include Randolph Rogers’s sculpture, Nydia, The Blind Flower-Girl of
Pompeii (c.1854), which has been described as the most popular piece of
American sculpture of the nineteenth century, and James Hamilton’s The
Last Days of Pompeii (1864). Among British examples are Alma-Tadema’s
Glaucus and Nydia (1857), Paul Falconer Poole’s Escape of Glaucus and Ione
42
The Demographic Imagination
(1860), and, most famously of all, Edward Poynter’s Faithful unto Death
(1865). Perhaps aware that it was in part reclaiming its own, opera did not lag
behind, and there were at least four treatments: Enrico Petrella’s Ione (1858),
Victorin de Joncières’s Le dernier jour de Pompéï (1869), George Fox’s Nydia
(1892), and Marziano Perosi’s Pompei (1912).
Nor was Bulwer Lytton’s tale forgotten with the advent of cinema:
between 1900 and 1950 no fewer than nine films appeared under that title
or under the Italian title Gli Ultimi Giorni di Pompei, as Italy and the United
States followed Victorian Britain in regarding their own reflection in the
glass of the imperial classical past.59 Less direct imitations include Cabiria
(1914), a classical costume drama with intertitles by Gabriele D’Annunzio,
which opens with the eruption of Mount Etna in Sicily and the destruction
of the town of Catana, which launches the eponymous protagonist upon her
adventures; this film would in turn inspire D. W. Griffith’s vision of the
ancient world in Intolerance (1916). Merian C. Cooper’s 1935 sound version of
The Last Days borrows Bulwer Lytton’s title and the drama of the amphitheater, but little else. By this time the gladiator has become the protagonist of the
story, which owes as much to depression-era boxing films as to historical
epic: Marcus fights his way to prosperity after the death of his wife and child,
but forgets along the way what is really important in life before the volcano
reminds him, and he sacrifices himself to save his Christian-convert adopted
son. As with earlier film versions, the greatest spectacle is provided by the
volcanic eruption and panicked crowd scenes.
But, long before then, in a satisfying return to its own origins in Georgian
firework shows, The Last Days appeared in the 1880s as one of the spectacular
pyrodramas or pyrotheatrics pioneered by the Pain family, firework manufacturers since before the time of Guy Fawkes. These lavish shows appeared in
London and New York before touring to provincial cities, and they combined
grand-scale open-air theater with dance and other entertainments, always
culminating in spectacular fireworks, generally to represent some scene of
death and destruction: for example, The Siege of Vera Cruz, Paris and the
Commune, and The Siege of Sebastopol. In New York, where it was part of a
more general embrace of imperial pageantry, The Last Days of Pompeii was
first performed in June 1885 to a crowd of over one thousand at Manhattan
Beach (later shows would draw up to 10,000).60 It featured a full-size Temple
of Isis and Palace of Arbaces and a landscaped lagoon with barges, all in the
shadow of Vesuvius (Figure 1.3). As the New York Times reported:
Before the Temple stands an army of mail-clad warriors, with glittering
weapons and armor, before whom passes a procession of priests, dancing
Under the volcano
43
Figure 1.3 The Last Days of Pompeii at Manhattan Beach, Harper’s Weekly,
July 25, 1885.
girls, Senators, and slaves, all in brilliant and fanciful costumes, escorting
Arbaces, who walks under a gorgeous canopy . . . There are foot races,
acrobatic performances, dancing by the fantastically attired girls, and then
a confused combat, in the midst of which Vesuvius vomits forth a volume of
lava; there is a tremendous earthquake, the buildings totter and fall, the
populace rushes wildly about, and chaos is wrought in very short order.61
As David Mayer has shown, one of the features of later shows was the
realization of well-known Pompeii paintings (such as Poynter’s Faithful),
but in turn some of the lavish backdrop of the pyrodrama later appeared in
the Kalem film Ben Hur (1907), a nice example of how new cultural forms
can cannibalize older rivals.62 Mayer notes that the Pain family also staged
The Last Days at Alexandra Palace in Muswell Hill, north London, building up the Christian subplot of the novel with material culled from George
Whyte-Melville’s The Gladiators, and later Wilson Barrett’s The Sign of the
Cross (1895); the expansive form also incorporated contemporary variety
crazes, such as bicycling. From the United States, we have a detailed
account of the Pains’s pyrodramatic performance at Fort Worth, Texas
in October 1890, which suggests that Bulwer Lytton’s clash of faiths had by
then evolved into a species of vigorous Christian pageantry in which
44
The Demographic Imagination
Olinthus, armed with a good-sized fiery cross, faces down the evil magician
Arbaces.63 Where Bulwer Lytton had transformed the commodityexperience of the volcano by turning it into a vehicle for comparative
religion, a textbook on domestic life in a Roman town, and an allegory of
unbridled democracy, in the Pains’s show, the spectacular overwhelms The
Last Days and reduces its elevating ambitions to a few bare bones. The real
hero becomes, once again, the volcano as spectacle, and the chorus line of
dancing girls and colorfully clad Pompeians seems a celebration of the
masses as well as a democratic commercial entertainment, more circus than
classical tableau.
I have tried to give an account here of a particular type of polymodal
volcanic entertainment, or commodity-experience, as it develops from firework spectacular to indoor show, and from canvas to page, stage, and
celluloid, as well as back to the pyrotechnic spectacular. From royal spectacle
it becomes a way of articulating fears and longings about city life, and about
the urban masses. This is not a comprehensive account of the representation
of volcanoes, of course; there are other sorts of narratives upon which I have
not impinged at all. There are, for example, the “hollow earth” adventure
novels that develop from John Cleves Symmes’s Symzonia (1820): Edgar
Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), Jules
Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), Bulwer Lytton’s own The
Coming Race (1871), and H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887) – to say nothing of
Blofeld’s volcanic lair in You Only Live Twice (1967).64 If these narratives link
the volcano with the landscape of the unconscious, there is also a more
emphatically psychosexual aspect of volcanoes that I have not discussed
except insofar as it touches upon the early-modern association between
volcano spectacles and the potency of the ruler. This too has a long line of
descendants in popular culture, from the playful lyrics of “Funiculì,
Funiculà” (1880) to the lava lamp. And then there is the more philosophical
volcano, the void into which Empedocles hurtles himself, thus returning
himself to the elements, in Matthew Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna (1852).65
All of these might be classed as volcanic narratives, but they suggest a very
different trend of fantasy and a different poetics of space; most crucially, they
are not structured around the madding crowd
At the core of the particular volcano disaster narratives that I have
considered here are a set of urban fantasies, which have spread across
media and genres, as well as across national borders and linguistic divides.
The Forge of Vulcan and its peers is a vision, albeit a somewhat reified one,
of the democratic powers unleashed by the industrial and French revolutions; the volcano shows, operas, and novels of the early nineteenth
Under the volcano
45
century register the political instability of those years, and imagine an
urban world on the verge of an abyss, as the masses enter the political
stage.
In our next chapter we see a set of urban dramas that suggest that the
modern city might not have to be destroyed if only the crowd could be
controlled properly. In these narratives, no less transnational than those of
the volcano, the city is characterized less by spectacle and more by its
mysteries, and we turn from the pleasures of sublime spectacle to those of
surveillance. The revolutionary energy of the crowd is condensed into
that of the criminal mastermind, and a new type of hero arises to confront
him: the detective.
chapter 2
The streets of wherever: French melodrama
and Anglophone localization
A man walks into a bar, but soon he finds himself locked in the cellar by his
enemies, and the building is to be demolished on top of him; a woman is
drowning in the Thames, watched by a horrified crowd, when a violent and
alcoholic man of the streets dives in and rescues her; he nurses her back to
health, and discovers that she is his long-lost daughter. An orphan is saved
from a life on the streets of Paris by a nobleman, but he turns out to be a
betrayer in disguise, and the house he takes her to is in effect a brothel; the
true hero arrives just in time.1
These are a few of the recurring scenes from the nineteenth-century
stage, staple ingredients of the city plays that possessed an irresistible power
of attraction for nineteenth-century audiences. Michael R. Booth has
argued that, in Victorian melodrama in particular, the city becomes less
of a backdrop and more of a character in its own right in plays with such
titles as The Heart of London; or, The Sharper’s Progress (1830), London by
Night (1845), Lost in London (1867), The Great City (1867), and The Great
World of London (1898). But the same was true of other cities. North
American theater audiences frequently saw productions of English city
plays, but were also drawn by local titles: for example, Life in New York; or,
Tom and Jerry on a Visit (1856), A Glance at New York (1848), The Poor of
New York (1857), and The Dark City and its Bright Side (1877). Parisians
were among the first to enjoy such fare, drawn by Les Bohémiens de Paris
(1843), the stage version of Les Mystères de Paris (1844), and Les Pauvres de
Paris (1856), among others.
The relationship of mise en scène to city life is not always so direct, of
course. Off-stage space can be as important as what the audience sees, and
plays may not be about their direct setting only. Louisa Medina, whose Last
Days of Pompeii we saw in the last chapter, also wrote the frontier drama
Nick of the Woods (Bowery Theatre, 1838), adapted from Robert
Montgomery Bird’s 1837 novel of life in Kentucky. While set firmly in
the wilderness, its highly charged representation of settlers and savage
46
The streets of wherever
47
natives would have had a particular resonance in the cities of the east coast
during a period of nativism.2 Nonetheless, the city itself appears on stage in
the middle years of the nineteenth century in a way that is unprecedented.
Busy street scenes, crowded railway stations, the homeless masses under the
dry arches of Waterloo Bridge and the Adelphi, or their equivalents, recur
in the mises en scène of plays set in Paris, London, and New York. In effect,
the stage city, like Pompeii, provides a way of condensing the more general
demographic revolution.
But the surging urban population also leaves its mark at the level of
plotting and characterization: this is a theater of mystery and melodrama.
In the plots of crime drama, the increasingly crowded and anonymous city
is a place of sudden reversals, of secrets revealed and tables turned; at the
level of character, the contrasts are just as sharp: in a sort of moral frottage,
good brushes against evil to produce a frisson for the audience.3 Vulnerable
and friendless orphans walk the streets until they are preyed upon, or
rescued and restored to their lost families. Hardened criminals slink alongside them, some beyond redemption, others concealing soft hearts beneath
their grimy faces and streetwise demeanor. The city in this ideologically
charged vision is often presented as the natural habitat of crime, and the
masses become the dangerous classes, lurking in back streets and subterranean dens. But sometimes this menacing world is also a place of organic
community in which the poor help each other. A descendant of the
labyrinthine Gothic castle, the stage city also represents something decidedly new, a site of bustle and energy. It is a fallen place, but, unlike the city
we met in the last chapter, it does not face a fiery end. The energies of the
crowd are here channeled into those of the shape-shifting professional
criminal, who takes advantage of the anonymity of city life. In this phase
in the history of the demographic imagination disguised aristocrats and
plucky middle-class heroes usually get the better of these lawless but
resourceful figures. But, eventually, a suitable foil to the urban criminal
appears in the form of the police detective, who is as much at home among
the mysteries of the crowd as the criminal he confronts.
This set of sometimes contradictory urban motifs accretes first on the
Paris stage: as Michael Booth describes, a new phase in Anglophone stage
realism was ushered in by the many adaptations of Adolphe d’Ennery and
Eugène Grangé’s Les Bohémiens de Paris (1843), a play inspired in turn by
the phenomenal success of Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris (1842–43).4
Popularized in English by Edward Stirling as The Bohemians; or, The
Rogues of Paris (1843), and first “localized” for English audiences by
W. T. Moncrieff as The Scamps of London (1843), it produced a model of
48
The Demographic Imagination
the stage city that influenced city drama for the rest of the century, with its
combination of a melodramatic plot and suspenseful rescue episodes,
scenes of a sinister underworld, and, crucially, elaborately realized settings
based on actual urban locations. Sue’s novel and its stage successors can be
seen as part of the more general fascination on the part of the French ruling
classes with urban criminality in these years, a fascination that was both fed
and stimulated by the work of Victor Hugo, the memoirs of Vidocq, and
newspaper and broadside accounts of violent crime.5 As Thomas Cragin
puts it, “Parisians were obsessed with crime in the nineteenth century. And
not just any crime, but murder”.6 Louis Chevalier argued that a surge in
migration into the city (between 1801 and 1846 the population of Paris
doubled), a massive concentration of population in unhygienic conditions
in some of the older central districts, unemployment, and other social
factors caused an actual surge in crime that in turn created a perception that
crime was pandemic in the city. For middle-class commentators, the
laboring classes and the criminal classes were hard to distinguish, and
crime was seen as the social norm among the poor, not the exception: les
misérables were poor and criminal. Honoré Antoine Frégier’s book,
Des classes dangereuses de la population dans les grandes villes, et des moyens
de les rendre meilleures, published in 1840, offered a useful new term to
demonize the urban poor: the dangerous classes.7 If the claim about actual
crime rates now seems at least questionable, the social fears Chevalier
describes were clearly very real. As Paris rapidly grew, it became more
anonymous, and one reaction to that was a perception of danger; likewise,
greater social opacity registered as urban mystery. This would certainly
suggest one reason for the appearance of the theatrical city of crime in the
boulevard theaters. The basic model for many subsequent London- and
New York-themed plays, then, derives from some specifically French fears
regarding city life: that population growth brought with it a flourishing
criminal underworld, or that the masses, indeed, were innately criminal.
But this picture is a little too neat. For one thing, as Kate Newey suggests,
the many adaptations of Les Bohémiens – and besides Moncrieff’s and
Stirling’s plays there were versions by C. Z Barnett, Charles Dillon, and
Frederick Marchant – indicate, in fact, the “transposability of modern
cities in dramatists’ and spectators’ minds”.8 The crowded, crime-plagued
Paris of Les Bohémiens seemed to audiences in London and New York to be
just like home. Moreover, as Newey notes, the issue of origins is far from
straightforward, involving a busy traffic between earlier British and French
materials: Sue’s novel owes something to an English source, Pierce Egan’s
Life in London (1821), and its stage adaptation, Tom and Jerry; or Life in
The streets of wherever
49
London (1821), and Egan’s London in turn suggests a lineage going back to
John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), if not earlier. Sue’s narrator affiliates
himself to Fenimore Cooper, “le Walter Scott Américain” in his description
of urban “barbares”.9 And we might also speculate that Sue had been reading
Oliver Twist (1837–39), known in France as Olivier Twist, or had seen
liberally adapted stage versions, since this crime narrative is closer to his
vision of the metropolis than Egan’s jolly, picaresque tale. Dickens sets out to
reveal the iniquities of the Poor Law, and state violence against the poor, but
the novel soon turns into an exploration of London as a nest of professional
criminals. Like the Newgate Novels to which it was compared, Oliver Twist
seems just as fascinated by the idea of a criminal underworld as anything
produced in Paris. (In France, Dickens was already in this period seen with
Bulwer Lytton to be the successor to Sir Walter Scott, and there were various
early translations of Oliver Twist, including Ludovic Bernard’s translation,
Olivier Twist, ou l’Orphelin du dépôt de mendicité (1841), and L. de Potter’s Le
Juif de Bethnal Green, ou les voleurs de Londres (1843–44].)10 France, then,
does not so much invent the city of crime as create the most successful stage
vehicles out of stories and images of the city that were in more general
circulation. What such combinations of international plots and local setting
suggest is not just a shared experience of urban realities, or indeed of urban
fantasies, but the common acceptance of melodrama as a mode in which
such anxious materials could be transformed into pleasurable affect and
entertainment.
In this chapter I want to look at some of most traveled transatlantic
urban crime plays, most of which are first staged in Paris, but which are
adapted to a variety of other urban settings, sometimes in response to quite
specific local concerns. These urban plays cast a long, long shadow on later
nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture, through dime novels, pulp
magazines, film noir, and comic books, notwithstanding the brighter
June-visions of ordinary city life brought by Joyce and Woolf: the identification of the city with crime, and emotional investment in the detective
hero, are still very much part of our international popular culture. But first
let us turn to the novel that made the city of crime an international
phenomenon, and introduced a number of the set pieces of subsequent
city drama, Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris.
The mysteries of Paris
In The Mysteries of Paris and London (1992) Richard Maxwell identifies
Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), known in English as The
50
The Demographic Imagination
Hunchback of Notre Dame, as the first in a series of “urban mysteries”, a
subgenre in which he places the subsequent work of Charles Dickens,
Eugène Sue, and William Harrison Ainsworth, as well as Hugo’s own later
work. For Maxwell these novels use a series of recurring figures (the
labyrinth, the crowd, the panorama, the document) to come to terms
with the unknowability of the modern city. While there are a few issues
with this argument – it ignores the earlier urban picaresque of Pierce Egan
and others, and the inseparability of the novel and the drama in this
period –Maxwell is quite right to stress the primacy of Paris and the
mystery element as the chief ingredients of a new type of urban writing.
However, it is not Hugo’s novel, but Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris that
provides the plots and mises en scène that resonate the loudest through
subsequent stage representations of the city. In direct forms, such as The
Bohemians of Paris, The Scamps of London, The Beats of New York, and more
obliquely in Les Pauvres de Paris (and its many avatars), Les Deux
Orphelines, Léonard, and The Ticket-of-Leave Man, Sue’s best-selling
novel leaves its mark on urban drama for the rest of the century, and
beyond. Initially published as a feuilleton in the Journal des débats, Les
Mystères substituted the Paris of the present for Hugo’s fifteenth-century
costume drama.11 Gothic situations and characters linger in Sue’s novel,
but the Gothic cathedral is no longer the center of his Paris, which is one of
seedy bars, frowsy lodging-houses, and thieves’ dens, with occasional
glimpses of the homes of the rich; its emblem is the Seine, which seems
to stand in for the city itself in its ability to drag people down. The
protagonist of Les Mystères is Rodolphe, the Grand Duke of Gerolstein,
who seeks to atone for his past sins by helping those in need. To do so, he
disguises himself as a Parisian workman, and, escorted by his stout companion, Sir Walter Murph (Murphy in English translations), he mingles
with the great unwashed of the city; he is also aided by David, a doctor who
is a former plantation slave. The first beneficiary of Rodolphe’s mission is
La Goualeuse [the street singer], alias Fleur de Marie, a young prostitute
whom he defends from the violence of Le Chourineur [the knife-man], an
ex-convict who later becomes Rodolphe’s devoted sidekick. The Grand
Duke sends Fleur de Marie to live in the country with Madame Georges, a
woman who has her own history of hardship, and who has lost her son. But
Rodolphe is opposed in his mission by the Countess Sarah McGregor and
her brother. Years earlier, we learn, she seduced the young Rodolphe, in an
attempt to gain a title, and she plans to draw him back to her at any cost.
(When the Duke realized her real nature, he left her, and she paid for her
daughter to be raised by strangers, telling him that she had died.) Subplots
The streets of wherever
51
involve the romance between Rigolette, a grisette friend of La Goualeuse,
and Germain, the lost son of Madame Georges; and the plight of the
Morels, a poor family. These characters live in a lodging house of which
Monsieur and Madame Pipelet, comic characters of the Dickensian type,
are the concierges. The novel’s villains include the physically powerful
Maître d’École [the Schoolmaster], a murderer who has disguised himself
by scarring his face with acid, and by severing part of his nose; the one-eyed
La Chouette [the owl], his accomplice, who, we are told, treated La
Goualeuse with nightmarish brutality when she was a child, punishing
her by pulling out one of her teeth with pincers; Bras-Rouge, a criminal
inn-keeper, and his crippled son, Tortillard; and the corrupt notary
Ferrand, his housekeeper, Seraphin, and the beautiful “mulâtresse”,
Cecily (David’s former wife), who is sent to seduce him. The novel’s
spectacular episodes include the Schoolmaster’s attempt to drown
Rodolphe in the cellar of Bras-Rouge’s bar (he is rescued by the
Chourineur); Rodolphe and David’s surgical blinding of the Maître
d’École; the attempted drowning of Fleur de Marie in the Seine on
the orders of Ferrand, and her rescue by La Louve (the She-wolf], another
ex-convict; and the horrific beating to death of La Chouette by the
Schoolmaster, in the same cellar in which Rodolphe had been imprisoned
and almost drowned. La Goualeuse/Fleur de Marie turns out to be, of
course, the daughter of Rodolphe and the Countess McGregor, and
Madame Georges’s long-lost son is also restored to her; the Maître
d’École is in fact her long-vanished husband. Rodolphe and his new
love, Clémence, retreat to Gerolstein, where Fleur de Marie becomes the
Princess Amelia. But memories of the past are too strong for her to enjoy
her new elevation, and she renounces the man she loves to enter a convent,
where she dies soon after.
As Stephen Knight has shown, authors in other cities paid Sue’s
feuilleton the sincere compliment of shameless appropriation, and there
soon followed George Lippard’s Philadelphia-set The Quaker City; or the
Monks of Monk Hall (1844–45), G. W. M. Reynolds’s The Mysteries of
London (1844–46), Ramon de Naverette’s Madrid y sus misterios, and “Ned
Buntline”’s [Edward Zane Carroll Judson’s] The Mysteries and Miseries of
New York (1848), as well as later versions of the mysteries formula set in
Naples, New Orleans, St. Petersburg, Montreal, Melbourne, and Lisbon,
among other cities. Michael Denning notes that in the United States in
particular the formula spread to towns as well as cities, producing, for
instance, Oscar Bradbury’s Mysteries of Lowell (1844) and Frank Hazelton’s
The Mysteries of Troy (1847).12 Some of these localizations of the Sue
52
The Demographic Imagination
formula were of complex parentage: The Mysteries of St Petersburg (1880),
for instance, was by the prolific Welsh-American writer Henry Llewellyn
Williams, and not, as it claimed, by “Mikael Gortschakov”; and Die
Geheimnisse von New Orleans (1854–55) was written by Baron Ludwig
von Reizenstein for a German-language Louisiana paper.13
Here, though, it is the long shadow cast by the novel on the nineteenthcentury stage that I wish to explore. Sue’s vision of the populous city as a
breeding-ground for crime shapes international urban drama for the rest of
the century, and lingers still. Among the first theatrical adaptations was
Eugène Sue’s own production, co-written with Prosper Dinaux, Les
Mystères de Paris, un roman [sic] en cinq parties et onze tableaux, which opened
at the Théâtre Porte-Saint-Martin on February 13, 1844.14 There was, naturally enough, enormous pent-up demand to see Sue’s action-filled feuilleton
realized on stage: by eight in the morning the theater was under siege; by five
in the afternoon, “la force armée” was needed to contain the crowds.15 Seats
in the orchestra stalls were changing hands for 200 francs apiece.16 When the
curtain rose at 7 p.m., the audience who sat so eagerly in the newly decorated
theater comprised representatives of “la royauté, la politique, les lettres, et les
arts” (“Porte-Saint-Martin”, La France Théâtrale, 4). As to the production
itself, as the compressed summary above shows, the novel contains multiple
plots and violent action that could not be accommodated easily on stage.
Some characters and subplots disappeared, and even the main action was
altered: Ferrand is also Bras-Rouge, and he is the employer and direct
persecutor of La Goualeuse/Fleur de Marie; they live in the same house in
the rue de Temple as Pipelet, Germain, Morel, Rigolette, and Rodolphe;
when Fleur de Marie is drowning at the pont d’Asnières it is Ferrand
who saves her, thus getting her back in his clutches; and when Ferrand
goes to prevent her leaving Paris with Rodolphe, he falls foul of the Maître
d’École and his brigands, who blind him.
As the reviewer for La France Théâtrale noted, some of the differences
were not the result of theatrical structure but of censorship: Ferrand is no
longer a notary (i.e., a public official) but a private citizen, a businessman; La
Goualeuse is no longer a prostitute, but a street singer. Some critics carped –
La Mercure des Théâtres, for example, saw the play as a pale copy of the
novel – and some in the audience were none too pleased to see their favorite
characters from the novel so radically altered. However, the performance of
the well-known actor, Frédérick [Frédérick Lemaître], in the part of Ferrand,
was considered a triumph: Théophile Gautier thought that in the scene in
which he is blinded he was “beau et terrible comme Œdipe antique”. In
commercial terms, the play was a success, the 5,000 francs it produced every
The streets of wherever
53
night allowing the management to ignore the critics, but it was thirty years
before there was another production on the Paris stage.17
As with many of Dickens’s novels, there were spin-offs as well as direct
dramatic adaptations of Les Mystères. Audiences could thus go to see, inter
alia, Le Ménage de Rigolette at the Délassemens-Comique, Le Nouveau
Rodolphe at Le Gymnase, and Cabrion (a practical-joking artist who is
mentioned but never actually appears in Les Mystères, part of the semicomic world of the Pipelets) at the Ambigu-Comique. These plays tended
to dwell on the sunnier aspects of the novel, setting to one side its startling
violence and its representation of Paris as a volatile social melting pot.
Notwithstanding its limitations as a play, Les Mystères can be seen as a
seminal piece of theater in that it made Paris itself a powerful stage
presence. As Odile Krakovitch has shown, in doing so it was not entirely
without predecessors. These included such vaudevilles as Bayard and
Vanderburch’s Le Gamin de Paris (1836) and Charles Dupeuty and
Eugène Cormon’s Paris la nuit (Ambigu-Comique, June 28, 1842): the
latter melodrama, for instance, put the streets of the city on stage as a series
of tableaux, including public transport, a detailed realization of “La Halle à
cinq heures du matin” (i.e., the “marché des Innocents”, the vegetable
market in the first arrondissement), and the street life of the rue SaintDenis by gaslight:
Au lever du Rideau, des passants viennent et vont dans toutes les directions.
Un omnibus est arrêté au coin du boulevard, une personne en descend, une
autre personne y monte; le conducteur crie Complet! L’omnibus part . . . Un
homme . . . crie de temps en temps, le Messager, le Moniteur parisien . . . un
autre homme . . . crie: Allumettes chimiques allemandes.18
[When the curtain rises, pedestrians come and go in all directions. An
omnibus is stopped at the corner of the boulevard, somebody is getting off,
another getting on; the conductor shouts, “Full up!”. The omnibus leaves . . .
From time to time a man shouts “the Messager”, “the Moniteur parisien”
[evening newspapers] . . . another . . . calls out “German chemical matches”.]
This play also anticipates Les Mystères in making Paris not just a bustling,
vibrant, and colorful setting but as a symbolic landscape, a place where
good and evil struggle for ascendancy.19 But perhaps the most influential
predecessor of Sue’s play was in fact a melodrama that was itself
heavily derivative of Sue’s novel, and which appeared while the novel was
concluding in its serial form in the Journal des débats. This was Adolphe
d’Ennery and Eugène Grangé’s Les Bohémiens de Paris, a play of five acts
and eight tableaux, first staged at the Théâtre de l’Amigu Comique on
54
The Demographic Imagination
September 27, 1843 (September 26, according to the Journal des théâtres),
which changed the names and plots of Sue’s novel to the point where it is
really a new theatrical entity. The villain, Montorgeuil, helpfully explains
Bohemians to us as:
cette classe d’individus dont l’existence est un problème, la condition un
mythe, la fortune une énigme, qui n’ont aucune demeure stable, aucun asile
reconnu, qui se trouvent nulle part, et que l’on rencontre partout! qui n’ont
pas un seul état, et qui exercent cinquante professions; dont la plupart se
lèvent le matin sans savoir où ils dîneront le soir, riches aujourd’hui, affamés
demain; prêts à vivre honnêtement s’ils le peuvent et autrement s’ils ne le
peuvent pas. (Act 1 Scene vii)
[that class of individuals whose existence is a problem, whose social position
is a myth, and whose source of funds is a mystery, which has no fixed abode,
no known refuge, which finds itself nowhere, and one meets everywhere!
which belongs to no single estate, and which has fifty professions; of which
the majority rise in the morning without knowing where they will dine in
the evening; rich today, hungry tomorrow; ready to live honestly if they can,
and otherwise if they cannot.]
The resonance of the play’s title would already have been familiar to those
in the audience who had seen Honoré Daumier’s series of lithographs
(1840–42) of that name in the Charivari; Daumier’s focus was, like that of
Dennery and Grangé, on the struggles of those on the margins of society.
This is semi-criminal milieu rather than the temporary Bohemia of young
artists later made famous by Henri Murger in the stories of Scènes de la vie
de Bohème (1845–49), the source for Puccini’s La Bohème (1896). But it is
from Les Mystères that Dennery and Grangé borrow the principal ingredients of their play: urban crime, the struggle between the hero and the
shape-shifting villain, and a series of striking set pieces of the kind later
termed “sensation scenes” in Anglophone drama, notably the river rescue,
and the hero’s ordeal in the cellar of a tapis-franc. Significantly, they depart
from Sue’s model by making their hero, Charles Didier, a middle-class
rather than aristocratic figure; he is the good-hearted hero of melodrama
rather than a mysterious avenger like Rodolphe.
Given the influence of Les Bohémiens on subsequent representations of
the crowded city, a brief summary of the action will be useful: François
Renaud, alias Montorgeuil, is the king of Bohemian Paris. He and his
accomplice, Digonard, prey upon Paul Didier, a man of good family, who
has frittered away his money, and who has seduced Louise Hubert,
daughter of one Crèvecœur (Jerome Hubert). Crèvecœur, alias l’Abruti
(i.e., the idiot), is a hard-drinking, brutalized former galley slave,
The streets of wherever
55
wrongfully condemned for the murder of his wife, Marie, a crime actually
committed by Montorgeuil/Renaud. Crèvecœur shows his finer qualities
by assisting in the rescue of the abandoned Louise, who has thrown herself
in the Seine; she is helped also by Bagnolet, a good-hearted Bohemian, and
his sweetheart, Arthémise. Meanwhile, Renaud/Montorgeuil schemes to
marry off Paul Didier to an heiress, in place of his brother, Charles. Charles
attempts to foil this plot, but when he visits the bar that is the thieves’
headquarters, he is locked in the cellar – and the building is about to be
demolished. When a police patrol visits the estaminet, his cries are drowned
out by the singing, orchestrated by Montorgeuil. With Charles Didier out
of the way, Montorgeuil proceeds with his plan to marry Paul Didier to the
heiress. But he also wishes to remove another potential threat, Louise. He
tells Crèvecœur that Louise is his wife’s killer, and Crèvecœur is on the
point of murdering Louise in the deserted quarries of Montmartre, when
she reveals that Marie was her mother, and he realizes that Louise is his own
daughter. (With the benefit of hindsight we can see in this dimly lit scene
an ancestor of a setting that becomes a staple of subsequent crime narratives, from the pulps to television drama: the empty, underlit industrial, or
post-industrial interior.)20 Crèvecœur prevents the marriage of Paul Didier
and the heiress, and when Charles Didier, rescued from the cellar by
Bagnolet, dramatically reappears, Montorgeuil is apprehended.
Montorgeuil is revealed as Renaud, murderer of Marie Hubert, and the
Didiers plan to return to the country, where Paul can amend for his sins.21
The play packed them in at the Ambigu until the following March, and it
lingered long after in the provincial theaters. While some reviews noted that
the play borrowed heavily from Les Mystères, the play was generally recognized as having a life of its own. Among the scenic effects, the panorama of
Paris from Montmartre and the Seine by night from underneath the arches
of the Pont Marie were praised; the episode in which Charles is thrown in the
cellar was seen as especially effective, and Montorgeuil recognized as an
excellent villain. Chilly in this part was seen to be the star of the piece.
Not everyone liked the play’s easy conflation of the working class and crime,
however: the reviewer for L’Indépendant noted that the working-class members of the audience were not best pleased to see their characteristic overalls
identified as a criminal’s disguise, a “cache-coquin”.22
The city of crime on the British stage
It was not long before the success of Les Bohémiens inspired a series of
London adaptations. The Adelphi, already famous for such crime dramas
56
The Demographic Imagination
as Buckstone’s version of Jack Sheppard (1839), introduced the play to
London audiences as Edward Stirling’s The Bohemians; or, The Rogues of
Paris (November 6, 1843). Playbills advertised it as “based on Sue’s Les
Mystères de Paris”, a rather incomplete truth.23 Stirling stuck close to Les
Bohémiens, and the play reproduced the same scenic attractions: the
Messageries Royales, the River Seine by moonlight, a garret, a “tapis
franc, or low billiard and smoking room”, and the quarries of
Montmartre. The reviews are both fascinated and disdainful, with The
Examiner advising readers that “the incidents are of that romantic school
which immures its heroes in dark cellars, and flings its heroines from
bridges; prompts mysterious men to get other mysterious men into their
power, for inscrutable purposes; and luxuriates in much grinding of
teeth, rolling of eyes, and burning of red fire”.24 The play, then, clearly
used a melodramatic theatrical vocabulary that was already more than
familiar, but the recurring suggestion is that this it is all a bit too highly
colored for discerning viewers. The Times was generally favorable, and
pronounced the play a “decided hit”: “The incidents of the piece are
rapid and effective, the scenery is more than usually good”. It noted,
though, that this was a play that would please best “that part of the public
which wants the aid of scenery, costume, dancing, horrors, and merriment to stimulate its appetite for scenic representations”.25 For its part,
The Era was not sure whether to blame the state or the public, wondering
“whether the representation of pieces like the present reflect a compliment on the discretionary power of the [Lord] Chamberlain, or on the
taste of a metropolitan audience”, but declined to pursue this line of
thought, concluding that “our theatres must sail with the stream; must
retail French debauchery and sentimentality at second hand, or shut their
doors”. Audiences, on this view, wanted imported rubbish, and would
not be denied. Interestingly, though, he goes on to suggest that the
appetite for such low pleasures had been sharpened by local fare too:
placing The Beggars Opera as the distant ancestor of such material, the
reviewer also blamed “Boz and Ainsworth [who] have reared hot-beds
and erected green-houses for the culture of the filthiest weeds and plants
of low life”. Eugène Sue is seen to follow in the steps of Victor Hugo,
but has outstripped him “in his researches into the profoundest ‘cabarets’
of vice” and has drawn his heroes from “galley-slaves, burglars, and
pick-pockets, generally expressed in the term of Bohemians”.26 Having
delivered himself of these stern views, the reviewer goes on to praise the
performers, and to predict a successful run. And run it did, for seventyone performances at the Adelphi.
The streets of wherever
57
Hostility towards – and interest in – the Anglicized Bohemians alike
were informed by broader cultural and social-historical forces. In terms of
theater history, the critical animus directed against the plays should remind
us that 1843 was a significant year, one in which issues of taste and the
masses were brought into sharp focus. This was the year in which the new
Theatres Act placed major houses (i.e., the patent-holding theaters: Drury
Lane, Covent Garden, and the Haymarket) and minor houses on an even
footing; the latter could now stage so-called legitimate drama, and the
majors were now free to make a profit “by any and every legal and moral
means”, as the Athenaeum put it.27 Among some commentators it was
feared that this would result in Drury Lane’s staging lurid “transpontine”
melodrama (i.e., that in vogue in the working-class theaters south of the
river Thames), and not in a glut of Shakespeare at the minors.
However, we should also bear in mind that London, and Britain more
generally, had its own obsession with crime and the dangerous classes in the
first decades of the nineteenth century. As in France, as urban populations
surged, the figure of the criminal began to stand in for the working class
more generally, and became associated firmly with the city. As David
Taylor puts it, “The burgeoning working-class quarters of urban Britain
were seen as the natural environment of the criminal”.28 H. A. Frégier’s
term, the “dangerous classes”, was taken up by English commentators, and,
though the equivalence of criminal and worker was never as taken for
granted as it was in France, it came to inform such influential accounts of
city life in the 1840s as Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London
Poor, originally published in the Morning Chronicle in 1849–50.29 Insofar as
anxieties about urban crime were underpinned by political fears, we might
assume that the political campaigns of the Chartists in the 1830s and 1840s
did little to defuse establishment fears about the urban masses. What those
same masses were reading and watching became a subject of concern, and
the supposedly pernicious influence of fictional and dramatic representations of crime and criminals was the subject of gloomy debate. Jeffrey
N. Cox has argued that early nineteenth-century melodrama represents a
conservative turn, in which the hero-villain of Romantic drama is turned
into the simple criminal.30 But the critical response to crime-themed
drama (and fiction) suggests that these hero-villains were also regarded as
politically subversive by contemporary commentators. There was considerable suspicion on the part of the governing classes of the degrading moral
influence of recent “Newgate Novels” like William Harrison Ainsworth’s
Jack Sheppard (1839–40); stage adaptations of that novel, including
Buckstone’s version at the Adelphi, enjoyed enormous popularity before
58
The Demographic Imagination
they were outlawed by the Lord Chamberlain, in the midst of a moral panic
over the influence of such fare on impressionable audiences.31 (In 1840,
valet Benjamin Courvoisier was supposedly inspired to murder Lord
William Russell by reading Ainsworth’s novel.) Against this background
there was never going to be warm welcome among the ruling classes for
Sue’s Les Mystères, which was seen to be equally pernicious when it
appeared in English translation in 1843 from the American publisher
Harper Brothers. For the Athenaeum, “So long as [Sue’s novels’] reputation
was local, it was the wiser morality to leave it undisturbed”. It was quite bad
enough that in Paris “the theatres are besieged from cock-crow when there
is any hope of seeing a scene from the same dramatized”, but now Sue’s
pernicious works were “circulating among the vast and busy millions of
American and English readers”.32 For this reviewer, even the Duke’s
mission in Les Mystères was immoral, an attempt to redress “crime with
crime, [detect] chicanery with chicanery”. With this rot at its core, what
possible purpose was served by painting the low dens of Paris “in the slime
of the shambles”, and delivering up a “Walpurgis revel of all that is darkest,
most filthy, and most mournful?”(review, 375). Such unhealthy material
could not but have a demoralizing effect on susceptible British readers.
Whether because of or in spite of this moral panic, the London public
continued to demand Sue-inspired drama, which offered them brightly
tinted melodramatic incidents, but also a recognizable version of their own
crowded world. Other theaters soon followed the Adelphi’s lead, and
during the 1843–44 season assorted translations and adaptations of Les
Bohémiens drew houses to the Brittania, Surrey, Sadler’s Wells, Victoria,
and City of London theaters. The Era of December 10 observed that these
urban plays appeared to “exercise a spell in collecting, nightly, audiences
which has not been exceeded in potency since the far-famed history of Tom
and Jerry.”33 There were so many versions of The Bohemians on the London
stage at one point that theaters were driven to stress the unique nature of
their particular production, the City of London, for example, claiming that
“The Fearful Leap from the Bridge by Mrs Cowle can only be witnessed at
this Theatre”.34 This may have been true of Mrs. Cowle, but there were
plenty of fearful leaps to be seen elsewhere too. Admittedly, enthusiasm for
this striking scene may have waned at the Surrey when its leading lady,
Mrs. Honner, sprained her ankle on opening night, having missed the
mattress meant to cushion her fifteen-foot fall.35 Other theaters had their
own trademark draws and their own problems: at the Victoria the performing cat who was meant to jump from a basket in the opening crowd
scene – a comic parallel to the heroine’s later leap – refused to co-operate.36
The streets of wherever
59
A more powerful draw than any special effect or stage “business” was the
opportunity for London audiences to see their own city replace Paris as
the habitat of the Bohemians. The Era of November 19 announced the
arrival of W. T. Moncrieff’s “spirited adaptation” of Les Bohémiens as The
Crossroads of Life, or The Scamps of London at Sadler’s Wells. The posters
advertised it, in an interesting phrase, as “a new National Local Drama”,
and one “applied to the circumstances and realities of the present”.37 As a
justification for his translation of the action of the play from Paris to
London, Moncrieff assured the paying public that “Life, whether high or
low, however it may vary in costume, is essentially the same in all
countries.” The Era pronounced itself satisfied with his substitution of
the streets of London for those of Paris, and felt that he had “produced a
very spirited entertainment out of the revolting mixture of poverty and
vice, riches and crime, which inform the mass of beings by whom we are
surrounded”.38 The contrasts of urban melodrama, that is, simply
modeled those of London itself. The plot was essentially that of the
Adelphi Bohemians, with Charles Didier becoming Frederick Danvers, a
former naval officer, presumably trading on the popularity of naval heroes
on stage, from Douglas Jerrold’s Black-Ey’d Susan (1829) on. Montorgeuil
and his accomplice, Digonard, become Devereux/Fox Skinner and
Hawksworth Shabner. The “local” appeal depended on the use of recognizable London settings: Euston, one of the new railway stations, replaces
the Messageries Royales; the dry arches of the Thames replace the bridge
on the Seine; and a lonely London brickfield replaces the Montmartre
quarries. Versions of this play continued to draw for years afterwards, and
the basic plot received a new lease of life in the 1860s, when the “railway
rescue” borrowed from Augustin Daly’s Under the Gaslight (1867) was
sutured into the play. Boucicault’s After Dark (1868) was the first of this
new hybrid, but many others followed, and soon there were as many
productions of The Bohemians of Paris on stage as there had been in
1843.39 Versions of this reworked Bohemians continued to attract audiences
until the end of the century.
Long before then a significant new direction for Anglophone crime
drama, and for the demographic imagination more generally, was signaled
by the appearance of Tom Taylor’s The Ticket-of-Leave Man (Olympic,
May 27, 1863). In Taylor’s play the amateur crime-fighter – be he the
aristocratic Rodolphe or the bourgeois Charles Didier – is replaced by the
professional. Hawkshaw is not the first stage detective – he is not even Tom
Taylor’s first stage detective – but he is certainly the most influential, and
the Ticket-of-Leave Man became one of the most popular plays of the
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The Demographic Imagination
century. At the Olympic it ran for a record-breaking 407 performances,
and was a great hit in the provinces for many years after. In the United
States, as we shall see, it enjoyed similar success.
Although it can be seen as one of the “sensation dramas” of the 1860s, in
which the audience’s attention is focused on special effects-driven scenes, it
is less spectacular than Dion Boucicault’s successes of the same period (e.g.,
The Colleen Bawn [1860] and The Octoroon [1861]), and largely owes its
impact to its treatment of urban crime. Taylor’s play touched a nerve in
London, just as Les Mystères and its imitators had in the wake of the
Courvoisier murder and the Jack Sheppard controversy. By 1863, the social
fears of the dangerous classes of the 1840s had receded somewhat, but
urban crime continued to fascinate, and the ticket-of-leave theme in
particular was greatly exercising the British press. Concerns about the
new system of parole for convicts were focused by the “garrotting panic”
that had begun the previous year: it was widely feared that robbers, working in threes, were stalking the streets, looking for victims to throttle and
rob. The perpetrators were assumed to be ex-convicts, and some people
believed that the technique of garrotting had been borrowed from the
Thugs of India, who had been suppressed in the 1840s.40 The 1862 panic
was not the first – there had been an earlier garrotting scare in the early
1850s. But the 1862 version probably had the greater impact, leading as it
did to the passing of the Security Against Violence Act (alias the Garrotters
Act) of 1863, which laid down harsh sentences for violent crime.41 Nor was
it only the state that responded to the panic: entrepreneurs recognized a
gap in the market for items of personal protection for the urban gentlemen
(the victims seemed to be male for the most part), and nervous pedestrians
could soon buy knuckledusters, belts that fired live ammunition, and such
stylish items as anti-garrotte glove, and an anti-garrotte cravat.42
One of the catalysts for the 1862 panic had been the publicity surrounding
the robbery of MP Hugh Pilkington in Waterloo Place in the early hours of
July 16: he had been hit on the head and robbed of his watch as he was
walking home from the House of Commons. Although it appears that
Pilkington had been clubbed rather than garrotted, the incident was soon
linked to other assaults, and London was seen to be in the middle of a violent
crime wave.43 But the wider context for the garrotting panic was the effective
end of the transportation of convicted criminals to Australia in 1852. The
worst of the dangerous classes could no longer be simply exported; instead
they would have to be somehow reassimilated. Tom Taylor was not the first
to make theatrical capital out of the issue of convicts released on “tickets of
leave” (i.e., on parole). Watts Phillips’s A Ticket of Leave, a farce, had
The streets of wherever
61
appeared at the Adelphi in December 1, 1862, and had run for an impressive
sixty-one nights, several reviewers noting that Phillips had taken a risk that
had paid off in producing a play that, as The Examiner put it, was “apropos to
the garrotte panic”.44 (The protagonist, Mr. Aspen Quiver, is a nervous
householder who thinks that his wife’s cousin, just returned from Australia, is
an ex-convict; in fact it is his butler who is the ticket-of-leave man, and the
cousin foils the burglary the butler plans.) J. Crawford Wilson had also
offered comic relief for the public’s fears with My Knuckleduster (Strand,
February 1863), in which a visitor to London arms himself against garrotting
with an anti-garrotte collar, knuckleduster, and revolver, only to injure
himself with the former two, and alarm himself with the last.45 (The Lord
Chamberlain’s office had suggested the title of My Knuckleduster, rejecting
the original: The Anti-Garrotte.)46
Taylor’s play, then, appeared at a moment when the perception of
London as home to the dangerous classes was at a new peak, and when
ex-convicts were seen to be a particular urban menace, a dangerous surplus
population that could no longer be exported. The plot of The Ticket-ofLeave Man is a straightforward one. Robert Brierly is a “Lancashire Lad”
who comes to London to spend a small inheritance, but falls into bad
company in the form of James Dalton, alias Jem Downy, and is tricked
into passing a forged banknote. Brierly is arrested by Hawkshaw, a police
detective, and spends two years in prison. When he is released on a ticket of
leave, Dalton and his associate, the fence Melter Moss, make sure that
employers know of his history. Though Brierly is buoyed by the love of
May Edwards, a singer, he is dismissed from one job after another, and is at
a low ebb when his old companions ask him to join them in the burglary
of his former employer, Mr. Gibson. Brierly is still an honest man, and tries
to get word to Gibson, but his companions stick close to him (cf. Les
Mystères de Paris, in which Rodolphe pretends to join the Schoolmaster
and La Chouette in a robbery, but cannot get away from them long enough
to warn his associates). But the disguised Hawkshaw witnesses all, and
reveals himself to Brierly (and us) at a crucial moment – a coup de théâtre
traceable to the memoirs of Vidocq, the French detective.47 In the play’s
most elaborate sensation scene, Dalton and Moss are caught red-handed as
they break into Gibson’s office, and the latter is suitably grateful to Brierly,
who is hurt in the fray.
As in the 1840s, this kind of urban material was felt to blur the
boundaries of class taste. The Times, for example, opined that it brought
the cops-and-robbers drama of the working-class transpontine theaters to
the West End: “forged notes are circulated in the least romantic way; the
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The Demographic Imagination
agency of the police detective is visible through the whole course of the
story; the handcuff is rarely out of sight . . . for many years expedients like
these have delighted the audiences on the Surrey side of the water”.48
However, the same review praises Telbin’s mise en scène for its verisimilitude: Gibson’s city office is described as looking “like a place where real
business is transacted”. “The city churchyard”, the reviewer continues, “in
which the catastrophe takes place, and which is to all intents and purposes a
‘sensation scene’, is not only one of Mr. Telbin’s masterpieces, but is just
that sort of obscure nook which to be found nowhere in the world beyond
the jurisdiction of the Lord Mayor”. The Athenaeum was largely favorable,
praising the acting and the realistic sets, and describing the play as “new”.49
In some ways it was new. It should be clear from the brief summary I
have given, though, how much the play owes to previous city dramas.
Dalton/Downy and Melter Moss are the lineal descendants of Les
Bohémiens de Paris’s villainous pair, Montorgeuil and Digonard, by way
of Devereux/Fox Skinner and Hawksworth Shabner from The Scamps of
London. But the character of the detective revises the picture of the city
created by those plays, and adds a new dimension to the demographic
imagination. Where did he come from? As The Times notes, the police
detective was a familiar character on the transpontine stage. Taylor himself
had already deployed stage detectives in Still Waters Run Deep (1855,
Gimlet) and The Overland Route (1860, Moleskin). However, Taylor was
not, in fact, borrowing in the first instance from Surrey-side, nor was he
simply reworking his own earlier use of the stage detective. Once again, the
Parisian stage had provided the model. When the play’s origins began to be
questioned, Taylor claimed that while he owed a debt to “a dramatic tale”,
Le Retour de Melun, as had been acknowledged in the application for a
license for the play, “the dialogue is my own, and I have made the
personages in the play, its sentiments, and its action my own”.50 This
gave the impression that he was adapting a French story for the theater, but
in fact Édouard Brisebarre and Eugène Nus’s Le Retour de Melun was a
play, published in Drames de la Vie in 1860, and staged as Léonard at the
Théâtre de la Gaité on December 31, 1862, where it had a good run.51 (Its
success was probably aided by the popularity of Victor Hugo’s epic
convict-novel, Les Misérables, which had appeared earlier that year.) The
Era was the first to notice the resemblance between Taylor’s play and
Léonard, though it was inclined to forgive such borrowings, noting that
while the play was “based on the French drama of MM. Brisebarre and
Nus, which under the title of Léonard has for some months had a successful
run in the Parisian capital, the treatment of Mr Tom Taylor has given it a
The streets of wherever
63
thoroughly English aspect”.52 On June 13, the Athenaeum reported that “a
correspondent intimate with the French playhouses and plays desires us to
point out that The Ticket-of-Leave Man at our Olympic Theatre, was last
season Léonard at one of the Boulevard Theatres and very successful
there”.53 The Daily Telegraph, the Star, and the Penny Illustrated Paper
also picked up on Taylor’s French debts. By August of that year, Henry
Morley, in his play-going journal, was stating it as common knowledge
that Taylor had simply appropriated the play:
August 15 [1863]. Mr Tom Taylor’s play, written by two Frenchmen, the
Léonard of MM. Brisebarre and Eugene Nus, Englished as the Ticket-ofLeave Man has a great run of success. When this drama was first produced
here Mr Tom Taylor received from most people entire credit for the play,
while some profound observations were made here and there as to his logic
in illustrating the ticket-of-leave question by a man who was not really a
criminal. We know what would be said of a writer in any other department
of literature, except only the stage, who, having translated into English, with
a few small changes and touches and a transformation of title, the book of
any foreign author, should present it to the public as his own.54
Such accusations lingered, and a few years later Taylor was described in
an acrimonious essay in the Athenaeum by Thomas Purnell [writing as
“Q”] as “the great foster-father of the Gallic drama”.55 This was a little
unfair, in that Taylor was probably not as heavy a borrower of French
dramatic material as, say, Dion Boucicault. Even as regards The Ticket-ofLeave Man, a line-by-line comparison of the kind done by the University of
Hull’s Performance Translation Centre shows that Taylor’s version is
significantly different from the version in Drames de la Vie: there are four
acts, not six; scenes and settings are dropped or altered; and the dialogue is
substantially different. The Montrouge quarry scene, for example, in
which Léonard is arrested, disappears, and Bob Brierly goes straight from
the Bellevue Tea Gardens to prison.56 Taylor does retain the basic narrative, the central characters, and the strongest scenes. Thus Brisebarre and
Nus’s Tête-Noire and Larigole become Dalton/Downy and Moss; Marcol,
alias “Le Lynx”, becomes Hawkshaw; Léonard becomes Brierly; La Cigale
becomes May, and so on; La Pipe Culotté becomes the Bellevue Tea
Gardens; La Cigale’s garret becomes May’s; M. Herbillon’s premises
becomes the City office of Mr. Gibson; and French audiences were
presumably as surprised and delighted as English ones to see that the
drunk in the tavern was really the disguised Marcol/Hawkshaw.
One aspect of the characterization that is significantly different is the
metamorphosis of the secondary villain Larigole into Melter Moss, a stage
64
The Demographic Imagination
Jew. Tête-Noire mocks Larigole’s “tightness” by saying: “Ta mère devait
être Juive, et ton père Arabe” [Your mother must have been a Jew, and your
father an Arab], but it is not clear that Larigole was played as a Jew. On the
London stage Moss was played as an ethnic stereotype by George Vincent,
The Times’s review describing him as “an old shuffling, shambling, snuffy
scoundrel of the Fagin breed”, The Era identifying him as an “old
Hebrew”.57 This element of the play suggests a debt not so much to
Brisebarre and Nus, then, but to the urban world of Dickens, as well as
to the Jewish accomplice of W. T. Moncrieff’s Scamps of London,
Shabner.58 Localization was not only a matter of changing the name of
streets and adding topicality: the landscape of prejudice could be adapted
too, and the ethnic elements of the dangerous classes could be varied.
Taylor’s bold adaptation inspired others to try their luck with the ex-con
and detective formula, and several imitations followed, including The
Return of a Ticket of Leave (Standard, July, 1863), a title that clearly echoes
Le Retour de Melun, and C. H. Hazlewood’s The Detective; or, A Ticket of
Leave, at the Victoria (July/August 1863). The title of Hazlewood’s play
indicates that by then it had become clear that it was the detective as much
as the ticket-of-leave man who was the key to dramatic success.
Henceforth, urban crime drama would also be detective drama; a hero
had been found for the thronged streets.
New York on stage
Léonard, Tom-tailored to the English appetite for returned convict
drama, traveled very successfully across the Atlantic, as we shall see.
But before American audiences ever wrung their hands at the hard lot
of the Ticket-of-Leave Man, or gasped at the sudden appearance of the
disguised Hawkshaw, they had seen quite a number of other European
plays that represented the city as a Bohemian world, and which seemed to
delight the houses of the Bowery and Broadway as much as they had their
transatlantic peers.59 An early example was Tom and Jerry, or, Life in
London, Moncrieff’s stage version of Pierce Egan’s picaresque Life in
London (1821), which was a hit in the United States in 1824, some
two years after its London debut. In the 1840s, the Irish actor-manager
John Brougham realized the potential of Tom and Jerry as a vehicle for a
series of localized urban comedies, and used it for his Life in New York
(1844), before taking it on the road as Tom and Jerry; or Life in Boston
(1847), Tom and Jerry; or Life in Cincinnati, and so on, as location
demanded.60
The streets of wherever
65
When the new style of suspense-driven Parisian crime melodrama
arrived in New York in the 1840s it came first not to the upmarket Park
Theatre but to the more working-class Bowery Theatre, then run by the
colorful English actor-manager Thomas S. Hamblin. An adaptation of Les
Mystères de Paris by C. H. Saunders ran there for two weeks from October
27, 1843, with C. W. Clarke as Rodolphe, J. R. Scott as the Chourineur,
and Mr. Johnson as the Maitre de Cole (sic) (Odell, Annals of the New York
Stage, vol. v, 22).61 In November, the audience at the rival Chatham
Theatre could also savor The Mysteries of Paris, bringing them a change
from such fare as the blackface minstrelsy of Thomas Dartmouth “Jim
Crow” Rice and the stage Irishisms of Barney Williams.62 The play was
soon familiar enough to attract the homage of parody: a comic piece
entitled The Mysteries of New York was staged in January, and Rice played
in it for his benefit (Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, vol. v, 33–34).
It is scarcely a surprise that plays featuring urban con-men succeeded in
the United States as they had in Britain and France, since, as Karen
Halttunen has argued, the confidence man haunted the imagination of
the middle class in Jacksonian America. At a time of unprecedented urban
growth driven by the demographic revolution, but also by migration from
the country to the city and by immigration from Europe, older assumptions about the link between personal sincerity and appearance came under
pressure. (To give some sense of the rapidity of urban growth, the population of New York in 1800 was around 60,000; by 1840, it had increased
fivefold; by 1850, it stood at half a million.63 The 1840s saw a major wave of
immigration from Ireland, driven by the potato famine.) For Halttunen,
the persuasive confidence man also condenses middle-class fears
about Jacksonian mass politics, and about speculation and the market
economy.64 But the urban tricksters fascinated the working classes too,
including the “Bowery b’hoys”, described by Richard Butsch as “the first
working-class youth culture, built around consumption of alcohol, clothes
and theater”, and drawn from the ranks of the young, unmarried men who
lived around the Bowery.65
It was in fact the equally working-class Chatham rather than the Bowery
that appears to have been the first to stage a version of Les Bohémiens de
Paris (December 20, 1843), with Junius Brutus Booth junior (brother of
Edwin and of John Wilkes) in the role of Montorgeuil (Odell, Annals of the
New York Stage, vol. v, 12–13, 33). The Bowery soon followed suit with its
own version, and other cities did not lag far behind, with the National
Theatre, Boston staging Stirling’s The Bohemians: or, The Rogues of Paris,
on January 22, 1844.66 It was not until March that the Bohemians found
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their way to the fashionable Park Theatre, New York in The Bohemians of
Paris, or, The Mysteries of Crime (March 6, 1844), with Mr. Barry as
Montorgeuil, and Mr. Chippindale as Bagnolet.67 Audiences at the Park
had earlier in the season enjoyed the more highbrow fare of such distinguished visitors as William Macready, the tragedian, who would later play
a part in the Astor Place Riot. By staging The Bohemians of Paris, as George
Odell points out, the manager, Simpson, was “tearing a leaf from the books
of the Bowery and Chatham” (Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, vol. v,
33). This effectively replicates the London pattern: the West End drew on
the transpontine houses for their urban crime dramas, and the transpontine, Surrey-side theaters drew on the theaters of Paris, as we have seen. At
the Park, the Bohemians continued a success, and was repeated frequently.
Revivals of the Mysteries of Paris, The Bohemians, and The Scamps of London
continued to pop up from time to time in subsequent decades, particularly
at the Bowery Theatre and National, and various popular Brooklyn
venues, in which the bill of fare changed frequently.
But, as the success of the various “localized” Tom and Jerry plays attests,
American audiences were as hungry as those of Paris and London for
detailed representations of their own city as they were for depictions of
the dangerous classes.68 They liked to see highly colored tales of urban
crime, but they also craved realistic local detail, as Laurence Hutton noted
in his 1890 Curiosities of the American Stage: “cruelly wronged but humble
maidens met disinterested detectives by real lamp-posts and real ashbarrels, in front of what really looked like real saloons”.69 Odell notes
that such local dramas are primarily associated with Mitchell’s Olympic
Theatre in the 1840s, but they were a recurring feature of New York drama
more generally. An early instance, The New York Merchant and His Clerks
(Park Theatre, April 11, 1843), had scenes of the Battery, Wall Street,
Chatham Square, and the Lunatic Asylum.70 (One is reminded of
Cormon and Dupeuty’s Paris la nuit, with its evocations of real streets
and markets.) These plays maintained their popularity in subsequent
decades: for example, on November 26, 1857, Burton’s New Theatre
advertised A Day in New York, the attractions of which included scenes
of the Battery, Noon in Broadway, and Night in the Bowery, with Burton
himself playing a wharf rat and an apple woman (Odell, Annals of the New
York Stage, vol. vii, 9). The following year, the Bowery on October 25
offered a local drama, New York and Brooklyn, or, The Poor Sewing Girl,
that featured the conflict between such broadly drawn characters as the
hero Cyrus Manly and villain Israel Grasp against a colorful local background. Spectacular sets included “The Conflagration of the Crystal
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Palace” (this large structure was situated in what is now Bryant Square until
it was destroyed by fire in October 1858), the “Fireman’s Torchlight
Procession”, and “Brooklyn by Moonlight” (Odell, Annals of the New
York Stage, vol. vii, 136). More over-the-top versions of these urban
melodramas drew audiences to the cheap Brooklyn theaters in later years,
as with Through by Daylight (Wood’s Museum, July 3, 1871). Odell quotes
the account of the latter in The Stage:
there are scenes in the Bowery, including the poverty-stricken chambers of
working girls and concert-saloons . . . a girl is poisoned and dies; somebody
dances a jig; a “nest of love” is exhibited, and a “viper” is shown up . . .
villainy is defeated, and virtue is rewarded. (Odell, Annals of the New York Stage,
vol. ix, 35)
Such local plays of lurid incident and realistic spectacle would live on in the
touring 10–20–30 drama and, as Ben Singer has shown, in early film serials.
But neither of these later off-the-peg versions of city life could offer drama
quite so tailor-made for local audiences in search of the familiar made
spectacular and the mysterious knowable. In light of this appetite for the
local, it took a surprisingly long time for the Bohémiens themselves to be
domesticated. New Yorkers had had thirty years of versions of Les
Bohémiens before they finally saw one adapted to their own locale: The
Beats of New York, by J. J. Wallace, which appeared at Niblo’s Theatre the
week of July 1, 1873. According to the New York Times, “Mr Wallace’s
adaptation of “Les Bohémiens” metamorphoses the vagrants of the French
capital into rather freely drawn specimens of the parasites of New York,
while the language of the poor and populous quartiers of Paris is exchanged
for the slang of the hour in the Paris of America.”71 While such transpositions still had some charm, it was clearly a charm that was worn rather thin,
and it is worth noting that this play was staged during the doldrums of the
summer, when no great audience could be expected.
At this stage we might consider a slightly different strain of specifically
American urban drama, one aimed squarely at the “Bowery b’hoys” and
their equivalents: the comic Mose plays that proliferated at mid-century
and that pushed the appeal of the urban familiar for all it was worth,
while retaining an essentially Mysteries-derived view of the city as the
habitat of criminals and confidence men. In these plays, as Richard
M. Dorson puts it, “through the slums and vice lairs of Gotham
moved a strange uncouth avenger, a gutter scamp turned knight errant”,
Mose the fireman or “fire b’hoy”.72 There are probably earlier fireman
hero plays, such as Life in New York, or The Fireman on Duty (before
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1832)73, and Mitchell’s Olympic Theatre had already made a reputation
for its local plays, but an epoch was marked with Benjamin A. Baker’s A
Glance at New York in 1848 (Olympic, February 15, 1848), a piece first
performed at Baker’s own benefit, and which spawned a whole series of
plays featuring Mose as “a true specimen of one of the b’hoys”, played by
Francis S. Chanfrau.74 (According to Thomas Allston Brown, Mose was
based on a real person, Mose Humphrey, a printer at the New York
Sun.)75 Mose’s first line, delivered in a broad Bowery accent, “I ain’t a
goin’ to run wid dat mercheen [fire-engine] no more”, became legendary,
and the play became one of the great popular successes of the nineteenthcentury American stage.76 The plot centers on one George Parsells, a
rube who comes to town, where he is cheated at every turn until he is
befriended by Mose, fireman, street fighter, and diamond in the rough, a
figure readily identified by working-class New Yorkers as one of themselves, providing “both a mirror and an ‘etiquette book’”, as Richard
Butsch phrases it.77 (In this respect Mose resembles the Swell of
London’s music halls, as analyzed by Peter Bailey.) The play itself bore
a family resemblance to Life in London as well as to The Scamps of London,
but the plot was largely an armature on which to hang various set pieces:
songs, dances, fights, dialogues with the audience, and rough-andtumble comic business. The principal draw was the performance of
Chanfrau as Mose, a burly figure, with his trademark red shirt, beaver
hat, plastered-down “soap-locks” hair, trousers tucked in his boots, and a
nice line in Bowery slang. A Glance ran first for twenty-four nights, to few
reviews, but then reappeared on March 15 with additional scenes and
characters, including Ben, a newsboy (Odell, Annals of the New York
Stage, vol. v, 374). This version took off, and inspired the Chatham to run
its own Mose play, New York as It Is (April 17, 1848,), and for a period the
two overlapped, with Chanfrau playing in both. Scenes in the Chatham
play included: a view of Chatham Square and Theatre; the Old Dutch
Church; a Soup-House interior; City Hall; the Catharine Fish Market; a
race between steamers; a Ladies’ Gymnasium; and the Old Bowery in
Flames. Spectacular firefighting episodes became a plank of subsequent
plays, and created a further outlet for Mose’s brand of heroism. A species
of rough gallantry became his trademark: he is, in effect, a semi-comic
Rodolphe for working-class audiences. Other Mose plays proliferated (all
of these appear to be lost), cannibalizing other popular material, including Ned Buntline’s story, The Mysteries and Miseries of New York
(Bowery, September 4, 1848). The fireman acquired a girlfriend, Lize,
and a sidekick, Sykesy, and soon New York was not big enough for
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Mose’s bold spirit: audiences were treated to such exotic fare as Mose’s
Visit to the Arab Girls, Mose in California, Mose in China, and Mose
in France. Mose was rarely impressed with his new surroundings:
confronted with mummies in the British Museum he concludes that
“they ain’ of no good to nuthin’”.78
The Mose plays, compounded of imported and local material, offered a
comic lens through which New York audiences could enjoy the spectacle of
their own mushrooming urban world, in a less phobic vein than that
offered by most city plays. A more melodramatic complement, closer in
spirit to the Parisian-derived plays, were the city dramas that married the
gothic vision of Eugène Sue to neighborhood material. These derived from
Sue at one remove, via the sensational fictions of Ned Buntline, George
Foster, George Thompson, and Osgood Bradbury.79 Like The Mysteries of
Paris and its British imitators, these novels reinforced the image of the city
as a den of criminals, and promised to reveal the city’s secrets while
stressing its ultimate unknowability. Titles included Buntline’s The
Mysteries and Miseries of New York (1848), Thompson’s City Crimes, or,
Life in New York and Boston (1849) and The Gay Girls of New York, or, Life
on Broadway (1850), Foster’s Celio, or, New York above Ground and Under
Ground and New York by Gaslight (1850), and Bradbury’s, Jane Clark, or,
Scenes in Metropolitan Life: A Tale Descriptive of New York Life. The stage
versions of such novels retailed the same melodramatic vision of urban life,
though sometimes they were put to more parodic use: as we have seen, one
version of The Mysteries and Miseries of New York by H. P. Grattan turned
Buntline’s story into yet another Mose vehicle (Chanfrau’s New National
Theatre, formerly the Chatham, September 4, 1848 (Odell, Annals of the
New York Stage, vol. v, 456)). But, as John W. Frick has shown in his study
of the “wicked city” on stage, for the most part these plays contributed to a
view of the city as a paysage moralisé, with good and bad streets, shiny
surfaces, and unspeakable depths.80 Sometimes international and local
urban crime drama alternated: during its 1858–59 season the National
Theatre offered both The Bohemians of Paris (December 27) and Howe’s
own version of The Mysteries and Crimes of New York and Brooklyn
(November 15; an adaptation of the novel The Newsboy [1854], by
Elizabeth Oakes Prince Smith), which featured an Italian villain and his
quadroon mistress
It is in this context that we can understand the success of Boucicault’s
The Poor of New York (1857), which took a French melodrama, Brisebarre
and Nus’s Les Pauvres de Paris (1856), or possibly Joseph Stirling Coyne’s
translation for the London stage, Fraud and its Victims (Surrey Theatre,
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March 2, 1857), and turned it into a “local” play. It appeared first on
December 8, 1857, against the backdrop of the financial crisis of that
year, its success providing Wallack’s Theatre with badly needed support
in a grim year for the theaters. Bringing together the panic of 1837 and 1857,
The Poor of New York is not primarily a play about the dangerous classes at
all, but charts the dramatic vicissitudes of a wronged middle-class family
against a naturalistic New York backdrop. In its spectacular sensation
scene, the hero, Badger, rescues vital documents from a burning building
in the Five Points. The mise en scène depicted the city as a place of contrasts,
and its highlights included “the Home of the Poor in Division Street, the
Home of the Rich in Madison Square . . . the Snow Storm in Union
Square” (Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, vol. vii, 22–23, drawing on
New York Tribune of December 10, 1857). The play was bolstered by a
strong cast that included two talented comic actors: E. A. Sothern (later
famous as the ridiculous Lord Dundreary in Tom Taylor’s Our American
Cousin) as Livingstone, and Charles T. Parsloe as Bob the Bootblack.81
Complete with its recognizable Bowery type, Dan, the Fireboy (a nod to
the success of Mose), The Poor was another play that brought fare long
familiar to a working-class audience to a more middle-class theater.
Audiences at the Bowery had already seen a version of the Les Pauvres,
Joseph Stirling Coyne’s Fraud and its Victims (August 31, 1857), “the
original from which came Boucicault’s famous The Poor”, claimed the
New York Times in later years.82 Wallack’s success inspired other theaters to
borrow the play themselves, including the National (formerly the
Chatham), which featured it on October 4, 1858. The Poor was also revived
at Wallack’s in 1858; at the New Bowery, June 6, 1864; and had another
long run under the title The Streets of New York at the Olympic Theatre
(December 1, 1864). The play received the ultimate accolade of parody at
Wood’s Hall in February 1865, where it was turned into a successful
minstrel burlesque. The Poor became famous as one of Boucicault’s most
transposable transatlantic city dramas, one that he subsequently reworked
in England as The Poor of Liverpool, The Streets of London, and so on, as the
local audience required.
The next urban crime drama to reach a similar level of transatlantic
success was Tom Taylor’s London-set The Ticket-of-Leave Man (1863),
which also juxtaposed the worlds of crime and business. As we have seen,
it was yet another French import, an adaptation of Brisebarre and Nus’s
Léonard. Unlike Les Pauvres, it was a success without being transposed to
an American setting. The Ticket-of-Leave Man was first seen in New York
on November 30, 1863 at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway, then
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managed by Edwin Booth, where it ran for 125 nights. The play’s success
led rival houses to try to access the drawing power of the police detective
and the ex-con, and versions were seen at the New Bowery, at Barnum’s,
the Brooklyn Park, and even at the prestigious Wallack’s. Like other
successful plays it was translated for New York’s sizeable German immigrant population, and appeared on April 9, 1864 at New York’s
Stadttheater, formerly the Bowery Amphitheatre, as Der Mann mit dem
Freischein.83 By January, there were also versions in other cities: at the Arch
Street Theatre and Walnut Theatre in Philadelphia, the Tremont and the
Boston Museum in Boston, and at Grover’s Theatre (also known as the
National Theatre) in Washington. The Daily National Intelligencer for
January 20, 1864, complimenting the magnificent scenery at Grover’s,
claimed that The Ticket-of-Leave Man was “in the way of a sensation”
everywhere it had been produced.84 Interestingly, the English play’s conflation of Jewishness and the dangerous classes seems to have crossed the
Atlantic with ease: Michael N. Dobkowski picks out Moss in The Ticket of
Leave Man and Mordie Solomons in John Brougham’s The Lottery of Life
(1867) (see below) as among the stage villains who for American audiences
condensed Jewishness, greed, and criminality, Shylock and Barabbas
together.85 The Winter Garden production achieved considerable critical
acclaim.86 Mr. and Mrs. W. J. Florence, who played Bob Brierly and May
Edwards, were better known, according to Odell, for their “Irish boy and
Yankee gal” performances, but took readily to their new parts (Odell,
Annals of the New York Stage, vol. vii, 555). In its “Amusements” column,
the New York Times of December 3, 1863 opined that “a better piece has not
been put on the stage for many years”, though it felt that “in many of its
details it is exceedingly local”, presumably meaning in this context
too much about the grittier side of London, and predicted that this
might affect its popularity. (No mention was made of the French original.)
This proved rather less than prophetic, and the play became a perennial
money-spinner for the Florences. When it was revived at Booth’s Theatre
in 1873, the cast list boasted that Florence’s role as Brierly would be “as
originally acted by him in New York and throughout the United States
over 1000 times”.87 He and his wife were still reprising their roles at major
theaters in the 1880s.88
But, as in London, it was the detective rather than the ticket-of-leave
man and his wife who would prove to be the most resilient stage presence
for the rest of the century. If the burgeoning immigrant city was a
mystery, here was a figure who had the clue. As Bordman notes,
Taylor’s play “pioneered, with conspicuous success, one of those related
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types that would soon be called the ‘crook-play’, the ‘detective-play’, and
the ‘mystery-thriller’” (American Theatre, 127). To list only a selection of
plays that had “detective” in the title, audiences could enjoy The Female
Detective, or, The Bow Street Runner (1865, starring Fanny Herring), The
New York Detective (1866, actually another Mose play), The Bowery
Detective (1870), The Boy Detective (1871), in which, Bordman says, “the
title character assists often thick-headed police in capturing a bevy of
dangerous criminals” (American Theatre, 41), Sharkey; or, The Shadow
Detective (1876), The Little Detective (1880, starring Lotta Crabtree, the
former child star), and The California Detective; or, Life in Two Great
Cities (1886).89 Extraneous factors reinforced the detective’s on-stage
popularity: the first version of the Pinkerton Agency was founded in
Chicago in 1855, and as it grew to become a national company its exploits
were regularly featured in the Police Gazette, and its founder’s memoirs
became popular reading; fictional detective stories featured in dime
novels and story-papers from the 1860s on – the focus of such tales was
less on the cerebration of Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin, and more on
dramatic action and adventure, not unlike the western stories of the
same period.90
A good example of the adaptability of the city detective character is yet
another international/local hybrid, John Brougham’s The Lottery of Life: A
Story of New York, An Original Local Drama (Wallack’s, June 8, 1868),
which grafts a plot derived from The Ticket-of-Leave Man and Les
Bohémiens onto a Manhattan setting. In this case the detective is himself
an immigrant, one of the multitude for whom city life is a numbers game,
as the play’s title suggests. Brougham himself played Terence O’Halloran,
alias Terry the Swell, a street-wise Irishman who gives up his criminal ways
and turns amateur detective to foil the stratagems of Mordie Solomons
(Charles Fisher), a Jewish fence and forger who also runs a respectable
business as a Mr. Allcraft. (The set directions call for him to wear a “false
Jewish nose with glasses”.) The romantic hero is Robert Mordaunt, framed
by Allcraft/Solomons, and now released early, having been pardoned – he
is, in effect, an American ticket-of-leave man. In the end, thanks to Terry,
Solomons’ double-life is revealed; Mordaunt is cleared, and found to be the
lost son of Allcraft’s former English partner, now Sir Wilton Downe,
baronet. The more spectacular scenes included New York port by moonlight, with Brooklyn Heights in the background, and an exploding ship
providing a traditional melodramatic “blow-up” ending.91 But it is
Brougham’s Terry who brings the play to life: a wily immigrant who is
able to match wits with Solomons, he is also able to use his fists in the fight
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scene at the Japonica, a concert saloon in which Mrs. O’Halloran is one of
the pretty waitresses. If Terry harks back to such amateur crime-fighters as
Rodolphe, and Mose, rough-hewn defender of innocents adrift in the city,
he looks forward to the hardboiled detective of the 1930s and 40s – tough
enough for the mean streets; a cynic who nonetheless does the right thing.
He expounds his philosophy of the aleatory to Robert Mordaunt: “It’s all
luck, all a chance in the great lottery of life. Talking of chances, have you
any money?” (Act 2 Scene ii).
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Parisian crime dramas
continued to find their way to New York, sometimes via London, sometimes not. At the New Park Theatre David Belasco survived the difficult
1883–84 season with a macabre melodrama freely adapted from a French
source, The Stranglers of Paris, in which the chief strangler, Jagon, is
transported for murder, but manages to return to Paris to avenge the
throttling of his own daughter (graphically shown on stage) by his former
accomplice; he dies in a hail of police bullets. Rather than waiting for a
London version, Belasco devised the piece himself from Adolphe Belot’s
Les Étrangleurs de Paris, serialized in Le Petit Journal in 1879, and a hit on
stage at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin in 1880. (Various London
adaptations followed, the first in 1887 at the Surrey.)92 It was deemed “a
sensation piece, embellished with showy scenery” by the New York
Tribune (cited in Bordman, American Theatre, 197), but drew audiences.
(“What buncombe it was”, was Belasco’s own later view.)93 Another
extravagantly produced Belot shocker, The Pavements of Paris
(December 18, 1883) derived from Le Pavé de Paris (Théâtre de la Porte
Saint-Martin, April 14, 1883), in which Belot combined a fairly threadbare inheritance plot with some dazzling special effects to show the
“bustling, heterogeneous human life” of that city.94 Belasco’s version
drew crowds to Niblo’s and other theaters with such attractions as a
representation of the ragpickers’ district, moving tableaux behind gauze,
and a death by railway.95 But perhaps the last of the Parisian crime plays
to become a major transatlantic hit had arrived a decade earlier: The Two
Orphans, which had its first performance at A. M. Palmer’s Union Square
Theatre, on December 21, 1874. This was Hart Jackson’s version of
Eugène Cormon and Adolphe d’Ennery’s Les Deux Orphelines (Théâtre
de la Porte Saint-Martin, January 20, 1874), which was to be, in Odell’s
words, “one of the greatest theatrical successes of all time in America”
(Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, vol. ix, 545).96 The play follows the
adventures of two orphaned sisters, Henriette (Kitty Blanchard) and
Louise (Kate Claxton) as they try to survive among the snares of the
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great city. As the blind heroine Louise, Claxton became a star; she bought
the rights to the play, and played the role all over the country.97 Whatever
The Two Orphans owed its phenomenal success to, it was not originality,
since the plot derives – once again – from Les Mystères de Paris of thirty
years earlier, and Henriette and Louise’s adventures closely resemble
those of Fleur de Marie/La Goualeuse. While Henriette is rescued by
the Chevalier Maurice de Vaudrey from the clutches of the debauched
Marquis de Presles, her blind sister Louise is abducted by La Frochard;
the latter, clearly modeled on La Chouette in Les Mystères, forces her to
sing and beg on the snow-covered streets.98 There were, though, some
fresh touches, including a mother/lost daughter scene on the steps of
Saint-Sulpice, and a prison scene in which another prisoner, Marianne,
takes Henriette’s place en route to exile, facilitated by a nun who for once
tells a lie. All is well in the end, of course: Henriette finds love, and
Louise is restored to her mother. (Louise is not actually the daughter of
the heroic de Vaudrey, as Fleur de Marie is of Rodolphe, but she is the
daughter of his aunt the Countess de Linières.) But despite, or perhaps
because of, the familiarity of this melodramatic version of the city
narrative, The Two Orphans enjoyed extraordinary success, and lingered
in American popular culture for decades.99 Several silent film versions
were made, including an adaptation starring Theda Bara (1915), and
D. W. Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm (1921), which projects the action
onto the French Revolution.100 The core fantasy – that those lost in the
anonymous, teeming city will eventually be found, and restored to
happiness – proved eminently portable.
The afterlife of urban drama
It would be possible to say of the urban crime dramas, especially the
“local” ones, that they simply sold audiences an imported and packaged
version of their own experience of city life. Their own crowded city was
served up to them as a reified spectacle, with simple oppositions of good
and evil replacing a more complex reality. In particular, the Frenchderived evocation of the dangerous classes in their various avatars formed
an ideologically laden picture of the city and its class divisions that cast a
long shadow. In Britain, such ideas resonated with the moral panics
around Courvoisier in the 1840s, and garrotting in the 1860s; in the
United States they exploited and gave further purchase to ideas about the
nature of character in an increasingly anonymous society. But it is
important also to recognize the different kinds of pleasure that audiences
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took in these localized spectacles. Urban crime drama was not only a
mode in which anxious segments of the middle classes could nervously
enjoy the acting out on stage of their fears about the masses. Other
audiences came too, like New York’s B’howery Boys. Seeing their own
streets on stage helped them, perhaps, to imagine their lives as part of a
colorful urban adventure, a drama played against a breathtaking
backdrop, part of a grimy urban sublime. And Mose, the stage version
of the B’howery Boy, is more everyman hero than rackety Bohemian.
Even the shady Bohemians in the end have their utopian aspect: they
offer an image of community, however degraded; and they suggest a
rather comforting world of urban insiders – they might fool others, but
nobody can fool them.
Les Mystères and its imitators left a mark on the urban imaginary that has
never entirely gone away. The international popular culture of the intervening period has continued to see the city as a place in which thieves’ dens
lie just beneath the surface, and in which the villains change names and
identities as it suits them. The closed world of the Bohemians, in which
characters have colorful street names and speak a secret argot, has had
many successors, and it continues to exude a certain fatal glamor for us. In
the form of underworld gang-members, the Bohemians continue to
appear, though they have also mutated in an international popular
culture in which “organized” crime is often seen through an ethnic lens:
the amorphous, bottom-feeding Bohemians have thus been reborn as the
immigrant gangs of New York, Mafiosi, triad-members, and AfricanAmerican gangsters, inter alia. But of all the figures produced by the
demographic imagination of the 1840s it is the detective who has turned
out to be the most resilient. The detective is a comforting figure in the
urban imaginary, reassuring audiences that the masses can be disaggregated, and sense made of urban mystery. Now set free from his original
urban milieu, his descendants (female as well as male) have spread virally
through drama, film, and fiction, proving far more portable than the
Bohemians, scamps, and rogues who conjured him up; they are as likely
to be found solving crimes in quiet villages and medieval monasteries as on
the mean streets of Paris, London, or New York.
Alongside crime drama there appeared a popular genre that was,
perhaps, rather less optimistic about the prospect of such mastery: the
urban ghost story. In the early nineteenth century, out of the debris of
the gothic novel and the oral tradition, there emerged the modern
magazine ghost fiction. While the majority of such stories are comforting
in their nostalgic settings and their very predictability, in a handful of
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them the haunted rural inn or country house is replaced by something
rather less quaint: haunted urban space. But however different these
stories are from the urban mystery story, their roots lie, I suggest, in
the same historical soil. To be a pedestrian or a commuter is to live under
the gaze of others, and it these ordinary urban affects, symptoms of the
demographic revolution, that the urban ghost story transforms into
persecutive haunting.
chapter 3
The ghost comes to town: the haunted city
Ghosts float free of the temporal restraints that bind the living, but the ghost
story as a literary form is far from being timeless, and can only walk the earth
when the market allows. Thus, while we can trace a longer history of oral
tales of the supernatural, the modern literary ghost story, distilled from the
more diffuse gothic fictions of the eighteenth century and from oral sources,
condenses first in the nineteenth-century magazines and annuals. It is at this
point that the ghost comes to town, and we begin to see the supernatural
abandon its traditional settings and take to the streets. In this chapter I want
to sketch a brief history of the ghost story as commodity-experience in terms
of its generic and commercial history, before turning to the rise of the urban
ghost story as a particular manifestation of the demographic imagination.
While a number of writers contribute to the rise of the urban ghost, a
crucial role is played by one figure, the Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le
Fanu (1814–73). In his tales of the supernatural Le Fanu often follows the
inherited conventions of setting, but in a number of stories his specters haunt
not crumbling castles or remote country houses but city pavements and
public transport. In this light I want to suggest that the experience of terror in
these stories derives not from the nightmares of Irish political history, as has
often been assumed, but from the same explosion of population that we have
considered in earlier chapters. Here the arrival of the age of crowds is
registered in terms of the disruption of an older urban fabric to accommodate
mass transport. Le Fanu captures the unease induced by this disruption, but
also the hell that is other people in an age of commuting. In this, I will
suggest, he looks forward to later urban gothic, including the late city
narratives of a very different writer, Henry James. These late tales are set
against the backdrop of a booming turn-of-the-century New York, by then a
city of skyscraper developments and mass immigration, and an alien city for
the Europeanized James. To find an appropriate mode to register the spatial
and social dislocations of this familiar yet new environment, he too turns to
the urban ghost story.
77
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The Demographic Imagination
The rise of the magazine ghost
The vogue of gothic is often considered to have been launched by Horace
Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), though its real heyday did not come
until the 1790s, with such novels as Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of
Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797), Matthew Lewis’s more sensational
The Monk (1796), and their many imitators. An investigation of the
historical roots of gothic are outside the scope of this study, but it is
probably fair to say that, among other factors, gothic was animated by
antiquarianism, counter-Enlightenment thinking, anti-Catholicism, and
new attitudes to pain and to the body. By the turn of the century, it also
provided a displaced way to write about the historical shocks of the French
Revolution, and the 1798 rising in Ireland.1 Walter Scott’s success helped to
usher in forms of historical fiction less dependent on depraved clerics,
vulnerable heiresses, and the representation of grotesque violence, so that
Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) is often seen as the last
major gothic novel before the revival of gothic motifs at the end of the
century in such novels as The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(1886), Dracula (1897), and The Beetle (1897). Such a loosely painted literary
history must be qualified. Gothic continued to flourish well into the
nineteenth century at the less prestigious end of the literary market, in
such cheap serials as James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampire (1845–
47), and gothic plays maintained their appeal in the minor theaters. Gothic
also survived, of course, as a subsidiary mode within more mainstream
fiction: as part of the regional novels of the Brontës, for example, or as part
of the urban imaginary of Dickens.2 The success of, for instance, Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables (1851) suggests that gothic themes
also lingered in the United States, and there have been various attempts to
trace a specifically Irish “gothic tradition” that lived on long after 1820.3
Nonetheless, we can see that gothic was a residual rather than dominant
formation by mid-century.
But when longer supernatural narratives began to fall from favor, the
Victorian ghost story flourished.4 In this shorter supernatural fiction
the original gothic settings, in which architecture contributes powerfully
to the sense of menace, did not entirely disappear, but tended to be at once
scaled down and partially updated, medieval castles and convents giving
way to remote country houses, rustic inns, college rooms, and other
picturesquely non-modern locales. In Britain, as the railway network
made the country shrink, regional settings provided the imaginative
space within which the supernatural could be allowed to linger, like the
The ghost comes to town
79
unhappy twin of the realistic narrative of provincial life: for example, rural
Northumberland in Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Story” (1852);
the northwest of England in Le Fanu’s “Madam Crowl’s Ghost” (1870),
which is narrated in Lancashire dialect; a Northern coal-mining district in
Amelia Edwards’s “Was it an Illusion” (1881).5 Seen from the expanding
city, the countryside began to seem increasingly alien, a suitable site for the
otherworldly. The Celtic fringe provided for metropolitan readers an even
more alien setting in which the superstitions of the past could be allowed to
flourish. For instance, the stories in Le Fanu’s Purcell Papers (1880),
originally published in the Dublin University Magazine from 1838 to
1840, are set in eighteenth-century rural Ireland, and thus doubly distanced, all the more free to describe Faustian pacts and supernatural
visitants.
The use of regional settings is a reminder that the literary ghost story also
draws on the revival of interest in folklore, and the literary redaction of oral
narrative, which, like gothic, were also facets of Romanticism. Many stories
present a storytelling scenario within the narrative: while this later becomes
a literary point-of-view device in such highly polished narratives as Henry
James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), in the earlier period it appears to have
more to do with creating atmosphere, and reproducing the intimacy of the
oral culture. Like folk tales, the literary ghost story tends to be short and, in
narrative terms, economical; it was, in fact, tailor-made for magazine
publication. This should remind us that while ghost fiction was an aspect
of late popular Romanticism, it was also part of the commodification of the
supernatural that E. J. Clery traces in her account of the rise of gothic: as
comic sketches about the Cock Lane ghost of 1762 anticipated, “freed from
the service of doctrinal proof, the ghost was to be caught up in the machine
of the economy; it was available to be processed, reproduced, packaged,
marketed and distributed by the engines of cultural production”.6 In this
context, the opposition of belief/disbelief grows less relevant, and fear of
the supernatural becomes available as a thrilling or a chilling commodityexperience for the literary market. The ghost story becomes something to
be savored self-consciously.
Like the demographic imagination more generally, the literary history of
the supernatural is not confined by national boundaries. Supernatural stories
from the United States, France, and Germany were widely read and drawn
upon by British writers – the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan
Poe, Honoré de Balzac, and E. T. A. Hoffmann, among others, as well as
folk tales of terror.7 Moreover, as the writers I have listed so far suggest,
when we disaggregate the “English ghost story” we find that many of its
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The Demographic Imagination
authors were not English at all, and alongside such figures as Dickens,
Bulwer Lytton, Gaskell, and Edwards there is a long line of Scottish,
Welsh, and Irish writers. The Scots include Walter Scott, Margaret
Oliphant, and Robert Louis Stevenson, and Blackwood’s Edinburgh
Magazine was an important conduit for the circulation of supernatural
fiction. Among Welsh writers in the Victorian period, Rhoda Broughton
(J. S. Le Fanu’s niece) and Arthur Machen stand out. Besides Le Fanu, Irish
contributors include Mrs. J. H Riddell, Fitzjames O’Brien, B. M. Croker,
and of course Bram Stoker.8
Nor should we forget that literary history did not operate in a vacuum in
this case any more than with the volcanic disaster story, and there was a
busy traffic between narrative fiction and the stage. One of the most
famous ghosts of the nineteenth century is that of Louis dei Franchi in
The Corsican Brothers; or, The Fatal Duel (Princess’s Theatre, February,
1852), Boucicault’s translation of Eugène Grangé and Xavier de Montépin’s
spectacle-driven 1850 Les Frères Corses, itself a version of Alexandre
Dumas’s short novel of that name (1844). Its “Ghost Melody” lived on
independently as a piece of spine-tingling music. Vampires too were as
popular on stage as in narrative fiction, perhaps more so.9 Nineteenthcentury opera also dealt in the supernatural, or apparent supernatural, in,
for example, Weber’s Der Freischütz (1821), Bellini’s La sonnambula (1831),
Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer (1843, adapted from Heine), Berlioz’s
Les Troyens (1890), and Tchaikovsky’s Pique Dame (1890, based on a story
by Pushkin).
Nonetheless, there were also local factors in play, and the Victorian
ghost story achieves its popularity in a particular way. Unsurprisingly,
perhaps, on the road to secularization and commodification, Victorian
supernatural tales were associated with Christmas, a festival that was itself
poised in this period between spiritual and commercial significance. The
association of “sprites and goblins” with Winter is an old one, at least as old
as A Winter’s Tale, as Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert point out in their
introduction to the Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories.10 Presumably
this association derives in part from the seasonal rhythms of an agricultural
world, in which the winter months allowed a greater measure of leisure,
and thus time for the telling of tales, and the evocation of the past; the
shortening of the days and the apparent ebbing of growth presumably
focused attention on death and the afterlife. However, as E. F. Bleiler has
noted, in the nineteenth century the ghost story becomes involved in rather
different seasonal rhythms, those of the British publishing industry.
Ethereal Christmas ghosts condensed as substantial Christmas gift books,
The ghost comes to town
81
annuals, and Christmas numbers.11 Thus Walter Scott’s haunted-room
story, “The Tapestried Chamber; or, The Lady in the Sacque”, appeared
in the second edition of The Keepsake (December 1828), a popular
Christmas gift book.
Charles Dickens is a significant figure here, as in many other aspects of
nineteenth-century publishing history. His first use of the Christmasghost nexus is in The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), in which the guests
assembled around the fire in Dingley Dell hear the story of “The Goblins
who stole a Sexton”. (Sources for this “traditional” English Christmas
scene include Washington Irving’s Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.
[1820], where the local parson retails “strange accounts of the superstitions and legends of the surrounding country” to a gathering around
the fire at Bracebridge Hall.)12 His most famous story of the supernatural,
A Christmas Carol (1843), with its admonitory seasonal spirits, appeared
as an expensively produced Christmas book with hand-colored plates.
From the 1850s, Dickens published special Christmas numbers of the
journals Household Words and its successor All the Year Round, featuring
such ghostly tales as Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Story”
(Household Words, December 1852), his own “The Signalman” (All the
Year Round, December 1866), Amelia Edwards’s “No. 5 Branch Line:
The Engineer” (All the Year Round, December 1866), and J. S. Le Fanu’s
“Madam Crowl’s Ghost” (All the Year Round, December 1870). Other
authors followed his lead: J. S Le Fanu’s Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery
(1851) was meant to appear as a Christmas book for 1850, although it did
not appear until January of the following year; Rhoda Broughton’s Tales
for Christmas Eve (1873) clearly targeted the Christmas market.13 Journal
editors also took their cue from Dickens: stories by J. S. Le Fanu, Mrs.
Riddell, Mrs. Henry Wood, Amelia Edwards, M. E. Braddon, and
others provided seasonal specters for the special Christmas numbers of
Tinsley’s, London Library, London Society, and the Pall Mall Magazine,
among others. From seasonal publications like Peter Parley’s Annual
(1841–89), aimed at children, developed the other great venue for
supernatural fiction, the Christmas annuals, which flourished from
1860 on: Beeton’s Christmas Annual, Routledge’s Christmas Annual, Bow
Bells Annual, Arrowsmith’s Christmas Annual, The Mistletoe Bough, and
Warne’s Christmas Annual, among others. Routledge’s Christmas Annual,
for example, saw the first appearance of Mrs. Riddell’s “Fairy Water:
A Christmas Story” (1873); and “The Haunted River: A Christmas Story”
(1877); and the 1869 edition of E. Lynn Linton’s “The Legend of
Lady House”.
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This does not tell the whole story. For one thing, supernatural tales
sometimes appeared in non-Christmas numbers of the magazines. This is
particularly true of Le Fanu’s stories, in fact. Further, the Christmas-ghost
nexus had a seasonal rival in the Celtic periphery: Halloween. In at least
one literary instance, that of Gerald Griffin’s Holland-Tide; or, Munster
Popular Tales (1827), we see Holland-Tide, or All-Hollands, otherwise
Halloween (October 31), being used in place of Christmas as the
appropriate setting for the telling of ghost stories.14 While the October 31
festival had long fallen out of favor in England, it continued to flourish in
nineteenth-century Ireland and Scotland, and was exported to the United
States and Canada by emigrants. That Halloween continued to be familiar
to English readers is clear from such cultural artifacts as Robert Burns’s
poem, “Halloween” (1786), J. C. Cross’s gothic spectacle, Halloween; of
The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1799), and Daniel Maclise’s painting,
Snap Apple Night or All-Hallow Eve (1832).15 October 31 was a natural choice
for a framed collection of supernatural and adventure tales set in rural
Ireland. Griffin’s collection purports to be the stories told by those gathered
around the fire at “a most frolick November-Eve party, at the house of a
respectable farmer in the west of Munster, upon whose hospitality chance
threw the collector of these stories”; it includes such grisly tales as “The
Brown Man”, in which a young woman marries a ghoul, with the consequences that might be expected.16 Now that Halloween has an almost
exclusive claim on tales of sprites and goblins in international popular
culture, it is the Griffin rather than the Dickensian pattern that seems the
ancestor of our own moment. It is tempting, of course, to speculate that the
Christmas fireside storytelling of the Pickwick Papers also owes something to
Griffin’s Halloween, and even Maclise’s Snap Apple Night.17
But in the nineteenth century there was no “Halloween season” for the
publishing industry. Thus, while individual ghost stories sometimes used
October 31, or the days following – All Saints’ and All Souls’ – as setting,
Christmas retained its position as the best time to publish chilling tales.18
In this light, it is worth noting that James Joyce (1882–1941), who grew up
in Victorian Dublin, havers between the festivals for the settings of two of
his most haunted stories, “The Dead” and “Clay”, which deal with
Christmas and Halloween respectively. In fact, “Clay” began life in 1904
as the unfinished “Christmas Eve”, possibly conceived in response to the
Irish Homestead’s solicitation of stories for their annual “Celtic Christmas”
December number; reimagined as “Hallow Eve”, the story was submitted
to the Irish Homestead in January 1905, and it is the latter, of which no
manuscript survives, that is the presumed basis of “Clay”.19
The ghost comes to town
83
At any rate, it was the magazine industry rather than seasonality that in
the end turned out to be the most important factor in the rise of the ghost
story, and indeed the short story more generally. The vogue of supernatural
fiction sustains and is sustained by a significant expansion of the periodical
market in the mid-nineteenth century, marked in particular by the increase
in the number of titles aimed at the middle-class reader, and specializing in
narrative fiction.20 (There was a similar expansion in the newspaper business in the same period, underwritten by the same technological and
commercial changes.) Tales of the supernatural provided essential yearround content for many of the magazines that proliferated at mid-century,
such as Temple Bar (where much of Rhoda Broughton’s fiction appeared),
M. E. Braddon’s Belgravia, Florence Marryat’s London Society, and Mrs.
Henry Wood’s Argosy – women played a prominent part in Victorian
publishing as well as in the creation of ghost stories and sensation fiction.21
In other words, ghost stories provided the “programming” for the magazines that would later be provided by detective fiction. The later trend is a
more familiar chapter in publishing history: the relationship between
Sherlock Holmes and the Strand is the best-known instance; Arthur
Morrison’s Martin Hewitt also drew readers to the Strand, before departing for the Windsor Magazine, and then London Magazine; and Catherine
Pirkis’s Loveday Brooke appeared in the Ludgate Magazine. The ghost
story did not lend itself to such series appeal, because of its very nature, and
while there are a few exceptions, such as Le Fanu’s “Purcell Papers”, even
there, Purcell is not a recurring protagonist in the stories in the way that
Sherlock Holmes’s amanuensis, Watson, is. But the ghost story, like the
detective story, or indeed like melodrama, could deliver a reliable readerly
pleasure; it was an effects-driven form that produced shudders to order.
This is not to say that writers did not achieve other ends besides; but their
first obligation was to create the effects that can be termed chilling,
thrilling, or uncanny. Bleiler suggests that with few exceptions the stories
followed only four patterns: dreams and nightmares that come true,
deathbed apparitions, haunted houses, and the ghosts of the wrongfully
killed.22 The last two categories often overlap, and we see something of a
parade of the specters of abused or murdered children and adults, who wish
the living to discover their stories, and sometimes suppressed wills, or
concealed graves.23 To this extent, the Victorian ghost story shades into
the detective story. It is a rare pleasure to discover, as we do in Le Fanu,
ghosts whose motivations are not quite so clear. And in Le Fanu we find a
writer who was at times prepared to replace the conventional lonely inns
and country houses with the busy streets of Dublin and London.
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Haunted Dublin
In the shaping of the modern ghost story, Patricia Coughlan has argued
that J. S. Le Fanu stands head and shoulders above his peers, a view shared
by Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert, who argue that “the ghost story’s
potential was first revealed by the Irish writer”24 Le Fanu is now read for
his atmospheric sensation novel, Uncle Silas (1864), and late erotic vampire
story, “Carmilla” (1872), but he was a prolific producer of supernatural tales
from the late 1830s until his death in 1872.25 His first ghost stories,
presented as the reminiscences of a Catholic priest, the Reverend Francis
Purcell of Drumcoolagh, appeared regularly in the Dublin University
Magazine from 1838 to 1840. Further stories appeared in the Dublin
University Magazine in the 1840s and 1850s, and he published in a range
of English magazines in the 1860s and 1870s (including Temple Bar,
Sampson Low’s The Dark Blue, Belgravia, and All the Year Round). After
some early attempts at historical fiction, in the 1860s, he began to write
mystery novels of uneven quality, which came from his pen with
“Braddonian rapidity”, as his obituary in the Freeman’s Journal phrased
it. Uncle Silas was the most successful of these: to quote the Freeman’s
Journal again, “there is a nerve, a fierce intensity in it, which keeps the
reader spell-bound”, and with it “he took then a place which he never lost
with library readers”.26
Like Uncle Silas, some of the other later novels create a curious sense of
dislocation, the result, perhaps, of Le Fanu’s use of fictional English
settings in an attempt to court a larger reading public. Despite, or perhaps
because of, their peculiar atmosphere, he enjoyed a measure of popular
success in his lifetime. After his death in 1873, he was remembered by
Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper in their round-up of “The Great Dead of 1873” as
a “clever teller of thrilling stories that harrowed up many a nervous soul”;
The Times also listed him among the illustrious dead of the year, alongside
such figures as William Macready and Edwin Landseer.27 A mythology has
grown around Le Fanu’s later life, and the idea that he became a reclusive
“Invisible Prince” after his wife’s death still has a certain currency, despite
evidence to the contrary.28 A cursory trawl through the social columns –
“Fashion and Varieties” in the Freeman’s Journal and “Court and Fashion”
in the Belfast News-letter – suggests that Le Fanu continued to attend
society gatherings in these years, generally with one of his daughters.
He was, after all, a widower, and somebody had to introduce them into
Dublin society.29 He also kept up with some of his literary and legal
acquaintance.30 Nonetheless, as Victor Sage notes, “the critical picture of
The ghost comes to town
85
Le Fanu’s career as a writer is often shaped by the (biographical) notion of
retreat”.31 On such a reading, Le Fanu comes to stand as the representative
of an isolated Protestant minority, haunted by the past, and increasingly
besieged in the present by the growing sway of the Catholic middle classes,
part of a specifically Irish Protestant gothic tradition. In a recent study of
the Irish short story, Heather Ingman, for example, presents “Carmilla” as,
in part, “a political fable expressing Le Fanu’s fear that the Anglo-Irish class
to which he belonged was on the brink of dissolution”.32 Here I want to
consider a different aspect of his supernatural stories: their immersion in
the social and material realities of Dublin, the largest city in these islands
after London, until it began to be outstripped in the early nineteenth
century by such industrial powerhouses as Liverpool and Glasgow.33
Notwithstanding their explicit antiquarianism and idiosyncrasy, Le
Fanu’s are stories of modern urban life, of building sites and the perils of
commuting, and it is the psychic disturbances of the overcrowded
present rather than the nightmares of history or of political stasis that
are registered.
While Le Fanu, like his peers, uses remote country houses, and even
castles, that hark back to eighteenth-century gothic – for example, “Sir
Dominick’s Bargain”, “Carmilla”, “A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone
Family”, “A Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess” – in a
significant number of stories his apparitions walk the city streets, and
penetrate comfortable urban interiors. And while many of his stories project
the supernatural events safely into the distant past, in others the past seems to
but thinly disguise the present; and, in a few, we are very much in the urban
now. It is that present that shapes the stories, and specifically it is the
transformations of the lived environment that underwrite the frissons of
these stories. The mutations in space sketched out by Walter Benjamin in
“Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” have suggested one way of
understanding the way fantasy works in this period. Benjamin argues that,
as industrial capitalism takes hold, lived space becomes warped, as it were:
the structural mysteries of commodity fetishism mean that while the office/
factory appears to be where we settle our accounts with reality, the
domestic interior becomes increasingly a place of reverie and self-indulgence,
but also of phantasmagoria. It also, of course, becomes a place of
emotional cathexis, on which the pressures of the nuclear family, and of
heteronormative courtship, bear. As Patricia Coughlan demonstrates,
space is particularly important in Le Fanu’s fiction, supernatural and
non-supernatural alike. Thus, one of the recurring scenarios in his
stories, early and late, is the locked room, often a locked room that turns
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The Demographic Imagination
into a death-trap. Where Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue”
(1841) takes a tale of horror, and famously turns it into one of the first
detective stories, Le Fanu dwells on the murderous aspects of domestic
space.34 Poe offers a fantasy figure, the detective, who can unpick the tangled
knots of urban mystery; Le Fanu seems to offer a less hopeful view. But in his
most pioneering work, Le Fanu’s oeuvre explores some rather different
aspects of the transformation of modern space. It is not just haunted private
interiors that feature in these urban stories but also public transport and the
streets themselves.
In the interests of concision, I want to touch upon just three stories.
Two of these appear in the late collection In a Glass Darkly (1872): “The
Familiar”, which is almost word for word taken from an earlier story, “The
Watcher” (Dublin University Magazine, 1847) and “Green Tea”, which had
first appeared in Dickens’s All the Year Round in October–November 1869.
The third was published in Dublin University Magazine as an account of an
actual haunting, “An Authentic Narrative of a Haunted House” (1862).35
Railway excavations
In “The Watcher”/“The Familiar”, the unfinished streets of Dublin provide the striking setting for a series of events that are meant to have taken
place “somewhere about the year 1794” (42).36 The story’s central character, Captain Barton, a retired naval officer, is menaced by a shrunken
figure resembling one of his former crew, Sylvester Yelland, who is supposed to have died in Naples. He had been harshly treated by Barton in
revenge for his own ill-treatment of his daughter, with whom Barton had
had some kind of illicit relationship.
Barton has returned to Dublin, and though living quietly in lodgings,
“in one of the then fashionable streets” (43) and largely eschewing “society”,
becomes engaged to a “reigning toast” (43), a Miss Montague, niece and
protegée of Lady Rochdale. Walking home from a visit to his fiancée at the
northside home of her aunt,
He had proceeded thus some way, when he, on a sudden, heard other
footfalls, pattering at a measured pace, and, as it seemed, about two score
steps behind him . . . but though there was quite sufficient moonlight to
disclose any object upon the road he had traversed, no form of any kind was
visible there. (45)
This aural persecution is followed by threatening notes from “The
Watcher”, not unlike the Rockite letters that in the Ireland of Le Fanu’s
The ghost comes to town
87
youth provided a sinister double to the ordinary post. Eventually the
Watcher actually appears before Barton, fixing him with “a look of maniacal menace and fury” (51) as he and our narrator are entering the House of
Commons on College Green. A diminutive figure in a fur cap (a traveling
cap in the earlier version), he resembles the dead Yelland, and mutters
angrily to himself as he approaches. The violence grows more explicit:
Barton takes another nocturnal walk through the unfinished streets (“the
road on either side was . . . embarrassed by the foundations of a street,
beyond which extended waste fields, full of rubbish and neglected lime and
brick kilns” (57)), and this time a musket is fired at him. He becomes
convinced that he is the object of a “system malignant, and inexorable”
(60) of persecution. The persecution retains a peculiarly aural character, as
he believes that he is “pursued with blasphemies, cries of despair, and
appalling hatred . . . dreadful sounds called after me as I turn the corner of
streets” (62). At the urging of friends, he decides to quit Ireland for France
for a time, only to find the Watcher waiting for him on the quay in Calais.
Back in Dublin, Barton stays at a secluded house in Clontarf, but the
Watcher appears there too. Ultimately the Captain is found dead in his
room, apparently frightened to death by the final visit of his nemesis.
In his introduction to In A Glass Darkly, Robert Tracy suggests that the
half-built streets that create such a powerful sense of atmosphere in this
story evoke Dublin during a phase of development in the 1790s, before the
Act of Union made it a political backwater (xvi). I agree that the streets are
the key to the story; indeed, the hostile Watcher seems like an emanation
from the very urban fabric. But I would suggest that this is a story whose
historicism is a thin veneer, and that it is the pressure of the city of the
present rather than the political past that is registered. Readers of the story
in 1847 would have been well used to walking past excavated streets, limekilns, and the detritus of building. In the 1840s, the fabric of Dublin, like
that of other cities in these islands, was indeed being reshaped, as the
Georgian planners who had swept away much of the medieval remnants
had been replaced by the Victorian railway engineers, who were cutting
swathes through the urban fabric to facilitate mass transport.37 (Although
Ireland’s population shrank dramatically during the famine years, Dublin
continued to grow.) The first Dublin railway terminus had opened at
Westland Row in 1834, providing easy access to the deep-water harbor at
Kingstown, as well as a service for commuters; by 1844, another terminus
had been built at Amiens Street for the Dublin–Drogheda line; and by
1846, Kingsbridge (now Heuston) provided access to the south and west via
the Great Southern and Western Railway. Ireland boasted its own railway
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The Demographic Imagination
newspaper, the Irish Railway Gazette, and from 1844, a telegraph system
that grew alongside the network of rail. In 1847, the year of “The Watcher”,
work began on a line between Harcourt Street and Bray, which railway
entrepreneur and engineer William Dargan planned to turn into a seaside
resort, complete with its own esplanade and Turkish baths. The same
“railway mania” that was abroad in England was sweeping Ireland too, and
the public were invited to pour their money into new schemes, some of them
of dubious merit. There was a wave of imaginative investment in the railways
as a transforming utopian force in these years, as with John Grey C. Porter’s
“A Few Observations Upon Our Present Railway System in Ireland” (1847),
which envisaged a rail-link from Westland Row to Valentia, Co. Kerry,
offering a deep-water harbor for ships to America. Other schemes seemed
merely fanciful, as with the rash of atmospheric railway plans in the 1840s,
including the “Dublin Southern Villa Railway”, which planned to offer a
line between Kevin Street and Ballyboden in the Dublin mountains.38
Nor did plans to carve up the city end with the decade of “railway mania”.
“The Watcher” seems to anticipate a period in which ever more radical
recreations of the city were contemplated. By the time Le Fanu had rewritten
the story as “The Familiar”, Dubliners had been treated to an extended
debate over plans to join all of Dublin’s railway termini, which would mean
extensive reshaping of the streets in between. There was stern opposition
from the Corporation who resented what they saw as English capital dicing
up the city for its own ends, and more generally from those nationalists who
saw a military agenda at work: unfavorable comparisons were made with
Baron Haussmann’s modernization of Paris.39 When in 1863 Frederick Barry
controversially proposed a line that would run twenty feet above street level,
and would feature a viaduct at Westmoreland Street, Dublin Corporation
built a full-sized model of this projected bridge in order to show people
exactly how intrusive it would be (a woman was seriously injured when some
of the scaffolding fell). The Irish Times was equally hostile to Barry’s
Metropolitan Railway project, which it saw as taking passengers “through
gloomy tunnels and down steep declines” – they favored the rival Dublin
Railway planned by John Hawkshaw and James Barton.40
Le Fanu was not alone in turning the advent of mass transport into the
stuff of horror. In 1862, “William Scribble” penned a gothic comic drama,
Dublin Destroyed!, or, The Witches Cauldron of Railway Horror: A
Mysterious Shakespeareana, in One Act, a sort of sequel to his Old Carlisle
Bridge, a burlesque on Dublin traffic, which had been performed at the
Queen’s Theatre the previous year. Even this brief excerpt will give you a
sense of its comic flavor:
The ghost comes to town
89
Scene: The Railway Engine house of destruction . . . distant rumbling noise,
like thunder of railway train; bells, Railway whistles, etc. [2 parliamentary
agents and a solicitor discovered as 3 witches]
2nd witch:
Through each house, and through each shop,
Nothing shall our progress stop.
3rd witch:
Let us e’en persuade the cits,
’Gainst their senses and their wits,
That each bridge across the street
Would be an architectural treat
...
All:
Dublin, Dublin, all great trouble in;
We must lay our rails through Dublin.
Railway Sprite [alias Barie]:
Westmoreland-street, we’ve most, I think, to fear,
And next to that the battle of D’Olier
...
No, I’ll engage the City well to shake,
In imitation of some great earthquake;
...
And all the architecture old and new,
(When we have cut the city into slices)
We’ll hide by cunningly concealed devices.
Happily, the Lord Mayor prevails in scene 2, and Dublin is not destroyed.41
If Le Fanu was attuned to such developments, it was in part because he
lived through them – from 1850 until his death in 1873 he lived at 18
Merrion Square, South, a prestigious address at which he was largely
surrounded by barristers, judges, and successful doctors. A convenient
ten-minute walk from Westland Row railway station, it was not much
further from the Harcourt Street terminus, which took commuters
through mushrooming south Dublin suburbia and on to Bray.42 Not
long after Le Fanu moved there, Merrion Square became a very bustling
place indeed, with the construction of the buildings for the 1853 Dublin
International Exhibition, modeled on the 1851 Exhibition in London. Held
on the west side of the square, the Exhibition was sustained by modern
transport links, with English railway companies offering special fares to
visitors wishing to cross to Ireland via Holyhead.43 The Exhibition itself
was financed by Irish railway money, support coming mostly from William
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The Demographic Imagination
Dargan, the country’s first great railway builder. As the crowds flowed into
Merrion Square, Le Fanu was well placed to see how modern transport and
demographics could operate together.
The Le Fanu family were far from being passive observers of these
seismic transformations of the city, and indeed of the country more
generally. Joseph’s brother William had forsaken the usual professional
routes for men of his background – law, medicine, the clergy, and the
military – and was that up-to-date thing a railway engineer. He worked in
this capacity for more than twenty years, until in 1863 he was appointed
Commissioner of the Board of Public Works. William’s career followed
the railways: he was aboard the very first train that ran in Ireland,
from Dublin to Kingstown; between 1840 and 1846 he worked on the
Dublin–Drogheda line, and he subsequently worked on the first lines to
Cashel and Carlow; between 1846 and 1863 he oversaw, inter alia, the
construction of the Great Southern and Western line from Dublin
to Cork, the Dublin, Wicklow and Wexford line, and the Waterford–
Limerick line, and designed the Cahir Viaduct over the river Suir.44 Nor
was Joseph completely insulated from this world: when William was asked
in 1851 by the Great Southern and Western Railway Company to evaluate
alternative Irish ports for transatlantic traffic to the United States, his
brother was roped in to promote his views using his contacts in
journalism (McCormack, Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland, 121).
Since J.S. became increasingly financially dependent on his more
prosperous brother, his fortunes were very directly tied to the railways.
William Le Fanu was closely involved in the “Dublin Destroyed”
debate. In June 1863, the Freeman’s Journal provided a detailed comparison
of Barry’s Metropolitan Railway and that proposed by William. By this
time the grand plans to link all of Dublin’s railway termini had been cut
down to a scheme to link Westland Row to Kingsbridge. Like rival
schemes, Le Fanu’s envisaged a central station at Aston Quay, but relied
less on viaducts and more on tunnels:
Mr Le Fanu’s line will leave Westland Row and the important part of
[Great] Brunswick Street (Pearse Street) uninjured, and will pass under
D’Olier Street, Fleet Street, and Westmoreland Street, leaving these important portions of the city just as they stand at present . . . Mr Barry proposes a
viaduct right through the city, passing every street from Aston’s Quay,
Parliament Street, Winetavern Street, all of them, say 12 or more in number,
by bridges. Mr Le Fanu proposes to reach the same destination by again
causing his line to dip and to cross Parliament Hill, Cork Hill and
Christchurch Place by a tunnel. This tunnel at Cork Hill he, however,
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intends to construct in such a way as to open a new line of street in
continuation of Dame Street behind Castle Street, with a gentle ascent to
Christchurch Place . . . It is plain that while one [scheme] would disfigure
many of our best streets, the other would be almost invisible to the street
traveller at the points of most interest; and . . . would be the means of
opening up a new lung for the city, and . . . would also have an important
influence on the sewerage of the city, and the purification of the Liffey.45
If Le Fanu had been inspired by the earthworks of the 1840s, the decade of
railway mania, to write “The Watcher”, his own brother’s active involvement in the restructuring of the city might suggest one reason why he
dusted off the story for republication in 1872 as “The Familiar”.
The same sense of being watched, of being under a hostile and even
murderous gaze informs other stories too, ones that at first glance seem
more typical of the magazine fiction of the period, as they deal with
haunted houses. Unsettling figures that come to gaze at the living include
the ghost of the debauched Judge Horrocks in “An Account of Some
Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street”, later extensively reworked for
In a Glass Darkly as “Mr Justice Harbottle”, and the series of poltergeists in
“An Authentic Narrative of a Haunted House”. In “An Account”, the
student inhabitants of an old house in Aungier Street, Dublin are terrified
by various manifestations of a long-dead hanging judge. When one student
tries to sleep in his new bedchamber he finds himself held by the gaze of a
face full of “malignant omen”: “the gaze of this hellish visage was fixed
upon me, and mine returned it with the inexplicable fascination of nightmare” (364).46 In “An Authentic Narrative”, the narrator and his family
rent a house “at a moderate distance from the city . . . and connected to it
by a railway” (420). The house is “quite a modern one”, recently painted
and decorated, and is “one in a cheerful row . . . facing the sea” (420). This
could be a number of commuter towns on the Dublin–Kingstown line,
though given the narrator’s desire for rest, it is tempting to speculate that
the house is in Bray, which expanded as a resort town after the 1854 opening
of the railway line from Harcourt Street, through Milltown, Foxrock, and
Dundrum to the coast. But in this sunny setting the relocated family are
soon subjected to inexplicable knocking in the night, and various
members of the household see shadowy figures: a ragged one-eyed
woman, a small man with a red face, and a young woman with a scar on
her neck. The servants believe that “thieves had established a secret mode
of access to the lower part of the house” (421). But it becomes clear that
their visitors are not of this world, and our narrator speculates that the trio
are reliving their parts in a murderous drama – human teeth and a jawbone
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are found in the back garden. It turns out that the house is not so modern
after all, but once formed part of a remote government store. Sharon
Marcus has suggested that in an age in which the middle classes rented
their homes, stories of haunted interiors encode anxieties about the
divisions of public and private urban space, as well as concerns that the
middle-class home could never be distinct enough from the crowded
lodging houses of the poor.47 But Le Fanu’s stories, as we have seen,
made public space just as haunted as the domestic interior. What we
have here, I would suggest, is a series of ghosts that have been scared up
by the spread of the new mass transport system, and its reshaping of
the built environment. To this extent Le Fanu is reworking an existing
strain of the demographic imagination, those discourses of mass transport,
which consistently deploy the supernatural to figure the experience of the
city produced by the railways. Here, for example, is an account of the
opening of the Dublin and Kingstown Railway in December, 1834:
Hurried forward by the agency of steam, the astonished passenger glides,
like Asmodeus, over the summits of the houses and trees of our city –
presently is transported through green fields and tufts of trees, then skims
along the surface of the sea, and taking shelter under the cliffs, coasts among
the marine villas, and through rocky excavations until he finds himself in the
centre of a vast port.48
The figure of Asmodeus, who becomes a familiar feature of railway
discourse and of the demographic imagination more generally, is borrowed
from Alain René Lesage’s satirical novel, Le Diable boiteux (1707), in which
he is the demon who, released from a bottle, flies with his liberator, Don
Cleophas, through the Madrid night to the top of the tower of San
Salvador, and makes the rooftops disappear to show the people within,
“the hidden motives of their deeds . . . [and] their unbidden thoughts”, in
order to unlock “the secret chambers of the human heart”.49 The potent
demon is invoked again in this later and considerably darker piece in the
Morning Chronicle, the journey into London over the roof-tops of
Bermondsey and Rotherhithe being described as a “bird’s-eye view . . . of
a mass of human struggle” in the closely paced tenements: “Asmodeus
himself, with all his burglarious tactics and invisible entries . . . never
collected domestic episodes half so full of emotion, so dramatic, so
varied . . . as here are mapped out in prodigal suggestiveness before the
railway traveler”.50 The railway, then, in its early years offers rich material
to the demographic imagination. A magic surveillance is opened up, one
that conquers the opacity of the unknowable metropolis, and renders the
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lives of the masses open to scrutiny. Like the detective, the railway offers a
fantasy of mastery over the crowded masses.
In a text coeval with Le Fanu’s “The Watcher”, Charles Dickens’s Dombey
and Son (1846–48), this same railway demon appears. Dickens famously
treats the railway with some ambivalence: if it is associated in the mind of
Mr. Dombey with death, and ultimately used to annihilate Mr. Carker, the
villain of the piece, it also brings order, light, and industry to the frowsy and
overcrowded neighborhood of Staggs’s Gardens, and prosperity to the
Toodles. But at another imaginative level Dickens presents the railway as
an Asmodeus who will lift the rooftops, and reveal the mysteries and miseries
of urban life. In chapter 47 the narrator calls for such “a good spirit who
would take the house-tops off, with a more potent and benignant hand than
the lame demon in the tale”. Dickens, in other words, may be writing within
a recognizable railway discourse rather than drawing directly on Lesage for
his vision of social transformation (the flying spirit of Christmas Present,
who in A Christmas Carol takes Scrooge on a tour of Christmas Eve festivities
all over Britain in order to warm the locked chambers of his frozen heart, can
be seen to be an earlier version of this same figure).
In Le Fanu too something magical comes from the transformation of the
crowded city wrought by the railway, but it is not the white magic of
Dombey and Son and earlier pro-railway accounts. What Dickens represents in terms of a magical panoramic and penetrative vision becomes
something different, and that vision is reversed. Barton does not command
the visual field of the city – he comes under a hostile gaze, is fired upon, and
ultimately dies of sheer terror at what he sees. Explicit or implicit allegory is
transmuted into a more enigmatic supernatural, and no historical reading
of the stories adequately accounts for the effect they describe and evoke.
But we can see at least that the benign spirit of Asmodeus has been replaced
by less-well-disposed forces. What we see is not the secret drama of
metropolitan homes, a fantasy of the masses rendered knowable, but things
that should perhaps remain unseen: a shrunken Watcher, an evil presence
in “An Account”, the participants in a historical crime in “An Authentic
Narrative”. And these suddenly revealed entities look back at us with a
glance that is far from friendly.
Passengers
While “The Watcher” deals with a form of spectral surveillance that seems
to be the antithesis of the visual mastery associated with the urban railway,
in “Green Tea” Le Fanu deals with a different but related aspect of the city
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life: one’s fellow-passengers on public transport. The unfortunate victim of
haunting in this case, the Reverend Jennings, has his first brush with his
supernatural persecutor not in the etui of his comfortable bachelor home in
London, where the story is set, but on an omnibus. While the story was
written in the 1860s, it is set in the early 1800s, when such vehicles as
omnibuses did not in fact exist, suggesting once again that for all their
antiquarianism, it is the crowded streets of his own time whose life informs
Le Fanu’s fiction: “Green Tea” is a story of the anxieties of the mid-century
commuter.
It is worth considering the specific nature of the omnibus as setting,
since by 1869 it was already a vehicle heavily freighted with social meaning.
Omnibuses were large horse-drawn vehicles that in the late 1820s contributed to the development of commuting in Paris, London, and New York,
and many other cities including Dublin (they are usually thought to have
originated in Nantes in 1826).51 The Morning Chronicle described the first
London omnibus, which ran from Paddington to the City from July 4,
1829, as “a handsome machine, in the shape of a van, with windows on each
side, and one at the end”, and capable of accommodating sixteen to
eighteen passengers.52 By the mid-1840s, there were a number of “’bus”
routes in Dublin, including services to Dundrum, Dollymount,
Sandymount, and Bray, despite opposition from operators of “cars”.53
From being a novelty enclosed safely in quotation marks, the omnibus
journey soon became a familiar part of urban life, and likewise became
available as a chronotope and symbol of the random intimacy of modern
city life in popular and high culture alike. A comic play called The
Omnibus, dealing with the perils of commuter-belt life, was on the
Sadler’s Wells stage by the end of 1829; it subsequently featured at The
Chestnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia (1833), the Park, New York (1833 and
1848), and pleased audiences at the Theatre Royal, Dublin, throughout the
late 1830s and early 1840s; it was still popular enough to be an afterpiece in
Melbourne in 1878.54 Paris likewise assimilated the experience of the
omnibus into vaudeville, in such short comic pieces as Gustave Albitte
and Louis Dugard Mon Voisin d’omnibus (Théâtre du Palais-Royal, 1846).55
George Cruikshank borrowed the name of the new vehicle for his comic
illustrated magazine Omnibus (1841–42), and used the chronotope of the
omnibus journey to structure the “Omnibus Chat” sections. Music-hall
songs described romantic omnibus encounters:
I jumped into an omnibus
That soon came passing by
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And sat opposite to a pretty girl
Who giggled at me so sly.56
Novelists also realized the crowded omnibus’s potential as a place in which
strangers could brush against each other, and random but fateful urban
encounters could be staged. In Wilkie Collins’s Basil (1852), the protagonist
first sees the alluring Margaret Sherwin, source of his subsequent misfortunes, on a London omnibus; her momentary touch as he helps her in
immediately stirs him deeply: “I felt it thrilling through me – thrilling in
every nerve, in every pulsation of my fast-throbbing heart”.57 A random
urban meeting on an omnibus journey produces a visceral response, that in
turn starts the protagonist on his narrative journey.58
Painters used the crowded omnibus metaphorically to show the way in
which the city quite literally throws people together: we see and are seen at
close quarters by strangers, and are forced at times to touch them. William
Maw Egley’s Omnibus Life in London (1859) is a famous early example of this
subject, with the foreshortened perspective making our point of view that of
a passenger within the claustrophobic space. Omnibus life, it would appear,
means unpleasant life: an everyday commuter experience of discomfort,
enforced intimacy, and being carried along by forces outside your own
control.59 Thomas Musgrave Joy’s The Charing Cross to Bank Omnibus
(c.1861) pursues a similar theme, but shows us the view from outside: a
young woman is carrying a terrier onto a very crowded omnibus; the
other passengers peer out from the already over-full interior.60 Musgrave
Joy’s work testifies that it was not just the presence of other humans that
made omnibus travel a trial. An article in Punch from 1860 ironically
welcomed the new regulations of the London General Omnibus
Company, which, inter alia, banned dogs, “except small dogs carried in the
hand, and then only with the consent of all passengers”. This suggests that
the bringing aboard of pets had by then become a familiar nuisance – Punch
mentions babies, band-boxes, crinolines, and wet umbrellas as other sources
of passenger misery.61 Of course coach journeys had created such shared
moving interiors too, but there was a quality of brevity, hurry, and randomness to the omnibus journey that was quite different. Over time people grew
habituated to these close encounters. Later paintings, including Alfred
Morgan’s An Omnibus Ride to Piccadilly Circus, Mr. Gladstone Travelling
with Ordinary Passengers (1885), and the Irish painter George William Joy’s
Bayswater Omnibus (1895), depict quiet, spacious interiors, the passengers
preoccupied with their newspapers, suggesting that by then the commuter
experience had been assimilated. But in the 1860s the omnibus was still
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shorthand for crowded urban modernity, and an enforced tactile, visual, and
olfactory intimacy; people did not talk to each other, but they were more or
less sitting on top of each other.
The world of commuting was scarcely unfamiliar to Le Fanu. As
William McCormack notes, between 1843 and 1850, when they settled in
Merrion Square (in the house vacated by Le Fanu’s father in law), Joseph,
his wife Susanna, and their growing family lived for periods in the coastal
towns of Bray, Malahide, and Kingstown, from all of which he would
presumably have taken a train or omnibus to the city to conduct his affairs
as a newspaper owner and magazine editor (125).62
In “Green Tea”, he takes up the popular image of the omnibus as a site
of difficult close encounters, but in his fictional treatment a fellow passenger turns out to be not only of another species, but not of this world at all.
The scholarly Reverend Jennings, returning one evening from the house of
a fellow bibliophile in the City of London to his house in Richmond, takes
“the omnibus which used to drive past this house” (22) when he cannot
find a cab. He initially believes himself to be the only passenger, but in the
gloomy interior he makes out two reddish lights that he realizes are the
glowing eyes of a small black monkey. But this is no ordinary monkey:
I fancied that one of the passengers had forgot this ugly pet, and wishing to
ascertain something of its temper, though not caring to trust my fingers to it,
I poked my umbrella softly towards it. It remained immovable – up to it –
through it. For through it, and back and forward it passed, without the
slightest resistance. (23–24)
Even a flesh-and-blood monkey might bridle at such treatment, but the
spectral animal takes it very ill indeed, and subsequently becomes the
clergyman’s relentless persecutor, haunting him wherever he goes, growing
increasingly malign, and squatting on Jennings’s Bible when he tries to
read to his parishioners. Dr. Martin Hesselius, the student of the paranormal upon whose papers the stories in In a Glass Darkly are supposed to
be based, promises to help the afflicted clergyman, whose spectral persecution seems to be somehow linked to his interest in the paganism of the
ancient world, which he terms a “degrading fascination” (21). Hesselius
considers that too much study, and perhaps too much green tea, have
opened Jennings’s inner eye to allow him to see evil spirits.63 However, the
good doctor then absents himself when Jennings desperately wants him,
and the distraught victim cuts his own throat.
Here again, then, we have the phantasmagoria not of the home but of
public space, in this case a specifically new kind of public space, the ’bus
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interior. As with two stories of 1866, Amelia Edwards’s “The Four-Fifteen
Express” and Dickens’s “The Signal-Man”, the supernatural takes up
residence in the new circuits of transport, rather than in the temporally
and geographically remote. Mr. Jennings does not so much appear here as a
delusional overworked scholar but as a nervous commuter for whom the
silent but hostile gaze of others becomes a living hell. In The Railway
Journey, Wolfgang Schivelbusch argued that railway travel trained people
into a new way of being in the company of strangers, in which the
conviviality of the coach journey turns into the polite silence of the railway
carriage.64 But at roughly the same time the commuters of the crowded
omnibus also learned such skills, and were forced into the same silent
intimacy as their steam-driven peers. “Green Tea” suggests that such a
retraining in being under the gaze of others came at a considerable psychic
cost, and that this was a fraught period in the history of affect. We might
see Jennings’s story as the flip side of those fantasies of random intimate
omnibus and railway encounters that we see in popular songs of this
period, and more rarely in painting, as in Abraham Solomon’s First
Class, The Meeting . . . “And at First Meeting Loved” (1854): where these
suggest the potential pleasures of enforced random intimacy, Le Fanu
renders such intimacy as nightmare.65
Terminus
Are the ghosts that haunt Le Fanu’s work, the half-glimpsed lives of the
urban multitude, fitfully visible from the railway carriage? Are they
shadows of the past as it flares up before disappearing forever beneath
the tracks of mass transport? Or are the hostile revenants that populate
the stories visitors from the hell that is other people in the modern city?
The stories generate their sense of dislocation and unease without allowing
us to answer such questions in any definitive way. It is worth noting that
elsewhere Le Fanu seems equally pessimistic about life as a passenger. In
Uncle Silas, Maud leaves Bartram Haugh for France. She arrives in London
“fatigued with the peculiar fatigue of railway travelling”; but after further
journeys by train and by coach she finds herself not in France but once
again at her murderous uncle’s house.66 The protagonist of “The Room in
the Dragon Volant” travels by coach with a new friend, only to find
himself paralyzed, able to watch his fellow-passenger, but powerless to
move, “a spirit in prison . . . [in] dumb and unmoving agony”, presaging
the subsequent attempt to bury him alive.67 As in Dickens’s Dombey and
Son, public transport is linked to death, but there is no “good spirit” of
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progress and enlightenment to offset that gloomy vision. The “Invisible
Prince” of the doomed Ascendancy is, of course, a far more dramatic figure
than Le Fanu the Victorian commuter, uncomfortable with the railway
mania that made his brother prosperous as well as with the intimacy of his
fellow passengers. But it is the latter who creates the first urban ghost
stories.
Watchers among the sky-scrapers
Other urban ghosts followed the lead of “The Watcher”, though most
stayed indoors rather than roaming the streets, or taking to public transport. As Sharon Marcus has shown, stories like Edward Bulwer Lytton’s
“The Haunters and the Haunted” (1859) are also very much driven by the
nature of city life, but they are tales of haunted domestic space. Among the
spectres who do venture outside are those in Charles Dickens’s legal chiller,
“To be Taken with a Grain of Salt” (1865), in which a member of the jury
in a murder trial has a vision of the murderer and his victim on the street
outside his window. As he notes, “it was in no romantic place that I had
this experience, but in chambers in Piccadilly”.68 Likewise, while most of
the haunting in George Macdonald’s “Uncle Cornelius His Story” (1864)
takes place at a country house of the kind to be found in many ghost stories
(“a large and rambling edifice, parts of it very old, parts comparatively
modern”), Uncle Cornelius’s first ghostly encounter takes place not far
from the British Museum, on the south side of Russell Square.69 In Mrs.
Riddell’s “Hertford O’Donnell’s Warning”, a banshee visits Soho: as the
protagonist remarks, “it’s a mighty queer thing to think of, being favored
with a visit from a banshee in Gerrard Street”.70 Riddell’s “Walnut-Tree
House” is a haunted house story, but one in which she is at some pains to
stress the urban aspect – the house of the title is a country house around
which south-east London has grown, an interesting way of urbanizing the
gothic. Ghosts take to the streets en masse in Margaret Oliphant’s religiously inflected “A Beleaguered City” (1879, 1880), in which the dead of
the French town of Semur return to drive out the skeptical living.71 A few
writers, like Le Fanu, exploited the supernatural possibilities of the new
transport networks. Amelia Edwards, as we have seen, partly anticipates Le
Fanu in her railway story, “The Four-Fifteen Express”, and deals with the
perils of other passengers – mad but earthly – in “A Railway Panic” (1856);
Dickens’s “The Signal-Man” might also be seen to belong to this strain.
The urban ghost revisits in the twentieth century, the years of the
Second World War providing a particularly rich trove. One of the best
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known of these is Elizabeth Bowen’s ghostly tale of London in the Blitz,
“The Demon Lover” (1941), which also uses public transport to chilling
effect.72 America produced its own urban spirits, abetted by the pulp
magazines. In Fritz Leiber’s “Smoke Ghost” (1941), which first appeared
in the pulp Unknown Worlds, the protagonist, Catesby Wran, wonders
what an urban ghost might be like: “I mean a ghost from the world today,
with the soot of the factories on its face and the pounding of machinery in
its soul. The kind that would haunt coal yards and slip around at night
through deserted office buildings like this one. A real ghost. Not something
out of books.”73 Leiber’s is also a tale of public transport, and it is the city
seen from the elevated train that seems to conjure up the smokey ghost that
pursues Wran and threatens his sanity.74 In Ray Bradbury’s “The Crowd”
(1943), published in Weird Tales in May 1943, the protagonist is hurt in a
car crash, and gets his first glimpse of an eerie group who materialize on the
streets as if from nowhere whenever there is an accident. Despite the
availability of such material, the film industry would by and large stick to
more traditional gothic settings –haunted houses and castles – for its
ghosts, though in terms of horror more generally there are plenty of
urban settings, from early versions of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1916),
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), and The Beetle (1920), to the expressionist
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), to the suburban and small-town slasher
films that begin in the 1970s.75
But around the time that the new medium arrived we see an interesting
return in literature to Le Fanu’s territory in the work of a very different
writer, Henry James. While far apart in their literary ambitions, the two
did have some things in common, insofar as James was Irish-American, his
grandfather hailing from Cavan. Curiously, his father bore some resemblance to Le Fanu’s Mr. Jennings: an amateur theologian, one day in 1844
he had the feeling that there was “some damned shape squatting invisible
to me within the precincts of the room, and raying out from his fetid
personality influences fatal to life”.76 This episode oppressed him for years,
until he eventually found some comfort in the writings of Emmanuel
Swedenborg, also consulted, it will be recalled, by Mr. Jennings. These
are rather tenuous biographical links, but Henry James as a writer very
much shared Le Fanu’s interest in and embrace of the ghostly. The Turn of
the Screw (1898) is probably the best-known of his supernatural tales, and it
is certainly the one that has garnered the most critical attention, but James
also produced a considerable number of magazine ghost stories throughout
his career, beginning with “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes”
(Atlantic Monthly, February 1868) and ending with “The Jolly Corner”
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(English Review, December 1908). His stories of the supernatural appeared
in many of the Victorian periodicals we have already touched on, as well as
the English Illustrated Magazine, Scribner’s, Cosmopolitan, Black and White,
and Collier’s Weekly, which published The Turn of the Screw.77 Some
featured in Christmas or January numbers, alongside the work of other
toilers in the ghost industry. In the 1890s, such work helped to make up for
the limited financial returns of his novels, and his decidedly uncommercial
theatrical ventures.78 Even his realist novels frequently seem peopled by
characters who are haunted, or who haunt. As T. J. Lustig observes,
“Jamesian consciousness could itself be described in ghostly terms . . .
[and] . . . [his] fiction is ghostly in its enigmatic allusiveness, its hovering
uncertainty, its fascination with anxiety and awe, wonder and dread.”79 As
the editors of a recent collection of essays on James and the supernatural
note, ghosts are linked in James to a number of his key themes: the
subjective element of experience, indeterminacy, opacity.80 Leon Edel
terms “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903), for example, “a haunting without
a ghost”.81 Thus although James was often dismissive of his potboiling
tales, these stories are not so radically different in their concerns from what
is usually seen as his major fiction, and he included a number of them in
the New York Edition of his life’s work. Of the two stories that I wish to
consider here, only one, “The Jolly Corner”, is usually seen as a ghost story.
The other, “Crapy Cornelia”, is one of those stories of haunting without a
ghost, though it covers very similar ground to “The Jolly Corner”.
James’s late tales of the city were the fruit of his 1904 visit to his native
New York; he had left for Europe in 1875, though he returned for periods in
the early 1880s. During his prolonged absence the population had doubled,
and the city had become a metropolis to rival London – though constructed on very different lines – and James found himself in a curiously
alien environment, spatially as well as socially. In a number of stories written
after his American visit, he reworks the ghost story for psychological purposes; what appears to haunt his protagonists is the past, or some sense that
they have not lived life to the full. And yet, one senses that these actual or
figural specters are only one source of the unease. The characters in these
stories are also discomposed by the transformations of the physical and social
space of the city. Where it was omnibuses and railways that were transforming Victorian Dublin, the population explosion of New York at the turn
of the century was evidenced by such features as the clanging of the
ubiquitous street-cars and, above all, by the replacement of older buildings
with “sky-scrapers”. The latter were the concrete-and-steel gothic cathedrals
of the modern world, driven ever-closer to the heavens by the cost of
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real estate. Like Chicago, New York was by the early 1900s dominated by
man-made cliffs and canyons. (Henry Blake Fuller’s novel, The CliffDwellers, set among the skyscrapers of Chicago, had appeared in 1893; the
use of the term canyon to describe the New York streets dates to the turn of
the century.) But James was equally shaken by the extent to which the
population had changed, and was changing daily in a period of mass
immigration.
James wrote directly – by his own standards – about his American visit
in a series of articles that appeared in the North American Review, Harper’s
Magazine, and the Fortnightly Review, and these essays were later collected
along with new material as The American Scene (1907). He expresses shock
at the way in which the city of his youth has been transformed by
commercial forces and short-term gain, “the most piercing notes in that
concert of the expensively provisional” being the sky-scrapers, which he
presents as “giants of the mere market”, with their “thousand glassy eyes”.82
But worse is to come. His visit to Ellis Island, the processing site for the
country’s immigrants, produces in him a lingering sense that “the alien” is
now the determining fact of American life. No “sensitive citizen” who goes
to Ellis Island to see its workings will return the same:
it shakes him . . . to the depths of his being; I like to think of him, I positively
have to think of him, as going about ever afterwards with a new look, for
those who can see it, in his face, the outward sign of the new chill in his
heart. So is stamped, for detection, the questionably privileged person who
has had an apparition, seen a ghost in his supposedly safe old house. (61)
He goes on to describe a sense of being “haunted” by a “sense of dispossession”, as he walks the thronged pavements, or travels on the crowded
street-cars. (A number of critics have remarked on how this passage
seems to look forward to the haunting of “The Jolly Corner”, and it is
hard not to see the connection between the two.)83 While he does note the
difficulty of positing a distinction between native and alien in a country
long marked by immigration (89), other passages strike a similar note of
ethnic panic: the Italians “who meet us at every turn” (92) are described as
“after the Negro and the Chinaman, the human value most easily produced”. Most chillingly, he describes the “great swarming” (93) of immigrant Jews, who seem to him both individually and together to show their
national type, as even a sliver of glass possesses the qualities of a larger
whole: “So the denizens of the New York Ghetto, heaped as thick as the
splinters on the table of a glass-blower, had each, like the fine glass particle,
his or her individual share of the whole hard glitter of Israel” (94). In
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another curious image he returns to the architectural similes of his Ellis
island visit, and likens an “array of Jews” to some “long nocturnal
street where every window in every house shows a maintained light”
(94). Plate glass seems to somehow link the “glass eyes” of the sky-scraper
and the Argus-eyed Jewish crowd. While some Jamesian critics have used
the complexity of James’s authorial strategies and shifting identifications to
argue for a more positive reading of such passages, it is difficult to see them
as other than expressions of a species of panic in the face of mass
immigration.84
In the stories, James deals with this physical and ethnic transformation
of the city in a more oblique way, though we can see at times how the base
metal of the American Scene has been transmuted into literary gold. In
“Crapy Cornelia” (1909), a middle-aged bachelor, White-Mason, returns
to a now thoroughly alien New York and plans to marry an attractive
younger woman, as Barton does in Le Fanu’s “The Watcher”. The story
opens in a Central Park in which White-Mason sits and contemplates a
visit to a new acquaintance, a Mrs. Worthingham. As he sits, he notices
the clothes of the little girls who play there, which he associates with the
“daughters of the strange native – that is of the overwhelmingly alien –
populace” (221). But he considers that the charming and knowing
Mrs. Worthingham, a wealthy widow, is able to keep step with the
“monstrous stride” of the “coming age” (227), and she will provide a
screen, as it were, between him and the dazzling, brashly materialist
world of the metropolis, saving him from having to engage too closely
with it. When he calls to her house, her value to him is described in a
particularly baroque piece of late-Jamesian prose:
Her outlook took form to him suddenly as a great square sunny window that
hung in assured fashion over the immensity of life. There rose toward it as
from a vast swarming plaza a high tide of motion and sound; yet it was at the
same time as if even while he looked her light gemmed hand, flashing on
him in addition to those other things the perfect polish of the prettiest pink
finger-nails in the world, had touched a spring, the most ingenious of recent
devices for instant ease, which dropped half across the scene a soft-coloured
mechanical blind, a fluttered fringed awning of charmingly toned silk, such
as would make a bath of cool shade for the favoured friend leaning with her
there – that is for the happy couple itself – on the balcony. (228)
This imaginary space is jarring: we appear to be at once behind a plate glass
sky-scraper window, complete with patented mechanical blind, and on
some older kind of balcony above a plaza.85 But I would suggest that the
“vast swarming plaza” below is as much the real city as that of some abstract
The ghost comes to town
103
“coming age”; the swarms below echo his description of New York’s Jews –
“there is no swarming like that of Israel” (94), and his evocation of the
“swarming little square in which an ant-like population darted to and fro”
(96). Mrs. Worthingham will shield him from these importunate realities,
but his plan to propose to Mrs. Worthingham, and marry himself to the
modern America she represents is halted – and his imaginary prospect
interrupted – not by a diminutive spectral visitant from his past, as in “The
Watcher”, but a diminutive former friend, Cornelia Rasch, whom he all at
once recognizes beside Mrs. Worthingham, her unfashionable hat swimming into his view, and coming “nearer and nearer . . . after the manner of
images in the cinematograph” (128). But after this momentary social and
spatial confusion, he comes to realize that Cornelia, unlike the glittering
heiress, shares his memories of the New York of yesterday; he and she are
the “conscious, ironic, pathetic survivors of a dead and buried society”
(236), a smaller, more intimate New York society that preceded the age of
“sky-scrapers” (239). “Crapy Cornelia” is a ghost story after all, but it is
White-Mason and Cornelia who are the revenants who seek the shade in an
overlit present that is all too inhabited by the living.
The psychic dislocation he experiences before the new York of Mrs.
Worthingham takes peculiarly optical forms. He experiences the gleaming
interiors, like the bustling city itself, with its “sky-scrapers” (239), as an
assault on the senses:
He met the whole vision with something of the grimace produced on
persons without goggles by the passage from a shelter to a blinding light;
and if he had – by a perfectly possible chance – been “snap-shotted” on the
spot, would have struck you as showing . . . a scowl almost of anguish.86
Mrs. Worthingham’s role, as we saw above, will be to provide some shade
from the modern glare, yet she also adds to it: her house is too shiny
and new to his eyes, having “that glare of a piece fresh from the mint”
(224), and no patina of use – one thinks of the “hard glitter of Israel”
(94) described in the American Scene. His desire for a place next to
Mrs. Worthingham at an imaginary window overlooking the city later
strikes him as resembling the “famous vertige de l’abime”, a form of
euphoric vertigo at the precipice; we may read this unstable combination
of fear and longing in terms of sexual cathexis, but I would suggest that it
may also be, more literally, the optical and spatial unease induced in
White-Mason, and perhaps James himself, by the glassy-eyed sky-scraper
cliffs and canyons of New York, as well as by a sense of some ethnic void
into which one might fall, a void that looks back at one. Even the prospect
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of contemplating the sources of Mrs. Worthingham’s money takes on the
aspect of an optical nightmare of a different sort, that of being exposed to
the hard gaze of others: “The idea of taking the field in any manner on the
subject of Mrs. Worthingham’s resources would have affected him . . . as
an odious ordeal, some glare of embarrassment and exposure in a circle of
hard unhelpful attention, of converging, derisive, unsuggestive eyes” (237).
It is an image that combines a sense of paranoid surveillance and an
agoraphobic feeling of exposure. Like Le Fanu’s characters, then, WhiteMason experiences the modern city as a collapsing of social distance and
privacy, and he feels curiously exposed to the gaze of others. Other people,
and one might add other peoples, are too close, too much present, too
surveillant, while the city itself throws up a material culture – including,
one assumes, Beaux-Arts white masonry – that is too new, too bright, too
vertiginously high; his own vision is overwhelmed to the point that he feels
he will have to “take up seriously the question of blue goggles” (241).87 This
urge to protect the eyes would some ten years later suggest to Sigmund
Freud, reading Hoffman’s “The Sandman”, the idea of castration anxiety,
but White-Mason’s anxiety seems less about the loss of his manhood than
of the destruction of the self in a totally foreign environment.
The most successful, as the best known, of the late stories, “The Jolly
Corner” (1908), is also a rewriting of the urban ghost story, but its evocation of the supernatural, or the “supernatural-thrilling”, as James himself
put it, is less metaphorical.88 Again, there are some obvious similarities
with “The Watcher”: Spencer Brydon (a name that recalls Le Fanu’s
Barton), has also just returned to his native city, after many years away;
he commences a relationship with a woman, though in Brydon’s case she is
an old flame, Alice Staverton, not a young toast of the town; like Barton,
James’s protagonist has a sexual past that is more hinted at than described;
and like Barton he takes nocturnal walks in one of his inherited properties
only to find that he is being watched by a supernatural presence. He
collapses, almost frightened to death by the climactic encounter with this
other. But he is found the next morning and restored to life by his beloved,
who visits the house with Brydon’s Irish housekeeper, Mrs. Muldoon.
The most intimate connection between the stories, though, is their
relationship to urban upheaval. Brydon spends his night’s walking the
floors of his old family home, hoping to catch a glimpse of his other self, a
version of himself who had stayed on in New York rather than embarking
for a life of decadence in Europe, or “Europe”, as Brydon thinks of it.89
This other self, he feels, would be a captain of industry, or in some other
way part of the world of money. But what underwrites this self-indulgent
The ghost comes to town
105
ghost-hunting is the fact that Brydon is about to make a fortune through
turning his second New York house into a modern apartment building. He
has come to New York “to look at his ‘property’” (162), but the lease on his
second, less good, house having ended, “renovation at a high advance had
proved beautifully possible” (163): it is to be turned into an “‘apartment
house’” (164).
Brydon finds that he has, in fact, a certain natural talent for dealing with
builders, and spends his days as an amateur developer, “ready to climb
ladders, to walk the plank, to handle materials and look wise about them,
to ask questions, in fine, and challenge explanations and really ‘go into’
figures” (163). Alice half-jokes that “if he had but stayed at home he would
have anticipated the inventor of the sky-scraper” (165). This is all the more
surprising in light of his hostility to the architectural and other wonders
that have mushroomed during the Gilded Age, “the ‘swagger’ things, the
modern, the monstrous, the famous things, those he had more particularly,
like thousands of ingenuous enquirers very year, come over to see” (162).
Part of the charm of his visits to Alice Staverton’s “small house in Irving
Place” (163) is that its tenant has kept it a “small still scene”, an oasis of calm
and older values amid the “dreadful multiplied numberings, which seemed
to him to reduce the whole place to some vast ledger-page, overgrown,
fantastic, of ruled and criss-crossed lines and figures” (163). (In this respect
she closely resembles Cornelia Rasch, who surrounds herself with the
things of the recent past.) Alice has learned to live in this world of urban
shock-experience: “She made use of the street-cars when need be, the
terrible things that people scrambled for as the panic-stricken at sea
scramble for the boats; she affronted, inscrutably, under stress, all the
public concussions and ordeals” (164). We are reminded again of The
American Scene, with its evocations of “a foreign carful; a row of faces, up
and down, testifying, without exception, to alienism” (89). The ghost that
Brydon first consciously hunts, and then flees, is the version of himself that
would have developed if he had stayed in New York, and learned himself to
cope with, and perhaps even thrive within, its importunate modernity. The
realization that overpowers him is that this other self is no benign wisp, but
something of a monster, a forceful man of business who might well have
built skyscrapers and made millions by hitching his fortunes to the rapidly
expanding city. Brydon cowers before his double, “falling back as under the
hot breath and the roused passion of a life larger than his own, a rage of
personality before which his own collapsed” (188). Here we see Le Fanu’s
vision of a city in which one is never alone taken in a rather different
direction: James’s hell is other people, but also other versions of the self.
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Brydon confronts a double that is all the more hostile for its having been
suppressed, and that partakes of the overwhelming energy of the modern
city; it is he who is the alien presence, not quite American enough.
The modern ghost story owes its origins to eighteenth-century gothic,
which first showed the potential of a commodified supernatural. But there
is no straight line from The Castle of Otranto to the psychological ghost
stories of Henry James. Along the way, Le Fanu’s achievement was to
strip the ghost story of its feudal trappings, and to make ordinary city
space – public as well as private – the setting for his nightmares of
persecution. To do this, he had to attune himself to the fears and fantasies
that were the other facet of mid-Victorian dreams of urban expansion and
punctual prosperity. By the late nineteenth century the dislocations we
can trace in Le Fanu had been assimilated. But Henry James, confronted
with the extraordinary transformation of the city of his youth into a
sky-scraping metropolis and a modern melting pot, experienced a similar
sense of spatial unease and social hostility, and found in the urban ghost
story an appropriate form to register it.
In the next chapter I want to turn to a rather different transformation of
the streets, and to a different cultural mode. The growing cities were
sustained not just by public transport and speculative development but
also by the printed word. As cities grew in size, complexity, and anonymity,
daily newspapers and advertising signage proliferated as necessary sources
of information, and the street became a legible environment. Newsboys
and bill-stickers became familiar urban characters. But in this chapter we
also leave the narrative and the dramatic for the visual arts: for artists,
popular and elite alike, the discarded newspapers underfoot and the fading
posters on the walls became a rich resource for commentary on the teeming
life of the streets.
chapter 4
The frenzy of the legible in the age of crowds
J: [is for] Journal du soir.
Alphabet grotesque des cris de Paris (1861)1
The News-Boy, though little, does a good trade
Morning and evening his pennies are made;
The “Times” and the “Standard” you hear him cry,
Or “Daily Telegraph” – which will you buy?
London Alphabet (c.1880)2
The Billsticker, with brush and paste,
Always appears to be in haste.
London Characters (c.1880)3
As urban populations surged and cities became ever more anonymous the
physical environment of the street became perforce a landscape of signs.
The nineteenth century may have developed into a technologically driven
frenzy of the visible, to use Jean-Louis Comolli’s much-cited phrase, but on
the street there was a frenzy of the legible. David M. Henkin has shown in
his study of “city reading” in antebellum New York that the peripatetic
urban dweller came to depend on text for a whole range of daily activities:
From a street name or an omnibus destination to the existence of a vacant
apartment or a haberdashery; from the location and nature of a riot to the
exchange value of personal property, crucial bits of information undergirded
all the activities, gestures, and encounters that comprised city life.
Increasingly, this information came in the form of writing or print.4
This is not to say that urban neighborhoods did not have a “local”
character, or circulate news and other information by word of mouth; but
in the central commercial districts to walk the streets was to read, or at least
to be presented with endless text. In a famous essay on urban walking
Michel de Certeau contrasts the panoptic view of the city from above with
the local tactics, the spatial practices, of actual urban pedestrians, the city as
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official text versus the myriad local misreadings, as it were. But, for the
nineteenth-century pedestrian, that more local process was also about
negotiating a hasty path through a baffling array of actual texts.5 Literacy
was an increasingly important urban skill, as was the ability to distinguish
between information and sales-pitch, since one of the principal forces
driving urban visual culture was retailing: the manufactured environment
of the street was dedicated to catching eyes and engineering attention.6
Indeed, in this context learning not to read must have been a valuable skill
too. The seduction of the pedestrian’s furtive glances did not only depend
on text, of course, as the shopping districts of towns and cities also
turned the pavement into a series of consumer dioramas: in the grander
shops – the “monster shops” or “monster houses”, and later the department stores – large plate glass windows enabled eye-capturing displays,
which were rendered ever more vivid through the artful use of gas-lighting
and mirrors; commodity fetishism here took on a peculiarly literal cast.7
But the expansion of outdoor advertising and the mass-marketing of cheap
newspapers made print a crucial part of this more general visual saturation.
Together, these changes brought in their wake posters and handbills,
pavement ads and omnibus ads, sandwich-boards, and the contents bills
of newspaper vendors, as well as the newspapers themselves. What resulted
was a multiplication of not so much images as image-texts, making the
cities and towns readable habitats.8
While a good deal of scholarly energy has been devoted to “reading the
city” in metaphorical terms, Henkin notes that much less has been
expended on the place of print on actual streets, and the practices of public
reading that characterized nineteenth-century urban life. Whether or not
one agrees with him that it in effect constituted an alternative public
sphere, the printed street must be recognized as a novel aspect of the
nineteenth-century city, and distracted public reading seen as a significant
complement to the more immersive private reading experience of the
domestic interior. French children learned that “I “was for “Images!
Marchand d’images”, and “J” was for “Journal du soir” in the Alphabet
grotesque des cris de Paris (1861); Anglophone children likewise learned to
view the city as an alphabetic landscape through such primers as J. Bysh’s
Illustrated London Alphabet (1861), the Pictorial London Alphabet
(1864), and Aunt Louisa’s London Alphabet (c.1880), in which “N” is for
“News-Boy”.9 But adults and children alike also experienced the actual
three-dimensional city as a printed surface. In the same urban ramble, a
pedestrian might walk over pavements ads, have to dodge a wandering
sandwich man, avoid being run over by a horse-drawn billboard,
The frenzy of the legible
109
distractedly read endless posters and window-cards, and have thrust under
his or her nose handbills for temporary entertainment and tracts offering
eternal salvation. This was no place for the illiterate, it would seem. On the
other hand, the streets offered the pedestrian and omnibus passenger such a
baffling profusion of competing texts that they were often only half seen,
and a quarter read. Reading, indeed, is a misleading term, in that it suggests
a level of leisure and textual mastery that could rarely have been possible.
In this chapter I want to give a brief history of the expanding city as a
print-covered environment before turning to consider the cultural refractions of this historical transformation in a number of media. There is by
now a body of work on the impact of advertising and daily newspapers on
nineteenth-century literature, including studies by John Strachan, Jennifer
Wicke, Thomas Richards, Lori Anne Loeb, and Matthew Rubery; and
Gerard Curtis has explored the relationship between the “Sister Arts” of
word and image in these years.10 But here I want to look at some of the
other vestiges left by the frenzy of the legible, specifically those left in
popular visual culture and fine art. The visual arts do not often engage
directly with the masses, but the printed commercial signs and newspaper
headlines that we register in the background of urban genre pictures act as
the metonymic symbols of that overcrowded and anonymous urban life. At
times they are more than that too: by framing their genre scenes of urban
life with the discontinuous flotsam and jetsam of urban print, some artists
found a way of adding oblique moral and political commentary. As we
shall see, this aspect of the demographic imagination was again international, and French and American artists deployed print culture in similar
ways; though we will track the most persistent use of this technique in the
work of the minor British artist Augustus Mulready. In Mulready’s work,
as in that of some of his peers, mass humanity is reduced – by a sort of
domesticating synecdoche – to a handful of vulnerable street figures: flower
sellers, crossing-sweepers, and newsboys in particular. But in his paintings
their plight is brought into ironic relief through the writing on the walls.
Papers, posters, and pedestrians
One of the ways in which print came to saturate the nineteenth-century
city was through the newspaper, which became a de rigueur guide to
anonymous urban life. In the course of the nineteenth century the
newspaper mutates from a luxury item with a second-hand resale value
into a ubiquitous disposable aimed at a mass readership. A sixpenny daily
newspaper was out of the reach of most, but a penny paper, and later a
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halfpenny paper, was not. As has often been described, this expansion and
“democratization” of the market for newspapers was underpinned by a
combination of legislative, technological, and social and economic forces,
though it is probably unwise to say that any of these caused that
expansion.11 In Britain, the lifting of the “taxes on knowledge” – various
duties on newspapers – sustained a significant growth in the number and
political range of titles. Thus the first successful penny daily, the Daily
Telegraph, could only appear when first the 4d and then the 1d stamp duty
on newspapers were finally lifted – the second in 1855; the advertisement
duty had been repealed in 1853, though the removal of the excise duties on
paper did not occur until 1861. In 1851, there were seventeen daily newspapers in total; by 1864 there were eighteen dailies in London alone, and
ninety-six regional dailies, with a total national circulation of 546 million.12
Liberals and radicals campaigned vigorously for these changes, under the
aegis of such bodies as the Association for the Promotion of the Repeal of
the Taxes on Knowledge, which included among its more prominent
members Richard Cobden and John Bright, as well as former Chartist
Richard Moore.13 In this fashion the power of the more expensive
conservative British dailies – The Times and the Morning Post – was
weakened, though The Times still dominated at mid-century, with a
circulation of 60,000 copies in 1855, a huge increase on the 2,500 to
3,000 copies sold in 1801.14 For the first half of the century, sales figures
for the stamped press in Britain give us only a limited sense of the growing
importance of the newspaper as a facet of everyday urban life. For one
thing, there was a vigorous – and cheaper –unstamped press up to the
1830s, which circulated in particular among the working class. But with all
newspapers, the number of readers cannot easily be derived from estimated
sales figures. Many copies were sold to clubs and reading-rooms, where
they reached multiple readers, and papers were often resold. Nonetheless, a
real mass market for dailies appears only at the end of the century. There
were no million-selling daily papers until the early 1900s, when the Irishborn journalist-turned-proprietor Alfred Harmsworth (Lord Northcliffe)
achieved that circulation – or close to it – with the Daily Mail, priced at a
halfpenny, though a weekly, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper (priced 1d), was
already selling 1 million copies by the 1890s.15
On the demand side the greater appetite for news of surging urban
populations was the major factor, but important too were higher levels
of literacy and disposable income. The 1870 Education Act is often
spotlighted as marking an epoch in popular reading, but sales of Sunday
papers before that date suggest that working-class newspaper reading
The frenzy of the legible
111
was already a well-embedded practice. On the supply side, technological
improvements played a significant part in this proliferation of print
culture, and not only because the expanding railway system facilitated
distribution: steam-powered rotary presses and improvements in
type-setting accelerated printing; wood engravings, stereotypes, line cuts,
and later half-tones were used to reproduce images; cheaper paper was
made possible by the gradual substitution of rags with first esparto grass,
and then wood pulp. By the 1880s, Ottmar Mergenthaler’s linotype
machine had appeared in the United States16
The same factors that sustained the expansion of the newspaper industry
in Britain largely applied elsewhere, mutatis mutandis. In the United States
there were no equivalents to the British “taxes on knowledge”, and New
York had a penny daily before London, in the form of Benjamin Day’s
New York Sun. Founded in 1833, by 1838 it had a circulation of 34,000
copies.17 James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald (1835) and Horace
Greeley’s Tribune (1841) soon followed; by the time the latter appeared
New York had twelve daily newspapers.18 The cheap papers tended to use a
smaller format than the older six-cent broadsheets, in which a single page
was almost six square feet, making the newer models pocket friendly in
more ways than one (Henkin, City Reading, 108). According to James
Gordon Bennett’s biographer, writing in 1855, “one could scarcely pass
his neighbor without seeing him thrusting one or more of the penny papers
into his pocket” (cited in Henkin, City Reading, 108). As the Crimean War
and Indian Mutiny did in Britain, the American Civil War created an
enormous appetite for news, and rapid urbanization fueled the growth in
circulation in the decades that followed. Another newspaper pioneer,
Joseph Pulitzer, saw the potential of “cheaper prices, more compelling
graphics, and more aggressive news-gathering tactics”, and by 1887 his New
York World had a circulation of more than a million.19
In France, stamp-duties and state censorship lasted until 1881, but a
mass-circulation press arrived in 1863 with Le Petit Journal.20 Founded by
Moïse-Polydore Millaud, this paper avoided the duties on political papers
by offering a diet of news aimed a popular readership. Priced at just five
centimes, or un sou, it sold in the region of 250,000 copies per day, reaching
a circulation of a million by 1891, by which time its innovative illustrated
supplement – in color by 1890 – was a powerful draw.21 To put the
circulation figures in context, the more staid Le Figaro sold 56,000 copies
when it first appeared as a daily in 1866; other papers, including the Journal
des débats, were selling fewer than 10,000 copies in the 1860s (Guéry,
Visages de la presse, 103); though the weekly Le Journal illustré could sell
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as many as 105,000 (Guéry, Visages de la presse, 87). In an era when most
newspapers saw themselves as molding political opinion, Millaud urged
his journalists to follow “the man in the street”: “Découvrez ce que
pense l’homme de la rue, et puis laissez-vous guider par lui” (Guéry,
Visages de la presse, 105). One thing the man in the street seemed to want
was sensation, and Millaud took a lesson from the cheap popular illustrated
broadsides, the canards. He more than doubled the circulation of the paper
in 1869 and 1870 by extensive coverage of the Troppmann murders, the
grisly “massacre de Pantin”, which mesmerized Paris, rather as the Jack the
Ripper murders would London.22 Circulation reached 594,000 copies on
January 15, 1870, the day that Troppmann was brought to the guillotine
(Guéry, Visages de la presse, 105).23 Other popular papers followed,
including Le Petit Parisien (1876), Le Matin (1882), and Le Journal (1889):
les “quatre grands” (Guéry, Visages de la presse, 106).24 The four, which
were dubbed the “consortium” in the early twentieth century, chased
readers with an aggressive publicity program: “affichages monstres,
défilés, lâchers de ballons, distribution de numéros gratuits” (giant posters,
parades, the releasing of balloons, and handing out of free copies (Guéry,
Visages de la presse, 107)).
Newspapers reached beyond the cities and towns, not least because used
papers could be sent by mail to country readers. (In the towns too even
yesterday’s news had a value, particularly in the earlier part of the
century when a four-sheet London newspaper cost 6d.) In Britain stamped
(i.e., taxed) newspapers could be sent free in the post, whereas a cheap letter
post did not develop until the introduction of the penny post in 1840.
Likewise, in the United States the mailing of newspapers was effectively the
principal role of the postal service until letter correspondence began to
displace it after 1845, when the rates for letter post were lowered – until
then, it was cheaper to send a newspaper than a letter, and correspondents
devised various ruses to convey personal information using newspapers.25
But whatever the regional reach of the press, the massive expansion of the
industry in the nineteenth century is indissolubly linked to the growth of
the cities. The daily press in particular was an urban entity. As Henkin puts
it, “Cities . . . were not simply the contingent sites of news production; they
were the primary and novel subject of the new dailies” (103). The newspaper was a two-dimensional public sphere tightly bound to the threedimensional public sphere of the street; in the rectilinear cities of the
United States, there was even a physical resemblance between newspaper
layout and street. The urban subject had to learn to negotiate both, and to
distinguish information from advertising (Henkin, City Reading, 101–03).
The frenzy of the legible
113
The presence of the newspaper on the street was not only a matter of
seeing copies in the hands of readers, though a broadsheet being read was
certainly hard to miss, a fact Benjamin Robert Haydon utilizes in his
painting Waiting for the Times (1831), where The Times takes up almost
half the composition. Newspapers peered out through the windows of
newsagents’ shops, and lined the booths of news sellers; discarded papers
added to the detritus underfoot, and provided cheap wrapping for a variety
of goods, as well as a source of improvised workmen’s hats.26 But the
papers were made particularly visible – and audible – by the ubiquitous
newsboys. While street news-selling was an old tradition, it expanded
enormously after the appearance of the cheaper papers, particularly the
cheaper evening press. In Britain, the Daily Telegraph was the first to use
uniformed newsboys, while The Echo employed 500 boys wearing “Echo”
caps in 1869. By 1874, similarly clad sellers were to be found everywhere in
England and Wales.27 It was quite a stratified system, with the uniform-less
and independent “street arabs” considerably below their officially endorsed
competitors (Lee, Origins of the Popular Press, 66). The United States had
its own equivalents, who were just as pervasive, “merging the traditional
orality of the street crier . . . with news print technologies and revolutionary
demands for up-to-the-minute news and information” (Henkin, City
Reading, 111). In France, as Thomas Cragin relates in Murder in Parisian
Streets, Le Petit Journal in the 1860s employed a small army of 1,200 crieurs,
who effectively borrowed the vocal techniques of the colporteurs, the
traditional vendors of broadside news-ballads (37).28 On both sides of the
Atlantic, major events generated “Extras”, special late editions to tempt the
purchaser, and the newsboys wandered the streets hawking these. The use
of such sellers was not without controversy: there were complaints from
newsagents who saw them undercutting their own sales; as well as from
those who protested the ethics of child labor. Controversy of a different
sort surrounded newsboys in London when it was suggested that they
circulated obscene publications – targeted by the Obscene Publications Act
of 1857 – as well as newspapers. Whether this was true or not, newsboys
were certainly key to the circulation of the racy “flash” press in New York.
There the Sunday Flash, the Whip, the Rake, and the Libertine offered
readers information on prostitution and sex scandals as well as sporting
news, and it was felt by some that the boys’ touting of these papers on the
Sabbath of all days “was preparing them for a life of vice and crime”.29
Newspapers depended on sales, but also on revenue from advertising,
which became a more professional business in the 1840s, when the “railway
mania”, inter alia, fueled its growth. By then professional advertising
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The Demographic Imagination
agents such as Charles Mitchell, founder of the Newspaper Press
Directory, had begun to appear.30 The 1851 Exhibition, which acted as a
giant shop window for British merchandise, gave advertisers further
impetus.31 Manufacturers began to spread their wings, and ads for a variety
of commodities proliferated alongside more traditional ads for plays,
performances, and lotteries. Many of the commodities that demanded
the attention of the Victorian pedestrian were, as John Strachan has
shown, already well-established in the Georgian period. These included
Warren’s Blacking (the young Charles Dickens worked for a breakaway
branch of this firm on Hungerford Stairs, off the Strand), and such
personal-grooming products as Rowlands’ Macassar hair-oil, Odonto
Tooth Powder, and Kalydor face-wash.32 Throughout the Victorian period
the scent and soap industries were advertising pioneers: Rimmel scents
were much touted; Pears were spending somewhere in the region of
£100,000 per annum by the 1880s, and Sunlight Soap probably spent a
similar sum.33 The patent medicine firms were the major advertisers of the
Georgian period, and this tendency continued too: Thomas Holloway is
supposed to have spent £5,000 per annum in the 1840s, increasing to
£40,000 per annum in the 1860s, and £50,000 by 1883, though not all of
this would have been on newspaper campaigns. In 1895, Joseph Beecham
claimed to be spending £100,000 per year (Elliott, A History of English
Advertising, 172; Nevett, Advertising in Britain, 71). Other major advertisers
in the newspapers included auctioneers, booksellers, finance houses, tea
companies, and tailors (Nevett, Advertising in Britain, 29). The tobacco
and cereal companies became more prominent at the end of the century, as
did the manufacturers of chocolate.
The growing spend on advertising buoyed the newspaper trade, as we
see from the appearance of Charles Mitchell’s Newspaper Press Directory in
1846, but some of the money went in other directions, and one did not
need a newspaper to experience the city as a landscape of print. As with the
press, what we see is not so much a radical departure as the industrialized
intensification of aspects of city life already there in the eighteenth century.
The Georgian city was no stranger to advertising, but in the Victorian city
there appeared to be no escape from the modalities of well-organized
puffery, from posters to placards to omnibus tickets. By 1847, Punch was
complaining that England had become a “Nation of Advertisers” in an
article that was illustrated with cartoons of a bill-poster tackling the dome
of St. Paul’s Cathedral, a cabman’s horse draped in ads, and a “Polar
Advertising Station” menaced by polar bears.34 Ads got under your feet
when pavement writing enjoyed a vogue for a period (Elliott, A History of
The frenzy of the legible
115
English Advertising, 167). Ads could even get in your way: Charles Knight
in his multi-volume London refers to advertising by “peripatetic placard”,
which we also see chronicled in the paintings of George Scharf (Elliott, A
History of English Advertising, 166; Nevett, Advertising in Britain, 57). These
placard men were employed to walk about bearing signs to advertise
various commodities and attractions, thus again avoiding the taxes on
newspaper advertising.35 As Nevett observes, that these human signposts
were often rather shabbily dressed cannot have done much to enhance the
aura of the products they advertised (57). While we see placard men
occasionally in later years (as we shall see in the anti-plumage campaign
in Chapter 5), they were by and large superseded by sandwich men, who
remained a feature of urban life long after Joyce had immortalized them in
Ulysses (1922). Punch’s cartoon of July 13, 1850, “The Real Street
Obstructions”, shows a policeman moving along a costermonger, while
seemingly oblivious to the other street nuisances, such as the sandwich men
who throng the pavement urging pedestrian readers to “Try Our 4d
Mixed”.36 Sandwich men were also a perennial feature of New York life,
as Henkin describes (City Reading, 46–47). Signs were not the only things
carried: men were employed to walk around with over-sized models of such
products as tins of Warren’s Blacking. Pedestrians faced another hazard in
the distributors of handbills, or flyers, whose wares were produced in their
tens of thousands to advertise goods, services, and events, and distributors
of religious tracts likewise competed for the pedestrian’s attention.
Handbills were also sent through the Penny Post, causing Punch to lament
that “We are haunted with advertisements enough in all shapes, tricks, and
disguises. The Penny Post has increased the distribution of them most
prolifically. Half our billet-doux end with an eloquent appeal to run to
some cheap grocer’s and buy a pound of his best Hyson” (Nevett,
Advertising in Britain, 60). Hindley and Hindley claim that to promote
The Dead Heart at the Adelphi (November 1859) some 5 million handbills
were distributed, alongside other materials – 1 million heart-shaped cards,
and cut-outs of crucial scenes (Advertising in Victorian England, 53). These
numbers seem high, and may have been exaggerated by the advertisers,
but we know with some certainty the quantities of handbills used by
Bradbury and Evans to promote Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1846–48):
220,000, along with 10,000 posters.37 The handbill was not the only
printed matter given away freely. Pill-manufacturers gave away sheet
music, and grocers and tailors gave loyal customers magazines and a street
map – Baker’s A.B.C. Guide to London (Hindley and Hindley, Advertising
in Victorian England, 44–49, 52).
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The Demographic Imagination
Pedestrians also had a variety of other eye-catching matter thrust into
their field of vision: as the Punch ad of 1850 shows, horse-drawn vehicles
dragged billboards and other forms of advertising through the streets – the
mobile billboard advertises Tussaud’s “Chamber of Horrors”, a “Monster
Concert”, and other delights. Lotteries in particular were advertised by
such conveyances, until they were stopped in 1826 (Sampson, A History of
Advertising, 466–71; illustration facing p. 466); John Strachan describes an
1826 parade of such vehicles that included a brass band, men in livery, and
flags, as well as the actual ads.38 German visitor Prince Hermann von
Pückler-Muskau noted in 1827 that “every day that sees some new
invention . . . [such as the] countless advertisements, and the manner of
putting them ‘en evidence’ . . . Chests like Noah’s Ark, entirely pasted over
with bills, and of the dimensions of a small house, drawn by men or horses,
slowly parade the streets”.39 In 1847, they were still a source of complaint to
Punch, which railed against the congestion caused by these “monster cart[s]
running over with advertisements”: “go where you will you are stopped by
[one], or are nearly knocked down by an advertising house put upon
wheels”.40 The nuisance was finally ended, in London at least, by the
Hackney and Stage Carriage Act of 1853. But while the 1853 Act suppressed
the use of horse-drawn signs, advertisers had already realized that the
sides of omnibuses, including the windows, offered a very satisfactory
alternative. Almost any Victorian photograph of a busy London street
shows us omnibuses, and later trams, covered in ads for such products as
Eno’s Salts, Nestlé’s Milk, Suchard’s Cocoa, Borwick’s Baking Powder,
Sanitas (a disinfectant), Sunlight Soap, and Quaker Oats, as well as, more
rarely, the Daily Telegraph and other newspapers. Thomas Smith and
Willing and Company were among the contractors for omnibus ads: for
12s 6d a month Smith could offer you a sign 8 feet by 20 inches.41 By the
end of the nineteenth century, the firm of J. W. Courtenay dominated
the provision of tram ads, with offices in London, Edinburgh, Belfast,
Leeds, and Newcastle.
These ingenious forms of advertising were fairly pervasive, but after the
newspaper it was the simple poster that came next in the hierarchy of
publicity. Posters enjoyed a number of comparative advantages over their
main rival: they were untaxed, they allowed for the use of striking visual
effects (even after the lifting of the tax on advertising the newspapers were
reluctant to disrupt the look of their pages with dramatic typography or
illustrations); they could be circulated fairly rapidly; and posters could
display material that newspapers might shy from, including political and
religious matter (Nevett, Advertising in Britain, 53, 55). Moreover, until the
The frenzy of the legible
117
lifting of the taxes on knowledge, most newspapers enjoyed quite small
circulations, driving those in pursuit of a mass market to other methods.42
The urban walls themselves became so many pages as bill-stickers eagerly
papered them over with ads for commodities and commodity-experiences.
In 1834, Tait’s Magazine noted that “If a house . . . becomes tenantless, on a
given day, the next shall see it covered to the very chimney tops with
posting bills” (Nevett, Advertising in Britain, 55). The bill-poster, or
bill-sticker, develops into a familiar figure of urban life in Britain and
America, one of the typical street characters who appear in illustrated
children’s books about the city. He becomes just as typical in France, as
we see from, say, the opening scene of d’Ennery and Grangés play, Les
Bohémiens de Paris, which we considered in the last chapter: the curtain
opens on a bustling city scene, and among the various street-characters
there is an “afficheur”. In volume 5 of London Charles Knight describes a
visual world in which no dead wall, hoarding, or building site was safe
from this intrepid figure:
Any dead wall, or any casing of boards around a public monument or public
dwelling in the process of erection, on which the cabalistic words
Bill-Stickers, beware! or Stick no Bills! have not been traced, may be,
without more ado converted into a place of exhibition . . . The boarded
fence at the top of the stairs leading down to the steam-boat station at the
north-end of Waterloo Bridge, the dead wall beside the English Opera
House in North Wellington Street, the houses condemned to have the
improvements driven through where Newport Street abuts upon
St. Martin’s Lane, the enclosure round the Nelson’s Monument in
Trafalgar Square, the enclosure of the space on the west side of St. James’s
Street, where the Junior United Service Club House is about to be erected,
are at present the most fashionable and conspicuous of these exhibitions at
the West End.43
This is one of the most detailed sources we have from the 1840s of the range
of poster advertising and its striking visual appeal:
There are colossal specimens of typography, in juxtaposition with which the
puny letters of our pages would look like a snug citizen’s box placed beside
the pyramids of Egypt. There are rainbow-hued placards, vying in gorgeous
extravagance of colour with Turner’s last new picture. There are tables of
contents of all the weekly newspapers, often more piquant and alluring than
the actual newspapers themselves . . . Then there are pictures of pens,
gigantic as the plumes in the casque of the Castle of Otranto, held in
hands as huge as that which was seen on the banisters of the said castle;
spectacles of enormous size, fit to grace the eyes of an ogre; Irishmen dancing
under the influence of Guinness’s Dublin Stout or Beamish’s Cork
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The Demographic Imagination
Particular; ladies in riding habits and gentlemen in walking dresses of
incredible cheapness; prize oxen, whose very appearance is enough to satiate
the appetite for ever. Lastly, there are Bills o’ the Play, lettered and
hieroglyphical, and it is hard to say which is the most enticing. (35)
The playbills offer the most striking pictures, whatever their deficiencies in
accuracy and perspective:
a Domestic Tale, in the shape of one man shooting another on the
quarter-deck of a vessel in flames, off the coast of Van Diemen’s Land,
with emigrants and convicts of all shapes and sizes crowded on the shore; or
the grand fight between grenadiers and Jacobite conspirators, in the Miser’s
Daughter; or Jack Ketch, caught on his own scaffold; or a view of the
tremendous Khyber Pass, as it may be seen nightly at the Queen’s
Theatre, with Lady Sale at the top of it brandishing a pistol in either
hand, beneath the cocked and levelled terrors of which a row of turbaned
Orientals kneel on either side of the heroine. (35)
This frenzy of the legible was hardly unique to London. As Henkin
describes, New York had become equally saturated with the postered
word. In France, placards with colored pictures advertising new novels
(and often reproducing the illustrations) appear from the 1830s. The
appearance from 1857 of the famous kiosques lumineux made the poster
an official ingredient of the street landscape; it was also in France that the
chromolithographic poster would later in the century make its first
real impact, in the work of Paul Gavarni, Jules Chéret, Edmond Grasset,
and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, among others (Hindley and Hindley,
Advertising in Victorian England, 70–74; Turner, The Shocking History of
Advertising, 106–07).44
Such ubiquity did not go unquestioned, of course. At mid-century,
British commentators were loud in their condemnation. According to
the anonymous author of The Language of the Walls: And a Voice from
the Shop Windows; or, The Mirror of Commercial Roguery by One Who
Thinks Aloud (1855), the “Language of the Walls”, which promises the
reader health, riches, music, and fun, is to be found “posted upon every
blank wall, from Caithness to Land’s End”; it is “silent, but often powerful
and eloquent – arresting our attention whether we will or not”.45 The
ancients did not make “libraries of their walls” (2), but the moderns face an
overwhelming and promiscuous array of text and image:
The great Wizard of the North may be seen in red and blue posters, in
company with my Lord Bishop of Exeter, or stuck up alongside of the
flaming announcement of a Love Feast [a religious service at which food or
drink was served], or a Missionary Meeting for the conversion of the Kaffirs,
The frenzy of the legible
119
or the Crowfeet Indians. We have seen D.P. Millar [of the Adelphi Theatre,
Glasgow] quietly covering a Noble Lord. (4–5)46
Such comic juxtapositions were a source of satirical prints on both sides of
the Atlantic (Turner, The Shocking History of Advertising, 104; Henkin, City
Reading, 69–71). Saturation, confusing heterogeneity, and the ability to
arrest our attention “whether we will or not” are recurring charges leveled
against the “language of the walls”, even by more temperate critics. It does
not seem too much of a stretch that such complaints also implicate the
heterogeneous masses who are the raison d’être of the advertising.
The issue of enforced reading appears in particular in relation to
omnibus and train ads. According to Punch in 1847, “advertisements are
spreading all over England – they have crept under the bridges – have
planted themselves right in the middle of the Thames – have usurped the
greatest thoroughfares – and are now just on the point of invading
the omnibuses.”47 Small posters were placed both on the panels adjacent
to the windows, or over the windows themselves. Later in the century we
see ads placed over the heads of the passengers, in the curved ceiling of the
carriage, though these may not have been conventional paper posters.
Punch, predictably, lamented the invasion of the omnibus interior:
How will you like sitting for an hour opposite to a pleasant list of wonderful
cures by some Professor’s Ointment? Or how will ladies like being stared in
the face all the way from Brentford to the Bank with an elaborate detail of all
the diseases which Old Methuselah’s Pill professes a specific for? [These] do
not form the kind of reading we should exactly prescribe to the fairer
portion of the public which patronises omnibuses.48
For Punch it was quite bad enough to be under the gaze of strangers for
extended periods in confined quarters, without also being vis-à-vis with this
mortifying reading material. Ads thus joined crinolines, dogs, and wet
umbrellas as one of the menaces of omnibus travel, that great symbol of
the overcrowded aspect of modern life (cf. pp. 94–95). Punch was, of course,
happy to condemn many forms of innovation, but there is a significant point
being made about the enforced aspect of this public reading, particularly for
middle-class women, who would generally travel inside the omnibus rather
than on top. The changing etiquette of communal travel meant that
passengers no longer talked to each other, which also meant that looking
too hard at other passengers was unacceptable – in such a situation the
advertisements became the only safe place to look.49 For this reason trains too
became a favored location for those advertisers, and the walls of second- and
third-class carriages were covered with ads, as we see in such paintings as
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The Demographic Imagination
Abraham Solomon’s Second Class – The Parting: “Thus Part We: Rich in
Sorrow, Parting Poor” (1854). (This is a companion-piece to his First Class –
The Meeting: And at First Meeting Love, also from 1854, in which no such ads
appear.) As with omnibus passengers, the railway passenger was a captive
reader: unless he or she had brought a book or newspaper, the bored gaze was
likely to wander to the print- and image-covered carriage-walls.50
We can in part track the proliferation in outdoor advertising through
the legislative attempts to control it. The Metropolitan Paving Acts of 1817
and 1839 attempted to regulate street advertising by providing for the
licensing of hoardings and by monitoring the bill-posters. The 1839 Act
also outlawed direct writing on walls, which suggests that such wallchalking was common enough to attract invidious attention (Nevett,
Advertising in Britain, 56). But it was the efforts of the bill-posters themselves to police the industry that brought real change, since even licensed
hoardings could be quickly postered over by renegade agents. By 1862, the
United Kingdom Bill-Posters Association had been founded, and licensed
hoardings were protected with some zeal by the police (Nevett, Advertising
in Britain, 86–92; Hindley and Hindley, Advertising in Victorian England,
90–91). Rogue postering continued, though on a lesser scale.
The self-policing of the industry continued until the end of the century,
when the state began to take a greater interest in the content and scale of
ads. The Indecent Advertisement Act of 1889, for example, provided for
prosecutions for the display of obscene material. One group lobbying for
such state control was the National Vigilance Association, which took a
close interest in any material they perceived to be corrupting. Occasionally
protests developed around particular posters, as happened in 1890 with the
Westminster Aquarium’s posters advertising Zaeo, the scantily clad female
acrobat.51 (The police decided not to act in the Zaeo case.) But the real
pressure on the industry came from a somewhat different source, and was
driven by aesthetic rather than moral imperatives. By then advertising was
a major adjunct of modern mass-manufacturing, and agencies along
modern lines had begun to appear. Advertising spend had grown
considerably from the estimated £1 million it had been at mid-century:
by 1914 total ad spend would be closer to £15 million (Elliott, A History of
English Advertising, 175; Nevett, Advertising in Britain). Giant billboards
replaced the cluttered composition of the older multi-poster hoardings,
and integrated campaigns supplanted more haphazard puffery. (The
problem of rogue postering never entirely disappeared, and remained a
source of comic images: in the 1880s, Punch was still satirizing the
“Pandemonium of Posters” and “The Way we Advertise Now”.)52
The frenzy of the legible
121
A reaction set in against the ever-increasing saturation of the visual field
with advertisements, with such essays as Richardson Evans’s “The Age of
Disfigurement” in the National Review (1890), and a series of letters to The
Times in 1892 on “The Advertising Plague”.53 In 1893, Richardson Evans
founded the Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising (SCAPA)
in order to stop the “abuse of the practice of spectacular advertising” and
guard “the picturesque simplicity of rural and river scenes, and the dignity
and propriety of our larger towns”.54 (One of the other titles that had been
mooted was “The Beautiful World Society”.) The endless advertising hoardings, in city and countryside alike, were leading to the “catchpenny alphabetification of the visible universe”.55 A particular offender was American food
company Quaker Oats, which had “affront[ed] the public eye” by placing
hoardings on top of the cliffs at Dover.56 Alfred Waterhouse, RA was the first
president of SCAPA, and early members included William Morris, Sir
William Blake Richmond, and Lord Brabazon (the Earl of Meath).57
SCAPA eventually saw the achievement of many of their aims through the
Advertisements Regulation Act in 1907, which enabled local authorities to
control spectacular ads in their area. The alphabetification of the universe was
checked outside urban areas, though the cities continued to be print-saturated
spaces: presumably their position in the “Beautiful World” was doubtful.
Comic commentaries
This print-saturated urban world was clearly a reflex of population explosion, but I want to turn now to how it began to inform the demographic
imagination. One of the first places it registers is in comic commentaries on
the kaleidoscopic aspect of visual environment, which comes to act as a
double of the heterogeneity of mass urban life. We have already seen the
interest that Punch took in advertising, and we can also follow the progress
of postering through the political cartoons of the period: “Bill stickers
beware” signs first appeared in the 1830s, and were an obvious source for
political puns, including John Doyle’s political cartoon on the Municipal
Corporations (Ireland) bill, A Gentle Warning (1836), which represents the
Duke of Wellington tearing down “bills”, while Lord Lyndhurst paints a
“bill stickers beware” notice.58 But posters also left their mark on other,
perhaps less elite, facets of the comic tradition. An early example is
Jonathan Blewitt’s song, London Shop Windows (c.1820?):59
I read all the bills as I pass in the throng,
And I think I could work them up into a song:
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The Demographic Imagination
This house and shop to be let upon lease,
Portraits taken 5 shillings a piece.
...
The last new novels which had such a run,
Messages taken and Porter’s work done.
...
New works just published, Waste Paper bought,
...
Lavender water, Books lent to be read,
20th edition new song Cherry Ripe,
Timothy Anderson, dealer in Tripe.60
The overwhelming proliferation of print is here imagined to lead to a
speeding up of the life-cycle of printed goods, as in the paratactic
humor of “new works just published, Waste Paper bought”.61 The
rhymes bring out the comic juxtapositions created by the visual overload:
new premises and portraits, cherries and tripe – all are jumbled up in
advertising messages, as the city itself becomes a melting pot for people
and things.
With the rise of music hall and the illustrated sheet music cover, the
humor of such messages is reinforced by the chromolithographic image.
The punning possibilities of the bill are explored, for instance, in the comic
song Bill Stickers, Beware (1864), sung by the music-hall performer,
William Randall.62 The humor of this song by John Caulfield junior
involves one William Stickers, who is horrified to come across what
seems to be a personal warning writ large – “Bill Stickers Beware” – on a
hoarding in a railway station (Figure 4.1). The source of the comic confusion is that in a teeming city there is bound to be a William Stickers out
there somewhere. But in a city whose surfaces are covered with anonymous
text, perhaps the real joke is that anyone would take the time to read such a
message, let alone feel interpolated by it, mistaking the verbal cacophony
for an actual personal message. (The background of Ford Madox Brown’s
painting Work, exhibited in 1865, features a slightly different version – a
poster appears advertising an estate agent, “William Poster”; similar jokes
circulated well into the twentieth century.) J. Wagner’s chromolithographic cover illustration to Randall’s song shows William contemplating
in horror the “bill stickers beware” sign on a chaotically postered temporary
hoarding. (In the background we can see a large and presumably legitimate
poster that is advertising excursions to Paris for a better class of pedestrian.)
The illicit posters include one that advertises a reward for information on a
The frenzy of the legible
123
Figure 4.1 J. Wagner, detail from cover to Bill Stickers Beware (1864).
“Horrid Murder”, and, in a common piece of self-reference, ads for
Randall himself at the Oxford Music Hall. The image, then, is in essence
a version of Blewitt’s song: the teeming city produces comic heterogeneity,
of ads as much as people.
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The Demographic Imagination
Alfred Concanen created another visual comic commentary on the
transformation of everyday life by printed matter for Henry Walker’s
comic music-hall song The Age of Paper (1862), which Howard Paul sang
each night “attired in a suit of paper”, according to the illustrated cover.63
The song is a mock lament for the arrival of a tidal wave of paper clothing:
Each swell attired in mode extreme
Of paper is a walking ream;
His collar, necktie, shirt, and vest,
Instead of starch’d are all hot press’d
But greatest care he’s forced to own,
Being held together by paste alone;
And should he sneeze, or start, or spring
Twould “weally be a dreadful thing”!
– For paper now is all the rage
– And nothing else will suit the age.64
The sheet music cover represents a street scene in which a gentleman
with Dundreary whiskers, the “swell” of the song, is surrounded by various
manifestations of the age of paper: a newsboy touts his wares – an index of
the arrival of affordable daily newspapers; the shop behind him, Arthur
Granger, is selling paper collars, paper hats, and paper coats; a bollard is
coated in bills that advertise a book or song punningly entitled “Il Papa di
Roma – Just Out”; “Paper-Hanging: Cheapest in London”; and, of course,
“Howard Paul [sings the] The Age of Paper in a Paper Suit Tonight”
(Figure 4.2). (Arthur Granger’s was an actual shop at 308 High Holborn,
a “Cheap Stationery and Toy Warehouse” that by the early 1860s was also
advertising patent paper collars and cuffs.) In the background a boy flies
a paper kite, and two shady looking characters with large noses – Jewish
stereotypes – are close in conversation. One assumes that they are meant
to be sellers of “paper” in dubious joint-stock companies, junk
bonds, in effect, not worth the paper on which they are printed, echoing
(unconsciously, one assumes) an eighteenth-century account of financial
bubbles entitled “The Age of Paper”.65 Indeed in this respect Concanen’s
cover brings out the larger context that links advertising and the “age of
paper”: capitalism is a paradoxical system that surrounds the consumer
with an increasingly complex and disjunctive world of material objects,
and curious material transformations, while all the time being really more
invested in the supra-sensible aspect of those objects as commodities, that
is as exchange values.66
Given his spirited depictions of verbal chaos, it is perhaps ironic that one
of the most widely reproduced images of the age of paper is a Concanen
The frenzy of the legible
Figure 4.2 Alfred Concanen, detail from cover to The Age of Paper (1862).
125
126
The Demographic Imagination
Figure 4.3 Alfred Concanen, detail from frontispiece to Henry Sampson, A History
of Advertising (1874).
chromolithograph that conveys a very different picture of everyday visual
culture. Modern Advertising: A Railway Station in 1874 was used as the
elaborate folding frontispiece to Henry Sampson’s History of Advertising
from the Earliest Times (1874) (Figure 4.3).67 It shows a railway station
abundantly papered with ads for newspapers and magazines (including the
Daily Telegraph, Punch, and Judy), patent medicines such as Ede’s
American Eye Liquid, Whelpton’s Pills, and Crosby’s Balsamic Cough
Elixir, as well as ads for sherry, pianos, and insurance (the Ocean, Railway,
and General Travellers Assurance Company, whose business was later
absorbed by what is now Aviva). But perhaps the most striking aspect of
this image is that the chaotic visual field of Concanen’s earlier representations of ads has been replaced with a strictly rectilinear one, in which no
posters overlap. This was to some extent a reflection of the progressive selfpolicing of the advertising market. It was also, of course, the vision of
advertising that the industry itself wanted to promote.
But for the most part the popular visual culture of the period
represents comic heterogeneity and chaos rather than the ordered landscape of public-relations fantasy. Sometimes the illustrated sheet music
tracks the transformation of the streetscape in indirect ways: newsboys,
handbill distributors, placard and sandwich men pop up regularly in the
The frenzy of the legible
127
background as typical street characters; posters and other advertisements
feature as pieces of local color, often self-referentially selling sheet music, or
music hall venues. Thus newsboys are part of the onlooking street population in the covers to such songs as The Happy Policeman, A Comic Burlesque
Duet (c.1862, illustration by H. C. Maguire), and The Man with the Indian
Drum (c.1870, illustration by T. W. Lee).68 Handbill distributors feature in
the Streets of London Quadrilles (1865), illustrated by Thomas Packer; the
latter also includes a man with an advertising hat, which promotes the Coal
Hole, a musical tavern opposite Exeter Hall in the Strand.69 Frank Hall’s
Oxford Street (1863) depicts a placard man who is promoting the music
publishers themselves, L’Enfant and Hodgkins. Other covers exploit the
newspaper itself as a ubiquitous feature of the urban landscape. Examples
include The Times Galop (c.1869), The Scotsman Galop [1877], and Times
Quadrille (1879).
Across the Atlantic the proliferation of print was likewise deployed in
humorous commentaries on modern life, as in the popular lithograph, The
Bill-Poster’s Dream: Cross Headings to Read Downwards (1862) (see Henkin,
City Reading, 69–72). In essence, it is a visual version of Blewitt’s London
Shop Windows, and the jokes are found by reading the overlapping posters
downwards like newspaper columns, for example, “Steamer Hero leaves
Pier 6 for . . . ‘Dixie’s Land’” [a reference to blackface minstrelsy that
visually echoes Parry’s poster for “Jim Crow”]. An illustrated comic song
of the period, also called The Bill-Poster’s Dream, hammers home the point:
If you walk through the streets of New York city;
You can daily see the subject I have chosen for my ditty;
...
Posted bills of every size and shape is sure to meet your eye,
...
“For Mayor” “the hippopotamus” – “Regular union
nomination”.70
A later version of the lithograph exists that makes a verbal salmagundi of
the attractions of 1877, with a theatrical poster for The Two Orphans just
above an ad for the evangelical preachers Moody and Sankey.71
Painting print
In fine art painting, commentaries on the urban are a comparative rarity,
especially when set against the huge numbers of rural genre scenes
and thinly populated landscapes. Nonetheless, the transformation of
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The Demographic Imagination
the street by print does occasionally register on the more elite side of the
demographic imagination. The place of print in these urban genre scenes is
rather different from that discussed by Garrett Stewart in his historical
account of the representation of reading and interiority in Western art: nor
is it entirely consonant with those scenes of non-reading described by Leah
Price as a facet of Victorian realist fiction.72 In the paintings I wish to
consider here the texts represented are the wallpaper of modern urban life,
a ubiquitous visual index of the pressures of population in the anonymous
city; often readable by us, they are not always within the visual field of the
subjects of the canvas. But they are also used, especially in English painting,
to supply us with information. To a considerable extent this use of ads,
newspapers, and newspaper content derives from the strong narrative drive
within Victorian art, the “touch of the tale” that F. T. Palgrave singled out
in 1862 as the dominant characteristic of contemporary art.73 The imaged
word often fills in the narrative, telling us things we need to know about
the subjects of the painting. In Walter Benjamin’s “Little History of
Photography” he draws attention to the power of the camera to capture
not just the subject of the photograph but background details that may not
have been part of what the photographer consciously wished to preserve.74
This aspect he describes as an “optical unconscious”, and it is an idea that
has proved very suggestive for literary studies as a way of theorizing the way
in which texts can indirectly capture the imprint of everyday life. But that
is not quite what we are dealing with here, I would suggest: artists are for
the most part making conscious use of the poster, newspaper and newspaper “contents bill” as background details – this is an optical conscious.
At times painters engaged very directly with the transformation of the
visual environment, and the homology between the kaleidoscopically
cluttered walls and the crowded pavement is made obvious. Perhaps the
best-known picture of this sort is John Parry’s extraordinarily detailed
watercolor of 1835, The Poster Man, which shows that street character at
work on the gable end of a building near St. Paul’s, the dome of which is
clearly visible in the background, behind wooden palings that cordon off a
building site. Here postering is a symbol of the sensory and commercial
saturation of modern urban life, but the overlapping – and yet legible –
posters are also the two-dimensional equivalent of the jostling crowd
beneath. They too are both a mass and yet readable as distinct urban
types. In the foreground a range of characters are watching the poster
man in action: a policeman (one of the relatively new Metropolitan Police)
speaks to a smartly dressed soldier while having his pocket picked by a
ragged youth; a chimney-sweep stands close to the bill-sticker; a butcher’s
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129
boy carrying a large joint stops to look at the wall, as do a number of others
who are clustered near the brazier of a vendor of some kind of street food.
This stylized disaggregation of the urban mass anticipates such midVictorian crowd-pieces as George Elgar Hicks’s The General Post Office,
One Minute to Six (1860), and William Powell Frith’s The Railway Station
(1862). But it is the trompe-l’œil effect of the poster-covered wall itself that
dominates the composition, with some forty posters and poster fragments
competing for our attention to tout the flesh-pots of the city: concerts,
operas, plays, and firework spectaculars, to say nothing of “industrious
fleas”, and ads for coaches, hats, magazines, and steam-ship voyages. While
there are some fine art precedents for this painting in the seventeenthcentury trompe-l’œil work of Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts (sometimes
Gysbrechts), as Peter Sheppard Skaerved has noted, The Poster Man is very
much sui generis.75 The mesmerizing image is all the more impressive for
not being the work of a professional painter, but that of a singer, musician,
and composer of comic songs. It is itself a semi-comic piece, of course, with
many self-referential touches, not least the poster advertising a performance by Parry, and the humorous word-salad effect of overlapping
posters was a familiar topos in popular visual culture too, as we have
seen. After Parry’s bold example the treatment of the frenzy of the legible
is usually oblique. Later street paintings also show playbills and posters, as
well as newspapers and newsboys, but they are often quite a muted
presence, though not, I will argue, an insignificant one.
Newspapers and newsboys are often represented in nineteenth-century
painting as indices of quotidian urban reality, especially that of the masculine public sphere, for example, in Benjamin Robert Haydon’s Waiting for
the Times (1831) and the American artist Richard Caton Woodville’s Politics
in an Oyster House (1848); or to highlight interruptions of that reality, for
example, in Alfred Morgan’s An Omnibus Ride to Piccadilly Circus: Mr.
Gladstone Travelling with Ordinary Passengers (1885); or to show the sentimental links maintained by the news, as in John Dalbiac Luard’s The
Welcome Arrival (1857), a scene from the Crimean War. By contrast, the
function of ads in early- and mid-Victorian painting is more often to give
us narrative information that adds nuance to the subject in the foreground.
The subjects of the painting do not read these signs, but we, the viewers,
do. A good example of this device is a painting we have already touched on,
Abraham Solomon’s railway painting, Second Class – The Parting, a companion piece to First Class – The Meeting (both 1854).76 The painting
represents a family group in the interior of a second-class carriage; we
deduce that it is a mother, accompanied by her daughter, bidding goodbye
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The Demographic Imagination
to her son. In the seats behind them we see a sailor and his sweetheart or
wife; through the window on the right hand side we can see the masts of
ships. Any doubt we may have as to where the boy is going is allayed by the
posters in the background, which advertise sailings to Australia.
Presumably he is off to make his fortune, one of the many drawn by the
Victoria gold rush of 1851. A less familiar example on a similar theme is
William Morrison Wyllie’s painting, The Soldier’s Farewell (1871). This
time the young man who is leaving home is a little older, and he is going to
war – presumably the Franco-Prussian War – rather than the gold fields of
Australia. One of the posters in the background advertises the “Emprunt
National” – a French national loan, or war bond. The young soldier, it is
suggested by this background detail, is giving something more precious
than money; and he is forsaking the real bonds of family for the metaphorical family ties of the modern nation.
Sometimes posters provide mildly comic commentary, as in William
Maw Egley’s Omnibus Life in London (1859), a painting that more generally
registers the demographic pressures of the modern city, as we saw in
Chapter 3. The ads in the background are at one level part of the minute
realism that Egley adopts for his claustrophobic interior scene, but they
also relate to the passengers that they frame. On the right we see an ad for
omnibus ads; and on the left-hand side we see an ad for a men’s tailor that
shows a pair of men’s legs, wearing fashionable trousers and casually
crossed at the knee. The visual joke is that no such relaxation is available
to the male passengers in the painting, who like the other passengers are
tightly hemmed in. The women who sit opposite the ad are looking
elsewhere, perhaps an indication that staring at pictures of men’s legs
was not seemly, and that such ads only added to the discomforts of city
life, as Punch suggested. The almost anamorphic form of the ads,
produced by the painting’s foreshortening perspective, further suggests
the cramped conditions.
A more somber commentary on the subject in the foreground is evident
in Augustus Egg’s Past and Present, no. 3, part of a famous moralizing
triptych that imagines the disastrous consequences of a woman’s adulterous love affair (the narrative is explained in an excerpt from a letter that
served in lieu of a title when the paintings were first exhibited).77 The final
painting shows the now abandoned woman with her infant in the dry
arches under the Adelphi near the Strand. Their likely future, we deduce, is
the Thames that flows in the background (cf. such paintings as G. F.
Watts’s Found Drowned (1867)). But the eye is also drawn to the posters on
the wall, some of which advertise plays: Victims (Tom Taylor’s three-act
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131
comedy of 1857), and A Cure for Love (probably Tom Parry’s two-act
comedy of 1842), titles that resonate with the woman’s plight. Another
promotes excursions to Paris, perhaps suggesting that the life of pleasure
goes on for others, or even the corrupting influence of France’s supposed
immorality.
In another well-known instance, Ford Madox Brown’s Work (1852–65),
the partly visible bills are used to add further layers of meaning – comic and
serious – to a canvas that is already heavily laden with allegorical
significance. Posters and poster-fragments adorn the walls; we can see a
bill-poster in the top left of the composition; and, in ironic juxtaposition, a
woman distributes religious tracts on the left. Legible poster fragments
include those for a funding event for a “Boys Home”, an estate agent (the
comically named “William Poster”) advertising a “Genteel house for sale”,
an election poster, a police notice offering a £50 reward for information on
a robbery, and a fragment that announces “Money! Money! Money!”.
Among other things, in a painting devoted to the theme of labor and
society, this seemingly random collection suggests the different messages
that the city offers to the individual depending, perhaps, on where they
are born in the social hierarchy.78
Many more instances could be cited, including paintings by George
Scharf, Luke Fildes, Francesco Coleman, and Eyre Crowe, whose
“Sandwiches” [1881], shows sandwich men at their lunch, a rare subject.
French and American examples exist, though the narrative use of such
textual images appear to be less of a feature of genre painting outside of
England. In Honoré Daumier’s satirical drawings, for example, text tends
to be rendered impressionistically, the verbal equivalent of the blurred
images of his Outside the Print-Seller’s Shop (c.1860–63): in Rue vide gousset
(1839) some text is legible (e.g., “St. Gervais”), but it is not there as
commentary; Dans l’omnibus (1864) is a partial exception, in that we can
make out an ad for “Peintures”, presumably an ironic touch. Henri
Coëylas’s Dans l’omnibus (c.1890) follows a similar pattern: ads are used
as indices of modern city life but not as sources of commentary. Maurice
Delondre’s L’omnibus (1880) allows us to see that there are overhead ads,
but we cannot discern any detail; nor can we read the title of the newspaper
being read by a passenger, though it is clear enough that he is only
pretending to read while looking at the woman next to him. In James
Tissot’s Going to Business (1879), the newspaper is the emblem and aegis of
the man of business, oblivious to his surroundings. When Jules BastienLepage paints a colporteur, a crier of cheap street publications, in Le petit
colporteur endormi (1882), he does not include any of the boy’s legible
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The Demographic Imagination
wares; and the same artist’s busy street scene London Bootblack (1882) is
relatively void of text, except for the label “Carr’s Blacking”. The impressionist Jean Béraud’s Paris Kiosque (c.1880–84) represents the ad-covered
kiosk of its title, but the posters that are legible are not there to point any
moral, or reveal crucial narrative information: they are simply part of the
colorful visual world that he is trying to capture, and the same is true of his
use of such kiosks elsewhere in his work.79 As continental influences
spread, British paintings too begin to suppress the commentary aspect of
background ads: Maria Brooks’ Down Piccadilly, Returning From Covent
Garden Market One June Morning, 1882 and George W. Joy’s Bayswater
Omnibus (1895) are good examples of this shift to a more impressionistic
aesthetic. Nonetheless, a realist commitment lingered, and few British
artists produce anything like Telemaco Signorini’s remarkable Leith
(c.1881), where the bright splash of color offered by the ad for Rob Roy
cigarettes shapes the whole composition
American artists sometimes explored the invasion of the streets by print
more explicitly, though they too are less inclined than their English peers to
use legible textual detail. Among many striking images in which posters or
newsprint offer local color rather than information or commentary are
Thomas Le Clear’s Buffalo Newsboy (1853); James Henry Cafferty’s The
Sidewalks of New York, or Rich Girl, Poor Girl (1859), News of the Day (1860)
and The Weary Newsboy (1861); William E. Winner’s Newsboy (1864); and
Thomas Waterman Wood’s Crossing the Ferry (1878).80 In some cases we
can infer that the urban delights promised by the posters are out of the
reach of the characters portrayed – as with the poster for F. S. Chanfrau in
A Glance At New York in Cafferty’s The Weary Newsboy. David Gilmour
Blythe’s The Higher Law (1861) might be seen to be an exception to this
general tendency, in that we are clearly invited to read the printed texts in
relation to the figures shown, but this is an allegory of the causes of the civil
war rather than a piece of urban genre painting. Outside of American genre
painting there are some more self-conscious uses of print. The trompe l’œil
paintings of the Irish-born painter William Michael Harnett use posters to
point the tale, as with his representation of books in Job Lot Cheap (1878),
which makes a similar point to London Shop Windows, though more
poignantly. The French-born Victor Dubreuil also deploys print symbolically, though in his work it is printed money that looms largest in the age
of paper, for example, in The Cross of Gold (1896).
A fuller consideration of the painterly uses of the detritus of the age of
paper would be a book in itself. Instead, in the remainder of this chapter I
want to focus on the work of a minor English artist, Augustus Edwin
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133
Mulready (1844–1904), who makes the frenzy of the legible the most
significant feature of almost all his output, and who uses it to frame the
lives of the street people who are his principal subjects. The urban masses in
his paintings are condensed into a handful of vulnerable figures: newsboys,
flower girls, crossing-sweepers. Their lives are represented as being as
ephemeral as the verbal detritus with which they are surrounded.
Augustus Mulready is not usually seen as a major figure, though a
handful of his paintings appear in major collections, and his work occasionally appears on the covers of Victorian paperback classics.81 He was the
grandson of the celebrated Irish-born artist William Mulready (1786–1863),
whose best-known paintings include such genre pieces as Choosing the
Wedding Gown (1846) and the Toy Seller (1862). His Mulready uncles,
John and Michael Mulready exhibited at the Royal Academy, as did his
father William Mulready junior, who exhibited a series of still lifes of game
there between 1835 and 1842. Augustus Mulready also had a painterly
pedigree through his grandmother Elizabeth Varley, who exhibited rural
landscapes at the Academy between 1811 and 1819. Her brothers had also
achieved some distinction in the visual arts: John Varley was a distinguished watercolorist, William Fleetwood Varley exhibited at the Royal
Academy from 1804 to 1818, and Cornelius Varley, also a gifted
watercolorist, achieved distinction in the design of optical instruments,
including a graphic telescope (a variety of camera lucida) that won a gold
medal at the 1851 Great Exhibition. Elizabeth Varley’s nephews – Augustus
Mulready’s uncles – included two other Royal Academy exhibitors, Albert
Fleetwood Varley and Charles Smith Varley.82
Against this bright family background, Augustus himself is a shadowy
figure, and little is known of his life. Born in Chelsea in 1844, the 1861
census finds him in the house of his grandmother Elizabeth, by then living
apart from her famous husband.83 In the census form, Mulready, then aged
seventeen, is described as a figure artist, his grandmother as a landscape
artist. He was recommended as a pupil at the Royal Academy Schools in
December of that year by John Callcott Horsley, later an academician, and
Rector of the Royal Academy from 1875 to 1890. Mulready was a member
for a period of the Cranbrook Colony of artists in Kent with Horsley,
Frederick D. and George Hardy, George Bernard O’Neill, and Thomas
Webster, though he does not seem to have spent much time there, and
would have been very much a junior member. Like the more experienced
colonists he practiced a form of genre painting that ultimately derives from
the Dutch realists of the seventeenth century, and like Webster and Hardy
in particular he was a prolific painter of children.84 But there is a significant
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The Demographic Imagination
difference in accent, in that Mulready’s children are the urban poor –
flower girls, match girls, newspaper boys, and other young street characters
of the kind catalogued earlier by Henry Mayhew in London Labour and the
London Poor (1851). There are a few exceptions, such as the rural genre
pieces, Keeping an Appointment, The Snow Ball [1871], Hard Times [1877],
In Spring Time [1881], and The Fallen Bird [1901], but he works almost
exclusively on representations of the urban poor.85
Between 1863 and 1880 he exhibited twelve paintings at the Royal
Academy: An Aged Lady (1863); Miss Graham (1868); Uncared For (1871);
Our Good-Natured Cousin, Uninvited, and Wild Flowers (all 1872); A
Passing Cloud and Remembering Joys that have Passed Away (both 1873);
“Stop my Hat!” and A Little Creditor (both 1875); Left to Herself (1877); and
A Recess on a London Bridge (1880).86 He gave various addresses in these
years: 11 Fitzroy Street, 8 Ordnance Road, St. John’s Wood; Cranbrook,
Kent (in 1871 and 1872); 22 Newman Street; and 62 Blenheim Crescent.
With the exception of Miss Graham, which is presumably a portrait, all of
these would seem to be genre pieces, and all of those that are traceable are
street scenes, including the misleadingly entitled Wild Flowers. One of
them, at least, caught the popular imagination, Our Good-Natured Cousin,
which shows three members of the upper classes strolling in the city,
exercising their terrier. According to the critic for the Graphic, who singled
it out for favorable notice that year, it is “an unpretending neatly-painted
little picture [that] shows a London street, with a young gentleman dressed
with provincial smartness, escorting two ladies, who persistently lean back
as they walk to exchange comments behind him. The subject is humorous,
and has been vivaciously set forth”.87 The critic does not mention the less
humorous aspects: the quite detailed background, which shows an undertaker’s, and a number of paintings in the window of a pawnbroker.
However, these features were not lost on the Graphic, which was interested
enough in the painting to reproduce it later that year88 in the issue for
Saturday, September 7, and to invent a comic monologue to go with it, in
which one of the young women, “Annie”, describes the lives of herself and
her sister Florence, and their good-natured cousin, Adolphus, who
allows them to chatter away while escorting them around the city with
his dog Dandy:
But, oh! Dearest you will hardly believe what I am going to tell you. One day
a gentleman stopped and looked very fixedly at us. Dolph, who had seen
him before, said he was an artist, and sure enough a few months later there
was a picture of us in the Royal Academy. It’s the very image of Dolph, and
Dandy is capital. Florence is not so pretty as I think her, and I won’t say
The frenzy of the legible
135
what I think of myself. But, oh! It was a shame of Mr Mulready to draw us
walking past two such horrid low shops as a pawnbroker’s and an undertaker’s. Marshall and Snellgrove would have been much more natural, or
Shoolbred’s, with ma being handed into a carriage by that lovely stout
policeman after buying the winter curtains for the dining-room.89
Annie would have been even more appalled at the later version of this
canvas, in which a flower-seller appears in the foreground, casting the title
into starker relief. She would have equally disliked Mulready’s subsequent
output, since over the years flower-sellers and their peers would become
more prominent, and the members of society become the background
figures in his art.
In that same year his Wandering Minstrels was favorably described in a
review of the Winter Exhibition of the French Gallery in London:
The name of Mulready stands high in English art, and it is pleasant to meet
with it attached to small and unpretending little picture – Wandering
Minstrels – by A. E. Mulready, grandson of the painter – of a young brother
and sister, very humble street musicians of the pipe and tambour order, who
have fallen asleep after a long and weary day, under the portico of the
Haymarket Theatre, in sight of the Royal Opera House, where more
successful, but perhaps less deserving, members of their craft reap their
full of gold and plaudits. Painted with the greatest delicacy and feeling for
tender tints and tones of colour, there is a touch of the pathetic in the picture
which is great promise in a young painter.90
Such urban pathos was becoming his trademark. While Mulready does not
seem to have exhibited at the Royal Academy after 1880, his work continued to appear at other galleries. In December 1886 he showed two
paintings at Hollender and Cremetti’s Hanover Gallery in New Bond
Street. The art critic for The Era (who evidently thinks they are by
William Mulready) describes them as:
A Day’s Reckoning, a small, altogether too refined crossing-sweeper counting
up his pence, and Sounds of Revelry, a crowd of hungry ragged urchins,
including same refined young crossing-sweeper as before, gathered round a
window on which are seen the shadows of happy young dancers within.91
Mulready also exhibited at some of the regional galleries, especially in
Liverpool, where his paintings of everyday city life perhaps appealed to the
new merchant classes. In 1879, his A Naturalist’s Window was shown at the
Spring Exhibition at the Basnett Street Gallery in that city. A street scene, it
represented “a group of persons in various stations of life, including an
African nurse girl looking at a stuffed gorilla in a naturalist’s shop”, and was
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The Demographic Imagination
described as a “remarkable production” that did great credit to the artist.92
(Other paintings at the Exhibition included works by Frank Holl, Richard
Burchett, C. S. Lidderdale, and Edwin Hayes.) In 1887, one of his pictures,
After Rain, representing a flower girl and a newspaper boy, also appeared at
the Basnett Street Gallery, alongside works by such contemporary artists as
William Muller and Frederick Goodall: the reviewer for the Liverpool
Mercury described Mulready’s canvas as a “characteristic example” of his
work, suggesting that his work had become reasonably familiar by then to
reviewers.93 In 1892, a large canvas by him, Homeless by Night, was exhibited
at the annual Spring Exhibition at the Atkinson Gallery in Southport: “[it]
shows a number of gutter children of both sexes preparing to sleep under
one of Landseer’s lions in Trafalgar Square”. The critic seems to have felt,
in fact, that it was too painful a subject for such a grand scale, and that it
“would have gained in effect if painted a cabinet instead of a gallery size”.94
(This idea that more humble genre scenes should be kept on a small scale
was not an unusual sentiment in these years.)95
Some details of Mulready’s life can be established from official sources:
he married in 1874 in Marylebone; he died on March 15, 1904 and was
buried at Finchley Cemetery.96 I cannot find him in the 1901 census,
though his brother, Henry, appears with his family on the Portobello
Road, and describes himself as a self-employed house decorator. The
last we see of him is a letter of condolence dated November 8, 1903 to
J. C. Horsley’s widow Rosamund in which he gives his address as 9
Alderney Street in Pimlico, and describes himself as working on “two
very cheap quickly to be executed portraits”, which suggests that he
continued to make a living as a painter, though at the more precarious
end of the scale of prestige.97
Whatever reputation Mulready commands is for his paintings of the
young, working poor of London. This was not by any means unique
territory: Frith’s Crossing Sweeper (1858) is a fairly well-known example,
and such paintings as Emily Merrick’s Primrose Day (1884), which
represents a crossing-sweeper and a flower-seller, suggest that other artists
were using the same social palette in the 1880s. Nonetheless, Mulready’s
single-minded devotion to the representation of the urban poor has earned
him a minor but respected place in Victorian art history. Thus Jeremy
Maas’s Victorian Painters (1969) praises Mulready as a “sentimental social
realist”, and reproduces A London Crossing-Sweeper and a Flower Girl
(1884), which juxtaposes that pair in a recess of London Bridge by night.98
Christopher Wood’s Victorian Painters (1995, revising and expanding his
1971 Dictionary of Victorian Painters) includes the later version of Our
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137
Good-Natured Cousin entitled Our Good Natured Cousins (sic), which
closely resembles that offered for sale at Christie’s in 2005, and which
interpolates a flower-seller leaning against a pillar box, ignored by the swell
and his female companions. Lionel Lambourne’s Victorian Painting (1999)
features Mulready’s Remembering Joys that have Passed Away (Royal
Academy, 1873), which depicts a crossing sweeper and a match girl on a
snowy evening, contemplating the colorful but tattered posters for a Drury
Lane pantomime.
Indeed, posters, newspapers, and other printed matter, as we shall see,
are as much his trademark as are the urban poor. They are not always used
to any obvious effect, as we see in such paintings as Picardie; After Rain,
Chelsea; and Street Scene in Chelsea, where the print on the posters is
illegible, and where they seem to function as aspects of authentic local
color, or simply as Mulready’s trademark motif.99 But consider, for example, the more striking use of posters in the painting Uncared For (1871)
(Figure 4.4), which Mulready exhibited at the Royal Academy in that year,
and which appears to be his first major painting to put the street sellers and
the textual backgrounds of the London streets into juxtaposition.100 The
uncared for of the title are two young barefoot children, a girl selling
flowers, and a boy, hunched in an almost fetal position, sitting on an
upturned basket at her feet. The girl looks out of the painting at us, placing
us uncomfortably in the position of passers-by, or customers. We can
imagine some of the mixed reaction of its original viewers, for whom the
masses of the urban poor might be a source of anxiety and even fear, as well
as of charitable concern. In this light, the focus on a small number of
isolated figures rather than a street crowd is significant, a sort of domesticating synecdoche. The choice of suppliant children rather than adult
street-sellers further works to minimize fearful and hostile responses.101 We
see the innocent in distress, as in stage melodrama, allowing us a less
complicated reaction to the plight of the urban poor more generally.
This is one recurring aspect of the demographic imagination in
Mulready’s work.
However, the painting achieves its more complex effects, its visual
ironies, through the use of the detritus of the age of paper as background
detail. On the right, we catch a glimpse of the affluent classes strolling past
shop windows, oblivious or indifferent to the misery of their fellow
Londoners. But more pointed still is the representation of a poster-covered
wall immediately behind the children. One poster-fragment advertises
spectacles “To Suit all Sights”, another promotes Gustave Doré’s painting,
The Triumph of Christianity, which drew crowds to the newly opened Doré
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The Demographic Imagination
Figure 4.4 Augustus Mulready, Uncared For (1871).
Gallery in New Bond Street in 1868. The Doré reference highlights the
failure of a supposedly Christian nation, delighting in the contemplation of
lofty religious subjects, to protect its most vulnerable citizens; the ad for
spectacles connotes a pervasive social rather than physical myopia: we can
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139
see this painting, but not the poor than it represents. (There is a historical
irony in the fact that the following year Doré would create his own striking
images of London poverty in London, A Pilgrimage (1872), and in subsequent work.) The fragment of a poster for the Foreign Aid Society indicates
that, like Dickens in chapter 4 of Bleak House, Mulready is skeptical of
“telescopic philanthropy” at the expense of the poor at home.102 Uncared
For appears to be the first in a vein that Mulready would return to again
and again, including a direct reworking of the same painting in 1885, also
entitled Uncared For (sold at Sothebys on June 3, 1992). In the later version
the girl and boy have switched sides, and her face and hair are somewhat
changed. Mulready has also reworked the posters in minor ways: the
spectacles ad reappears, but this time superimposed on the poster for
the Doré Gallery; and there is an additional poster fragment that features
the words “War wounded”, perhaps a topical reference to the Sudan
campaign, in which General Gordon had been killed in January of that
year; the writing on the walls spells out that there are battles just as
important to be fought at home.
The posters we see in Mulready’s paintings are never pristine; they vary
from being slightly distressed around the edges to being mere scraps: a
word, or a word-fragment. What is at stake in such details? At one level
they add to the verisimilitude of the pieces, simply documenting the effects
of weather, and the over-papering by rival bill-stickers that we have seen
treated comically elsewhere. At a more metaphorical level, one presumes, it
reminds us that the writing on the wall is not always so easy to read, though
it is there for whoever is willing to look. Anyone who believes in the
“triumph of Christianity” should consider that perhaps they have been
weighed and found unsatisfactory, like Belshazzar in the Book of Daniel.
But it is also possible to interpret these torn and faded posters as commenting more generally on the nature of time. In this light they serve as mise-enabyme equivalents of the genre painting itself as a limited, time-bound
form – Mulready seems to hint that his art too may be tied to its own
historical moment, and bound for oblivion after its work of witnessing.
This engagement with advertising and temporality is more obvious in
one of Mulready’s few well-known paintings, Remembering Joys that have
Passed Away (now in the collection of the City of London at the Guildhall
Art Gallery) (Figure 4.5), which he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1873,
and later reworked as a smaller painting, Outsiders.103 Again, his subject is
the urban poor. This time his subjects face the writing on the walls: two
children stand in the snow near Covent Garden, gazing wistfully at a
colorful but fading poster for a pantomime at Drury Lane, Princess
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Figure 4.5 Augustus Mulready, Remembering Joys that have Passed Away (1873).
Beauty and the Demon Dwarf. This is the shorter title of an actual
Christmas pantomime, Prince Happy-Go-Lucky; or, Princess Beauty and
the Demon Dwarf, a lavish balletic spectacle staged at the Royal
Alhambra Palace in December of 1871. It boasted 150 coryphées and five
principal dancers from La Scala, and featured a number of elaborate
transformation scenes, as well as comic topical songs.104 The Prince,
aided by a good fairy or two, rescues Princess Beauty from the
Enchanted Castle of the Dwarf King, and they go off to live in the
Prismatic Palace of Peaceful Pleasures. In the painting, the show is evidently over, though the posters remain, as does bitter winter weather. A
closer look reveals that the two children are not simply nostalgic for
Christmas treats past. Though the girl is quite well dressed, the clothes
of the boy are beginning to fall apart – one of them has come down in the
world, perhaps both. The broom and box of pipe-lights in the background
suggest that they now both work for a living, one as a crossing-sweeper; the
other as a match girl.105 Where once they may have been part of the
audience for the theater’s seasonal pleasures, with their magical
The frenzy of the legible
141
transformations, now they hope to survive by selling matches and their
physical labor to other theatergoers. The background reinforces this idea:
one of the other posters advertises Dion Boucicault’s melodrama the
Streets of London (first performed as The Poor of New York in 1857, the
Streets of London was performed at the Princess’s Theatre, Oxford Street
(1863)), which we saw in Chapter 2, and which is centered on the fate of a
middle-class family that loses all its money, though it is ultimately restored
to fortune. Further temporal commentary is suggested by two of the other
phrases we can make out. “Last Night”, and “Day by Day” suggest on the
one hand an absolute break between present and future and on the other
the idea of hand-to-mouth survival. It is, then, a snapshot of a moment that
gestures towards a bleak future rather than the magical transformations of
Princess Beauty: this pair remain trapped in the enchanted castle of London
itself, and no Prismatic Palace awaits; even the happy ending of the Streets
of London seems unlikely. But it is also a painting that highlights the life
and color of city life, even as it shows the ephemeral nature of these. Again,
while the posters point to the role of the artist in adding beauty to the
world, they also suggest that art is perhaps itself not forever, and that it is in
the service of commerce, even when it spotlights the off-stage lives of the
urban poor.
The age of papers
I want to turn to another category of paintings that is even more focused on
the city as text – Mulready’s newsboy pictures. As we have seen, newspapers and newsboys were everywhere in genre paintings in this period,
indices of an overcrowded, anonymous, and information-saturated modern urban life. Benedict Anderson argues for the role of newspapers in
creating the temporality of the nation – and Henkin suggests of the city
(122) – the sense of a lived, shared present.106 The representation of the
newspaper in nineteenth-century fine art often touches on this role. But in
Mulready’s work, newspapers and newspaper-sellers seem to have a different relationship to society, one that reminds one less of Benedict Anderson
and more or Jacques Rancière. Newspapers play a role in defining what is
not news, and thus take part in what Rancière calls “the distribution of the
sensible”, the unwritten laws that shape what a society sees and says.107 So,
of course, does fine art painting, and Mulready’s work seems to wish to
use genre painting to illuminate the lives of those who, socially speaking,
are invisible: they scrape a living selling news, but they themselves are
decidedly not good copy. Of course in many ways Mulready’s wish to
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make us see the socially invisible was part of the mainstream: just as Henry
Mayhew had exhaustively chronicled the lives of London’s poor in the late
1840s and early 1850s, by the end of the century the “New Journalism” was
turning the urban poor into column inches: some of the poor, at least, were
good copy. W. T. Stead’s sensational account of child prostitution in “The
Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” in the Pall Mall Gazette sold many a
paper in 1885; and the undercover journalism of the cross-class dressing
Olive Christian Malvery was equally popular in the 1900s.108 Nonetheless,
Mulready’s persistent pursuit of the socially marginal is striking, not least
in its self-consciousness.
Mulready’s newsboy paintings include Newsboy (c.1880), London News
Boys (1884), Paper-Boy (1893), Drury Lane, London Newsboy (1893), and
Luck in a Moment (1874).109 The recurring theme of these canvases is that
while these child workers sell news, they themselves are invisible to the
media – the grinding poverty in which they live is simply not newsworthy,
it is a non-story. Mulready forces us see the parallel between the ephemeral
commodities they sell – newspapers are almost worthless by the end of the
day, fit only to wrap food and line drawers – and the lives of the sellers.
Texts and partial-texts within the paintings drive the point home
relentlessly. In Newsboy, for example, the boy is selling the London
Standard, but is also carrying a “contents bill” that proclaims “The cry
and shriek from Dublin Castle to England’s House of Lords”, perhaps
referring to an episode in the Land War of the 1880s. As elsewhere,
Mulready is keen to highlight what is not news but ought to be; the
quiet misery of London’s child workers should also carry to the ears of
the House of Lords.110 In one of the most direct of these appeals to the
viewer, A London News Boy (1893), a barefoot boy stands at the corner of a
street, probably again near Drury Lane, for which there are eye-catching
and quite detailed ads in the background. He holds up a contents sheet for
the Standard with various headlines: “Have any done or only half
performed the good they might for others”, “The Pathos of London Life:
How the Poor Live”, “The Strikes”, and “A Drama of the Day”.111 The
painting carries a forceful if none too subtle message: the eager readers of
New Journalism articles about “how the poor live” are nonetheless
oblivious to the newsboy selling them their paper.
Flower-sellers, whom we saw earlier in Mulready’s Royal Academyexhibited work Uncared For, become another favored subject in his later
paintings, the female equivalents of the newsboys among his cast of
street dwellers. (Newsboys and flower-sellers sometimes appear together
as in his At the Corner of a London Street.) As elsewhere he includes textual
The frenzy of the legible
143
details – usually posters, torn fragments of posters – to add point to the
representation of these ephemeral sellers of ephemeral beauty. Examples
include his Wild Flowers (1872), The Flower Girl (1872), A Street Flower
Seller (1882), Day is Done (1884), Flower Girls – A Summer Night (1885), and
several paintings with the title Selling Out. Again, this is not an urban
subject unique to Mulready, as we see from such paintings as David Lee’s
The Violet Seller (1877), George Clausen’s Flower Seller (1879), Gustave
Doré’s Flower Sellers of London (c.1880), the American artist John George
Brown’s Buy a Posy (1881), and the French painter Jules Bastien-Lepage’s,
Marchande de Fleurs à Londres (1882), but it is one that Mulready pursues
with peculiar insistence.
In Selling Out (no date, but c.1890) and Selling Out (1901)112 we see two
flower-sellers, older than Mulready’s street-children, but perhaps not quite
young women either. As elsewhere there are fragmented bills in the background, but here there is very little textual detail, in keeping with the way
in which Mulready’s later paintings become themselves more stylized and
poster-like, often with less of the painterly finish of his Royal Academy
pictures of the 1870s. In the background of Selling Out a poster-fragment
spells out “Day by Day” (a phrase which also appears in the earlier
Remembering Joys), perhaps meant to stress again the precarious life of
the seller. In the 1901 painting, the seller is evidently a “Bouquet Girl”, one
of those who in the evenings sold flowers to theatergoers – the flowers are
wrapped in wire because the stifling heat of the theater would otherwise
make them wilt. Her target audience of well-to-do theatergoers is represented impressionistically in the background. Unlike the figure in the other
Selling Out, this young woman meets the eye of the viewer with something
of a “come-hither” glance. The single advertising fragment on the pillar
behind her is for “comedy . . . Money”, a reference to the 1840 comedy of
that name by Edward Bulwer Lytton in which the life of a poor relation,
Alfred Evelyn, is transformed by an unexpected inheritance, though there
is also a possible echo here of the “Money, money, money” of Ford Madox
Brown’s Work. Bulwer Lytton’s play casts a cold eye on the power of wealth
in society and the cant of Liberals and Tories alike on the subject of
poverty. Evelyn muses that poverty can transform an individual as much
as wealth can: “there is many a man in [the] streets honest as you are, who
moves thinks, feels, and reasons as well as we do; excellent in form –
imperishable in soul; who, if his pockets were three days empty, would sell
thought, reason, body, and soul too, for that little coin [of gold]” (Act 2
Scene i).113 In this context it is difficult to ignore the other implications of
“selling out”, and young women selling their flowers. Covent Garden was a
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part of town long associated with prostitution as well as the theater, and
the women who sold flowers in the evenings shared the streets with sex
workers, amid some suggestion that the two professions overlapped. In
Pygmalion (1912), George Bernard Shaw draws on the familiarity of this
idea by setting the opening of the play in Covent Garden; Eliza, a flower
seller, fears that she will end up on the streets if Higgins makes a complaint
against her.114 Is the young woman who meets the eye of the viewer in
Mulready’s 1901 painting issuing an invitation to sexual commerce? If so,
the viewer is placed as her client: we are both seduced and shamed. And
where does this place the artist? If his paintings are becoming more
poster-like, and his models are selling themselves as well as flowers, what
does this suggest of Mulready’s attitude to his own work? The artist too is
bringing beauty to the marketplace, and selling his wares, if not himself, in
an already cluttered market for entertainment.
I want to turn finally to two late paintings that bring together some of
these themes: A London Flower Girl (1877) and Close of Day – Selling Out
(undated).115 The first of these shows us more nocturnal sales activity, again
with a possible hint of sexual sale: the young woman in the foreground
stands on one of London’s bridges, though perhaps rather less invitingly
than the figure in Selling Out (1901), and she is more simply dressed
(Figure 4.6). Again, painting links flowers to the fragile beauty of the seller.
But the newspaper reappears too, this time as wrapping for flowers – what
was once news, a valuable commodity, by the end of the day is worthless
except as packaging. What have disappeared from Mulready’s composition
are the usual posters; instead the night sky and an impressionistic rendering
of the riverside provide the backdrop.
The second picture, Close of Day – Selling Out, is very similar, but the
tonal register is a little different, and it becomes clearer why the starlit sky
has replaced Mulready’s trademark posters in these paintings.116 Again we
see flowers and discarded newspapers, both existing at some level in
symbolic relation to the young woman – who is beautiful, and delicate,
and flowerlike, and possibly for sale, though not newsworthy.117 Wearing a
blue dress and white apron, she sits in a recess on the bridge, her basket of
flowers next to her. The flowers have begun to lose their petals, some of
which lie on the pavement in front of her. Her white apron is torn in
places, but she lifts one end of her scarf above her head as if posing for the
picture. One of the stars above her is bright enough to be Venus, though
the stars also give the painting a hint of religious imagery. We are reminded
of Stella Maris, one of the Virgin Mary’s titles, and also of the many
paintings of Mary that show her with a halo of stars, a spiritual crown
The frenzy of the legible
Figure 4.6 Augustus Mulready, A London Flower Girl, 1877.
145
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The Demographic Imagination
befitting one of her other titles, Queen of Heaven, as in Carlo Dolci’s
Madonna in Glory (1670) and many polychrome church statues of Mary.
The patch of blue starlit sky that appears through the clouds picks up the
blue of her dress. As Michel Pastoureau has shown, the association of Mary
with blue begins in the twelfth century and accompanies a more general
rise in prestige of that color in that period: the stained-glass Virgin of
Chartres, Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière, with her dress of bright blue, is
an early example; the Wilton Diptych a later and even more vivid instance
of the association.118 The writing on the walls, then, has given way here to
some more eternal commentary that suggests the apotheosis of the earthbound girl of the streets (cf. the transformation of Eliza from Covent
Garden flower-seller to Society Beauty in Pygmalion, which George
Bernard Shaw wrote some ten years later). The light of heaven shines not
just on her, but from her. The threatening urban mass, condensed into a
single, vulnerable figure, has here become a street angel. We might also see
this painting as Mulready’s attempt to highlight the nature of modern
urban art. For Baudelaire, famously, the painter of modern life has to
capture the now, the “fleeting, the contingent, the transient”, but also the
eternal and immoveable.119 Mulready’s art clearly focuses most intensely on
the “fleeting”, the short lives of street people who make a precarious living
by selling ephemera, and who are surrounded by torn posters and scraps of
newspaper, fragmented and rapidly fading texts that attest to an age of
crowds and paper, but that almost tell us something – the biblical writing
on the wall rendered secular and opaque. Here he seems to gesture towards
something else – a hint of utopia, or the magical light that shines from
other, distant worlds – or perhaps a glimpse of something beyond the
ephemerality he evokes
Conclusion
The visual arts found a variety of ways of registering demographic revolution. As we saw in Chapter 1 the volcanic disaster painting was one such
mode, with its evocation of terrified crowds fleeing a fiery end. In terms of
modern genre painting, artists were more inclined to eschew direct representation of mass urban humanity, though there are obvious exceptions
like Frith and Hicks. Instead, I have argued, the torrent of humanity
registers in the background details, in the visual flotsam and jetsam of
anonymous urban life – newspapers, posters, handbills. We do meet
individualized and representative street characters: crossing-sweepers,
flower girls, and newsboys, among others. These synecdochic
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147
representatives of mass humanity were unthreatening, and available for
sentimental treatment. But in Mulready’s obsessive treatment of urban
themes we encounter something more interesting: an attempt to use the
visual and verbal debris to give an edge to his genre scenes: we must read
the writing on the walls to decipher his critique of the distribution of the
sensible. His flower girls and newsboys are not just sentimentalized types of
the urban poor, but our fellow human beings who have become socially
invisible.
In the final chapter we will look at some of the other casualties of
demographic growth. As the human population soared, so did that of
many other species, who came to town as workers, entertainers, pets, and
of course as food, or simply to take advantage of the rich pickings of
the cities. But as mass consumer power was galvanized by the
advertising industry, and by newspapers and magazines, it began to affect
the ecological balance of some more remote parts of the earth. When the
writing on the walls and in the papers told people to wear fur and exotic
feathers it was very bad news for some wild animals. In this last account
of the demographic imagination it is the anthropogenic power of the
masses that comes to the fore. However, at the same time, a few people
came to a new recognition of the fragility of our world.
chapter 5
Fur and feathers: animals and the city
in an Anthropocene era
Public life is already overcrowded, verbose, incompetent, fussy
and foolish enough without the addition of her in her sealskin
coat with the dead hummingbird on her hat. Ouida, “The New
Woman” (1894)1
She wears a sealskin coat;
Its grace and shape I note
...
She wears a little bonnet:
A bird that’s perched upon it
To fly seems ready.
Oscar Fay Adams, “A Valentine”
(1886)
In this study of the ways in which the surging populations of the nineteenth
century were imagined I have suppressed until now one significant piece of
information: those surging numbers were not exclusively human. Census
figures tally up one kind of life only, but we know that the ever-increasing
human populations of the nineteenth century never had the streets all to
themselves: the cities were vast magnets for other species too, and nonhuman inhabitants lived quietly – more or less – alongside the human
hordes, their numbers generally increasing with theirs. In the first part of
this chapter I want to consider briefly these sometimes overlooked residents,
secret and not-so-secret sharers of urban experience. This is one facet of the
impact of the demographic revolution on the animal world. But in the
second and longer part of this chapter I track some of the dead animals that
were drawn by the gravitation pull of urban consumption, specifically birds
and seals. The narratives, images, and practices of international fashion
created a vogue for particular forms of animal couture in the late Victorian
period, and, together with changing demographics and new technologies,
this brought some wild species living in other parts of the world – notably
birds and fur seals – to the verge of extinction.
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Fur and feathers
149
Extinction is nothing new. At the turn of the eighteenth century Baron
Cuvier had posited the existence a whole series of espèces perdues, such as the
Mastodon, Megatherium, and the Ptero-dactyle.2 As a recent book notes, if
one takes the long view, “the great majority of species to have lived on the
planet are no longer with us”.3 And yet something was changing. Current
estimates suggest that each fifty-year period since 1650 has seen the rate of
extinction increase, with hunting, the destruction of habitat, and the
artificial introduction of new species as the main contributors. (The
current rate of extinction is thought to be at least ten times and possibly
as much as a hundred times the historical average.)4 To take just some of
the better-known instances, wolves, beavers, and wild cats had been hunted
into local extinction in Great Britain and Ireland even before the
nineteenth century, and in France the nineteenth century saw the
disappearance of the lynx and brown bear.5 The Great auk, once plentiful
on north Atlantic coasts, was gone by the middle of the nineteenth century,
hunted for food and feathers, and – when the birds became rare – to satisfy
collectors; the last pair were killed on a small island off the coast of Iceland
in June 1844.6 In the United States the bison, the passenger pigeon, and the
Carolina parakeet were among the famous nineteenth-century casualties of
human settlement, though small numbers of the bison survived. (North
America’s indigenous peoples did not fare much better, of course, when
their presence got in the way of ranchers, farmers, or miners.) The
passenger pigeons are a particularly striking instance: they were once the
most numerous birds in North America, with flocks containing not
millions but billions; decimated by farmers who wanted to protect their
crops, and by indiscriminate hunting, their numbers collapsed. The last
nest was seen in 1894, and the very last bird died in Cincinnati zoo in 1914.
The pressures of human population were felt everywhere, even before the
population explosion of the nineteenth century. In the Pacific, the rats and
pigs that arrived with settlers killed off local species, though the moa of
New Zealand had been killed off even earlier, hunted to extinction by the
Maori by the fifteenth century. The dodo of Mauritius disappeared
before the end of the seventeenth century. As settler populations grew in
the nineteenth century many larger mammals came under pressure. The
thylacine of Tasmania (lupine, but actually a marsupial) and the zebra-like
quagga of southern Africa were completely wiped out. The photographs
we have of some of these species remind us of just how recently
they were here.7
But while other species were vanishing on all fronts before the advance
of humanity, the plight of a few of them began to capture the public’s
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attention. Some of the first protests against the human role in the
extinction of other species took shape around urban animal fashions:
while urban fashion stories were destroying whole animal populations,
counter-narratives began to appear too. A minority of commentators began
to view the teeming city in terms of its global environmental impact, and
realized that what people wore on the Avenue des Champs Élysées, or on
Regent Street, or Fifth Avenue, could have devastating effects on other
species, not just in other parts of the country, but in other parts of the
world: the vogue for what became known as “murderous millinery” and for
sealskin jackets brought this global impact into sharp focus. For some, the
advent of the fashion-conscious masses – especially women – represented a
threat more social than environmental: the volcanic urban crowd imagined
by Bulwer Lytton in 1834 reappears in a new guise at the end of the century
as the voracious mass of fashion-wearing women. But others felt that
something momentous was underway, and that an Anthropocene era
had dawned. The demographic imagination at this point shades into the
ecological, and the imagined urban disasters of the early nineteenth
century are replaced by real extinction – but not ours.
Working and companionate animals
Animal labor made the growth of the cities possible: without horses and the
various forms of horse-drawn transport, the urban population explosions
of the nineteenth century would have been unlikely, if not impossible.
Richard Sennett argues that in the twentieth century “the technologies of
motion – from automobiles to continuous, poured concrete highways –
made it possible for human settlements to extend beyond tight-packed
centres”, and for the nineteenth century we tend to think of trains as the
enablers of urban expansion.8 But the latter is only partly true: from the
1820s it was the horse-drawn omnibuses, and later horse-drawn trams, that
made commuting possible. Huge numbers of horses were also employed by
the drivers of cabs, hackneys, and other vehicles for hire, by the railways,
the army, the police, undertakers, the post office, fire-brigades, breweries,
and coal-merchants, to say nothing of those privately owned.9 The equine
population in fact increased rather than decreased with the arrival of the
railways, and horse-drawn transport survived well into the twentieth
century, as well as enjoying something of a revival during the Second
World War, when petrol was rationed. In London, for example, Ralph
Turvey estimates that there were around 11,000 horses in the early 1800s,
more than 22,000 by 1850, 70,000 by the mid-1860s, and over 200,000 by
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151
1900.10 Paris was home to 78,908 horses in 1880; but even in 1912, some
years after the arrival of motor transport, there were still 55,418.11 In 1900,
Manhattan was home to 130,000 horses, Chicago to 74,000, and
Philadelphia to 51,000.12 As Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr put it, “The
nineteenth-century city represented the climax of human exploitation of
horse power. Humans could not have built nor lived in the giant wealthgenerating metropoles that emerged in that century without horses”.13
As they also point out, the feeding of large numbers of horses was no
mean feat, and required its own supply chains – horses were also urban
consumers. In the 1880s, the reign of the horse in public transport was
challenged by the electric tram. For individual travelers, the bicycle, which
needed neither food nor stabling, began to present an attractive alternative.
But only in the early twentieth century did the internal-combustion engine
finally displace horse power from its economic centrality; henceforth, horse
transport would largely be confined to sports, leisure, and ceremonial
events, though several countries were still deploying cavalry units as late
as the Second World War.
Other animals lived in the city too, some very briefly, to supply the
appetite for meat, poultry, and dairy products. This is still very much the
case: in many global cities keeping chickens, pigs, and fish is widespread –
in Dhaka, with a population of 7 million, some 80 percent of the population keep animals for this purpose.14 In Europe and America, the keeping
of chickens and pigs is enjoying something of a revival, driven by green and
locavore movements, as well as by recession. (Since the 1990s, there has
been a call for a “trans-species” element in urban theory to account for such
factors.)15 In the nineteenth-century city, the keeping of urban animals
was partly a result of shorter supply chains: chilling, freezing, and other
food-preservation technologies were in their infancy. Thus until the early
twentieth century urban milk, for example, was supplied by local dairies, or
individuals with single cows, and distributed from the churn (the milk
bottle does not arrive until the end of the nineteenth century, when it does
not displace other methods for some time). In 1850, there were estimated to
be 13,000 cows in London.16 For the most part people wanted cow’s milk,
but some consumers wanted asses’ milk, and these animals were brought to
the customer’s door to be milked.17 According to Henry Mayhew, writing
in the 1850s, “the principal sale of milk from the cow [was] in St James”,
where eight cows supplied the public in the summer, four in the winter.18
The St. James cows were not alone, though: J. R. McCulloch claims that
there were 2,764 “milk-sellers and cow-keepers” in London in 1841.19
Dairies sometimes also supplied eggs, and city chickens lived alongside
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city cows. Other animals roamed freely in the streets, including pigs,
as Friedrich Engels famously describes in his account of Manchester in
The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). Charles Dickens
gives a vivid account of the wandering swine of Broadway in his American
Notes of 1842:
They are the city scavengers, these pigs. Ugly brutes they are; having, for the
most part, scanty brown backs, like the lids of old horsehair trunks: spotted
with unwholesome black blotches . . . They are never attended upon, or fed,
or driven, or caught, but are thrown upon their own resources in early life,
and become preternaturally knowing in consequence. Every pig knows
where he lives, much better than anybody could tell him. At this hour,
just as evening is closing in, you will see them roaming towards bed by
scores, eating their way to the last.20
Pigs enjoyed similar liberty in other US cities until the end of the nineteenth century.21
Some farm animals came to the city only to be killed, and perhaps
should not be seen as residents: cattle, sheep, pigs (again), and geese, the
last often wearing shoes, were herded through the streets on their way from
farms and markets to the city meat markets and abattoirs. Their numbers
grew as the cities grew. Some did not have far to travel, notably urban
horses: in France, the sale of horsemeat for human consumption began in
1866, and soon became common, with some 60,000 horses finding their
way to the table by 1912 (In fact, Germany precedes France in the sale of
horsemeat for humans, with its first Berlin shop opening in 1847.)22 In
Britain, horses were usually served up to other urban animals – pet cats and
dogs – rather than humans. The United States tended to follow suit,
though there were exceptions: hippophagous immigrants kept to their
old ways in the new country, and soldiers were fed horsemeat during the
Civil War.23 Other industries also depended on dead horses and dead
cattle: in the larger, more modern abattoirs hair became blankets; skin
became leather; hooves became gelatin; bones became handles; and fat
became candles.24
Not everyone wanted to see animal slaughter as part of city life. Over the
course of the century, there was a move in some cities to push
slaughterhouses out of town, but this happened unevenly, and the edge
of town kept moving outwards to incorporate peri-urban sites. In France,
Napoleon had decreed that abattoirs should be on the outskirts of Paris,
not in the city itself, though this was not effected until 1818.25 In 1863, on
the outskirts of Paris, Baron Haussmann began work on La Villette, an
enormous abattoir that could feed the city’s 2 million catchment area.
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Other European cities tended to follow this pattern or concentration and
displacement, which meant that even while the number of livestock
animals drawn to the city increased they became less visible.26 As Alain
Corbin describes, this sequestration was part of a more general process of
modernization, and changing thresholds of tolerance for smells and noise.
(There were counter-tendencies: as we see in Joseph-Ferdinand Gueldry’s
painting, The Blood-Drinkers (1898), invalids continued to visit abattoirs
to drink fresh blood.) London’s Smithfield, its venerable livestock
market and slaughterhouse, and one-time site of Bartholomew Fair, also
grew to be unacceptable, and in 1852 it was decided to move it. By then
some 200,000 head of cattle and 1.5 million sheep were being killed there
every year. As John Timbs described in 1855, its closure would mean the
end of the “attendant nuisances of knackers’ yards, tainted sausage-makers,
slaughter-houses, tripe-dressers, cat’s-meat boilers, catgut-spinners,
bone-houses, and other noxious trades in the very heart of London”.27 In
1860 it finally closed, and its activities were transferred to a new site
in Islington, further from the commercial center; a new market in meat
and poultry was developed on the old site. In the United States, the sheer
size of the national meat market generated a different pattern. Cincinnati,
and later Chicago, became national centers for distribution. Starting
with some hundreds in 1837, Chicago was processing some 12 million cattle
and pigs annually by the end of the century (Brantz, “The Domestication
of Empire”, 83–84). New York continued to have its own slaughterhouses,
but, with the widespread use of refrigerated railway cars in the 1880s, much
of the city’s meat arrived as carcasses rather than as livestock.28 Rendering
plants continued to be a nuisance in urban areas long after, and were
usually confined to working-class districts.29
While their numbers are harder to gauge with any accuracy, we know
that smaller quadrupeds were ubiquitous. Among the smallest, rats and
mice thrived in the cities, and the rat-catcher and mousetrap-man were
familiar aspects of the urban imaginary – as well as of urban experience –
immortalized in such music-hall songs as Edward Bradley’s The Ratcatcher’s
Daughter (1842) and The Mouse-Trap Man (c.1867).30 By 1851, Britain
employed 2,256 professional rat-catchers.31 Rodent-control was also a source
of employment for other animals, and cats maintained their historical role as
mousers throughout the nineteenth century. As artist and founding
president of the National Cat Club, Harrison Weir, put it in 1889:
In our urban and suburban houses what should we do without cats? In our
sitting or bedrooms, our libraries, in our kitchens and storerooms, our
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farms, barns, and rickyards, in our docks, our granaries, our ships, and our
wharves, in our corn markets, meat markets, and other places too numerous
to mention . . . In our ships, however the rats often set them at defiance.32
He goes on to describe their employment in this capacity by the Morning
Advertiser (“they boast of a race of cats bred there for nearly half a
century”); by the Government “in public offices, dockyards, stores,
shipping, etc.”; by the town magistrates of Vienna (which pensions them
off after a limited period); by the United States Post Office, the Imperial
Printing Office of France, the Midland Railway, and other public and
private bodies (88). (Other natural enmities were also put to use: hedgehogs
were employed to keep down black beetles, if Mayhew can be believed.)33
Dogs for their part were employed as ratters. Urban ratting was often more
blood-sport than vermin control, since some rats were bred for the
purpose: dogs were pitted against masses of rats in a pit, usually attached
to a public house; this remained a popular (and legal) activity in Britain
until 1912, long after bull- and badger-baiting had been banned. Nor was
this only a British sport: according to Jan Bondeson, Paris imported the
“chasse à l’Anglaise” in the 1870s, and had its own ratodrôme at the Route de
la Révolte well into the twentieth century. New Yorkers could visit the
rat-pit at the Sportsman’s Hall on Water Street, and ratting lived on in
Chicago and other cities until the 1890s.34
Pest-control was only one role for city dogs. While the organized
training of guide-dogs for the blind came in the aftermath of the First
World War, the blind certainly used dogs long before. Watch-dogs were
widely employed, and until 1854 dogs were used to pull carts, though
by-laws prevented their use in London and some other towns from
1839.35 In an even more curious chapter in canine history, from the 1880s,
a number of dogs worked as “collecting dogs” at railway stations, pubs, and
other public places; these collected money for charity in tins attached to
their backs or around their necks. A few were stuffed after death to enable
them to continue their good work.36 Jan Bondeson names W. Edwards’s
dog Rover as the first of these collecting dogs: in the 1860s, Rover collected
funds for Lancashire workers affected by the “cotton famine” of the Civil
War years (Amazing Dogs, 106). But it is the railway-station charity dog
London Jack (so called to distinguish him from another collecting dog,
Basingstoke Jack) who is probably the most celebrated of subsequent
canine collectors; he worked at Vauxhall, Waterloo, and other stations of
the London and South-Western Railway until 1901, and was succeeded by
various other “London Jacks” at Waterloo. After death, the first London
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Jack was preserved by the taxidermist’s art, and he can now be seen at the
Natural History Museum in Tring, Hertfordshire. The last of this breed
worked as a collector from 1923 to 1930, and his stuffed remains still work
for charity at the terminus of the Bluebell Railway and Railway Museum,
which runs steam trains in Sussex.37 Other well-known dogs that appear in
the newspapers of the period include Brake at Southsea; Punch in Bristol;
“Station Jim” at Slough; Bruin, alias “The Hertfordshire Collecting Dog”;
and Charley, the Windsor Great Western Station dog. The collecting dogs
lingered well into the twentieth century: the preserved remains of Laddie, a
collecting Airedale from Wimbledon, who retired in 1956, are to be seen at
the National Railway Museum, York. As far as I can establish, there is no
record of any collecting cats.
To these hard-working animals we must add the vast numbers of dogs,
cats, and other animals who were kept as pets. Status symbols, playthings,
part-time controllers of vermin, objects of emotional cathexis, these
animals had a complex position in the household. Again, accurate figures
are hard to come by. One of Mayhew’s informants, a seller of cats’ and
dogs’ meat, assured him that there must be one cat for every ten people in
London, which would mean a feline population of around 200,000.
(Present-day figures for London are unavailable, but in 2011 there were
estimated to be around 8.6 million domestic cats in Britain, or about one
cat for every 6.5 people.)38 What we can say with some certainty is that, as
Harriet Ritvo among others has shown, pet-keeping was widespread in
nineteenth-century Britain, and the breeding of pedigree dogs in particular
was popular; cats were slower to shake off their role in vermin control, but
interest in breeding cats for their appearance developed over the century.39
In March 1863, a dog show in Chelsea attracted more than 1,000 canine
entrants, and the first international dog show was held that same year;
Crufts was first held at the Royal Agricultural Hall in Islington in 1891.40
Thinking “of the large number of cats kept in London alone”, Harrison
Weir claims to have organized the first major cat show in 1871 at the
Crystal Palace (Weir, Our Cats, 1), though it has been suggested that
there were significant shows in the late 1860s organized by the naturalist
F. W. Wilson, and the Baroness Burdett Coutts is also credited with a
founding role.41 We know a little of the pet-keeping of eminent Victorians.
As a girl the future Queen Victoria had a spaniel, Dash, which she dressed
up in a “scarlet coat and blue trousers”; in later life she bred Pomeranians,
but also popularized Skye terriers.42 Dickens had a cat, Bob, who kept him
company as he wrote; when Bob died Dickens had his paw made into the
handle of a letter opener (it is now in the Berg collection of the New York
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Public library). Wilkie Collins, Dickens’s friend and collaborator, was also
a great lover of cats. Dickens’s dogs at various times included Turk, a
mastiff, Sultan, an Irish wolfhound, a St. Bernard, Linda, and a
Newfoundland, Don.43 The dogs of some other public figures – Lord
Byron’s Newfoundland, Boatswain, Sir Walter Scott’s Highland greyhound, Maida – became themselves famous; and stories accreted around
such dogs as “Greyfriars Bobby”, celebrated for their loyalty.44 As the status
of dogs rose, dog-stealing also became more widespread. And as more
sentimental attitudes to animals developed pet cemeteries, once the preserve of great country houses, were created: London’s Hyde Park had a pet
cemetery from 1880 (Bondeson, Amazing Dogs, 251–53). (In Richard
Jefferies’ future-disaster novel of 1885, After London, the city’s pampered
pet dogs, unable to fend for themselves, are among the first victims of
urban collapse: “The poodle is extinct, the Maltese terrier, the Pomeranian,
the Italian greyhound”.)45 As Kathleen Kete and Katherine C. Grier have
shown, France and the United States were by no means behind Britain in
their pet-keeping.46 An 1899 estimate placed New York’s pet dog population, for example, at 75,000, though another survey less than ten years later
claimed there were 200,000 domestic dogs, which suggests these figures
may be rather speculative.47 The elite dogs of Paris enjoyed – or possibly
did not enjoy – pampered lifestyles, and their owners had them styled,
dressed, and photographed. As Kete records, “the fashionable dog had a
costume for afternoon visits, for the evening, for travel, and for the beach”
(The Beast in the Boudoir, 85). When cars arrived at the end of the
nineteenth century, goggles for traveling dogs appeared on the market.48
Some beloved animals were stuffed after death, though, like London, Paris
also had its own pet cemetery, the Cimetière des chiens et autres animaux
domestiques, founded in 1899 at Asnières-sur-Seine (Kete, The Beast in the
Boudoir, 89–91; Robb, The Discovery of France, 178–79).
Cats and dogs were not the only domestic pets, needless to say.
Aquariums enjoyed enormous popularity in London and Paris between
1850 and 1880 (Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir, 57). Throughout the century
enormous numbers of wild birds were snared and sold in the streets as pets:
linnets, finches of various kinds, larks (which were also eaten), jackdaws,
nightingales, among others, were netted or limed, and sold as songbirds.
Some of these were blinded – a practice decried by Thomas Hardy in “The
Blinded Bird” – or had their tongues split – practices believed to improve
their singing.49 Sparrows and starlings were sold cheaply as living toys for
children.50 Ravens were kept as pets – Dickens kept a number of these
at various times.51 By the end of the century, canaries – easy to breed
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in captivity and brightly colored – had become the urban songbird of
choice.52 These were among the most common pets, but there were others,
such as tortoises. According to Walter Benjamin’s account of the
nineteenth-century Paris arcades and their flâneurs, “In 1839 it was
considered elegant to take a tortoise out walking . . . [which] gives us an
idea of the tempo of flanerie.”53
Among the non-domesticated urban fauna, birds were also prominent,
as they continue to be. Less visible, but hard to ignore, were fleas and lice,
and a variety of microscopic species greatly exercised those Victorians who
were concerned with the state of their drinking water. Other wild animals
included the significant population of feral cats. Thomas Hardy’s “black
cat . . . wide-eyed and thin” in the poem “Snow in the Suburbs” had many
peers, and the throwing of easily found dead cats was considered a great
practical joke in the earlier part of the century.54 Mayhew’s cats’ meat
dealer informant assured him that one of his customers, a woman of color,
fed strays from her roof: “the noise and cries of hundreds of stray cats
attracted to the spot was ‘terrible to hear’”.55 Popular cultural artifacts like
the music hall song, Jolly Cats, also remind us that cats were probably not
silent sharers of urban space:
There are lots of jolly cats,
That often meet at night,
To hold a concert on the tiles,
Or else to squall and fight.56
Nor was there any shortage of stray dogs, though, as Jessica Wang
describes, official estimates of the feral population vary widely. Brooklyn,
for example, had 20,000 stray dogs in 1877 according to one estimate, but
just 7,615 in 1879.57 In the second half of the nineteenth century, stray dogs
and cats attracted both philanthropic and state attention.
Many animals came to town to entertain and, more arguably, educate
the public. London’s barrel-organ men had their performing monkeys;
in France, bears were trained to do tricks to entertain passers-by.58
Menageries of exotic animals were a popular attraction of long standing,
until they were overtaken by the ostensibly more scientific and educational zoological gardens.59 Paris’s Jardin des Plantes featured animals
from 1793, including some that had come from the royal menagerie.
London’s Royal Menagerie in the Tower of London had begun its
collection of wild beast, birds, and reptiles in the thirteenth century; it
was in a dilapidated state by the early nineteenth century, but its
dwindling grew under Alfred Cops, who took over as Keeper of the
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Lions in 1822, and ran it until its animals passed to the new Zoological
Gardens in 1834 (for a period afterwards, he ran it with his own collection) – under him it boasted at various times an orang-utan, leopards, a
jaguar, a zebra, an alligator, and other exotica.60 Londoners also had the
choice of George Wombwell’s menagerie in Soho (before it took to
traveling), and the famous menagerie in Exeter ’Change in the Strand,
managed in turn by Gilbert Pidcock, Stephen Polito, and Edward Cross.
The ’Change menagerie, upon its closure in 1828, provided some of the
animals for the new Surrey Zoological Gardens in Kennington, also run
by Cross. New York had its Central Park Zoo, which developed in the
1860s. At least one animal entertained the public in France, Britain, and
North America: Jumbo, the famous elephant, appeared at both the
London and Paris zoos, though his transatlantic appearances were in
P. T. Barnum’s circus; he died in a railway accident in Canada. Among
other exotic animals were the unfortunate big cats kept by the crowbar
wielding Van Amburgh, the self-styled “Brute Tamer of Pompeii”,
whom we met in Chapter 1.61 By the end of the century public taste
had moved on to the less violent animal acts of the exotic animal dealer
Carl Hagenbeck, who, as Nigel Rothfels shows, also played a major role
in shaping nineteenth- and early twentieth-century zoo culture.62
For the most part, the exotic animals stayed behind bars or in the circus
ring, but, while they were not an everyday sight, larger zoo and circus
animals were on occasion brought through the streets, as with the mysterious “Bonassus” that was displayed in 1821–22; imported from the United
States, it was actually an American bison, Bison bonasus (Altick, The Shows
of London, 303). Great interest was attracted in 1828 by an even more
remarkable street parade, when the inhabitants of Cross’s menagerie were
marched up the Strand to the King’s Mews in Charing Cross (Altick, The
Shows of London, 316). Occasionally, exotic animals escaped. Commercial
suppliers of exotic animals supplied zoos and private collections – including that of William Rossetti, and Charles Jamrach’s menagerie in Ratcliff
Highway (now St. George’s Road East) in London’s East End is the
most famous English instance. In October 1857, one of Jamrach’s Bengal
tigers escaped while it was being transported by cattle truck from the docks,
where it had just arrived along with other exotica on the steamship
Germany; it bolted from outside his warehouse along Ratcliff Highway,
carrying off a young boy, John Wade, from the corner of Betts Street as
is went; Jamrach beat the unfortunate animal with a crowbar until it
relinquished the boy, who was badly hurt by the mauling, and by a
glancing blow of the crowbar.63
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Less exotic species worked in the urban entertainment industries too. If
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries bear pits and displays of
bull-baiting had been rivals to the theater, in the nineteenth century
animals took to the stage themselves.64 The restrictions on legitimate
drama, and the resultant rise of melodrama, had brought a plethora of
animal acts, which by their very nature were sparing of dialogue. The
equestrian drama, or hippodrama, associated with the Cirque Olympique
in Paris, Astley’s Amphitheatre, London, and the Lafayette Circus and
other venues in New York, has become well known – H. M. Milner’s
Mazeppa; or, The Wild Horse of Tartary (1831) is a celebrated example,
partly due to the drawing power of Adah Isaacs Menken. But there were
animals on stage at the legitimate theaters and minor houses too. Chunee
the elephant, for example, appeared in pantomime on the Covent Garden
stage in 1811–12, before taking up residence in Cross’s ’Change menagerie.
Tragically, the popular animal was shot in 1826 during one of his periodic
fits of rage, presumably at his being cooped up alone in an indoor pen
(Altick, The Shows of London, 311–13). And while the horse race that
provides the sensation scene of Dion Boucicault’s Flying Scud (Holborn
Theatre, 1866) was achieved using moveable cardboard flats, a real horse
was walked on stage afterwards to add to the verisimilitude of the piece.65
Among the animal stars of the period, there were several notable dog and
cat acts, with dogs in particular fitting well into the action of melodrama.66
Carlo, a large Newfoundland (a favored breed in the early nineteenth
century), was the great canine star of 1803: in Frederic Reynolds’s two-act
afterpiece, The Caravan; or, The Driver and His Dog (Drury Lane, 1803),
the intrepid animal dives into a tank of water and saves a drowning child.67
London wits were delighted with the new performer, who provided them
with an occasion to say that the play had been cur-tailed, that Mr. Carlo
was in liquor [“licker”], and so on.68 Some were less amused at the prospect
of the stage being further turned into spectacle:
The appearance of Carlo at Drury Lane must be considered a grand epoch in
the annals of the stage. We may now expect to see every folly ridiculed, and
every passion pourtrayed (sic), by actors from the Menagerie . . . The ballet
of Bacchus and Ariadne will be performed by dancing dogs . . . And would
not the entrance of a couple of tigers, much more than the finest tragic
exertions of Kemble and Mrs Siddons, excite the terror of the audience?69
Dog drama received a fresh fillip from France with the success of
Pixérécourt’s melodrama Le Chien de Montargis; ou, La Foret de Bondy
(Théâtre de la Gaité, June 1814), in which the dog hero, Dragon, avenges
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his murdered master. A great success in Paris, it proved equally popular the
same year in Covent Garden and the Royal Circus (formerly the Surrey) as
The Forest of Bondy, or, The Dog of Montargis.70 This play, or rather its
absence, caused riots at the Theatre Royal, Dublin in December of that
year when the dog’s owner demanded more money to go on, causing the
manager to put on The Miller and His Men in its place – newspaper
accounts suggest that the crowd were so displeased with this substitution
that they stopped the performance, and caused considerable damage.71
Transatlantic success was enjoyed by the suitably named Barkham Cony,
who appeared with his performing dogs at the Cobourg Theatre, London
in 1828. Cony became known as the “Dog Star”.72 His first American show
was at the Bowery Theatre in 1836, and he and his partner Edwin
Blanchard and their performing dogs were a regular attraction at the
Bowery until the partnership split in 1851. Plays included The Planter and
his Dogs and The Dogs of the Wreck.73 (Dog acts were usually in pairs: the
hero had his loyal dog, and the villain to be apprehended in due course by
the dog also needed to be a trained dog-handler.) Blanchard then appeared
with his dogs Hector and Bruin at the National Theatre in such plays as
The Fisherman and His Dogs. Before and after this split, they appeared at
various London venues, and we see Cony and Blanchard (and sometimes
Hector and Bruin) appear together or separately on playbills at the
Whitechapel Pavilion, the Standard Theatre, Shoreditch, and the Royal
Albert Saloon between 1841 and 1857.74 Cony continued his own show with
his star dog Yankee in other dog-driven productions, for example, The
Butcher’s Dog of Ghent and The Cross of Death, or, The Dog Witness. (His
son, Master Eugene Cony also took to the boards, appearing, for example,
at the Pavilion, Whitechapel with his father in May 1850 and at the Bowery
in 1851.)75 The ads of the theatrical newspaper The Era and the posters of
the period contain many references to “Dog Men”, “Dog-pieces”, and
other dog acts including Pattison and Ferris (and their dog Boatswain),
Kitchen and Lamb (with Carlo), and Nat Emmett – and “his wonderful
dogs” – who played the Pavilion in such fare as Life in the Far West, or, The
Dogs of the Prairie (March 4, 1862). In later years, the London-born actress
Fanny Herring appeared on the New York stage with her dogs Lafayette
and Thunder, while in London Jack Matthews and his dog appeared at the
Queen’s Theatre in Tottenham Street in such canine fare as The Inn of
Death; or, The Dog Witness, but also in the more elevated “Dog Hamlet”:
[T]his gentleman played the Prince of Denmark with a large black dog at his
heels, who used to “bay the moon “ at the sight of the ghost and throttle the
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161
king in the last scene, which would be arrived at in about half an hour after
the commencement.76
As Jan Bondeson notes in Amazing Dogs (81), there are no evil dog
characters on the Victorian stage, and all the stars appear to be male.
Audiences came to see fierce canine loyalty to masters both living and
dead, and villains faced down by good dogs, who often act as agents of
divine justice – in an uncertain and sometimes hostile world, you could
rely on a dog. Cinema continued this melodramatic tradition, with Cecil
Hepworth’s Rescued by Rover (1905) a pioneering instance. Hollywood’s
many canine heroes include Rex the Dog and Rin Tin Tin in the 1920s,
Asta, aka Skippy, star of the Thin Man films in the 1930s, and Lassie in the
1940s and 50s, as well as many less-familiar figures.77
Feline acts offered little real competition to dog acts, presumably because
cats are much less willing to take direction, but they appeared periodically. In
London they included Signor Cappelli’s troupe of Learned Cats, who drew
audiences in the 1830s (Altick, The Shows of London, 307). The Victoria
Theatre’s production of The Scamps of London (1843) featured an acting cat,
which leapt from his or her basket on cue in the opening crowd scene (or did
not, on occasion, as we have seen).78 In New York, cat acts popped up from
time to time at such minor venues as the American Museum in Brooklyn,
which offered a “Great Cat Show” in December 1877. In the 1890s, Herr
Techow enjoyed considerable success on both sides of the Atlantic with his
cat act, whose stars included a tightrope-walking “Blondin tabby” and a cat
clown; Leonidas Arniotis toured with his cat and dog show.79 Swain’s Rats
and Cats, a vaudeville act in which rats dressed as jockeys and rode cats, was
popular into the twentieth century. But, according to Carl Van Vechten,
writing in 1920, most theaters kept cats not for their acting, or even their
mousing, but because of superstition: “the cat . . . is a harbinger of prosperity
in the theater. A black cat is preferred . . . this superstition is so widespread
that every theater from the Comédie Française to the People’s Theatre on the
New York Bowery entertains a cat, feeding her lavishly.”80 Thus many
theatrical appearances by cats were unplanned, and took place when such
lucky cats strayed onto the stage.
From humane to ecological attitudes
Happily for at least some of these urban residents, more humane attitudes
to animals were gaining ground during the nineteenth century. This
gradual transformation derived from a variety of sources: as E. S. Turner
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has argued, the benevolism of the Earl of Shaftesbury, Methodism and
Evangelicism, and Romantic views of nature all contributed. James Turner
has shown that the post-Darwinian understanding of human kinship with
animals, the more general prestige of science, urbanization, and new ideas
about pain also played a part in the slow rise of a less instrumentalist view
on animals. We should not ignore, however, the role that social policing
played in such changes: the working classes were often the targets of anticruelty legislation, and it was feared in France that spectacles of cruelty
would create a heartless and dangerous public.81 It has been suggested that
nature, and thus animal life, became increasingly seen as a last refuge
from the forces of modernization, and that it is thus no coincidence that
the new attitudes showed first in the cities, not in the countryside.82
However, as we have seen, the cities were themselves full of animal life,
so that argument does not entirely persuade. Nonetheless, the growth of
urban life was accompanied by a gradual decline in the tolerance for such
common eighteenth-century practices as bull- and badger-baiting, the
“mumbling” of sparrows, the “crimping” of salmon, the scourging to
death of pigs to tenderize their flesh, and the display of squirrels on
treadmills.83 When Richard “Humanity Dick” Martin proposed legislation
on the ill-treatment of horses in 1821, his fellow MPs became helpless with
laughter, joking that donkeys, dogs, and cats would be protected next. But,
despite such attitudes, Martin’s bill, in a revised and extended form, passed
in 1822. A short-lived Society for Prevention of Wanton Cruelty was
formed in 1809; The Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
dates from 1824; and the Home for Lost and Starving Dogs, later to be
Battersea Dogs Home, was founded in 1860. In France, the Grammont
Law of 1850 outlawed the mistreatment of animals, at least in public. In
America, by the 1800s, judges were using the common law against public
nuisance to punish those who were openly cruel to animals.84 The ASPCA,
in part modeled on its English predecessor, was formed in 1866. Initially its
membership was limited to New York, but by 1874 most major cities
outside the South had a branch.85 Animals were not its only targets insofar
as it was felt by some of its elite members that ending cruelty would also
regenerate the brutal masses.86 Flagrant abuses continued long into the
century: in Britain, George Wombwell staged lion-baiting in 1825;
the baiting of bulls and other animals was not outlawed until 1835; illicit
cock-fights and dog-fights continued into the twentieth century, though
one might remain skeptical of the dwarf versus dog fight described in James
Greenwood’s Low-Life Deeps (1875). (Unsurprisingly, little attempt was
made to check the abuse of animals in the rural blood-sports of the
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163
aristocracy.) As we have seen, ratting survived as a sport in the United
States until the 1890s, and France had its ratodrômes for several decades
after that, with the Ratier Club de France staging a championship in Paris
in 1920.87
Debates over the status of animals gathered force towards the end of the
century, and spilled into the realm of culture. Such first-person animal
novels as Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) were indices as well as sources
of new attitudes to animal life.88 If vivisection suggested that scientific
progress was by no means inconsistent with the most barbaric instrumentalism, the anti-vivisection movement, galvanized by Frances Power Cobbe,
among others, attracted wide support from writers and artists.89 Wilkie
Collins’s novel, Heart and Science (1883) is one of the better-known
examples of a subgenre of anti-vivisection fiction.90 Among those who
leant their cultural capital to pro-animal ventures were Lord Tennyson,
John Ruskin, Robert Browning, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Thomas Carlyle,
Charles Dodgson, George Bernard Shaw, Jerome K. Jerome, Ouida, Marie
Corelli, Walter Crane, Edward Burne-Jones, Sarah Grand, Thomas
Hardy, and John Galsworthy. Both Tennyson and Carlyle acted as
Vice-Presidents of the National Anti-Vivisection Society, and Shaw was
a staunch supporter. The Animals’ Friend Society published pamphlets
on various cruel practices, including Jerome K. Jerome’s The Cruel Steel
Trap, Andrew Lang’s On Otter Hunting, and John Galsworthy’s For Love
of Beasts.91
But the sense that nature’s plenty might run out, and that whole species
might vanish, represents a different sensibility. However the vast numbers
of animals drawn to the city were affected by massive urban growth, very
few of them were in danger of dying out at species level. The deadly
anthropogenic potential of the modern city in fact first comes into focus
in an unlikely place: “feather fashion”, the wearing of plumes from wild
and sometimes exotic birds in women’s hats. Consider, for example, this
quote of September 1890 from the Leeds Mercury: feather fashion “involves
the extinction or survival of whole races of these lovely [birds]. It has taken
whole centuries to produce the types most sought after; and as things go,
their extinction is but a question of years”.92 Clearly, Darwin’s work had by
this time well permeated popular consciousness, since there is an awareness
here of species as existing in time rather than as timeless, and of human life
as one species among others, as well as of the threat posed by human society
to other forms of life. In fact this passage is closer to our own view of
extinction that that of Darwin: as Gillian Beer points out, he regarded
extinction as a natural part of the evolutionary process, rather than a sign of
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human depredation of the planet’s resources.93 In this he echoes Lyell, who
in his Principles of Geology discusses humankind’s role in the extinction
of species, from the wolves of the British Isles to the Dodo; he argues that
humans are hardly unique in displacing other species, and that this is
part of slow, natural change in the order of things.94 But by the end of
the century there was a recognition in some quarters that what Darwin
and Lyell saw as business as usual was intensifying and accelerating.95
There is more than just fin-de-siècle pessimism at work here. While most
arguments against feather fashion tended to be from a humanitarian
perspective, these began to be complemented by an emergent
environmentalism, by a sense of consumer power, and by nascent global
consciousness: what people chose to wear on the streets of London, or
Dublin, or Boston could have direct, rapid, and dire effects in other parts
of the world. It was, as James Turner suggests, what would later be termed
an ecological view.96
Fashion victims
Feather fashion was a facet of a more general pattern, since among the dead
animals of the Victorian city a significant number were fashion victims. In
a world in which synthetic polymers were still decades away, people were
far more dependent on animal-derived clothing, from wool to silk to
leather (linen and cotton were two major exceptions). From his silk
hat, to his leather-soled shoes, most of the mid-Victorian gentleman’s
wardrobe depended on animal products, some from live animals, some
from dead. His sister’s clothing, including her whalebone corset, would not
be very different in this respect. The use of fur and feathers was scarcely
remarkable in this respect.
Nor was there much new about the use of feathers in hats. Humans
have been borrowing the plumage of other species for millennia, and feathers
continue to be a part of the contemporary haute couture millinery of such
designers as Philip Treacy.97 The fourteenth century saw a fashion for
large-brimmed men’s hats trimmed with ostrich feathers; and in the
sixteenth, women’s hats were similarly adorned. In the late eighteenth
century, there was a vogue among the wealthy for the plumed “picture
hat”, popularized by the feather fashions of the French court, and by
Thomas Gainsborough’s famous portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire.98
In the early nineteenth century, ostrich feathers were fashionable for trimming, but were a good deal less popular than flower trimmings, and the
variety in use, according to a French manual of 1829, was relatively limited.99
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It is in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that the real
vogue for feather fashion develops. Indeed, it was not only feathers that
found their way into hats: by the 1880s, heads, wings and whole birds
adorned the headgear of the woman of fashion. Crucially, such fashions
were no longer the preserve of a small elite: the vogue for birds was
widespread enough to be responsible for the collapse in numbers of some
species. Robin W. Doughty in Feather Fashions and Bird Preservation
records that by the turn of the century it was estimated that 200 million
birds were killed annually to feed the fashion industry.100 If this seems like
a fanciful figure, the British Board of Trade figures indicate that between
1872 and 1880, 1,091 tons of feathers were imported into the United
Kingdom; between 1901 and 1910, this climbed to 6,411 tons, valued
at almost £20 million. Some of these were for the domestic market, some
for re-export (Doughty, Feather Fashions, 26–27). For the United States,
the period 1901 to 1910 saw 10 million dollars’ worth of feathers being
imported, most of them from France, which remained the capital of the
feather industry, as well as enjoying a more general dominance in fashion;
the figure for France was 50,300 tons (Doughty, Feather Fashions, 28).101 By
1900, some 83,000 people, many of them women, are thought to have been
employed in feather-based fashion in the United States, most of them in
New York; that figure, however, includes workers in the ostrich-feather
industry, which depended on farmed ostrich feathers rather than the wild
birds of the “fancy feather” business.102
As the Oxford Journal noted in 1887, “Birds are not the only or the
principal sufferers from the caprices of fashion, nor are ladies the only
offenders”, pointing out that beavers had been hunted into extinction to
supply men’s hats, before the fashion for silk took over.103 It concludes that
“probably little or nothing can be done to save a bird or beast whose
garment of feather or fur has once become the fashion”, but that if the
leaders of fashion could be swayed there might be some hope for “the seal,
the silver fox, the chinchilla, and the humble thrush”. By the 1870s, fur was
as essential an element of a chic wardrobe as feathers, with equally grim
consequences at species level. When British newspaper readers were
assured that Paris had decreed that “the favourite furs this winter will be
sealskin, skunk and beaver, worn as capes round the neck”, or that “fur is in
great vogue; long pelisses are made of sealskin, and bordered with beaver or
otter fur; these soft brown furs are great favourites” it did not augur well for
seals, beavers, and otters.104 The appetite for sealskin in particular had
disastrous effects on the world’s seal herds: by the end of the century the
seal breeding-grounds of the Southern hemisphere had long been
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decimated, and political tensions were running high as the United States,
Canada (and thus Great Britain), Russia, and Japan competed in the
Bering Seas for the shrinking herds that bred around the Pribilof Islands.
The drop in numbers between the 1870s and the 1890s was so severe that
the hunting of those herds into extinction seemed entirely likely too.105
Fashion had a long reach, and it had new technologies and practices to
help it. The Age of Cities was accompanied by advances in hunting
technology, and in transport networks. By the end of the century, hunters
had firepower that made it comparatively easy to shoot large numbers of
birds in the space of a few days. Repeating shotguns became available in the
1890s (Doughty, Feather Fashions, 42), and the use of “almost noiseless”,
small-caliber Flobert rifles in the vast bird breeding grounds of Florida
meant that flocks did not take flight as they once would have done, so that
whole rookeries could be destroyed.106 As to the sealskin industry, while
ashore, sealing tended to continue along pre-industrial lines – bachelor
seals were clubbed to death and rapidly skinned by hand – increasingly
seals were of both sexes being shot from boats. However they were killed, a
modern transport network of railways and steamships brought the skins
from Alaska to San Francisco to London in time for the tri-annual sales.
But it was at the other end of the supply chain that there occurred the
most significant shift. This was no longer fashion for a small elite: by
the 1870s, the imperatives of fashion held sway over an army of devotees,
recruited largely from the burgeoning cities. The modern ready-to-wear
industry was already under way by the 1840s, made possible by the
availability of the sewing machine; changes in retailing practices
included the spread of department stores, and catalogue-based mail-order
sales. The latter meant that even those outside the major hubs could
purchase the latest fashions, or at least versions of them.107 Fashion, in
other words, had become mass fashion, and for the wild species that
supplied fashion’s raw materials this was not good news.
How did fashions spread in this mass market? Not by word of mouth
only, of course, and mass fashion was underpinned by changes in the
publishing industry. Fashion came to offer a set of commodity-experiences
outside of the purchasing and wearing of clothes, shoes, and hats: reading
about and knowing about fashion developed as pleasurable activities in
themselves, and publishers began to make those pleasures available to larger
and larger readerships. The French fashion weeklies took off between 1870
and the First World War, though the important La Mode Illustrée had
already appeared by 1860. Le Petit Écho de la mode started in 1878; aiming at
a wider readership than the more prestigious papers, by 1886 it had a
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circulation of 100,000; by 1900 it boasted a circulation of 300,000, boosted
by the dress-patterns in “papier de soie” that came with every issue.108
Similar papers included France Mode and Mode Pour Tous. As Margaret
Beethham has described, the period 1880–1900 is marked in Britain by
rapid growth in the number of periodicals aimed at women, with some 120
new titles appearing. Among those that promoted new fashions were The
Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (1852–79), The Queen (1861–1967) and
The Lady, which all had regular fashion features and color plates. Lavishly
illustrated (and thus expensive) specialist magazines, such as The World of
Fashion (1824–79) and Myra’s Journal of Dress and Fashion (1875–1912) had
a more limited circulation.109 While these magazines had a growing but
still niche readership, fashion news enormously extended its reach when
the newspapers began to feature occasional columns on Paris fashion,
or seasonal fashion, sometimes taken verbatim from the magazines.110
Even juvenile readers were briefed in fashion by such publications as the
Girl’s Own Paper. In the United States, likewise, the overall number of
periodicals surged between 1865 and 1885, from 700 to 3,300.111 Many of
these, including Harper’s Bazar, contained fashion guides that promised to
give their readers advance warning of new trends, providing a form of
valuable cultural capital even for those who never got to purchase or
wear the clothes in question, though the numbers of those who did was
growing apace.
While fashion was increasingly international as well as increasingly
“massified”, Paris retained its position as fashion capital.112 In Britain and
America, magazines briefed readers on what was being worn on the streets
of Paris, or pictured in French magazines, and local milliners and dressmakers bought and copied Paris hats and dresses. Paris correspondents, real
or imagined, assured readers that, for example, the winter-wear of stylishly
dressed ladies of Paris was still based on “sables, chinchilla, Persian lamb
[i.e., astrakhan] . . . Birds of Paradise and Osprey” [i.e., egret feathers].113
Or they confidently proclaimed that on the streets of London “sealskin
trimmed with beaver or seal-brown plush, edged with the same costly fur,
is so generally worn by the well-dressed that it almost takes the character of
a livery”.114 The ads of an American trade-journal, the Millinery Trade
Review, in these years contain endless offers of “rich novelties from Paris”
(offered by the Nusbaum firm), “French Bonnet Frames” (by Heath),
“French Flowers and Feathers” (by S. J. Held), and other French millinery
goods, while its regular “Paris Millinery” feature kept readers in touch with
the latest trends from such major designers as Caroline Reboux. In general,
the dominance of the fashion sector by France went unquestioned, though
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there were occasional protests at cosmopolitan influences, such as that of
the International Federation of Catholic Women’s Leagues, who in 1917
blamed the excesses of women’s dress on the fact that “the leading
fashion-houses in Paris and other great continental cities are almost all in
the hands of Jews and Freemasons”.115 Anglo-American tailoring did
sometimes go its own way. This was particularly true of attempts to
make women’s clothing less constrictive: bloomers originated in the
United States, for example, and the Rational Dress Reform Movement
of the 1880s was of English origin; the trend towards simpler “sports” wear
was also a feature of English rather than Parisian fashion.116
The stage, that of Paris, but also those of London and New York, was
taken to be a natural source for new fashions. For instance, in 1886, the
Daily News reported that Sardou’s Georgette featured a “charming evening
toilet which would prove suitable to many of our insular girlish belles who,
for hygienic or other reasons, do not wish to wear low bodices”.117 Arguably
the most influential couturier of the twentieth century, Gabrielle “Coco”
Chanel, started her fashion career as a milliner in 1908, selling hats to
Paris’s successful actresses.118 Among the performers who were almost as
acclaimed for their style as their talent were Sarah Bernhardt, Adelina Patti
(both of whom used Charles Worth, among others), and Lily Langtry.119
Later, the role of the stage as a platform for new fashions would be taken
over by the cinema, and the advertising industry would take a much
more direct – and directive – role in determining the clothes that
appeared on screen.120
“Murderous millinery”
The reign of feather fashion lasts from the last quarter of the nineteenth
century until the 1920s. It is clear that the fashion for wearing domestic
gull-feathers and body-parts in hats had begun at least as early the 1860s,
when Alfred Newton began his campaign to protect British seabirds.
Newton, a Cambridge zoologist, had arrived in Iceland in 1858 in search
of the Great auk, only to find that it had been hunted into extinction
fourteen years earlier.121 Realizing that what had happened to the auk could
happen to other species, back in England he protested that the kittiwake
breeding grounds along the chalk cliffs of Flamborough, Yorkshire were
being decimated by “sportsmen” and by other hunters employed to supply
the heads and wings of the birds to milliners (Doughty, Feather Fashions,
58). The popularity of exotic bird-species for decorative purposes probably
dates from roughly the same period. For instance, the British Museum has
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169
in its jewelry collection a sumptuous gold necklace set with the heads of
hummingbirds that was made by Harry Emanuel of Bond Street in the
1860s.122 But, according to fashion historian Anne Buck, “the trimming of
hats was usually fairly restrained” at mid-century, and she dates the real rise
of feather fashion to the second half of the 1870s, when “whole birds as well
as parts of birds were used in the trimming of bonnets”; feathers were
increasingly employed “not only as trimmings, but also as the fabric of the
whole hat”.123 The 1880s marked a further advance of animal fashion. As
C. Willett Cunnington put it in his exhaustive 1937 survey of nineteenthcentury dress, “the singular use of dead animals, whole or in part, as
trimmings was perhaps the most noticeable feature during this decade.
The head became a mausoleum or even an entological museum”.124 The
author of Practical Millinery (1897) put it more delicately, “it is customary
at the present day [in Britain] . . . to trim hats very heavily, indeed, to
overtrim them, and very large quantities of material are used for
trimming.”125 Fiona Clark suggests that the rise of feather fashion is
related to the Aesthetic movement, and an embrace of “those aspects of
nature which would commonly be regretted as unpicturesque”, though
she also points to the developing craft of taxidermy, which made possible
some of the more bizarre trends: the use of whole birds, as well as mice
and reptiles.126 Some birds became highly coveted, like the birds of
paradise, whose feathers provided an opaline iridescence, suggestive,
perhaps, of the Aesthetic movement, and the peacock themes of
Whistler and Beardsley.127 But many other exotic species were prized
too, especially egrets, as the breeding-season feathers of the male of the
species produced dramatic so-called aigrette or osprey feathers.
According to Madame Rosée, Principal of the London School of
Millinery, “ospreys are . . . invaluable to the milliner”, adding “height
and lightness” to any hat.128 Ostrich feathers – usually from farmed
birds – also gave height to the more dramatic hats of the 1890s and
1900s, and were also popular for fans in this period.129 While feathers
continued to be fashionable long after as trimming, the more extreme
feather fashions diminished in popularity after the First World War,
probably pushed out by such factors as more active lifestyles for middleclass women, and the rise of the closed motor car, which quite simply did
not have the headroom for big hats. As Clark notes, the rise of cloche hat
in the 1920s was in keeping with the more general prestige of smooth,
streamlined forms in this period, ultimately part of a machine aesthetic
(Hats, 53). Change was already visible before this, with the ostrich feather
industry collapsing as early as 1914.130
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But between 1875 and the 1920s, feathers were de rigueur, surviving many
shifts in the shape of hats. When the wholesale killing of domestic gulls was
checked by the Sea Bird Protection Act of 1869 and subsequent Acts (1872,
1876, 1880), the plumage of exotic birds came to fill the market.131 Ostrich
plumes had been in vogue since 1859, when the Empress Eugénie made them
popular, and ostrich farms had sprung up to meet demand (ostriches did not
have to be killed to obtain their feathers).132 But increasingly it was exotic
wild birds that were desired. Newton, whose protests had led to the 1869 Act,
highlighted in 1876 the “enormous sales of birds’ feathers which are constantly being held in London” and the “destruction to which exotic birds are
condemned by fashion”.133 He described a catalogue offering quantities of
egret feathers (Newton estimated these must have come from 9,700 birds),
the skins of 15,000 hummingbirds, and the feathers and skins of many other
birds, including parrots, kingfisher, and tanagers. Where did these birds
come from? Newton pointed to India, Trinidad, and Demerara, but Britain
was soon importing bird skins from North and South America, and Australia
too. In just five months in 1884–85, 6,828 birds of paradise were sold, 4,974
Impeyan pheasants, 404,464 West Indian and Brazilian and 356,389 East
Indian birds (Haynes, “Murderous Millinery”, 26). W. H. Hudson, in a
widely quoted letter to The Times of October 17, 1894, claimed that by then
as many as 20 million birds were being imported annually to supply
the fashion industry.134 The turn of the century marked only an expansion
of the trade: extrapolating from quantities of feathers sold at auction to the
numbers of birds they represented, Bird Notes and News estimated that
490,000 egrets and herons were shot to supply the London market between
1905 and 1907. Figures for other years indicated that 50,000 kingfishers had
been killed for millinery in 1906–07; 155,000 birds of paradise between 1904
and 1908; and 152,000 hummingbirds between 1904 and 1911 (Doughty,
Feather Fashions, 30).
The vogue for feathers crossed class bounds: when there was a temporary
dip in feather fashion in the West End, the cheap Saturday-night markets
could absorb the surplus stock, as W. H. Hudson describes:
I saw trays and baskets full of tropical birds exposed – tanagers, orioles,
kingfishers, trogons, humming birds, etc. – from 2d to 4½d per bird. They
were indeed cheap – so cheap that even the ragged girl from the neighbouring slums could decorate her battered hat, like any fine lady, with some
bright-winged bird of the tropics.135
However suspicious we might be of the social assumptions of this
description, it does point to a basic truth: that it was the scale of demand
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171
in the large cities that was the problem, given the finite supply of wild birds.
Even a casual perusal of the catalogues and advertisement of the period
gives one an idea how all-pervasive – and cheap – feather fashion had
become. “Fancy Feathers”, part of an autumn 1901 catalogue for the New
York Millinery and Supply Company, which sold to the millinery trade,
shows whole parrots (at 25 cents), starlings (10 cents), Mexican Merle (23
cents), as well as the wings and feathers of several other species.136
Trimmed hats were available from the same supplier, several with whole
birds, at $27 per dozen.
Counter-narratives to the stories of fashion began to emerge. The
slaughter of egrets and other members of the heron family attracted
particular opprobrium when eyewitness accounts circulated of what
Florida rookeries were like after the hunters had left. The “ospreys” that
were so fashionable came from nesting birds only, which meant that every
dead bird usually meant an abandoned nest. Wounded birds, from whom
the attractive mating plumage had been torn, were left to die on the
ground; the young birds were left to starve, or be eaten by raccoons or
buzzards. Richard Bowdler Sharpe of the British Museum presented the
details to British audiences in July 1887 in a letter to the London Standard
that was widely reprinted in other papers.137 T. Gilbert Pearson’s graphic
description of the massacre of birds at Horse Hummock, Florida in 1891,
read at the World’s Conference on Ornithology in 1897, created fresh
outrage (Doughty, Feather Fashions, 64–65). The controversy took off
once again in 1906, when A. H. E. Mattingley obtained photographs of
the effects of an egret hunt in New South Wales. The Royal Society for the
Protection of Birds (RSPB) posted these on billboards, and they featured in
shop windows; in 1911, they were used in another campaign in London, in
which men carried the photos on placards around the shopping districts
of the West End (Doughty, Feather Fashions, 65).
The Plumage League – a somewhat confusing name – was formed
by Emily Williamson in 1885 to campaign against the slaughter, and this
merged with George Arthur Musgrave’s Selborne League the
following year.138 Williamson joined forces with the Fur and Feather
League (established by Mrs. Edward Phillips, W. H. Hudson, and others
in 1889) to form the Society for the Protection of Birds (SPB), which would
eventually become the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.139
Adherents to these movements spanned a wide range, from naturalists to
such society figures as Baroness Burdett Ashmead Coutts. Meetings and
letters to the newspapers were principal instruments of disseminating their
anti-plumage views. Newspaper columns aimed at women took up the
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cause, though not always with any great understanding, as when the
Manchester Times lamented that “the fashion of wearing birds’ plumes
(or whole birds) on hats and headdresses has produced disastrous
results on the bright-feathered birds of the tropics”, before going on
to note that “except with careful arrangement . . . birds decoratively
used do not produce a good effect in dress”.140 Presumably, if a better
effect could be produced the disastrous results would be more
tolerable.
Cultural support for the movement came from artists and writers
such as John Ruskin, a founder-member of the Plumage League, Lord
Tennyson, first president of the Selborne Society (formerly the
Selborne League), Thomas Hardy, and W. H. Hudson. John
Galsworthy was a regular pamphleteer for animal causes. His For
Love of Beasts attacked, inter alia, the wearing of aigrettes, and the
women who wore them: “most women are mothers themselves! What
would they think of gods who shot women with babies in arms for
the sake of obtaining their white skins to wear on their heads”.141
Punch mocked feather fashion – and its democratization – in cartoons
by Linley Sambourne, F. H. Townsend, and others.142 Among the
more striking are George du Maurier’s “A Large Order”, in which an
overweight woman demands “Wings”; Sambourne’s “A Bird of Prey”,
which shows the feathered woman of fashion as a harpy; and
“The Extinction of Species; Or, the fashion-plate lady without
mercy and the egrets”.143 In the last, a fashionably dressed woman
stands in what appears to be an egret rookery. She wears one ospreydecorated hat, but also carries an even larger picture-hat that features
an entire dead egret; another egret looks up at its dead mate
(Figure 5.1).
Perhaps the most striking contribution from the cultural quarter was
made by artist G. F. Watts, whose symbolist painting A Dedication (1898–
99, Watts Gallery) was dedicated to “all those who love the beautiful and
mourn over the senseless and cruel destruction of birdlife and beauty”
(Figure 5.2).144
The canvas shows an angel (with wings) covering its face before an altar
that is decked with brightly colored bird feathers and bird-fragments, some
of which echo the color of the angel’s robe. Heaven itself, it suggests, is
appalled at murderous millinery. To the base of the altar is a figure of a
satyr, which has been interpreted as a figure of the greed and vanity that
drive the feather trade.145 Where Linley Sambourne’s Punch cartoon “A
Bird of Prey” turns the woman of fashion into a winged harpy, Watts goes
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173
Figure 5.1 “The ‘Extinction’ of Species”, Punch, September 6, 1899.
for a less ad feminam approach: the angel is of indeterminate sex, and the
satyr is a male figure.
The Humanitarian League added its energies to the existing campaigns
when it was formed in 1891.146 The League’s concern with bird welfare was
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The Demographic Imagination
Figure 5.2 G. F. Watts, A Dedication (1898–99), lithograph reproduced in The
Studio (1903).
part of a more general humane program that reprised meliorist views,
and that also opposed vivisection, blood sports, compulsory vaccination,
flogging in prisons, and sweated labor. With links to movements as
different as Fabianism, Suffragism, and vegetarianism, the League attracted
a diverse membership, and its supporters included Thomas Hardy,
Edmund Carpenter, Charlotte Despard, George Bernard Shaw, and writer
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175
and illustrator Edmund Selous. Not only did feather fashion involve
cruelty, but for some League members it broke with cross-species fellowship. League founder Henry Salt considered that our humane attitude to
animals is innate, and forms “a natural tie which cannot be broken without
doing violence to many of the finer attitudes of our nature” (Weinbren,
“Against All Cruelty”, 95–96). The League published a pamphlet in 1903
using the by then familiar title “murderous millinery”, which summarizes
the level of destruction being done by fashion, and noting that it was
thirty years since Alfred Newton had warned of the “ruthless destruction of
birds for the bedizenment of women”.147 The pamphlet pointed to the
difficulties in getting accurate information on the quantities of dead birds
then being imported, and highlighted the disinformation circulated by the
trade. It was nonetheless able to identify the Fancy Feather and Bird Skin
Auction at the Commercial Sale Rooms in Mincing Lane as at the centre of
the industry, and referred readers to W. H. Hudson’s pamphlet for the
SPB, “Osprey, or Egrets and Aigrettes”.
Although many women were active in the anti-feather movement, one
of the most striking things about the campaigns on both sides of the
Atlantic was their targeting of the female consumer more than the hunters,
suppliers, or milliners. Alfred Newton’s much-cited paper, “The
Zoological Aspect of Games Laws”, delivered to the British Association
at Norwich in 1868, assured any woman wearing gull-feathers that “fair and
innocent as the snowy plumes may appear . . . she wears the murderer’s
brand on her forehead”.148 The Humanitarian League was still repeating
that charge over thirty years later.149 Newton’s letter to The Times of
January 28, 1876 thundered that “if ladies like to attire themselves like
salmon-flies, let them do so, but . . . feathers on the outside of any biped
but a bird suggest the association of tar”. For William Dutcher, writing in
Science in 1886, it was the “female love of ornament” that was threatening
the birds of America with extinction.150 As a possible explanation for
women’s reluctance to change their cruel ways, W. H. Hudson musingly
invoked Herbert Spencer’s claim that women were not as advanced as men
intellectually and “on the side of the aesthetic faculties”, being “midway
between the man of our era and the pure savage”.151 The Times made it
equally clear that the limitations of women were at issue, rhetorically
asking “if their sense of humanity is too feeble, will not their native sense
of maternity arouse them?”. Proclaiming that it should be “clearly understood that the feathered woman is a cruel woman”, it reiterated Newton’s
argument about tar.152 Perhaps the popular novelist Ouida’s vitriolic
broadside against the New Woman, cited in my epigraph, suggests one
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reason for this persistent tendency to scapegoat women: it was not so much
women’s vanity as their new political visibility that was in question. The
feathered woman stood in for the woman who was seeking the franchise,
university education, legal rights, and greater social freedom.
The plumage trade for its part was far from passive in the face of the
threat to its profits posed by the various pressure groups. When the Pall
Mall Gazette sent a reporter (possibly Hulda Friederichs) to interview “one
of the largest London dealers in birds and bird-feathers” he stressed that
much of the domestic feathers they used were “the refuse of a poulterer’s
shop”, with the exception of larks (which were used for food anyway) and
the odd robin, because “ladies will insist on wearing them”.153 He poohpoohed the idea that foreign birds were being hunted into extinction: “the
cry has often been raised that a certain kind was no more to be had [but] the
scarcity was invariably followed by a greater supply than ever”. He also
claimed that very few birds were shot, since that would damage their
feathers. (More convincing is his account of his stock, which includes
“over a hundred different kinds of humming birds”, tangaras (“a
great favourite of ladies . . . the only bird which is naturally red”),
Japanese pheasants (“at present much used”), and the expensive white
Java sparrows.) Similar claims – that plumes were farmed, or found, or
from domestic poulterers proliferated. As Galsworthy’s pamphlet had
explained, squeamish shoppers could always be assured that the aigrettes
they were buying were not “real”.
A vigorous campaign of disinformation along similar lines helped to
stymie any effective legislation for years. India was prevailed upon to ban
the export of bird feathers in 1902, and similar measures followed in most
of the other countries over which Britain had some measure of control.
This did not prevent imports reaching Britain, sometimes disguised as
other products, or in one case as exam papers (Haynes, “Murderous
Millinery”, 28). The first bill to ban the import of such feathers was
introduced in 1908, and a number of others followed, all of them effectively
squashed by the agile maneuverings of the British textile trade, which
protested variously that such legislation would affect huge numbers of
workers, that many of the feathers were artificial or were molted or were
from “farmed” egrets (there were no such things), and that the quantities of
wild birds involved were exaggerated. Although the RSPB exposed some of
these tactics in its booklet, Feathers and Facts: A Reply to the Feather-Trade,
and Review of Facts with Reference to the Persecution of Birds for their
Plumage (1911), the industry continued to lobby successfully, and a brisk
trade continued.154 Even during the first three years of the First World
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War, close to 900 tons of bird feathers from wild species were
imported, a figure which excludes farmed ostrich plumes (Haynes,
“Murderous Millinery”, 29; Doughty, Feather Fashions, 29).
Eventually an end did come to the indiscriminate importation of
wild-bird feathers. The Plumage Bill of 1920 was defeated, bringing
forth fresh condemnation of the heartless women who wore feathers (a
tendency sharply criticized by Virginia Woolf in an essay in the Woman’s
Leader, in which she pointed out that male hunters, merchants, and
politicians also sustained the feather trade).155 But in July 1921, thirteen
years after the first bill on the issue had been introduced, the Importation
of Plumage (Prohibition) Act was passed. By then, fashion had moved
on, making the Act less pressing, though even in 1920 a substantial
quantity of exotic feathers was still being imported.
Birds of America
The anti-plumage movement in the United States followed a similar
trajectory. In the 1880s, the scientific community in the United States
had begun to be gravely concerned at the effects of city fashions on
native birds; the American Ornithologists Union was formed in 1883,
and in 1886 the first Audubon Society was founded to encourage the
wider community to “refrain from the use of wild bird’s plumage as
an article of dress or ornament”.156 In the same year a supplement to
the journal Science featured a number of articles that discussed the
wholesale slaughter of bird species, distinguishing between the damage
done by destruction of habitat, electric light-towers, telegraph cables,
and other modern incursions – which it saw as inseparable from
modern settlement – and the decimation caused by the “cupidity
and heartlessness” of the fashion industries.157 The New York Sun, it
noted, could happily describe a woman “with a whole nest of sparkling, scintillating birds in her hair” without a thought for the source
of those ornaments.158 The supplement ended with “An Appeal to
Women of America in Behalf of the Birds”.
One article, subsequently excerpted in both American and British
newspapers, noted that the evidence of bird-slaughter was everywhere:
“in shop-windows, on the street, in the cars, and everywhere else women
were seen”.159 The author gave an account of what a friend had seen while
traveling in a Madison Avenue streetcar. Eleven women out of the thirteen
present were wearing hats with feathers, partial, or whole birds as
decoration, as follows:
178
The Demographic Imagination
(1) heads and wings of three European starlings; (2) an entire bird (species
unknown), of foreign origin; (3) seven warblers, representing four species;
(4) a large tern; (5) the heads and wings of three shore larks; (6) the wings of
seven shore larks, and grassfinches; (7) one half of a gallinule; (8) a small
tern; (9) a turtle dove; (10) a vireo and a yellow-breasted chat; and (11)
ostrich plumes.160
Likewise, the ornithologist Frank M. Chapman had reported to Forest and
Stream that while walking on Fifth Avenue he counted 700 hats on which
were the remains of 542 birds of forty species, mostly terns and quail; most
of the hats without such features were worn by those in mourning
(“Destruction of Birds for Millinery Purposes”, 197). Science estimated that
a female population of 25 million was unwittingly responsible for the deaths
of not fewer than 5 million birds every year; one New York taxidermist
claimed to produce 30,000 stuffed birds every season for use in hats.161 It was
thought that 40,000 terns had been shot on Cape Cod in a single season; and
that “a million rails and reed-birds bobolinks [were] killed in a month near
Philadelphia”.162 Less colorful birds, such as swallows, martens, and sparrows
were dyed for use; “orioles, crows, blackbirds, purple-grackles, redwing
blackbirds, bobolinks, and terns” were used as they were.163
The appearance of the two bird protection societies and the concerns
voiced in the scientific and nature magazines indicate that, as in Britain,
some were questioning the assumption that animals were an endless
resource to be exploited.164 An American Society for the Prevention to
Animals had been founded in 1866, but the societies’ appearance suggests
that in addition to a rising resistance to cruelty and neglect there was a
nascent ecological awareness, a sense that nature’s plenty was not infinite,
and that whole species could effectively vanish, as had the passenger
pigeon. As the human population of the United States grew apace, something would have to be done to preserve its other species. The tide began to
turn at the end of the century. The Lacey Act of 1900 brought the
protection of native species under federal control. In Florida, where
populations of flamingoes, ibises, herons, and egrets as well as other species
faced extinction, William Dutcher, the Ornithologist’s Union, and the
Audubon Society managed to push through a law against plume hunting.
The 1901 law resulted in clashes between the authorities and hunters, at
least two of them fatal.165 As well as formal legislation in some other states,
agreements had been reached in New York with the Millinery Merchants
Protective Association to refrain from the use of the feathers of various
named species. Membership of the societies, and the teaching of nature
subjects in schools also began to exert pressure: milliners complained that
Fur and feathers
179
no mother whose child was enrolled in the Audubon Society was likely to
purchase a feather-trimmed hat.166 While legislation was slowly having its
effect in the city, the country more generally was being reshaped by
conservation forces: 1903 was also marked by President Roosevelt’s creating
the nation’s first wildlife refuge on Pelican Island in Florida, and in 1916
Congress approved the formation of a National Park Service.
Fur fashion
As was made clear by another Humanitarian League pamphlet, The Fur
Fashion, it was not only the wild birds of the world which were hunted for
what the author of “murderous millinery” termed “the Juggernaut wheel of
greed and vanity”.167 Fur-bearing animals, from badgers to bears, and from
muskrats to seals, were also at the sharp end of fashion’s magic wand. As
with feather fashions, there was nothing new about the use of fur for
human clothing. The author of Furs and the Fur Trade (1923), Captain
John Sachs (“Author of Silver Fox Farming, Furs, etc.”), stresses that “our
earliest recorded ancestors, Adam and Eve, wore furs” (Genesis 3:21).168 He
goes on to chart some of the better-attested uses of fur through the ages: fur
was used by the Greeks and Romans for decoration, leaving the wearing of
full skins to the barbarians; and fur was common enough in the middle
ages for there to be sumptuary laws limiting their use by those outside the
aristocracy: a law of 1127 confined nuns to the wearing of the fur of lambs
and cats only.169 The modern fur industry owes its origins to the Hudson
Bay Company, founded in 1670 under the aegis of Prince Rupert, which
gave rise to a vast network of trappers, traders, manufacturers, and retailers,
knitting together the commerce of Britain, Canada, and the United States
for more than 200 years. The Hudson Bay Company, like the East
India Company, was once one of the world’s most powerful private
organizations, though Canada took over many of its powers in 1869
(Sachs, Furs and the Fur Trade, 28, 37). Britain was not the only fur
beneficiary, of course: for example, the American Fur Company, founded
in 1808, and eventually bought out by Hudson Bay, made John Jacob Astor
one of the richest men in US history.
By the early twentieth century, fur, especially the fur coat, was increasingly coveted by all classes. To get an idea of the industry’s scope, Sachs
urged any doubter to:
take his stand in any busy shopping thoroughfare in London, Paris, or New
York – Oxford Street, London, for example. Let him count the women who
180
The Demographic Imagination
pass by in a period of five minutes, noting at the same time those wearing fur
in some form or other. Let him calculate how many will pass in a shopping
day . . . He will see furs that have come from the frozen North, the hills of
Abyssinia, the wilds of Peru, the plains of China, the grass lands of Australia,
the war-devastated regions of Central Europe, the steppes of Tartary, the
Pribylov Islands, many of the United States of America, Asia Minor, Persia,
England, Scotland, France – the list is endless. (Furs and the Fur Trade, 15)
Because of its historical links to the Hudson Bay Company, and expertise
in the treatment of furs, by the late nineteenth century, London was one of
the world hubs of the fur trade, one source describing London’s enormous
sales in March, June, and October as “the great fur events of the year”:
In January offerings of muskrats, beavers and opossums rule. It is the March
sales that bring the choice collection of the Hudson’s Bay Company and the
finest consignments shipped to the great London brokers. These consignments are sold at auction to purchasers from all parts of the world.170
In 1875, the total figure for imported bear skins was 5,898, that for mink was
62,760; and that for musquash (alias muskrat) 503,948. The sales figures of
just one major firm, C. M. Lampson, for 1913, give some idea of how the
scale of the trade had grown:
Bear. January: 3,150 [skins]; March: 5,294; June: 3,966; October: 5,098
Mink. January: 32,620; March: 51,125; June: 12,203; October: 24,671
Muskrat. January: 1,635,768; March: 826,394; June: 784,575;
October: 614,273.171
Alongside these were sold considerable numbers of the pelts of such
animals as seals, skunks, squirrels, and wallabies and smaller quantities of
those of lynxes, wolves, wolverines, and wombats. Among the less exotic
species, there were 35,239 domestic cat skins sold in March alone.
What was driving this expansion? While some of the increase must be
attributed to the coming of the mass market, insofar as that term can
be applied usefully to an expensive commodity like fur, there was also a
significant change in the way fur was worn. For much of the nineteenth
century, the world of fashion considered fur to be most suitable for trimming, for lining, and for ladies’ muffs, which were made of fur for most of the
century: ermine, sable, and chinchilla in the first half of the century, with
sable remaining the most prized thereafter; skunk was popular in the 1870s;
astrakhan, fox, stone-marten, beaver, and seal in the 1880s; in the 1890s, mink
enjoyed new favor, and it became fashionable to retain the heads and tails of
the animal as part of the design, a trend satirized by Punch.172 (Fur was not
the exclusive preserve of the wealthy: the working class used cheaper furs – for
Fur and feathers
181
example, rabbit and mole – and men’s coats were sometimes lined with
genette, that is to say, cat fur.) Countries with colder winters were at least as
fond of fur: the United States and Canada both had thriving fur industries.
Britain certainly had a market for fur at mid-century: the 1851 Exhibition
featured displays by such companies as Nicholay of Oxford Street with “a
large collection of furs from all parts of the world”; G. Ellis of Fore Street,
with “Boas, victorines, muffs, etc., in fur and velvet”; Clarke and Co., with
“manufactured furs of ermine, minx and musquash, natural and dyed”; and
Luthe and Parsons of King Edward Street, with “minevir, chinchilla, squirrel
and seal boas”; Nova Scotia sent, inter alia, “young seal-skins” and “raccoon
and cat-skin sleigh-robes”.173
But it was only in the 1870s that coats and jackets made entirely from fur
begin to be really fashionable in Britain, and that fur was usually sealskin.
In 1871, the Graphic was already proclaiming the continuing popularity of
sealskin jackets, and in 1872, the Manchester Times assured its readers that
the fashion for these jackets had “revived in full force” after a lull.174 In
1880, Myra’s Journal and Sylvia’s Journal both pronounced sealskin to be
the fur of the season.175 The Queen likewise declared that the “rage of the
season . . . is for a sealskin jacket trimmed with otter or beaver”.176 By 1881,
one columnist ventured the opinion that sable was making something of a
comeback, after a long period in which “the sealskin jacket [has] ruled the
market to the exclusion of most others”.177 More than ten years later
sealskin still maintained its position, with the Ladies Supplement to the
London Journal assuring its readers that dark sealskin was still the popular
fur for coats and wraps.178 By then some nine-tenths of the world’s sealskins were processed in London, and 10,000 people were employed in the
industry. Many of these skins stayed in the country, most of them destined
for the clothing industry.179 Sealskin – as coats, wraps, dolmans [sleeveless
coats], sacques, pelisses, muffs, tippets, and gloves – was everywhere to be
seen on the streets and in the shop windows. The sealskin jacket in
particular was a trophy of middle- to upper-class fashion over a period of
some twenty years, coveted by those who could not afford it as well as those
who could: middle-class fraudster, Emily McGregor, who tricked a number of London’s upmarket shops out of clothes and cash in 1870, was
wearing a sealskin jacket from Hitchcock’s when she was arrested.180
Sealskin enjoyed a transatlantic vogue, and in Manhattan sealskin dolmans
were “all the rage”.181 The Canadian retailer Eaton’s Fall and Winter
Catalogue 1899–1900 promised the discerning buyer ladies’ Alaska seal
jackets (starting with “The Rosamund” at $150) and, for the thrifty, ladies’
“electric seal capes” (actually dyed hare or rabbit skin).182
182
The Demographic Imagination
Such popularity made the sealskin jacket a useful social shorthand. In
her assault on the New Woman, Ouida paints a picture of the New
Woman as elbowing her way into public life “in her sealskin coat with
the dead hummingbird on her hat”; for the animal-loving Ouida, that this
woman wears “dead birds as millinery and dead seals as coats” is one of the
many proofs of her heartlessness and her unfitness for a man’s place in the
world.183 The portrait of the modern woman clad in hummingbird hat and
sealskin would have been readily familiar even to those who did not share
Ouida’s reactionary views. Other writers referenced sealskin to stress their
own topicality. The “fast and fashionable young woman of the day” was
claimed by minor poet Frederick William Orde Ward to be:
At home . . . with seals and sables,
With things that are no use;
And then in turning coats and tables,
She is the very deuce.184
Music Hall too deployed sealskin as a useful topical reference, as in
William Bint’s I Bought Her a Sealskin Jacket and a Diamond Ring (c.1880),
sung by Fred Coyne (Figure 5.3).
The chromolithographic cover by William Spalding shows a shop interior, with the protagonist and his sweetheart in the process of buying the
jacket from a deferential shop assistant. Our hero steps back in shock when
he sees the price of the jacket: £80; he is even more surprised, of course,
when he eventually learns that his materialistic sweetheart is already married.
By the time of Ouida’s article some commentators had begun to be
concerned at the effect the appetite for seal fur was having on the fur seal
population. (There are, in fact, several types of fur seal rather than one
species; they are thought to resemble sea lions more than the grey and
harbor seals found in European waters.) They had a historical precedent for
their concern. Once there had been extensive breeding grounds in the
South Atlantic and Pacific, including those off the coasts of South America
and New Zealand, but these had been hunted to the verge of extinction.185
Millions of fur seals had been killed in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries; with no regard to sustainability, breeding seals and
pups had been killed as well as bachelor seals. The result in Europe and the
United States was a glut on the market, and poor quality sealskin; the result
in the southern breeding grounds was a collapse in populations – the
“breeding grounds were devastated, and the amphibians exterminated”.186
One major source of sealskin remained: the Bering Sea, and especially
the Pribilof Islands seemed to promise an endless harvest, so densely were
Fur and feathers
183
Figure 5.3 William Spalding, cover for I Bought Her a Sealskin Jacket and a Diamond
Ring (c.1880).
184
The Demographic Imagination
they populated with fur-seals. An article in All the Year Round in 1886
praised the sustainable practices of the sealers, who were acting under
license from the US government. (The United States had purchased
Alaska from Russia in 1867, and also leased the Commodore Islands.) It
confidently stated that there was “not the slightest fear that this fur will
become either scarcer or more plentiful”.187 But, by 1890, Henry
W. Elliott, commissioned by the US government to review the seal
population in the wake of the former lessee, claimed that, between 1872
and 1890, the female population of the Pribilof Islands had shrunk by 50
percent, and the male population by 90 percent.188
The United States leased the Pribilof Islands to the Alaska Commercial
Company, a subsidiary of Hutchinson, Kohl and Company (who were
succeeded as lessees in 1890s by the North American Commercial
Company), and tried to control the industry so that seal populations
could be sustained as a resource; the Russians tried to maintain the
rookeries on their side and Japan tried to maintain its rookeries on the
Kurile Islands. But sealing vessels from Canada, Japan, and Norway
continued to hunt seals off the coast (pelagic sealing) and by the 1880s
their activities were felt by the Company to be affecting the rookeries. This
had, in fact, led to the seizing of a number of Canadian sealing ships in
1886–87 and political tension between the United States and Britain, which
retained control of Canada’s foreign affairs. By 1889, relations had not
greatly improved, and Britain was threatening to dispatch warships to the
region.189 These tensions lasted through the 1890 and 1891 seasons. Elliott
leaked his report, which suggested that land sealing as well as pelagic
sealing was contributing to the dramatic collapse of the seal population,
weakening the US position on the Canadian pelagic fleets. Eventually a
deal was brokered at the Paris Arbitration Tribunal of 1892–93, though this
too proved unsatisfactory, and some commentators in Britain regarded
subsequent legislation by the United States on sealskin importation as a
form of economic warfare calculated to destroy British–Canadian sealing
and London-based processing.190
The voices raised against the seal industry were never as loud as those of
the Plumage League, the RSPB, or the Audubon Society, and critics tended
to dwell on cruel hunting practices more than the ecological precariousness
of the Pribilof herds. The public was not ignorant about the sources
of sealskin, and journal articles in the 1870s and 1880s give fairly matterof-fact accounts of the clubbing of seals, though opinions about what
constituted cruelty were gradually shifting.191 In Britain, for example, a
controversy developed in 1887 around the cruelty of sealing when Dr. Anna
Fur and feathers
185
Kingsford, the well-known “lady doctor”, anti-vivisectionist, suffragist,
Theosophist, and spiritualist, linked the cruelties of the feather trade
with those of the fur trade. Boasting that there were no furs in her
wardrobe, she urged her audience to use their consumer power, and
recommended the substitution of farmed ostrich feathers for muffs and
trimmings.192 Anticipating twentieth-century “celebrity” power, Lotta
Crabtree, the former child star whom we met in Chapter 2, attracted
some attention when she refused to wear fur, except for imitation fur.
Another American actress and playwright, Minnie Maddern Fiske, likewise
used her fame to denounce the fur-trade (she also liked to hand out free
copies of Black Beauty).193 As with feather fashion, the Humanitarian
League weighed in to harness consumer sentiment. Joseph Collinson’s
How We Get Our Sealskin (1903), a League pamphlet, blended ecological
and humanitarian arguments, giving harrowing accounts of the slaughter
of seals, drawn from descriptions by one Captain Borchgrevink, Gambier
Bolton, the well-known animal photographer and lecturer, Dr. William
Gordon Stables, the author and traveler, Dr. William Gavitt, and Professor
D’Arcy Thompson. According to Borchgrevink, the seals were sometimes
skinned alive, as “it is easier to skin a seal which is half alive. In the utmost
agony the wretched beast draws the muscles away from the sharp steel”.194
The pamphlet quotes Bolton – who early on recognized that some species
were being hunted to extinction – to the effect that such things were done
“merely to satisfy the craving . . . [of] refined and delicate ladies in civilized
lands”. It also gives a horrific account of the way in which the adult
seals were driven before being clubbed to death, and the fate of the seal
pups left to starve. Citing Professor D’Arcy Thompson, it claimed
that 600,000 seals were killed in 1896, a figure that seems high compared
with other estimates.195 A few commentators dwelled less on the cruelty
of the seal industry and more on the likely extinction of the Pribilof
herds; one American article, for example, opined that the limitless hunting
of seals would see them found only in museums, “as the buffaloes are
found today”.196
In the end, though, it was neither humanitarian arguments nor
ecological ones that saved the last fur seals, but a form of commercial
ecologism that had emerged in the aftermath of Elliott’s damning report of
1890. It was only the prospect of the complete disappearance of fur seals as a
valuable commercial resource that led to the signing of the North Pacific
Sealing Convention in 1911.197 By that point the herd on the Pribilof
Islands was down to 130,000; that of the Commander Islands was down
to around 4,500, and the Kurile Islands herd was no more (Orshenko,
186
The Demographic Imagination
Polar Politics, 31). Signed by the United States, Russia, Great Britain (for
Canada), and Japan, the agreement ended the practice of commercial
pelagic hunting in the region, and ceded the management of the Pribilof
herds to the United States, with financial arrangements in place to
compensate those who would lose out; Britain and Canada, as the only
parties without their own rookeries, insisted on such a scheme. Provision
was also made for the continuation of non-commercial seal-hunting by
indigenous peoples. Seal-hunting continued, after a moratorium, but the
seal population was no longer in danger of extinction; the close season was
maintained more stringently, and only “surplus” bachelor seals were to be
hunted. Britain’s monopoly of processing was ended, and the Fouke Fur
Company of St. Louis took over this side of the industry. This agreement
held until the tensions that led to the Second World War brought about its
suspension. As sealskin was still in demand for fur coats and wraps, the
trade became lucrative once more, and the US government, through
the Fish and Wildlife arm of the Department of the Interior, became a
major beneficiary, earning some 17 million dollars from the sale of Pribilof
sealskins between the signing of the agreement and 1955.198 It would be
another thirty years or so after that before animal-rights activists in Britain
and America began to make the wearing of fur of all kinds socially
unacceptable, though of course a considerable global market still exists.
Conclusion
The nineteenth-century city was a “trans-species” place, in which other
animals proliferated as much as humans did. As beasts of burden, as
livestock, as entertainers or companions, or as feral fellow citizens they
lived quietly, or not so quietly, alongside our growing numbers. In our
stage fantasies they almost always played loyal companions, but in reality
most of them had little choice about their roles. Few of the species who
were brought or drawn to the city were in danger of dying out. Even those
who became part of the food-chain were rarely at risk of disappearing at a
species level, though there were exceptions – for example, the American
bison, which only just avoided extinction, and the passenger pigeon, which
did not. But, as the world shrank and its human population surged, some
wild species, far from the great urban centers, were in danger of becoming
permanent fashion victims, caught up in a system that comprised the
publishing and advertising industries, the fashion industry, the expanding
retail sector, transport and distribution networks, and modern weaponry.
The surge in human numbers, along with a relative democratization of
Fur and feathers
187
demand, had given the cities enormous environmental power. By the turn
of the century, the effects of this power on some species of birds and seals
had become too obvious to ignore completely, though the responses were
often slow and uneven, and hindered by vested interests. A few people did
begin to see that nature’s plenty was not infinite, that the world was
shrinking, and that the Age of Cities might mean the permanent end of
other forms of life far beyond the boundaries of the urban world. In the
same period such different individuals as Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Gambier
Bolton, and E. Ray Lankester linked the extinction of exotic species to
big-game hunting and even to empire itself.199
As we have seen, at this moment there came into conflict two very
different sets of narratives about city life. An increasingly international
fashion industry diffused its narratives and images via magazines,
newspapers, and advertising, ensuring a democratization of demand.
These created a vogue for fur and feather fashion that lasted decades.
They were effective in part, we might speculate, because they harnessed a
number of social and political desires, and tapped into changes that were
already under way. Thus fur was equated with luxury and elegance, but it
also, perhaps, offered something more primitive, a hint of some sexual
animal magnetism in the 1880s and 1890s when such terms as “sex instinct”,
“sex interest”, and even “sex mania” were beginning to be deployed.
Leopold von Sacher Masoch’s cruel, fur-clad Venus appears in Venus im
Pelz in 1870; and one thinks of Elinor Glyn’s linkage of sex and fur (tiger
skin) in Three Weeks in 1907. Between those dates the New Woman writers
had made possible a greater deal of frankness about the “sex question”, and
at times suggested that the modern urban woman could be wild at heart.
Likewise, the feathers of various species were made synonymous with
elegance, but one might also think of the resonance they have with the
iridescent peacock feathers of Whistlerian aestheticism, with Beardsleyan
decadence, or even with James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus and his fantasies of
flight and transcendence. George du Maurier’s Punch cartoon mocks the
stout woman who wants “Wings!”, but women’s aspirations for greater
mobility in this period, often checked in the political arena, perhaps took a
more symbolic form. That the beaked heads of owls were in demand
suggests a more predatory aspect to feather fantasies; again, perhaps, a
more aggressive sexuality is being signed.
But, secondly, a number of pressure groups attempted to tell urban
women different stories about the effects of their fashion choices and/or to
shame them into changes in their “cruel” consumer behavior, while also
lobbying at a political level for an end to the trade in exotic birds. (There
188
The Demographic Imagination
are echoes here of the abolitionist campaign of the late eighteenth century
that linked the consumption of sugar with the slave trade and of
John Ruskin’s mid-century criticism in volume 2 of The Stones of Venice
(1851–53) of the woman who bought polished glass beads or other poisoned
fruits of industrial cruelty.) In the work of these lobby groups, alongside
accusations against the cruelty of hunters, and misogynist attacks on vain,
consuming women, we see the germ of something more promising, a
proto-ecological critique of urban consumption and its enormous
anthropogenic power. One would not want to exaggerate the strength of
this proto-ecological tendency. As we have seen, it had a limited impact on
the feather industry as long as feathers remained fashionable, and it
was probably only the self-interest of the fur trade that saved the
Pribilof fur seals from following the passenger pigeon into extinction.
But at least in some quarters there was a growing perception of how our
own swarming kind was affecting other species in unprecedented and
sometimes catastrophic ways.
Epilogue
This book opened with an account of the fantasies of volcanic disaster that
awed and entertained audiences from the late eighteenth century on,
modeling a variety of responses to dramatic demographic change, from
aristocratic hostility to acceptance and celebration. At the century’s end we
see a different – and less popular – disaster narrative, this time that of the
extinction of other species through the voracious consumer power of the
city: this one, of course, can hardly be called a fantasy. The intervening
period had brought a dramatic increase in the population, the “statistical
fact” that Ortega y Gasset saw as underpinning the “revolt of the masses”.
By the century’s end the human torrent that Edward Bulwer Lytton
imagined in 1834 as sweeping all England before it had arrived even more
dramatically than he could have foreseen. By then, too, the masses were not
just visible on the streets, but had arrived more fully on the political stage in
Britain, France, and the United States, though women had to wait until
well into the twentieth century for suffrage on the same terms as men. John
Carey has argued that it is out of the response to these masses that
modernism develops, particularly when universal education became at
least a partial reality.1 But I hope that I have shown that long before the
years of modernism the pressure of population had molded a whole range
of cultural forms between the two versions of apocalypse. Crime dramas
equated the masses with criminality, and conjured up a new type of hero to
confront them. The urban ghost story imagined dark forces unleashed by
urban growth, while also exploiting the most ordinary urban affects, such
as the feeling of always being under the gaze of others: in the crowded city
everyone can hear you scream. Genre painting found other ways of
representing the demographic revolution. Synecdochic street characters
such as the newsboy and flower-seller stand in for the masses, and make
them sympathetic; the larger urban world registers as the background
detritus of advertising and newspapers, which sometimes, as in the work
of Mulready, offers ironic commentary. Across the century, as I have
189
190
Epilogue
suggested, many other genres could just as easily be read in terms of the
demographic revolution. Industrial and slum novels; regional novels of
knowable community; Victorian Robinsonades; imperial adventure
narratives that offer heterotopias of the overcrowded urban world; and
thinly peopled landscape paintings: all are shaped by seismic change at the
level of population. Sometimes that change is confronted directly, but
the response is just as often a fantasy of escape into emptier realms.
Towards the end of this period we also see a new level of popular
fictional engagement with the (in fact, quite limited) demographic
changes brought by immigration into Britain rather than natural
increase, in such fin-de-siècle narratives as Bram Stoker’s Dracula
(1897) and Edgar Wallace’s The Four Just Men (1905), the latter published
in the same year as the Aliens Act, as David Glover notes.2 As fiction
moves towards modernism, we see similar strains in the work of such
proto-modernist writers as Henry James, as we have seen in his account of
turn-of-the-century New York. (Walter Benn Michaels argues that it is in
the 1920s that modernism and nativism really come together in the
United States, around the representation of the family as the model of
national belonging.)3 We can see a similar pattern in the work of James’s
proto-modernist peer Joseph Conrad. Conrad described how he was
inspired to write his first metropolitan novel, The Secret Agent (1907),
when “the vision of an enormous town presented itself . . . a monstrous
town more populous than some continents . . . a cruel devourer of the
world’s light”.4 In his work too this teeming city is now also a city of
immigrants.
However, the voracious consumer city we saw in the last chapter also
inspired a very different type of fin-de-siècle fiction, the “scientific
romances” of H. G. Wells. Such works would later be termed science
fiction, a mode that would come to offer a rich resource for the depiction of
the Anthropocene era. In such realist novels as Tono-Bungay (1909), Wells,
like E. M. Forster and others, portrays London’s rapid and unplanned
growth, and also imagines the rise of rich Jewish immigrants in the place of
the older, landed elite. But it is in his scientific romances that we see the
demographic imagination most powerfully at work. Wells’s The War of the
Worlds, serialized in 1897, is a pointed instance in its description of an
invasion of the earth by an alien species for whom humans are easy prey, a
natural resource to be sucked dry without compunction. The novel is at
one level a version of the European invasion narratives that were then
popular, and which were driven by increasing national rivalries in the years
before the First World War – George Tomkyns Chesney’s The Battle of
Epilogue
191
Dorking (1871) is usually seen as starting the trend: Britain is invaded and
humiliated by a German-speaking (though never named as German)
continental power. But it is clear that Wells’s version of the invasion
narrative is also an environmental and demographic one. Indeed, this is
made fairly explicit at the novel’s beginning, when our narrator reflects
upon the story he is about to tell, and its echoes of imperial violence:
before we judge of [the Martians] too harshly we must remember what
ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon
animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races.
The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of
existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the
space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the
Martians warred in the same spirit?5
In this light the destructive powers of the Martians reveal themselves to be
simply projections of our own: the cold-hearted aliens slaughter us as we
might bison, or dodos, or egrets, or fur seals – or our fellow human beings,
when they are seen to stand in the way of expansion. The novel returns to
this idea of humans as prey. As he hides from the earth’s bloodthirsty new
masters, the narrator “touche[s] an emotion beyond the common range of
men, yet one that the poor brutes we dominate know only too well” – the
fear of the hunted, the sense of being harried – he feels like “an animal
among the animals” (The War of the Worlds, 138). Later he muses in the
same vein, “Surely, if we have learned nothing else, this war has taught us
pity – pity for those witless souls that suffer our dominion” (143). In the
end, of course, the Martians do not prevail, as they are killed off not by us,
but by some of the species with whom we share the planet, bacteria. The
novel’s other major invasive force, the noxious red weed that the Martians
have, probably inadvertently, brought with them, likewise quickly
succumbs to native bacteria, “our microscopic allies” (161). Wells is feeling
his way towards an ecological view.
In an earlier and bleaker narrative, The Time Machine (1895), Wells
pursues to a fantastic but logical conclusion the same proto-ecological ideas
by imagining total human extinction. Carey argues that Wells’s writings at
times suggest that he would welcome such an extinction of the
planet’s human population, a fantasy that he argues was shared by many
masses-hating modernists (The Intellectuals and the Masses, 118–34).
However, we might also read The Time Machine in ecological terms.6 In
the same period the naturalist Richard Jefferies’s After London, or Wild
England (1885) and M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901) imagine sudden
192
Epilogue
depopulation events, though both of those novels imagine survivors as well
as mass victims.7 Wells’s novel goes a stage further by picturing a future in
which humankind is fully extinct. The Time Machine, famously, imagines
the eventual divergence of the human species into the delicate, sun-loving
Eloi and the fierce, subterranean Morlocks. (The Time Traveller at first
assumes the Eloi are an effete ruling class; only later does he realize that the
photosensitive Morlocks are now in control.) It is a thinly veiled parable of
late-Victorian class warfare, a master–slave dialectic in which the slaves
eventually emerge from downstairs to keep their former masters as
livestock. At the close of this first voyage to the future the Time
Traveller’s Eloi female companion, Weena, is carried off by the
Morlocks, presumably to be devoured, and he barely escapes with his
own hide intact. But that is only one of the futures witnessed by the
nameless Time Traveller. When he leaves the Eloi and Morlocks behind,
he travels to several more distant futures. In the first he sees a transformed
landscape – we have to remind ourselves that we are still in what used to be
London – in which giant butterflies swoop overhead, and giant crabs lurch
about. In the last future landscape he visits even these monstrous forms are
gone: the sun is dying, and the air is bitter cold. (So-called “Heat Death” –
the dying of the sun – rather than global warming is envisaged by Wells as
our long-term prospect.) In this future twilight he sees a solitary tentacled
creature “hopping fitfully about” on an otherwise desolate planet:
“All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum
of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives – all that was
over”.8 Only a living anachronism like the Time Traveller can witness this
icy, underlit future in which there should be no human observer:
extinction, one might say, is not an event in the life of a species.
It is not by any means a sentimental vision that Wells offers: having seen
that over time humankind will degenerate into the feeble Eloi and
carnivorous Morlocks the reader is not encouraged to mourn too much
for his or her own kind. Wells seems to ask: if other species can be displaced
by humankind, why should we not expect in our turn to be shoved from
the stage of history? As the planet changes, other species might have their
day in the cooling sun. Why should we not eventually follow to dusty death
such ancient creatures as the woolly mammoth, the mastodon, and the
megatherium? He is presumably thinking of Lyell and Darwin and their
long historical view of species displacement, but, as with The War of the
Worlds, it is tempting to speculate that Wells also had in mind the
more rapid extinction of such species as the Great auk and the quagga,
and the ongoing decimation in the 1890s of egrets, birds of paradise,
Epilogue
193
hummingbirds, and fur seals. At one level, then, Wells’s novel is a
post-Darwinian return to the apocalyptic demographic imagination we
saw in the disaster narratives of Chapter 1, a chillier secular vision of the
Last Days of London; this time the cold of a second Ice Age rather than lava
and ash will finish off the masses. But I think Wells also suggests something
quite different: an Anthropocene era might have arrived, but no matter
how much our numbers increase the planet we inhabit is not, after
all, anthropocentric. Other species, perhaps new ones, will have it when
we are gone. It is unlikely that they will miss us too much.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. Introduction to the 1881 census report for England and Wales, and the
preamble to the 1861 census report, available online from the Vision of
Britain website. The 1881 report also provides a historical table that makes
the urban shift clear. If anything, 1851 is a rather conservative date, since the
rural population was assumed to include people living in villages and smaller
towns. (In 1881, the cut-off point was taken to be those urban sanitary districts
with more than 3,000 inhabitants.)
2. The exact causes of this demographic transition, and the associated shift from
high fertility and high mortality to low fertility and low mortality, are still
debated, but absolute increases in prosperity, the medical advances of Pasteur
and others, and food imports from other global regions are often cited. See, for
example, Massimo Livi-Bacci, The Population of Europe: A History, trans.
Cynthia De Nardi Ipsen and Carl Ipsen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 126–63.
For Britain, see Michael Anderson (ed.), British Population History: From the
Black Death to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
191–279 and Andrew Hinde, England’s Population: A History Since the
Domesday Survey (London: Hodder Arnold, 2003).
3. Livi-Bacci, The Population of Europe, 134–36; Anderson, British Population
History, 272.
4. Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), 320.
5. The total population of England and Wales in 1801 was 8.8 million. London
and the principal towns would surely have accounted for at least 1.33 million of
that figure. According to the 1901 report, there were actually slightly more rural
inhabitants that year than in 1891, but the percentage they represented had
fallen from 25 percent of the population to 23 percent.
6. As early as the 1850s, the British middle classes were beginning to have fewer
children too, but this did not become widespread until the early twentieth
century.
194
Notes to pages 2–5
195
7. José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, anonymous translation of La
rebelión de las masas [1930] (London: George Allen & Unwin, n.d.), 38.
8. See Livi-Bacci, The Population of Europe, 126.
9. James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the
Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
10. The population totals I have given for Great Britain are based on the census
figures for 1801 and 1901, available from the Vision of Britain website. (In the
same period, the population of Ireland had been around 6 million in 1800,
and reached a peak of 8 million in 1841, before declining to 4.5 million by
1900; that of Scotland had been 1.5 million in 1800, and had reached 4.5
million by 1900.) The population figures for the United States are extracted
from Historical Statistics of the United States, 1789–1945, available online
from the US Census Bureau, accessed March 1, 2012. Population figures for
France are taken from the online resources of the Institute national de la
statistique et des études économiques, accessed March 1, 2012.
11. Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities [1963] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 59.
Writing in 1899, Adna Ferrin Weber declared “that the most remarkable
phenomenon of the present century is the concentration of population in
cities”. See Adna Ferrin Weber, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth
Century: A Study in Statistics [1899] (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press,
1963), 1. For contemporary theories of population, see Yves Charbit,
Economic, Social and Demographic Thought in the xixth Century: The
Population Debate from Malthus to Marx (Paris: Springer, 2009).
12. Roy Porter, London: A Social History (London: Penguin, 2000), 249.
13. Between 1841 and 1911, natural increase added 3.8 million to London’s
population, while migration accounted for only 1.3 million. Hinde,
England’s Population, 251.
14. For a survey of responses, see Karen Chase, The Victorians and Old Age
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). As she points out, ideas of when
old age began differed from our own, and Queen Victoria considered herself
old at 42 (159). On recent work on age in Victorian studies, see the roundtable
discussion of Chase’s book and Devoney Looser’s Women Writers and Old Age
in Great Britain, 1750–1850 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2008) in the Journal of Victorian Studies 16.1 (April 2011).
15. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, ed. Claire Tomalin, Oxford World’s Classics
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 213. Subsequent references in parentheses in the text.
16. Elizabeth Taylor, A View of the Harbour [1947] (London: Virago, 2006), 179. In
fact, the elderly busybody, Mrs Bracey, does just that, as if to prove him wrong.
17. The “third age” is a term coined by Peter Laslett in A Fresh Map of Life: The
Emergence of the Third Age (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989). On
196
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
Notes to pages 5–9
“Elderquest”, see, for example, the program for the version delivered at Brandeis
University: www.brandeis.edu/bolli/program/programarchives/flyers/2006elder
questflyer.pdf, accessed June 4, 2014. Interest in changing life-patterns is also
reflected in more philosophical accounts of ageing – for example, Helen Small’s
The Long Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Copenhagen and Malmö are used in the television crime series The Bridge
(2011, 2013); the Australian outback features in the horror film Wolf Creek
(2005).
John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the
Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London: Faber, 1992).
See, for instance, Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English
Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1988); John Plotz, The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and Sennett, Flesh and Stone.
On the cultural response to the 1867 Reform Act, see my own Sensation and
Modernity in the 1860s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”, in Illuminations, ed.
Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1985), 155–200.
See Eric E. Lampard, “The Urbanizing World”, in H. J. Dyos and
Michael Wolff (eds.), The Victorian City: Images and Realities, vol. 1
(London and Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 3–57 (9) and
Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 2.
Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is his unlikely tribute to a city he loved to
visit; Thackeray’s Paris Sketch Book (1840) was based on some of his many
visits; Collins’s The Woman in White (1859–60) derives from an account of an
eighteenth-century legal case he picked up in Paris; Bulwer Lytton’s unfinished The Parisians (1873) is set around the Franco-Prussian War and its
aftermath; M. E. Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife (1864) is loosely based on
Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), and her Circe (1867) derives from
Octave Feuillet’s Dalila (1857).
Allardyce Nicoll, A History of Late Nineteenth-Century Drama, 1850–1900
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946), 77, 78.
Michael R. Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), 143. Dion Boucicault, a great translator himself,
complained in the 1870s that he could not make money from writing new
plays because managers would tell him, “I can go to Paris and select a firstclass comedy . . . to get this comedy translated will cost me £25”. Quoted in
Nicoll, History of Late Nineteenth-Century Drama, 68. Little, if any, money
accrued to the French originators.
Quoted in Townsend Walsh, The Career of Dion Boucicault [1915] (New York:
Benjamin Blom, 1967), 95.
Notes to pages 9–15
197
27. In 1872, Augustin Daly staged a city drama called Round the Clock at the
Grand Opera House in New York. The New York Times reviewer noted that
“it was taken from the French, but extensively altered and localized” in terms
of language and setting. “Amusements: Theatrical”, New York Times,
November 26, 1872. Daly’s play was published as Round the Clock: A Local
Drama in 4 Acts.
28. The term “local drama” was in use in Britain at least as early as the 1810s, and
initially seems to have meant a piece that had local appeal, but not necessarily
a local setting. By the 1840s, it is used on both sides of the Atlantic to describe
a play with a local setting, though not always a contemporary one.
29. Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture
in America (London and New York: Verso, 1987), 85–117; Stephen Knight,
The Mysteries of the Cities: Urban Crime Fiction in the Nineteenth Century
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012). The popular Mystères de Londres by Paul
Feval, on the other hand, is unrelated to Reynolds’s Mysteries of London.
30. For a collection of essays on various facets of Britain’s complex cultural
relations in this period, see Lauren M. E. Goodlad and Julia M. Wright’s
special journal issue on “Victorian Internationalisms”, Romanticism and
Victorianism on the Net 48 (November 2007).
31. Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian
Novel (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
32. Tanya Agathocleous, Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the
Nineteenth Century: Visible City, Invisible World (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013).
33. Other recent examples of work of this sort include Daniel Hack’s “Wild
Charges: The Afro-Haitian ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’”, Victorian Studies
54.2 (2012): 199–225 and Julie Flavell’s When London was the Capital of America
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). The latter focuses more on the
traffic of people than texts. For a recent study of French culture in a transatlantic rather than national context, see Bill Marshall, The French Atlantic:
Travels in Culture and History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009).
34. Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever, The Literary Channel: The International
Invention of the Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
35. Ibid., 22.
36. On “remediation”, see Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation:
Undertanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
37. The term “Anthropocene” was coined by Paul Crutzen to suggest that we are
living through a geological age that has been shaped by human activity. Some
suggest that the industrial and population revolutions of the modern period
mark the beginning of a new era; others suggest that the Anthropocene age
arrived much earlier, and that it was human activity, not climate change, that
198
Notes to pages 16–20
caused the last “megafauna” extinction. See Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth
Extinction: An Unnatural History (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 107–10,
227–35.
38. The first involved protests against a visiting French company; the second
clashes between nativist supporters of the American tragedian Edwin Forrest
and his more established British rival William Charles Macready. Both affairs
had complex roots. See, for example, Victor Emeljanow, “The Events of June
1848: The ‘Monte Cristo’ Riots and the Politics of Protest”, New Theatre
Quarterly 19.1 (February 2003): 23–32.
1 UNDER THE VOLCANO
1. Cited in David G. Orr, “Pompeii: A Site for All Seasons”, in John H. Jameson
Jr., John E. Ehrenhard, and Christine A. Finn (eds.), Ancient Muses: Archeology
and the Arts (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003), 84–91 (87).
2. This pattern is traceable from thirties disaster films like Deluge (1933) and San
Francisco (1936), to those of the Cold War era, for example, The World, the
Flesh and the Devil (1959) and The Day of the Triffids (1962, based on John
Wyndham’s 1951 novel), to contemporary narratives of ecological apocalypse
like The Day after Tomorrow (2004). For a reading of the disaster films of the
1990s in these terms, see Despina Kakoudaki, “Spectacles of History: Race
Relations, Melodrama, and the Science Fiction/Disaster Film”, Camera
Obscura 17.2 (2002): 108–53. For a reading of modern images of disaster as
part of a post-Christian imaginary, see George Landow, Images of Crisis:
Literary Iconology, 1750 to the Present (Boston, MA: Routledge, 1982).
3. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); Martin Meisel, Realizations (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).
4. On the “commodity-experience” as an aspect of modern culture that develops
throughout the period I am discussing, see Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping:
Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 3,
7, and 55–57.
5. On the evolution of the Pirates franchise, see Jason Surrell, Pirates of the
Caribbean: From the Magic Kingdom to the Movies (New York: Disney, 2005).
6. Kevin Salatino, Incendiary Art: The Representation of Fireworks in Early Modern
Europe (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 1997), 54, 56. On the longer
history of fireworks, see also Alan St. H. Brock, A History of Fireworks (London:
Harrap, 1949).
7. As Brock notes, this occurred in Paris in the wake of the Orsini assassination
attempt in 1858, and Moscow in 1881 after an attempt on the life of the Czar
(A History of Fireworks, 81, 102).
Notes to pages 20–26
199
8. Ibid., 126; Philip Butterworth, Theatre of Fire: Special Effects in Early English
and Scottish Theatre (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1998).
9. Victoria C. Gardner Coates and Jon L. Seydll, “Introduction”, Antiquity
Recovered: The Legacy of Pompeii and Herculaneum (Los Angeles, CA: J.
Paul Getty Museum, 2007), 1–14.
10. Colin Amery and Brian Curran Jr., “The Legacy of Pompeian Style”, in The
Lost World of Pompeii (London: Frances Lincoln, 2002), 168–83.
11. Jan Kozák and Vladimir Cermák, The Illustrated History of Natural Disasters
(Springer: Dordrecht, 2010), 47.
12. Charles W. J. Withers, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically
about the Age of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 125–29.
13. See, for example, Richard Stein, Victoria’s Year: English Literature and
Culture, 1837–1838 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 97–99; James
A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and
Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2000).
14. Millie Sands, Eighteenth-Century Pleasure Gardens of Marylebone, 1737–1777
(London: Society for Theatre Research, 1987), 93–94.
15. Warwick Wroth and Arthur Edgar Wroth, The London Pleasure Gardens of the
Eighteenth Century [1896) (London: Macmillan, 1979), 215–16.
16. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination,
1830–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 313–14; Salatino,
Incendiary Art, 96–98.
17. Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1978), 96; Meisel, Realizations, 33.
18. Alexandra R. Murphy, “Introduction”, Visions of Vesuvius: Catalogue of an
Exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston, MA: Museum of Fine
Arts, 1978).
19. Ibid., 17.
20. As evidence of the democratization of the grand tour, we might note that, by
the 1860s, a country doctor’s daughter, like Lucilla in Margaret Oliphant’s
Miss Marjoribanks (1866), could plausibly be represented as planning to “go
up Vesuvius” (vol. 1, chap. 2).
21. See Sotheby’s sale of Old Master Paintings, October 31, 2006, lot 275, and lot
193, Sotheby’s British and Continental Pictures, July 13, 2005. There are dozens,
if not hundreds, of other examples in the sales records of the major auction
houses.
22. Murphy, “Introduction”, Visions of Vesuvius, 15.
23. On this transition, see Gardner Coates and Seydll, “Introduction”, Antiquity
Recovered, 4; Thomas Gray, The Vestal, Or a Tale of Pompeii (Boston: Gray,
1830), v.
200
Notes to pages 26–33
24. See Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1980); George Landow, “Victorianized Romans:
Images of Rome in Victorian Painting”, Browning Institute’s Journal 12 (1984):
29–51.
25. See Orr, “Pompeii”, 84–91; Virginia Zimmerman, Excavating Victorians
(Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), 112.
26. Cited in Orr, “Pompei”, 87.
27. On More’s painting, see Landow, Images of Crisis, 9.
28. Curtis Dahl, “The American School of Catastrophe”, American Quarterly 11.3
(1959): 380–90; Dahl, “Bulwer-Lytton and the School of Catastrophe”,
Philological Quarterly 32.4 (October 1953): 428–42.
29. Cited in Milena Melfi, “Excavating Opera: Composer and Archeologists in
19th-Century Italy”, Congreso internacional: imagines: la antigüedad en las
artes escénicas y visuales [International Conference: Imagines: The
Reception of Antiquity in Performing and Visual Arts], Logroño, 22–24
October 2007, ed. Pepa Castillo, et al. (Logroño: Universidad de La Rioja,
2008), 162; and see Victoria C. Gardner Coates, The Last Days of Pompeii:
Decadence, Apocalypse, Resurrection (Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty
Museum, 2012), 197.
30. On later stagings of volcanic eruptions, see the unsigned article “Man-Made:
A Volcanic Eruption and a Naval Battle”, Sketch 983 (November 29, 1911):
241–42.
31. Unsigned review, “Theatrical Examiner: King’s Theatre”, The Examiner,
March 20, 1831. 19th-Century British Library Newspapers Database, accessed
December 10, 2010.
32. For reviews, see “Adelphi”, The Examiner, December 21, 1834 and “Adelphi
Theatre”, Morning Chronicle, December 17, 1834. 19th-Century British
Library Newspapers Database, accessed February 14, 2010.
33. The scene also looks forward to the deaths of two other monsters: Varney, in
James Malcolm Rymer’s (inter alios) long-running serial Varney the Vampire
(1845–47), and Alan Raby in Dion Boucicault’s The Phantom (1856, a reworking of his earlier The Vampire (1852)), in which the permanent destruction of
the vampire, Alan Raby, is secured when Dr. Reese throws his body down an
abyss on Mount Snowdon – itself an extinct volcano – where the reviving
effects of moonlight cannot reach.
34. Jane Fulcher, The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and as
Politicized Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 41–42 (my
translation).
35. On the “blow-up” in melodrama, see Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in
London, 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 98–102;
Maréchal’s drama is reprinted in Daniel Hamiche, Le Théâtre et la révolution
Notes to pages 33–38
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
201
(Paris, 1973). I am grateful to Martin Meisel for bringing this play to my
attention.
Marian Smith, “Three Hybrid Works at the Paris Opéra, Circa 1830”, Dance
Chronicle 24.1 (2001): 7–53.
See Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, 114–16. On the various versions of
Masaniello in London, see Frederick Burwick, “Masaniello on the London
Stage”, in Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass (eds.), Dante and Italy in
British Romanticism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
“Drury Lane Theatre”, Morning Chronicle, May 5, 1829. 19th-Century British
Library Newspapers Database, accessed 15 February, 2010.
Report from the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature, with Minutes of
Evidence (London: House of Commons, 1832), 227. By then, Kenney calculated, Masaniello had been performed some 150 times. See also Moody,
Illegitimate Theatre, 114–15.
Cited in James S. Donnelly, Captain Rock: The Irish Agrarian Rebellion of
1821–1824 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 94.
“Netherlands”, The Examiner, September 5, 1830. 19th-Century British
Library Newspapers Database, accessed February 14, 2010.
Cited in Altick, The Shows of London, 158, 160.
See Peter Skaerved and Peter Sheppard, with Janet Snowman and
Frances Palmer, John Orlando Parry: The Poster Man, A Snapshot of London’s
Musical Life in 1835 (London: Royal Academy of Music, 2007), 22. Parry’s
painting advertises J. B. Buckstone’s drama, The Last Days of Pompeii, at the
Adelphi, and “The Destruction of Pompeii”, possibly a diorama at the Egyptian
Hall. The Surrey Zoological Gardens featured Vesuvius and Mount
Etna firework shows in 1837–38, 1846, and 1852 (Brock, A History of Fireworks, 67).
The name Arbaces may have been borrowed from Lord Byron’s Sardanapalus
(1821), where he is one of the rebels against Sardanapalus’s rule. See William
St. Clair and Anninka Bautz, “Imperial Decadence: The Making of the Myths
in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii”, Victorian Literature
and Culture 40 (2012): 359–96 (360).
See Angus Easson, “‘At Home’ with the Romans: Domestic Archeology in
The Last Days of Pompeii”, in Allan Conrad Christensen (ed.), The
Subverting Vision of Bulwer Lytton: Bicentenary Reflections (Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 2004), 100–15 (103–04).
Edward Bulwer Lytton, The Last Days of Pompeii, in 3 vols. (London: Bentley,
1834), vol. 3, 246–47.
According to a contemporary review that dwells on Bulwer Lytton’s borrowings, Fairfield, editor of the American Monthly Magazine, had sent a copy of
his poem to Bulwer Lytton. See review of The Last Days of Pompeii, North
American Review 40.87 (April, 1835): 447–57.
202
Notes to pages 38–42
48. On the novel’s success, see Victor Bulwer-Lytton, The Life of Edward Bulwer,
First Lord Lytton, by His Grandson, the Earl of Lytton, 2 vols. (London:
Macmillan, 1913), vol. 1, 445. On the sales figures for the many cheaper
editions throughout the century, see St. Clair and Bautz, “Imperial
Decadence”, 369.
49. As Isaac Disraeli put it in a letter to the author: “They will be no more the last
days . . . we can enter the city when we choose . . . I was present at the
tremendous tragedy of nature – a trembling spectator, and I watched . . . till I
was overcome by the phantasma, and I was glad to find myself once more in the
solitude of my armchair”. Cited in Bulwer-Lytton, Life of Edward Bulwer, 444.
50. Alessandro Manzoni’s influential, proto-nationalist novel, I Promessi Sposi
(1827), had been translated into English as early as 1828. Like The Last Days it
deals with the attempts by a powerful figure to block the marriage of two
lovers, though its historical backdrop is seventeenth-century northern Italy.
51. Esther Schor, “Lions of Basalt: Bulwer, Italy, and the Crucible of Reform”, in
Christensen, The Subverting Vision of Bulwer Lytton, 116–32.
52. Meisel, Realizations, 29–37.
53. J. B. Buckstone, The Last Days of Pompeii: A Dramatic Spectacle in Three Acts;
Taken from Bulwer’s Celebrated Novel of the Same Title (London: J. Dicks, n.d;
issue 829 of Dicks’ Standard Plays).
54. See also “The Theatres”, Spectator, December 20, 1834, 9 and “Theatricals”,
John Bull, December 21, 1834, 3.
55. Other London versions included one by Edward Fitzball, The Last Days of
Pompeii:, or, The Blind Girl of Tessaly (1835). For a review, see “Victoria”,
Morning Chronicle, December 27, 1834. 19th-Century British Library
Newspapers Database, accessed February 14, 2010.
56. Nick Yablon, “‘A Picture Painted in Fire’: Pain’s Reenactments of The Last
Days of Pompeii, 1879–1914”, in Gardner Coates and Seydll, Antiquity
Recovered, 189–205 (193).
57. Unfortunately the manuscript of Buckstone’s play is not in the Lord
Chamberlain’s collection in the British Library: either it was never licensed,
or the copy submitted for license was lost. In the absence of international
copyright, Medina could have copied Buckstone’s play with impunity.
58. R. Reece, The Very Last Days of Pompeii: A New Classical Burlesque (London:
Lacy, 1850), 25.
59. Judith Harris, Pompeii Awakened: A Story of Rediscovery (London: Tauris,
2007), 206–10. Not all of these films closely followed Bulwer Lytton. Merian
C. Cooper’s feature film Last Days of Pompeii (1935), for example, is centered
on Marcus, a blacksmith who as a gladiator becomes wealthy and powerful
but in the end discovers that riches are not everything; it is in essence a
Depression-era boxing movie in classical garb.
Notes to pages 42–48
203
60. On American imperial pageantry, see Margaret Malamud, “The Imperial
Metropolis: Ancient Rome in Turn-of-the-Century New York”, Arion, 3rd
ser., 7.3 (2000): 64–108.
61. “A Drama in Pyrotechnics: The Last Days of Pompeii Enacted at Manhattan
Beach”, New York Times June 12, 1885. Web, accessed 30 July, 2009.
62. David Mayer, “Romans in Britain, 1880–1910”, Theatrephile: Popular Theatre
Research 2.5 (1984–85): 41–50; Mayer, “‘The Last Days of Pompeii’ by James
Pain”, in Playing out the Empire: Ben-Hur and Other Toga Plays and Films,
1883–1908. A Critical Anthology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 90–103.
63. Jan Jones, Renegades, Showmen and Angels: A Theatrical History of Fort Worth,
1873–2001 (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2006), 73–86;
Harris, Pompeii Awakened, 205.
64. The portal to the underground world of the Vril-ya is not a volcano per se but
a volcanic chasm deep within a mine. Nonetheless, it is tempting to see The
Coming Race as Bulwer Lytton’s late-career reworking of The Last Days.
65. Late Victorian volcano narratives include R. M. Ballantyne’s Blown to Bits
(1889) and Grant Allen’s tongue-in-cheek disaster story, “The Thames Valley
Catastrophe” (1897). Thanks to Will Tattersdill for bringing the latter to my
attention.
2 THE STREETS OF WHEREVER
1. The first two episodes feature in Adolphe d’Ennery and Eugène Grangé’s Les
Bohémiens de Paris (1843), and in many English adaptations; the last in
Adolphe d’Ennery and Eugène Cormon’s Les Deux Orphelines (1874).
2. Bird’s novel firmly rejects Fenimore Cooper’s Romantic view of Native
Americans, expressed in such frontier novels as The Last of the Mohicans (1826).
3. As Peter Brooks suggests, the characteristic figures of nineteenth-century
melodrama are antithesis and hyperbole. See Brooks, The Melodramatic
Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess [1976]
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). Other useful accounts include
Michael R. Booth, English Melodrama (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1965) and
the essays in Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou (eds.), Melodrama:
The Cultural Emergence of a Genre (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).
4. Michael R. Booth, “The Metropolis on Stage”, in H. J. Dyos and
Michael Wolff (eds.), The Victorian City, vol. 1 (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1973), 211–26.
5. The classic account is Louis Chevalier’s 1958 study, which appeared in English
as Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First Half of the
Nineteenth Century, trans. Frank Jellinek (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1973).
204
Notes to pages 48–52
6. Thomas Cragin, Murder in Parisian Streets: Manufacturing Crime and Justice
in the Popular Press, 1830–1900 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press,
2006), 145. Cragin argues that older popular forms, the canards (resembling
English broadsides), continued to circulate images and narratives of crime
alongside the expanding newspaper industry.
7. Frégier, head of the Préfecture de la Seine, characterized the dangerous classes
as “les classes pauvres et vicieuses” (7).
8. Kate Newey, “Attic Windows and Street Scenes: Victorian Images of the City
on Stage”, Victorian Literature and Culture 25.2 (1997): 253–62 (254).
9. Eugène Sue, Les Mystères de Paris, par M. Eugène Sue. Nouvelle édition, revue
par l’auteur, Paris: C. Gosselin, [1844], vol. 1, chap. 1, 5.
10. A detailed review of “Le Marchand d’antiquités” (i.e., The Old Curiosity Shop)
by A. de B.-L. in the Écho de la littérature et des beaux-arts en France et à l’étranger,
September 1842: 198–201, indicates that Dickens’s work was by then very familiar
to educated French readers. Some would have read the English original rather
than waiting for translations. Thomas Sauvage’s popular Newgate, ou les voleurs de
Londres, which had its first performance at the Théâtre de la Gaité, November 20,
1829, is set in Dublin and London, and for the most part among genteel society,
though Act 2 does take place in Newgate. Dickens’s impact in France is discussed
by Nathalie Vanfasse in Michael Hollington (ed.), The Reception of Dickens in
Europe (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
11. Serial publication of this sort was not an exclusively French phenomenon. As
Louis James notes, the Sunday Times pioneered this mode in England in 1840
by serializing William Blanchard Rede’s The History of a Royal Rake (January 5
to December 27). See his Fiction for the Working Man (London: Oxford
University Press, 1963), 35, 92.
12. Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture
in America (London and New York: Verso, 1987), 85.
13. See Knight, The Mysteries of the Cities, 182–84, and passim, and Cohen and
Dever, “Introduction”, The Literary Channel, 23.
14. The Porte Saint-Martin was at this time under the management of the brothers
Cogniard, and was known for its “dramas, vaudevilles [i.e., comedies with
topical songs], ballets and fairy spectacles”. Its hits in the 1840s included the
fairy spectacle La Biche au Bois and Don César de Bazan. See Charles Hervey,
The Theatres of Paris (Paris: Galignani, 1846) 3, 303–24. The latter two plays
both went on to British and American productions. For an overview of popular
French theater in this period, see John McCormick, Popular Theatres of
Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Routledge, 1993).
15. “Porte-Saint-Martin”, La France Théâtrale, February 18, 1844, 3–4, and J. J.
[Jules Janin], “Feuilleton des Journal des débats: théâtre de la Porte-SaintMartin”, Journal des débats, February 18, 1844, 1–2.
Notes to pages 52–58
205
16. L. Henry-Lecomte, Un comédien au xixe siècle, Frédérick-Lemaître: étude
biographique et critique, d’après des documents inédits, vol. 2, 1840–76 (Paris,
1888), 46.
17. On Frédérick’s performance, see Henry-Lecomte, Un comédien au xixe siècle,
vol. 2, 48–50.
18. “Deuxième tableau”, Dupeuty et Cormon, Paris la Nuit, drame populaire en
cinq actes et huit tableaux (Paris: Magasin Théâtral, [c.1842]), 8.
19. Odile Krakovitch, “Paris sur scène au xixe siècle: mythe ou décor?”, Sociétés et
représentations 1/2004 (no. 17): 195–210. Web, accessed June 27, 2011.
20. For an image of this key tableau from a subsequent production, see the
advertising poster for an 1858 revival of the play at the Théâtre de la Porte
Saint-Martin: Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin. Les Bohémiens de Paris, tous les
soirs à 7 heures, Septième tableau – les Carrières de Montmartre (Paris: Delas,
1858), available online through Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque
nationale de France.
21. Variations on this basic plot included one in which Montorgeuil is shot at the
end, and one in which the estaminet is burnt down,
22. For the Journal des théâtres, for example, the cellar scene produced “un effet
terrible” (“Ambigu”, September 28, 1843, 1). On the hostility of the workingclass audience, see “Théâtre de L’Ambigu-Comique”, L’Indépendant,
September 28, 1843, 2–3. On the splendid sets, see, for example,
“Ambigu-Comique”, La Presse, October 2, 1843. See also “Théâtre de
L’Ambigu-Comique”, Journal des débats, October 2, 1843, 3.
23. “Daily Calendar for 1843–1844”, Adelphi Theatre Project. Web.
24. “Theatrical Examiner”, The Examiner, November 11, 1843.
25. “Adelphi Theatre”, The Times, November 8, 1843.
26. “The Theatres”, The Era, November 19, 1843
27. “Sadler’s Wells”, Athenaeum, June 1, 1844.
28. David Taylor, “Beyond the Bounds of Respectable Society: The ‘Dangerous
Classes’ in Victorian and Edwardian England”, in Judith Rowbotham and
Kim Stevenson (eds.), Criminal Conversations: Victorian Crimes,
Social Panic, and Moral Outrage (Columbus: Ohio University Press,
2005), 1–20 (4).
29. Taylor, “Beyond the Bounds”, 5.
30. Jeffrey N. Cox, “The Ideological Task of Nautical Melodrama”, in
Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou (eds.), Melodrama: The
Cultural Emergence of a Genre (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996),
167–89.
31. On the significance of Jack Sheppard, see, for example, Matthew Buckley,
“Sensations of Celebrity: Jack Sheppard and the Mass Audience”, Victorian
Studies 44.3 (2002): 423–63.
206
Notes to pages 58–61
32. Untitled review of Matilda and The Mysteries of Paris, Athenaeum, April 27,
1844, 374–5 (374).
33. Franklin Case and Mary Case, “The 1843–44 Season”, Adelphi Theatre
Project. Web. “The Theatres”, The Era, December 10, 1843. Among those
drawn to the Adelphi, The Era noted, were “nine warriors of the Ojib-be-way
tribe . . . now in London sight-seeing”.
34. “Public Amusements”, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, December 10, 1843.
35. “The Synopsis”, The Era, December 3, 1843.
36. “The feline establishment at the Victoria is considerable, consisting of no less
than 5 of these interesting quadrupeds”, but none of them proved willing. To
encourage them, the manager took to feeding them only after the performance. See “Curious Instance of Animal Sagacity”, Daily National
Intelligencer, March 15, 1844. This story was presumably picked up from a
British paper, but I have been unable to find the original.
37. This poster is represented in Booth, “The Metropolis on Stage”, 214. On
“local” dramas, see the Introduction. I have not come across any other
instances of a “national local drama”.
38. “The Theatres”, The Era, November 19, 1843.
39. See my “Blood on the Tracks: Sensation Drama, the Railway, and the Dark
Face of Modernity”, Victorian Studies 42.1 (1998–99): 47–66.
40. On the panic, see, for example, Jennifer David, “The London Garotting
Panic of 1862”, in V. A. C. Gatrell, Bruce Lenman, and Geoffrey Parker (eds.),
Crime and the Law (London: Europa, 1980), 190–213; Rob Sindall, “The
London Garotting Panics of 1856 and 1862”, Social History 12 (1987): 351–58;
and Emelyne Godfrey, “Stranglehold on Victorian Society”, History Today
59.7 (2009): 54–59.
41. Nor were such panics confined to Britain. There was a similar panic in Boston
in 1865.
42. Godfrey, “Stranglehold on Victorian Society”. Anthony Trollope incorporates the garroting panic into Phineas Redux (1873).
43. A witness claimed that she had seen two men strangling Pilkington after his
watch had been stolen by their female accomplice, but her testimony was
shown to be contradictory and unreliable.
44. “The Theatrical Examiner”, The Examiner, December 6, 1862. Phillips was
also taking a risk with the censor, William Bodham Donne, who had a
propensity for censoring plays that showed crime on stage. See James
F. Stottlar, “A Victorian Stage Censor: The Practice of William Bodham
Donne”, Victorian Studies 13.3 (March 1970): 253–82.
45. “Strand”, Athenaeum, February 14, 1863, 235. The reviewer noted that garroting was “now happily on the decline”. Surprisingly, perhaps, comic garroting
Notes to pages 61–64
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
207
drama had some international reach. On April 6, 1868, The Theatre
Comique, 514 Broadway, New York, featured a performance by comic
actor/singer William Lingard of his sketch, A London Garroter, with the
song The Garroter’s Lament. See C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage,
15 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927–49), vol. viii, 358.
“Plays Licensed in 1863”, from Catalogue of the Lord Chamberlain’s Plays,
1852–1863, Research Project, Royal Holloway University of London. Web,
accessed August 23, 2012.
See Martin Maloney, “Origins of the Detective Film”, Journal of the
University Film Association 27.2 (1975): 34–35 (34).
“Olympic Theatre”, May 29, 1863, 5.
“Olympic”, June 6, 1863, 753.
“Music and Drama Abroad”, New York Times, August 1, 1880.
There is a “notice de spectacle” for Léonard in the catalogue of the
Bibliothèque nationale that gives La Gaité as the venue for its first performance, but the printed text for Léonard (1863) gives its first performance on
the same date at the Théâtre du Boulevard du Temple. Louis-François
Dumaine played Tête Noir. It was reprised in 1868 at La Gaité. See the
entry in the “Théâtrographie” for the Théâtre de la Gaité on the web journal,
Inf’Operette, accessed July 20, 2012.
“The Theatres”, The Era, June 7, 1863
“Musical and Dramatic Gossip”, June 13, 1863, 785.
Henry Morley, The Journal of a London Playgoer from 1851–1866 (London:
George Routledge, 1876), 312–13.
Purnell reprints these views and his extended correspondence with Taylor in
his Dramatists of the Present Day (London: Chapman and Hall, 1871), 94–126.
His damning opening line, “Just as Napoleon maintained there was no such
word as ‘impossible’, Mr Tom Taylor holds there is no such word as ‘original’” (94), sets the tone for what follows. The exchange shows that at least
some English critics were familiar with French dramatic criticism – Purnell
quotes Jules Janin – as well as with French plays. See also Montrose J. Moses,
Representative British Dramas, Victorian and Modern (Boston, MA: Little,
Brown, and Company, 1918), 222.
It is possible, though, that some of these may already have been changed in the
French performance, since the posters advertise “5 Actes et 7 Tableaux”.
The Times, May 29, 1863, 5; “The Whitsuntide Amusements”, The Era, May
31, 1863. See my Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000
(Cambridge: Cambidge University Press, 2004), 27–33 on this aspect of
Boucicault’s play. The Daily News (“Drama”, May 28, 1863) noted that
Taylor rather avoided the controversial topic his title alluded to by making
Brierly a victim of a criminal conspiracy rather than a reformed criminal.
208
Notes to pages 64–66
58. Such ethnic typecasting lingered: when Bouicault appropriated the plot of
The Scamps of London for his After Dark (1868), he made the equivalent
character, Dicey Morris, a stage Jew, complete with lisping accent; the hero
describes him as looking like “a Jew horse dealer”.
59. Besides reviews, the sources I have drawn on for the survey that follows
include T. Allston Brown, A History of the New York Stage from the First
Performance in 1732 to 1901, vol. 1(New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1903);
Odell’s epic account, Annals of the New York Stage; Don Wilmeth and
Christopher Bigsby, The Cambridge History of American Theatre, vol. 2,
1870–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and
Gerald Bordman, American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama,
1869–1914 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
60. See Tice L. Miller, Entertaining the Nation: American Drama in the Eighteenth
and Nineteenth Centuries (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
2007), 97–98.
61. Among the melodramatic successes of the Bowery in previous years had
been The Last Days of Pompeii, Jack Sheppard, and William Tell, all of which
had also been successes on the London stage. The Bowery later featured
another adaptation from Sue, The Female Bluebeard, or La Morne au Diable
(February 5, 1844). The Mysteries of Paris was revived in 1850 as an afterpiece.
62. The Virginia Minstrels were associated with the Chatham, and elsewhere
other minstrel groups proved a major draw. Odell notes that 1843–44 “might
be denominated the season of the complete establishment of negro minstrelsy” (Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, vol. v, 56).
63. Figures taken from the website of the United States Census Bureau, “Fast
Facts” for 1800, 1850, and 1900.
64. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of MiddleClass Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale
University Press, 1982), 1–32.
65. Richard Butsch, The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television,
1750–1990 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 47.
66. The Daily Atlas of January 22, 1844 features a classified advertisement for the
play that gives a detailed description of the cast, scenes, and highlights: “W.
G. Jones played Montorgeuil, Mr Taylor took the part of Digonard, A Money
Lender”. The play also found favor in other cities, including New Orleans,
where it was staged at the St. Charles Theatre on December 11, 1844
67. Classified ads, New York Herald, March 6, 1844.
68. For an early account of this aspect of American drama, see Laurence Hutton,
Curiosities of the American Stage (New York: Harper, 1891), 47–53.
69. Ibid., 48.
Notes to pages 66–71
209
70. See the Cambridge History of English and American Literature, vol. 15, 28, and
Allston Brown, A History of the New York Stage, 60.
71. “Amusements”, New York Times, July 1, 1873. Bordman mistakenly thinks this
play was an adaptation of Murger’s Scènes de la vie de Bohème (American
Theatre, 62). Boucicault’s adaptation of that text, Mimi, played soon afterwards at Wallack’s.
72. Richard M. Dorson, “Mose the Far-Famed and World-Renowned”,
American Literature 15.3 (November 1943): 288–300 (295).
73. See William Trent, John Erskine, Stuart P. Sherman, and Carl van Doren
(eds.), The Cambridge History of American Literature (New York: Macmillan,
1917), vol. 2, 228.
74. The spelling “b’hoy” was meant to capture the pronunciation of Irish emigrants. The “b’hoys” were young working-class men, often attached to the
volunteer fire service, which also functioned as a form of political organization
analogous to Tammany Hall.
75. Brown, A History of the New York Stage, 283–85.
76. On Mose as an Irish-American figure, see Maureen Murphy, “From
Scapegrace to Grásta: Popular Attitudes and Stereotypes in Irish American
Drama”, in John P. Harrington (ed.), Irish Theater in America: Essays on Irish
Theatrical Diaspora (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009), 19–37
(26–27). A Glance was successfully revived in postmodern form by New
York’s Axis Company in 2007, and was staged at the Edinburgh Festival
and at the Axis Theatre in Manhattan.
77. Butsch, The Making of American Audiences, 59.
78. Cited in Dorson, “Mose the Far-Famed”, 296.
79. On the last two in particular, see Karen J. Renner, “Seduction, Prostitution
and the Control of Female Desire in Popular Antebellum Fiction”,
Nineteenth-Century Literature 65.2 (September 2010): 166–91.
80. John W. Frick, “The Wicked City Motif on the American Stage before the
Civil War”, New Theatre Quarterly 77.20 (2004): 19–27.
81. It helped to make Parsloe’s career as a “low” comic character; later he would
achieve fame playing comic Chinese coolies, beginning with Bret Harte’s The
Two Men of Sandy Bar (1876). Parsloe’s life on stage is tracked by Jacqueline
Romeo in an unpublished thesis, “Comic Coolie: Charles T. Parsloe and
Nineteenth-Century American Frontier Melodrama”, Tufts University, 2008.
82. In a decidedly hostile piece, the New York Times identified R. Barnett’s Pride
and Poverty and Stirling’s play as the likely models for The Poor, noting that
they both derived from Brisebarre and Nus’s Les Pauvres. “Poor Old
Boucicault”, New York Times, July 17, 1887.
83. Frederick Adolph Herman Leuchs, The Early German Theatre in New York,
1840–1872 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1928), 217.
210
Notes to pages 71–73
84. See notices in, for example, the North American and United States Gazette, and
the Boston Daily Advertiser. “Grover’s Theatre”, Daily National Intelligencer,
January 20, 1864.
85. Dobkowksi, “American Anti-Semitism: A Reinterpretation”, American
Quarterly 29.2 (1977): 166–81 (171–72). He notes that Taylor’s play was first
produced on the New York stage during the Civil War, during which there
were pronouncements about Jewish profiteering by such figures as Generals
William T. Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant. In its review of the Florence
production of The Ticket of Leave Man, the New York Times recognizes Melter
Moss as a Fagin character. See “Amusements”, New York Times, December 3,
1863.
86. See, for example, “The Idler About Town”, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated
Newspaper, December 26, 1863.
87. “Amusements”, February 4, 1873. Taylor’s play made it even to the roughand-ready mining towns. See Henriette Naeseth, “Drama in Early
Deadwood, 1876–1879”, American Literature 10.3 (November 1938): 289–312.
88. Other London crime melodramas that transferred successfully to the New
York stage included G. R. Sims’s The Lights o’ London (Union Square, 1881).
Bordman, American Theatre, 171.
89. Detectives also popped up in other kinds of plays, of course – for example, the
Kiralfy brothers’ lavish stage version of Around the World in 80 Days (1875),
featuring the detective Fix.
90. See Denning, Mechanic Accents, 139, 148 and Max Collins, Matthew
V. Clements, and George Hagenauer, The History of Mystery (Portland,
OR: Collectors’ Press, 2001), 10–17.
91. On these endings, see Chapter 1, and also Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, 28.
The play ran for a respectable nine weeks, and was subsequently revived
(Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, vol. viii, 277–78). It was revived at the
Park Theatre, Brooklyn, May 31–June 5, 1869, without Brougham, and at the
same theatre, January 10–20, 1870, with Brougham.
92. The poster for the French original, illustrated with tableaux of the Pont Neuf,
the convict ship, and the strangling scene, among others, is available online
through Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
The Stranglers of Paris was later produced at various London theatres as Grip of
Iron. A film version was produced in 1913.
93. William Winter, The Life of David Belasco, 2 vols. (New York: Moffat, Yard,
1920) 240.
94. “Some Parisian Town Talk”, New York Times, April 30, 1883.
95. See Bordman, American Theatre, 197, 199, and see “Amusements: The
Pavements of Paris”, New York Times, December 19, 1883. Web, accessed
October 8, 2012.
Notes to pages 73–79
211
96. The play was also a huge hit in France. For images of the French production,
see the illustrations from Le Monde Illustré and the Jules Chéret poster,
available online through Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque
nationale de France.
97. Volume ix of Odell’s Annals of the New York Stage contains some photographs of the original cast and sets, including the great set piece of Louise in
the snow.
98. Louise recalls earlier melodramatic heroines, such as Nydia in the The
Last Days of Pompeii, and a long line of deaf and dumb melodramatic
characters.
99. Bordman gives the gross takings for the original run as $192, 896, a huge sum
for this period (American Theatre, 84).
100. Nor was it only in the United States that the two orphans worked their
emotional magic: there are also Italian, Mexican, Egyptian, and Turkish film
adaptations, as well as several French ones.
3 THE GHOST COMES TO TOWN
1. There is an extensive bibliography on the rise of Gothic fiction. Among the
most useful are volume 1 of David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of
Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day, 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1996)
and E. J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005).
2. For an account of the lingering power of gothic in the nineteenth century, see
Deborah Lutz, “Gothic Fictions in the Nineteenth Century”, in John Kucich and
Jenny Bourne Taylor (eds.), The Oxford History of the Novel in English, vol. 3, The
Nineteenth-Century Novel, 1820–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
3. For a succinct summary of arguments for a specifically Irish gothic tradition,
see Jarlath Killeen, “Irish Gothic: A Theoretical Introduction”, in the online
Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 1, October 30, 2006. Web, accessed
December 13, 2011.
4. Accounts of the form include Julia Briggs, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of
the English Ghost Story (London: Faber, 1977) and Jack Sullivan, Elegant
Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood (Athens:
Ohio University Press, 1978). Earlier accounts, such as that of Briggs, tend to
read ghost fiction in terms of the Freudian uncanny. For a more recent account
that reads the ghost in the light of Marx, Derrida, and the spectres produced by
capitalism, see Andrew Smith, The Ghost Story, 1840–1920 (Manchester and
New York: Manchester University Press, 2010).
5. The same might be said of rural Yorkshire in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
and her sister’s Jane Eyre. See Nancy Armstrong, “Imperialist Nostalgia in
212
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
Notes to pages 79–81
Wuthering Heights”, in Linda Peterson (ed.), Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
(Boston, MA: Bedford Books, 1992), 128–49.
Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 17.
On the impact of German folk material in Britain, see Louis James, Fiction for
the Working Man (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 80. For a recent
exploration of the transnational aspect of supernatural fiction, see
Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, Le Gothic: Influences and Appropriations in
Europe and America (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Bram Stoker is famous for his reinvention of the gothic novel in Dracula
(1897), but he also wrote a number of ghost stories, anthologized after his
death as Dracula’s Guest (1914). The Carrickfergus-born Mrs Riddell (1832–
1906) was known during her lifetime for London-set novels, often turning on
financial intrigue in the business world, some of them “sensation novels” of
the kind made popular by Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Bradon, but she
is now mostly remembered for her magazine-published supernatural stories,
some of which were collected in Frank Sinclair’s Wife, and Other Stories (1874),
Weird Stories (1882), and The Banshee’s Warning and Other Tales (1894). Born
in West Cork (probably), Fitzjames O’Brien (1828–1862) spent most of his
literary life in New York rather than London, though he spent two years in the
latter city, squandering his inheritance, and he published a few stories there,
before emigrating to the United States. In New York he formed part of a
Bohemian literary circle that met at Pfaff’s bar on Broadway and that also
included Walt Whitman, John Brougham, Ada Clare, Henry Clapp (editor of
the Saturday Press), and William Winter. O’Brien was killed in action during
the American Civil War in 1862. His posthumously published Poems and
Stories of Fitzjames O’Brien (Boston: James Osgood, 1881) was republished in
London in 1887. Bithia Mary Croker, née Sheppard (1849–1920) was born in
Roscommon, though she spent much of her life in India, Burma, and
England. Her considerable output includes The Road to Mandalay (1917),
filmed by Tod Browning in 1926 (not to be confused with the musical comedy
“Road” movies of the 1940s), as well as several ghost stories, some of which
appeared in London Society and other journals before being anthologized in To
Let, and Other Stories (1893).
The most extensive account is Roxana Stuart, Stage Blood: Vampires of the
19th-Century Stage (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling University Popular Press,
2004).
“Introduction”, in Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert (eds.), The Oxford Book of
Victorian Ghost Stories [2003] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), ix–xx
(xiii).
E. F. Bleiler, “Mrs Riddell, Mid-Victorian Ghosts, and Christmas Annuals”,
in E. F. Bleiler (ed.), The Collected Stories of Mrs J. H. Riddell (New York:
Notes to pages 81–82
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
213
Dover, 1977), v–xxvi. Cox and Gilbert stress the role of the Christmas
numbers rather than the Annuals (“Introduction”, The Oxford Book of
Victorian Ghost Stories, xii).
Washington Irving, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. [1820] (New
York: Putnam’s, 1884), 322. On Irving’s influence on Dickens, see
“Introduction”, in Michael Slater (ed.), Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol
and Other Christmas Writings (London: Penguin, 2003), xiv.
On the seasonal publication of Le Fanu’s Ghost Stories, see
W. J. McCormack, Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1980), 117.
On Holland-Tide, see John Cronin, Gerald Griffin (1803–1840): A Critical
Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 35–41 and
Claire Connolly, “Irish Romanticism, 1800–1830”, in Margaret Kelleher and
Philip O’Leary (eds.), The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, vol. 1
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 407–48 (423–24).
Cross’s play, which was performed at the Royal Circus, later the Surrey
Theatre, a great home of melodrama, was an adaptation of Ann Radcliffe’s
The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789). Maclise’s first major genre painting
in oils, Snap-Apple Night was shown at the 1833 Royal Academy Exhibition,
and was engraved by James Scott. Based on a Halloween party Maclise had
attended with Thomas Crofton Croker at the house of the Revd Matt Horgan
in Blarney, it shows traditional Halloween games, and features portraits of the
Revd Horgan, Sir Walter Scott, Croker, and the artist’s sisters. See
Peter Murray (ed.), Daniel Maclise, 1806–1870: Romancing the Past (Kinsale:
Gandon Editions, 2008), 96–99.
Gerald Griffin, Holland-Tide, or Munster Popular Tales (London: Printed for
W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 1827), 5. The longest story in the collection, the
novella-length “The Aylmers of Bally-Aylmer”, is a tale of the explained
supernatural.
Maclise and Dickens became close friends in 1836, the year of Pickwick. See
John Turpin, “Charles Dickens and Daniel Maclise: A Study of their
Friendship”, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 73.289 (1984): 47–66;
Nancy Weston, Daniel Maclise, Irish Artist in Victorian London (Dublin:
Four Courts, 2001) 111–43.
Victorian ghost stories set around October 31–November 2 include Mrs
Henry Wood’s “Reality or Delusion” (Argosy, December 1868) and George
Macdonald’s “Uncle Cornelius” (St Paul’s Magazine, January 1869). Both are
reprinted in the Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories.
I am grateful to Claire Connolly for bringing this aspect of the composition of
“Clay” to my attention. Steven Connor speculates that some of the material
from the abandoned “Christmas Eve” was hived off to create the “The Dead”.
214
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
Notes to pages 83–84
See his “From the House of Bondage to the Wilderness of Inhabitation: The
Domestic Economies of Ithaca”, in Andrew Gibson (ed.), Joyce’s “Ithaca”
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 199–228 (204).
This expansion built on the work of a number of magazines – for example,
Blackwood’s, the London Magazine, and the New Monthly Magazine – in
developing a market for short fiction in the earlier nineteenth century. See
Tim Killick, British Short Fiction in the Early Nineteenth Century: The Rise of
the Tale (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 5–37.
On female author-editors and sensation, see Beth Palmer, Women’s
Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture: Sensational Strategies
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Bleiler, “Mrs Riddell, Mid-Victorian Ghosts, and Christmas Annuals”, xix.
A neglected child haunts Mrs Riddell’s “Walnut-Tree House”, which also
features a suppressed will; concealed graves are brought to the attention of the
living by the dead in Riddell’s “Nut Bush Farm” (1882) and Amelia Edwards’s
“The Four-Fifteen Express” (1866) and “Was it an Illusion” (1881).
Patricia Coughlan, “Doubles, Shadows, Sedan-Chairs and the Past: The
Ghost Stories of J. S. Le Fanu”, in M. Allen and A. Wilcox (eds.), Critical
Approaches to Anglo-Irish Literature (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1989),
17–39. “Introduction”, Cox and Gilbert, The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost
Stories, xvii.
The classic account of his literary career is still McCormack, Sheridan Le Fanu
and Victorian Ireland. More recent studies include Victor Sage, Le Fanu’s
Gothic: The Rhetoric of Darkness (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and
James Walton, Vision and Vacancy: The Fictions of J. S. Le Fanu (Dublin:
University College Dublin Press, 2007). For an annotated bibliography of his
considerable output, see Rolf Loeber, and Magda Loeber, A Guide to Irish
Fiction, 1650–1900, 2 vols. (Dublin: Four Courts, 2006).
“Death of Mr Lefanu” [sic], Freeman’s Journal, February 10, 1873.
“The Great Dead of 1873”, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, January 4, 1874.
The picture of a reclusive Le Fanu is supported by his obituary in the
Freeman’s Journal (February 10, 1873) – that his “handsome, even distinguished face was wholly missed from society” in the seven years before his
death. As far as I can discern, the first use of the label “Invisible Prince” is in
the appreciation that Alfred Perceval Graves wrote in “An Irish Poet and
Novelist”, Temple Bar 50 (May–August 1877): 504–17 (republished in The
Purcell Papers). The term presumably derives from J. R. Planché’s stage
extravaganza of that name; popular as a comic afterpiece for decades, the
play was based on Countess d’Aulnoy’s “Prince Lutin”.
J.S. was not as much of a socialite as his brother, William, who may at times have
replaced him as chaperone (McCormack, Sheridan Le Fanu, 197). But Mr. and
Notes to pages 84–86
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
215
Miss Le Fanu (presumably the eldest: Eleanor, or Ellie) attended a reception at
the Chief Secretary’s Lodge in January, 1866; he returned from a trip to Britain
via Holyhead in September 1866; he attended the funeral of his neighbor, the
Hon. George Hancock on October 24, 1867; Mr. and Miss Le Fanu were at a
dinner given by the Lord Lieutenant and the Marchioness of Abercorn in
February 1868 (Belfast Newsletter, February 14, 1868); and he and his daughters
attended the State Ball at Dublin Castle on July 18, 1868. Miss Le Fanu appeared
in various amateur theatricals in these years, though it is possible she had a
chaperone other than her father. Both brothers and Miss Le Fanu were at the
viceregal ball on February 16, 1869, and Mr. and Miss Le Fanu were at the
Guards’ Ball in February 1870. We can also assume that he attended his daughter
Eleanor’s marriage (December 21, 1871) to Lieutenant Patrick Francis Robertson
of the 92nd Gordon Highlanders at St. Stephen’s Church.
In the same paragraph in which McCormack claims he was called the
“Invisible Prince” he notes a considerable amount of social activity including
“Club dinners” up until 1869 (McCormack, Sheridan Le Fanu, 197). As late as
April 1871, when his health was in decline, Le Fanu attended a dinner and
musical evening (269).
Victor Sage, Le Fanu’s Gothic: The Rhetoric of Darkness (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004), 3.
Heather Ingman, A History of the Irish Short Story (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009), 41.
In 1798, Whitelaw’s census of Dublin established its population as 182,370.
According to the Preface to the 1831 British census, the population of
Manchester and environs in 1801 was about half that; Liverpool, Glasgow,
and Edinburgh hovered around 80,000. By mid-century, however,
Liverpool was almost twice the size of Dublin, with a population of over
400,000.
Those who like coincidences might note that in the same year that the trickwindow locked-room mystery of Uncle Silas appears Le Fanu’s countryman,
Dion Boucicault, was packing them in with Arrah na Pogue, in which the
great sensation scene shows us Shaun escape through a faulty prison window,
and then, as the set swivels and sinks, shows him from the outside of the same
prison, as he climbs the ivy-covered walls.
The character of Dr. Martin Hesselius is introduced in the framing narrative
to the 1869 version of “Green Tea”. Presumably, Le Fanu then saw the
possibility of using Hesselius as a narrator to link the stories, old and new,
that comprise In a Glass Darkly.
As the two texts are almost identical, the page references given here are from
“The Familiar” in the readily available Oxford World’s Classics edition of In a
216
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
Notes to pages 87–92
Glass Darkly, edited by Robert Tracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008).
See, for example, Tom Ferris, Irish Railways: A New History (Dublin: Gill &
Macmillan, 2008) and Fergus Mulligan, One Hundred and Fifty Years of Irish
Railways (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1983).
These schemes were inspired by the actual atmospheric railway line from
Kingstown to Dalkey. See K. A. Murray, Ireland’s First Railway (Dublin: Irish
Railway Record Society, 1981), 55.
Ralph Roth and Marie Noëlle Polino, The City and the Railway in Europe
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 192–200.
Editorial, Irish Times and Daily Advertiser, April 5, 1864. Proquest Historical
Newspapers.
“William Scribble”, Dublin Destroyed!, or, The Witches Cauldron of Railway
Horror: A Mysterious Shakespeareana, in One Act (Dublin: John Wiseheart,
1862). “William Scribble” (William Smyth, 1813–78) was a comic actor, writer,
and painter. His other topical compositions include Erin’s Fairy Palace; or the
Palace of Industry and Pleasure: A Vision (Dublin, 1865), which celebrated the
Dublin International Exhibition. I am grateful to Stephanie Rains for bringing his work to my attention.
Thom’s Irish Almanac and Official Directory for these years indicate that the
Square was dominated by the legal profession, though some doctors also lived
there, including, of course, William Wilde, surgeon, folklorist, husband of
“Speranza”, and father of Oscar, who lived with his family at 1 Merrion
Square North. In 1856, Le Fanu’s immediate neighbors were William
Henn, QC and Acheson Lyle, Master in Chancery; in 1862, there were
barristers in numbers 13–16, and the Crown Solicitor for Dublin lived at
number 19. Le Fanu’s own occupation is given as barrister, rather than as
newspaper and magazine proprietor, or writer.
On the 1853 Exhibition, see Stephanie Rains, Commodity Culture and Social
Class in Dublin, 1850–1916 (Dublin and Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press,
2010), 29–37.
See W. R. Le Fanu, Seventy Years of Irish Life, Being Anecdotes and
Reminiscences (London: Edward Arnold, 1894), especially 190–203 and
277–78.
Editorial (no title), Freeman’s Journal, June 5, 1868.
Page references to the version of these stories in E. F. Bleiler (ed.), Best Ghost
Stories of J. S. Le Fanu (New York: Dover, 1964), 361–79 and 419–30.
Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris
and London (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
“Line of Railroad from Kingstown to Dublin”, in Thirteen Views on the
Dublin and Kingstown Railway (Dublin: P. Dixon Hardy at the Offices of
Notes to pages 92–95
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
217
the Dublin Penny Journal, 1834), unpaginated. See also Mulligan, One
Hundred and Fifty Years of Irish Railways, 14.
Alain René Le Sage, Asmodeus; or, The Devil on Two Sticks, trans.
Joseph Thomas (London: Joseph Thomas, 1841), 20. Le Sage’s book enjoyed
great popularity, and his demon became a very portable resource for satirical
writers in such publications as Charles Sedley’s Asmodeus; or, The Devil in
London (1808); Edward Bulwer Lytton’s series “Asmodeus at Large” in the
New Monthly Magazine (1832) and the Liverpool Mercury’s “The Magic Globe;
or, the Bottle Imp” (1829). On the currency of the Asmodeus figures in urban
sketches, see Tanya Agathocleous, Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan
Imagination in the Nineteenth Century: Visible City, Invisible World
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 82.
“A Run on the Eastern Counties Railway”, Morning Chronicle, Saturday,
October 5, 1850.
An early English-language reference describes a bet made by the Duchess of
Berri (sic) that she could travel from the Tuileries to the Bastille in an omnibus
without being recognized. “Mirror of Fashion”, Morning Chronicle,
December 13, 1828, British 19th-Century Newspapers Online.
“On Saturday”, Morning Chronicle, July 6, 1829.
According to Michael Corcoran, attempts to create a Dublin service as early as
1834 had been squashed by legal intervention by the car-men. Corcoran
suggests that this impasse continued until 1848, though the newspapers
indicate that quite a few routes were operating successfully before then. See
Corcoran, Through Streets Broad and Narrow (Leicester: Midland, 2000), 8.
For an example of a clash between the various providers of horse-drawn
transport, see, for example, “Carriage Court – Yesterday”, Freeman’s
Journal, November 5, 1846.
The play is based on Richard John Raymond’s farce, Cherry Bounce (1821). It
owed much of its popularity to the comic Irish servant Pat Rooney, who was
played at various times by Tyrone Power, John Brougham, and Barney
Williams.
On French vaudeville as a form, see Jennifer Terni, “A Genre for Early Mass
Culture: French Vaudeville and the City, 1830–1848”, Theatre Journal 58.2
(2006), 221–48. The protagonist of Albitte and Dugard’s play finds himself
helped at every turn by a stranger he meets on the omnibus who later turns
out to be helping him to prosperity only because he is his creditor.
Frank Hall, The Properest Thing to Do (London: L’Enfant and Hodgkins,
1863).
Wilkie Collins, Basil [1852] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 29.
For other writers, from Trollope to Thackeray, the attitude of characters to
omnibus transport provided a way of placing them in the social hierarchy. See
218
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
Notes to pages 95–99
Richard Altick, The Presence of the Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian
Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991), 369–81.
Michel de Certeau contrasts the tactics available to the urban pedestrian with
the incarceration of the commuter. For a critical account, see Nigel Thrift,
“Driving in the City”, in his Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics,
Affect (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 75–88.
On the omnibus in Victorian art, see Christopher Wood,
Victorian Panorama: Paintings of Victorian Life (London: Faber, 1976),
216–19.
“Omnibus Reform”, Punch, October 6, 1860, 139.
The Dublin University Magazine had offices on Sackville Street; the Warder
had offices on Parliament Street.
Bram Stoker draws on this aspect of the story for his own tale of a scholar
haunted, “The Judge’s House”, which also leans heavily on Le Fanu’s “An
Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street”.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time
and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1986).
In First Class a young man and woman eye each other as her father sleeps in
the corner of the railway carriage. A later version of First Class, dated 1855, and
painted in response to criticisms of the vulgarity of the theme of the first,
renders the original painting more innocent: the father is awake, and talking
to the young man.
Le Fanu, Uncle Silas [1864] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 390.
“The Room in the Dragon Volant”, in Tracy, In a Glass Darkly, 151.
“To be Taken with a Grain of Salt”, in Cox and Gilbert, The Oxford Book of
Victorian Ghost Stories, 55–64 (56). The story was originally published in the
1865 Christmas number of All the Year Round.
“Uncle Cornelius His Story”, in Cox and Gilbert, The Oxford Book of
Victorian Ghost Stories, 130–49 (146).
“Hertford O’Donnell’s Warning”, in Collected Stories of Mrs J. H. Riddell,
130–47 (138).
A short version of the story appeared in the New Quarterly Magazine in
January 1879; the longer version was published in book form in 1880.
Such whimsical tales as E. M Forster’s “The Celestial Omnibus” (1911) seem
to belong to a different strain of the supernatural.
Fritz Leiber, “Smoke Ghost”, Unknown Worlds 5.3 (October 1941): 100–07
(100). The story has a racial as well as an urban-technological subtext: Wran’s
psychiatrist and his son see the smokey ghost that dogs him as a black man, or
a white man in blackface.
Notes to pages 99–104
219
74. It might be argued that Robert Barbour Johnson’s subway story, “Far Below”,
which appeared in Weird Tales in June 1939, belongs to a similar strain, but it
is more of a horror story than a ghost story.
75. The latter include Halloween (1978), The Fog (1980), and the Nightmare on
Elm Street series that began in 1984.
76. Cited in Leon Edel (ed.), Henry James: Stories of the Supernatural (London:
Barrie and Jenkins, 1971), v–vi.
77. On James’s relation to the more general market for supernatural fiction, see
T. J. Lustig, Henry James and the Ghostly (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), 87.
78. “Introduction”, in Anna Despotopoulou and Kimberley C. Reed (eds.),
Henry James and the Supernatural (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011),
2.
79. Lustig, Henry James and the Ghostly, 2.
80. “Introduction”, Despotopoulou and Reed, Henry James and the Supernatural,
5–6.
81. Edel, Henry James: Stories of the Supernatural, 667.
82. Henry James, The American Scene [1907] (London: Granville, 1987), 56.
83. See, for example, Beverly Haviland, “The Return of the Alien: Henry James in
New York, 1904”, Henry James Review 16.3 (1995): 257–63.
84. See, for instance, Gert Buelens, “Henry James and the (Un)Canny American
Scene”, in Greg W. Zacharias (ed.), A Companion to Henry James (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2008), 193–207.
85. The term “sky-scraper” enters the lexicon of architecture some time in the
1880s, the Oxford English Dictionary giving the first use as 1883 in the American
Architect and Building News. It had earlier been used to describe, inter alia, tall
sails and tall horses. The use of the term “plaza” to describe the core of a
shopping center dates to the 1940s.
86. “Crapy Cornelia”, in Henry James, The Jolly Corner and Other Tales
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 221–48 (224).
87. The goggles, which are mentioned several times, remind one of those worn by
the sinister stranger in Le Fanu’s “The Mysterious Lodger” (1850).
88. Cited in Edel, The Master, 324. According to Edel, James described the
story to his agent as a “miraculous masterpiece” (324). Andrew Smith
identifies this story as one of those in which James explores anxieties
about his Anglo-American identity in the face of an America that he
found increasingly alien. See Smith, The Ghost Story, 134–37. See also
Martha Banta, Henry James and the Occult: The Great Extension
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972). Leon Edel points out that
the story also revisits James’s unfinished novel The Sense of the Past in which
an American inherits a London house and “finds himself, on entering it,
220
Notes to pages 104–108
within the past of his English ancestors”. Henry James: The Master,
1901–1916 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1972), 320.
89. James, The Jolly Corner and Other Tales, 162.
4 THE FRENZY OF THE LEGIBLE
1. Alphabet grotesque des cris de Paris, woodcut (Paris: Pellerin, 1861). Available
through Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France,
accessed October 10, 2012.
2. Aunt Louisa’s London Toy Books: London Alphabet (London: Frederick Warne,
c.1880), 14. University of Florida Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s
Literature, online digital collection, accessed July 19, 2012.
3. Aunt Louisa’s London Toy Books: London Characters, From Coloured Designs by
H. W. Petherick (London and New York: Frederick Warne/Scribner
Welford & Armstrong, c.1880), 6.
4. David M. Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in
Antebellum New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 5.
Alongside the papers and posters discussed here, Henkin also considers the
role played by street signs and paper money.
5. de Certeau, “Walking in the City”, in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans.
Steven Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 91–110.
6. Literacy is a tricky area of historical enquiry. In Britain there is a dramatic increase
in adult literacy between the 1840s and the end of the century, if we consider the
evidence of the signatures in marriage registers. See David F. Mitch, The Rise of
Popular Literacy in Victorian England: The Influence of Private Choice and Public
Policy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). However, such
evidence tells us very little about actual functional literacy. Henkin notes that
according to the 1840 census New York had very low rates of illiteracy, but again
such evidence has to be treated skeptically. He suggests that the proliferation of
urban signage may itself be an indication of widespread literacy (20–22).
7. On the “monster shops” or “monster houses” of Britain, see, for example,
Peter Scott, “The Evolution of Britain’s Urban Built Environment”, in
Martin Daunton (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. 3, 1840–
1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 504–05. On hostile
reactions to the massification of urban retail, see Stephanie Rains, Commodity
Culture and Social Class in Dublin, 1850–1916 (Dublin and Portland, OR: Irish
Academic Press, 2010), 9–47. Rosalind Williams discusses the advent of mass
consumer culture in Paris in Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late
Nineteenth Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
For the importance of plate glass, see Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, 134–40.
Notes to pages 108–111
221
8. Outdoor advertising is a somewhat misleading term, as some of the smaller
posters would have appeared in shop windows; omnibus interiors and train
stations were also much favored venues, as we shall see.
9. On Aunt Louisa’s London Alphabet and similar publications, see Megan
A. Norcia, “Come Buy, Come Buy: Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’
and the Cries of London”, Journal of Victorian Culture 17.1 (2012): 24–45.
10. John Strachan, Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Jennifer Wicke,
Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading
(Columbia, NY: Columbia University Press, 1988); Thomas Richards, The
Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); Lori Anne Loeb, Consuming
Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1994); Matthew Rubery, The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction
after the Invention of the News (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009);
Gerard Curtis, Visual Words: Art and the Material Book in Victorian
England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).
11. On this period in newspaper history, see, for example, Alan J. Lee, The Origins
of the Popular Press in England, 1855–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1976).
12. Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media (Cambridge: Polity,
2005), 156.
13. Lee, Origins of the Popular Press in England, 45.
14. T. R. Nevett, Advertising in Britain: A History (London: Heinemann, 1982), 41.
15. Briggs and Burke, A Social History of the Media, 161.
16. On the adoption of new technologies by the French newspapers, see
Louis Guéry, Visages de la presse: la présentation des journaux des origines à
nos jours (Paris: Éditions du Centre de formation et de perfectionnement des
journalistes, 1997), 94–95, 118–19; on newspaper technology in the United
States, see Henkin, City Reading, 107.
17. Briggs and Burke, A Social History of the Media, 155. On the rise of the penny
press in the United States, see also Henkin, City Reading, 101–36 and Jean
M. Lutes, “Newspapers”, in Christine Bold (ed.), The Oxford History of
Popular Print Culture, vol. 6, US Popular Print Culture, 1860–1920 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012), 97–112
18. Briggs and Burke, A Social History of the Media, 155.
19. Lutes, “Newspapers”, 99.
20. Guéry, Visages de la presse, 103 (subsequent references in parentheses in the
text); Thomas Cragin, Murder in Parisian Streets: Manufacturing Crime and
Justice in the Popular Press, 1830–1900 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University
Press, 2006), 37–38.
21. Guéry, Visages de la presse, 103, 120–21.
222
Notes to pages 112–114
22. In August and September 1869, Jean-Baptiste Troppmann killed eight members of the Kinck family, including five children; money appears to have been
his motive. The discovery of the bodies, the trial, and execution attracted an
unprecedented level of public interest.
23. On Troppmann and Le Petit Journal, see Cragin, Murder in Parisian Streets,
37–38.
24. See also Briggs and Burke, A Social History, 156; and “La Presse” in the
Larousse Encyclopédie. Web, accessed July 30, 2012.
25. David M. Henkin, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications
in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 2007), 42–62.
26. Masons, carpenters, and other skilled workers wore paper hats as a badge of
their occupation. See, for example, Peter Chrisp, A History of Fashion and
Costume: The Victorian Age (Hove: Bailey Publishing, 2005), 39. The Tenniel
illustrations to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1871) show the
Carpenter wearing such a hat.
27. Lee, Origins of the Popular Press, 65.
28. Colporteurs continued to sell their wares noisily up to the end of the century,
suggesting, Cragin argues, that an oral culture survived in Paris long after
modernity might have expected to sweep it away. See Cragin, Murder in
Parisian Streets, 35, 39.
29. Cited in Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen
Lefkowitz Horowitz, The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New
York (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 94. On the 1857 Obscene
Publications Act and the London streets, see Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon:
People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, CT and
London: Yale University Press, 2000), 149–61.
30. On the history of advertising in Britain, see, for example, Henry Sampson, A
History of Advertising from the Earliest Times (London: Chatto & Windus,
1874), which is more focused on novelties and swindles than the industry per
se; E. S. Turner, The Shocking History of Advertising (London: Michael Joseph,
1952); Blanche B. Elliott, A History of English Advertising (London:
Batsford, 1962); Diana Hindley and Geoffrey Hindley, Advertising in
Victorian England, 1837–1901 (London: Wayland, 1972); Nevett, Advertising
in Britain; and Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England.
On Mitchell, see Hindley and Hindley, Advertising in Victorian England,
20–26.
31. See Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England on the cultural
impact of the Exhibition.
32. Strachan, Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period, chaps. 3
and 5.
Notes to pages 114–120
223
33. Turner, The Shocking History of Advertising, 89.
34. “A Nation of Advertisers”, Punch 12 (1847): 31.
35. See also Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor [1861–2] (New
York: Dover, 1968), on the life of the placard carrier.
36. “The Real Obstructions”, Punch 19 (July 13, 1850), 30. Punch returned to the
theme of street advertising in a number of other cartoons, including “More
Easily Said than Done”, Punch (1846). See also “A Nation of Advertisers”. See
Gerard Curtis, “Dickens in the Visual Market”, in John O. Jordan (ed.),
Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing
and Reading Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
37. Robert L. Patten, Dickens and his Publishers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978),
206.
38. Strachan, Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period, 18.
39. Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, Tour in England, Ireland and France in the
Years 1826, 1827, 1828 and 1829 (Philadelphia, PA: Carey, Lea and Blanchard,
1833), 145.
40. “A Nation of Advertisers”.
41. This ad is reproduced in Hindley and Hindley, Advertising in Victorian
England.
42. Strachan, Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period, 23.
43. Knight, London, vol. 5 [1843], 34–35, Tufts Digital Library. Web, accessed July
25, 2012.
44. On the history of the English poster in this period, see John Hewitt, “‘The
Poster’ and the Poster in England in the 1890s”, Victorian Periodicals Review
35.1 (2002): 37–62.
45. Anon., The Language of the Walls: And a Voice from the Shop Windows; or, The
Mirror of Commercial Roguery by One Who Thinks Aloud (Manchester: Abel
Heywood, 1855), 2, 3–4.
46. The “Great Wizard of the North” is probably the magician, actor, and writer
John Henry Anderson rather than Sir Walter Scott. An astute publicist, and
author of several best-selling books on magic, Anderson is credited with
originating the trick in which rabbits are pulled out of a hat.
47. “A Nation of Advertisers”.
48. Ibid.
49. On the development of silent communal travel, see Schivelbusch, The
Railway Journey.
50. See also Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor and
Charles Dickens’s “Bill-Sticking”, Household Words, March 22, 1851.
51. See Brenda Assael, The Circus and Victorian Society (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2005), 121–24; Alistair O’Neill, London: After a
Fashion (London: Reaktion, 2007), 51–53.
224
Notes to pages 120–124
52. See “Horrible London: Or the Pandemonium of Posters”, a cartoon and
poem in Punch, October 13, 1888. The lurid posters decribed
were presumably linked to press reports of the Ripper murders of that
year.
53. The Age of Disfigurement was subsequently published in book form in 1893 by
Remington.
54. John Ranlett, “‘Checking Nature’s Desecration’: Late Victorian
Environmental Organizations”, Victorian Studies 26.2 (1983): 197–222 (206).
See also Terence Nevett, “The Scapa Society: The First Organised Reaction
against Advertising”, Media, Culture and Society 3.2 (1981): 179–87; and
John Taylor, “The Alphabetic Universe: Photography and the Picturesque
Landscape”, in Simon Pugh (ed.), Reading the Landscape (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1990), 177–96.
55. Cited in Taylor, “The Alphabetic Universe”, 188.
56. Richardson Evans in a letter to The Times of October 1900, cited in Hindley
and Hindley, Advertising in Victorian England, 80.
57. Ranlett, “‘Checking Nature’s Desecration’”, 210.
58. This cartoon is available online from the Wellcome Library. Web, accessed
April 28, 2010. The bill/Bill joke was dusted off in 1892 in the era of Home
Rule. See “‘There’s the Rub!’ (An Old Story with a New Application):
Champion Bill-Poster, Loquitur”, Punch 102 (January 16, 1892): 33.
59. The British Library dates the sheet music to 1820, but the lyrics mention
Cherry Ripe, which became popular in the wake of its use in Paul Pry (1826).
60. The song is described as “written by T. Hudson”, but the British Library
Catalogue attributes it to the prolific Jonathan Blewitt, one-time composer at
the Theatre Royal, Dublin.
61. On the life-cycles of printed texts and Henry Mayhew’s account of the
waste paper industry, see Leah Price, How To Do Things with Books in
Victorian Britain (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press,
2012), 219–57.
62. Randall (1830–98) also sung such comic hits of the 1860s as No Irish Need
Apply (1864) and The Charming Young Widow I Met in the Train (1863). See
Michael Kilgarriff, Sing Us One of the Old Songs: A Guide to Popular Song,
1860–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
63. Mr. and Mrs. Howard Paul were a highly successful music-hall couple. In
their show “Patchwork”, and similar entertainments, they performed various
typical characters of the day as well as singing comic songs. Mrs. Paul was
acclaimed for her impersonation of one of the great tenors of the day, Mr.
Sims Reeves – according to contemporary reviews her imitation of his Come
into the Garden Maud was much in demand.
Notes to pages 124–129
225
64. Henry Walter, The Age of Paper (London: Metzler, 1862). This was not entirely a
comic conceit: by 1870, one Boston manufacturer was producing 75 million
paper collars a year. See Dard Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique
of an Ancient Craft [1947] (New York: Dover, 1978), 386.
65. Published pseudonymously by Jun. Colbert, The Age of Paper; or, an Essay on
Banks and Banking. Containing the History of the Most Remarkable Paper
Bubbles (London, 1795).
66. See Peter Stallybrass, “Marx’s Coat”, in Daniel Miller (ed.), Consumption:
Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences (London: Routledge, 2001), 311–34.
67. Alfred Concanen (c.1836–86) is generally seen as one of the most talented
popular lithographic artists of the nineteenth century. A prolific illustrator of
sheet music, he also illustrated books and produced some one-off large-scale
lithographs. Born in Nottingham, he was the son of the artist Edward
Concanen, who is perhaps best known for his beautifully illustrated volume
commemorating the 1851 Exhibition. Among the few commentaries on his life
is N. J. Irons, “Alfred Concanen, Master Lithographer”, Irish Arts Review 4.3
(1987): 37–41.
68. These and the other covers mentioned below can be seen online in the
Spellman Collection of Victorian Music Covers, available through the
Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) vads.ac.uk.
69. The present Coal Hole pub in the Strand is a twentieth-century construction.
70. Eugene T. Johnston, The Bill-Poster’s Dream, or Cross Readings (New York:
Charles Magnus, [1863]). Lincoln Broadsides collection, Brown Digital
Repository, accessed June 1, 2013.
71. See “America on Stone”: The Harry T. Peters Collection, Smithsonian
National Museum of American History, Washington, DC, online, accessed
August 10, 2013.
72. Garrett Stewart, The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2006). Price, How To Do Things with Books in
Victorian Britain.
73. “The British School of Oil Painting”, The International Exhibition,
1862: Official Catalogue of the Fine Art Department (London, 1862), 5. On the
role of the international exhibitions in shaping the idea that English art was
narrative art, see Julia Thomas, Pictorial Victorians: The Inscription of Values in
Word and Image (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004), 109–12.
74. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography”, in Michael W. Jennings
(ed.), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934 (Cambridge, MA:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 507–30.
75. Peter Sheppard Skaerved, with Janet Snowman and Frances Palmer, John
Orlando Parry: The Poster Man, A Snapshot of London’s Musical Life in 1835
(London: Royal Academy of Music, 2007), 11. See, for example, Trompe-l’œil:
226
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
84.
85.
Notes to pages 129–134
Letter Rack with an Hourglass, a Razor and Scissors (1664), in the collection of
the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent. Skaerved also notes the resonance with
Parry’s contemporary, George Johann Scharf (father of Sir George Scharf,
director of the National Portrait Gallery), some of whose work also captured
the impact of advertising in London.
See Chapter 3 n. 65. The latter painting exists in two different versions, one of
which was thought to be too risqué: it showed a young couple in a railway
carriage getting on famously while the young woman’s older companion slept; in
the revised version, the companion is awake, and sits between them.
For a detailed reading of the triptych, see Thomas, Pictorial Victorians,
145–59.
For a detailed analysis of the painting’s background texts, see Gerard Curtis,
“Ford Madox Brown’s Work: An Iconographic Analysis”, Art Bulletin 74.4
(December 1992): 623–36.
The first kiosques lumineux were built in 1857 during Baron Haussmann’s
radical remodeling of the Paris streets. Doubling as newspaper stalls and
advertising hoardings, by the time Béraud was painting they had become
icons of the Parisian street.
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) exhibition, Taxing
Visions: Financial Episodes in Late Nineteenth-Century American Art, held at
the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State in 2010, brought together quite a
number of these genre pieces.
One of the few sources of information on Augustus Mulready’s life is “The
Cranbrook Colony”, the catalogue of an exhibition organized by the festival
and held at the Vestry Hall, Cranbrook, June 29–July 11, 1981, researched by
Andrew Greg and printed by South Eastern Newspapers. The 2003 Penguin
edition of Oliver Twist, for example, uses a detail of Mulready’s A Recess on a
London Bridge. A number of Mulready’s paintings feature on the BBC’s “Your
Paintings” website. See www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/artists/augustusedwin-mulready.
On the connections among these artists, see, for example, the entries in
Christopher Wood’s Victorian Painters: The Text (London: Antique
Collectors’ Club, 1995).
In the 1861 census his birthplace appears to be Kensal Green; the 1851 census
records Chelsea. The latter seems more likely insofar as the family was then living
at 4 Sussex Place, Chelsea, and other members of the family lived in Chelsea.
“The Cranbrook Colony”, 10.
Keeping an Appointment sold at Bonhams, Edinburgh, on December 4, 2009.
It shows a rather pert-looking country girl posed at a stile, presumably waiting
for her sweetheart. The Snow Ball (1871), which shows children at play in a
rural landscape, appeared for sale at Christie’s on March 15, 2006. It is signed
Notes to pages 134–137
86.
87.
88.
89.
90.
91.
92.
93.
94.
95.
96.
97.
98.
99.
100.
227
with a monogram rather than Mulready’s usual signature of A. E. Mulready.
Hard Times (offered for sale at Brightwells on November 9, 2005) shows a
young woman at a desk, following a text with her finger. It also is signed with
a monogram. In Spring Time is a quite detailed study of a young girl
gathering flowers; it sold at auction at Bonhams on March 16, 2000. In
The Fallen Bird, which is signed in the usual way, a girl walking in a snowy
wood comes across a frozen bird.
See the entry for Augustus Mulready in Algernon Graves (ed.), The Royal
Academy: A Complete Dictionary of Contributors and their Work from its
Foundation, vol. 5 (London: Henry Graves and George Bell, 1905).
“The Royal Academy”, Graphic, Saturday, June 29, 1872.
The reproduction indicates that the original painting closely resembled that
sold at auction at Holloway’s on November 30, 2004.
“Our Illustrations”, Graphic, Saturday, September 7, 1872. Marshall and
Snellgrove, and Shoolbreds, were London department stores, the former on
Oxford Street, the latter on the Tottenham Court Road.
“Fine Arts: The Winter Exhibitions – the French Gallery”, Daily News,
Thursday, October 31, 1872.
“The Hanover Gallery”, The Era, Saturday, December 4, 1886, 22. Other
paintings exhibited included pieces by Bastien Lepage, Sir John Gilbert, and
Enrico Crispi.
“Fine Art Exhibition”, Liverpool Mercury, May 15, 1879.
“Spring Exhibition at the Basnett Street Gallery”, Liverpool Mercury, May 4,
1887, 5.
“The Southport Exhibition”, Liverpool Mercury, February 27, 1892.
See, for example, “Fine Arts”, Daily News, May 7, 1863.
London Metropolitan Archives, St. Pancras Parish Church, Register of
Burials at Finchley Cemetery.
“The Cranbrook Colony”, 32
Jeremy Maas, Victorian Painters [1969] (New York: Harrison House, 1988),
234, 255. Maas notes that the back of the painting (which he locates in the
London Museum, Kensington Palace) has an inscription by the artist:
“London Flower Girl and Street Arab – mutually giving and receiving
aid – they set each other off like light and shade” (254).
After Rain, Chelsea, is inscribed simply “Chelsea” in the picture, above
Mulready’s signature. This picture appeared for sale at Bonhams on
November 18, 2008. Street Scene in Chelsea was sold at auction by David
Duggleby Auctioneers, Scarborough, on June 14, 2010.
This painting was sold at Bonhams on September 29, 2010. At 39¾
inches × 2915/16 inches, it is a one of his larger canvases. On June 13,
228
101.
102.
103.
104.
105.
106.
107.
108.
109.
Notes to pages 137–142
1996 Bonhams sold another painting under this title, a smaller copy of
the original.
On this aspect of the visualization of urban poverty, see Julian Treuherz and
Susan Casteras, Hard Times: Social Realism in Victorian Art (London: Lund
Humphries and Manchester City Art Galleries, 1987), 132–33.
“The work at home must be completed thoroughly, or there is no hope
abroad”, is how Dickens put it in a non-fiction article on the Niger
Expedition. Cited in Bruce Robbins, “Telescopic Philanthropy:
Professionalism and Responsibility in Bleak House”, in Homi
K. Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (London and New York:
Routledge, 1990), 213–30.
Nicola Bown gives a detailed reading of this painting in terms of its emotional impact in “Tender Beauty: Victorian Painting and the Problem of
Sentiment”, Journal of Victorian Culture 16.2 (2011): 214–25.
Lionel Lambourne, Victorian Painting (London: Phaidon Press, 1999)
gives the title as Remembering Joys that are Passed Away but Algernon
Graves records it as Remembering Joys that have Passed Away, in The Royal
Academy of Arts: A Complete Dictionary, vol. 5, 322, and the Guildhall Art
Gallery catalogues it under this title.
For a contemporary review, see “Royal Alhambra Palace”, in “Christmas
Entertainments”, The Times, December 27, 1871, 3.
On the crossing-sweeper as a signifier of London, see Julia Thomas, Pictorial
Victorians: The Inscription of Values in Word and Image (Athens: Ohio
University Press, 2004), 122.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible,
trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2006).
See, for example, the selections from Stead, Malvery, and others in
Stephen Donovan and Matthew Rubery (eds.), Secret Commissions: An
Anthology of Victorian Investigative Journalism (Peterborough, Ontario:
Broadview, 2012). On Malvery, see Judith Walkowitz, “The Indian
Woman, the Flower Girl, and the Jew: Photojournalism in Edwardian
London”, Victorian Studies 42:1 (1999–2000): 3–46.
Newsboy is in the collection of York Art Gallery and is dated by Bridgeman
Art online as 1863–66, though it is closer in style to Mulready’s newsboy
paintings of the 1880s and 1890s. Paper-Boy was offered for sale as Lot 443 by
Kidson-Trigg Fine Art Aucioneers, October 27, 2010. Luck in a Moment was
sold at auction by Bonhams, Knightsbridge, on February 19, 2008. Images of
most of the Mulreadys that have gone through auction in recent years are
available on websites such as Artnet.
Notes to pages 142–149
229
110. Mulready uses the same contents bill in another newsboy painting, London
News-Boy. See Mary Cowling, The Artist as Anthropologist: The
Representation of Type and Character in Victorian Art (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989).
111. This painting was offered for sale by Bonhams, Knightsbridge, on June 15, 2010.
112. The undated Selling Out sold at auction as Lot 3157802 at a Gorringes
auction on June 13, 2006; Selling Out (1901) sold at Bonhams, Chester
Sale, 16–18 March, 2010.
113. Money, in George Rowell (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Plays (London: Oxford
University Press, 1969), 66. The play was first performed at the Theatre
Royal, Haymarket, on December 8, 1840.
114. See Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007),
189–90.
115. The first is in a private collection, but can be seen through Bridgeman Art
online; the second sold at auction through Bonhams, Knowle, on November
21, 2006.
116. This painting is in a private collection, but a high-resolution image of it is
available on Wikimedia Commons.
117. Mulready also uses the recesses of London Bridge for the background of a
number of other pictures, including Sympathy (1881) and Mutually Giving
(1884).
118. Michel Pastoureau, Blue: The History of a Color (Princeton, NJ and Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2001), 50–55. As he notes, the 1854 Papal doctrine
of the Immaculate Conception led to an association of Mary with white.
119. Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life”, trans. P. G. Konody, in
C. Geoffrey Holme (ed.), The Painter of Victorian Life: A Study of Constantin
Guys (London: The Studio, 1930).
5 FUR AND FEATHERS
1. Ouida [Mary Louise de la Ramée], “The New Woman”, North American
Review 158.450 (May 1894): 610–19 (614).
2. Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (London:
Bloomsbury, 2014), 23–46.
3. Paul Taylor (ed.), Extinctions in the History of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), xi.
4. Ibid., 2; Beverly Peterson Stearns and Stephen C. Stearns, Watching, from the
Edge of Extinction (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1999), x.
5. According to Graham Robb, the few brown bears that survive in the Pyrenees
were imported from Slovenia. Even by the end of the nineteenth century, the
trainers of performing bears could no longer find native specimens. See
230
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
Notes to pages 149–151
Graham Robb, The Discovery of France (London: Picador, 2007), 173, 177.
Wolves survived in Scotland and Ireland later than in England and Wales, but
they are thought to have been extinct by 1743 in Scotland and by 1786 in
Ireland. See, for example, Janice Short, “Wolf’s Tale: The History of the Wolf
in Scotland”, on the website of The Wolves and Humans Foundation; and
Kieran Hickey, Wolves in Ireland: A Natural and Cultural History (Dublin:
Four Courts Press, 2011). Wild cats still survive in remote parts of Scotland, as
do small numbers of wolves in France.
Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction, 65–67.
On the passenger pigeon, carolina parakeet, thylacine (actually a type of
marsupial), and quagga, see Errol Fuller, Lost Animals: Extinction and the
Photographic Record (London: Bloomsbury, 2013) 62–77, 170–179, 194–205
and Vinzenz Ziswiler, Extinct and Vanishing Animals: A Biology of Extinction
and Survival (London: Longmans, 1967), 2–7, 22.
Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western
Civilization (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1996), 17.
See, for example, the table from W. J. Gordon’s The Horse World of London
(1893), reproduced in Ralph Turvey, “Horse Traction in Victorian London”,
Journal of Transport History 26.2 (2005): 38–59 (49).
Turvey, “Horse Traction”, 57.
Ghislaine Bouchet, Le Cheval à Paris de 1850 à 1914 (Geneva and Paris:
Librairie Droz, 1993), 93.
Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, The Horse in the City: Living Machines in
the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2007), 16.
Ibid., 1.
See Hans Schiere and Rein van der Hoek, “Livestock Keeping in Urban Areas:
A Review of Traditional Technologies Based on Literature and Field
Experience”, Report of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United
Nations. Web, accessed April 10, 2012. The figure from Dhaka is given in Hans
Schiere, et al., “Livestock Keeping in Urbanised Areas”, International
Development Research Centre report, Box 12.2. Web, accessed April 10, 2012.
See, for example, Jennifer R. Wolch, Kathleen West, and Thomas E. Gaines,
“Transspecies Urban Theory”, in Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space 13.6 (1995): 735–60. See also Jennifer R. Wolch and Jody Emel (eds.),
Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-Culture
Borderlands (London: Verso, 1998).
Turvey, “Horse Traction”, 46.
Such a scene is described in Mayhew’s novel, Paved with Gold (1858). Butter
was easier to preserve and transport; in a heavily salted form it could be
shipped long distances.
Notes to pages 151–153
231
18. “Of Milk-Selling in St. James’s Park”, in Peter Quennell (ed.), Mayhew’s
London: Being Selections from “London Labour and the London Poor ”, 1851
(London: Spring Books, 1969), 131–32.
19. J. R. McCulloch, London in 1850–1851 (London: Longman, 1851), 53.
20. Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (London: Chapman
and Hall, 1842), vol. 2, 207–08.
21. On nineteenth-century urban animals in the United States, see Jessica Wang,
“Dogs and the Making of the American State: Voluntary Association, State
Power, and the Politics of Animal Control in New York City, 1850–1920”,
Journal of American History 98.4 (2012): 998–1024.
22. Bouchet, Le Cheval à Paris, 226, 220.
23. McShane and Tarr, Horse in the City, 29.
24. See ibid. for a more comprehensive list.
25. Johannes Willms, Paris, Capital of Europe: From the Revolution to the Belle
Epoque, trans. Eveline L. Kanes (New York and London: Holmes and Meier,
2002).
26. See Dorothee Brantz, “The Domestication of Empire”, in Kathleen Kete
(ed.), A Cultural History of Animals in the Age of Empire (Oxford and New
York: Berg, 2007), 73–93 (83). Brantz notes that the number of animals
moving through Paris increases from around 600,000 to 2.8 million between
1800 and 1920.
27. John Timbs, Curiosities of London: Rare and Remarkable Objects of Interest in
the Metropolis (London: David Bogue, 1855), 500.
28. On La Villette and the centralization of slaughter in the United States, see
Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to
Anonymous History [1948] (New York: W.W. Norton, 1969), 209–28. City
Inspectors regularly complained about the implications for health of situating
abattoirs in heavily populated districts, but the abattoirs also had their
defenders. Dr. Stephen Smith claimed in 1865 that the relatively affluent
Seventeenth Ward in Manhattan contained fifty-six slaughterhouses, but had
a lower death rate than Wards that had none. See “Abattoirs”, New York
Times, April 1, 1866.
29. McShane and Tarr, The Horse in the City, 30.
30. The latter, which tells the story of a man thwarted in love: “Outside her door,
loudly bawling he’d go / Mouse-traps a penny throughout all the day / In her
good graces he soon got, I know – / Caught her with his mouse-traps and stole
her away”. “The Mouse-Trap Man”, Tony Pastor, Tony Pastor’s 201 Bowery
Songster: Containing a Choice Selection of all the New Comic, Eccentric and
Characteristic Songs. As Sung by the Inimitable Eccentric Vocalist, Tony
Pastor (New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, 1867), 38. The song is probably earlier
than 1867.
232
Notes to pages 153–155
31. Brantz, “The Domestication of Empire”, 81.
32. Harrison Weir, Our Cats and All About Them (Tunbridge Wells:
R. Clements, 1889), 87. Subsequent references in parentheses in the text.
33. Mayhew, “Of the Street-Sellers of Birds’-Nests”, London Labour and the
London Poor, vol. 2, 58–63.
34. Jan Bondeson, Amazing Dogs: A Cabinet of Canine Curiosities (Stroud:
Amberley, 2011), 206–27.
35. E. S. Turner, All Heaven in a Rage (London: Michael Joseph, 1963), 149–51.
36. For an account and picture of the Southsea collecting dog, Brake, see “Dog
Stories”, Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times, Saturday, December 20,
1884. The Bristol Mercury and Daily Post reported that the dog Punch, collecting
at the Standard of England in Castle Street, brought in £9 in 1892 for the Bristol
Hospital for Sick Children and Women. “Local News”, February 4, 1893, 4.
Sadly, he was reported lost in December 1898. Jim, alias “Station Jim”, collected
at Slough Station for the Great Western Railway Widows’ and Orphans’ Fund.
“Collecting Dog at Slough”, Reynolds’s Newspaper, November 29, 1896; “Death
of a Well-Known Dog”, Illustrated Police News, Saturday, December 5, 1896.
Other well-known dogs included Bruin, alias “The Hertfordshire Collecting
Dog”, and Charley, the Windsor Great Western Station dog. For a survey of the
phenomenon, see also Bondeson, Amazing Dogs, 104–18.
37. In 1899, Jack was at the centre of a crime drama when he was stolen from his
owner’s house by a gang of dog thieves. Happily, he was recovered after some
weeks, and he continued his collecting until his death in 1901. See “Where is
Jack”, Newcastle Weekly Courant, Saturday, August 12, 1899; and “London
Jack Found: Rejoicings Domestic and Popular: Alleged Dog-Stealers in
Court”, Daily News, August 29, 1899.
38. Mayhew, “Of Cats’- and Dogs’-Meat Dealers”, London Labour and the
London Poor, 127–29.
39. On the growth in pet ownership in nineteenth-century Britain, see
Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the
Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). On the
criminal enterprise of dog stealing that accompanied that growth, see
Philip Howell, “Flush and the Banditti: Dog-Stealing in Victorian London”,
in Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert (eds.), Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New
Geographies of Human–Animal Relations (London: Routledge, 2000), 35–55. In
2011, the pet owners of Britain were estimated to have 8.2 million dogs and 8.6
million cats. See “Dogs Overtaking Cats as Britain’s Favourite Pets’, Daily
Telegraph, April 3, 2011. Web, accessed April 26, 2012. On modern pet-keeping,
see Margo Demello, “The Present and Future of Animal Domestication”, in
Randy Malamud (ed.), A Cultural History of Animals in the Modern Age (Oxford
and New York: Berg, 2007), 67–94 (80–94).
Notes to pages 155–157
233
40. Ritvo, The Animal Estate, 98.
41. Amanda Bright, “Changing History: Exploring the Origins of the Modern
Cat Fancy”, The British Newspaper Archive Blog, posted February 13, 2013.
Asa Briggs reports that £500 was offered (and refused) for a pedigree cat at the
Sydenham show of 1869. Asa Briggs,Victorian Things (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1989), 36.
42. Stanley Weintraub, Victoria: An Intimate Biography (New York: Truman
Talley/E. P. Dutton, 1987), 79; Hilda Kean, “The Moment of Greyfriars
Bobby: The Changing Cultural Position of Animals, 1800–1920”, in Kete, A
Cultural History of Animals, 25–46 (30–31).
43. Sultan was a present from Percy Fitzgerald; he was shot after he attacked a
young girl. Turk died in a railway accident. See Michael Slater, Charles
Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing (New Haven, CT and London: Yale
University Press, 2009), 540–41, 555, 570–71.
44. Kean, “The Moment of Greyfriars Bobby”, 30–31.
45. Richard Jefferies, After London, or Wild England (London: Cassell, 1886), 12.
46. On the cultural construction of pet-keeping in France, see Kathleen Kete, The
Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995); on the United States, see Katherine
C. Grier, Pets in America: A History (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2006).
47. Wang, “Dogs and the Making of the American State”, 1002.
48. Robb, The Discovery of France, 179.
49. Turner, All Heaven in a Rage, 199; Hardy also touches on the cruelty of caging
wild birds in “The Bird-Catcher’s Boy”: “Every caged nightingale / Soon
pines and dies”. Literature Online (LION). Web, accessed July 23, 2011.
50. Mayhew, “Of the Street-Sellers of Live Birds”, London Labour and the London
Poor, 240–49; Turner, All Heaven in a Rage, 193–200.
51. Slater, Charles Dickens, 163, 225.
52. Nigel Rothfels, “How the Caged Bird Sings: Animals and Entertainment”, in
Kete, A Cultural History of Animals, 95–112 (105–11).
53. “The Flâneur”, M3,8, in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans.
Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1999), 422.
54. Weir, Our Cats, 208.
55. “Of Cats’- and Dogs’-Meat Sellers”, 127–29.
56. “Jolly Cats”, Tony Pastor, Tony Pastor’s 201 Bowery Songster, 10–11.
57. Wang, “Dogs and the Making of the American State”, 1002.
58. Graham Robb notes that these were originally French bears, but by the end of
the century the collapse of the native population meant that they were
imported from eastern Europe. See The Discovery of France, 173.
234
Notes to pages 157–159
59. On the rise of the zoo, see Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts: The Birth
of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2002) and his chapter “How the Caged Bird Sings”, in Kete, A Cultural
History of Animals. Rothfels is skeptical of the break that is often
assumed between the entertainment of the menagerie and the “scientific”
zoo. On animal entertainments of London, see Altick, The Shows of
London, 302–30, 487–88. On their literary reflections, see Altick, The
Presence of the Present, 500.
60. “Introduction”, Edward Turner Bennett, The Tower Menagerie: Comprising
the Natural History of the Animals Contained in that Establishment; with
Anecdotes of their Characters and History. Illustrated by portraits of each taken
from life, by William Harvey (London: Printed for Robert Jennings, Poultry,
1829), ix–xviii. See also Altick, The Shows of London, 317.
61. For an illustration of “Van Amburgh, the Brute Tamer of Pompeii”, see
Teresa Mangum, “Narrative Dominion or The Animals Write Back? Animal
Genres in Literature and the Arts”, in Kete, A Cultural History of Animals,
153–73 (165). See also Rothfels, Savages and Beasts, 158–59.
62. Rothfels, Savages and Beasts, passim.
63. See “Fearful Occurrence”, The Times, October 27, 1857, 12; “The Late Escape
of a Tiger in Ratcliff Highway”, The Times, October 30, 1857, 7; “Escape of a
Tiger in Ratcliff Highway, Daily News, October 27, 1857. The earlier account
identifies one of Mr. Jamrach’s men as the rescuer. The tiger was bought by
Mr. Edmonds, successor to Wombwell. Soon after, it escaped from its cage in
West Bromwich, and killed a lion that was in the same compartment. See
“Extraordinary Fight”, The Times, November 10, 1857, 5. A statue in Tobacco
Dock, Wapping commemorates the Ratcliff escape, which also inspired
Carol Birch’s Jamrach’s Menagerie (2011).
64. Bear pits continued as part of nineteenth-century zoos, before they were
replaced by more “modern” modes of presentation early in the twentieth
century, indicating more continuity between earlier treatment of animals and
the modern zoo than is often assumed. See Rothfels, “How the Caged Bird
Sings”, 97–100 and Savages and Beasts, 22–24.
65. Richard Fawkes, Dion Boucicault: A Biography (London: Quartet, 1979), 164, 166.
66. For a survey, see “Dog Dramas”, in Gerald Bordman and Thomas S. Hischak
(eds.), The Oxford Companion to American Theatre, 3rd edn. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004), Oxford Reference Online, accessed October 20, 2011;
and Bondeson, Amazing Dogs, 69–86.
67. On this theatrical innovation, see Frederick Reynolds, The Life and Times
of Frederick Reynolds, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, PA: Carey and Lea, 1826), vol. 2,
193–95. Reynolds borrowed the dog from the owner of an “à la mode beef
shop”. See also Victor Emeljanow and Donald Roy (eds.), Romantic and
Notes to pages 159–162
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
235
Revolutionary Theatre, 1789–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003), 222–23, which compresses Reynolds’s account.
“For the Morning Chronicle: The New Performer”, Morning Chronicle,
December 15, 1803.
“The Mirror of Fashion”, Morning Chronicle, December 16, 1803.
“The Mirror of Fashion”, Morning Chronicle, October 10, 1814. The Royal
Circus reversed the title, giving precedence to The Dog of Montargis.
See, for instance, “Theatrical Riot”, Morning Chronicle, December 23, 1814.
William L. Slout (ed.), Charles H. Day, Joe Blackburn’s A Clown’s Log
(Rockville, MD: Borgo Press, 2007), 11–12.
“Dog Dramas”, The Oxford Companion to American Theatre.
See playbills in the online collection of the East London Theatre Archive
and a handbill for the Royal Albert Saloon, August 24, 1846, offered for
sale by Bloomsbury Auctions, London, on September 20, 2012.
Blanchard and Cony were both in London in August 1841 for a benefit at
the Pavilion.
See playbill for the Pavilion, May 13, 1850 and see Francis C. Wemyss,
Chronology of the American Stage from 1752 to 1852 (New York: W. Taylor,
1852), 42.
See H. Barton Baker, History of the London Stage and its Famous Players, 1576–
1903 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1894), 317.
A number of the less-well-known dog performers appear in the 1940 film
Famous Movie Dogs. See also Gertrude Orr, Dog Stars of Hollywood (Akron,
OH: Saalfield, 1936).
“Curious Instance of Animal Sagacity”, Daily National Intelligencer, March
15, 1844.
For an account of the acts of Herr Techow and Leonidas Arniotis, see Helen
M. Winslow, Concerning Cats: My Own and Some Others (Boston, MA:
Lothrup, 1900), 232–36. For an account of Herr Techow’s show at the
Alhambra, London, see, for example, “The London Music Halls”, The Era,
February 19, 1898.
Carl Van Vechten, The Tiger in the House [1920] (New York: Dover, 1996),
170. The whole chapter, “The Cat in the Theatre” (170–86) is of interest.
See Kathleen Kete, “Introduction: Animals and Human Empire” in Kete, A
Cultural History of Animals, 1–24 (1–4).
James Turner, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in
the Victorian Mind (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980),
33–36.
For a grim picture of the eighteenth-century treatment of animals, see Turner,
All Heaven in a Rage, chap. 4: “Tom Nero’s World”, 51–64. “Mumbling” was
236
84.
85.
86.
87.
88.
89.
90.
91.
92.
93.
94.
95.
96.
97.
98.
99.
100.
101.
Notes to pages 162–165
a fair game in which people competed to bite the head off a live sparrow;
“crimping” meant cutting up live salmon.
Turner, Reckoning with the Beast, 20.
Ibid., 45–52. See also McShane and Tarr, Horse in the City, 46–53.
Turner, Reckoning with the Beast, 54–55.
Bondeson, Amazing Dogs, 223.
See Turner, Reckoning with the Beast and Leonard Lutwack, Birds in
Literature (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994).
On Cobbe, see Turner, Reckoning with the Beast, 89–95.
On anti-vivisection fiction, see, for instance, Keir Waddington, “Death at
St. Bernard’s: Anti-vivisection, Medicine and the Gothic”, Journal of
Victorian Culture 18.2 (2013): 246–62.
Richard D. Ryder, Animal Revolution: Changing Attitudes Towards
Speciesism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 129, 142.
“Tea Table-Talk”, Leeds Mercury, Saturday, September 27, 1890.
Gillian Beer, “Darwin and the Uses of Extinction”, Victorian Studies 51. 2
(2009): 321–31.
Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, 3 vols. (1830–33; London: John Murray,
1840), 187–206.
Graham Robb argues that in France native species – for example, the lynx,
the bear, the chamois, bouquetin, and mouflon – were disappearing so
rapidly that there was only a “gradual, creeping disappointment, dull awareness that wildness had only to be discovered to disappear” (The Discovery of
France, 173, 177).
Turner, Reckoning with the Beast, 125.
Stephen Jones, Hats, An Anthology (London: V&A Publishing, 2009), 121.
He notes that the feathers of endangered species are now replaced by the
dyed feathers of poultry (51).
On the early use of ostrich feathers, see Jessica Ortner, Practical Millinery
(London: Whittaker, 1897), 8, 12. See also Robin W. Doughty, Feather
Fashions and Bird Preservation: A Study in Nature Protection (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1975), 1–13.
Mme. Celnart, Manuel de fleuriste artificiel, suivi de L’art du plumassier
(Paris, n.d.), 211–12.
Doughty, Feather Fashions, 153. Doughty’s book remains the classic account.
Further references in parentheses in the text.
On the French industry, see also Anca Vlaspolos, “Pacific Harvests: Whales
and Albatrosses in Nineteenth-Century Markets”, in Deborah
Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay (eds.), Victorian Animal Dreams
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 167–78 (175). Figures for those employed in the
industry should be treated with caution, as industry lobbyists exaggerated the
Notes to pages 165–167
102.
103.
104.
105.
106.
107.
108.
109.
110.
111.
112.
113.
237
numbers when trying to head off anti-plumage legislation. See Alan Haynes,
“Murderous Millinery”, History Today 33 (July 1983): 26–30 (29).
On the ostrich-feather industry, see Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Plumes: Ostrich
Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce (New Haven, CT and
London: Yale University Press, 2008). According to Stein, as hostility to the
fancy feather industry grew, the ostrich trade became increasingly keen to
distance itself (125).
“The Week”, Oxford Journal, October 29, 1887. The writer links the controversy about sealskin, the hunting of egrets, and the decimation of the
chinchilla and other fur-bearing species.
“Dress and Fashion in Paris”, Derby Mercury, November 26, 1879;
“Dress and Fashion in Paris”, Bristol Mercury and Daily Post,
December 27, 1880. Both articles are taken from Myra’s Journal of Fashion
and Dress.
D. O. Mills, “Our Fur-Seal Fisheries”, North American Review 151.406
(September 1890): 300–06 (300).
William Earl Dodge Scott, The Story of a Bird Lover (London: Macmillan,
1904), 258; see also Herbert Keightley Job, Wild Wings: Adventures of a
Camera-Hunter among the Larger Wild Birds of North America on Sea and
Land (Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin, 1905), 65.
Peter Robinson of Regent Street had a mail order ready-to-wear department
by 1876. Their catalogue, Book of Styles, featured photographic illustrations.
See Ginsbury, Victorian Dress, 73.
Louis Guéry, Visages de la presse: la présentation des journaux des origines à nos
jours (Paris: Éditions du centre de formation et de perfectionnement des
journalistes, 1997), 130–31.
For a survey of the range available, see Margaret Beetham and Kay Boardman,
Victorian
Women’s
Magazines:
An
Anthology
(Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2001). See also the bibliography in
Anne Buck, Victorian Costume and Costume Accessories, 2nd edn. (Carlton:
Ruth Bean, 1984), 218–19.
For example, in the 1870s, the Derby Mercury, the Bristol Mercury, and other
regional papers began to feature columns on “Dress and Fashion in Paris”,
credited to Myra’s Journal. By the 1880s, the Aberdeen Weekly Journal, North
Wales Chronicle, and Belfast News-Letter were also drawing on Myra’s.
Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own: Domesticity and Desire in the
Woman’s Magazine (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 122.
On Paris’s unique position in the industry, see Valerie Steele, Paris Fashion:
A Cultural History (London and New York: Berg, 1998).
“Fashion in Paris: From our Lady Correspondent”, Freeman’s Journal,
December 8, 1897.
238
Notes to pages 167–170
114. “Fashions for February”, Daily News, February 2, 1886.
115. Mary Butler (Mrs O’Nolan), “The Ethics of Dress”, Irish Monthly 45.526
(April 1917): 219–29 (221).
116. See C. Willett Cunnington, English Women’s Clothing in the Nineteenth
Century: A Comprehensive Guide with 1117 Illustrations [1937] (New York:
Dover, 1990), 309, 321, 331, 338, 370, 426–27. He cites, for example, an
unnamed source from 1887: “The increasing spread of outdoor amusements
and games is an incentive to simpler dressing” (338).
117. “Evening Dresses”, Daily News, January 2, 1886.
118. Jones, Hats, An Anthology, 66, 119. Jeanne Lanvin and “Lucile” (Lady Duff
Gordon) also began as milliners in 1889 and 1894 respectively (66).
119. See Madeleine Ginsburg, Victorian Dress in Photographs (London: Batsford,
1982), 70, 77.
120. Charles Eckert, “The Carole Lombard in Macy’s Window”, Quarterly
Review of Film Studies 3.1 (1978): 1–21.
121. Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction, 65–67.
122. See “Gold Necklace Set with the Heads of Humming-birds”, British
Museum Online, accessed August 1, 2012. Emanuel took out a patent on
his hummingbird process.
123. Buck, Victorian Costume, 112–13, 118, 121. Fiona Clark’s well-illustrated Hats
(London: Batsford, 1982) provides a detailed account of hat trends in this
period. Another source for tracing the rise of feather fashion is
Nancy Bradfield’s Costume in Detail: Women’s Dress 1730–1930, 2nd edn.
(London: Harrap, 1981), which shows the prominence of the osprey
and wing in the 1890s, and well into the twentieth century. See, for example,
the illustrations on pages 287, 291, 301, 322, 331, 344, and 346. Ginsburg’s
Victorian Dress in Photographs shows examples on pages 70 and 83.
124. C. Willett Cunnington, English Women’s Clothing in the Nineteenth Century:
A Comprehensive Guide with 1117 Illustrations (1937; New York: Dover,
1990), 352.
125. Ortner, Practical Millinery, 150.
126. Clark, Hats, 35–37 (36).
127. For an example from the 1930s by Caroline Reboux, now in the collection of
the V&A, see Jones, Hats, An Anthology, 41.
128. Mme. Rosée, The Handbook of Millinery: A Practical Manual of Instruction
for Ladies (London: Upcott Gill, [1895]), 59.
129. Buck, Victorian Costume, 170.
130. Stein, Plumes, 23–24.
131. Turner, All Heaven in a Rage, 174, 189. Doughty, Feather Fashions, 93–95. That
the carnage continued is clear from the press. See, for example, “Slaughter of
Sea Birds”, a letter by F. O. Morris to the Leeds Mercury, September 16, 1887.
Notes to pages 170–172
239
132. “Ostrich Feathers”, Pall Mall Gazette, October 14, 1887.
133. “Borrowed Plumes”, The Times, January 28, 1876; see also Haynes,
“Murderous Millinery”.
134. See “Feather Ornaments”, Irish Naturalist 3.2 (February 1894), 46; Turner,
All Heaven in a Rage, 190.
135. W. H. Hudson, “Feathered Women”.
136. “Fancy Feathers”, New York Millinery and Supply Company (1901), available through the Smithonian Image Galaxy, accessed October 7, 2011. An
exhibition at the University of Alberta, Fashioning Feathers: Dead Birds,
Millinery, Crafts and the Plumage Trade, curated by Dr. Merle Patchett,
features excellent photographs of hats of the period from the university’s
clothing and textiles collection, illustrations and detailed notes on various
aspects of the trade, and fashion photographs. Web, accessed October 7,
2011.
137. See, for example, “A Cruel Fashion”, Graphic, July 30, 1887.
138. On the Selborne League, see George Arthur Musgrave, The Selborne League
for the Preservation of Birds of Beautiful Plumage, Rare Birds, Plants, and
Pleasant Places (London, J. Wakeham and Son, c.1885).
139. On Mrs. Phillips, Margaretta Lemon, and the SPB, see Barbara T. Gates,
Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 114–24.
140. “Hearth and Home, by a Lady Contributor”, Manchester Times, Saturday,
June 5, 1886.
141. John Galsworthy, For Love of Beasts (London: RSPB, 1912), 11. The pamphlet
was originally published as a feature in the Pall Mall Gazette. It was reprinted
in 1912 by the Animals’ Friend Society, which also published such essays as
Joseph Collinson’s How Sealskins are Obtained, and Jessey Wade’s Cruelties
in Dress, which dealt with furs and feathers.
142. On Sambourne’s collation of women and animals in his cartoons, see Susan
David Bernstein’s “Designs after Nature: Evolutionary Fashions, Animals
and Gender”, in Denenholz Morse and Danahay, Victorian Animals
Dreams, 65–80.
143. Linley Sambourne’s “A Bird of Prey”, Punch, May 14, 1892, is reproduced in
Doughty, Feather Fashions, as is “The Extinction of Species”. See also F.
H. Townsend’s “Increasing Depravity of Women”, Punch, April 14, 1909,
257 and E. T. R.’s “Unconscious Plagiarism”, Punch, January 6, 1909. On class
and fashion, see the untitled hat cartoon by A. Wallis Mills, Punch, December
26, 1906. The maid assures her mistress that the hat in question must still be in
fashion because “Cook has just bought one exactly like it”.
240
Notes to pages 172–178
144. The painting was later used by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt as the frontispiece to
his long narrative poem Satan Absolved: A Victorian Mystery (London: John
Lane / The Bodley Head, 1899).
145. In a painting from early in his career, The Wounded Heron (1837), Watts
seems to anticipate these concerns. On Watts and the RSPB, see Doughty,
Feather Fashions, 49. For a reproduction of the painting, and some useful
context, see the Watts Gallery webpage on the painting.
146. Dan Weinbren, “Against All Cruelty: The Humanitarian League, 1891–
1919”, History Workshop Journal 38 (1994): 86–105.
147. E. P., “Murderous Millinery”, in the Humanitarian League’s Food and
Fashion: Some Thoughts on What We Eat and What We Wear (London:
Humanitarian League, 1903), unpaginated.
148. A. F. R. Wollaston, Life of Alfred Newton, Professor of Comparative Anatomy,
Cambridge University, 1866–1907 (London: John Murray, 1921), 139.
149. E.P., “Murderous Millinery”, in the Humanitarian League’s Food and
Fashion.
150. William Dutcher, “Destruction of Bird-Life in the Vicinity of New York”,
Science 7.160 (February 26, 1886): 197–99 (199).
151. “Feathered Women: To the Editor of the Times”, The Times, October 17,
1893.
152. Editorial, October 17, 1893, responding to W. H. Hudson’s letter in the same
edition.
153. “Birds, Butchers and Beauties”, Pall Mall Gazette, January 6, 1886. I am
grateful to Fionnuala Dillane for bringing this article to my attention.
154. This booklet also contains a useful summary of the campaign against feather
fashion.
155. Virginia Woolf, “The Plumage Bill”, Woman’s Leader, July 23, 1920, reprinted in volume 3 of her Essays. See Reginald Abbott, “Birds Don’t Sing in
Greek: Virginia Woolf and ‘The Plumage Bill’”, in Carol J. Adams and
Josephine Donovan (eds.), Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical
Explorations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 263–89.
156. “The Protection of Wild Birds in America”, Pall Mall Gazette, Wednesday,
April 28, 1886. See also Turner, Reckoning with the Beast, 124–25.
157. J. A. Allen, “The Present Wholesale Destruction of Bird-Life in the United
States”, Science 7.160 (February 26, 1886): 191–5. The same article describes the
extermination of the bison as part of a “disgraceful greed for slaughter” (191).
158. William Dutcher, “Destruction of Bird-Life in the Vicinity of New York”,
197–99 (199).
159. Anon., “Destruction of Birds for Millinery Purposes”, 196–97 (196).
160. Ibid., 197.
Notes to pages 178–181
241
161. “Present Wholesale Destruction”, 194; “Destruction of Birds for Millinery
Purposes”, 196.
162. “Present Wholesale Destruction”, 194.
163. “Protection of Wild Birds in America”.
164. See Turner, Reckoning with the Beast, 124–25.
165. See Doughty, Feather Fashions, 111–12; Stuart McGiver, Death in the
Everglades: The Murder of Guy Bradley, America’s First Martyr to
Environmentalism (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003).
166. William Dutcher, “Report of the American Ornithologists’ Union
Committee on the Protection of Birds”, Auk 21.1 (January 1904): 97–208
(100). Other threats were noted, including “the house cat run wild”, since
“there is no doubt that millions of birds are killed in the United States and
Canada every year by cats” (104). To control numbers and behavior, it called
for a tax on cats along the lines of that already existing for dogs.
167. In “The Fur Fashion” the League turned its attention to the sources of
Britain’s fur coats, stoles, and wraps, warning that by wearing furs we are
“giving our patronage and sanction to a trade involving wide-spread
cruelty”. It appeared in the collection Food and Fashion.
168. Sachs, Furs and the Fur Trade (London: Pitman, ?1923), 1.
169. Ibid., 8.
170. Marcus Petersen, The Fur-Traders and Fur-Bearing Animals (Buffalo, NY:
Hammond, 1914), 46. See also “Fur: The Ne’er-Ending Fashion”, Lotus
Magazine 7.2 (November 1915): 68–76, which is largely copied from
Petersen.
171. Petersen, Fur-Traders, 66. Compare the figures given by Sachs for May 1922:
Raw Skins
Name
Cat, house
Fox, silver
Seal, fur
Leopard
Mink
Sable
Quantity
23,500
2,550
500
685
50,000
1,450
Average Price
2s. 3d.
£39
60s.
36s.
42s.
£24
172. Buck, Victorian Costume, 176–77.
173. “Class 16: Leather, Saddlery and Harness, Skins, Fur and Hair”, Official
Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851
(London: Royal Commission, 1851), 91–92.
174. See, for example, “Fashions for November”, Graphic, Saturday, November 4,
1871; “The Ladies Column”, Manchester Times, Saturday, January 27, 1872.
175. Cited in “A Column for the Ladies”, Hull Packet and East Riding Times,
Friday, January 16, 1880.
242
Notes to pages 181–184
176. Cited in Buck, Victorian Costume, 104. Curiously, Cunnington barely mentions sealskin in his wide-ranging survey of Victorian trends (though see p.
320, describing the fashions of 1881).
177. “The Ladies Column: Winter Furs”, Manchester Times, Saturday, October
29, 1881.
178. “The Most fashionable Furs”, Ladies Supplement to the London Journal,
October 1, 1893, 11.
179. Up until 1913, all North American fur sealskin was processed in London.
“Seals are Big Business”, Science News Letter, September 17, 1955, 180. Not all
sealskin became clothing: some was used for the fur-lined Burnaby Bag, a
variety of sleeping bag named for the popular Victorian explorer, Frederick
Burnaby.
180. Tammy C. Whitlock, Crime, Gender and Consumer Culture in 19th-Century
England (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2005), 179–81.
181. Constance Cary Harrison, “A Glance at Street Costumes”, Art Amateur
6.1 (December 1881): 10–11 (11). Harrison is not impressed by this trend.
182. Other offers include ladies’ Labrador beaver caperines, a ladies’ white fox
scarf with “1 head, 4 paws, and 1 tail” and matching muff, with “1 head and 1
tail”, and a men’s wombat coat, “The Skagway”, at $18. T. Eaton Co., Fall
and Winter Catalogue 1899–1900 (Toronto: T. Eaton, 1899), 107, 109, 113, 117.
Available from the Internet Archive, accessed August 1, 2011.
183. Ouida [Mary Louise de la Ramée], “The New Woman”, 614, 618.
184. Frederick William Orde Ward, “Queen Pussy at Play: Being the Natural
History of a Fast and Fashionable Woman of the Day” (1890), Literature
Online (LION).
185. See “Sealskin, and Where it Comes From”, All the Year Round, vol. 39, new
series (November 1886): 318–22, 349–52, 377–81, 399–403 (401).
186. “Sealskin, and Where it Comes From”, 401. See also Ziswiler, Extinct and
Vanishing Animals, 9–10.
187. “Sealskin, and Where it Comes From”, 380.
188. Charles S. Campbell, “The Anglo-American Crisis in the Bering Sea, 1890–
1891”, The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 48.3 (December, 1961): 393–
414 (404–05). On contemporary reaction to Elliott’s views, see “The Failure
of the Paris Tribunal’s Award to Save the Seals”, The Advocate of Peace 57.2
(February, 1895): 37–38. The Advocate, given its politics, felt that it would be
better if the whole herd disappeared rather than risk a war between Britain
and the United States.
189. “The Behring Sea Imbroglio”, Pall Mall Gazette, June 1, 1889. “The Seizure
of Sealers”, Daily News, August 2, 1889. The latter quotes the condemnation
of American Secretary of State James G. Blaine by the New York Herald,
which called him “The Knight of Jingoism”. For a detailed account of
Notes to pages 184–187
190.
191.
192.
193.
194.
195.
196.
197.
198.
199.
243
Anglo-Canadian-American tensions in this period, see Campbell, “The
Anglo-American Crisis”.
“The Sealing Question”, The Times, December 20, 1897, 5.
As well as the piece in All the Year Round, see “Sealskin Coats, Alive and Dead”,
Chambers Journal, November 27 1886, 753–56. The comic journal Judy published a piece in 1875 that treats seal-clubbing as humorous material, suggesting
that at that point they assumed that their readers were not too fastidious about
such matters. See “The Strange Story of a Sealskin: A Tale of
Metempsychosis”, Judy, November 24, 1875, 52.
“Fur and Feathers”, Pall Mall Gazette, September 17, 1887. Dr. Kingsford
was also a proponent of vegetarianism, in keeping with her commitment to
the rights of animals. On her philosophy, see Gates, Kindred Nature, 148–52
and the Dictionary of National Biography.
Frank Carlos Griffith, Mrs Fiske (New York: Neale Publishing Company,
1912), 90–92.
Humanitarian League, “How We Get Our Sealskin”, Food and Fashion,
unpaginated.
Similar pamphlets (price 2d.) were published by the Animals’ Friend
Society: Joseph Collinson’s paper on sealskin was reprinted as How
Sealskins are Obtained; Jessey Wade’s Cruelties in Dress looked at the fur
and feather industries. A series of leaflets (price ½d.) reprinted the salient
points of each. See, for example, the advertisements in the Animal Friends’
Society’s edition of Galsworthy’s For Love of Beasts.
D. O. Mills, “Our Fur-Seal Fisheries”, North American Review 151.406
(September 1890): 300–06 (303).
Gail Orshenko, Polar Politics: Creating International Environment Regimes
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 30–34.
“Seals are Big Business”, 180.
In Satan Absolved: A Victorian Mystery, Blunt charges the “Anglo-Saxon”
with, among other things, having “depopulated continents, species after
species, of their wonderful animal life” (vi). Gambier Bolton highlighted
the extermination of species that was taking place, including that of the
African lion. Zoos were paying high prices for some animals, because they
realized that some would soon be extinct in the wild. “Rare Animals”,
Liverpool Mercury, August 26, 1899. Nigel Rothfels observes that zoos were
actually part of the problem: hunters were killing whole adult groups so
that their young could be sold to dealers, who sold them on in turn to
zoos (Savages and Beasts, chap. 2). In 1905, E. Ray Lankester worried that
the giraffe would soon be hunted into extinction by “sportsmen”.
See his Extinct Animals (London: Archibald Constable & Co. Ltd.,
1905), 20.
244
Notes to pages 189–192
EPILOGUE
1. John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the
Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London: Faber, 1992).
2. On the connections between the Aliens Act and the fiction of the day, see
David Glover, Literature, Immigration, and Diaspora in Fin-de-Siècle England:
A Cultural History of the 1905 Aliens Act (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2012).
3. Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).
4. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale [1907], ed. Martin SeymourSmith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 40–41.
5. H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, introduced by Arthur C. Clarke (London:
Everyman, 1993), 6–7.
6. For a recent discussion of Wells’s fiction in relation to a longer literature of
science, see Michael R. Page, The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to
H. G. Wells: Science, Evolution, and Ecology (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).
7. In After London our narrator describes the quasi-medieval world that takes
shape when all the cities are emptied – of people and animals alike – by an
unspecified catastrophe. In Shiel’s novel our editor presents the transcript of a
psychic who can see the future, the first-person account of Adam Jeffson, one of
only two survivors when a cyanide-laden cloud covers the earth.
8. H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, Centennial Edition, edited by John Lawton
(London: Everyman, 1995), 75–76.
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Index
1851 Exhibition, 89, 114, 181, 225
abattoirs, 152–53
Adelphi, 8, 29, 40, 55, 57, 58, 59, 61, 115, 200, 201,
205
advertising, 113–21
aigrettes, See egrets
Ainsworth, W. H., 50, 56
Jack Sheppard, 57
Alma-Tadema, Lawrence, 26, 41
Altick, Richard, 17, 22, 24, 158, 159, 161, 218, 234
American Ornithologists Union, 177
American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty
to Animals, 162, 178
Anderson, Benedict, 141
Anderson, Michael, 1
animal acts, 159–61
Animals’ Friend Society, 163
Anthropocene era, 15, 150, 190
anti-vivisection movement, 163
Astor Place riot, 16, 66
Astor, John Jacob, 179
Atherstone, Edwin, 27–28
Auber, Daniel François Esprit
La Muette de Portici, 18, 33, 38
Audubon Society, 177, 184
Bailey, Peter, 68, 222
Barrett, Wilson, 43
Barry, Frederick, 88
Bastien-Lepage, Jules, 14, 131, 143
Belasco, David, 73
Belich, James, 3
Belot, Adolphe, 73
Ben Hur, 43
Benjamin, Walter, 6, 68, 85, 111, 128, 157, 196,
225, 233
Bennett, James Gordon, 111
Béraud, Jean, 132
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 80
Blanchard, Edwin, 160
Bleiler, E. F., 80, 83, 212, 214, 216
Blewitt, Jonathan, 121, 123, 127, 224
Blythe, David Gilmour, 132
Bolter, Jay David, 19
Bolton, Gambier, 185, 187
Bondeson, Jan, 154, 156, 161, 232, 234, 236
Booth, Michael R., 46, 47, 196, 203, 206
Boucicault, Dion, 9, 59, 60, 63, 69, 70, 80, 141,
159, 196, 200, 207, 209, 215, 234
The Corsican Brothers, 80
Flying Scud, 159
The Poor of New York, 69, 141
Bowen, Elizabeth, 99
Bowery b’hoys, 65, 67
Bowery Theatre, 46, 65, 160
Bradbury, Ray, 99
Braddon, M. E., 8, 81, 83, 196
Brisebarre and Nus
Les Pauvres de Paris, 9
Le Retour de Melun, 8, 13
Briullov, Karl
The Last Day of Pompeii, 36, 38
Brooks, Maria, 132
Brougham, John
The Lottery of Life, 72–73
Broughton, Rhoda, 80, 81, 83
Brown, Ford Madox, 15, 82, 122, 131, 143, 207,
208, 209, 225, 226
Buck, Anne, 169
Buckstone, J. B., 40, 41, 56, 57, 201, 202
Bulwer Lytton, Edward, 49, 80, 150, 189
The Coming Race, 44
The Last Days of Pompeii, 9, 45
Buntline, Ned, 9, 51, 68, 69
Burke, Edmund, 24
Cabiria, 42
Cafferty, James Henry, 132
Carey, John, 189
The Intellectuals and the Masses, 3, 6, 191
Carlo, the performing dog, 159
268
Index
Casanova, Pascale, 8
cats, performing, 58
cats, urban, 155
Census Reports, 1, 2
Chambers, Robert, 22, 243
Chanfrau, Francis S., 68, 69, 132
Chapman, Frank M., 178
Chevalier, Louis, 48
Chunee, 159
Clark, Fiona, 169
Clausen, George, 14, 143
Claxton, Kate, 73, 74
Clery, E. J., 79
Cobbe, Frances Power, 163
Coëylas, Henri, 131
Cohen, Margaret
The Literary Channel: The International
Invention of the Novel, 11
collecting dogs, 154–55
Collins, Wilkie
Basil, 95
Heart and Science, 163
Concanen, Alfred, 15, 122–26
Conrad, Joseph, 190
Cony, Barkham, 160
Cooper, Fenimore, 49, 202, 203
Cormon, Eugène. Les Deux Orphelines
Paris la nuit, 53
Coughlan, Patricia, 84, 85, 214
Courvoisier, Benjamin, 58, 60
cows, urban, 151
Cox, Jeffrey N., 57
Crabtree, Lotta, 72, 185
Cragin, Thomas, 48
Cranbrook Colony, 133
Crowe, Eyre, 131
Cunnington, C. Willett, 169
d’Ennery, Adolphe, 47, 203
Les Bohémiens de Paris, 13, 53–56, 117
Les Deux Orphelines, 8, 73
Daly, Augustin, 59
dangerous classes, 13, 48, 57, 60
Dargan, William, 88, 90
Darwin, Charles, 4, 163, 164, 192, 236
Daumier, Honoré, 54, 131
de Certeau, Michel, 107, 218
Degas, Edgar, 25
Delondre, Maurice, 131
demographic imagination, 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12,
15, 17, 36, 47, 59, 62, 75, 77, 79, 92, 109,
121, 128, 137, 147, 150, 190, 193
demographic revolution, 1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 12, 14, 47,
65, 76, 146, 148, 189
demographic transition, 2, 12, 194
269
Denning, Michael, 9, 51, 197, 204, 210
detectives on stage, 71–72
Dever, Carolyn, See Cohen, Margaret
Dickens, Charles, 8, 50, 53, 56, 64, 78, 80, 81, 86,
93, 97, 114, 115, 139, 155, 156, 196, 204, 213,
223, 228, 231, 233
A Christmas Carol, 93
American Notes, 152
Christmas stories, 81
Dombey and Son, 93, 97, 115
Oliver Twist, 9, 49
The Signal-Man, 97, 98
To be Taken with a Grain of Salt, 98
disaster narratives, 17–45
dog dramas, 159–61
dogs, as urban pets, 155–56
Doré, Gustave, 14, 137, 143
Doughty, Robin W., 165, 166, 236, 238, 239,
240
du Maurier, George, 172, 187
Dublin International Exhibition, 89
Dubreuil, Victor, 132
Dutcher, William, 175, 178, 240, 241
ecology, 15
Edel, Leon, 100, 219,
Edwards, Amelia, 61, 71, 79, 80, 81, 97, 98,
214
Egan, Pierce
Life in London, 48, 49, 50, 64
Egg, Augustus, 130
Egley, William Maw, 130
Omnibus Life in London, 95
egrets, 170, 171, 192
Eidophusikon, 23
Elderquest, 5
Elliott, Henry W., 184, 185, 222, 242
Evans, Richardson, 121
extinction, 149
Fabris, Pietro, 22, 23
Fairfield, Sumner Lincoln, 31–32, 38
fashion, 15
fashion publishing, 166–68
feather fashion, 165
fireworks, 20, 22, 42–44
Fitzgerald, Percy, 8
Florence, Mr. and Mrs., 71
Freedgood, Elaine, 10
Frégier, Honoré Antoine, 48, 57
Frick, John W., 69
Friedberg, Anne, 19
Frith, William Powell, 4, 14, 129, 136
Fulcher, Jane, 33, 200
270
Index
Fur and Feather League, 171
fur fashion, 165–66, 179–82
fur seals, 182–86
Galsworthy, John, 163, 172, 176, 243
garrotting, 61
Gaskell, Elizabeth, 79, 80, 81
Gell, William, 36, 37
ghost stories, urban, 77–106
Gilroy, Paul, 10
Glover, David, 190
Glyn, Elinor, 187
Goldicutt, John, 21
gothic novel, 78
Grangé, Eugène, 13, 47, 53, 80, 203
Les Frères Corses, 80
Gray, Thomas, 30–31
The Vestal, 9, 26, 30, 31, 32, 38, 199
Great auk, 149, 168, 192
Griffin, Gerald, 82, 213
Griffith, D. W.
Orphans of the Storm, 74
Grusin, Richard, 19
Haggard, H. Rider, 44
Hamilton, James, 41
Hamilton, William, 21, 23
Handel, George Frideric, 23
Hardy, Thomas, 156, 157, 163, 172, 174,
217, 233
Harmsworth, Alfred, 110
Harnett, William Michael, 132
Hart, Jackson N.
The Two Orphans, 8
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 78, 79
Haydon, Benjamin Robert, 113, 129
Henkin, David M., 107, 108, 111, 112, 115, 118, 119,
127, 141, 220, 221, 222
Herring, Fanny, 160
Hicks, George Elgar, 129
hippodrama, 159
Hoffmann, E. T. A., 79
horses, urban, 150–51, 152
Horsley, John Callcott, 133, 136
Hudson Bay Company, 179, 180
Hudson, W. H., 170, 171, 172, 175, 179, 224, 239,
240
Hugo, Victor, 48, 49, 50, 56, 62
Humanitarian League, 173–75, 179
Hutton, James, 22
Hutton, Laurence, 66
Indecent Advertisement Act of 1889, 120
industrial novel, 4
Jack Sheppard, 40, 56, 60, 205, 208
Jackson, Hart N.
The Two Orphans, 73
James, Henry, 99–106, 190
“Crapy Cornelia”, 102–4
The American Scene, 101–2
The Jolly Corner, 104–6
The Turn of the Screw, 79, 99
Jefferies, Richard, 156
Jones, Owen, 21
Joy, George W., 132
Joy, Thomas Musgrave, 95
Joyce, James, 4, 49, 82, 115, 187, 214
The Dead, 4
Kenney, James, 34
Kete, Kathleen, 156
Kingsford, Anna, 185
kiosques lumineux, 118, 226
Knight, Charles, 115, 117–18
Knight, Stephen, 9, 51, 197, 204, 223, 242
Krakovitch, Odile, 53, 205
Lambourne, Lionel, 137
Le Clear, Thomas, 14, 132
Le Fanu, J. S., 6, 14, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83–98, 99,
102, 104, 105, 106, 211, 213, 214, 215, 216,
218, 219
“An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in
Aungier Street”, 91
“An Authentic Narrative of a Haunted
House”, 91–92
“Carmilla”, 85
“Madam Crowl’s Ghost”, 79
“The Room in the Dragon Volant”, 97
“The Watcher”, 86–91
Green Tea, 14, 93–97
In a Glass Darkly, 86, 91, 96, 215, 218
The Watcher, 14
Uncle Silas, 84, 97
Le Fanu, William, 90–91
Leiber, Fritz, 99
Léonard, See Le Retour de Melun
Lesage, Alain René
Le Diable boiteux, 92, 93
Lisbon earthquake, 21, 35
local drama, 59, 66–67, 70, 72, 197
localization, 9, 15, 64, 67
longevity, 1, 4, 5
Lord Chamberlain, 34, 56, 58, 61, 202,
207
Loutherbourg, Philippe Jacques de, 23
Luard, John Dalbiac, 129
Lustig, T. J., 100
Index
Lyell, Charles, 22, 164, 192, 236
Lytton Bulwer, Edward, See Edward Bulwer
Lytton
Maas, Jeremy, 136
Macdonald, George, 98
Maclise, Daniel, 82, 213
Macready, William, 66, 84, 198
Manhattan Beach, 42
Marcus, Sharon, 42, 92, 98, 202, 241
Maréchal, P. Sylvain, 33
Martin, John, 26
Martin, Richard, 162
Masaniello (Auber), See La Muette de Portici
Masaniello, other versions, 34–35
Maxwell, Richard, 49
Mayer, David, 43
Mayhew, Henry, 57, 134, 142, 151, 154, 155, 157,
223, 224, 230, 232, 233
McCormack, William J., 90, 96, 213,
214, 215
Medina, Louisa H., 40, 41, 46, 202
Meisel, Martin
Realizations, 19, 40
menageries., See zoos and menageries
Merrick, Emily, 136
Merrion Square, 7, 89, 96, 216
Midsomer Murders, 5
Millaud, Moïse-Polydore, 111, 112
Milner, Henry M., 30, 34, 159
Moncrieff, W. T.
The Scamps of London, 47, 48, 59,
64, 161
Monte Cristo riots, 16
Moody, Jane, 34, 200, 201, 210
Moore, Thomas, 29, 30, 31, 38
More, Jacob, 26
Moretti, Franco, 15
Morgan, Alfred, 129
Mose plays, 67–69, 72
Mount Etna, 21, 22, 23, 30, 35, 42,
44, 201
Mulready, Augustus, 6, 15, 109
flower girl paintings, 142–46
Homeless by Night, 136
newsboy paintings, 142
Our Good-Natured Cousin, 134, 137
Remembering Joys that have Passed Away, 137,
139–40
Uncared For, 139
Wandering Minstrels, 135
Mulready, William, 15, 133
Murphy, Alexandra, 24
Musgrave, George Arthur, 171
music hall, 122, 127, 153, 157
271
New Woman, 148, 175, 182, 187, 229, 242
Newey, Kate, 48
newsboys, 113, 127
newspapers and technology, 111
newspapers, role of, 109–13
Newton, Alfred, 168, 170, 175, 240
Nicoll, Allardyce, 8
Obscene Publications Act of 1857, 113
Odell, George, 64–74
Oliphant, Margaret, 80, 98, 199
omnibus, 53, 94–96, 131
Ortega y Gasset, José, 2, 16, 189
ospreys, See egrets
Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée), 163, 175, 182,
229, 242
Pacini, Giovanni
L’ultimo giorno di Pompei, vi, 9, 18, 28, 29, 30,
31, 36, 38
Pain family, 42
Parry, John Orlando, 15, 36, 128
Pastorini prophecies, 35
Paul, Howard, 124
pets, urban, 157
Phillips, Watts
A Ticket of Leave, 60
Picker, John, 10
pigs, urban, 152
Pixérécourt, René Charles Guilbert de
Le Chien de Montargis, 159
Plumage League, 6, 171, 184
Poe, Edgar Allan, 44, 72, 79, 86
Pompeii, 17–45
Poole, Paul Falconer, 42
Poynter, Edward, 42
Pribilof Islands (seal colonies), 182–86
Price, Leah, 128
Princess’s Theatre, 8, 80, 141
Pückler-Muskau, Hermann von, 116
Pulitzer, Joseph, 111
Purcell Papers, 79, 83, 84, 214
pyrodramas, See fireworks
pyrotechnics, See fireworks
quagga, 149, 192, 230
Rancière, Jacques, 141, 228
Ranelagh Gardens, 23
ratting, 154, 163
Reece, Robert, 41
remediation, 12, 19
Reynolds, G. W. M.
Mysteries of the Court of London, 9
272
Index
Riddell, Mrs J. H., 80, 81, 212, 214, 218
Robinsonade, 4
Rockite movement, 35, 86
rodents, urban, 153–54
Rogers, Randolph, 41
Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals, 162
Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, 171,
176, 184
Ruskin, John, 163, 172, 188
Sachs, Captain John, 179–80
Sage, Victor, 84, 214, 215, 217
Said, Edward, 10
Salatino, Kevin, 20
Sambourne, Linley, 172, 239
SCAPA, 121
Scharf, George, 115, 131
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 97
Scott, Walter, 36, 49, 65, 78, 80, 81, 156,
213, 220, 223, 237
seals, See fur seals
Selborne League, 171
Sennett, Richard, 2
sensation drama, 60
Sewell, Anna
Black Beauty, 163
Sharpe, Richard Bowdler, 171
Shaw, George Bernard, 174
Pygmalion, 146
Shelley, Mary, 30
Signorini, Telemaco, 132
Singer, Ben, 67
slaughterhouses, See abattoirs
slum novel, 4
Solomon, Abraham, 97, 120, 129
Spencer, Herbert, 175
Stead, W. T., 142
Stewart, Garrett, 128
Stirling, Edward, 9
The Bohemians, 47, 48, 56, 65, 69, 209
Stoker, Bram, 80, 190, 212, 218
Strachan, John, 116
Sue, Eugène, 56
adaptations of his work, 51–52, 69
Les Mystères de Paris, 6, 9, 13, 47, 51
Les Mystères de Paris (stage version), 52
Taxes on Knowledge, the, 110
Taylor, Elizabeth
A View of the Harbour, 5
Taylor, Tom
The Ticket-of-Leave Man, 13, 59, 61–64, 70–72
Victims, 130
Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 163, 172
The Forest of Bondy, See Le Chien de Montargis
The Last Days of Pompeii (films), 42
The Last Days of Pompeii (operas), 42
The Ticket-of-Leave Man, 9
Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin, 8, 41, 73, 204,
205
Theatres Act (1843), 57
Thylacine, 149, 230
Tissot, James, 131
Torre, Giovanni, 22, 23
Tracy, Robert, 87
transpontine melodrama, 57, 61, 62, 66
Troppmann murders, 112
Turner, E. S., 161
Turner, J. M. W., vi, 24, 25, 26, 117, 118, 222, 232,
233, 235, 239, 240, 241
Turner, James, 162, 164
Van Amburgh, Isaac A., 41, 158, 234
Van Vechten, Carl, 161
Varley family, 133
Varley, Elizabeth, 133
vaudevilles, 53
Vernet, Joseph, 24,
Vesuvius, 21, 23
Victoria, queen of England, 1, 155
Vidocq, Eugène François, 48, 61
Volaire, Pierre-Jacques, 24
Warhol, Andy, 25
Watson, Tim
Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the
Atlantic World, 1780–1870, 10
Webb, Sidney, 3
Weir, Harrison, 155
Wells, H. G.
The War of the Worlds, 190–91
Werner, Abraham Gottlob, 22
Westland Row railway terminus, 87, 88, 89, 90
Williamson, Emily, 171
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 21
Winner, William E., 132
Wombwell, George, 162
Wood, Christopher, 136
Wood, Thomas Waterman, 132
Woodville, Richard Caton, 129
Woolf, Virginia, 177
Mrs Dalloway, 4
Wright, Joseph, 24
Wyllie, William Morrison, 130
zoos and menageries, 157–58
cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature
and culture
General editor
Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge
Titles published
1. The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill
miriam bailin, Washington University
2. Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age
edited by donald e. hall, California State University, Northridge
3. Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics
in Early Victorian Literature and Art
herbert sussman, Northeastern University, Boston
4. Byron and the Victorians
andrew elfenbein, University of Minnesota
5. Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British
Publishing and Reading Practices
edited by john o. jordan, University of California, Santa Cruz
and robert l. patten, Rice University, Houston
6. Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry
lindsay smith, University of Sussex
7. Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology
sally shuttleworth, University of Sheffield
8. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle
kelly hurley, University of Colorado at Boulder
9. Rereading Walter Pater
william f. shuter, Eastern Michigan University
10. Remaking Queen Victoria
edited by margaret homans, Yale University
and adrienne munich, State University of New York, Stony Brook
11. Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels
pamela k. gilbert, University of Florida
12. Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature
alison byerly, Middlebury College, Vermont
13. Literary Culture and the Pacific
vanessa smith, University of Sydney
14. Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel: Women, Work and Home
monica f. cohen
15. Victorian Renovations of the Novel: Narrative Annexes and the
Boundaries of Representation
suzanne keen, Washington and Lee University, Virginia
16. Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance
and the Galatea Myth
gail marshall, University of Leeds
17. Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction
and the Anxiety of Origin
carolyn dever, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
18. Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Blood
Relations from Edgeworth to Hardy
sophie gilmartin, Royal Holloway, University of London
19. Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre
deborah vlock
20. After Dickens: Reading, Adaptation
and Performance
john glavin, Georgetown University, Washington DC
21. Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question
edited by nicola diane thompson, Kingston University, London
22. Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry
matthew campbell, University of Sheffield
23. Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire: Public Discourse
and the Boer War
paula m. krebs, Wheaton College, Massachusetts
24. Ruskin’s God
michael wheeler, University of Southampton
25. Dickens and the Daughter of the House
hilary m. schor, University of Southern California
26. Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science
ronald r. thomas, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut
27. Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology
jan-melissa schramm, Trinity Hall, Cambridge
28. Victorian Writing about Risk:
Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World
elaine freedgood, University of Pennsylvania
29. Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in
Nineteenth-Century Culture
lucy hartley, University of Southampton
30. The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study
thad logan, Rice University, Houston
31. Aestheticism and Sexual Parody 1840–1940
dennis denisoff, Ryerson University, Toronto
32. Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920
pamela thurschwell, University College London
33. Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature
nicola bown, Birkbeck, University of London
34. George Eliot and the British Empire
nancy henry The State University of New York, Binghamton
35. Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and
Christian Culture
cynthia scheinberg, Mills College, California
36. Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body
anna krugovoy silver, Mercer University, Georgia
37. Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust
ann gaylin, Yale University
38. Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860
anna johnston, University of Tasmania
39. London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914
matt cook, Keele University
40. Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian
Britain and Ireland
gordon bigelow, Rhodes College, Tennessee
41. Gender and the Victorian Periodical
hilary fraser, Birkbeck, University of London
judith johnston and stephanie green, University of Western Australia
42. The Victorian Supernatural
edited by nicola bown, Birkbeck, University of London
carolyn burdett, London Metropolitan University
and pamela thurschwell, University College London
43. The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination
gautam chakravarty, University of Delhi
44. The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics and the People
ian haywood, Roehampton University of Surrey
45. Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of
Nature
geoffrey cantor, University of Leeds
gowan dawson, University of Leicester
graeme gooday, University of Leeds
richard noakes, University of Cambridge
sally shuttleworth, University of Sheffield
and jonathan r. topham, University of Leeds
46. Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain from Mary Shelley to
George Eliot
janis mclarren caldwell, Wake Forest University
47. The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf
edited by christine alexander, University of New South Wales
and juliet mcmaster, University of Alberta
48. From Dickens to Dracula: Gothic, Economics, and Victorian Fiction
gail turley houston, University of New Mexico
49. Voice and the Victorian Storyteller
ivan kreilkamp, University of Indiana
50. Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture
jonathan smith, University of Michigan-Dearborn
51. Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture
patrick r. o’malley, Georgetown University
52. Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain
simon dentith, University of Gloucestershire
53. Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal
helena michie, Rice University
54. The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture
nadia valman, University of Southampton
55. Ireland, India and Nationalism in
Nineteenth-Century Literature
julia wright, Dalhousie University
56. Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination
sally ledger, Birkbeck, University of London
57. Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability
gowan dawson, University of Leicester
58. ‘Michael Field’: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle
marion thain, University of Birmingham
59. Colonies, Cults and Evolution: Literature, Science and Culture in
Nineteenth-Century Writing
david amigoni, Keele University
60. Realism, Photography and Nineteenth-Century Fiction
daniel a. novak, Lousiana State University
61. Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic
World, 1780–1870
tim watson, University of Miami
62. The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History
michael sanders, University of Manchester
63. Literature and Dance in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Jane
Austen to the New Woman
cheryl wilson, Indiana University
64. Shakespeare and Victorian Women
gail marshall, Oxford Brookes University
65. The Tragi-Comedy of Victorian Fatherhood
valerie sanders, University of Hull
66. Darwin and the Memory of the Human: Evolution, Savages,
and South America
cannon schmitt, University of Toronto
67. From Sketch to Novel: The Development
of Victorian Fiction
amanpal garcha, Ohio State University
68. The Crimean War and the British Imagination
stefanie markovits, Yale University
69. Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction
jill l. matus, University of Toronto
70. Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s
nicholas daly, University College Dublin
71. Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision
in Victorian Literature and Science
srdjan smajić, Furman University
72. Satire in an Age of Realism
aaron matz, Scripps College, California
73. Thinking About Other People in Nineteenth-Century
British Writing
adela pinch, University of Michigan
74. Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination
katherine byrne, University of Ulster, Coleraine
75. Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth
Century: Visible City, Invisible World
tanya agathocleous, Hunter College, City University of New York
76. Women, Literature, and the Domesticated Landscape: England’s
Disciples of Flora, 1780–1870
judith w. page, University of Florida
elise l. smith, Millsaps College, Mississippi
77. Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society
sue zemka, University of Colorado
78. Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century
anne stiles, Washington State University
79. Picturing Reform in Victorian Britain
janice carlisle, Yale University
80. Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative
jan-melissa schramm, University of Cambridge
81. The Silver Fork Novel: Fashionable Fiction
in the Age of Reform
edward copeland, Pomona College, California
82. Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece
iain ross, Colchester Royal Grammar School
83. The Poetry of Victorian Scientists: Style, Science and Nonsense
daniel brown, University of Southampton
84. Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel
anne dewitt, Princeton Writing Program
85. China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined
ross g. forman, University of Warwick
86. Dickens’s Style
daniel tyler, University of Oxford
87. The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession
richard salmon, University of Leeds
88. Before George Eliot: Marian Evans and the Periodical Press
fionnuala dillane, University College Dublin
89. The Victorian Novel and the Space of Art: Fictional Form on Display
dehn gilmore, California Institute of Technology
90. George Eliot and Money: Economics, Ethics and Literature
dermot coleman, Independent Scholar
91. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood
in British Popular Literature, 1870–1914
bradley deane, University of Minnesota
92. Evolution and Victorian Culture
edited by bernard lightman, York University, Toronto
and bennett zon, University of Durham
93. Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination
allen macduffie, University of Texas, Austin
94. Popular Literature, Authorship and the Occult
in Late Victorian Britain
andrew mccann, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire
95. Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century:
Looking Like a Woman
hilary fraser Birkbeck, University of London
96. Relics of Death in Victorian Literature
and Culture
deborah lutz, Long Island University, C. W. Post Campus
97. The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City:
Paris, London, New York
nicholas daly, University College Dublin