Conceiving the City : London, Literature, and Art 1870-1914

Conceiving the City is an innovative study of the ways in which a generation of late-Victorian novelists, poets, painters, and theoreticians attempted to represent London in literature and art. Breaking away from the language and style of Dickens and the static panorama paintings of William Powell Frith, major figures such as Henry James and J. M. Whistler, and, crucially, less-celebrated authors such as Arthur Machen, Edwin Pugh, and George Egerton bent realism into exciting new shapes. In the naturalism of George Gissing and Arthur Morrison, the fragmentary impressions of Ford Madox Ford, and the brooding mystery of Alvin Langdon Coburn's photogravures, London emerged as a focus for dynamic, explicitly modern art. Although many of these insights would be dismissed or at least downplayed by subsequent generations, the ideas evolved during the period from 1870 to 1914 anticipate not only the work of high modernists such as Eliot and Woolf, but also that of later urban theorists such as Foucault and de Certeau, and the novels and travelogues of contemporary London writers Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair. Nicholas Freeman recovers a sense of late-Victorian London as a subject for dynamic theoretical and aesthetic experiments, and shows, in stimulating analyses of Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, Arthur Symons, and others how much of our understanding of urban space we owe to eminent (and not so eminent) Victorian figures. Written in a clear and accessible style, the book restores a much-needed historical perspective to our engagement with the metropolis. ISBN-13: 9780199218189 Contents 10 List of Illustrations 12 Introduction: The Problem of London 14 Accumulating Impressions 14 The City of the World 17 Passing the Baton 32 Being Realistic 39 1. ‘Inclusion and Confusion’: Empiricist London 48 Fact versus Fiction 49 Dealing with Dickens (and Zola) 56 ‘A restricted number of natural facts’: London under the Microscope 60 Slumming It 67 Telling Tales 78 ‘O wot’ orrid langwidge’: Talking to the Cockneys 83 The Exact Knowledge of Sherlock Holmes 93 Stories without Ends 99 2. Shadows and Fog: Impressionist London 102 ‘The almost awful clarity of Henry James’ 102 Paternal Prompting 110 Floating like a Butterfly: Whistler 116 Impressionist Cityscapes 125 Imitating Whistler 131 Imitating Monet 142 ‘Fleeting and transitory things’: Speeding London 147 Towards the Within 156 3. ‘That untravell’d world’: Symbolist London 160 Doors in the Wall 160 Mysteries and Initiations 162 Fashioning the Symbol 183 Realist Veils 194 Phantasmagoria: The Street beyond the Street 209 An Immense Darkness 214 Afterword 219 Bibliography 223 Index 244 A 244 B 244 C 245 D 245 E 246 F 246 G 247 H 247 I 248 J 248 K 248 L 248 M 249 N 249 O 250 P 250 Q 250 R 250 S 251 T 251 U 252 V 252 W 252 Y 253 Z 253 Oxford University Press,USA Conceiving the City looks at how major writers and artists - Henry James, Monet, Whistler - as well as less familiar figures represented London in fiction, poetry, essays, and art. It shows that late-Victorian fin-de-si--egrave--;cle London emerged as a focus for dynamic, explicitly modern art as writers and artists broke with earlier tradition and bent realism into exciting new shapes, from naturalism to impressionism and symbolism. - ;Conceiving the City is an innovative study of the ways in which a generation of late-Victorian novelists, poets, painters, and theoreticians attempted to repre 'Conceiving the City' looks at how major writers and artists represented London in fiction, poetry, essays, and art. It shows that late-Victorian fin-de-siècle London emerged as a focus for dynamic, explicitly modern art as writers and artists broke with earlier tradition and bent realism into exciting new shapes