Street Figures Victorian Urban Iconography
1. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 308. The epigraph to this section of text is from p. 41. [BACK]
2. Michael Steig, Dickens and Phiz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968). [BACK]
3. Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 185. The epigraph to this section of text is from p. 43. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. [BACK]
4. For a detailed account of the nineteenth-century perceptions of London's irregularity and the characterization of it as a "Provisional City," see Donald J. Olsen, The Growth of Victorian London (London: Penguin, 1979), esp. chapter 1, "A Topography of Values" (16-35). [BACK]
5. I have discussed one manifestation of this impulse toward monumentality for its own sake in "Remember The Téméraire! " in Victoria's Year: English Literature and Culture, 1837-1838 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 239-71. [BACK]
6. Stephen Bayley, The Albert Memorial: The Monument in Its Social and Architectural Context (London: Scholar Press, 1981), 100. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. [BACK]
7. Gavin Stamp and Colin Amery cite the original description of the memorial to suggest that the monument is at the "centre of the four quarters of the globe, 'and their production'" ( Victorian Buildings of London, 1837-1887 [London: Architectural Press, 1980], 74). [BACK]
8. The central imagery of the design connotes value. According to John Summerson, Gilbert Scott "explained it as a medieval shrine or reliquary magnified to the 'natural' scale of which such objects seem to be miniatures" ( The Architecture of Victorian London [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1976], 70). [BACK]
9. Here it is worth pointing out that Scott conceived the central arched space of the memorial as a modern version of a medieval reliquary, "the realization in an actual edifice, of the architectural design furnished by the metal-work shrines of the middle ages. Those exquisite productions of the goldsmith and the jeweller profess in nearly every instance to be models of architectural structures, yet no such structures exist" (quoted in Stamp and Amery, 73). [BACK]
10. Kenneth Clark regards these figures as proof of the pure philistinism" of the memorial: it "has always appealed in the same degree to the same class of people—the people who like a monument to be large and expensive-looking, and to show much easily understood sculpture, preferably of animals" ( The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste [New York: Harper and Row, 1962], 189). Robert Furneaux Jordan observes that "the iconography, the literal representation of sentiment, the excess and the pathos are the Victorian aspects'' of the design ( Victorian Architecture [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966], 93). [BACK]
11. According to Olsen, Victorian London was understood first in relation to the model of Paris (56-59). [BACK]
12. For a different view of the development of photography, see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). [BACK]
13. The spelling of his name varies, as in Stephen White, John Thomson: A Window to the Orient (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985); and Street Life in London, text by Adolphe Smith, photographs by John Thompson (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969). White points out that Smith's own real name was Adolphe Smith Headingly (31). Subsequent citations of both Street Life and White's biography of Thomson are given parenthetically in the text. [BACK]
14. Roy Flukinger, The Formative Decades: Photography in Great Britain, 1839-1920 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), 83. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. [BACK]
15. Publisher's note to the 1969 reprint of Street Life in London . [BACK]
16. Alan Thomas speaks of the "simplicity and naturalness" of Thomson's images and of the photographer's "courage to be simple" ( Time in a Frame: Photography and the Nineteenth-Century Mind [New York: Schocken Books, 1977] 147). [BACK]
17. Both quotations are from White (9); in the first he quotes Thomson, The Straits of Malacca, Indo-China, and China, or Ten Years' Travels, Adventures, and Residence Abroad (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low, and Searle, 1875), 10. [BACK]
18. White, 40-41, quoting from "Three Pictures in Wong-nei-chung," China Magazine (August 1868): 52-56. [BACK]
19. I discuss some social dimensions of this ideology in Victoria's Year, 275-79. [BACK]
20. Beaumont Newhall observes that Thomson turned from his "pioneering photographic documentation" in Asia to photograph the London poor "in a similar spirit" ( The History of Photography [New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982], 103). [BACK]
21. Thomas Prasch, "Mirror Images: John Thomson's Photographic Projects in the Far East and the East End," paper delivered to the Indiana University Victorian Studies Club, December 1990, 15. I am grateful to Dr. Prasch for making his work available to me. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. [BACK]
22. Prasch (5-10) discusses the connections between Thomson's photographic representation of racial "types" and the classificatory practices of Victorian anthropology. [BACK]
23. Thomson, 135 ("Flying Dustmen"); the discussion of flooding appears in the section "Street Floods in Lambeth." [BACK]
24. Prasch points out (3-4) that Thomson's Asian documentaries look forward to the commercial progress of the people and places he photographed. [BACK]
25. Those "conditions"—as Raymond Williams would remind us—include the social and economic conditions that located the nineteenth-century city in a network encompassing the countryside of England and much of the rest of the world ( The Country and the City [New York: Oxford University Press, 1973], 278, passim). [BACK]
26. On the recurring Victorian image of the city as an unchartable foreign world, see F. S. Schwarzbach, "'Terra Incognita'—An Image of the City in English Literature, 1820-1855," Prose Studies 5, no. 1 (1982): 61-84. [BACK]