Unknown London:
Early Modernist Visions of the Metropolis, 1815–1845
General Editor: John Marriott
Consulting Editors: Masaie Matsumura and Judith Walkowitz
978 1 85196 730 8: 234x156mm: £495.00/$875.00
Unknown London is an anthology of literature and graphic illustration that effectively defined a formative moment in the history of the metropolis. Over the period from 1815 to 1845, a relatively small number of authors, playwrights and illustrators, working within a bohemian literary culture, attempted innovatively to grasp the complex totality of the metropolis. They drew contradictorily upon previous genres, but used radical new devices to define their object of inquiry, simultaneously laying the foundation for the writings of Charles Dickens, Henry Mayhew and their successors.
Works by Pierce Egan, George Smeeton, James Grant and W T Moncrieff in particular paved the way for early literary modernism. They inhabited a literary world increasingly concerned with opening the eyes of a new reading public to all levels of metropolitan life. Many of these authors experimented with the relationship between word and image, so establishing forms of pictorial realisation that became such an important feature of Victorian publishing. These factors contributed to widening the social range of the theatre, journalistic inquiry and the novel; specifically giving rise to the extraordinary output of ‘problem’ novels in the 1840s, the ascent of Dickens and the tradition of urban travel inspired by Mayhew.
This collection of rare texts, most of which have been unavailable for at least a century, will be of special interest to academic communities exploring nineteenth-century British culture, particularly around the metropolis. It will appeal, therefore, to urban, cultural, art, theatre and literary historians, as well as
Contents
Volume 1
Anon [John Badcock], The London Guide (1818), W T Moncrieff, Tom and Jerry (1821)
Volume 2
Pierce Egan, Life in London (1821)
Published after serialization in 1821, in many respects Life in London marked a transitional stage. Its depiction, for example, or the grotesque and exotic characters of metropolitan low life encountered on a tour by three young ‘bucks’ drew upon Elizabethan popular literature and eighteenth century successors, and yet its narrative devices and concerns anticipated much of the work of urban travellers and novelists, including Dickens, who had a copy in his library.
Volume 3
George Smeeton, Doings in London (1828)
Doings in London was among the most popular accounts to follow Egan. Smeeton launched a critical assault on Egan’s ‘fanciful tales’. But he could not escape totally the vision promoted by Egan. Thus, as with Egan, the reader was conducted around London by fictional travellers, but here the comic was displaced by critical inquiry supported by detailed statistics and extracts from contemporary reports
Volume 4
Jon Bee [John Badcock], A Living Picture of London (1828); George Cruikshank, Scraps and Sketches (1828–32); W T Moncrieff, The Heart of London (1830); Douglas Jerrold, Martha Willis (1831); George Cruikshank, My Sketch Book (1834–6); Robert Seymour, Seymour’s Humorous Sketches (1834)
Volume 5
Anon, 'Two Citizens of the World', How to Live in London (1828); George Cruikshank, Sunday in London (1833); Anon [John Duncombe], The Dens of London Exposed (1835); W. T. Moncrieff, Sam Weller (1837), W. T. Moncrieff, The Scamps of London (1843);
A C Campbell, The London Banker (1844)
The plates Cruikshank produced for Egan’s Life in London lacked the detailed observation of metropolitan low life evident in Rowlandson, but later he was also able to free himself from authorial influence to publish Scraps and Sketches (1828-32) and Sunday in London (1833). The satirical imagery that resulted did much to inspire and promote early modernist versions of the metropolis. Less than three years later his collaboration with Dickens had begun. John Duncombe, a leading figure in the small radical underworld of metropolitan journalism, laid claim to a new age of inquiry. His Dens of London Exposed (1835) dismissed Egan’s ‘by-gone piece of notoriety’, and embarked on an investigation of common lodging houses and thieves based on direct observation and faithful recording. How to Live in London (1828) was written out of duty by two ‘citizens of the world to describe some of the most eccentric and notorious persons’, the book combined contradictorily extracts from official reports with arguments that the reality of metropolitan life had given way to appearance.
Volume 6
James Grant, Sketches in London (1838)
A devout Calvinist and prolific journalist, Grant did as much as anyone to bring this to the attention of the reading public. Sketches in London (1828) was one of a number of collections of previously-published pieces that sought to reveal in an empirically reliable way information on the 'modern Babylon' that 'may prove instructive as well as amusing'.
Reviews
‘Whatever one’s realm of study, this set will prove an invaluable research tool for students and scholars alike in pursuit of some angle of the “hot” topic of the nineteenth-century metropolis.’
– Susan P Casteras, Nineteenth Century Studies
‘...by making this phase of urban literature more widely available, Unknown London puts in place a missing stepping stone on the path to understanding the modernist perspective. It deserves grateful notice.’
– Louis James, The Times Literary Supplement