Victorian London

While the expansion of the London Underground coincided with that of the Indian Railways, an Indian psychogeography was quietly emerging in the marginal geographies of the Victorian imperial capital where Indian visitors, travellers, students and migrants gravitated. In their memoirs and chronicles, late-nineteenth-century travellers, Pothum Janakummah Ragaviah, Trailokyanath Mukharji, Fath Nawaz Jang, Behramji Malabari, G.P. Pillai, T.B. Pandian, among others, actively engaged with London’s railway spaces, where they found an access to architectural wonders and a platform for intracultural, transcultural and canonical mimicries to renegotiate their colonial subjectivity. New ways of seeing and recreating London’s railway spaces helped overcome colonial traumas and railway-led economic exploitation in the colony. While neighbourhoods around Baker Street, Bloomsbury and Belgravia assumed an Asiatic character, Indian memoirists learned to inhabit London in a typographical imagination, that this paper defines as Typogravia. Architectural, economic, artistic and literary consciousness overlapped in this typographical space to foreground an independent Indian aesthetic of travelling and selfhood, shaped around London’s railway spaces, which subtly but steadily drove India’s journey towards provincial autonomy.

MA thesis, shortlisted for the RIBA President's Award for Research in History. Subsequently published by RIBA.
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An architectural history of three anarchist social clubs, based in London between 1884 - 1914. Focuses on three clubs in particular: the Autonomie Club, the Berner Street IWMC and the Jubilee Club. Details the role of the clubs as refuges for European exiles fleeing the suppression of radical politics across the continent in latter half of the 19th century. Provides evidence and analysis of the representation of the clubs in the popular press, and contrasts it with the views of the anarchists themselves. Explores the contradictory impulses towards antagonism and respectability inherent to the design of the clubs. Contextualises the aesthetic politics of anarchism, arguing against a solely incidental reading of the club's use of derelict simplicity; drawing on the influence of nihilism and its rejection of artifice and appearances to explain its semiotic significance.  Concludes with an analysis of the gender politics of the Jubilee Street club, and their expression in the club architecture.

Summary of archaeological fieldwork on the Thames foreshore at Chelsea, London recording the remains of infrastructure features including piers/jetties, chalk barge beds, and a number of artefact scatters.

The fieldwork was supported by grants from the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology and the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester.

While Gottfried Semper’s time in London generally is considered to have been pivotal for his theoretical work, the impact of his associations at the School of Design has been appraised negatively. However, examination of thematically related lectures and writings by other protagonists of the Department of Science and Art exposes a number of concepts, references and rhetorical elements that Semper had in common with his colleagues. This paper presents examples of shared issues from the lectures of William Dyce, Owen Jones and Ralph Wornum to demonstrate that there is sound basis for re-evaluating the theoretical elements of Semper’s London oeuvre within the broader corpus of contemporary theories of design and ornament.

Title:
Bull’s-eye, Agency and the Species Divide in Oliver Twist: a Cur’s-Eye View

Abstract

Dickens’s satire of the 1834 Poor Law in Oliver Twist draws upon Victorian discourses of animality in a way that highlights contemporary understandings of the continuities and differences between human and animal behaviour. This chapter suggests that Sike’s dog, Bull’s-eye, is figure onto which the novel displaces a contradiction about inherited traits and social conditioning in the formation of character, a question that was at the heart of the New Poor Law and the decades-long debate about the status of the poor in England. While Bull’s-eye stands in for human traits and concerns, he also has an agentive role in novel’s diegesis and retains an animal recalcitrance that points to material practices and situated knowledges that cannot be accommodated within the confines of allegory.

Artigo que reproduz, com algumas alterações, partes da dissertação de mestrado, apresentada à Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de
Lisboa sob o título «“Jack, o Estripador” em Portugal (1888-2008)» defendida a dia 8 de Janeiro de 2009.

Excavation and building survey, related to the redevelopment of parts of Tottenham Court Road Underground Station by Crossrail Ltd, chart the history of food manufacturer Crosse and Blackwell in the Victorian and Edwardian periods until the 1922 move to Branston, Staffordshire. Operating from their 1838 premises in Soho Square, the company converted properties to the east for warehousing and factory space, enabling production of its food sauces, pickles, vinegar, jams and marmalades on a vast, industrial, scale. With a royal appointment and the innovative use of celebrity chefs, Crosse and Blackwell were able to dominate the domestic market and compete globally

This paper is an excerpt of 37/115 pages from a recently self published book on Amazon.

The Whitechapel legacy from the late 1880’s has conjured a vast number of solutions to many questions such as ‘Who was killed?’ and ‘Who was Jack?’. It is a classic cold case but one that regularly fails to include perspective, verified investigative techniques and logical deductive thinking. Much has been written about the district of Whitechapel but in considering the question of ‘Who was the killer?’, one must go back to the start and consider who was killed by the same person.

Life and living was hard in Whitechapel. Overcrowding, object poverty and illness were factors that inflicted the residents. It has been described as seedy and crime ridden, but Whitechapel was not alone as a London district to suffer these problems; and not every resident was regarded as poor. Whitechapel may have been viewed as a hard place to live, but before 1888, the district had deaths like any other but none as a result of homicide. Mortality rates were high but causes were recorded as natural, illness/disease, accidental or suicide. One night in August 1888 changed that…

‘Rewriting Whitechapel’s Legacy’ provides the opportunity to apply Behavioural Science to this lasting cold case and present an intelligent investigation of the events. One supported by techniques and evidence that identifies a new figure whose verified background makes him a very significant person. It provides answers to who was killed, who was Jack ‘in name’ and who was Jack ‘the person’.

The increasing numbers of urban poor and the unprecedented growth of Victorian London significantly altered the ways in which social and moral differentiations came to be written into the structure of the city in the late nineteenth century. In George Gissing and Arthur Morrison’s city, this paper argues, the ‘otherness’ and ‘isolation’ of the poor were explicitly identified and narrated through mapping poverty with a naturalistic representation of smaller spatial units within the borders of impoverished districts. Considering Charles Booth’s distinctive analysis of London as a physical structure in Labour and Life of the People (18891903), this article provides a comparative approach to the representation of urban poverty and slums in Gissing’s The Nether World (1889) and Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (1896) with an emphasis on physical boundaries, spatial segregation and naturalism. In these works, the outcast poor dwell in strongly classified spaces because of their difference; ...

The increasing numbers of urban poor and the unprecedented growth of Victorian London significantly altered the ways in which social and moral differentiations came to be written into the structure of the city in the late nineteenth century. In George Gissing and Arthur Morrison's city, this paper argues, the 'otherness' and 'isolation' of the poor were explicitly identified and narrated through mapping poverty with a naturalistic representation of smaller spatial units within the borders of impoverished districts. Considering Charles Booth's distinctive analysis of London as a physical structure in Labour and Life of the People (1889-1903), this article provides a comparative approach to the representation of urban poverty and slums in Gissing's The Nether World (1889) and Morrison's A Child of the Jago (1896) with an emphasis on physical boundaries, spatial segregation and naturalism. In these works, the outcast poor dwell in strongly classified spaces because of their difference; they are considered deviant and a threat to the structure of power in the metropolis, where an increasing consciousness of boundaries and of spatial order exists. Gissing's city is generally described as dull and monotonous, while Morrison's streets are full of grotesque and lively characters corrupted by socioeconomic conditions and trapped in East London.

Este trabajo explora el origen de la arquitectura del hotel de viajeros a la luz del concepto de 'casa' y, por extensión, de la arquitectura residencial y privada, convocando diversas tipologías de vivienda unifamiliar y, especialmente, el edificio de viviendas que prolifera con la ciudad burguesa del XIX. Se plantea a modo de introducción de un caso particular, el gallego, en el que los primeros hoteles aparecen en el último cuarto de aquel siglo sin otra referencia que la imagen y funciones del caserío preexistente.

This paper explores the origin of the architecture of travellers' inns in relation to the concept of 'home' and, by extension, residential and private buildings. These include different types of single-family homes and, in particular, the apartment buildings that are such a feature of the bourgeois cities of the 19th century. The paper is intended as an introduction to a specific case, that of Galicia, where the first hotels appeared in the last quarter of the century with no other reference point than the image and functions of existing homesteads.

The development of what Mayne and Lawrence (Urban History 26: 325–48, 1999) termed “ethnographic” approaches to studying nineteenth-century households and urban communities has gathered momentum in recent years. As such research agendas have taken hold and been applied to new contexts, so critiques, methodological developments, and new intellectual and theoretical currents, have provided opportunities to enhance and develop approaches. This article contributes to this on-going process. Drawing upon household archaeological research on Limehouse, a poor neighborhood in Victorian London, and inspired by the theoretical insights provided by the “new mobilities paradigm,” it aims to place “mobility” as a central and enabling intellectual framework for understanding the relationships between people, place, and poverty. Poor communities in nineteenth-century cities were undeniably mobile and transient. Historians and archaeologists have often regarded this mobility as an obstacle to studying everyday life in such contexts. However, examining temporal routines and geographical movements across a variety of time frames and geographical scales, this article argues that mobility is actually key to understanding urban life and an important mechanism for interpreting the fragmented material and documentary traces left by poor households in the nineteenth-century metropolis.

This paper traces the growth of working-class street markets in Victorian London and argues that they possessed the capacity to disrupt axiomatic narratives of liberal reform and commercial progress. It contends that accounts by slum writers (James Greenwood and George Gissing) and the visions of market reformers (Baroness Burdett Coutts and Arthur Cawston) sought to define the parameters of a proscribed sphere of informal commerce and to replace it with a sanitized, formal ideal. Rather than meekly fading away into obsolescence, however, street traders challenged these ‘static images’ in spaces like Whitecross Street market, which flourished on the frontiers of urban modernity.

Margaret Harkness’s In Darkest London has most often been read as social documentary. However, the lack of specific allusions to contemporary events, such as the London matchgirls’ strike, and the inclusion of highly symbolic and mysterious material in the form of dreams and religious imagery suggest that this text is more than simply reportage. In this paper I will argue that Harkness in fact constructs her tale of the East End as a philosophical exploration of the possibility – or impossibility – of attaining love in the city, whether that is love between individuals, or the abstract love of humanity necessary for social and religious missions. In this she made an important contribution to the contemporary debates of reformers and city social workers, many of whom veered between expressions of love and horror when discussing the London poor.
Harkness originally titled her novel, Captain Lobe: A Story of the Salvation Army. Her change of title not only recalls Booth’s In Darkest England, and the Way Out but also Stanley’s In Darkest Africa. Scholars have noted how nineteenth-century writers portray the London poor as a different race when they draw parallels between ‘darkest Africa’ and the East End. However, Harkness’s novel is less concerned with racializing the East Enders, and the new title serves to associate the novel with the wider missionary movement. Londoners – the incomprehensible crowd – become the missionaries’ ‘mass of heathenism’. The Salvation Army characters and other social workers in the East End are equated with foreign missionaries ministering to the infidels.
In this heathen environment love has been made impossible. Both love between individuals – in Christianity a route to God’s love – and family love – seen in the nineteenth century as a sign of a Godly society – are thwarted. Poverty and drunkenness lead to family breakdown, and one of the foreign missionary movement’s most emotive tropes, that of heathen infanticide, is invoked throughout the novel. Individuals are separated by great gulfs of understanding, irredeemable contrasts of ideology and even extreme physical difference. 
In response, Harkness presents her main characters as attempting to attain a different kind of love – a more abstract, and godly, love of humanity. Captain Lobe’s odd surname comes close to spelling the word ‘Love’; its failure by one letter suggests the impossibility of attaining this superhuman benevolence. The novel is striking in its ambivalence towards this central question. Even as Harkness’s characters voice hope that love can be achieved, ever present is the incomprehension separating the classes, which love and journalism do little to solve.

The ornate Queen Adelaide's Dispensary in Bethnal Green is a witness to the ravages of cholera, as well as the need for healthcare met by philanthropists ahead of the authorities. The former dispensary features on my philanthropic tour 'The Battle for Bethnal Green'.

Discussions of promenade concerts, at least in the United Kingdom, tend to run along one of two lines: either the format is emblematic of attempts to popularize classical music or (in the famous case of the Last Night of the BBC Proms) it is symptomatic of a contested cultural nationalism. An alternative line of inquiry is to consider promenade concerts as part of the built environment. Until 2010 the fountain at the Royal Albert Hall was a mainstay of musical promenading; it had been so for over a century and a half. Such fountains, often accompanied by potted plants and Arcadian décor, were said to cool the concert hall and freshen the air, especially when their sprinkles were supplemented with blocks of imported ice. They occupied a prominent place in a concert architecture that encouraged mobility and informality, drawing on a long tradition of outdoor promenading that had gradually moved indoors. The history of concert hall suggests that the promenade phenomenon constituted not...

This paper explores the deployment of flower missions, flower shows and window gardening in Victorian efforts to elevate the moral and material condition of London's working poor. It identifies three forms of botanical engagement – the moral, pedagogic and civic – that were key to understanding the use of flowers in this period. The construction of a ‘moral botany’ in the early nineteenth century popularised the notion that flowers could carry meaning beyond their ornamental value. This attribute was widely used by social reformers who employed flower shows as biopolitical and pedagogical instruments to discipline the desires, habits and behaviours of the working poor and their children; projects that were heavily gendered, placing responsibility for the moral defence of the family upon women. Floral reform movements at the civic level also worked within a racialised framing of ‘civilisation’ amidst late century fears of racial degeneration. This paper therefore argues for the political nature of plant life, drawing attention to the role of plants in the co-constitution of human worlds.

In 1882 Edmund Clarence Stedman, the American poet and critic who coined the term 'Victorian Poetry', noted in his perceptive essay 'Some London Poets' that 'London has always been a city of song.' 'A generation comes and goes,' he added, 'poetry is in and out of fashion; but London at no season is without its poets.'4 Written for the periodical Harper's New Monthly Magazine and with the purpose of keeping American readers abreast of London's modern schools of poetry, the essay focuses on the life and work of renowned and wellpublished poets and (often overlapping) poetic schools ranging from verse de societé that celebrated the spirit of London (Austin Dobson, Andrew Lang and Frederick Locker-Lampson) and the prominent dramatic genre (Richard H. Horne and Augusta Webster), to the Pre-Raphaelite school (most notably Christina Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne). To highlight the work of contemporary women poets such as Webster and Rossetti, it set out a lineage of women's poetry beginning with Letitia E. Landon and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and placed a newcomer to the world of poetry, A. Mary F. Robinson, at the front of both women's modern verse and a new generation of London-based (post-Pre-Raphaelite) aestheticist poets – most notably Arthur O'Shaughnessy, Philip Bourke Marston, Edmund Gosse and Swinburne – whose artistic sensibilities found inspiration, expression and publication in London.

This reflection on the loneliness of Ebenezer Scrooge's lodgings puts them in the context of office accommodation at the time. Such an angle restores to the arrival of Marley's ghost an appreciation of the horror of the moment.
http://footprintsoflondon.com/2017/09/scrooges-lonely-rooms/