Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City

144 Pages·1996·6.681 MB·English

by  Deborah Epstein Nord

Literature 1 Womens Studies
Lirerary rradirions of urban descriprion in rhe ninereenrh century revolve
around the figure of rhe srroller, a man who navigares and observes rhe
ciry streets with impuniry. Whether the stroller appears as fictional
character, literary persona, or the nameless, omnipresent narrator of
panoramic ficrion, he casts rhe woman of rhe srreers in a distinctive role.
She funcrions ar rimes as a double for rhe walker's marginal and alienared
self and ar orhers as connector and conraminanr, c.arrier of the literal and
symbolic diseases of modero urban life. Deborah Epsrein Nord explores
rhe way in which the female figure is used as a marker for social suffering,
poverty, and contagian in rexrs by De Quincey, Lamb, Pierce Egan, and
Dickens.
Whar, rhen, of rhe female walker and urban chronider? While rhe male
specraror enjoyed rhe abiliry ro see wirhour being seen, rhe female srroller
struggled to rranscend her role as urban spectacle and her associarion wirh
sexual rransgression. In novels, nonfiction, and poerry by Elizaberh
.G askell, Flora Trisran, Margarer Harkness, Amy Levy, Maud Pember
Reeves, Bearrice Webb, Heleo Bosanquet, and others, Nord locates rhe
tensions felr by rhe female specraror conscious of herself as borh observer
and observed: Finally, she considers the legacy of urban rambling and rhe
uses of ~ncogniro in rexrs by George Orwell and Virginia Woolf.
DEBORAH EPSTEIN NORD is Professor ofEnglish·ar Princeron
Universiry, where she also reaches in rhe Program in Women's Srudies. She
is the aurhor of The Apprenticeship ofBeatrice Webb (Cornell Paperbacks).
jacket illustration: George Cruikshank, "Seven Dials." From Charles Dickens,
Sketches by Boz (1839).
· Cornell Paperhacks
u ·
·>... .AJ·,,· ·'·~ -:. ,,, . • ...... -Corne1 1· ntverst· ty Press
~.;·.•~.b¡~:'.:~~. ~f''.'':,~i.':;;:
<;
..' .¿,_··.~ ,-_ .·. . ·. )., .¡v~);'" lljJIIfi/IUif/lrt//11·1 ·1·.. /1111 /1l/.f1f11 11!
~-··. f-·f¡ ...? *~")';f.< ~,. //,
11111111111 !Lil/¡ ilill/11111111
•,;,·t,,~ · ~~~:~ :·~ $~~- XOOOF282WH Us ed
..... Walking the Victorian Síreets: Women,
Representation, and the City
. jt:
~-
)~~-y.

WALKINGTHE
VICTORIAN STREETS
Women, Representation, and the City
Deborah Epstein Nord
Cornell University Press
lthaca and London
For Philip
Copyright © 1995 by Comell University
AH rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or
parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in
writing from the publisher. For information, address Comell University
Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.
First published 1995 by Comell University Press.
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nord, Deborah Epstein, 1949-
Walking the Victorian streets : women, representation, and the city 1 Deborah
Epstein Nord.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN o-8014-2392-g (alk. paper)
1. English fiction-19th century-History and criticism. 2. Women and litera
ture-England-History-19th century. 3· Feminism and literature-England
History-19th century. 4· Marginality, Social, in literature. 5· City and town life in
literature. 6. Moral conditions in literature. 7. Social problems in litera-
ture. 8. Prostitutes in literature. 9· Sex role in literature. 10. Mimesis in litera
ture. l. Title
PR878.W6N67 1995
823'.809352042-dc20 95-10932
@) The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements
of the American National Standard for Information Sciences
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39·48-1984.
Contents
List of Illustrations
ix
Acknowledgments
xi
Introduction: Rambling in the Nineteenth Century
I
PART ONE STROLLER'INfO NOVELIST
CHAPTER ONE The City as Theater: London in the 182os
I9
CHAPTER 1WO Sketches by Boz.:
The Middle-Class City and the Quarantine of Urban Suffering
49.
CHAPTER THREE ''Vitiated Air'':
The Polluted City and Female Sexuality in
Dombey and Son and Bleak House
BI
·o,)' \1,.\
viii
Contents
PART TWO FALLEN WOMEN
CHAPTER FOUR The Female Pariah:
Flora Tristan's London Prornenades
IIJ Illustrations
CHAPTER F1VE Elbowed in the Streets:
Exposure and Authority in Elizabeth Gaskell's Urban Fictions
I37
PART THREE NEW WOMEN
CHAPTER SIX "Neither Pairs Nor Odd":
Women, Urban Community, and Writing in the 188os
I8I
CHAPTER SEVEN The Female Social Investigator:
Figure I Thomas Shepherd, "The Quadrant and Part of Regent Street."
Matemalism, Feminism, and Women's Work
Thomas Shepherd and James Elmes, Metropolitan Improvements; or,
207
London in the Nineteenth Century (1827).
26
Conclusion: Esther Summerson's Veil
Figure 2 Thomas Shepherd, "Burlington Arcade, Piccadilly." Thomas
237
Shepherd and James Elmes, Metropolitan Improvements; or, London in
the Nineteenth Century (1827).
Bibliography
28
249
Figure 3 l. R. and G. Cruikshank, "Lowest 'LiJe in London. 'Tom,Jerry &
Logic, among the unsophisticated sons & daughters of nature at 'All
Index
Max' in the East." Pierce Egan~ LiJe in London (1821).
259
32
Figure 4 l. R. and G. Cruikshank, "Midnight. Tom &Jerry ata coffee
shop near the Olympic." Pierce Egan, Lije in London (1821).
34
Figure 5 l. R. and G. Cruikshank, "Bow Street. Tom &Jerry's sensibility
awakened at the pathetic tale of the elegant cyprian, the feeling
coachman, & the generous magistrate." Pierce Egan, LiJe in London
(1821).
47
Figure 6 George Cruikshank, "The Streets, Morning." Charles Dickens,
Sketches lJy Boz ( 1839) .
59
¡,
~
X tf·
lllustrations
~
f
Figure 7 George Cruikshank, ''Seven Dials.'' Charles Dickens, Sketches
by Boz {1839).
67 f
Figure 8 George Cruikshank, ''The Pawnbroker' s Shop. '' Charles Dick- t'
¡
ens, Sketches by Boz {1 839). - Acknowledgments
6g f[.
Figure 9 William M'Connell, "Two o'Ciock A.M.: The Tumstile of Wa f
!
terloo Bridge." George Augustus Sala, Twice Round the Clock; or the [
Hours ofthe Day and Night in London (1859).
78
Figure Io Hablot K. Browne, "A Chance Meeting." Charles Dickens,
Dombey and Son {1 848).
8g
Figure .I I Hablot K. Browne, "Florenc e and Edith on the Stairs."
Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son {1848).
9I
Figure I 2 Hablot K Browne, "Consecrated Ground." Charles Dickens,
Bleak House (1853). It is a great pleasure to be able to thank those who have supported and
inspired me through the years of writing this book. From one perspec
IOJ
tive the book had its origins in my years at the Society of Fellows at
Figure I 3 Hablot K Browne, "The Moming." Charles Dickens, Bleak
House {1853). Columbia University and in the courses I taught there as Heyman Fel
low in urban studies. From another, longer perspective it grew out of
ro8
my training as a student of Victorian studies, as a Dickensian, and as a
Figure I4 Eyre Crowe, "The Dinner Hour, Wigan" (1874). .-:
critic of nineteenth-century women's writing. The interdisciplinarity ';
I40
that "is intrinsic to both Victorian studies and feminist scholarship has
Figure IJ J. Bemard Partridge, "Odds and Ends." Amy Levy, A London
influenced my work in profound and lasting ways; and the centrality of
Plane-Tree and Other Verse (18go).
urban experience and representation to our understanding of the Vic
rg8
torian period shaped my interests and my thinking. The mark of two
Figure I 6 Gustave Doré, "London Charities." Gustave Doré and Blan
of my teachers-Steven Marcus and the late Ellen Moers-can be de
chardjerrold, London, A Pilgrimage (1872).
tected on many of the pages that follow.
2IO
The writing of this book coincided with my coming to Princeton
Figure I7 Hablot K. Browne, ''The Visit at the Brickmaker's.'' Charles
University and finding an academic home in the English department
Dickens, Bleak House (1853).
and the Program in Women's Studies there. Without the welcome and
2II
the support 1 have enjoyed in both, 1 doubt that this book would exist
Figure r8 'Jersey Dwellings, Ancoats, 1897."
in its current form-or, perhaps, that it would exist at all. I particularly
2IJ
thank Elaine Showalter, who invited me to Princeton as a visitor, and
Christine Stansell and members of the Women's Studies faculty, whose
graciousness and confidence in me helped make it possible for me to
stay. The friends and colleagues who have read or heard parts of the
manuscript and given invaluable advice include Joseph Boone, Dana
Brand, Patrick Brantlinger, Jerome Buckley, Dina Copelman, Deirdre .
d'Albertis, Laura Engelstein, Donald Gray, Olwen Hufton, UliKnoepfl-
, 1/./..'_.·.'L':r'·,·, •.t:•..=,.···::.·;·
xiii
xii
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments
Home and lts Dislocations in Nineteenth-Century France, edited by Suzanne
macher, Peter Mandler, Arno Mayer, Andrew Miller, Suzanne Nash,Jeff
Nash (Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 1993). Parts of "The
Nunokawa, Susan Pennybacker, Ellen Pollak, Ellen Ross, Bonnie Smith,
Urban Peripatetic: Spectator, Streetwalker, Woman Writer," an article
Judith Walkowitz, and anonymous readers at Signs and Comell Univer
that appeared in Nineteenth-Century Literature 46 ( 1991) , are dispersed
sity Press. Philip Collins put me on the trail of George Sala; Peter Kea
throughout this book and are reprinted by permission of the Regents
ting's Into Unknown England introduced me to Mary Higgs; and years
ago David Crew talk~d to me about Florence Bell. 1 also thank the of the U niversity of California, © 1991. 1 also thank the Manchester
City Art Galleries, the Manchester Central Library: Local Studies Unit,
students in my two graduate courses on the Victorian city for tolerating
and the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton
my hobbyhorses and adding their own insights and intelligence to our
University Librarles, for permission to reproduce works in their collec-
discussions. For listening to other kinds of obsessions 1 thank Maria
DiBattista, Ellen Pollak, and Chris Stansell. tions.
A grant from the American Council of Learned Societies helped in
D. E. N.
the very early stages of this project, and support from the Princeton
University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sci
ences buoyed me through its final stages. 1 have had wonderful re
search assistance over the years from Tova Perlmutter, Maria Davidis,
Anne-Lise Fran~ois, Julie Barmazel, and, above all, Lisa Sternlieb, who
helped with crucial aspects of research and with the selection of illus
trations. Beth Harrison and Barbara Gershen provided assistance in
moments of crisis and calm. John Blazejewski photographed the nine
teenth-<:entury materials 1 have used for illustrations. 1 also thank Laura
Moss Gottlieb for her superb work on the index and Carol Betsch for
overseeing the production ofthe manuscript with intelligence and care.
Bemhard Kendler of Comell University Press has been an encour
aging and stalw~t editor; 1 am grateful for bis support, bis patience,
and the occasional sardonic nudge. Each generation of my family has
contributed to the writing of this book in ways both direct and indirect.
The knowledge of my mother's unflagging support of my work and of
the personal decisions 1 have made has been a rare and precious gift.
Both my mother and my brother, Jeremy, stand as inspiriting models
of determination and character. My children, Joseph and David, have
provided the distractions of joy which, 1 hope, find their way back into
m y work. . Finally, 1. dedicat e this book to m y husband, Philip, who has
listened endlessly, edited with alacrity, made me laugh, kept faith, and
been my partner in all things.
An earlier version of Chapter 6 appeared under the title "'Neither
Pairs Nor Odd': Female Community in Late Nineteenth-Century Lon
don" (Summer 1990) in Signs and is reprinted here by permission of
the University of Chicago Press (© 1990 by the University of Chicago.
All rights reserved). Chapter 4 appeared in slightly different form in
Introduction:
Rambling in the
Yet perception of the new qualities of the modem city had been asso r
t Nineteenth Century
ciated, from the beginning, with a man walking, as if alone, in its
streets.
f
¡r
-Raymond Williams, The Country and the City
Who are those fair creatures, neither chaperons nor chaperoned: those
"somebodies whom nobody knows," who elbow our wives and daugh 1
ters in the parks and promenades and rendez-vous of fashion?
t
t
- William Acton, Prostitution
I n the literature of the nineteenth-century city, the figure of the
Sometimes, when 1 have been walking in Gray' s lnn Road and seen one '
observer-the rambler, the stroller, the spectator, the flaneur-is
of those terrible old women that are so common there, the sense of 1
¡ a man. As Raymond Williams rightly remarks, the entire project of
agonised oneness with her that 1 have felt, that she was myself only under
representing and understanding the exhilarating and distressing new
different circumstances, has stricken me almost mad. r
¡ phenomenon of urban life began, in sorne important sense, with this
-Oiive Schreiner, letter to Karl Pearson, 1885 . [ figure of the lone man who walked with impunity, aplomb, and a pen
t
etrating gaze. He begins as a visible character in the urban sketch, a ;
¡
signature-like "Boz" or "Spec"- who is both authorial persona and
t
fictional actor on the city streets, and ends as the invisible but all-séeing
['
! novelist, effacing all of himself but his voice in the evocation of an
r urban panorama.1 He delineates the spaces of modemity, the public
realm of commerce and exchange, the alienation of the man in the
t
crowd, and the display and selling of all things. The novelist-spectator
V
¡; passes invisibly through the crowd and then behind the facades of
r
¡ buildings, extending what Williams, thinking primarily of Dickens, calls
a "potent and benignant hand, which takes off the housetops and
shows the shapes and phantoms" within.2 He discern~ the patterns of
1 Susan Buck-Morss writes, "The flaneur in capitalist society is a.fictional type; in fact,
he is a type who writes fiction." See Buck-Morss, "The Flaneur, the Sandwichman, and
the Whore: The Politics of Loitering," New German Critique 39 (Fall 1986): 111. "Boz"
is, of course, the name used by Dickens as urban spectator and sketch writer, and "Spec"
was Thackeray's pseudonym for a series of London travels and sketches published in
Punch in the 184os (see Chapter 2).
f 2 Raymond Wtlliams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973), p.
156.
3
2
Ramhling in the Nineteenth Century
Walking the Victorian Streets
alienated self, as an instrument of pleasure and a partner in urban
social relations that remain hidden to the uninitiated or the indifferent;
sprees, as a rhetorical and symbolic means of isolating and quarantin
he is investigator and theorist of poverty, disease, and class difference.
ing urban ills in the midst of an otherwise buoyant metropolis, or as
One of the major paradigms of urban spectatorship and observation
an agent of connection and contamination.
in the nineteenth century emerges as a dialectic between alienation
H the rambler was a man, and if one of the primary tropes of his
and contagion, between the sometimes liberating and sometimes dis
urban description was the woman of the streets, could there have been
turbing sense that the crowd is distant, unknown, and unreadable and
a Jemale spectator or a vision of the urban panorama crafted by a female
the anxiety that proximity to the crowd puts the spectator in dangerous
imagination? And if such a vision were possible, under what conditions
contact with contamination and taint. The literature of rambling, the
and with what distinctive features might it have been created? These
urban sketch, and the culture of bohemia fed on the exhilaration of
are questions of history, about who was on the street in which urban
disconnection and anonymity, of being, as Walter Benjamin writes, ''at
neighborhoods and at what times of day and night, and questions of
the margin, of the great city as of the bourgeois class. "3 The detach
representation, about the cultural meanings ascribed to men and
ment of the marginal man, the artist, gave him the status of stranger
women in the context of urban literature and analysis. Social historians
and fostered his identification-although not necessarily his sympa
have begun to tell us about the public lives of women during the last
thy-with the outcast, the pariah. For the bourgeois novelist-for Dick
decades of the nineteenth century, when they began to move about the
ens, and for Victor Hugo as contrasted with Baudelaire-the city could
city with sorne freedom, but it remains difficult to track the street lives
be read as a place of coincidence, unseen connection, and imminent
ofwomen in the 184os, 185os, and 1.86os except through memoirs and
contagion.4 The novel itself, unlike the sketch, made manifest in its
fiction. We have the overwhelming sense, however, that women alone
very structure pattems of relationship and. alliance; it incorporated into 6
on the street in the mid-nineteenth-century city were considered to be,
the world of the familiar what might in other forms have remained
as one American historian has put it, "either endangered or danger
exotic or ephemeral. The novelist-spectator took on the task of repre
ous."7 Martha Vicinus asserts that, even late in the century, a "lady was
senting the poor and the outcast as features of middle-dass experience
simply not supposed to be seen aimlessly wandering the streets in the
and of illustrating the invasion of disease and disgrace into the bornes
evening or eating alone."8 Virginia Woolf's middle-class Pargiter sisters,
of the respectable.
At the very center of this dialectic stood the figure of the fallen
Recent historical works that recover the urban experiences of nineteenth-century
6
woman, the woman of the streets. Her role in the evocation of the women indude: Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1918 (New
nineteenth-<:entury city, from Charles Lamb's "London-with-the-many York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Com
munity for Single Women, 185o-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); and
sins .. , City abounding in whores" to the high-capitalist London of
Judith R Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Vutorian
Mrs. Warren s Profession, established the particular sexual politics of ur London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Mary Ryan's Women in Public Places:
Between Banners and Ballots, 182 5-1 88o (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990);
ban spectatorship and helped to shape narratives of urban experience
and Christine Stansell's City oJWomen: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-186o (New York:
throughout the period.5 An inquiry into the masculinity of the spectator Alfred A Knopf, 1986), are invaluable works about the American scene which also shed
and into the role of woman as either spectacle or player on the ram light on Britain.
bler's stage suggests that the fallen woman's meaning was by no means 7 Ryan, Women in Public Places, p. 86.
Vicinus, lndependent Women, p. 297. The question of the presence of working women
8
monolithic. She could stand variously as an emblem of social suffering on the streets has to be addressed in a slightly different manner. A rich source is the
or debasement, as a projection of or analogue to the male stroller's diary of Arthur Munby, who described London Bridge in 1861 as "the great thoroughfare
for young working women and girls." He writes: "One meets them at every step: young
women carrying large bundles of umbrella frames borne to be covered; young women
3 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans.
carrying cages full of hats, which yet want the silk and the binding, coster-girls often dirty
Harry Zohn (London: New Left Books, 1973), p. 170.
and sordid, going to fill their empty baskets, and above all female sack-makers." Given
4 Benjamin distinguishes between Baudelaire, the flaneur, and Hugo, the citoyen, who
Munby's sexual interest in working women, bis description is not devoid of the eroticizing
celebrated the crowd as hero and placed himself comfortably within it (ibid., p. 66).
gaze of the male spectator, despite its evocation of a mundane and quotidian scene. See
5 Lamb's phrase comes from a letter to Thomas Manning writt~n in November 1802. Derek Hudson, Munby, Man of Two Worlds: The Lije and Diaries of ArthurJ Munby, 1828-
See TheLettersofCharlesLamb, ed. E. V. Lucas (London:J. M. Dent, 1935), 1:223. George
s 1910 (London: John Murray, 1972), p. 99· For working women in the metropolis, see
Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren Projession was written in 1894.