Architectural bodies and human surfaces: Locating the urban picturesque in Victorian London

Laura B Eidam, Purdue University

Abstract

The picturesque refers to the nineteenth century's leading aesthetic--one that rearranges landscapes to heighten variety and contrast and to prolong the viewer's pleasure. Though widely influential, its reputation as a carelessly applied cliché remains a roadblock to scholarship. Since the 1980s, literary critics and art historians have increasingly challenged this over-generalization, but without moving past it or considering new evidence in support of the alternative theory--that the picturesque became so complex that it now requires field-specific studies of each of its applications. In this dissertation, I argue that Victorian illustrations of London subvert picturesque techniques to critique their implicit dehumanizing perspective. As the industrial metropolis supplanted the countryside as the nation's quintessential landscape, the picturesque exchanged peasants for chimney sweeps and cottages for slums. Nowhere is this urbanization more vibrant than in illustrated picture books, novels, and guidebooks set in London. Victorian authors and illustrators differentiated themselves from earlier practitioners of the picturesque by elevating scenes of poverty to the focal point and enmeshing this subject matter in a discourse of indignation, sympathy, and altruism. These efforts to redeem the picturesque failed in the sense that they continued to objectify the poor as aesthetically pleasing. However, they also disprove the myth of the picturesque's degeneration into a meaningless term unrelated to eighteenth-century picturesque theory. Quite the contrary: authors and illustrators reinvented the picturesque to critique self-reflexively the class tensions, middle- and upper-class ways of viewing, and systems of poor relief that earlier practitioners sought to mask or idealize. As a critical component of popular print culture's representations of modern Victorian London, their illustrated texts deserve reconsideration specifically in light of the politics of the picturesque. Until now, studies of the urban picturesque have remained confined primarily to its manifestation in architecture, photography, or the fine arts set in the modern nineteenth- and twentieth-century city. I instead focus narrowly on illustrated and ekphrastic texts from the long nineteenth century--a scope that contributes to our understanding of the picturesque, as well as to urban and empathy studies. By attending to the urban picturesque's circulation in illustrated texts, I demonstrate that the aesthetic originated in the late eighteenth century with illustrated guidebooks and Gothic novels that respond to London's expansion and industrialization. Next, explicating influential Victorian illustrated texts–Vanity Fair (1847-48) and London: A Pilgrimage (1872)–allows me to assert both that authors and artists relied on the joint image-text to re-envision the picturesque as sympathetic to poverty and that this picturesque discourse held a widely influential role in Victorian visual culture. This dual thematic and chronological organization enables me to demonstrate that while the urban picturesque became an increasingly altruistic aesthetic as the long nineteenth century progressed, it remained flexible enough that individual authors and illustrators continued to experiment with variations sometimes more closely related to the picturesque of the 1770s and 1780s and sometimes radically experimental.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Allen, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Romance literature|British and Irish literature

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