“THE GREATEST WONDER OF THE WORLD”: BRUNEL'S TUNNEL AND THE MEANINGS OF UNDERGROUND LONDON

2005 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 341-367 ◽  
Author(s):  
David L. Pike
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Significant Proportion ◽  
Railway Tunnel ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Urban Topography ◽  
East End ◽  
The City

THE EAST END OF LONDONwas not a common destination for the upper- or middle-class sightseer in the early nineteenth century. The requisite steamer ride down the Thames from London Bridge for the excursion out of the city to Greenwich would show, along the way, in the words of one tourist, “The Custom House and the Tower, the only prominent objects rising out of the dreary range of shabbiness which stretches along close to the water's edge” (Hawthorne 232–33). There was one exception to the habit of overlooking the East End: a significant proportion of the twenty-four million persons who passed through the Thames Tunnel between Wapping and Rotherhithe from 1827 to 1865 had indeed made the eastward excursion expressly for that purpose. Essential viewing at the time but little studied since, the history of the Thames Tunnel indicates the stakes and the consequences of remapping the urban topography of London during the era when middle-class tourism was being invented. Comprised of two 1200-foot-long arched passageways joined by a wall of open arches in an overall brickworked space of 22 1/2 feet high by 38 feet wide (Bobrick 58), the Tunnel was unique among the obligatory sights of the city in that it was also a practical thoroughfare employed as such almost wholly by the working classes. It was open twenty-four hours a day, and, as one visitor noted, it offered the unusual experience of emerging “in the midst of one of the most unintelligible, forlorn, and forsaken districts of London or the world” (Catlin 2: 112–13; qtd. in Altick 373), the docklands and slums of the East End. Through a half-century as a symbolic hub of London life from the years of its design and excavation (1824–43) to its conversion to a railway tunnel on the East London Line in 1869, the Thames Tunnel mobilized the tensions in the modernizing city between technological progress and social repression into a dense network of underground myths.

‘Otherwise in London’ or, the ‘Essence of Things’: Modernity and Estrangement in the Nineteenth-Century Cityscape

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35
Author(s):  
Julian Wolfreys
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Thomas De Quincey ◽  
Urban Centre ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Representation ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Writers of the early nineteenth century sought to find new ways of writing about the urban landscape when first confronted with the phenomena of London. The very nature of London's rapid growth, its unprecedented scale, and its mere difference from any other urban centre throughout the world marked it out as demanding a different register in prose and poetry. The condition of writing the city, of inventing a new writing for a new experience is explored by familiar texts of urban representation such as by Thomas De Quincey and William Wordsworth, as well as through less widely read authors such as Sarah Green, Pierce Egan, and Robert Southey, particularly his fictional Letters from England.

The National and the Universal

2020 ◽  
pp. 368-386
Author(s):  
Sarah Collins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Johann Gottfried Herder ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Respective Treatment ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines the continuities between the categories of the “national” and the “universal” in the nineteenth century. It construes these categories as interrelated efforts to create a “world” on various scales. The chapter explores the perceived role of music as a world-making medium within these discourses. It argues that the increased exposure to cultural difference and the interpretation of that cultural difference as distant in time and space shaped a conception of “humanity” in terms of a universal history of world cultures. The chapter reexamines those early nineteenth-century thinkers whose work became inextricably linked with the rise of exclusivist notions of nationalism in the late nineteenth century, such as Johann Gottfried Herder and John Stuart Mill. It draws from their respective treatment of music to recover their early commitment to universalizable principles and their view that the “world” is something that must be actively created rather than empirically observed.

Puccini's La Bohème

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Music Drama ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
La Boheme ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Many ◽  
The City

La bohème is one of the most frequently performed operas in the world. But how did it come to be so adored? Drawing on an extremely broad range of sources, Alexandra Wilson traces the opera’s rise to global fame. Although the work has been subjected to many hostile critiques, it swiftly achieved popular success through stage performances, recordings, and filmed versions. Wilson demonstrates how La bohème acquired even greater cultural influence as its music and dramatic themes began to be incorporated into pop songs, film soundtracks, musicals, and more. In this cultural history of Puccini’s opera, Wilson offers a fresh reading of a familiar work. La bohème was strikingly modern for the 1890s, she argues, in its approach to musical and dramatic realism and in flouting many of the conventions of the Italian operatic tradition. Considering the work within the context of the aesthetic, social, and political debates of its time, Wilson explores Puccini’s treatment of themes including gender, poverty, and nostalgia. She pays particular attention to La bohème’s representation of Paris, arguing that the opera was not only influenced by romantic mythologies surrounding the city but also helped shape them. Wilson concludes with a consideration of the many and varied approaches directors have taken to the staging of Puccini’s opera, including some that have reinvented the opera for a new age. This book is essential reading for anyone who has seen La bohème and wants to know more about its music, drama, and cultural contexts.

scholarly journals A Place Called Supermarket

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Elisabeth Goidanich ◽  
Carmen Rial
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
The City

Abstract: The objective of this study is to interpret supermarket stores as privileged spaces for the observation of social relations. The article is based on an ethnography of shopping conducted in the city of Florianópolis, Brazil, by observing middle class housewives during their daily shopping in supermarkets. These stores are seen as places, in opposition to that proposed by Augè (1995), who affirms that supermarkets are non-places produced by supermodernity. The article discusses the history of supermarkets, their role in the cultural and social transformations of the twentieth century, as well as ethnographic data, and shows that it is possible to identify many social interactions inside Brazilian supermarkets.

The Legacy of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians’

2019 ◽  
pp. 156-195
Author(s):  
Bill Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Student ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

The penultimate chapter looks at the longer-term impact of the efflorescence of evolutionary speculation in early-nineteenth-century Edinburgh on later generations of natural historians. First it examines the evangelical reaction against progressive models of the history of life and its role in the eclipse of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians.’ Next it examines to the evolutionary theory proposed by Robert Chambers in his anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) to assess its possible debt to the Edinburgh transformists of the 1820s and 1830s. Finally it turns to the important question of the possible influence of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians’ on Charles Darwin during his time as a medical student in Edinburgh in the years 1825 to 1827, during which period he rubbed shoulders with many of the key proponents of evolutionary ideas in the city.

The City Sketch

2021 ◽  
pp. 69-104
Author(s):  
John Evelev
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Dominant Mode ◽  
Lydia Maria Child ◽  
Margaret Fuller ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Urban Populations ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
City Life ◽  
The City

Although the picturesque sketch genre is primarily associated with rural subjects, it was also applied to city life during the mid-nineteenth century, when urban populations were undergoing unprecedented growth. Chapter 2 argues that the newly popular picturesque city sketch helped the emergent middle class to establish its identity as it attained a distinctive position between the wealthy and the working classes. Walking the streets, the middle-class picturesque city sketcher turned the class-divided city into picturesque tableaux that were far less antagonistic to city life than the sensationalist characterizations that were central to the dominant mode of city writing in midcentury. The chapter examines city sketches and fiction derived from the genre, written by Edgar Allan Poe, Lydia Maria Child, George “Gaslight” Foster, Margaret Fuller, Cornelius Mathews, and others. Although city sketchers helped articulate a middle-class identity, the picturesque at times tended to give way to a sublime mode in which the city crowd threatened to absorb the middle class into its undifferentiated mass.

The VC Office and the Concentration of Capital

2020 ◽  
pp. 104-139
Author(s):  
Sharon Zukin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Venture Capitalists ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Investment Funds ◽  
Bases Of Power ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Business Establishment ◽  
The City

Profiling New York–based venture capitalists and VC firms that have been established in the city since the early 2000s, the chapter examines their risky but privileged perch between Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Interviews with VCs are juxtaposed with the post–World War II history of venture capital as a distinctive form of investment and management. The VCs’ equally distinctive commitment to New York is then contrasted with the increasing geographical dispersal of their investment funds to other regions of the world. Meanwhile, the integration of some corporate and VC members of the tech “community” into New York’s business establishment suggests the formation of a local tech-financial elite, updating C. Wright Mills’s critique of the institutional bases of power.

scholarly journals XIX.—The City of Cumæ, and the recent Excavations there

Archaeologia ◽  
1858 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 316-334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur Ashpitel
Keyword(s):  
The Earth ◽  
Points Of Interest ◽  
The World ◽  
Great Poet ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

There is scarcely a district in the world endowed with such singular beauty, and possessing such deep points of interest, as that extending about ten or twelve miles westward from Naples. A sky of such brilliancy as only Italy can shew; a sea of colours like the transparent hues of the sapphire and emerald; mountains on land and mountainous islands rising from the sea twice and thrice the height of those in Wales, and crowned with snow for a third of the year. The air of extraordinary clearness and purity, and redolent with the odours of the myrtle, orange, and citron. The earth covered with rich crops of maize, the vine hanging in a cordage of festoons from tree to tree, huge groves of figs and olives twisted in every fantastic form, and interspersed with the feathery palm, forests of pine, leccio, and cypress, all form a scene of beauty difficult to describe. But how is the interest heightened when we reflect on the history of the spot! We are in the scene so exquisitely described by Virgil in the Æneid. Here are the Isles of the Sirens and of Circe, the Tomb of Misenus, the Grotto of the Sibyl, the mysterious River Cocytus, the Lake Avernus, and the Elysian Fields. Here, too, the great poet is supposed to have been interred. The heights are crowned with the remains of sumptuous villas, where Caesar, Crassus, Pompey, Lucullus, and Augustus feasted, and where Cicero penned his best philosophical works.

scholarly journals A Review of Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World

2008 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 946-973 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert C Allen
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Living Standards ◽  
Preventive Check ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

A Farewell to Alms advances striking claims about the economic history of the world. These include (1) the preindustrial world was in a Malthusian preventive check equilibrium, (2) living standards were unchanging and above subsistence for the last 100,000 years, (3) bad institutions were not the cause of economic backwardness, (4) successful economic growth was due to the spread of “middle class” values from the elite to the rest of society for “biological” reasons, (5) workers were the big gainers in the British Industrial Revolution, and (6) the absence of middle class values, for biological reasons, explains why most of the world is poor. The empirical support for these claims is examined, and all are questionable.

HISTÓRIA, PATRIMá”NIO E MEMÓRIA SENSáVEL: o Cais do Valongo no Rio de Janeiro

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (26) ◽  
pp. 98-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
MONICA LIMA
Keyword(s):  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
World Heritage ◽  
Heritage Site ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Pain And Suffering ◽  
The City

O artigo trata sobre aspectos que definem a importá¢ncia do sá­tio histórico e arqueológico Cais do Valongo, situado na cidade do Rio de Janeiro, para a história da escravização de africanos e seus descendentes nas Américas e, em especial, no Brasil. Além de ressaltar a relevá¢ncia desse bem, reconhecido em 2017 como Patrimônio Mundial pela UNESCO, também aborda o seu significado como sá­tio histórico de memória sensá­vel e lugar de memória do tráfico atlá¢ntico de africanos escravizados. Ao longo do texto, são abordadas ideias-chave, tais como passados sensá­veis, violência, dor e sofrimento em perspectiva histórica, indicando possibilidades de comparação com outros espaços no mundo, considerando tragédias humanas e conceitos utilizados nos estudos sobre esses processos. Finalmente, o texto analisa elementos em torno da história da região do Cais do Valongo como espaço de resistência e de afirmação das populações negras.Palavras-chave: Cais do Valongo. História da Escravidão. Passados Sensá­veis. Patrimônio Mundial. História dos africanos no Brasil.HISTORY, PATRIMONY AND SENSITIVE MEMORY:  the Pier of Valongo in Rio de JaneiroAbstract: The article deals with aspects that define the importance of the historical and archaelogical site of Valongo Wharf, located in the city of Rio de Janeiro, for the history of enslavement of Africans and their descendants in the Americas and especially in Brazil. In addition to highlighting the relevance of this property, recognized in 2017 as a Worl Heritage Site by UNESCO, it also addresses its significance as a historical site of sensitive memory and a place of memory for the Atlantic traffic of enslaved Africans. Throughout the text, key ideas such as sensitive past, violence, pain and suffering are discussed in historical perspective, which indicates possibilities of comparison with other spaces in the world, considering human tragedies and concepts used in the studies on these processes. Finally, the text analyzes other elements around the history of the Valongo Wharf region as space of resistance and affirmation of the black populations.Keywords: Valongo Wharf. History of Slavery. Sensitive Pasts. World Heritage. History of Africans in Brazil.HISTORIA, PATRIMONIO Y MEMORIA SENSIBLE:  el Cais do Valongo en Rá­o de JaneiroResumen: El artá­culo trata sobre aspectos que definen la importancia del sitio histórico y arqueológico Cais do Valongo, situado en la ciudad de Rá­o de Janeiro, para la historia de la esclavización de africanos y sus descendientes en las Américas y, en especial, en Brasil. Además de resaltar la relevancia de ese bien, reconocido en 2017 como Patrimonio Mundial por la UNESCO, también aborda su significado como sitio histórico de memoria sensible y lugar de memoria de la trata atlántica de africanos esclavizados. A lo largo del texto, se abordan ideas clave, tales como pasados sensibles, violencia, dolor y sufrimiento en perspectiva histórica, indicando posibilidades de comparación con otros espacios en el mundo y considerando tragedias humanas y conceptos utilizados en los estudios sobre esos procesos. Finalmente, el texto analiza elementos en torno a la historia de la región del Cais do Valongo como espacio de resistencia y de afirmación de las poblaciones negras.Palabras clave:  Muelle de Valongo. Historia de la Esclavitud. Pasados Sensibles. Patrimonio Mundial. Historia de los africanos en Brasil.

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