‘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.

The Melville Monument and the Shaping of the Scottish Metropolis

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 ◽  
pp. 105-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clarisse Godard Desmarest
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Grid Pattern ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Town ◽  
National Monument ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The City

AbstractThe Melville Monument, which stands at the centre of St Andrew's Square in Edinburgh, was erected between 1821 and 1823 in memory of the Tory statesman Henry Dundas, first Viscount Melville (1742–1811). The design for the monument, more than 150 ft tall, was provided by William Burn (1789–1870). The 15 ft statue of Dundas that stands on top, added in 1827, was carved by Robert Forrest (1789–1852), a Scottish sculptor from Lanarkshire, from a design by Francis Chantrey (1781–1841). The Melville Monument, imperial in character and context, is part of a series of highly visible monuments built in Edinburgh in the early nineteenth century to celebrate such figures as Horatio Nelson, Robert Burns, William Pitt, King George IV and the dead of the Napoleonic wars (National Monument). This article examines the commission and construction of the Melville Monument, and analyses the choice and significance of St Andrew's Square as a locus for commemoration. The monument is shown to be part of an emerging commitment to enhance the more picturesque qualities of the city, a reaction against the exaggerated formality of the first New Town and its grid pattern.

scholarly journals PLANNING OF PRIVATE GATED DEVELOPMENT: AN ANALYSIS OF GATED VS NON-GATED NEIGHBOURHOODS, CITY OF GURUGRAM, INDIA

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ajay Kaushik
Keyword(s):  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Spatial Configuration ◽  
Space Syntax ◽  
Gated Community ◽  
Neighbourhood Environment ◽  
Scholarly Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
Recent Trends ◽  
The City

The cities are expanding rapidly all over the world. India has also experienced this phenomenon and has continued the pace of growth. The recent trends in spatial growth of the cities are a new phenomenon in Indian urban landscape. The cities in India are witnessing development with the help of private developers for the last couple of decades. Being private properties these are by nature of exercising control have gates and boundaries. In scholarly literature these are called as Gated Community/Gated Development. Authors have argued them from various perspectives of anthropology, law, management and sociology etc. but very little has been discussed about their planning and morphology. Although, the rise of Gated Development is majorly attributed to the sense of fear and need for security, yet architects and urban designers, and even sociologist stress upon other methods to make the neighbourhoods secured. Hence the security aspects are not made part of the research here. The aspects of how these gated development impacts the perception of neighbourhood by residents is not touched upon. The paper discusses the distinction between the gated and non-gated neighbourhoods and also how residents perceive their neighbourhoods at large. For explaining this phenomenon, three neighbourhoods in the city of Gurugram in Haryana state in India have been identified as case study. These are identified on the basis of different morphological images that are identified. Space syntax and space cognition through sketch mapping is used for the analysis of the three neighbourhoods. The paper suggest that the continuity and connectivity of any spatial configuration is of utmost importance to make neighbourhood environment worthy of living life more socially connected.

Collected Letters of Sir George and Lady Beaumont to the Wordsworth Family, 1803-1829

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
National Gallery ◽  
Artistic Development ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Art ◽  
Personal Significance ◽  
Familial Relationship ◽  
History Of

This edition presents and contextualizes an archive of letters -- belonging to the Wordsworth Trust -- that reveal the creative and personal significance of the friendship between William Wordsworth and Sir George Beaumont. Beaumont is a key figure in the history of British Art. As well as being a respected amateur landscape painter, he was a prominent patron, collector, and co-founder of the National Gallery. Wordsworth described Beaumont’s friendship as one of the chief blessings of his life, and the letters reveal that the two men became collaborators as well as companions. In addition to documenting unique perspectives on social, political, and cultural events of the early nineteenth century (providing new contexts for reading Wordsworth’s mature poetry) the letters chart the progress of an increasingly intimate inter-familial relationship that included Lady Beaumont and Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth. The picture that emerges is of a coterie that—in influence, creativity, and affection—rivals Wordsworth’s more famous exchange with Coleridge in the 1790s. The edition includes an extended critical study of how Wordsworth and Beaumont helped shape one another’s work, tracing processes of mutual artistic development that involved not only a meeting of aristocratic refinement and rural simplicity, of a socialite and a lover of retirement, of a painter and a poet, but also an aesthetic rapprochement between neoclassical and romantic values, between the impulse to idealize and the desire to particularize.

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.

Community Resilience and Urban Planning during the Ninth-Century Maya Collapse: A Case Study from Actuncan, Belize

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
David W. Mixter
Keyword(s):  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Urban Centre ◽  
Ritual Space ◽  
Maya Collapse ◽  
The City

To remain in place in the immediate aftermath of the ninth-century Maya collapse, Maya groups employed various resilient strategies. In the absence of divine rulers, groups needed to renegotiate their forms of political authority and to reconsider the legitimizing role of religious institutions. This kind of negotiation happened first at the local level, where individual communities developed varied political and ideological solutions. At the community of Actuncan, located in the lower Mopan River valley of Belize, reorganization took place within the remains of a monumental urban centre built 1000 years before by the site's early rulers. I report on the changing configuration and use of Actuncan's urban landscape during the process of reorganization. These modifications included the construction of a new centre for political gatherings, the dismantling of old administrative buildings constructed by holy lords and the reuse of the site's oldest ritual space. These developments split the city into distinct civic and ritual zones, paralleling the adoption of a new shared rule divorced from cosmological underpinnings. This case study provides an example of how broader societal resilience relies on adaptation at the local level.

scholarly journals ‘The radicals in these Reform times’: Politics, Grand juries, and Ireland’s Unbuilt Assize Courthouses, 1800–50

2015 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 109-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. Butler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Local Government ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
The Political ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Funding Sources ◽  
Architectural Development ◽  
Irish Case ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Do So

It is the aim, in this article, to identify the reasons why certain designs for courthouses in early-nineteenth-century Ireland remained unexecuted, and to do so by analysing surviving drawings and placing them in the political context at this time of Irish local government and of the efforts of Westminster politicians to institute reform. The funding and erection of courthouses were managed by grand juries, an archaic form of local government which gave few rights to smaller taxpayers and was widely perceived as an unaccountable institution associated with theancien régime. In addition to hosting court sittings, courthouses were used by these grand juries for their private meetings and functions. By exploring the agendas and pretensions of these bodies, and by looking at the fluctuating availability of funding sources that were needed to initiate building work, I will argue through a series of Irish case studies that a renewed focus on elite patronage and its associated politics allows a new insight into courthouse building, which places less emphasis than is often the case on, for example, the role played by the changing legal profession in the architectural development of the courthouse.In nineteenth-century Ireland, courthouses demarcated the visible and tangible presence in the urban landscape of the law and state-sanctioned justice. Laws passed by the Irish parliament and then, after its abolition in 1800, by the Westminster government, were enforced in assize courthouses by travelling judges on established ‘circuits’, visiting each city or county town twice a year (in the spring and summer). These judges travelled with great splendour through the countryside, and were welcomed by a high sheriff at the county border and escorted with military pageantry, ritual, and procession to their destination.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document