Cities and Literature

Malcolm Miles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138219533
• eBook ISBN: 9781315414836
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers a critical introduction to the relation between cities and literature (fiction, poetry and literary criticism) from the late eighteenth to twenty-first centuries. It examines examples of writing from Europe, North America and post-colonial countries, juxtaposed with key ideas from urban cultural and critical theories.

Cities and Literature shows how literature frames real and imagined constructs and experiences of cities. Arranged thematically each chapter offers a narrative which introduces a number of key thinkers and writers whose vision illuminates the prevailing idea of the city at the time. The themes are extended or challenged by boxed cases of specific texts or images accompanied by short critical commentaries; the structure provides readers with a map of the terrain enabling connections across time and place within manageable limits, and offers elements of critical discussion to serve a growing number of university courses which involve the intersections of cities and literature.

This volume offers access to literature from an urban perspective for the social sciences, and access to urbanism from a literary viewpoint. It is an excellent resource for both undergraduate and postgraduate students in the fields of urban studies and English literature, planning, cultural and human geographies, architecture, cultural studies and cultural policy.

1 The city and the countryside

In this chapter I discuss the ambivalence of relations between the city and the countryside in literary representations from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries. I refer to the writing of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy and Emily Brontë, and to cases of Portuguese and German writing in which landscape reflects states of psyche. Generally, cities designate progress, for instance in the rational proportions of new buildings; but they become sites of decline as rapid growth, industrialisation and migration from rural areas produce dire and overcrowded conditions for the urban poor. This in turn produces an idealisation of the countryside, ranging from the pastoral image of the eighteenth-century landscaped park to a projection onto wild landscapes, such as the moors, of human passion in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). In North America, a philosophy of nature as a regained Eden informed the design of New York’s Central Park in the 1850s. Nature is framed in these cases according to perspectives deriving from cities; even agricultural land is an adaptation of natural growth, organised to produce the wealth from which new town houses were built.

Cities and rural areas are, then, interdependent, and from that point of departure I make two arguments: first, time is the dimension of change, epitomised by the Georgian terraces of London, Bath, Edinburgh, Dublin and other cities which make rural areas seem residual. Second, representations of both cities and rural areas are permeated by social distinctions, including those between classes but also within the rising middle classes. Literature reflects its readership, and Austen unpicks relations between the middle classes and the gentry as they become blurred by intermarriage, in Pride and Prejudice (1813).

Towards the end of the century, Hardy addresses the plight of the rural working class, part of his achievement being to give them a characterisation lacking in Austen’s writing. Now, two centuries after the publication of Pride and Prejudice, Jo Baker’s Longbourne (2013) re-tells Austen’s novel from the position of the servants. Baker is partisan but Austen is partisan too, in her use of female protagonists, and in taking the novel into a terrain of individual affections. Much of her narrative takes place in interiors, such as drawing rooms and ballrooms, in the orbit of elite society in cities and towns. Hardy, in contrast, reconstructs the landscape of rural Wessex. But alterity is also a form of relation, which brings me back to my initial point, confirmed by Raymond Williams in The Country and the City (1973), that there is no simple contrast between town and country.¹

I begin the chapter by discussing Longbourne’s re-telling of Pride and Prejudice. I do not give a critique of Austen’s work as such but note Austen’s use of interior spaces, and her concern for social nuances. From Baker I draw out references to progress in a carriage journey from the country to London. I move next to the refiguring of the land in English landscaped parks, and cite another journey – a privileged rite of passage – from Paris to a rural area in Portugal in Eça de Queíroz’ The City and the Mountains (1901). I turn to Georg Büchner’s Lenz (1835) with its use of mountain scenery to reflect mental derangement; and the wild landscape of the moors in Wuthering Heights. After that I reconsider Hardy’s realism in his early Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) and late Jude the Obscure (1895). Finally, I resume arguments around the city and the land from Williams’ The Country and the City (1973). In boxed cases I comment on a photograph of a ruined colossus of Ramesses II, perhaps the source for Shelley’s poem Ozymandias (1818); and cite Matthew Gandy’s account of the design of New York’s Central Park in Concrete and Clay (2002).

Longbourne

Longbourne is the Bennett family’s house in Hertfordshire in Pride and Prejudice; and the title of Baker’s retelling from the viewpoint of Sarah, a servant. Introducing a 1992 reprint of Pride and Prejudice, the editor says that Austen’s novels, ‘demonstrate the crude coercive power of society which is not just of her day, but … still exerts a powerful influence over social life’.² It does, but the question is who is included, and whether society is a construct representing elites – high society – or a term for, as Williams defines it, ‘the body of institutions and relationships within which a relatively large group of people live’.³ Austen reflects the distinction between house owners and servants by not giving the servants in Pride and Prejudice any characterisation or voice. Baker inverts class relations by giving them names and lives, to which the Bennetts now are adjunct. Both novels deal with gender, Austen’s by individualising a female protagonist, Elizabeth Bennett, and Baker’s by emphasising that most servants were women, required to work all hours, to clean steps and fireplaces by hand, and wash the family’s soiled underclothes.

Before discussing Longbourne I need to say a little about Austen and Pride and Prejudice. Writing in the Hampshire town of Chawton in the 1810s–1820s, daughter of a middle-class clergyman, Austen set her plots in the world she knew. Mr Bennett is a retired lawyer from Merytown, another small town. Mrs Bennett is preoccupied with marrying off her daughters to wealthy men, a necessity because Mr Bennett’s estate will be inherited by a cousin, the clergyman Mr Collins, as women are legally barred from inheritance. The Bennetts’ neighbour – ignoring any cottages in the way – is Mr Bingley at Netherfield Hall. Mr Bingley does not own the Hall but rents it, representing the rising upper-middle class, and has a London house as well.

Austen draws out the nuanced claims to status of the upper and middle ranks of the middle classes in a period of increasing intermarriage. Mrs Bennett entertains her brother, Mr Gardiner, and his wife at Christmas. He is, ‘gentlemanlike’ while the ladies of Netherfield Hall would have, ‘had difficulty in believing that a man who lived by trade, and within view of his own warehouses, could have been so well bred and agreeable’.⁴ Austen is sometimes ironic but living in view of his warehouses marks Mr Gardiner as a man of trade. At the same time, if trade is base, Austen does not mention that the gentry’s wealth derives from trade in slaves and sugar. Hearing of Mrs Bennett’s efforts to secure marriages for her daughters, Mrs Gardiner suggests that they accompany her to town. But distinctions apply there, too: ‘We live in so different a part of town, all our connections are so different, and, as you may well know, we go out so little’.⁵ Going out required invitations; and adherence to rigid conventions in conversation.

Longbourne dwells on another set of social distinctions. Early in the plot, after breakfast, a message for Elizabeth is received from Netherfield, brought by a black servant. In Pride and Prejudice he is not named and does not reappear. In Longbourne he is Ptolemy, a mulatto ex-slave employed by Mr Bingley. Sarah, the Bennett’s maid and protagonist of Longbourne, first meets him at Netherfield when she takes a reply. His eyes are as dark as coffee. She asks herself in inner monologue if he is what they call a black man even though he is brown and the Africans she has seen in an engraving are cross-hatched, half-naked and in chains. Ptolemy wears a smart livery denoting the status of his employer. Later, he tells Sarah that the Bingleys and their friend Mr Darcy, who is staying with them at Netherfield, are going to London; and he invites Sarah to visit him if she is in town, enforcing another distinction: the Bennetts have no town house. Sarah does go to London later, accompanying one of the Bennett daughters on a visit to a married sister in Kent, but does not call on Ptolemy. Descriptions of place in Pride and Prejudice are limited to interiors as settings for dialogue; but the journey to London in Longbourne enters a world of urban expansion. Trees and fields give way to the paved turnpike road and a toll – technological progress enabling faster travel, also a sign of centralisation since the new roads connected London to cities and ports throughout Britain. When the coach crosses the Thames, market gardens appear – another sign of progress in the intensive use of land for food production adjacent to the city. There are wagons and coaches; a fast mail coach overtakes them and they see houses in rows – Georgian terraces, contrasting to the unplanned, cumulative building of villages – but also beggars – possibly migrants dispossessed from the land by mechanisation – and dung. There are street cries, and the sounds of ironclad wheels and iron-shod hooves, the products of new industries and mobilities. When they arrive at the house which is their destination, its step scrubbed clean by a maid, a footman takes the horses and the party enters, seeing tall windows and two flights of stairs, one for the owners, the other for servants. Sarah sleeps in an attic where the blankets smell of previous occupants. Accompanying the ladies to the dentist the next morning she sees new squares and an unbuilt lot with only a cesspit dug.

Sarah marvels at the city, imagining herself in a smart London street, with its pavements and glowing windows, or in a warm and bright arcade. But her journeys are involuntary, planned for her, keeping her in her place in the underside of society. The city unsettles her. Later, she leaves the security of domestic service and makes a hazardous journey to Cumbria where … I will not give the end away.

Longbourne alludes to a difference between a residual countryside and the city as a kind of tomorrow, its planned terraces and paved streets replacing the informality of hedgerows and dirt tracks. There are also social differences: Merytown has Assembly Rooms where dances are held but in London the elite enjoy an annual season of balls. To own and maintain a London house was expensive, as Hannah Greig says in The Beau Monde, ‘Prestigious town houses demanded similarly prestigious furnishings, and their high-ranking occupants delighted in glittering adornment. Letters, household accounts, diaries, and bills affirm the staggering cost of maintaining a profile in fashionable London’.⁶ Greig writes on Georgian times, while Pride and Prejudice is set in the Regency when conspicuous consumption increased further, exacerbating the gulf between wealth and poverty, and with it the divide between owners and servants. As Antonia Fraser writes, closer relations pertained in seventeenth-century households, and dairymaids went alone to town markets where they danced and collected tips on Mayday.⁷ In Longbourne, Sarah claims independence only by leaving service.

The social and wealth divisions of the period were countered to an extent by reforms in the mid-century, in housing and education, for instances. Eq...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of boxes
• Introduction
• 1. The city and the countryside
• 2. Utopias
• 3. Dystopias
• 4. Metropolis
• 5. Bohemians and avant-gardes
• 6. Ruinscapes
• 7. Exile
• 8. Post-war
• 9. Alterities
• 10. Cosmopolitanisms
• Selected bibliography of critical (secondary) sources
• Index