The City of London, Real and Unreal

The abstraction that accompanied the growing financialization of the Victorian economy required a reconceptualization of the geographical space at the center of that economy: the City of London. This essay traces how mid-century writers both mourned and helped advance the transformation of what had been a place of lived, affective experience into metaphor for commerce and a repository of public labor. Though the City's transformation from private to commercial space was far from complete, journalists and others during the period stressed the gradual expiration of the signifiers of private life and their replacement by a cultural graveyard given over to commerce, a space where the histories of individual experience gave way to the records of depersonalized labor that characterize the modern financial capital.