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  • PrefaceRe-imagining the City
  • Gregory Dart

Now in no shape is any part of this treasure more visible to us, or more striking, than in that of a great metropolis. The present is nowhere so present: we see the latest marks of its hand. The past is nowhere so traceable: we discover, step by step, the successive abodes of its generations.

Leigh Hunt, The Town (1848)

Historical geographers fix on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Romantic period in English studies, as the origin of the modern metropolis. David Clark, in his Urban Geography points to this period as the moment when the large conurbation characteristic of modern industrial society first emerged. City experience underwent a radical transformation at this time, a phenomenon that Jan de Vries has memorably referred to as 'the urbanisation of the cities'.

In Book VII of The Prelude the poet Wordsworth produced a trenchant critique of this phenomenon, a thoroughgoing rejection of life in the modern metropolis, and this has been a consistent focus for scholarly inquiry over the years, not least because it was felt to sum up the Romantic position more generally. But with the increased interest in more pro-urban (and urban-based) Romantics such as Leigh Hunt, Fanny Burney, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt and Mary Robinson, Wordsworth's 'blank confusion' no longer has the same authority. The attitude of Romantic writers to the city, we now realize, was rich and various; enthusiastic and forward-looking in some cases, anxious and nostalgic in others. Far from being based upon a simple emotional opposition between the old and the new, responses often reflected a complex dialectical relationship between the two, as in the Leigh Hunt extract quoted above, where the great metropolis is defined as that space in which the present and the past are most vibrantly and simultaneously themselves.

The vigorous debate within Romanticism in the last decade on the representation of the city, and of London especially, has informed much of the thinking on this Special Issue. Recent contributions to the field such as Romantic Metropolis, James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin's Oxford collection of 2005, have been a marked influence, as have the multi-volume Pickering anthologies Parodies of the Romantic Age (1998) and Unknown London (2000), not to mention Celina Fox's now classic compendium London – World City, 1800–1840 (1992). [End Page 5]

That said, there are a few traits in the present collection that might be seen to distinguish it. The first is a marked preference for viewing Romantic period culture from the perspective afforded by the long eighteenth century, an approach that places as much emphasis on the continuities between the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century as it does on the contrasts. In both of the first two essays, by Judith Hawley and Alison O'Byrne, the centre of attention is on the stubborn survival and slow modification of Augustan modes of representing the city right through to the Regency period. O'Byrne's piece on texts of urban pedestrianism shows how politeness manuals slowly mutated into survival handbooks; Hawley's on Scriblerian satire shows how Grub Street slipped gradually from being a social and geographical reality to an abstract idea. In Leya Landau's essay on the city in women's fiction the main focus is on the subtle shift towards a more cosmopolitan, devolutionary perspective as one moves from Evelina (1778) to Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) and The Wanderer (1814).

The second thing these essays have in common is a comparative lack of interest in relating their inquiries to debates about Romanticism or the Romantic canon. In Richard Hamblyn's essay on the reconstruction of Lisbon the parallels with the gothic fiction of the period are undoubtedly suggestive – but Hamblyn refuses to let The Monk waylay him. His main concern throughout is to chart the emergence of a secular, commercial and antiseismic city from the rubble of a god-fearing, despotic and precarious one. He then goes on to show how the earthquake metaphor was used by early nineteenth-century visitors to the city as a potent invocation of the dark forces still felt to be lurking beneath its surface...

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