Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century: Visible City, Invisible World (review)

In 1856, Henry Mayhew published an evocative urban portrait, “The World of London,” depicting the metropolis as a microcosm of the Earth’s “immense human family” (qtd. in Agathocleous xiii). Mayhew’s essay forms the opening gambit in Tanya Agathocleous’s study of global consciousness between 1850 and 1930. She contends that Mayhew’s portrait of the metropolis, which described London “as not only a world but the world,” is representative of the way in which realist writers employed London as a means “to apprehend global modernity” (xiv). For a diverse array of authors, she argues, the national capital served as a means for conceptualizing “the national and the global level simultaneously” (xv).

Agathocleous situates her study among the growing body of work that seeks to “transcend a focus on the nation and nationalism” (2). She does so by focusing on the evolution of a distinctive form of cosmopolitanism that emerged in writing about London from the 1850s onward. Agathocleous defines cosmopolitanism as a “discourse engaged in an internal dialectic between the symptoms of globalization and their critique,” and argues that urban realist authors articulated a distinctive sub-form of this discourse “wherein London was used as a way to comprehend global modernity” (3, 29). In the nineteenth century, writers first employed two representative modes borrowed from visual culture—“the sketch and the panorama”—which allowed them to shift easily from fragmentary to all-encompassing views of the urban milieu, creating accounts of London that melded the city and the world into a single field of vision. She calls this representative methodology “cosmopolitan realism” (xvi).

Agathocleous places the origins of cosmopolitan realism in the 1850s, specifically with the Great Exhibition of 1851, arguably the most significant moment of global consciousness in Victorian Britain. She argues that published accounts of the Exhibition created a collection of ideas about cosmopolitanism that would then be applied more generally to London until the end of the century. While representations of the world on display at the Crystal Palace veered between positive and deeply critical assessments of Britain’s relationship to other peoples and cultures, these accounts nevertheless shared an emphasis on totality that would be employed by future writers engaged in considering the possibilities cosmopolitanism offered as a political alternative in an age dominated by imperial competition. The diversity of perspectives the Exhibition evoked likewise exemplified the character of cosmopolitan realism as a discourse fraught with contradictions—as one that was “both utopian and dystopian in outlook”— a point Agathocleous stresses repeatedly throughout her study (xvi).

The remainder of the book is dedicated to examining subsequent works engaged in the “same epistemological project,” as it developed from the mid-nineteenth century to the early decades of the twentieth century (xix). Agathocleous charts this evolution in a careful analysis of four imaginative, but also potentially controversial, pairings of texts: William Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1850) and Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53), Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887) and Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima (1886), William Booth’s In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890) and William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925). The book concludes by considering the legacy of these works in postcolonial depictions of London, such as in Stephen Frears’s film Dirty Pretty Things (2002).

As this list suggests, a foundational element of Agathocleous’s larger argument involves rethinking the canon of British realism in terms of chronology, geography, and genre. Indeed, such an ecumenical definition of realism may be broader than some readers are willing to embrace. Nevertheless, by treating non-fiction and fiction, Romantic poetry and the modernist novel, and British and foreign-born authors within a single evolving field of discourse, Agathocleous makes the case for a definition of realist writing as fluid...