William Blake, Charles Lamb, and Urban Antimodernity

Urban modernity has never had a single monolithic form, neither at the moment it first emerged nor any time since. The city is a site for the articulation and contestation of different modes of modernity. In the decades around the turn of the nineteenth century, we can see in the work of William Blake and Charles Lamb the articulation and institutionalization of what would become a familiar modern set of ways of surveying and governing London in the unilinear time of development; and, at the same time, an antagonistically different way of inhabiting and understanding what some at least take to be the multiple dissonant layers of urban space-time—an alternative way of thinking through the vertiginous dynamics, political possibilities, and forbidden promises of urban modernity.