Mapping the Victorian Social Body

Preface

IN 1844, WHEN DICKENS’S young architect Martin Chuzzlewit visits America, he invests in Eden: “a most important place” which he knows only through a map, or, more precisely a plan. The plan shows “A flourishing city. . . . An architectural city, too! There were banks, churches, cathedrals, market-places, factories, hotels, stores, mansions, wharves; an exchange, a theatre; public buildings of all kinds, down to the office of the Eden Stinger, a daily journal; all faithfully depicted in the view before them” (Martin Chuzzlewit 355). Phiz’s illustration shows us Martin, entranced before the great plan, as his less educated but more sensible companion Mark looks on dubiously, and the con artist selling property in Eden laughs slyly at them both. Martin buys in, of course, and shortly thereafter arrives in “Eden”—a swamp with a few “rotten and decayed” shacks in which most who have tried to build have died of fever (380). The illustration of his arrival, entitled “The Thriving City of Eden as it Appeared in Fact” pictures Martin seated before a tumbledown cabin, weeping. Three important themes emerge in this little comedy: the idealism of the young professional intent on building the more perfect society; the contrast between the ideal society of the future and present reality expressed in terms of order and commerce versus disorder and disease; and finally, the importance of visual representation in picturing both that reality and the ideal. Here, it is the ideal which is “faithfully represented,” not the reality—it is, after all, a plan, not a map. But the mapping of the ideal gives form and credibility to Eden in part because it is the goal of the young Victorian professional to civilize savagery, to turn the disease-infested swamp into the modern architectural , or planned, city. This modern city is a place of production, commerce, amusement, and above all, civility, as public buildings and a newspaper complete the references to the flourishing public sphere of Eden. Sadly, this Eden is in fact unsalvageable, but its purgatorial qualities do lead to Martin’s salvation , as his selfishness and desire for easy glory in America give way to a more selfless and realistic commitment to sustained effort in Britain. xi P R E F A C E The figure of the map that appears in this vignette is an important one. As Lynda Nead points out, London’s modernity was “shaped by the forces of two urban principles: mapping and movement,” and the mapping had always as its goal the restoration or enhancement of that movement, usually figured as circulation (13). Sanitary mapping, such as that of sewerage, tended to figure the city as a body that could sicken (Nead 15). And the antimodern—the old, dirty slums of great cities—were figured as disease producing “Town Swamps,” as George Godwin, editor of The Builder, put it. As Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have argued, the nineteenth-century city is organized around the binaries of filth/cleanliness and the constant fear of their transgression , or contamination, resultant from desire (136). This fear “was articulated above all through the ‘body’ of the city,” which had to be surveyed to be controlled (Stallybrass and White 125–26). By the midcentury, this surveillance —equated with the very essence of civilization—was institutionalized in the mechanisms of sanitary inspection and had entered both literary and visual culture, the latter principally in the form of sanitary maps. The sanitary movement responded to overcrowding and epidemic disease by emphasizing the dangers of filth. Wastes were no longer simply byproducts of the life process, but animated and hostile filth that would, given the chance, attack the body itself. The body and its continence, which also modeled the boundaries of the middle-class individual self, could only be preserved through a careful policing of the abject and the closure of the boundaries of the body, through which contaminated or contaminating fluids should neither enter nor escape. By midcentury, the “lower bodily strata” of the city and its inhabitants that Stallybrass and White describe being identified with both sewage and underclass behaviors was increasingly thematized as disease and antimodernity, as health and modernity in turn came to be identified with a careful mapping and containment of the city’s (and citydwellers’) “guts.” Sanitary mapping both documented the horrors of the modern city and provided a template for its salvation through urban planning and reform. Both Martin’s optimism about the plans of Eden and his companion ’s skepticism refer to...