Sewers, Wood Engraving and the Sublime: Picturing London's Main Drainage System in the Illustrated London News, 1859-62

During the 1860s London's infrastructure was physically transformed. The building of a vast new main drainage system, designed by the engineer Joseph Bazalgette (1819–1891), was but one gigantic work among many begun in this decade, including the Metropolitan Underground Railway (from 1860), the Thames Embankment, containing part of the main drainage (from 1862), the London, Chatham and Dover railway (also from 1862), and new street improvements such as the Holborn Viaduct (1866– 69). Such building works brought chaos to the streets of the city as well as pervasive spectacles of both excavation and ruination, translated into a wide variety of imagery that filled the pages of London's illustrated press.

This paper considers press responses in the early 1860s to the construction of the main drainage system. It will focus on wood engravings in The Illustrated London News (ILN), which gave by far the most extensive visual coverage of the project, but will also make comparisons with responses in other newspapers, illustrated and otherwise. The paper will investigate how the concept of the sublime relates to these images of the construction of the main drainage system and will assess how the nature of this relationship shifts according to the differing content and context of the engravings. If the sublime was an effective aesthetic tool for celebrating the project, it also provided a vehicle for the more disturbing experience of the destructive nature of the construction process itself, both of which were brought together in the particular medium of wood engraving. My reading of the sublime will therefore draw attention to a number of considerations: the subject matter being depicted and its dramatic effect; the particular agenda of the ILN and its attitude towards wood engraving; the technical characteristics of wood engraving as a distinct medium; and the relationship between image and text in the pages of the newspaper. What I suggest is that if one reads these images as sublime, then this sublimity cannot be interpreted solely in aesthetic terms: rather, these images should be read as embodiments of different and shifting "sublimes", the precise nature of which reflects the particular context and content of the individual wood engravings.

The focus of this paper contrasts sharply with previous discussion of these images. Stephen Halliday's The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis (1999) includes reproductions of some of the engravings from the ILN, but the author gives them no specific analysis, rather employing them solely to illustrate an historical account (85–101). More recently, the cultural historian Lynda Nead, in a section describing the construction of the main drainage system in Victorian Babylon – People, Streets and Images of Nineteenth-Century London (2000), draws attention to the ambivalence of press responses but also gives little attention to the wood engravings themselves (23–24). This paper will instead focus squarely on the images, drawing attention to their specific contexts and interpretive possibilities.

The structure of the essay will be as follows: the paper will first briefly outline how the concept of the sublime came to be associated with images of industrial forms in the early- to mid-nineteenth century and will go on to consider how the ILN appropriated such ideas in its illustrations. By focusing on an early example of a wood-engraved image of a sewer excavation, published by the ILN in 1845, this paper will introduce questions that will inform its subsequent analysis of the newspaper's coverage of the building of the main drainage system in the 1860s. By making a distinction between the presentation (or rhetoric) and reception (or experience) of the main drainage system, the paper will assess how the sublime relates to the varied imagery produced by the ILN that documented the construction process. On the one hand the...