The Printed Image in Early Modern London: Urban Space, Visual Representation, and Social Exchange by Joseph Monteyne (review)

237 JOSEPH MONTEYNE. The Printed Image in Early Modern London: Urban Space, Visual Representation, and Social Exchange . Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Pp. xvi ⫹286. $124.95. ‘‘Early Modern’’ in the title must be understood to mean that The Printed Image in Early Modern London examines printed images at one brief period in that epoch and not across the entire age: the book concentrates on London during the Restoration. Methodologically fresh and theoretically informed, it complements Anthony Griffith’s Print in Stuart Britain and Sheila O’Connell’s Popular Print in England 1550–1850 (not mentioned), as well as my own work on ephemeral images of transient people. It espouses prints created for what I would call a mass audience; the less expensive printed objects that ‘‘decorated coffee-houses and taverns’’ were ‘‘used’’ rather than ‘‘collected.’’ These images are distinct from those created for elite collectors and popular viewers —Hogarth’s Invasion: France and England was aimed at a mass audience, but his Harlot’s Progress was done for both elite and popular classes, two groups that are quite different but not easy to separate because they share some tastes and proclivities, but not others . More needs to be thought about the distinction between elite, popular, and mass consumers of graphic art. Though sometimes jargonistic, The Printed Image is sharply focused, examining how ‘‘appropriations and representations of space negotiated the boundaries of the social and political world of early modern Londoners, challenging an older subjectivity and more traditional forms of order that the restoration of monarchical rule struggled to reassert.’’ It looks at how prints depicted and propagandized threats to the flow of life in restoration London; Mr. Monteyne ’s book views images as interventions , polemics, reflections on, and politicized statements about, events from the apocalyptic to the festive. Though disruptive, some effects were cataclysmic ; others, carnivalesque or festive. The exception is the so-called ‘‘solemn mock progression of the pope,’’ in which an effigy of the pontiff, after being carried through the streets of the city, was ceremonially burned in a bonfire . More congruent with coffee houses, this event does not fit with the Great Fire, the Great Plague, and Frost Fair. Though carnivalesque, the evidence of its importance and even its occurrence (as Roger North describes it) is not entirely convincing. But this is a small matter in a book otherwise rich and rewarding . At the apocalyptic end of the spectrum of events, Mr. Monteyne looks at how images published in London represented the bubonic plague of 1665. His interest is chiefly in broadsides, such as John Dunstall and John Sellers’s Scenes of the Plague in London with Statistical Breakdown by Parish for the Years 1625, 1636, and 1665. Sheets like this are examples of a distinctive seventeenth -century genre providing an account of the city and the social practices of its inhabitants; they invite an examination of the link between print culture and urban movements and spaces as the social order broke down. But Mr. Monteyne examines the title pages and also the texts of Thomas Dekker’s A Rod for Run-awayes and Henry Petowe ’s The Countrie Ague: or London her Welcome Home to her Retired Chil- 238 dren. To definitively explore the most vital of contemporary issues raised by the plague, he unearths matters not fully broached before, scrutinizing, in depth, flight from and return to the city, the treatment of removed Londoners in the country, and the establishment and function of pesthouses. Writing about an equally apocalyptic event, Mr. Monteyne looks at how the London fire of 1666 threatened the identity and autonomy of the city and how this threat was mapped literally in contemporary cartography. After treating paintings of the city in flames by AngloDutch artists, he devotes most energy to maps of London by Wenceslaus Hollar and others. The Great Fire, like the Great Plague, created conflicts between the city center and its periphery that were visibly reflected in the art and literature . Prints and maps of the fire, which contrasted the glorious ‘‘before’’ with the dreadful ‘‘after,’’ ‘‘generated new visual conceptions of the city and urban space that foreshadowed the disappearance of an older London.’’ As well as foreshadowing, these widely...