An Exploration of the 1872 Edition of London: a Pilgrimage

“We are Wanderers”: An Exploration of the 1872 Edition of London: A Pilgrimage Anne Elizabeth Rowlenson Avon, Connecticut Bachelor of Arts, University of Virginia, 2014 A thesis presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Master of Arts Department of English University of Virginia May 2015 Abstract London: a Pilgrimage by Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Dore is a book about looking. By positioning the reader alongside the narrator as a kind of observer, flâneur, and “wanderer”, the book creates an environment in which reader derives pleasure from the act of gazing. Lavishly illustrated and advertised as a sumptuous gift for the holiday season, even the physical form of the 1872 edition demands a kind of pleasurable looking. This thesis will explore how the book both as a text and as a physical artifact enables a scopophilic view of the city of London and its inhabitants, ultimately moving towards a more modernist conception of urbanity. Table of Contents Introduction…………………………………………………………………….………….4 I. Liminality, Gaze, and Representation……………………….…………………….6 II. Genesis and Bibliographical Description………………………………......…….26 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………...…..45 Works Cited & Consulted………………………………………………………………..47 Appendix of Images……………………………………………………………………...51 4 Introduction Part objet d’art, part act of social journalism, London: a Pilgrimage paints a vivid portrait of Victorian London in all of its restlessness and complexity. Conceived in 1869, it is the result of a rather unlikely pairing of men: Blanchard Jerrold, a young English playwright and journalist, and Gustave Doré, the famous French illustrator. Jerrold, who had been inspired by a previous work entitled The Microcosm of London, approached Doré while the illustrator was visiting the newly opened Doré Gallery in New Bond Street in 1869 (Ackroyd xvii). The idea was ambitious: to create a fully illustrated book depicting the city of London. Seeking to situate their work within the field of social exploration, Jerrold and Doré referenced Henry Mayhew’s reformist journalistic series, London Labour and the London Poor. Jerrold claimed the book would reinterpret Mayhew’s categories of ‘those who work, those who cannot, [and] those who won’t work’ (Ghosh 91). The goal of the work was not simply to create a catalog of London’s various sights and social strata, but instead to allow the reader to encounter the “representative” scenes one might find in the city in order to complete the seemingly impossible task of conceptualizing the larger whole1. Doré’s images would serve not only to accompany, but also challenge and converse with, Jerrold’s text. The reader accompanies the narrator as he wanders the urban landscape: “We are pilgrims, wanderers, gipsy-loiterers in the great world of London—not historians” (Jerrold 1). London: A Pilgrimage does the important cultural work of depicting the city of London as it appeared to the Victorians. Yet, it has not achieved nearly the amount of recognition as might be expected. In its time, the work was popular mainly due to Doré’s 1 As Jerrold states in the preface, “it is impossible to put a world in a nut-shell” (Jerrold xxx). 5 fame, but has since tended to fall in the shadow of some of his more popular illustrated works such as Paradise Lost and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It has recently begun garnering more attention after being reprinted by Anthem Press with an introduction by Peter Ackroyd, completed with many of the original wood engravings. Increasingly, critics are beginning to view London2 not only as one of Gustave Doré’s many projects but also as an important work in its own right. Jerrold’s text, while largely panned by his contemporaries, is invaluable for its depiction of Victorian London. Not only does London depict real scenes of the city, but it also manages to capture the mythic and allegorical overtones of the city in the same portrait. In short, the book represents London through a textual and pictorial chorography, mapping the city through image and narration rather than traditional cartography. For Jerrold and Doré, the cultural work of London is to depict a dynamic social and mythic space rather than simply a collection of streets and buildings. The work accomplishes this by inviting the reader to look; it is, at its core, a book about looking. By positioning the reader alongside the narrator as a kind of tourist, flâneur, and “wanderer”, the book creates an environment in which reader becomes a voyeur who derives pleasure form the act of gazing. Lavishly illustrated and advertised as a sumptuous gift for the holiday season, even the physical form of the 1872 edition demands a kind of pleasurable looking. London gives us two different media3 through which to view the city in this physical form; both text and image afford us an opportunity to gaze at London and its inhabitants. This thesis will explore how the book both as a text and as a physical artifact encourages a scopophilic view of 2 I will refer to Jerrold and Doré’s work as London throughout this thesis for the sake of brevity. 3 According to Tanselle, “…inserted plates, if their content is visual rather than verbal, represent not merely a different medium of reproduction from the text but a different medium of expression as well” (Tanselle 2). 6 the city, ultimately moving towards a more modernist conception of city life. Part I will explore the content of London, and how it represents the city as straddling the ideal and the real through text and image. Part II will provide specific bibliographical information about the 1872 folio edition of the work in order to establish Jerrold’s original vision for London. For London: A Pilgrimage, the scopophilic mode is a means of unlocking the essence of the chorographic subject, empowering both observer and observed through an exchange of mutual looking. I: Liminality, Gaze, and Representation London is a book about looking. The reader gazes at the characters on the page, and the characters gaze back. In order to navigate the labyrinthine world of London the reader must learn to navigate the various modes of gaze and representation present throughout the illustrated text. Exaggeration, for example, becomes one of Doré’s modes of perceiving and conceptualizing Londoners. The “Bull Dogs” illustration (see fig. 1) is one of several small images peppered throughout the text that show individual Londoners who, though nameless, present their individual identities through caricature or exaggeration. Some of Doré’s larger engravings utilize a similar aesthetic; at times, the use of exaggeration verges on the grotesque, or magical realism. It is the reader’s task to separate the ideal from the real, the imaginary from the genuine. In a notable moment in the “Whitechapel and Thereabouts” chapter, Jerrold and Doré depict a scene in an opium 7 den inspired by the opening of Edwin Drood4. The image, paired with the text, presents London at its most grotesque, illusory, and bizarre: [We] were introduced to the room in which ‘Edwin Drood’ opens. Upon the wreck of a four-post bedstead (the posts of which almost met overhead, and from which depended bundles of shapeless rags), upon a mattress heaped with indescribable clothes, law, sprawling, a Lascar, dead-drunk with opium; and at the foot of the bed a woman, with a little brass lamp among the rags covering her, stirring the opium over the tiny flame. She only turned her head dreamily as we entered. She shivered under the gust of the night air we had brought in, and went on warming the black mixture. It was difficult to see any humanity in that face, as the enormous grey dry lips lapped about the rough wood pipe and drew in the poison (Jerrold 173-4). The passage begins as many of the scenes in London begin: with a “we” statement, in which the author recounts entering a scene with his travelling partner Doré. From the outset, the description of the scene reflects the subject. Jerrold observes amorphous and changing entities: the posts of the bedstead “almost met overhead”, and the “shapeless rags” and “indescribable clothes” seem to transfigure into Lascar, who is himself a kind of shapeless, indescribable mass to the observer. Proportions become warped; the woman’s “little brass lamp” seems disproportionate to the “enormous grey dry lips” of the opium smoker. Jerrold’s prose demands a kind of identification with the hazy state of consciousness of the characters observed. In short, the reader views the scene through an opium-tinged lens. As the reader’s perception is warped by the formlessness of the scene, so too is the reader implicated in the scene, blurring the line between the diegetic and extra- diegetic worlds. The key to making the reader an involved observer, rather than simply a reader of Jerrold’s prose, is the woman. Again, Jerrold uses the “we” pronoun to refer to himself and Doré, but here the “we” also seems to implicate the reader: the woman 4 The authors title the illustration “Opium Smoking—The Lascar’s Room in ‘Edwin Drood’” (see fig. 2). 8 “turned her head dreamily as we entered. She shivered under the gust of the night air we had brought in”. This small but essential moment is a place where the boundaries between observer and observed break down. We, the observers, are temporarily involved in the scene by being invited to recognize the woman’s momentary discomfort5. The grotesque shapes this illustration, and draws the reader into the scene. However, the more conservative critics, who interpreted his interest in blurring the ideal and the real as a moral insufficiency, often put Doré’s treatment of the content he illustrated into question.

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