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This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Beyond the Flâneur Walking, Passage and Crossing in London and Paris in the Nineteenth Century Murail, Estelle Awarding institution: King's College London University of Paris VII - Denis Diderot University The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). 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KING’S COLLEGE LONDON Jointly-supervised PhD in English Language and Literature UNIVERSITÉ PARIS DIDEROT-PARIS 7 SORBONNE PARIS CITÉ Doctorat en co-tutelle Études anglophones Laboratoire de Recherche sur les Cultures Anglophones: LARCA EA 4214 ECOLE DOCTORALE N°131 Langue, littérature, image : civilisation et sciences humaines (domaines anglophone, francophone et d’Asie orientale) Estelle Murail Beyond the Flâneur: Walking, Passage and Crossing in London and Paris in the Nineteenth Century PhD supervised by Professor Josephine McDonagh and Professor Sara Thornton Thèse soutenue en France le 29 novembre 2013 Jury: - Dr. Matthew Beaumont (University College London) - Professor Catherine Bernard (Université Paris Diderot – Paris 7) - Professor Catherine Lanone (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3), pré-rapporteur - Professor Josephine McDonagh (King’s College London), directrice de recherche - Professor Jeremy Tambling (University of Manchester), pré-rapporteur - Professor Sara Thornton (Université Paris Diderot – Paris 7), directrice de recherche 1 À mes parents 2 Thanks I would like to offer my heartfelt thanks to the following people, without whom I would never have completed this epic task... Firstly, my sincere thanks go to Sara Thornton and Jo McDonagh for being such wonderful supervisors. For their patience, encouragement, and kindness, and for pointing me in the right direction when I believed myself irrevocably lost in the wilderness of Victorian literature. And for accepting the additional duties of counsellors and coaches. My thanks also go to: All the teachers I have been lucky enough to meet during the course of my studies. Mr. Joël Blondel, ‘storyteller, teacher, enchanter,’ whose teaching opened up a whole new world to me. Professor Paul Volsik for the passionate and inspirational way he taught literature. Professor Frédéric Ogée, for teaching me how to apprehend Englishness. Professor Catherine Bernard for her wonderfully clear and insightful teaching, and for shedding light on the twists and turns of critical theory. Professor Jeremy Tambling and Professor Michael Hollington for taking the time to share their extraordinary references and anecdotes with me. Anneke Ely, Emma Eden and Ewa Szypula for making this PhD possible by sharing hearth and home with me in London over the past four years. My fellow Victorianists from Paris 7, Cécile Bertrand, Una Brogan, Florence Renault-Bigo and Valentine Prevot, and particularly the ‘Baker Street Irregulars’ – Mark Fitzpatrick, Sonia Ouaras, Marina Poisson, Céline Prest – for their references, tea and G&T, and for all their help and support. Róisín Quinn-Lautrefin, co-creator of the Victorian Persistence Seminar, for being such an enthusiastic colleague, and a delight to work with. Clémence Folléa for her constant support and friendship, as well as for her insightful comments. Diane Leblond for her friendship and for lending me her Asmodean eye in the quest for the perfect plan. Tom Stammers for his friendship and guidance, and for sharing with me his encyclopaedic knowledge of the nineteenth century (and everything else in the known universe). Fariha Shaikh for acting as my liaison officer and informer at King’s College London. Richard Bates and Stephanie O’Dea for casting their eagle eyes over dodgy translations so many times. My sister Aurélie for being my personal 24/7 IT assistance helpline. My sister Natacha, Ewa, Mathieu Fernandez, Renaud Lejosne-Guigon, Clément Martin, Marie Mazeau, Caroline Pollentier, Pippa Rimmer, Russell Williams, and all of the above, for rereading my work and acting as my pep squad throughout this PhD, and especially during the last stretch. 3 Abstract Beyond the Flâneur: Walking, Passage and Crossing in London and Paris in the Nineteenth Century This thesis examines reworkings of the flâneur in France and Britain during the nineteenth century (1806-1869). It suggests that before it was made famous by Baudelaire, this urban observer emerged out of French and British print culture, and of crossings between them. It has endured because it is a protean, composite figure which weaves in and out of literature, journalism and essays. Its roots in print, the thesis argues, fostered a form of cross-cultural pollination which ensured the power and persistence of the figure. Given the metamorphosis of the flâneur from ‘type’ to literary character to ‘critical concept,’ the thesis looks at flânerie as a fluid concept which demands both rigour and a possibility of going astray. My corpus reflects this flexibility since it includes newspapers and physiologies, as well as works by De Quincey, Dickens, Brontë, Balzac and Baudelaire. The thesis is chronologically structured, and begins with a study of the flâneur’s origins, exploring how the early Parisian flâneur of the press and physiologies finds predecessors and descendants in the London press. Chapter 2 demonstrates how the flâneur is rooted in the British and French collective literary imagination and is thus inextricably linked to other gazing figures whose traits he adopts and discards as he moves seamlessly through time. Chapter 3 examines how ever-evolving optical technologies profoundly altered the flâneur’s ‘ways of seeing.’ Chapter 4 is a phenomenological exploration of walking, demonstrating that the flâneur’s gaze is also created through a living, moving body embedded in time and space. The final chapter introduces the concept of croisement, a heuristic device I develop to understand the role of the flâneur as passeur and go-between and re-read the literary history of flânerie as one of constant crossings and crossovers. It concludes that the flâneur’s permanent in-betweenness or ‘out-of-jointness’ makes him ‘contemporary’1 – more capable than others of grasping his own time. 1 Giorgio Agamben, ‘What is the contemporary?’ in Nudities, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), pp.10-19. 4 Abbreviations The following abbreviations are used for frequently cited works, which are given parenthetically throughout. AP : Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin MacLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass., London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999, 2002) CB : Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London, New York: Verso Editions, 1973, 1989) SBB : Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz [1839], ed. Dennis Walder (London: Penguin Classics, 1995) OCS : Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop [1841] (London: Penguin Classics, 2000) C : Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings [1821], ed. Grevel Lindop (Oxford,