Changing Perspectives, Altering Perceptions: Picturing the Victorian London Street as Narrative Space

Simon Knowles
University College Cork
Faculty of Arts and Celtics Studies' Department of History of Art
2011
PhD

Subject: Painting
Country: England
Period: 19th Century

This thesis considers the many ways in which the crowded and contested London thoroughfare functioned as an urban signifier during the Victorian Period. By focusing on the discrete spaces of the real street, its location within the city, and upon the occupants and activities operating within its precinct, this thesis will argue for a synergy between the real and the represented street whereby the latter responded to the experience of the former. The street will be considered in three forms: the real street, experienced as social space; the described street, re-constructed in text; and the depicted street, re-constructed as image. Focusing primarily on the second half of the nineteenth century, the chronological framework of this thesis begins in 1851, when the conflict between the instrumental and social function of the street reached a new degree of intensity as a result of the crowds visiting the Great Exhibition. It concludes in 1900, allowing the incorporation of two areas of visual practice that are normally studied in isolation but which overlap chronologically: Victorian genre painting and the slightly later practice of Whistler and the London Impressionists, normally situated and evaluated within the context of Modernism. The principal theoretical framework of this thesis will be a socio/historical approach, utilizing, as part of this methodology, the reciprocal relation between image and text. This analytical tool is used as means to investigate the correlation between the real street and the street in its represented form, measuring the extent to which the latter provided a means to stabilize the experience of the former.

Irish Georgian Society

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Changing Perspectives, Altering Perceptions: Picturing the Victorian London Street as Narrative Space