Modernity and Meaning in Victorian London

Tourist Views of the Imperial Capital

Joseph De Sapio

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137407221
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Joseph De Sapio examines how individuals not only understood their contacts with industrial modernity as distinct from the inherited traditional rhythms of the eighteenth century, but how they conceived of their own positions within the increasingly sophisticated political, social, and commercial paradigms of the Victorian years.

1

‘The Bonds of Empire and Imperial Fraternity’: London as Imperial Capital

In 1886, Conyngham Crawford Taylor, a Canadian businessman and investor, reflected on the impact of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition, held that year at South Kensington in London:

Who can predict the result of this union of the great British family, brought together in this way for the first time? The Hindoo of India will shake hands with his brother, the red man of the Canadian forest; and the New Zealander, described by Macaulay as one day sitting on London Bridge sketching the ruins of St. Paul’s, will be there to falsify the prediction on behalf of his future countrymen … Then will soon arrive the time when those vast regions, traversed by the iron road, will be peopled by untold millions of happy and contented settlers, all true in their allegiance to the great Empire of which Canadians are now amongst the most loyal subjects.¹

His words highlight that for all the rhetoric surrounding the British Empire of the late nineteenth century, no theme was more central than that of imperial inclusivity. The Canadian was as much a British subject as the Indian, the Malay, and the Londoner himself. Sanford Fleming, the Scottish-Canadian railway engineer, likened this imperial unity to a fistful of coins: while in ‘currency there are dissimilarities of name, of value, of colour and of metal, all are impressed with the stamp of the one sovereign; so in the people there are diversities, but all can be recognised as British subjects.’² Fleming’s analogy is a good one: the symbolism of a shared monarchy was the most robust image of the imperial club, while the allegory of the coins (i.e., British trade goods and commerce) provides the second most tangible connection most colonials would have had in their day-to-day lives. Nor was it lost on Taylor or Fleming that both of these networks were centred in London.

For much of the nineteenth century, London was imbued with significance as an imperial capital – a city that noisily trumpeted its status as the world’s emporium, the great crossroads between the colonies and peoples of empire. London was, according to one visitor, ‘a little world in itself … Representatives of every nationality are congregated here. Here thrive all the varied extremes of human existence.’³ The elements of imperial modernity – the docks, the warehouses and commercial offices, and the presses on Fleet Street – buzzed and rang on full display with the frenetic energy of a rapidly growing metropolis. In the words of one Indian traveller, ‘Englishmen connect themselves with other nations by means of trade, railways and electric telegraphs … To be convinced that London is the commercial world, let anybody [sic] spend a few hours at the Docks and Royal Exchange and see if he will not agree with me.’⁴ Yet as striking as London’s examples of industrial innovation were, the capital seemed to have one foot stuck firmly in the past.

Indeed, the British metropolis seemed to have been constructed using parts and pieces of past empires and conquered cultures. There was an Egyptian pyramid atop the water tower on Shooter’s Hill and Cleopatra’s Needle stood guard on the Embankment. A section of Roman wall at the Tower spoke of the march of the legions. The British Museum resembled a classical Greek temple, while both St Paul’s and the Greenwich Naval Hospital recalled the glories of Enlightenment Europe. London signalled not just one city in its bosom, but many, as though history itself had been dragged from the past into the view of the present. Such elements gave it a Janus-like character: striding purposefully, if haphazardly, into industrialisation, while always looking back at past glories.

This relationship between the past and the present was an object of intense fascination for colonial visitors, due in part to their own perceived circumstances. London’s uncertain identity in the face of industrial and social upheaval paralleled the search for imperial identity: what did it mean to be British subjects? Were British historical traditions shared by those in the settler dominions? Was participation in the Empire an indication of modernity? Britain was an old nation – did the future rest in the development of its colonial possessions? There was a palpable sense that London held the answers to these questions in some way – and indeed, these questions of imperial and national identity functioned as important responses in a world where time and space between populations was collapsing. Outshining many of the imperial capitals, London naturally magnified and focused the dialogue between modern and anti-modern attitudes. The imperial capital was, in the words of one historian, ‘the fount of all standards, power, justice, art, taste, culture and career advancement, as well as the seat of imperial government.’⁵ For visiting imperial tourists, travel to the capital reflected not only a search for an imperial or national identity, but functioned as a quest to understand their place in a rapidly shifting world of technological and social progress.

During imperial visits to Victorian London, the focus on ‘imperial identity’ is thus omnipresent: the voyage to Britain is recounted as a transit through imperial spaces; the individual in London’s public sphere is not sightseeing, he or she is engaged in exploring the boundaries of an imperial exchange; and, crucially, all of this exposure to the globalising forces of the British Empire serves to grant the traveller a sense of identity within the colonial network.⁶ It is difficult indeed to find an aspect of travel to London in this period which does not acquire an imperial subtext in some fashion. Moreover, such a subtext was often linked with a broad, modernising influence – to be ‘British’ is to have gas (or electric) lighting, clean streets, large cities, railways, and the social and physical infrastructure that produced such works. Mrs Ireland, a Manitoba teacher visiting at the end of our period, provided an example of this link between Britain, the Empire, and its modernity:

It was a great privilege for them to be in the centre of the Empire … Their country was big, Nature had been kind to it, but when they came here and saw the wonders that man had made, the engineering, the architecture – and the underground railways – they felt inclined to worship England.⁷

Yet the allure of historical tradition was equally enticing, and many visitors spoke reverently of the Houses of Parliament, the Queen, and the often centuries-old ties that bound Britain to Canada or India. The past had been one long story of creation and beneficial improvements. Viewing the tombs and effigies of Westminster Abbey, Canadian visitor Canniff Haight witnessed more than an ancient church; it was a site where

the royal histories of the British Empire radiate, and hither they converge … The outside face of its walls registers the rising tide of English civilisation through a score of ages, the slow transformation of religious and political institutions, the gradual upgrowth of the British Constitution, and the rights and recognitions it brought with it at different stages of its development … It is a wonderful, grand junction-station of the ages past and present, a castellated palace of the illustrious living and the illustrious dead.⁸

Imperial visitation to London was thus born out of a desire to see the by-products of British history, whether they led to a romantic, artificially created version of the past, or instead heralded an instructive present dominated by machinery, commerce, and unctuous social interactions.

‘A World-Venice’: networks, Empire, and the metropolis

The popular association of London with British imperial history rested on decades, if not centuries, of connections and exchanges. The British Empire of the mid-to-late nineteenth century encompassed a variety of environments, climates, and ethnic and cultural groups, was governed in a largely informal fashion. The white settler colonies enjoyed a loose link with London: the difficulties of control across long distances and geographical sizes meant that Canada and Australia were granted self-government in 1867 and 1900, respectively. For the Indian subcontinent, where formal Crown control had been in place since 1858, the connection to Britain was similarly tenuous: the India Office and its associated administration numbered around 1,000 individuals, with responsibility for some 250,000,000 Indian natives. But while formal control may have been weak, the more informal elements of contact, convergence, and culture were plentiful⁹ – one only had to take a stroll through Bombay to see the same neo-Gothic design of Victoria Terminus as the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa and St Andrew’s Cathedral in Sydney.

Mapped alongside traditional military-political-economic considerations, these networks paralleled and shadowed the formal organisation of the empire: as Martin Lynn noted, ‘The naval officer in the Atlantic, the missionary in Africa, and the trader in China were as much agents of potential British influence as the colonial administrator in India.’¹⁰ The result, as characterised by Simon Potter, gave the empire a web of ‘patterns of informal, integrative, competing, and constantly shifting interconnection.’¹¹ At the head of the imperial family, London’s position was to mediate and contextualise such fluctuations firmly under the aegis of metropolitan oversight, as with the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition held in South Kensington.¹² The connection was strong enough for J.R. Seeley to call the empire ‘a world-Venice with the sea for the streets.’¹³ Perhaps the best sense of this intra-imperial and metropolitan linkage is given by Goldwin Smith, who in 1888 found that ‘we are fast making one mind and one heart for the world.’¹⁴

In some ways, Smith may be the archetypal individual of the networked, modern empire. He was born in 1823, the son of Richard Pritchard Smith who would himself later become a railway promoter. Smith’s early life took him to Oxford and London, where he initially trained for the law before settling on a tentative career as an historian. While Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford between 1858 and 1866, Smith became disenchanted with the Tractarian movement, and was sufficiently sympathetic towards the Unionists among the American Civil War to renounce the chair, and lived for a time in New York, before ultimately shifting once more to Toronto where he eventually died in 1910. Throughout his North American ‘exile’, Smith returned several times to England, and became fascinated with the concept of Anglo-Saxon racial, though not political unification. The concept underpinning such a belief was Smith’s idea that British history stood as the hallmark of Anglo-Saxon heritage, and that it provided the necessary continuity for racial identification.

Yet while Smith’s dream of a pan-global Anglo-Saxon unity never came to pass, of importance here was his ease of mobility through multiple, and often competing, networks of influence and identity, both on a national and global stage. Goldwin Smith was undoubtedly a product of the British metropolis, yet his support for American Unionists and later relocation to North America reveal the presence, and the subsequent impact, of competing linkages to other world-systems and places. For our tourists, the process was much the same. William Carter, an Australian municipal councillor in the state of Victoria, travelled in 1852 to England via Cape Horn and Rio de Janeiro. Carter’s handwritten diary of life aboard ship makes little mention of the outside world during the four-month journey, but several incidents do illustrate the presence of national and imperial systems infringing upon local identities. Leaving Melbourne, their ship sailed in company with an American schooner for several hours. Even in the great expanse of empty Pacific Ocean, he notes that ‘we are now more than 13 hours before Greenwich time.’¹⁵ After weeks of travel, they rounded the Horn to sail up the east coast of South America. At Bahia, in Brazil, they are greeted by an Irish customs agent who informs them of the news from the metropolis: ‘Napoleon Emperor, his Marriage the latest we heard from England.’¹⁶ It seemed that Britain could never quite be avoided nor left behind.

Most visitors from the dominions were, in fact, quite eager to assimilate into their cultural homeland. Indeed, colonial travel to the imperial capital, especially on the part of Canadian and Australian visitors, quickly acquired the overtones of a homecoming. Conyngham Taylor found the family metaphor an apt one: ‘As children separated from the parental home anticipate with joy a reunion, so are England’s sons, the world over, looking forward to the grand family gathering of 1886.’¹⁷ The metaphor was still in use a quarter of a century later, as Manitoba principal Fred Ney commented during the trip from Liverpool to London, ‘We realised that we were speeding toward the Great Metropolis, and that we were really in the country called England, the Homeland of us all and for which w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: ‘The Capital of the Human Race’: The City as the Centre of Modernity
• 1 ‘The Bonds of Empire and Imperial Fraternity’: London as Imperial Capital
• 2 ‘How Differently We Go Ahead in America!’: American Constructions of British Modernity
• 3 ‘A Kingdom in Itself’: Domestic Perceptions of Metropolitan Space
• 4 ‘England Has No Greatness Left Save in Her Industry’: London as a Path to Disharmony
• Epilogue: ‘The Vast Curiosity-Shop of All the World’: London and the Culture of Modernity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index