A complete cyclopaedia

Abstract

Despite Colquhoun’s attempts to reveal the nature of the casual residuum, the sheer unknowability of the poor inhabiting the wider metropolitan landscape served only to intensify prevailing anxieties. In response, a considerable body of literature emerged. Best remembered are the writings of Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew, but these were a small part of the nineteenth-century endeavour by social reformers, novelists, evangelicals, illustrators and cartographers to organize new knowledges of modern London and the poor who inhabited its inaccessible, seemingly primordial courts, rookeries and alleys. Neither were they the first, for these writers drew inspiration from earlier work. It is thus to Pierce Egan, George Smeeton, George Cruikshank, James Grant and others of the early nineteenth-century literary subculture that we have to look for the defining moment. Concern with the dissembling potentiality of the poor focused endeavour to know London as a modern city at that paradoxical moment when the realization of this vision came to be recognized as problematic. Toward the close of the eighteenth century a range of issues around aesthetics, power and class featured in urban texts with unprecedented power and complexity.1 Previous writers, most notably Alexander Pope in The Dunciad and John Gay in Trivia and The Beggar’s Opera, had engaged actively with the plurality of London life, assuming uncritically that it could be described and represented. The profound change in sensibility provoked by fears of disorder undermined this confidence, and from the turn of the century writers approached the mapping and representation of London with faltering appreciation of its immense, labyrinthine totality now quite beyond the limits of comprehension found in earlier urban rhetoric. Thus in Blake, Wordsworth, De Quincey and of course Dickens