Orpheus in the city

Abstract

Chapter 1 begins with a primal myth transposed to the city. William Wordsworth’s ‘Power of Music’ represents street music as an unqualified blessing: in proclaiming his fiddler ‘An Orpheus!’, the poet summons the miraculous and sacred power of music and song, but any allusion to Orpheus is shadowed by his tragic fate. Wordsworth’s poem recalls, by inversion, William Hogarth’s famous print, ‘The Enrag’d Musician’ (1741), in which a mob of urban noise-makers (including rival and degraded forms of street music and song) advance on the ‘classical’ violinist, himself a bathetic version of divine harmony. Hogarth’s urban ‘soundscape’ reappears in James Clarence Mangan’s poem ‘Khidder’ (1845), which likewise brings the fate of Orpheus, rather than his power, into focus. The violence with which street singers are faced is evident in George Gissing’s The Nether World (1889), whose title indicates that Orpheus will descend in vain into the hell of the city.