Victorian Studies

Victorian Studies 44.1 (2001) 25-32

Sex and the City:
Metropolitan Modernities in English History

Margot Finn

Despite the enduring popular identification of Victorianism with sexual prudery, a cloying domesticity, and adherence to rigid social conventions, late-nineteenth-century British culture now boasts an impressive (and increasing) association in scholarly literature with the erotic, the spectacular, and the modern. In literary and historical studies alike, the past decade has seen the publication of an array of works in which the Victorian era figures not as a bulwark of conservative repression but rather as an age of social, sexual, and spatial emancipation. New understandings of gender and urban consumer culture have played a key part in this shift in representation, and the department store has in this context gained an almost totemic status as the quintessential symbol of Victorian modernity. Thus for Mica Nava, "shopping and the emergence of the department store" represent "key iconic aspects of modern urban society," and late-Victorian women's participation in "the exploding culture of consumption and spectacle" is the arena in which "the everyday lives of large numbers of ordinary women were most deeply affected by the process of modernity" (38, 46). In this prevailing view, department stores and shopping were instrumental to Victorian women's liberation from the domestic circle and their entry into the public sphere. Judith Walkowitz argues that "[m]iddle-class women first established their urban beachheads around West End shopping," which "emerged as a newly elaborated female activity in the 1870s" (46-47); in a similar vein, Erika Rappaport details how later Victorian entrepreneurs and journalists represented the department store as "the agent of female emancipation and pleasure and the symbol of the modern metropolis" (144). Lynn Walker's analysis of department stores as "the most significant symbol of the many pleasures of the modern city open to women" captures the essential features of this ostensibly new metropolitan modernity, finding in the department store "a setting [. . .] which for the first time gave [End Page 25] women [. . .] a feeling of being at home in the public sphere, which only men had previously experienced" (79).

Viewed against this late-Victorian backdrop, Miles Ogborn's Spaces of Modernity: London's Geographies 1680-1780 (1998) offers an especially refreshing perspective on the making of modern urban cultures in England. Ogborn's book is a broadly interdisciplinary study of the city's historical geography which draws its insights from maps and tracts, travel diaries and philosophical treatises, prints, plays, and political arithmetic. Five case studies frame this analysis of the spatial construction of modernity in late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London. Ogborn begins with the Magdalen Hospital, an institution established in Whitechapel in 1758 as a charitable reformatory for London's prostitutes. Here, in the creation of carefully delineated disciplinary spaces designed to reclaim fallen women, he discerns "a machine for creating selves," an urban establishment attuned to "a peculiarly modern alchemy of subjectivity: that selves can be made, unmade, and remade" (70, 73). The extension, cleansing, and lighting of London's sidewalks, developments promoted by paving legislation of 1762, form the subject of Ogborn's second case study. Providing a physical environment conducive to the gaze of the solitary urban walker, these street reforms revealed London as a "deliciously dangerous" city of public spaces in which the individual's dominant relationship to the metropolis was "one of spectator to spectacle" (107, 109). A chapter on commodification, commercialization, and sexuality at Vauxhall allows Ogborn to incorporate eighteenth-century women into the purview of metropolitan modernity, for in pleasure gardens such as this he locates "key sites for questioning and switching identities within the welter of new experiences brought about by consuming pleasures within the novel circuits of commodities" (119). An innovative account of the shifting geographies of the excise tax serves to situate this analysis of urban consumption firmly within the imperial ambit of the fiscal-military state. And finally, the establishment of the "Universal Register Office" in 1750 illustrates urban denizens' increasing effort to extend routine communication across urban spaces. Together with...