Abstract
Reviewed by: Thomas Stammers, University of Durham, UK
Elizabeth Jay’s new study offers fascinating reading not just for literary scholars but also for all historians of Franco-British cultural relations. It represents the first full monograph not just on why a broad range of British writers flocked to the French capital, and how their experiences of the city were shaped according to distinctions of class, generation and gender; but, just as importantly, Jay’s study also analyses how Paris was represented within a broad range of genres – including memoirs, letters, poems, novels, sketches – as well as how it transformed the very possibilities of Victorian prose. Whether in matters of genre, plot, tone or imagery, much British writing at mid-century seems inexplicable without reinstating powerful but often occluded cross-Channel influences. To that extent, the volume nicely complements works like Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever’s The Literary Channel, or Juliet Atkinson’s French Novels and the Victorians, in disclosing a complex transnational traffic of ideas, built in equal measure on imitation and disavowal.
The book is organized in layers, moving from the broad political frameworks and the changing urban environment, through to how these changes found expression in the work of popular journalists and novelists. While the account of political change feels a little schematic, and is rather light on historiography, the range of British eye-witness accounts of how these changes were perceived at the time is impressive. Lady Blessington’s mortified response to the rabble in 1830 (‘the dregs of the people… the worst ingredients of a reeking cauldron’) contrasts sharply with the disappointment of Arthur Clough in 1848 to see the Second Republic unravel (‘the glory and the freshness of the dream is departed’). From the shadow of the guillotine to the fires of the guillotine, Paris remained an unmatched tourist destination for revolutionary thrill-seekers. Jay balances the breathless reports of visitors with acknowledgement of the more rooted, expatriate community in Paris and its own social institutions. If the British embassy, the hôtel Meurice or the Jockey Club provided hospitality for high society, even greater mystique surrounded the salons, with their intellectually forthright hostesses and alien conversational protocol. Jay frequently points out the centrality of Madame Mohl, remembered in legend as Clarkey, in giving British visitors an intimate glimpse of France’s literary lions, in addition to profitable access to French publishers and translators.
Paris was evidently a crucial apprenticeship in launching careers. In a country that elected its authors to high office, British writers marvelled at the esteem and the profits the French accorded to men and women of letters. Empirically, the most original section of the book concerns the evolution of the English press in Paris – incarnated in staple publications like Galiagni’s Messenger – as well as the growth of foreign correspondents. Living out of a suitcase, often drinking absinthe in the same cafés, these independent and resourceful rival journalists fought hard to get scoops and send news out of the city, especially during the rigours of the siege. With pigeons at a premium, Henry Vizetelly walked up to eight miles between different launch pads to ensure his copy was carried safely by balloons back to London and did not fall into German hands; Emily Crawford and Frances Hoey had the triumph of interviewing the leaders of the Commune in March 1871, whilst George Augustus Sala suffered the indignity of being arrested by the Communards as a spy.
The significance of such anecdotes lies not simply in the light they shed on the perils of news-hunting in the early days of the telegraph; such tales also illuminate how prolifically British writers borrowed from Parisian print culture, leading to the emergence of genuinely hybrid modes of writing. To Thackeray’s Parisian residency is accredited many of his defining qualities: if the illustrations for Vanity Fair reflect his admiration for Gavarni, his taxonomy of society is lifted from the popular genre of physiologies, and its heroine is a modified grisette. The disorientating blend of amoral detachment and sentimental excess reflects Thackeray’s oscillation between French and English conventions. Paris exerted as significant an influence on G. M. Reynolds too, the literary populist and political radical whose career Thackeray part paralleled, part deplored. Just as the serial Mysteries of London in 1844 was sparked by the stories of Eugène Sue and legendary French detective Vidocq, so the anti-hero of the French theatres provoked Reynolds’ anti-establishment satire, Robert Macaire in England. Even that bulldog of English humour, Punch magazine, was founded in 1841 with its subtitle The London Charivari, and a circle of contributors who had lived and worked in Paris, including Gilbert à Beckett, Albert Smith, Henry Mayhew and Douglas Jerrold (branded by Thackeray ‘a savage little Robespierre’).
Deftly reconnecting styles of writing often studied in isolation, Jay’s book doubles first as a cultural history of the British in Paris – at a time when they accounted for around 10 per cent of the foreign population – and second as a history of the direct and discrete presence of Paris in British culture. A salutary tonic against insularity, the book also asserts the need to enlarge the literary canon. Dickens’s approach in Tale of Two Cities can be profitably read alongside the commonplace techniques of Parisian description (like the panorama), and recurrent geographical locations. The imaginary construction of Paris is traced through ‘silver fork’ novels (Catherine Gore, Edward Bulwer-Lytton), the intrigues of sensation fiction (with Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s 1882 Under the Red Flag a climax in anti-Communard hysteria), biting journalistic sketches and the aestheticism of Henry James. Fiction was inseparable from politics, and both tapped into specific Parisian sources to produce potent and deceptive stereotypes of national difference.