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Thursday, April 17, 2008
‘Over London, By Rail’ (1872)
My lovely home-town, as beautiful today as it has ever been:
This famous image is by Gustave Doré, of course; one of his many illustrations for Blanchard Jerrold’s London: A Pilgrimage (1872).
One of the many things I love about ‘Over London, By Rail’ is the intensity with which it replicates its theme. The texture here is hyperbolically bricky and tiley: apart from a tiny patch of night sky and a few sheets there is nothing but bricks, tiles, and people, on display ... as if the people and the bricks are versions of one another, different ways of constructing a city. Doré, clearly, is saying something about the oppressiveness and monotony of working class existence; about how crowded it is (every single garden on display here is packed with people; there are people at every window) and how wearying (all this activity in the middle of the night). It is an image that makes a sort of explicit aesthetic virtue out of the formal techniques of Victorian illustration, something that was largely based on a visual strategy of very many repeated strokes, dots or lines, as for instance in the hatching and cross hatching to indicate shade and contour. The deliberately repetitive, busy overpopulated visual field here enacts that on the level of subject as well as treatment.
The overall composition of this picture is so immediately striking and memorable that it’s something of a shock to look more closely into the details, many of which don’t add up. Why, for instance, are people hanging washing in their gardens in the middle of the night? In particular, the visual specifics puzzle the eye. So: look at the line of the guttering above the top windows of that main left flank of housing. That line follows a weird, disorienting perspectival logic at odds with the perspective of the rest of the image (compare it to the line of curving perspective sketched in by the roofs of the outhouses or sheds in every garden). By the time our eye has traced along it to the distance the two-storey back-to-back houses it tops look about eight-storeys high. (Was any railway-bridge in the whole of London actually as towering, and precarious looking, as the railway bridge at the far end of this image? Of course not.) But best of all, I think, is the way the tops of the various garden walls, receding on a curving line into the image’s depth-of-field, rather resemble railway sleepers: the gardens themselves tracing and curving away in a mannerist imitation of a sort of meta-railway-line. The railway theme, in other words, is repeated in the physical architecture of the world in which Londoners of this class live, as if the train system so dominates their lives as to have possessed it, warped and bent it physically out of shape. Those chimneys: don’t they rather resemble locomotive smokestacks? The whole is a sort of nightmarish reduplication of mechanised technologies of transport, with the added irony that locomotives do at least, you know, move. These houses, and these lives, have been gorgonized, or brickized, into a ghastly stasis.
Comments
The overly huge and looming railway bridge, particularly the ways it looks down and in into the lives of extremely compartmentalized urbanites, reminds me of two images.
In Akira Kurasawa’s Ikiru, there are multiple shots where the main character looks down into a small plot in urban Tokyo that, having been bombed out during the war, is still a swamp and a public nuisance. Since the entire film is about the problem of urban renewal and the question of how a living space can be constructed by centralized authority, the figure of the high overpass looking down onto the tiny piece of land is one of the most significant perspective used (a perspective the camera shares in at points). One of my favorite films.
And you also reminded me of Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives. I seem to recall that the text uses some very strange language to figure how roads intersect and overpass living communities but without actually entering into them (his whole theme being the ways that urban ethnic tenement communities don’t get incorporated into the larger city). I’ll have to check and see if there are any photographic images that express that idea.
Does anybody know please what part of London this depicts?
My understanding is that it isn’t anywhere; it’s a composite of various bits and pieces melded together by Doré’s fertile imagination. Look more closely and you can see that elements of the picture (What happens to the respective heights of the left and right row of slums? How high is that viaduct in the background, exactly?) don’t really add up.