In early modern Europe, prevention of large blazes engendered more municipal regulation than almost any other problem of urban habitation. Almost every major city has endured a ‘Great Fire’ at one time or another, starting with the Great Fire of Rome which took hold of the city on 19 July 64 AD for which Nero blamed and persecuted the Christians (it is not unusual to look for scapegoats after a disaster: Londoners blamed the Dutch or the French for their Great Fire of 1666).

Fires occurred for a variety of reasons, most commonly human error or carelessness. Records show that their social and economic impact was often devastating. Regular fire-fighting forces did not appear until the creation of voluntary societies in the nineteenth century. However, urban rebirth in the aftermath of great fires offered a chance to shape the future and rebuild the city. Residents and planners created sweeping changes in the methods of constructing buildings, planning city streets, engineering water distribution systems, underwriting fire insurance, and fire-fighting itself. A key development in the modernization of fire-fighting in Europe occurred in seventeenth-century Amsterdam: the invention of the fire engine and fire hose.

Multi-talented Dutch painter Jan van der Heyden executed a number of landscapes and still lifes, but was chiefly a painter of townscapes, which stand out for their exceptionally detailed handling. Imaginary views, anticipating the capricci of eighteenth-century Venetian painters, are common among his works (in 1668 Cosimo II de’ Medici had bought one of his Amsterdam town hall views). Van der Heyden was a native of Gorinchem, though his family had moved to Amsterdam by 1650. He was trained as a glass painter. Before 1661 he travelled extensively in the southern Netherlands and in Germany, making drawings later used in his paintings. When he married in 1661, he lived on the most fashionable canal in Amsterdam, the Herengracht.

His splendid oil on canvas ‘Gezicht op de [view of the] Herengracht’ dates from circa 1670. This, ‘Patricians Canal’, is the first of the three major canals in the city centre which were dug in the seventeenth century and form concentric belts around the city. It is named after the ‘Heren’ who governed the city at the time. As a skilled architectural draughtsman, Van der Heyden seldom turned his hand to the delineation of anything but brick houses and churches in streets and squares. A well-travelled artist he has painted urban scenes in a variety of cities, Utrecht, Veere, Delft, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Brussels, and London.

However, Van der Heyden was the Amsterdam painter par excellence. His views of the city with its churches and canals are numerous, the Herengracht, Keizersgracht, Martelaarsgracht, de Nieuwezijds and Oudezijds Voorburgwal, de Dam, de Westerkerk, the new town hall, etc. His reported inability to draw figures may have been tied to his lack of formal artistic schooling. He painted in partnership with Adriaen van de Velde, who populated his architectural scenes with figures and landscape effects. His most important works were painted in the years between 1660 and 1670, most notably views of the Amsterdam town hall, the Amsterdam exchange, the London exchange, and views of Cologne.

After Van de Velde’s death in 1672 he received assistance from Johannes Lingelbach and Eglon van der Neer. Van der Heyden was a contemporary of the landscape painters Hobbema and Jacob van Ruysdael. This was a time in which artists competed in a market where too many paintings were produced. Many artists starved or were forced to take on additional activities. Van der Heyden was a practical and versatile mind who combined painting with the study of mechanics. From the late 1660s onwards he was engaged in projects to improve street lighting and fire-fighting in Amsterdam.

As a youngster, Van der Heyden had witnessed the fire in the old city town-hall which made a deep impression on him. He later would describe or draw some eighty fires in almost any neighbourhood of Amsterdam. Together with his brother Nicolaes, a hydraulic engineer, he improved the fire-hose in 1672. He modified manual fire engines and re-organized the volunteer fire brigade. He wrote and illustrated the first fire-fighting manual, Brandspuiten-boek (The Fire Engine Book), published in 1690. His comprehensive scheme for street lighting which lasted from 1669 until 1840 was adopted as a model by many other towns. Van der Heyden’s impact was felt in London.

The psychological scars of the Great Fire were deep. Fire prevention was placed high on the political agenda. London desperately needed an organized and well-equipped fire brigade. Insurance companies were granted charters to provide fire assurances. It was in their interest to train professional fire fighters and make sure that the proper equipment was available to them. Assurance companies initially formed their own, often competing, fire brigades. It was not until 1833 that the London Fire Engine Establishment came into being. In 1689 a patent (no.263) was granted to a Dutch merchant and manufacturer of engines named John Lofting for the sole making and selling of an ‘engine for quenching fire, the like never seen before in this Kingdom’. Lofting’s fire engine was the first in England to use a wired suction hose to throw water as high as 400 feet and force the water ‘in a continued Stream into Alleys, Yards, Back houses, Stair-Cases; and other obscure places, where other Engines are useless’, according to a contemporary observer in 1694. The engines were employed at several palaces and their usefulness was praised by Christopher Wren himself. Lofting later recorded that he had lived for seven years in Amsterdam with one of the masters of the fire engines there. The master was Jan van der Heyden.

A particular aspect of urban psychological history is a continuous fascination with crime. City dwellers are obsessed with acts of violence. Every age has expressed worries about escalating evil. The issue of law and order has always been a concern. Politicians make a career out of such anxieties. And yet, at the same time, we devour crime stories, real or fictional, in whatever form these are presented. Crime is a never-ceasing attraction to the public at large. It dominates television programming, ‘good stories’ sell newspapers, and the thriller remains the most popular literary genre. From early civilization onwards acts of cruelty have been recorded in the annals of mankind, be it the Celtic sacrificial ritual of head-hunting or the medieval visions of hell.

Death in early history was violent – not a blissful transition from life to heaven, but an event of pain and horror, either through some form of epidemic disease or through the continuous evils of war and armed conflict. Murder and theft were rampant. Punishment was brutal, but did not stop villainy. Paradoxically, out of this mixture of fear and fascination a new figure arose – that of the criminal folk legend. Robin Hood is the best known outlaw in English folklore and the first criminal to be acclaimed a hero by poets and artists. Stories about crime during the seventeenth century seemed to address the insecurities of the age. Printed ballads, periodicals, reports of crimes, pamphlets taking the side of defendants or prosecutors, last dying speeches, accounts of executions, all became popular literature. By the early eighteenth century, these genres had contributed to the development of criminal biographies, the novel and satirical print. The market for criminal accounts was buoyant. It was not unusual for a condemned person to sell his biography to the highest-bidding prospective author. The expansion of detailed information about cases of wrongdoing meant that more sensationalist accounts became increasingly implausible as readers could compare these tales with more explicit accounts in newspapers and elsewhere. Changing standards of morality led to a toning down of the more lurid sexual details found in early publications and by the 1770s some of the more racy publications were in decline. Even so, throughout the nineteenth century terror continued to be an audience-puller. However, there was crime and there was the myth of crime and the two are often difficult to separate.

‘The history of the world, my sweet – is who gets eaten and who get to eat’, is an often quoted line from Sweeney Todd in discussion with Mrs Lovett. Anxiety of crime was a dominant aspect of metropolitan life during the nineteenth century, but the red spectre of revolution was an almost obsessive fear. During the 1790s cannibal and eating imagery became part of the English artistic and literary iconography in response to the French Revolution. In Europe it was widely alleged that the Jacobins and the Terrors of the 1790s had plunged Europe into collective savagery. Rejecting Rousseau’s theory of natural man, critics declared that primitive man is a ferocious brute. The aim of civilization, contrary to all revolutionary beliefs, was not a return to the state of nature but to escape from it. The Jacobins had destroyed all social restraints and transformed society into a barbarian horde.

After the massacres of September 1792, James Gillray portrayed a family of Paris ‘sansculottes’ feasting upon dismembered bodies. Radical Tory journalists associated with Fraser’s Magazine adopted this set of images and gave it new social meaning during the restless 1830s and 1840s. Thomas Carlyle was closely connected to the magazine. He made its imagery his own. Thomas Malthus had introduced the unnerving notion of food scarcity into contemporary thinking, but he did not project the spectre of cannibalism when he outlined imminent struggles for survival. In Sartor Resartus (1831) Carlyle introduces a character named Heuschrecke, an apostle of Malthus, who suggests the prospect of cannibalism. Carlyle depicts a world ‘by its too dense inhabitants, famished into delirium, universally eating one another’.

The Rue de la Harpe is a quiet cobblestoned and residential street in the Latin Quarter of Paris, running in a south-easterly direction between the Rue de la Huchette and the Rue Saint-Séverin. Only a few buildings that date from before the Haussmann era have survived. During the nineteenth century the name of the street send shivers down people’s spine. It was associated with crime and cannibalism.

In 1800, Minister of Police Joseph Fouché supposedly documented a series of murders undertaken in the street by a local barber and baker. The two are cited as the first serial killers. Becque would murder his victims for the contents of their pockets and Mornay disposed of the bodies by mincing and cooking them in his meat pies that were renowned throughout Paris for their flavour. The men were tried and found guilty at the Palais de Justice in 1801. In a punishment seen to fit the crime, they were torn to pieces on the rack rather than executed by guillotine. Their fate influenced the tale of barber Sweeney Todd of Fleet Street and his baker accomplice Mrs Lovett. In 1825, Tell-Tale Magazine published ‘A Terrible Story of the Rue de la Harpe’. In this tale, the barber murders a country gentleman and steals a string of pearls before delivering the corpse to his mistress, a chef renowned for her delicious ‘pâtés en croûte’. The duo are discovered when the victim’s dog leads the police to a cellar heaped with the skeletal remains of three hundred people. On 21 November 1846 The People’s Periodical and Family Library began serializing Edward Lloyd’s eight-part story entitled ‘The String of Pearls’ which was set in 1785 and concerned Sweeney Todd, a barber in Fleet Street who murdered wealthy clients for their valuables by throwing them through a trapdoor into a cellar. His neighbour Mrs Lovett cut up the bodies and turned them into tasty pies.

Todd apparently tried to murder Mark Ingestre for a string of pearls, but the latter survived and Sweeney Todd confessed his crimes. Before the serial had ended, a stage version of the story dramatized by the playwright George Dibdin Pitt began a long run at the Britannia Theatre, Hoxton. In that version Todd gained his stage catchphrase: ‘I’ve polished him off’.The phrase has entered the English language. In 1850, Edward Lloyd published an enlarged The String of Pearls as a stand-alone ‘penny-blood’ serial. Both the preface to the 1850 edition and the bills for Pitt’s play insisted that the Todd story was based on fact. A further serial was published by Charles Fox in 1878, by which time Todd had become the ‘Demon Barber of Fleet Street’.

The legend gained further embellishments. No. 186 Fleet Street became established as Todd’s residence, an identification encouraged by the discovery of human bones under the cellar during building work in the late nineteenth century, supposedly those of Todd’s victims. Todd remained part of popular culture in the twentieth century and was the subject of several films. By the 1930s ‘The Sweeney’ had become Cockney rhyming slang for the Metropolitan Police’s flying squad, and in the 1970s it provided the name for a famous television drama series. The original French story, however, smacks of being an urban myth and the supposed book by Fouché is impossible to trace.

Rue de la Harpe has made its presence felt in the history of the Revolution, or more precisely: in the annals of the revolutionary press. Paris bookseller Antoine-François Momoro was thirty-three years old when the Revolution began. He had arrived in Paris from his native Besançon in 1780. He was one of many small Parisian book dealers with little hope of advancement under the restrictive Old Regime. With the declaration of the freedom of the press in August 1789, however, his prospects looked a lot brighter. Embracing the revolutionary movement, he opened a printing shop at no. 171 Rue de la Harpe and declared himself the ‘First Printer of National Liberty’. In 1793, he composed and published a treatise on printing, the Traité élémentaire de l’imprimerie, which was intended to put the practical knowledge of printing within the reach of a broad audience. To this day, it remains the most complete source of eighteenth-century printing shop slang. Momoro used his press to launch a career in radical revolutionary politics, soon becoming the official ‘Printer for the Cordeliers Club’. When he was arrested in February 1794, the police made an inventory of his stock which consisted exclusively of pamphlets, handbills and posters. His business was totally devoted to the printed ephemera that sustained the Revolution. Economically, he made a good living out of his activities. The Revolutionary Tribunal heard repeated depictions of Momoro as a greedy opportunist who was notorious for shady dealings. In the first four years of the Revolution his business in printing revolutionary propaganda expanded perhaps as much as twofold. His career, however, was not untypical.

In 1789 Parisian printing exploded. The Revolution triggered an unprecedented political discourse throughout the country which was reflected in a substantial increase in published materials. During the first few years of the Revolution the industry was overrun by a new generation of little printers, most of them former printing-shop workers or small book dealers, amounting to something like a four-fold increase in the number of printers and a tripling of the number of booksellers and/or publishers. They seized the cultural space opened by the declaration of freedom of the press, and through the production of political ephemera took part in recording and shaping revolutionary events. Paris suddenly became the world’s largest centre of newspaper production. The Revolution was also a revolution of the press. Printing became an essential part in the struggle over public opinion which contributed to the formation of a new democratic political culture. Just as the press served as more than just a chronicle of events, the position of the journalist was transformed as well. He took up the role of critic, denouncer, and commentator. He was an engaged participant, actor, and witness, fuelling the course of events. The link between Revolution and the development towards democratization of the printed word is further emphasized by the career of typographer and encyclopaedist Pierre Leroux, who was the inventor of the term ‘socialism’.

Born in 1797, Leroux attended the École Polytechnique, before joining a printshop and start a career in publishing. He founded the Globe newspaper in 1824 and, with George Sand, the Revue Indépendante in 1841. Moving to Boussac, he set up his own publishing house and attracted a small community of disciples and readers. He was elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1848, and formally honoured by the Commune upon his death in 1871. To combat ignorance was one of the main aspirations of nineteenth century socialism to which general access to printing and publishing was of crucial importance. Socialism was born with a printers’ tag around its neck. Momoro had used his press as a call to arms and an instrument for the expression of subversive criticism. Pierre Leroux, using print as his medium, spoke words of liberation and spread ideas of democracy and social justice. Newspapers and pamphlets to him were a source for political education and instruction.

John Baskerville came from a different angle, a non-conformist and atheist he was above all interested in the presentation of the text, the quality of the letter, and the layout of the page. Ironically, it was the French Revolution that safeguarded his legacy. He settled in Birmingham in 1726. Having made his fortune in the lucrative ‘japanning’ business (an early form of enamelling), he secured a lease on eight acres ground to the north-east of the city which he named Easy Hill, and built himself the house in which he lived for the rest of his life. At some point before 1757, he was joined there by Sarah Eaves (née Ruston), a married woman with a son and two daughters whose husband Richard had fled the country because of fraud. About 1750 Baskerville began his career as a printer and type-founder. Influenced by the work of Italian Renaissance printers, his guiding principles were simplicity and clarity. His page layouts were minimalist, they tended to be completely typographic, allowing his letterforms to stand on their own. Baskerville died at his house at Easy Hill in January 1775. Sarah Eaves was a resourceful character in her own right. For a number of years she managed the type-foundry herself. In December 1779 she concluded a sale of the printing firm with the cosmopolitan figure of Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, a principal participant in the Société Typographique et Littéraire which was established in order to produce the complete works of Voltaire at a printing office set up for this purpose at Kehl, a German town located on the right bank of the Rhine directly opposite the city of Strasbourg. To the edition of Voltaire in eighty-five volumes (issued in 1784/89) was added one of the works of Rousseau.

The news that Baskerville’s types were being used at Kehl attracted the attention of Piedmont dramatist Vittorio Alfieri, the ‘founder’ of Italian tragedy. Alfieri, like Lord Byron, was both an aristocrat and a revolutionary. A friend of Beaumarchais, he was in many ways typical of the eighteenth century enlightened cosmopolitan European. His plays communicate an intense hatred of tyranny and despotism. Inevitably, he became a proponent of the French Revolution and enthusiastically embraced the American cause for independence. Baskerville would have been delighted to learn that Alfieri ordered from Beaumarchais the printing of several of his works.

Charles-Joseph Panckoucke was one of the most successful newspaper editors and publishers of his age; among his authors were such distinguished figures as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Buffon. At the outbreak of the Revolution, Panckoucke’s newspapers were virtually the only ones with the privilege of publishing political news. On 24 November 1789, he founded the Gazette Nationale ou Le Moniteur Universal, a daily newspaper which became the official journal of the French Revolution. Baskerville’s association with Enlightenment radicalism is emphasized by the fact that his types were used to print the Moniteur. For some years the journal’s imprint read, ‘imprimé … avec les caractères de Baskerville’. From his base in Birmingham, Baskerville provided the Revolution with a letter of liberation.

Bishopsgate was anciently divided into Bishopsgate Street Within (i.e. within the walls of London) and Bishopsgate Street Without, and derives its name from an ancient gate in the city walls which is attributed to Erkenwald, elected Bishop of London in 675. Throughout its history this street in Camden has been one of the City’s main commercial centres. A specific nineteenth century addition to the history of city- and streetscapes is the dimension of industrial and commercial activity. This, the age in which religion was replaced by economics, opened up an urban imagery of ports, docks, industrial sites, smoke stacks, factories and shop fronts in painting, poetry and fiction.

Walter Riddle may not be a household name in the annals of English painting, but the Guildhall Art Gallery holds a few interesting canvases by him. One of these paintings, created in 1872, is entitled ‘Bishopsgate in 1871’. The image shows a busy commercial street with in the centre the warehouse of Moore & Moore, pianoforte manufacturers. The firm started production in London in 1837 and was taken over by the Kemble group in 1933. Whatever the quality of their pianos may have been, the firm was part of a lively history of making musical instruments in the capital.

Having arrived from Switzerland in 1718 as a simple journeyman joiner, Burkat Shudi set up his own workshop as a harpsichord maker in 1728. It was the foundation of the famous business now known as John Broadwood & Sons. Some time in the 1720s Burkat Shudi became apprenticed to Hermann Tabel, a Fleming who had learned the art of harpsichord making in the famous Antwerp house of the Ruckers dynasty of instrument makers. He was the first person who built harpsichords in London where he resided between 1680 and 1720. Little is known about Tabel, but a harpsichord made by him is in the possession of Helena, Countess of Radnor, and bears the inscription ‘Hermannus Tabel fecit Londini, 1721’. Another London pupil of Tabel was the German immigrant Jacob Kirkman, who set up a rival workshop producing harpsichords of equal quality to those of Shudi. Later, both Broadwood and Kirkman became leading manufacturers of pianos (between 1771 and 1851 no fewer than 103,750 pianos were produced by Broadwood, one of the main London employers at the time).

The piano was first demonstrated in London by the multi-talented Charles Dibdin (composer, singer, actor, novelist), who is most famous for his sea songs. Between the acts of a performance of The Beggar’s Opera at Covent Garden, on 16 May 1767, he accompanied Miss Bricklet on the ‘new pianoforte’. Dibden lived in Arlington Road, Camden Town, and it was there that the piano industry blossomed. Camden was a suitable centre for its manufacture. Transport conditions by water and rail were ideal. By the middle of the century, London had over two hundred piano making firms, three quarters of them north of the river. Some firms made instruments on a mass production system, as Collard & Collard (originally established as Longman & Broderip in 1767) did in their famous circular factory in Oval Road. Others were merely small assembly shops. Besides manufacturers there were part makers, such as piano key makers; wrench pin makers; hammer coverers; truss carvers; gilders; marquetry workers; veneer, timber and ivory suppliers; makers of piano castors; piano stool makers, piano-back makers; piano tuners and others. All these professionals found a living in and around Bishopsgate.

The London Tavern was once situated at the western side of Bishopsgate Street. The house was destroyed during a terrifying blaze that took place on 7 November 1765. The fire broke out at a peruque-maker’s shop opposite. The flames were carried by a high wind across the street to the property immediately adjoining the tavern, quickly spreading to other streets. Fifty houses and buildings were destroyed or damaged. The new London Tavern was designed by architect Richard Jupp and re-opened in September 1768. The size of the place was phenomenal. The dining room, known as the ‘Pillar Room’ for its Corinthian columns, was decorated with medallions and garlands. At the top of the building there was a ballroom that extended over the full length of the structure which, if laid out as a banqueting area, offered room to hundreds of people. The walls were covered with paintings. The cellars occupied the whole basement of the building. They were filled with barrels of porter, pipes of port, and butts of sherry. At any time some 1,200 bottles of champagne were kept in store, in addition to six or seven hundred bottles of claret and ‘floods’ of other wines. The original purpose of the tavern was not so much to create a venue for feasting, but to offer space for public meetings.

In 1817, Robert Owen was determined to publicize his conversion from philanthropic cotton prince to socialist campaigner. He spent much of his time in London organizing public meetings. On 14 August he made his most notable address before an audience of hundreds of politicians, intellectuals, and followers at the London Tavern. The new religion of terrestrial paradise was promised in the tavern. In 1848, the London Chest Hospital was founded here at a meeting held by a group of nineteen City merchants and philanthropic bankers (which at the time was not a contradiction in terms), thirteen of whom were Quakers. Tuberculosis or consumption was then the major endemic killing disease, accounting for twenty per cent of all fatal illnesses. Charles Dickens presided here at the 1851 annual dinner for the General Theatrical Fund. Especially during the spring season meetings were numerous and these often concluded with a sumptuous dinner and entertainment. The London Tavern employed an army of sixty to seventy servants at any time. The majority of City companies held there banquets there; there were la large number of annual balls; Masonic Lodges met in the London Tavern, etc. Business was booming.

The London Tavern holds a niche in the history of English late eighteenth century music. Dublin-born John Field was the eldest son of violinist Robert Field. He studied first with his father and his grandfather, John Field, a church organist. In 1793, the family moved to London where John Field entered an apprenticeship for seven years with Muzio Clementi, the Italian composer, pianist, and publisher who had settled in the capital. John’s first public appearance in England took place at the London Tavern on 12 December 1793, when he played a ‘Lesson on the new Grand Piano Forte’ at a benefit concert under the patronage of the Prince of Wales. In return for his instruction, Field had to work as a salesman-demonstrator in Clementi’s piano warehouse (the latter had created a successful association with the Collard family under the name of Clementi & Company; Munzio retired in 1815 after which the firm was called Collard & Collard). Field’s early talent as a composer was put to use by his Clementi who published several of young John’s piano pieces anonymously. Field’s professional career as a composer was launched on 7 February 1799 with the performance of his Piano Concerto No. 1 at the King’s Theatre. His apprenticeship expired shortly thereafter, and for the next two years he was in great demand as a concert pianist. Field’s Opus 1 Piano Sonatas was published in 1801. It was dedicated to Clementi. Field’s creation of the ‘Nocturne’ as a genre is his substantial contribution to music. Having experimented with titles such as Pastorale, Serenade, and Romance, he settled on the name when Nocturne No. 1 was published in 1812. In conception and style, Field anticipated Chopin by nearly two decades. Liszt, Mendelssohn, and other composers were influenced by the Nocturnes. These pieces strengthened the Romantic belief that music is the language of emotion that begins where words fail. They were the first ‘songs without words’. Celestial music for piano found its first expression in the London Tavern.

A successful undertaking as the London Tavern depended heavily on master chefs and cooks. And management hired the best. John Farley is a figure about whom little is known apart from his best-selling book, The London Art of Cookery published in 1783 (it went into twelve editions by 1811). His claim to fame rests on this book, although ninety per cent of the text was compiled – ‘stolen’ – from two culinary best-sellers of the eighteenth century, Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747) and Elizabeth Raffald’s The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769). In 1792 Farley was listed as being cook at the London Tavern.

What about the food at the famous tavern? The house was above all appreciated for its turtle soup. There were a number of London outlets where turtles were presented as a speciality. Of specific interest in this context is the Ship and Turtle tavern in Leadenhall Street. It has been claimed that the house dated back to 1377. The tavern was the meeting place of numerous Masonic lodges and a sought-after venue for corporation and companies’ livery dinners. Inevitably, management prided itself upon the quality of its turtle soup. Another house was the Queens Arms Tavern at St Paul’s Churchyard which was popular with City politicians and booksellers. Great numbers of turtles of differing sizes were being dressed at the tavern. In 1787, the New, Complete and Universal Body, or System, of Natural History describes three turtles being prepared at the tavern, ‘two of which together did not weigh three ounces, and the other exceeded nine hundred pounds in weight’. The London Tavern however enjoyed a supreme reputation when it came to turtles.

For a long time turtle had been considered synonymous with filth. The word ‘tortoise’ (tartarus) means ‘resident of hell’. Turtle was not considered fit for food. The shell however was used for medicinal purposes and promoted as an aphrodisiac. At sea it was a different matter altogether. During the seventeenth century, the edibility of the giant sea turtle had been exploited by mariners and whalers. Turtles were stored on deck and would remain alive for up to a year without feeding, thus providing fresh meat for long voyages. During the nineteenth century however turtle meat developed into a delicacy wreaking havoc on the species from which it has never fully recovered. Soup was made from the green cartilage that lines the shell of the turtle. These reptiles were kept in massive tanks, which occupied a whole vault. Gastronomical wisdom at the time dictated that turtles will live well in cellars for three months as long as they were kept in the same water in which they had been transported. Changing the water would lessen the weight of the turtle and affect is flavour. An estimated 15,000 turtles were imported to London yearly. When, as a consequence, the turtle became rarer as a species, soup prices shot up dramatically to a level of imported luxuries like truffles or caviar today.

Mock turtle soup was introduced by the early 1800s. This was a consommé with a calf’s head and maybe a calf’s foot, hooves or tail, and root vegetables like turnips and carrots. The non-muscular meat was used to imitate that of the turtle. This is why the John Tenniel’s illustration of ‘Alice with the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon’ in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is depicted as a collection of creatures that make up the ingredients of mock turtle soup. The illustration shows the Mock Turtle with the body of a turtle, and the head, hooves, and tail of a calf. ’Turtle Soup’, as sung by the Mock Turtle in the story, makes it clear that special pots were created for this soup:

Beautiful soup, so rich and green,
Waiting in a hot tureen!
Who for such dainties would not stoop?
Soup of the evening, beautiful soup!

A turtle soup tureen could hold up to six litres of soup in its body. Interestingly, ‘Mockturtlesuppe’ is a traditional meal in Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen). In 1714 the House of Hanover had succeeded the House of Stuart as monarchs of Great Britain and Ireland. Up to 1837 the Kingdom of Hanover and Britain were joined in a personal union, thus sharing the same person as their respective head of state. The union was ended when different succession laws resulted in Queen Victoria ascending the British throne and her uncle Ernest Augustus that of Hanover. During that period of close contact both the recipe and the name for the dish were transported from England to the northern part of Germany. Did mock turtle soup enhance the mutual understanding of the two nations? It certainly is a challenging question for socio-political researchers to answer. History is a lady with a wicked sense of humour.

The Enlightenment, with its emphasis on rationality and inquiry, and its belief in human ‘perfectibility’, disturbed the religious and cultural underpinning of the European socio-political order. Voltaire and Diderot in France, like David Hume and Jeremy Bentham in Britain, explored the human and secural bases of governmental power. These thinkers prepared the ground for the emergence of democracy as a viable system of government. Others rejected universal suffrage as a first step towards fragmentation. Awareness of disintegration in the workplace was raised when Adam Smith introduced the term and concept of division of labour in The Wealth of Nations (1776).

Adam Ferguson warned of the dangers implicit in the system. While Smith feared the effect of specialization on the individual, Ferguson argued that excessive division of labour would strain the social ties that bind society together. Progress would deteriorate into a process of atomization. Specialization also affected science and the arts. Already in his day, Goethe complained that the sciences were pigeon-holed. Universities created a multitude of disciplines without offering an integrated world-view. Too many specialisms caused the part to obscure the whole, and information to replace wisdom. Once divorced from architecture, the arts that were traditionally tied to building (sculpture, painting, and even music) developed into independent branches of creative endeavour. This particularization divorced them from their social purpose. The demand of originality dealt a final blow to stylistic unity or continuity within the creative domain that splintered into a plenitude of aggresively combative groups or -isms succeeding each other at an ever accelerating rate. Time and again critics applied phrases such as ‘cultural anarchy’ or ‘decadence’ to describe the perceived state of fragmentation into which the creative domain had fallen. Subjectivity was seen as the hallmark of disintegration.

These observations were made at the same time that an unstoppable process of centralization took place in Europe. All roads and railways led from the provinces to the capital. Napoleon was a key figure in pushing the development towards a single authority of law- and policymaking forward. The French Revolution had swept away most remaining medieval and feudal laws. A truly national law code was established. Paris is the cause of the destruction of all the old bounds of provinces and jurisdictions, ecclesiastical and secular, Edmund Burke observed in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). The ‘strength of Paris thus formed, will appear a system of general weakness’. Critics such as Mme de Staël or Alphonse de Lamartine claimed that centralization would be disastrous from a cultural perpective. They hailed the vibrancy of Italian or German cities competing to emulate and outdo each other in artistic achievements, or, as Hippolyte Taine put it in 1866, in Renaissance Italy, ‘[une] cité était une élite, et non, comme chez nous, une multitude’. It was widely feared that individual regions would forfeit their cultural traditions and the consequent loss of regional identities would undermine the nation’s strength as a whole.

That is why George Eliot insisted in Middlemarch (1871/2) that an intelligent provincial man with a grain of public spirit, should do what he can ‘to resist the rush of everything that is a little better than common towards London. Any valid professional aims may often find a freer, if not a richer field, in the provinces’. Cities may be centres of innovation and knowledge transfer, but over-centralization or the coming together of all cultural facilities in one place, carries the dangers of homogenizing art (and language) and killing off diversity. Many of our standard handbooks of literature and art seem to suggest that outside the metropolis cultural life is stagnant or non-existent. The attitude is summarized by the figure of Sir Ernold in François de Neufchâteau’s comedy Pamela, ou La vertue recompense (1795): ‘Hors de Paris, vraiment, le goût n’existe pas’. That, of course, is an outrageous statement.

Like it was the case for a number of other European cities, Rouen’s modern history has been a painful one. During the nineteenth century its main industry was textile and cotton. Manufacturies were established in the Cailly and Robec valleys as well as on the left bank of the Seine. Endless rows of brick houses were built to lodge the influx of migrant workers. The poor living conditions of the working classes caused social unrest. In April 1848 the city was full of barricades although the insurrection was quickly and brutally put down. During the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, Rouen was occupied by the Prussians. During the First World War the city was a support base for the front line and saw the arrival of many refugees from Northern France and Belgium, before the landing and stationing of British troops. World War ii brought serious suffering to the city. The Germans entered Rouen on the 9 June 1940. The area of the city most affected by combat was located between the cathedral and the river which burned for a week as the Germans refused to allow the fire service access. Rouen was to remain under Nazi control for four long years during which time the city was bombed regularly and recklessly. The worst Allied attack took place during the week from 30 May to 5 June 1944 when 400 bombs hit Rouen killing 1,500 people, damaging the Cathedral, Saint-Maclou and the Palais de Justice and completely destroying a large part of the left bank.

When the Canadians liberated Rouen on the 30 August 1944 they entered a devastated city. Cityscapes and photographs now serve as a memory of old Rouen. One of the streets obliterated by bombing during the war was Rue de l’Épicerie, literally: street of grocery stores, a bustling market street near to the cathedral. French artist Marcel Augis (pseudonym of Henri Dupont) was one a number of First World War French and Belgian artists that trod the Western Front during the Great War. They recorded the devastation of the battlefields and the areas that contained Allied troops. Many of these etchings/aquatints would have been sold to soldiers returning home after the War or subsequently purchased on battlefield remembrance tours that took place in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1916/7 Augis produced five or six scenes of Rouen. The etching of ‘La Rue de l’Épicerie, Rouen’ dates from 1917 shows a street full of grocery speciality shops of spices from the Far East with the cathedral is in the background.

The city is associated with three major artistic movements, namely Realism in literature and Romanticism and Impressionism in painting. From a literary point of view, Rouen is first and foremost associated with novelist Gustave Flaubert. The author was born in the city on 12 December 1821 and educated at the Lycée Pierre Corneille (the dramatist was also born in Rouen). In 1840 he went to Paris to study law, but hated the legal profession and found the city distasteful. From 1846 to 1854, Flaubert had a relationship with the poet Louise Colet. After leaving Paris, he returned to Croisset, near the Seine and close to Rouen, and lived with his mother in their home for the rest of his life. He never married. The affair with Louise was his only serious relationship.

His 1856 novel Madame Bovary is set in the sleepy town of Tostes (now Tôtes), near Rouen, and focuses on a doctor’s wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the emptiness of provincial life. Trapped in a banal marriage to Charles Bovary, a man without drive or ambition, and living in provincial surroundings, infidelity and Rouen are her only means of escape. To her, Paris represents the culmination of all dreams. Her reality however is life in a dull town, an existence of bitterness and discontent. The town of Tôtes also figures in another classic of French literature, Guy de Maupassant’s Boule de Suif. Set during the Franco-Prussian War, the story tells the cowardly betrayal of prostitute Elisabeth Rousset by a group of upright citizens from Rouen in order to save their own skins. De Maupassant himself was educated at a boarding school in the city. 09 Nestling in a meander of the river, the capital of Normandy has always held a fascination for artists. A number of English painters found inspiration in the old town. Richard Parkes Bonington, an Anglo-French painter of coastal scenes with a fine handling of light and atmosphere, painted the famous Rue du Gros-Horloge. Critics consider this work a masterpiece of Romantic lithography.

Turner created a well-known watercolour of Rouen Cathedral and, like Pissarro would do many years later, he compared the city to Venice. Paul Huet painted his splendid ‘Vue générale de Rouen, prise du Mont-aux-Malades’ in 1831. During three trips to Normandy in 1829, 1830 and 1833, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot produced various views of and landscapes around the Seine as seen from Rouen. Théodore Géricault was born and educated in Rouen before settling in Paris. From a historical perspective, a dramatic moment in the turn from Neoclassicism to Romanticism was the exhibition of one of Géricault’s paintings at the Salon of 1819 in Paris. In June 1816, the French frigate ‘Méduse’ had departed from Rochefort bound for Senegal. The ship drifted off course and ran aground on a sandbank off the West African coast. Passengers and crew tried to travel the sixty miles to the African coast in the frigate’s six boats. Although she was carrying 400 people, there was space for just about 250 of them in the boats. The others were piled onto a hastily-built raft. For sustenance the crew had no more than a bag of ship’s biscuits and two casks of water. The journey carried the survivors to the edge of human experience. Crazed and starved, they slaughtered mutineers, ate their dead companions, and killed the weakest amongst them. After thirteen days at sea, the raft was rescued. Fifteen men were still alive. The others had been thrown overboard, died of starvation, or drowned themselves in despair.

The disaster inspired Théodore Géricault to create ‘Le radeau de la Méduse’. The painting depicts the moment that survivors view a ship approaching from a distance. The artist was obsessed by the subject-matter. He undertook extensive research, interviewed survivors, and constructed a scale model of the raft. His efforts took him to morgues and hospitals where he could view the dying and dead. He was said to be spellbound with the stiffness of corpses. He brought severed limbs back to his studio to investigate their decay, and stored a severed head borrowed from a lunatic asylum on his studio roof. Despite their drudging reputation, fixed routines are an indispensable tool to artists of all kinds. The creative process demands discipline. Géricault drove this awareness to the extreme. During the eight months of creation, the painter lived a monastic existence, working in methodical fashion and complete silence. The painting established the artist’s international reputation and the disturbing image became an icon of French Romanticism.

Johan Barthold Jongkind visited Paris in 1860 where his Dutch watercolours of land- and seascapes enjoyed enormous successs. He decided to stay and paintings such as a ‘Vue de Rouen’ or ‘La Seine près de Rouen’ (both paintings date from 1865) which record the mood and atmospherics of the moment became influential in the push towards new aesthetic ideals. The Impressionists were regular visitors to Rouen. In fact, it was in Normandy that Claude Monet in 1872 painted his famous ‘Impression, soleil levant’, a painting that gave the movement its name. It would, however, be another twenty years before the artist turned his attention to Rouen’s Gothic Cathédrale Notre-Dame. Painted from the first floor of a ladies’ lingerie shop, he worked on up to fourteen canvases at a time, determined to capture each and every atmospheric detail. The final result consists of twenty-eight views of the impressive facade which includes ‘La Rue de l’Épicerie à Rouen’ (1892).

Monet finished the works in his studio at Giverny, carefully adjusting the pictures both independently and in relation to each other. In 1895, he successfully exhibited twenty of his cathedral pictures at Durand-Ruel’s gallery in Paris. In the autumn of 1883, Paul Gauguin moved his family from Paris to Rouen. In desperate financial trouble, he combined painting with selling life insurances and other part-time jobs in order to survive before moving to Copenhagen where his Danish wife Mette tried to keep the family afloat by teaching French to Danish students. During his short spell in Rouen, Gauguin painted a number of street- and city-scenes which includes ‘Rue Jouvenet à Rouen’ (Rouen-born Jean Jouvenet was appointed to the post of Director of the Royal Acadamy in 1705).

Léon-Jules Lemaître produced some stunning paintings of the area. In his oil painting ‘Palais de Justice de Rouen’ Lemaître masterly captures the atmosphere of the Law Courts’ Renaissance courtyard. His 1890 painting of the Rouen’s Gros Horloge, one of Europe’s oldest working medieval clocks, is an outstanding example of his interest in the cityscape. Lemaître is one of a handful of a group of artists that became known as the ‘École de Rouen’. The term was coined in 1902 by the French critic Arsène Alexandre and refers to a group of post-Impressionist artists who followed in the footsteps of Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Alfred Sisley. The members of the School of Rouen were drawn to the city as an escape from the strict academic attitudes found in the salons and galleries of Paris at the time. Their efforts culminated in two legendary exhibitions: the first, held in 1907, brought together works by Fauvist artists such as Dufy, Matisse and Braque; the second, organised on the Ile Lacroix in 1912, was addressed by Apollinaire who gave a lecture on ‘Orphic Cubism’.

Pissarro was famous for his portrayal of Rouen, a city he once described ‘as beautiful as Venice’. He first worked there in 1883. An admirer of Monet’s Rouen Cathedral series, he painted several views of the quays along the Seine. He tended to work at the spot to capture the atmosphere and activity there and then. In 1893, following treatment on an eye, his doctor warned him not to expose himself to dusty conditions. He returned to Rouen in 1896 and in 1898 for three extended painting campaigns. By working from an elevated position, Pissarro found a perfect solution to the problem of capturing the hustle and bustle of the city, its linear and aerial perspectives, without the impracticalities of installing himself in the street. From the third floor of his room at the Hôtel de Paris which overlooked the Seine, he painted different views of the Pont Boïeldieu, at sunset, on an overcast day, in the fog. The bridge joined the old Gothic city in the north with the new southern industrial areas of Sainte-Sever. On the far bank we see boats docking and unloading cargo, with the urban landscape in the distance. It is this juxtaposition of mist and smoke, of the industrial and the historical, that gives his cityscapes its intriguing character. An exhibition of his work at Paul Durand-Ruel’s gallery in Paris in April/May 1896 included eleven Rouen paintings which were critically appreciated and found buyers giving him financial security at last. It allowed him to return to Rouen in September 1896. This time he stayed at the Hôtel d’Angleterre on the other side of the bridge, where his fifth-floor room offered panoramas of the city’s three bridges. In 1898 he travelled to Rouen for a fourth time, painting more views of the bridges, as well as of the Gare d’Orléans and the Quai de la Bourse.

On 19 August 1898, Pissarro wrote to his son Lucien that he had found an excellent place from which to paint the Rue de l’Épicerie and the Friday market in the Place de la Haute-Vieille-Tour. He made various paintings of the street under different atmospheric conditions, be it in bright sunshine or on a grey morning. Like fellow Impressionists he liked to experiment with the effects of light. Depicting light and the play of shadow has always been a challenge to painters. The Impressionists abolished the traditional use of neutral tones and black and grays for creating shadow by applying purples and yellows instead to suggest coloured shadows and reflected light. Pissarro’s paintings of the old street are a reminder of the cruel damage World War ii had inflicted on Europe’s heritage. His views of Rouen total a number of forty-seven. They vastly exceed the numbers of any other series he created. Cityscapes dominate his oeuvre. Rouen’s rich artistic history in the meantime shows that there is life outside the capital after all.

Early urban culture and the invention of the printing press are intertwined. The diffusion of this technology encouraged activity in the city and stimulated commercial and intellectual pursuits. Printing was the catalyst. It made a huge impact on business skill and performance (bookkeeping and the calculation of exchange and interest rates for example) and allowed for the social ascent of new professional classes such as merchants, lawyers, officials, doctors, and teachers.

The Arte dell’abbaco (known as the ‘Treviso arithmetic’), the earliest known printed book on mathematics, is a textbook in commercial arithmetic written in vernacular Venetian and published in Treviso in 1478. It is significant that early places of printing excellence were either commercial centres (Venice, Bruges), university towns (Mainz, Louvain), or both (Leiden). The early modern city was a meeting place of traders, bankers, printers and intellectuals.

The city-state (civitas) of Rome has been the inspiration to our notions of civilization and ‘civility’ (literally, the way of life that belongs to the city). The Latin term ‘urbs’ implies a tradition of ‘urbanity’ in a sense of refined social intercourse. A history of Western civilization is largely a tale of urban development within Europe. Basel is one of those cities that take pride in a strong intellectual tradition. Scholars have always enjoyed considerable prestige here. John Foxe worked on his history of the persecutions suffered by the Reformers while in exile in Basel; Jacob Burckhardt, who was born in the city, became the celebrated historian of the Italian Renaissance; Nietzsche taught Greek philology at Basel University and wrote some of his philosophical works there; Jung studied medicine at the University; and Theodor Herzl addressed the first Zionist Congress in the old Municipal Casino.

At present, the city is home to a number of famous schools and museums and constitutes an international marketplace for art and antiquities. Totengässlein, located in the heart of historic Basel (the name translates as Little Lane of the Dead), houses the Pharmazie-Historisches Museum which was founded in 1925. Dedicated to pharmaceutical history, it holds one of the world’s largest collections on the subject that includes notable books such as Der Gart der Gesundheyt by Johann de Cuba (Augsburg, 1488) and New Kreüterbuch by Leonhart Fuchs (Basel, 1543).

The museum is located in the historical house ‘Zum Vorderen Sessel’ which dates back to the thirteenth century. The building once housed an important printing press owned by Johann Amerbach who had arrived in Basel from Germany in 1475. In 1507 the property, consisting of several houses and a yard, was bought from him by his pupil Johann Froben. Here, in 1514, a meeting took place that would shape the course of Europe’s intellectual history. 06 In 1499, Erasmus of Rotterdam paid his first visit to England as guest of William Blount, his former pupil in Paris and the future Lord Mountjoy, who encouraged the Dutch scholar to compile his Adagia. During his stay Erasmus met Thomas More and the two became lifelong friends. Apparently, their very first meeting took place at the Lord Mayor’s table. They were seated opposite each other. Their debate was lively. Each was so impressed by the other’s wit that Erasmus exclaimed, ‘Aut tu es Morus, aut nullus’ (Either you are More, or no one), and More replied, ‘Aut tu es Erasmus, aut diabolus’ (You are either Erasmus, or the devil). Whilst on a second visit in 1505, Erasmus was joined by Thomas More and together they worked on the translation of Lucian’s satires from Greek into Latin (published in Paris, 1506).

In 1509 Erasmus visited England for a third time. During his stay he wrote Encomium Moriae (In Praise of Folly) which he dedicated to Thomas, jokingly including More’s name in the title. The meeting between Erasmus and Johannes Froben took place five years after the former’s 1509 visit to England. Froben was a printer in Basel who established the greatest Swiss publishing firm of the early sixteenth century. A scholar himself, a master printer, and a successful businessman, he recognized the vitality of humanistic thinking. Froben had originally worked in Nuremberg, before moving to Basel in 1490. Three years later, he entered a partnership with Johannes Petri and the leading Basel printer of the preceding generation, Johannes Amerbach.

A fine 1513 reprint of Aldus’s edition of Erasmus’s Adagia had drawn the humanist’s attention to the superb skills of the Basel printer. Moreover, Erasmus was intrigued by the work that was undertaken by Amerbach and Froben for an edition of the writings of Saint Jerome. Erasmus admired this early scholar and had been busy himself translating his epistles. His plan to restore the books of Jerome and add a commentary had been frustrated by a variety of problems. Basel offered the opportunity of joining a group of editors who were working on the same subject. In July 1514, he set out to meet Froben. He carried his notes on Jerome with him. After the death of his partners, Froben took full control of the press. In 1500 he married the daughter of the bookseller Wolfgang Lachner, who entered into a partnership with him. She ran the commercial side of the business, while Froben handled the authors and editors and the process of production. By 1510 his press had become the centre of a large circle of mostly German and Swiss humanist scholars. The inclusion of Erasmus meant a major turning point for the firm. From about 1515, Froben was the main publisher used by Erasmus. In 1521, the latter moved from the Netherlands to Basel.

It was Froben’s fine printing and humanistic scholarship that made him decide to make the move. It turned out to be a happy meeting of minds and skills. The greatest period of Froben’s work as a printer coincided with the years of his friendship with the celebrated scholar, the ‘prince of humanists’. Erasmus himself was delighted with the new environment in which he had settled. In a letter to Joannes Sapidus, he described his stay in Basel as ‘living in some charming sanctuary of the Muses, where a multitude of learned persons, and learned in no common fashion, appears a thing of course’. The vibrant intellectual climate and captivating atmosphere of the city inspired his finest work. The wandering scholar had found his home.

Froben could teach contemporary publishers a lesson or two. He was alert enough to offer Erasmus a fixed annual income of 200 gulden for his services and a fair share in the profits of the books produced. The two men entered into a proper business partnership. Working closely together, this relationship turned into a close friendship. What did these services consist of? Printing ancient texts demanded expert assistance. Manuscripts had to be obtained in the first place. When acquired, they needed to be evaluated (manuscripts were often in a poor state and before the invention of printing editors had not been particular careful with their texts), collated, and emendated. This task demanded scholarship of the highest level. Erasmus became the most eminent of ‘learned correctors’ at Froben’s publishing house. We think of Erasmus first and foremost as an author. Where did he gain his editorial skills? Before moving to Basel, Erasmus had spent nine months in Venice with Aldus Manutius, the most famous printer in Europe. It was Aldus’s ambition to rescue from oblivion the work of the classical, especially Greek, writers. To this end he edited and printed those works for which workable manuscripts could be procured. His firm, named Ne-academia Nostra, employed many scholars who were involved with the deciphering of ancient manuscripts. Erasmus stayed with Aldus from January to September 1508. It was there that he learned the editorial trade by preparing an impressive number of texts, including editions of Plautus, Seneca, Terence, and Plutarch.

In December 1516, Louvain-based printer Dirk Martens had published one of the lasting highlights of European literature. It was Thomas More’s Utopia. Whilst on a trade mission in the Low Countries in 1515, the author had entrusted the publication of his book to Erasmus and to Pieter Gillis (Petrus Aegidius in Latin or Peter Giles in English), a town councillor (‘griffier’) in Antwerp. The delightful introductory letter to the text itself is addressed to my ‘right heartily beloved friend Peter’ [Giles]. The book depicts the society of a fictional island and its religious, political and social customs. The quasi-Platonic debate in the first part of Utopia, in which a critique of a corrupt contemporary society is formulated, stands at the beginning of a long subsequent tradition of European socio-cultural criticism. A Paris edition was published in 1517, embellished with supportive letters from leading humanists to whom Erasmus had sent copies of the manuscript. That same year painter Quinten Massys completed his famous portrait of Erasmus which was commissioned with a pendant portrait of Pieter Gillis, to be sent as a gift to Thomas More. In presenting themselves surrounded by their books, both men must have hoped these portraits would seal their bonds of intellect and friendship with a like-minded thinker.

On 25 August 1517 Erasmus sent a letter from Louvain to Johannes Froben in Basel. In it, he recommended the publication of More’s Utopia in combination with the Prolusions (the works were published together in two 1518 – March and November – editions by Froben). If you think fit, Erasmus wrote, ‘let them go forth to the world and to posterity with the recommendation of being printed by you. For such is the reputation of your press that for a book to have been published by Froben, is a passport to the approbation of the learned’. Froben employed Hans Holbein to supply the woodcut borders to his edition. This border takes the form of a Renaissance niche flanked by columns in which putti play around a shield showing Froben’s printer’s mark with a bird perched on top. Holbein’s brother Ambrosius designed the alphabet letter within the text. The book proved to be an overwhelming success. By the middle of the century translations of the original Latin had appeared in German, Italian, French, and English. The first translation into Dutch entitled De Utopie van Thomas Morus, in zijn tijden Cancellier van Enghelant was printed by Hans de Laet in Antwerp in 1553. Within a time span of three decades the whole of Europe had taken notice of Thomas More’s masterpiece. Quality travels fast – even in those early days. 13 The close personal relationship between Froben and Erasmus is perhaps unparalleled in the history of authors and their publishers, although it was surely in keeping with the climate and ideals of the time. It was Renaissance humanism in its most perfect form. With the death of Froben in 1527, Erasmus expressed his personal loss and sorrow. His grief for the death of his close friend was more distressing than that which he had felt for the loss of his own brother. The world of ‘studia humanitatis’ was in mourning.

The twin approach to this blog was to track the development of the street- and cityscape through the history of Western painting and identify as many urban themes in art, literature, photography and film as could be managed within the structure of this undertaking. As is clear from the sequence of previous chapters, the cosmopolitan nature of the metropolis provided a wide variety of images for artists. Themes of urban entertainment for example were rooted in French nineteenth century art. Circus, theatre, ballet, cabaret and café-concert became part of a rich patchwork of subjects ranging from Manet’s interest in the audience and spectators to Toulouse- Lautrec’s obsession with outcasts such prostitutes, clowns and bohemians. By the 1920s, Berlin had become the entertainment capital of the world and mass culture played an important role in distracting a society traumatized by war and humiliation. Artists depicted scenes of leisure, entertainment and city life at night. By portraying the city’s seedy underbelly, they broke down the wall between serious art and popular culture. Cityscape and urban entertainment are beautifully fused in the final picture to be discussed in this wide-ranging overview.

Broadway equals showbiz. The avenue runs through almost the entire length of Manhattan Island and continues northward through the Bronx. It is the oldest north-south thoroughfare in the city. Broadway was originally the Wickquasgeck Trail which, mapped out by Native Americans, snaked through swamps and rocks. Upon the arrival of the Dutch, the trail soon became the main road through the island from ‘Nieuw Amsterdam’ at its southern tip. The name Broadway is a literal translation of ‘Breede Weg’. Today, a stretch of Broadway is known worldwide as the heart of the theatre industry. The name of the avenue appears in an endless number of poems and songs.

Born in the Dutch provincial town of Amersfoort in 1872, Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan grew up in a strict Protestant household. His father often neglected his family in favour of service to the church. His mother was sickly, and it fell to Mondrian’s elder sister to take charge of her four brothers. His miserable childhood and unstable life at home made the future artist introspective and bitter. Art became for Mondrian a way to escape day-to-day reality and immerse himself in the world of his imagination. Young Mondriaan (between 1905 and 1907 he changed the spelling of his name into Mondrian) painted traditional subjects in an increasingly non-representational style. In 1911, he attended a Georges Braque exhibition. The work of the Cubist painter impressed him greatly, as it paralleled much of what he had been experimenting with on his own. Fascinated by the artistic innovations being introduced in Paris, he decided to pay a visit to the French capital. However, arriving there in the winter of the same year, the artist made no attempt to contact any of the local modernists. Though he followed the development of their art and theory, he had no wish to enter their circles. Instead, Mondrian rented a small studio and went on with his experimentation in private. He was and remained an outsider. Socially, Mondrian tended to distance himself from other people and he enjoyed few lasting relationships. He did make one attempt to settle down. In 1914, he became engaged to Greet Heybroek and the two married soon afterwards. The relationship lasted only three years. Mondrian was not made for marriage.

The Dutch review De Stijl was founded in 1917 by Theo van Doesburg, and the name has come to represent the common aims and utopian vision of a loose affiliation of Dutch and international artists and architects. Mondrian soon became one of the central figures of De Stijl. The idea underlying De Stijl’s utopian program was the creation of a universal aesthetic language based in part on a rejection of the decorative excesses of Art Nouveau in favour of a style that emphasized construction and function, one that would be appropriate for every aspect of modern life. It was posited on the fundamental principle of the geometry of the straight line, the square, and the rectangle, combined with a strong asymmetricality; the predominant use of pure primary colours with black and white; and the relationship between positive and negative elements in an arrangement of non-objective forms and lines. Mondrian adopted a totally abstract motif, employing an irregular checkerboard drawn with black lines, and with the spaces paints mostly white or sometimes in the primary colours of blue, red and yellow. Between 1917 and 1944 he created some 250 abstract paintings. He named his style ‘neo-plasticism’ (from the Dutch ‘nieuwe beelding’ meaning new image). In 1938, as the political situation in Europe began to grow tense, Mondrian abandoned the Continent for London where he stayed with the British artists Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth. In 1940, with France fallen to Nazi Germany, and England suffering daily air raids, the artist took a ship to New York, despite the risk of U-boats.

Mondrian settled in New York where he spent the last four years of his life. He held a number of exhibitions together with other European abstract artists who had escaped the war and the brutal Nazi regime that viewed modern art as an aberration. The metropolis, its size, scale and exuberance, fascinated him and inspired his ‘New York, New York’ (1941/2). His subsequent creation ‘New York City I’ (1942) can be read as an elegant abstraction of the Manhattan gridiron whereby streets are represented in primary colours (red, blue, yellow) and blocks in white. Another interpretation of this painting is an abstracted ‘snapshot’ of built form in Manhattan, whereby primary colours represent vertical construction elements (post, beams and/or floors) and white represents the space or window framed within these load-bearing elements. In his final painting ‘Broadway Boogie Woogie’ (1943) the checkerboard lines, previously black, are now painted blue, gray, red and yellow (inspired by New York’s Yellow cabs).

The craze for boogie-woogie (the etymology of the term is unclear) in New York had reached fever point in those years. In 1938 and 1939 producer John Hammond promoted the ‘From Spirituals to Swing’ concerts at Carnegie Hall. The success of these events inspired many swing bands (Tom Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Will Bradley) to incorporate the boogie-woogie beat into some of their music. The Andrew Sisters sang boogies. The floodgates had opened. Every big band included boogie numbers in their repertoire, as the dancers were learning to jitterbug (derived from the slang term ‘jitters’ or delirium tremens – an American critic of the exploding jazz scene had made the observation that ‘just when they made delirium tremens unconstitutional, jazz came along and gave us dancing tremens’) and do the Harlem inspired Lindy Hop.

Critics consider ‘Broadway Boogie Woogie’ to be Mondrian’s masterpiece, and a culmination of his aesthetic. Compared to his earlier work, the canvas is divided into a much larger number of squares. The painting was inspired by the city grid of Manhattan, and the jazz music to which the artist loved to dance. New York painter and printmaker Robert Motherwell grasped the essence of this remarkable painting and its significance in the history of the cityscape: ‘The Modern City! Precise, rectangular, squared, whether seen from above, below, or on the side; bright lights and sterilized life; Broadway, whites and blacks; and boogie-woogie; the underground music of the at once resigned and rebellious’.

Mondrian was a man of complex contrasts. Artistically he was a precise technician and the creator of austere pictures, in life he was a chaotic dreamer and a withdrawn romantic. He was a lucid intellectual who, at the same time, was attracted to the mysticism of Mme Blavatsky, Annie Besant and Rudolf Steiner. He joined the Theosophical Society in 1909. In Art and Act Peter Gay locates Mondrian’s creative impulse not in some rational aesthetic concept of pictorial form, but in the artist’s flight from sentiment and sensuality, in his dread of desire. For Mondrian – as was the case for Albert Einstein – creativity was partly motivated by a desire to escape from day to day reality in order to find a harmony and balance that he could not find in private life. Withdrawn, anxious, and fastidious to the point of obsession, Piet Mondrian painted cool geometric abstractions for intensely personal reasons. No sentiment, no curves, no touching – that is how he lived and that is what his abstract paintings proclaim. Beauty was wrested from anxiety. That gives such significance to the title and execution of Mondrian’s last painting which contrasts the square severity of Broadway with the nerve and restlessness of jazz as an expression of modern life.

Mondrian’s boogie woogie supplies a rhythmic finale to this festival of street art. This does not mean that Mondrian stands at the end of a tradition or that the possibilities of further developing this genre have been exhausted. It certainly is a fact that during the twentieth century attention was largely focused on abstract and conceptual art. The interest in cityscapes declined as a result of that development. The revival of figurative art at the end of the century however heralded a revaluation of the urban landscape. Gerhard Richter’s townscapes – and those of Milan in particular – have been influential. An important contribution to the genre was made by photo-realist painters. An already classic example is the view of Madrid’s ‘Gran Via’ which Spanish artist Antonio López painted from life during innumerable sessions across a seven years period (1974/81). Since his arrival in 1980, Martin Kostler has produced some fine cityscapes of Washington DC. Richard Estes is based in New York. His 2010 painting ‘Broadway Bus Stop’ has given the genre a new impetus. Over the years, Leon Kossoff has produced a number of splendid London landscapes. Some of the most intriguing post-war cityscapes have been created by Frank Auerbach. As a youngster he was sent to England from his home city, Berlin, shortly before his eighth birthday and the outbreak of war. Both his Jewish parents were killed in the concentration camps and Auerbach made London his new home where from 1947 to 1952 he was an art student. The capital at the time was badly scarred by war wounds. The Blitz had levelled whole areas of the metropolis and left numerous buildings severely damaged. During the post-war years large numbers of workmen were involved in clearing the debris and excavating new foundations. Once again, London was in the process of transforming itself. For Auerbach, this changing urban landscape made the most compelling of contemporary subjects. He remembered London after the war as a ‘marvellous landscape with precipice and mountains and crags, full of drama’.

His uncompromising painting ‘Building Site, Earls Court Road: Winter’ is one of an extraordinary group of paintings of post-war London building sites. This series of fourteen works was created in the decade between 1952 and 1962 and are among the most profound responses made by any artist to the post-war urban landscape. The painful irony is that the Blitz – like the Great Fire had done previously – offered London the opportunity for renewed ‘planning’. It either had damaged poor districts and shabby property in need of redevelopment, or opened up hidden architectural treasures that once again could be made visible. Bomb damage was the spur to reconstruction. London’s post-war revival is not only proof of the urban resilience in overcoming disaster, but also of the creative potential to harness and maintain its distinctive character.

At first we thought to integrate our new series on immigrants in this, our successful blog on art, books, and cultural history. But our series on immigrants will be huge and different enough to deserve a separate blog. You will find this new blog a http://londonimmigrants.wordpress.com. From time to time we will publish longer articles here that refer to our new project.

We think our new work important, as cultural history, but more as a statement of where we stand. It is possible to take a subscription to our new site – but there will be days when we publish 10+ posts or more. Still, we love subscribers – it is important to know that you are read and appreciated.

Paul Dijstelberge

Dear readers of this Blog –  you will have noticed that we have not published a single entry for some time now. Busy with our London Immigrants and with our first publication.

Streetwise has become a Book with everything that makes a book more interesting than a blog: a new and different sequence that gives the content a new and – we think – interesting rhythm of its own.

It is a digital book that you can read and download here: http://issuu.com/bookhistory/docs/streetwise_f53b04df393fff. It is free and we think it is fun. Download it, read it, give it as a present on a memorystick to people you love or like. It deserves it. And tell us what you think of it.

The printed book is not dead, nor will it die. We believe in the book as a real book: something you can keep in your hands. And so we are going to have this book printed and bound in a hardcover. We think that you will love it and hope of course that you will buy it for 65 dollar / euro. If so please contact Paul Dijstelberge  p.dijstelberge@uva.nl.

The first print run will be ready by the end of July. It will be delivered to you by one of the foremost Dutch booksellers. We have not yet figured out how much the postage will be, but as soon as we know what it weights, we will add that information here.

We are now going to continue with Streetwise and we hope that you will enjoy our new series

Strand, often called the Strand, is a major thoroughfare in Westminster running from its western origin at Trafalgar Square to its eastern end at Temple Bar, where it continues into Fleet Street, marking Westminster’s boundary with the City of London. The Old English word strand means shore, referring to the bank of the Thames before construction of the Victoria Embankment.

The name was later applied to the road itself. In Roman times the route of the Strand was part of Iter VIII on the Antonine Itinerary, the road map of Roman Britain. Part of it was known in the thirteenth century as Densemanestret (Street of Danes). Immigration has been a continuous aspect of the capital. During the Middle Ages it was the principal route between the separate settlements of the City of London (the civil and commercial centre) and the Palace of Westminster (the political centre). By then, large mansions lined the Strand, including several palaces and townhouses inhabited by bishops and royal courtiers.

Once the high and mighty had left for other parts of inner London, the character of the Strand changed fundamentally. It became synonymous with pleasure, entertainment, and artistic performance. Palaces and estates were replaced by theatres, clubs, coffee houses, taverns, and brothels. The Strand and a taste of tea are inseparable. The first tea samples reached England in the early 1650s. On 25 September 1660 Samuel Pepys enjoyed a ‘cupp of tee’ for the very first time.

John Ovington’s Tea Essay, 1699

John Ovington published his Essay on Tea in 1699 (containing a woodcut of the plant). Tea mania swept across the nation. Having been apprenticed to an East India merchant, Thomas Twining acquired Tom’s Coffee House at no. 216 Strand, Devereux Court, in 1706. Thanks to his enterprising efforts and hospitality, tea drinking became an everyday part of London life. Still at the same address on the Strand, the firm holds the world’s oldest company logo and is longest-standing rate-payer in the metropolis. 05 Around the same time, the Strand had become a focus of music publishing and instrument making. François [Francis] Vaillant, who had fled Saumur for London on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, started his bookseller’s business at no. 82 Strand (opposite Southampton Street) in 1686. Specialised in foreign books, he was also involved in the sale of music and music books. There are a number of books in British libraries with a label stating: ‘London, sold by Francis Vaillant, French bookseller in the Strand, where you may be furnished with all sorts of musick’.

Thomas Cahusac (probably of French extraction as well) was a music publisher who, as early as 1755, ran his business at the sign of the ‘Two Flutes and Violin’ opposite St Clement’s Church in the Strand. After 1784 the firm moved to no. 196 Strand. His younger son William carried on the business as Cahusac & Co. up until 1819. The family did not make instruments themselves, but employed outworkers. Flutes, recorders and flageolets with their name stamped on them show a range of quality, from very cheap work to instruments made entirely from ivory. The violins carrying their name also appear to show a range of different hands. William [‘Old’] Foster set up the firm of musical instrument makers and publishers that from 1785 onwards traded at no. 348 Strand. Trumpet maker Richard Woodham resided at no. 12 Exeter Court, Strand, from 1774 until his death around 1797/8. Music printers John Preston & Son were active in the 1790s at no. 97 Strand.

In the early nineteenth century Charles Wheatstone ran an imposing music warehouse at no. 436 Strand. The most important figure at the time was music publisher and instrument maker John Walsh. Of Irish descent, he had established himself in Catherine Street, just off the Strand, by around 1690. He began publishing music in 1695, at which time he had few rivals in the trade. His firm was soon printing engraved music on a scale previously unknown in England. In addition to English composers, he published a good deal of music by foreign composers, mostly copied from Dutch editions (from 1716 onwards he worked closely together with Estienne Roger in Amsterdam).

From 1711 onwards his name became associated with Handel. Around 1730 his son John took control of the business, and was responsible for developing the firm’s relationship with Handel from that time onward. In 1739 he was granted a monopoly on Handel’s music for fourteen years. John Walsh played another part in English musical life which was totally unforeseen and yet of lasting importance. 09 Violin maker Daniel Parker is a mysterious figure. Active from around 1700 to 1725, there is no trace about his birth or background and no record can be found of any apprenticeship. The little that can be discovered about his life has to be inferred from studying his thirty or so known violins and violas and the labels and dates that some of them bear. He worked mainly for the trade in the City of London, having no retail establishment of his own. His contribution can be seen in the instruments of Edward Lewis, Barak Norman, Richard Meares and John Hare, all of whom ran music shops on the northern edge of St Paul’s Churchyard at one time or another. Prior to 1700, there were few violin makers in England and they were in the process of developing their skill. Only a precious few Amati instruments were available to study and imitate.

A number of the early instrument makers were immigrants. Jacob Rayman was born in Füssen, Bavaria, in about 1596. He arrived in London in 1620, having come from s’Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands according to court papers of the time. He settled first at Blackman Street, then at Bell Yard, Southwark. Rayman was active till about 1650. He was not the first violin maker in this country. Various craftsmen were busy making violins amongst all sorts of other instruments by the end of the sixteenth century. However, no actual surviving work earlier than Rayman’s has been securely identified. His violins maintain many of the characteristics of Jacob Stainer’s Tyrolean design, tending to be rough on the exterior, with flat arching, and a fine varnish, all contributing to a dark sound.

The skill level was raised dramatically in the first decade of the eighteenth century. What caused this sudden progress? Virtuoso violinist and composer Gasparo Visconti was born in Cremona in January 1683 into a noble family. Details of his life and career are sketchy. He was a dilettante who pursued a musical career not out of economic necessity, but for its artistic delights. He had been, according to his own testimony, a pupil of Arcangelo Corelli for five years. The Corellian manner of his first published music, the six violin sonatas of Opus 1 (Amsterdam: Estienne Roger, 1703), appears to bear out the truth of that claim. He resided in London from 1702 to 1705, where he regularly performed as a solo violinist or together with his friend the French flautist Jacques Paisible. His sonatas for violin and flute were widely appreciated in England. His compositions were published by John Walsh who had connections with the violin trade and apparently with Daniel Parker himself. Visconti also had a scientific interest in the sound of the violin and is almost certain to have come to England with knowledge Stradivari’s working methods. In London he assisted Frederick and Christian Steffkin, the prominent viol players at the Royal Court, in acoustical demonstrations in July 1705 at the Royal Society. Since the Fire of London, meetings of the Royal Society took place at Arundel House, London home of the Dukes of Norfolk in the Strand near St Clement Danes (in 1710, under the Presidency of Isaac Newton, the Society acquired its own base in Crane Court, off the Strand). 11 In 1704 Visconti married Christina Steffkin. To celebrate the marriage, he commissioned a violin from Stradivari for his wife, and the original template for the neck of this instrument remains in the Stradivari museum in Cremona, inscribed with her name.

Parker presumably gained access to the Visconti violin and was the first craftsman to realise the high quality of the workmanship of Stradivari. He made patterns of the instrument, and from then on his violins were firmly rooted in Stradivari’s work of the period 1690-1700. The Cremonese model became the central inspiration for a new generation of English violin makers who were located around St Paul’s Churchyard. Whatever happened to Visconti after 1705 is poorly documented. It is certain that he returned to his native city by 1713, the year his daughter was born. He was the teacher of the violinist and composer Carlo Zuccari which indicates that he continued to be active in Cremona during the late 1710s and early 1720s (Zuccari left for Vienna in 1723). Parker’s standing in the meantime was established during his lifetime. The last known violin by Daniel Parker is a fine example of collaboration with Barak Norman, dated 1723. Norman died in the following year, and the once-populous community of instrument makers in St Paul’s Churchyard dwindled as Piccadilly became the new focus for English musical culture. His legacy was confirmed when Fritz Kreisler at the end of his 1910/11 tour of Britain (when he premiered the violin concerto that Edward Elgar had written for and dedicated to him) bought one of violins from W.E. Hill & Sons. Made in the early eighteenth century, its modelling and construction showed that Parker had grasped the Stradivarian principles of instrument making. Kreisler played the violin frequently during his career and referred to it as his ‘Parker Strad’.

(c) The Fitzwilliam Museum; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

The art of performing string instruments in England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century was also refined by the arrival of immigrants from Italy. Once again, the Strand figures in the narrative. Violinist and composer Nicola Matteis was of Neapolitan descent, describing himself as ‘Napolitano’ in several of his works. Nothing is known about his origins or education. He arrived in London in the early 1670s. On 20 November 1674 John Evelyn made an enthusiastic note in his diary. He had dined at the Strand home of Henry Slingsby, Master of the Mint, and was treated to a private concert in which Nicola Matteis excelled (a Frenchman played the lute, an Italian the harpsichord, and a German the viol d’amore: music in London was largely a Continental experience). The violinist was actively supported by such eminent men as Roger L’Estrange, William Waldegrave and William Bridgeman, all of whom had strong interests in music (and were sympathetic to the Roman Church). He became the earliest notable Italian Baroque violinist active in the capital. Initially very much his own promoter, Matteis published his Arie diverse per il violin in 1676, a collection of 120 pieces for solo violin and continuo bass. A second edition with an English title-page together with a second part containing a further seventy pieces appeared two years later. These self-published volumes helped establish in England the skill and technology of engraving music. In 1685, he published the third and fourth parts of the Ayres for the Violin, which was followed two years later by an expanded second edition. His portrait was painted by Godfrey Kneller in 1682. Matteis teamed up with John Walsh in 1696 enjoying great artistic and commercial success with his published music. He married a rich widow in 1700 and retired from the London musical scene. Having squandered his wealth, he died in poverty sometime after 1713. Matteis is credited with changing the English taste for violin playing from the French to the Italian style. Burney stressed his importance in the English history of violin playing, stating that the virtuoso ‘had polished and refined our ears, and made them fit and eager for the sonatas of Corelli’.

Stradivari’s reputation in Britain was cemented in the Strand. A veritable cult of Cremona would follow. The Stradivarius violin became a metaphor for perfection attained by individual genius, consummate skill, and close attention to details. Little is known about Antonio Stradivari’s life. Contemporaries did not deem it necessary to eulogise a productive craftsman and chronicle his deeds as was done for Renaissance painters or sculptors. No authentic portrait has survived. After all, he was only a craftsman. It only contributed to nineteenth century myth making (the most persistent and prominent one is that of the ‘secret’ and ‘lost’ varnish recipe). In literature it led to the creation of a new leading role, that of the craftsman-hero. Painter Edgar Bundy specialised in historical paintings in oil and watercolour, usually in a very detailed and narrative style, a genre that was popular amongst the Edwardians. In 1893 he produced Antonio Stradivari at work in his studio, a painting that typifies the mystique surrounding the figure of the violin maker. It is the kind of sugar pill Romanticism which created many nonsensical notions about the artist, his craft and the creative process that have remained in circulation to this day. Such was the Stradivari hero-worship that in 1902 the three Hill brothers, owners of a violin and bow-making firm in New Bond Street and leading experts on the work of Stradivari, published a detailed study of the master’s work and productivity. According to their figures Stradivari produced a total of 1,116 instruments, most of which were violins – 540 violins, 50 cellos, and 12 violas could be accounted for. They went out their way to separate the legend from the reality of the workshop. The Hills were emphatic in asserting that Stradivari had no individual secrets in the craft of violin making. He was just a gifted and diligent artisan. It was the skill factor – not the genius, divine inspiration, or any other claptrap – that Daniel Parker recognised in the Stradivari’s craftsmanship. He used the master’s work as a starting point, developing his own results from a set of ideas that were familiar to Cremonese instrument makers without sacrificing useful elements which he had acquired during his traditional London training.

Streetwise is now a book. The printed version can be ordered by mailing to p.dijstelberge@uva.nl and costs 65 euro (hard cover, full color 500+ pages)

this link brings you to a new concept of the book. Let us know what you think!

https://metabotnik.com/projects/130/

Painter Ford Madox Brown was born in Calais in 1821. His parents had moved there to cut living costs when struck by poverty. He studied art at Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, Rome and Paris before returning to England in 1845.

Emma Hill, the illiterate child of a bricklayer, was one of his models and became his mistress. In 1848 they settled together at no. 17 Newman Street, Fitzrovia, close to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s studio, though the relationship remained a secret from all but his closest friends. In November 1850 she gave birth to a daughter. Brown taught Emma to read and write, and they were married at St Dunstan-in-the-West on 5 April 1853, in the presence only of Rossetti and another friend, the landscape painter Thomas Seddon.

In 1852, Brown had been lodging in Heath Street, at a time that Hampstead was expanding dramatically with the wholesale development of its large estates. Adelaide Road and South Hampstead were developed from the 1840s, Kilburn and Belsize in the 1850s, Lyndhurst Terrace in the 1860s. Gas lighting began to be introduced in the 1840s. Hampstead’s population grew from 10,000 in 1841 to 15,000 in 1851 and 19,000 in 1861. Brown witnessed this intense activity which transformed a largely rural area into a London suburb. In Heath Street he spotted a gang of navvies (manual workers on major civil engineering projects – mostly Irish immigrants) digging up the road for the laying of a sewage system. This lively scene of men at work fascinated him and he judged the activity of a navvy in full swing (in his own words) ‘at least as worthy of the powers of the English painter, as the fisherman of the Adriatic, the peasant of the Campagna, or the Neapolitan lazzarone’. Soon after, Brown began work on what has been called the first serious attempt by a British artist to represent the working class in an urban environment. Thirteen years later he completed the picture which he called Work.

Brown’s painting has been interpreted as one of the most didactic and moralistic paintings of his age. Despite the fact that he was never considered a true member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the painting made a considerable contribution to the intellectual orientation of the movement. Brown created a ‘realist’ painting utilising a composition crowded with figures that represent various types of workers and citizens in Victorian society. Every character tells its own story. The image is an odd combination of navvies digging a hole (representing the nobility of physical work); an orphan girl wearing her dead mother’s dress looking after brothers and sisters whilst her father is in the pub (the plight of neglected children); a flower seller from the country stuck in the city (the curse of urbanisation); standing against a railing there is a group of apparently jobless people (the plight of poverty); and, further to the right, there appear the figures of Frederick Maurice, leader of the Christian Socialist movement, and of Thomas Carlyle, the social critic.

They represent the ‘brainworkers’ and – in a Saint-Simonian sense – the social responsibility of the intellectual elite. Brown had been influenced by Carlyle’s view of the ‘nobleness and even sacredness of work’. In the painting he attempted to capture the dignity of the British worker. The women on the left, in fine dress and parasols, represent members of the middle class. One of the women is distributing pamphlets regarding the Temperance movement (the curse of alcoholism). Two well-dressed figures on horseback are placed towards the back of the painting (the idleness of the leisure class). Brown focuses the sunlight in the painting on the labouring figures, whereas the middle class members are painted in shadowy light. This contrast of labour and idleness continues on the gold frame which contains Biblical quotations about to the virtue of hard work.

The image is – to put it mildly – a confusing one. In 1848, as revolutions swept continental Europe and a Chartist movement for social reform unsettled England, at a time of industrialism and urbanisation, of newspapers and expanding means of communication, seven rebellious young London artists formed a secret society. They called themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Disenchanted with contemporary academic painting, members of the Brotherhood were inspired by late medieval and early Renaissance art up to the time of Raphael. This art was characterised by minute description of detail and by subject matter of a noble, religious or moralising nature. Late medieval ideals in mid-nineteenth century England – the concept appears an aberration: interesting, impressive at times, but a weird anachronism none the less. This is historicity at it most absurd, a retreat into the past.

To many artists and intellectuals of the nineteenth century the Middle Ages offered an asylum in which to hide from the relentlessly changing present. A similar symptom of European intellectual escapism during the late 1900s and early twentieth century was the cult of the Renaissance. The veneration of this period by such thinkers as Gobineau, Nietzsche, Taine, Jacob Burckhardt, or John Addington Symonds, was associated with an intense contempt for the present. While being swept into an uncertain future, men sought counterbalance in the past. Yet, each of these retrospective strands also reflected different attitudes towards the present. History, after all, was not read for history’s sake, but as a lesson for the here and now. The past should teach the present, preferably with concrete examples to be followed or avoided. The standard had been set by Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present (1843). This ‘flight into the past’ was not a matter of pure escapism. Most idolaters of Europe’s great tradition had an agenda that concerned their own time. Nostalgia is by implication socio-cultural criticism. Victorian medievalists pitted their glorified past against the reality of capitalism and gross materialism. Pre-Raphaelite painters depicted medieval, Renaissance and Romantic themes mixed with contemporary subjects and criticism of society, including exploitation, poverty, and taboos such as prostitution, suppressed sexuality or homosexuality. They countered the reality of Victorian orthodoxy by celebrating neo-pagan and hedonistic lifestyles, and setting alternative ethical and aesthetic values.

All that however is philosophy, not reality. It is quite astonishing that the labels of ‘social realism’ and ‘urban observation’ are still used to describe Brown’s odd picture. The working conditions of navvies in particular were squalid. The men were paid daily and their pay reputedly went on drink, leaving little for food. The building of Britain’s infrastructure, roads, canals, railways, has an often painful history. It takes some leap of the imagination to associate Brown’s men who are digging sewers with the sacredness of work. For all its aesthetic qualities this is a strange painting, one of muddled imagery and confused thinking. In an age that work was increasingly divided, mechanised, and degraded, philosophers and moralists sang the praises of labour, whilst artists and poets ignored the drudgery of machines and instead observed the muscles of digging men with an almost Soviet like admiration. Brown and the Pre-Raphaelites were not of this world – they were nostalgic dreamers at best and sloppy sentimentalists at worst. There was no nobility in work. There was factory labour, mechanised labour, child labour, slave labour. There were greedy owners, relentless hours, low pay, dirty factories, and poor conditions. There was oil and grease. Life was black. There was but one escape: drink.

One of the workmen in Brown’s painting is draining a pewter pot of porter. In front of him stands the potboy from one of the local pubs. He is dressed in bowtie and waistcoat, wearing a publican’s apron, and in his left hand he carries the pot-board (beer tray) which bore up to ten beer pots and, on the top, clay pipes for those who wanted a smoke with their beer. The introduction of this figure stresses the anachronistic nature of the image. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word ‘potboy’ was first used in an anonymous book published around 1662 entitled The Life and Death of Mrs Mary Frith, Commonly Called Moll Cutpurse. A potboy was a young man employed at a public house to fill orders for those wanting beer at home, or delivering porter for an aristocratic household’s servants to drink with their meals, or bring beer to those who were working in the building trade or repairing the roads. His shout of ‘beer-ho’ was once one of the familiar cries of London. Madox Brown painted Work at a time when the institution of the potboy had become mere memory. Gin had replaced beer as the cheap and common drink amongst the working poor. The contented workmen drinking tankards of foaming beer in Hogarth’s moral image of Beer Street (which includes a potboy) had made way for the chaos and drunkenness of Gin Street.

The English passion for gin dates back to the Glorious Revolution. On 24 August 1689 William III banned all trade with France. Low levels of duty on liquor or cider established by statute in 1690 were introduced in an attempt to encourage native alternatives to French wines. As a possible substitute, William encouraged the distilling of Dutch ‘jenever’ (geneva) or gin as it was known in England. This politically motivated economic move heralded the beginning of an urban gin addiction. The effect was such that in London, despite some real improvements in sanitation and health care, the population of the metropolis actually fel in numbers. Londoners were drinking themselves to death. There was an alarming increase in the number of ‘gin shops’, many of which were former public houses that had been converted. George Dodd, in The Food of London, published in 1856, observed that many small pubs were being transformed into gin houses, ‘from painted deal to polished mahogany, from small crooked panes of glass to magnificent crystal sheets, from plain useful fittings to costly luxurious adornments’. The success of the gin-shops coincided with developments in plate glass production and gas lighting which were employed to the full, creating a dazzling spectacle of light and reflection. In the dark city streets these places stood out like beacons. To the poor they were palaces – Gin Palaces. At the time of its exhibition, Madox Brown’s Work was timeworn in almost every detail of the painting. A jug of stale beer.

London has always been a heavy smoker. Complaints about air pollution in the city were raised at an early stage of urban development. In 1644 an anonymous pamphlet entitled Artificiall fire, or Coale for rich and poore (held at the British Library) seems to predate a longing for suburban greenery: ‘as some fine Nosed City Dames used to tell their Husbands: Husband! we shall never bee well, wee nor our Children, whilst wee live in the smell of this Cities Seacole smoke; Pray, a Countrey house for our health, that we may get out of this stinking Seacole Smell’.

Like most old cities, London has experienced numerous serious fires in the course of its history. At times it was feared that the capital would literally go up in flames. Industrial use of burning coal deeply altered social and environmental history. The Industrial Revolution produced an endless suply of goods for consumption, but in the process natural resources were ruthlessly exploited. Waste and fumes polluted street, soil, and sky. Factories and chimneys blocked out most natural light in the towns. Steam was used to power the factory machines and the burning coal produced an ‘ink-sea of vapour, black, thick, and multifarious as Spartan broth’ (Thomas Carlyle). The streets of industrial cities were covered with thick greasy dirt. A dramatic rise in urban population exacerbated the effects of pollution. City life often was unbearable. Pollution remained (and remains) London’s main enemy. The Great Smog of 1952, a mixture of weather conditions and coal fires, created panic. Understanding the health impacts of London’s air pollution became an issue and for many city dwellers a priority.

Visitors to taverns, clubs and other social gatherings in the capital experienced the smell of another fume in their nostrils. Tobacco was introduced in England in 1586 and placed under a duty in Elizabeth’s reign. It is said to have first been smoked at the Pied Bull tavern at Islington. Addiction to tobacco was reported from the early days of the habit of smoking (then termed ‘drinking’ tobacco, the smoke being inhaled and allowed to escape through the nose). Objections were raised from the outset.

In 1604 James I published his ‘A Counterblaste to Tobacco’ in which he condemned smoking as ‘a branch of the sin of drunkenness, which is the root of all sins’. By 1614, the number of tobacconists in London was estimated at over 7,000. The weed was also sold by apothecaries and prescribed as a drug. Its medical use has long been advocated. Physician Tobias Venner spent time between his practice in North Petherton (Somerset) in the winter, and in Bath between spring and autumn.

The annual influx of the sick provided a lucrative trade for visiting physicians in the city. The hot mineral springs in Bath enjoyed a reputation for the cure of skin problems, paralytic disorders, and other painful conditions. In 1620 he published The Bathes of Bathe, the first to book dedicated exclusively to the city’s spa. He successfully cultivated his image as a genuine balneologist in a world of quacks and charlatans. Venner also published A Briefe Treatise Concerning the Taking of the Fume of Tobacco (1621). Although he disliked the ‘detestable savour’ of tobacco and deplored its recreational use, he recommended smoking as a means of improving digestion and countering the malign effects of cold, misty weather and contagious air. Tobacco came into general medical use during the time and panic of the Great Plague.

The production of tobacco was integral to the slave trade. The signs of tobacconists’ shops in the eighteenth century generally consisted of a large wooden figure of a black Indian, wearing a crown of tobacco leaves and a kilt of the same material. He was usually placed at the side of the door, above which hung three rolls, also cut in wood. The decorated cards or shop-bills of tradesmen at this period were often designed by artists of repute. Hogarth in his early days designed one for ‘Richard Lee at ye Golden Tobacco-Roll in Panton Street near Leicester Fields’.

From early on, the import and production of tobacco in London has had a strong Jewish input. Portuguese-born merchant Dunstan [Gonsalvo] Anes took refuge in London late in 1540 having fled the inquisition in his home country. His son William carried on the family business as a London merchant. In 1626 he and Philip Burlamachi were the king’s factors for tobacco and licensed to import 50,000 pounds of tobacco free of duty for the king. The Anes family lived and traded in Tudor and Jacobean London for ninety years, publicly conforming to the established church, and privately practising Judaism in their homes.

The initial manufacture of tobacco was concentrated in Hackney, East London, which at one time contained seventy-six factories for the production of tobacco, cigars, and snuff. The name of various taverns reminded its customers of the local tobacco industry, such as the Virginia Plant in Great Dover Street, Southwark, and a Virginia Planter in Virginia Road, Bethnal Green. Through the late 1800s the areas of Spitalfields, Whitechapel, and Bethnal Green became central to the tobacco industry. The raw material was imported from America and brought into warehouses at Pennington Street, alongside Tobacco Dock. Cigar makers worked long hours for a low wage – it was ‘slave labour’ on a leaf that had been produced by slavery. On the other side of the social scale, cigar lounges were established in London that were havens of sophistication and indulgence, places where time stood still in the midst of the relentless pace of the metropolis.

In 1828, Samuel Reiss opened the Grand Cigar Divan, a coffee house on the Strand where gentlemen smoked in peace, browsed over the daily journals and newspapers, indulged in political conversations, and played chess, sitting on comfortable divans or sofas. It became the acknowledged Home of Chess in Britain. Many of the top players of the nineteenth century played here at some stage: Wilhelm Steinitz, Paul Morphy, Emmanuel Lasker, Johannes Zukertort (who had a fatal stroke whilst playing there), Siegnert Tarrasch, and many others. It also hosted the great tournaments of 1883 and 1899 and the first ever women’s international in 1897.

Before the arrival of Polish and other Eastern European Jews who tended to work in the rag trade, the tobacco industry was the chief employer of immigrants in the East End. The continuous decline of the Dutch economy during the first half of the nineteenth century prompted many Amsterdam Jews to settle in London. Arriving from the 1840s onwards, these immigrants established the oldest Ashkenazi synagogue in London at Sandy Row, Spitalfields, in 1854. Amongst their particular skills were shoe, hat and cigar making. Many of them settled in a small system of local streets known as the Tenter ground.

Formerly, this had been an enclosed area where Flemish weavers stretched and dried cloth on machines called tenters which were fitted with sharp hooks. The first use of the figurative phrase ‘on tenterhooks’ dates from 1748. By the nineteenth century, the site had been built upon with housing, but remained an enclave where the Dutch Chuts lived as a virtually separate community (the name is thought to be an approximation of the sound of the word ‘good’ in Dutch). During the second half of the century there was in Chicksand Street, off Brick Lane, a family business of cigar makers called Zeegen Brothers. This was one was of a number of similar factories that had mostly come from Amsterdam. Initially, the Zeegen Brothers prospered, expanding their business into addresses at no. 123 Commercial Street and no. 23 Lamb Street. However, the introduction of machinery for the mass-production of tobacco proved fatal and ultimately led to the collapse of the cigar-making economy on which many members of the Chuts community depended. In the London Gazette of 13 October 1896 Alexander, Louis and Israel Zeegen, together with Morris Isaacs, gave notice of the fact that the brothers had dissolved their partnership as cigar manufacturers.

Bernhard Barron was born on 5 December 1850 in the Russian town of Brest Litovsk into a poor Jewish family. He was probably of French descent. In 1867 Baron emigrated to New York, where he worked in a tobacco factory. Soon he started to manufacture cigarettes himself. He then moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where he found customers among the students of Yale University, before settling in Baltimore. In 1872 Barron took out his first patent for machine made cigarettes. In 1895 he visited England to sell the patent rights of his invention which could make 450 cigarettes a minute. Attracted by the business opportunities, he decided to settle in London at St James’ Place, Aldgate. There he established the Barron Cigarette Machine Company Limited. In 1903 he joined the board of Carreras Limited, becoming its managing director and chairman. He held both positions until his death in August 1929. Carreras’s cigarettes, notably their Black Cat brand, proved highly popular. The House of Carreras had been founded in the nineteenth century by Don José Carreras Ferrer, a Spanish nobleman who fought in the Peninsular War under the Duke of Wellington. After serving with distinction, he was forced to leave Spain on account of his political views. During the early years of the nineteenth century he began trading in London. Don José specialised in cigars, but his son José Joaquin expanded the business by concentrating on the blending of tobaccos and snuff. His reputation soon spread and by 1852 he had established himself at no. 61 Prince’s Street (near Leicester Square). The majority of his workforce had Iberian roots.

Charles Dickens in Bleak House refers to poor Spanish immigrants clustered around Somers Town and census data reveals the presence of many of tobacco traders and workers in the area. This district, covering the railway termini of Euston, St Pancras and Kings Cross, was originally granted by William III to his Lord Chancellor John Somers. In 1784, the first housing was built amid brick works and market gardens. The construction of New Road (now: Euston Road) improved access to the area and in 1793 Frenchman Jacob Leroux leased land from the Somers family for luxury building and development. His scheme failed. War and recession forced down property prices and the neigh¬bourhood lost its appeal. A number of houses were bought by exiles from the French Revolution and thirty years later a similar intake of Spanish political refugees gave Somers Town a strong Catholic tradition which remains to this day. Being the home of a substantial community of exiled liberals, the district developed into a sort of expatriate Spanish barrio.

During the First World War smoking increased sharply and Carreras came to the fore in supplying cigarettes to the armed forces. Having outgrown its Arcadia cigarette factory in City Road, Bernard Baron decided that the Carreras Tobacco Company needed more adequate facilities. In 1926, he commissioned the new Arcadia Works to be built on Mornington Crescent’s communal garden – formerly a favourite residence of artists and writers – to a design by Collins (brothers) and Arthur George Porri which was inspired by the vogue for Egyptian-style building and decoration. Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun had made a huge impact on art and architecture. Egypt-o-mania was in full swing. The 1925 Paris Exhibition popularised the fashion even more, but the English passion for Egypt dated back to the mid eighteenth century. Orientalist John Montagu, future Earl of Sandwich and First Lord of the Admiralty, was among the early English travellers who sailed on from Italy to the Ottoman Empire (inspiring others to undertake the ‘Ottoman Grand Tour’). Back in London, under the assumed name of Sheikh Pyramidum, he founded both the Egyptian Society (December 1741), open to ‘any gentleman who has been in Egypt’, and under the different name of El Fakir Sandwich Pasha, the Divan Club open to gentlemen with the intention of going to Turkey.

Egypt was also a globally successful manufacturer of cigarettes. Non-Egyptian tobacco companies adopted oriental motifs in their advertising to take advantage of this. English soldiers returning from the Crimean War had brought with them a taste for Turkish cigarettes and soon this more ‘sophisticated’ form of smoking was in vogue throughout the city of London. In 1913, American tobacco manufacturer R.J. Reynolds introduced the packaged smoke with a ‘new’ flavour, creating the Camel brand, so named because it used Turkish paper. All these different developments were brought together in the design of Baron’s factory. The white building’s distinctive Egyptian-style ornamentation originally included a solar disc to the Sun-god Ra, two gigantic effigies of black cats flanking the entrance, and colourful painted details. These versions of the Egyptian god Bastet stood guard over Arcadia Works until 1959 when Carreras merged with Rothmans of Pall Mall and moved to a new factory in Basildon. The Carreras factory was opened in style in 1928. The pavements in front of the building were covert with ‘desert’ sand. There was a procession of cast members from a contemporary production of Verdi’s Aida, a performance of actors in Egyptian costume, and a chariot race was held on Hampstead Road.

When the factory was converted into offices in 1961 the Egyptian ornamentation was lost and its revolutionary concept, both in construction procedures and working conditions, became more evident. It was the first factory in Britain to make use of pre-stressed concrete technology, the first to contain air conditioning, and to install a dust extraction plant. Today the building is appreciated as one of the best Art Deco buildings in the capital and seen as an icon of modernist architecture. In his manifesto Ornament und Verbrechen (translated into English in 1913 as ‘Ornament and Crime’), Viennese architect Adolf Loos had declared that lack of decoration in new building is the sign of an advanced society. Progress in architecture, he argued, is aesthetic simplification (honest, simple, and pure) and the removal of ornament. The principle was brought in practise by Le Corbusier and Bauhaus. In the 1920s and 1930s lack of decorative detail became a hallmark of modern architecture. All this makes the design of the Arcadia Works intriguing. Its ornamentation reflected the early English interest in various manifestations of ancient Egyptian culture. At the same time, it offered a glimpse of future corporate branding in which the characteristic features of a building were to be sacrificed to the gleaming demands of advertisers and product-peddlers.

Poet, singer and songwriter Théophile-Jules-Henri Marzials was born at Bagnères de Bigorre, Hautes Pyrénées, on 20 December 1850. His father Antoine-Théophile Marzials was a Huguenot pastor. In 1857 the family settled in London, at no. 2 Brunswick Row, Bloomsbury, on the appointment of Antoine-Théophile as pastor of the French Protestant church at St Martin’s-le-Grand. Having Anglicised his Christian names as Theophilus Julian Henry, young Marzials joined the staff of the British Museum in September 1870. He resigned for health reasons in November 1882. Marzials found great success with songs like ‘Twickenham Ferry’ (1878); a setting of Christina Rossetti’s ‘My Love is Come’; and an English version of ‘A Summer Night’ (1881) by Arthur Goring Thomas, for whose opera Esmeralda (1883) he and Alberto Randegger provided the libretto. Marzials was a friend of Edmund Gosse and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, at whose house in Cheyne Walk he sang.

He gained Swinburne’s permission to set some of his poems to music, including ‘Ask Nothing More of Me, Sweet’, which became a popular ballad of the 1880s. Altogether Marzials published more than eighty songs. His Pan Pipes (1883), settings of Elizabethan and seventeenth-century songs, contained coloured illustrations by Walter Crane. In 1894 he participated in the festivities at Old Compton Street to mark the first number of The Yellow Book, which published poems by him in volumes three and seven. He spent his later days in Colyton, Devon, where he died in February 1920.

During the last quarter of the eighteen century small numbers of young Italians left their towns and villages around Lake Como and came to Britain. Amongst these migrants were skilled carvers, gilders, glassblowers, and scientific instrument makers. They were particularly known for their production of fine barometers.

While a tradition of scientific observation of atmospheric pressure lay behind their craft, political tension encouraged their departure. Lombardy at the time was ruthlessly exploited by the ruling Habsburgs. Right at the end of the century the socio-economic situation further deteriorated when the French invaded the province. The men of Lombardy were conscripted into their army. Many of the locals preferred to take their skills elsewhere.

They travelled to France, the Low Countries and Britain and their work was sought after. In London, the first Italian instrument makers scattered across a few streets to the north of Holborn, in the parish of St Andrew Holborn: Leather Lane, Greville Street, Charles Street, Kirby Street, Cross Street, and Hatton Garden. They settled there because the area had a tradition of skill with a concentration of craftsmen, including clock and watch makers, umbrella makers, gilders, carvers, and frame makers. To Londoners, it became known as Little Italy. Immigrants themselves preferred to name it ‘Il Quartiere Italiano’. Leather Lane was at the centre of London’s Italian community since the 1700s. It would remain so until World War I.

Lake Como was part of the Grand Tour and the remarkable skills of local craftsmen were reported throughout Europe. There are numerous references to the barometer makers in the writings of travellers to the region. Historian and clergyman William Coxe who toured Europe as tutor to various wealthy travellers, wrote from Chiavenna on 21 July 1779 that the ‘neighbourhood of Turnio [Torno], and the districts bordering the lake of Como, supply, for the most part, those Italian emigrants who wander through Europe vending barometers and thermometers, of whom numbers annually resort to England for that purpose’. The journey for these migrants was far from easy.

The ‘favoured’ route before 1799 was to go north from Como, across Lake Lugano towards Airolo, and over the St Gothard Pass. On the northern side, at Andermatt, the wild waters of the River Reuss crash down the Schöllenen Gorge. Travellers crossed this via the narrow sixteenth century stone Devil’s Bridge, a structure which had been improved in the 1770s to take carriages but not stagecoaches. J.M.W. Turner painted a number of dramatic views of this route in 1802. His dramatic image of the original bridge suggests what migrants had to contend with on their search for a better life. From Andermatt the road took travellers past the Swiss lakes and into France at Basel. Travelling up the Rhine or taking the land route through France, the migrants reached Rotterdam from where they embarked on a ship for England.

Local instrument makers were quick to offer employment to Italian artisans and introduce Italian designs. One of the first successful firms of Lake Como settlers in London was Martinelli & Co. They were producing barometers in 1799 out of no. 82 Leather Lane. Ronchetti was another important name among those barometer makers. The Ronchetti Bros. worked in London at no. 172 Strand until 1880. In 1799 instrument maker Caesar Tagliabue, also from the Como area, established a company in Holborn. Before the end of 1820 he had moved to no. 23 Hatton Garden in the heart of London’s scientific instrument making community. Louis Pascal Casella was born on 29 February 1812 in Edinburgh, the son of Pasquale Casella, teacher of painting, who had moved from near Como to Britain at around the same time. The young man was employed by Tagliabue. In November 1838 he married his daughter Maria Louisa. In the same year Tagliabue took his son-in-law into partnership, changing the company’s name to Tagliabue & Casella. In 1844, following Tagliabue’s death, Casella took over the running of the business. The firm was making and selling a wide variety of scientific instruments. By the 1860s Casella & Co. sold thermometers, hydrometers, and drawing and surveying instruments, as well as meteorological instruments and accessories for photography. Among the company’s customers were the British and overseas governments, universities, and other scientific institutions.

These firms were the first of many Italian instrument makers who would settle in London. The biggest name was that of Negretti & Zambra who, from the mid-nineteenth century continued its London-based business until late in the twentieth century. Henry Angelo Ludovico Negretti was born on 13 November 1818 in Como. He did not want to follow in his father’s footsteps in operating a horse-drawn coach service over the St Gotthard Pass and moved to London in 1830. He learned his instrument skills under two established fellow-Italian makers: Caesar Tagliabue at no. 23 Hatton Garden, and Francis Augustus Pizzala at no. 4 Dorrington Street. In 1841 Negretti moved into Angelo Tagliabue’s former workshop at no. 19 Leather Lane, recently acquired by Jane Pizzi whose late husband Valentine had been a glass blower and barometer maker. The cooperation of Pizzi & Negretti continued until 1844. He then formed a partnership with Joseph Warren Zambra at no. 11 Hatton Garden in 1850. The latter, a photographer and instrument maker, was born into a family of Italian immigrants in Saffron Walden. He was apprenticed to his father before coming to London where he settled in the Italian community around Leather Lane.

The quality of the firm’s work became apparent at the 1851 Great Exhibition where they were the only instrument makers based in Britain to receive a prize medal. They were subsequently appointed instrument makers to the Queen, the Greenwich Observatory, and the British Meteorological Society. The firm became one of the biggest instrument makers in London, with workshops in Hatton Garden and Cornhill and a retail outlet on Regent Street, as well as a specialist photographic equipment emporium at the Crystal Palace in Sydenham. Zambra himself took numerous photographs of the latter building which are now among the iconic surviving images of the structure. The firm’s 1859 catalogue described 2,134 items and instruments and this range doubled a few years later. Negretti was naturalised as a British subject in April 1862. When Giuseppe Garibaldi visited London in 1864, he was invited to lead the Italian reception committee. The company of Negretti & Zambra prospered well into the twentieth century, diversifying into aircraft and industrial instruments in 1920, but eventually succumbed to a 1981 take-over bid by Western Scientific Instruments.

In 1845 Vincent Palotti, founder of the Pallotine Fathers, requested the building of a Basilica-style church at no. 136 Clerkenwell Road to serve the community of Little Italy. Irish-born architect John Miller-​​Bryson modelled the Italian church on Rome’s Basilica of San Crisogono in Trastevere. It was consecrated as the church of St Peter of all Nations in 1863. In a good Italian tradition, food and wine could soon be purchased close to the church. Luigi Terroni was born in 1853 into a poor Tuscan family of small farmers. He left home in 1870 and walked to Paris. On blistered feet he continued his journey to London, where he lodged in Clerkenwell. In 1878 he opened a food shop in Summers Street. It was London’s first Italian deli. Having married his childhood sweetheart, the couple set up home in Warner Street, Little Italy. Business flourished and Luigi opened a second shop, adjacent to St Peter’s. Its cellars extended beneath the church and it is said that worshippers could smell the fragrant aromas of cheese and dry cured salumi. To this day, the shop remains on the same site next to St Peter’s and still bears the name of its founder.

In spite of strengthening ties within the Italian community, the nature of Little Italy changed in the course of the nineteenth century. Large numbers of impoverished immigrants moved into the area in search of work. It became a district of paupers and young thieves, home to Fagin in Dickens’s Oliver Twist. By then, Little Italy received predominantly immigrants from the South, while Soho attracted Northern Italians. The Soho contingent consisted of tailors, watch­makers, artists, domestic servants, and those working in the hospitality industry. The Neapolitans and Calabrians of Little Italy held occupations of an itinerant nature, such as organ men, ice vendors, ambulant merchants, plaster bust sellers, and models for artists. It was also a safe harbour for political refugees. Giuseppe Mazzini, the apostle of Italian freedom, arrived in London after being expelled from Switzerland. He initially lived above the Italian barbers at no. 10 Laystall Street. Later, whilst living at no. 5 Hatton Garden, he set up the Società per il Progresso degli Operai Italiani which served the purpose of harnessing nationalist feelings among the immigrant community. Education was considered of crucial importance. With funds provided by supportive Scottish and English friends, he opened a free school where two hundred deprived Italian children received a rudimentary education. Established on 10 November 1841, it was the first Italian school in London. Charles Dickens was a benefactor.

Reminders of the Italian impact on the manufacture of precision instruments in the capital remain to this day. Comitti of London was founded in 1845 by Onorato Comitti, a precision instrument maker who had started a business manufacturing barometers in Little Italy. He opened his first workshop in 1850 alongside other specialist makers in the area. He quickly achieved an unsurpassed reputation for his recording instruments, including high quality mercury and aneroid barometers. During the late Victorian period the company gained renown as one of Britain’s finest clockmakers, receiving the Diploma of Honour for its workmanship in 1888. In 2015, Comitti remains a family-owned business with a proud Italian history.

Organ builder John Snetzler  was born Johann Schnetzler in Schaffhausen in 1710. He trained with the firm of Egedacher in Passau and initially worked in partnership with his cousin Johann Conrad Speisegger. He may have joined Christian Müller in building the famous organ in the Bavokerk in Haarlem. Snetzler arrived in London around 1742 and worked from premises in Oxford Street. He collaborated on occasion with piano maker Jacob Kirkman. His organ for St Margaret’s at King’s Lynn in 1754 earned him the praise of Charles Burney. For the next fifteen years his skills were in continuous demand all over Britain. He was naturalised in 1770, but returned to Schaffhausen in 1780 where he died in September 1785. His thriving business was continued by Swedish immigrant Jonathan Ohrmann and later taken over by Thomas Elliot.

Diplomat Wilhelm Philipp Best was born in Hanover in 1712, but he spent most of his working life in London. After completing his studies at the University of Helmstadt, he entered the service of George II and was posted to the Hanoverian legation in London in 1746 where he remained until about 1782. From the 1750s to the 1770s he lived at no. 6 St James’s Place.

His most significant contribution to Anglo-Hanoverian relations during his long residence in London was as the representative of the University of Göttingen, the Hanoverian ‘national’ university (founded in 1737). He was overseeing the London side of the acquisition of books for the university’s rapidly growing library. His surviving correspondence is a crucial source for the early history of the library. By 1800 it was to become the largest single assembly of books in Europe.

Books acquired through the London book trade formed a significant proportion of the estimated 133,200 held by the library by this date. Their presence in Göttingen contributed in no small measure to the increasing awareness of English-language authors in Central and Eastern Europe. From about 1782, when Best appears to have retired to Hanover his role was taken over by his son Georg August Best. Wilhelm Best died in Hanover in 1785.

Photographer Nicolaas Henneman was born in Heemskerk on 8 November 1813. Having worked in Paris for a while, he arrived in England around 1835. He was employed as valet to William Fox Talbot at Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire, where he assisted in preparations and printing, and he took many photographs himself. He accompanied Talbot on photographic expeditions around Britain, and in 1843 the pair ventured into France, securing important photographs later published in The Pencil of Nature (1844/6: the first first commercially published book illustrated with photographs).

Later that year, Henneman left Talbot’s employ to set up the world’s first dedicated photographic printing works at no. 8 Russell Terrace in Reading. Unable to sustain that operation he moved to London in 1847, this time in a business largely owned by Talbot but called Nicolaas Henneman’s ‘Sun Picture Rooms’ at no. 122 Regent Street. In 1848 he was joined by the young chemist Thomas Augustine Malone, and by the next year Henneman & Malone were billing themselves as ‘Photographers to the Queen’. While Henneman taught many successful photographers, he never achieved true artistry himself. In the increasingly competitive photographic world of the 1850s he lost out. By 1859 financial difficulties had overwhelmed him and he shut down his business.

In the 1860s Henneman worked as an operator for other photographers in Scarborough and Birmingham. He died in London in January 1898. Henneman’s major claim to fame was his involvement in the publication of the first photographically illustrated book on art. To the three volumes of text of William Stirling’s Annals of the Artists of Spain (1848) was added a limited edition volume of sixty-six photographic illustrations. These were the first photographs ever published of Spanish paintings, drawings, sculpture and prints, by artists including El Greco, Velázquez, Murillo, Zurbarán, Ribera and Goya, in addition to examples of architectural designs and book illustrations. The photographs were taken by Henneman who used the Talbotype (or Calotype) process invented by Talbot. The book has become extremely rare. Only fifty copies of the Annals were produced, and their deterioration, due to daylight, chemicals and other factors, began immediately.

Art historian Bruno Adler was born in Karlsbad, Bohemia, on 14 October 1888 into a Jewish family. His father was editor of the social democratic newspaper Volkswille. From 1910 to 1916, he studied art history, literature, and philosophy at universities in Vienna, Erlangen and Munich, acquiring his doctorate in 1917 with a dissertation on the origin of woodcuts. From 1919 to 1924, Adler lectured on art history at the Bauhaus and between 1920 and 1930 he taught at the Weimar Saxon-Grand Ducal Art School.

After the Nazis seized power, he was forced to flee to Prague. In 1936, he went to England. Writing under the pseudonym (and anagram) Urban Roedl, he released a biography of Stifter with the publisher Ernst Rowohlt, who was afterward prohibited by the Nazis from working, having been charged with disguising Jewish writers. Adler taught at Bunce Court School, a German-Jewish school in Kent founded by refugee Anna Essinger with help from British Quakers. It was a haven for many young children who had arrived on the Kindertransports. During the war, Adler worked in the German Service of the BBC at Broadcasting House, Portland Place, which had begun broadcasting in German in September 1938. Among its early contributors were novelist Thomas Mann.

Under the guise of literary entertainment, these German-language programs produced British propaganda, using established native-speaking writers in exile. Adler created the satirical ‘Frau Wernicke’, a program broadcast from summer 1940 to January 1944. The lead role, disgruntled Frau Gertrud Wernicke from Berlin who launches hilariously subversive tirades against the Nazis, was voiced by the exiled German actress and cabaret artist Annemarie Hase. It became one of the most popular programs of the BBC’s German Service. After the war he edited the monthly German-language magazine Neue Auslese aus dem Schrifttum der Gegenwart. In 1958, Adler, again writing as Roedl, re-issued his 1936 biography of Stifter. He died in December 1968.

Frederic Albert was born in Frankfurt in 1733. He served at the Court of Mecklenburg-Strelitz and accompanied Princess Sophie Charlotte in September 1761 to England as her page and hairdresser when she was engaged to marry George III. His daughter Charlotte was born in 1765. She was appointed Assistant Keeper of the Wardrobe in 1797/8 and later became Reader to Queen Charlotte as well. She married Mr Papendiek, a servant and musician to George III.

Both continued the family tradition of being faithful servants to the Court of St James’s. Charlotte Papendiek began her retrospective journal of the ‘Court and Private Life in the Time of Queen Charlotte’ in 1833, continuing the work until her death in 1839. Her memoirs cover the first thirty years of George III’s reign until 1792. The diary was published by her granddaughter in 1886. The journal is a valuable source of information for George III’s court in a time of turmoil. Britain lost its colonies in the War of American Independence and the European political system changed dramatically in the wake of the French Revolution. In addition, problems with the King’s health led to a constitutional crisis.

Photographer Oscar Gustaf Rejlander was born in 1813 in Sweden, but nothing is known about his early life. He apparently studied art in Rome in the 1830s and supported himself there by working as a portrait painter and copyist of old masters. He was in England by 1841. In 1845 he had settled at no. 42 Darlington Street, Wolverhampton, where he opened a painter’s studio. He took up photography in 1853 and two years later began to exhibit his photographic compositions consisting of portraits, landscapes, nudes, anatomical studies, and subject pictures.

His genre photographs earned him the reputation as one of Britain’s leading photographers. His ‘Night in Town’ (also known as ‘Homeless’), depicting a child in rags huddled on a doorstep, was used by the Shaftesbury Society for over a hundred years to highlight the plight of homeless children. In the spring of 1862 Rejlander moved to London and settled in Malden Road, Chalk Farm. On the relationship between photography and painting, he insisted that artists had as much to learn from photography about observation and draughtsmanship as photographers had to learn from painting about composition and expression. Contemporary critics described him as ‘the father of art photography’. As a portraitist Rejlander photographed several illustrious sitters, including Alfred Tennyson, Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), Henry Taylor, Charles Darwin, Gustave Doré, and Prince Albert. In 1868 he opened a richly furnished studio opposite Victoria Station. It was soon after this move that Charles Darwin entered his shop. Rejlander supplied Darwin with nine illustrations for his The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). The photograph illustrating ‘mental distress’, that of an infant boy wailing, known as ‘Ginx’s Baby’ after the popular novel by James E. Jenkins, became a best-seller. He died in January 1875 at his home at no. 23 East Cottages, Clapham.