Nervous London: Urban Sensibility in the Romantic Period

Abstract

Nervous London: Urban Sensibility in the Romantic Period traces a continued cultural and scientific interest in sensibility and how it shifted and developed in the Romantic period. This project explores representations of what I call urban sensibility, which entailed an experience of increasing nervousness as the subject became exposed to the developing urban culture and topography of London. I argue that urban sensibility was part of a medico-literary discourse that engaged medical science in literary representations of art, urban life, and modern experience. The project investigates how Romantic writers imagined, managed, complicated, and even challenged popular scientific and cultural notions of nervous sensibility and the urban body. As part of a culture of growing commodification, urban sensibility is presented by writers as a form of consumption, a way of consuming sensations and spectacles in the city. This study particularly examines how urban sensibility was depicted in Romantic-era literature through the figure of the urban pedestrian, an earlier, British version of the flâneur, who consumes urban experience and spectacles presented in metropolitan street scenes. The urban texts explored in this project reveal the results of bodies engaging with the commodification of sensual experience in a historical process that helped to shape our conception of modernity. In exploring urban sensibility and peregrination, the dissertation teases out multiple modes of urban, Romantic experience, including consumerism, civic engagement, masculinity, and the sublime. Moreover, this project argues that urban sensibility demonstrates the various ways that Romantic-era institutions and power structures attempt to control urban bodies, as well as the ways that writers attempt to use this expression of the body and mind to resist hegemonic influences and reclaim agency for themselves. Beginning with a reading of Wordsworth’s Book 7 of The Prelude and then moving to works by De Quincey, Hazlitt, Lamb, and Blake, the chapters of the study are organized to demonstrate a particular progression of increasingly liberating urban experience. As the first chapter shows, urban sensibility and the excesses of this experience offer Wordsworth an active and resistant way to react to the city, but they also remind him of how entrenched his own ideas of nature and poetics are in commodity culture. Urban sensibility thus causes for him an awakening (however unwelcome) to what is at stake in his own representations of nature and the poetic body. For De Quincey, urban sensibility and pedestrianism allow the individual to actively create new and intensely pleasurable experiences of the city and the urban body in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. In Hazlitt’s and Lamb’s essays, it leads away from the passive reception of city life to powerful expressions of community and civic engagement. For Blake, urban sensibility in Jerusalem is even more liberating in that it allows individuals to actively resist oppressive systems and leads to a revolutionary redemption of both London and England. Although the Romantics are traditionally approached as pastoral or nature poets, as this project demonstrates, exploring representations of urban sensibility reveals that an urban Romanticism developed in the period alongside representations of Romantic nature, even in the writings of pastoral works like Wordsworth’s The Prelude.