The thesis investigates anxieties about urban life in late Victorian and Edwardian culture, and examines emotional responses to urbanisation, industrialisation and modernity at this high point of urban growth and rural-urban migration: one that marked Britain’s decisive breakthrough to a largely and permanently urbanised society. During the period, earlier nineteenth-century tropes of the ‘shock’ of the city, and anxieties surrounding rapid early urbanisation and industrialisation, began to recede. But from the 1880s onwards, as life in industrial cities came to be regarded as the norm, new anxieties came to the fore: concerns that related to the very pervasiveness and inescapability of urban life. I argue that the historically unprecedented growth in the size of cities placed enormous strain upon conceptions of the individual in modern society: the impulse to conceive of mass urban society in the abstract was in constant tension with a new, modernistic awareness of the essential humanity of each individual. The research utilises insights from the recent ‘emotional turn’ within the humanities, which is more sensitive to psychological factors in cultural practices and social processes; and brings this historiographical turn to bear on attitudes towards the city. An emotional approach enables both a deeper and subtler exploration of high cultural responses, and the extension of the range of sources and actors beyond ‘ideas’ and ‘intellectuals’. The thesis integrates a wide range of sources: literature, art, the writings of urban planners and social commentators, medical writings, working-class autobiographical writing, and oral history transcripts. Such an approach reveals the common emotional impulses and shared structures of feeling behind a diverse range of responses to the urban environment, and provides a deeper understanding of contemporary emotional life. It thus illuminates the ways in which individuals, societies and culture react to the complexities of modernity, and provides insights into the relationship between social transformation and emotional experience.

This thesis examines the social politics of literary production at London's Inns of Court from 1572 to 1634. Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of cultural production are widened beyond his own French academic context so that the Inns may be located as institutions central to the formation of literary and, in particular, dramatic culture in early modern London. A significant part of Bourdieu's research has concerned the establishment of a foundation for a sociological analysis of literary works. The literary field, Bourdieu argues, is but one of many possible fields of cultural production—social networks of struggle over valued economic, cultural, scientific, or religious resources. As a historically constituted arena of activity with its own specific institutions, rules, and capital, the juridical field of early modern London was a competitive market in which legal agents struggled for the power to determine the law. Within this field, the Inns of Court served as unchartered law schools in which the valuable cultural currency of the common law was transmitted to the resident students, whose association with this currency was crucial for their pursuit of social prestige. Focusing on the four Inns of Court as central institutions in the juridical field and their relationship with the larger political and economic forces of London, that is, the field of power, the thesis demonstrates how the literary art associated with these institutions relates to the students' struggle for social legitimation, particularly in their interaction with the City and the Crown. By demonstrating how the structures of literary texts reflect the structures of the relationship between the Inns and other centers of urban power, this analysis examines the pivotal role(s) played by law students in the development of London's literary culture. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

In his evocative account of walking through Restoration London, the seventeenth-century diarist Samuel Pepys conveys a vibrant city comprised of movement, exchange, and conflict. We follow Pepys, for example, into the coffee-house on his insatiable search for news and political argument. Within urban space he is equally persistent, noting the ritual demarcation of urban boundaries at moments of tension between London and the Crown, or describing how the city's spaces were alarmingly transformed by the presence of disease. This is hardly the London imagined by scholars of the Restoration, who have characterized this historical moment of the return of Charles II and restoration of monarchical government to England as a time of concord after the violent struggles resulting in civil war at mid-century. It is telling that one of the first strategies adopted by Charles IPs government to stabilize a volatile situation in London was to assert control over print. At this moment, though, print culture served to open up urban space in new ways, becoming a mode of opportunity for individuals like Pepys. My dissertation considers precisely the interrelation between these spaces and forms of print. Like Pepys, my thesis journeys through the city, stopping at the Restoration coffee-house. These spaces of congregation, where print was displayed and purchased, appeared in significant numbers around the Royal Exchange after 1660. The coffee-house has been given mythic proportions in the twentieth century as the foundation of a modern public sphere. However, as this thesis will show, instead of producing an abstract and universal realm of public opinion, the coffee-house was an actual space formed through contestation, and through a struggle taking place between an older form of subjectivity and a newer urban culture. Another site of urban contestation shaped through print was the street processions staged by Whigs during the Exclusion Crisis, a moment of increased City and Crown tensions. Within these political struggles, the unexpected also had its part to play. The crisis brought on by bubonic plague in 1665 generated prints mediating all kinds of conflicts, but especially the social practices of flight and quarantine. The sudden destruction of the city within the walls by fire in 1666 was met by mapping and picturing the ruins that struggled to account for the void in the urban centre. My dissertation concludes with a series of unique prints which represent an ephemeral city built on the in-between space of the frozen Thames. This unexpected suspension of the everyday rhythms of London led to its festive re-imagining. In conclusion, I address the significance of the location of both print and the coffeehouse at the very centre of this urban space. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate

This thesis takes as its starting point the use of extracts from the works of historical authors who wrote in England in the early to mid twelfth-century. It focuses upon the ways in which their works began to be incorporated into three particular texts in the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Through the medium of individual case studies – De Abbatibus (Abingdon), CCCC 139 (Durham) and The London Collection three elements are explored (i) how mediaeval writers used extracts from the works of others in ways which differed from modern practices with their concerns over charges of plagiarism and unoriginality (ii) how the structural and narrative roles which the use of extracts played within the presentation of these texts (iii) how the application of approaches developed in the twentieth century, which transformed how texts are now analysed, enabled a re-evaluation and re-interpretation of their use of source material with greater sensitivity to their original purposes This analysis casts fresh light upon the how and why these texts were produced and the means by which they fulfilled their purposes and reveals that despite their disparate origins and individual perspectives these three texts share two common features: (i) they follow a common three stage pattern of development (ii) they deal with similar issues: factional insecurities and concerns about the quality of those in power over them – using an historical perspective The analysis also reveals the range of techniques which were at the disposal of the composers of these texts, dispelling any notion that they were either unsophisticated or naïve in their handling of their source materials. Together these texts demonstrate how mediaeval authors used combinations of extracts as a means of responding quickly and flexibly to address particular concerns. Such texts were not regarded as being set in stone but rather as fluid entities which could be recombined at will in order to produce new works as required.