Creating
the City
Identity, Memory and Participation
Conference proceedings
edited by
Pål Brunnström &
Ragnhild Claesson
Creating the City
Identity, Memory and Participation
Conference proceedings
edited by
Tack till Leif Ljungbergs stiftelse som genom ett generöst bidrag möjliggjort denna publikations tryckning och grafiska formgivning.
Titel: Creating the City. Identity, Memory and Participation. Conference proceedings
Proceedings from the conference ‘Creating the City. Identity, Memory and Participation’
at Malmö University 9-10 February, 2017. © Authors, 2019
Institute for studies in Malmö´s history, Malmö University Malmö University Publications in Urban Studies (MAPIUS 23) Print: Tryckservice, Ängelholm
ISBN (pdf): 978-91-87997-13-6 ISBN (tryck): 978-91-87997-12-9 ISSN: 1654-6881
Contents
Introduction 7
Part 1: Authors Writing the City
17Where have you been? Creating the city
av Carolyn Steedman 18
Kvinnorna och den kluvna staden. Röster ur samtidens arbetar litteratur
av Anna Williams 45
Klass och kön i Stockholm omkring 1910. Martin Koch, Maria Sandel, Sigfrid Siwertz och Elin Wägner
av Catrine Brödje 55
Maria Sandel och staden
av Ewa Bergdahl 65
Interaktionen mellan storstads modernism och
arbetar litteratur 1927–1932: exemplet Artur Lundkvist
av Per-Olof Mattsson 78
Part 2: History Writing
and Narrating the City
97Det ständigt nya arvet. Om nyttan av historiska minnen i Stockholm och Lüneburg
av Heiko Droste 98
Fragment av stadens kulturarv
av Kerstin Gunnemark 112
Historiebruk i Solas Karlstad. Nöjesliv och traditionsbildning längs Rännan
av Peter Olausson 120
Vem tar plats? Normkritiska perspektiv på lokalhistoria
av Elisabeth Högdahl & Anja Petersen 139
”Platsen för industrialismens drama”. Om Söder i Helsingborg och bokverket Svensk stad
(Re)constructing identity through the past: the memories of Stalinist purges in Moscow. Identity construction on the verge of memory and heritage
av Olga Zabalueva 179
“Vyborg is ours”. The collective memory of a lost Finnish city
av Chloe Wells 194
Part 3: Transforming the City
– Planning and Redevelopment
217Minnet av Kiruna. Tid, historia och representation av en stad i omvandling
av Johanna Overud 218
Omvandling av industriområden. Minnen och verksamheter
av Eva Dahlström Rittsél 237
Åldrade världar eller framtidens urbana tillgångar? En studie längs Göteborgs industriella älvstrand
av Gabriella Olshammar 254
Från 1500-talets Nya Lödöse till 2000-talets Gamlestaden. Ny identitet från gammalt material?
av Mattias Öbrink, Ivonne Dutra Leivas & ChristinaToreld 289 Equality in Death. Sigurd Lewerentz and the Planning of Malmö Eastern Cemetery 1916–1973
av Ingrid Campo-Ruiz 299
Part 4: Counter-Narratives
and Spatial Practices for Change
301The narrative battle of Jerusalem. Analysing the politics of place-making in a contested city
av Ann-Catrin Kristianssen 302
New collective identities and alliances. A study of activism in Möllevången, Malmö
Vad är den svenska modellen? Socialdemokratisk historieskrivning i den samtida “tiggeridebatten”
av Erik Hansson & Maria Persdotter 343
Contentious Politics and the Welfare State. Squatting in Sweden 1968–2016
av Dominika V. Polanska 363
Stockholm
av Jenny Wrangborg 386
Graffiti. Urbana platser och norrländsk natur
av Anja Örn & Tomas Örn 388
“Keep Fighting Malmö”. Graffiti and the negotiations of interest and control at Open walls
av Erik Hannerz & Jacob Kimvall 395
“We are favela”. An ethographic account
on the production of identities, cultures and places
av Vinícius Zanoli & Rubens Mascarenhas Neto 421
Part 5: Museum Work – Top-Down and
Bottom-Up Perspectives
441Museums need to stop being dinosaurs
av Carlos Tortolero 442
The Museum of Movements. Presenting the results of a feasibility study and introducing the next step
av Fredrik Elg 459
Bland kaféer, bordeller, parker, skyltfönster och kök. Mångdimensionella vandringar i stadens rum
av Karin Carlsson & Rebecka Lennartsson 472
Communicating Migration History. The House of Emigrants, Gothenburg
Part 6: Inquiring and Collecting
– Methods of Understanding the City
497Ethnography on inter-ethnic encounters
av Tiina-Riitta Lappi & Pia Olsson 498
How to Collect Radical Political Material in the 21st Century. A Project in the City of Malmö, Sweden
av Fredrik Egefur 516
Platsverkstan – Berättelser om Märsta
av Annelie Kurttila 523
Planning Culturally for Equitable Cities
av Lia Ghilardi 529
Mapping Memory Routes. A Multisensory Approach to Migration Heritage and Urban Studies
av Alda Terracciano 538
Hemlös i Helsingborg
av Birgitta Witting 548
Part 7: Non-profit Associations and
Patrons as History Making Actors
565Utmaningen att arbeta som en ideell organisation i dagens samhälle. Exemplet Malmö Förskönings- och Plant eringsförening
av Inger Lindstedt 566
Ideella föreningar som näring för skapandet av goda samhällen. Öresundsregionens mecenater – Aktörer, inter aktion och kontexter
av Kjell Å Modéer 581
Hembygdsförening i storstad. Malmö Fornminnes-förening/ Malmö Kulturhistoriska förening
av Göran Larsson 591
Introduction
Cities are places of constant contradictions – on the one hand cul-turally rich and diverse places with interesting entanglements of so-cial and spatial relations, on the other hand sites of inequality, seg-regation and conflict. There are obviously various and sometimes opposing understandings, narrations and representations of a city. From an urban history perspective, it is adequate to critically ask: how do history-making and representations of a city’s past contrib-ute to create cities and trajectories of urban development? To un-derstand this, we need to pay attention to how urban phenomena are historicised, categorised, preserved and used in official history, and in urban planning. How cities are narrated and projected will influence what kind of city it is possible to imagine, what is under-stood as problematic, and consequently how and for whom cities are planned and developed.1 This correlation between history and
future-making places questions of power at the centre of urban his-tory and development.
The question of The Right to the City has since the 1960s been widely addressed by urban activists, NGO:s, public institutions and academia. From Henri Lefebvre’s radical concept expressed in 1968, as “a demand for a transformed and renewed access to urban life”,2 of rights to urban life for all; through acts of land
appropria-tion by dispossessed citizens; human rights struggles for equal rep-resentation across class, gender, race and sexuality; to more moder-ate municipal inclusion agendas – The Right to the City concept has come to encompass a variety of intentions and perspectives on right claims, lately also seen reduced to a watered down slogan.3
Howev-er, we think there are very interesting perspectives and insights to be gained from using the concept as a starting point for a renewed debate. Whether with an egalitarian or more distributive approach, questions of how rights relate to urban space are not fixed or uncon-tested but have to be constantly practiced and critically exercised to make rights matter, and to advance social justice.4 We believe that
the fields of urban history and cultural heritage need to be further included and problematized in such debates and inquiries. It is cru-cial to discuss how history-making and narratives of the past play
a role in the way perceptions and ideals of cities and citizens are portrayed, understood and legitimatised in the present. An obvious example of why this is important is the way populist movements use idealised and homogenised narratives of the past to forward a polit-ical agenda whose impact on democracy and justice can be disputed. This anthology has its origin in the conference Creating the City. Identity, Memory and Participation, in Malmö, Sweden, 9-10 Feb-ruary 2017,5 arranged by the Institute for Studies in Malmö’s
His-tory (IMH) – a research institute affiliated with the Urban Studies department at Malmö University. The conference gathered schol-ars from various disciplines, such as history, anthropology, literature, geography, sociology, political science and media and communica-tion; and practitioners as archive and museum professionals, urban planners, architects and artists. With a mix of Swedish and interna-tional participants, approximately 90 presentations were organised in thematic sessions. The anthology comprises of 38 texts (chap-ters), written in English or Swedish, each correlating to individual presentation at the conference.
The texts, we believe, all engage in urban history, life, politics and governance in ways that can be related to The Right to the City con-cept, even if the authors themselves do not use this concept. They do however interrogate related questions such as: Who are represented by a city’s official history and mediated collective memory, and who are excluded? How are city identities created and marketed – and for whose benefit? What forms of struggles and resistance are creat-ed to challenge dominant histories, and whose dreams and utopias are expressed in municipal visions for urban futures? From different perspectives, the authors discuss and problematize these and similar issues, some through case studies of specific places, others through literature and document studies. Several authors interrogate and discuss power relations in connection to class, gender or racialisa-tion. The examples in the texts are drawn from cities and towns in Sweden, Finland, United Kingdom, Germany, Russia, Israel/Pales-tine, Brazil and USA.
The 38 chapters are organised in seven thematic parts, correlating to different session themes at the conference. The first part is Au-thors Writing the City starting with the conference keynote speech
by Carolyn Steedman, Professor Emeritus in History at Warwick University in England. In her text, Steedman follows Mary Woll-stonecraft's travels in the 1790s in Sweden and Norway, as well as Thomas Malthus' travels a few years later, discussing their respec-tively different approaches and observations, of towns and country-side they visit and of people they meet. Following is three chapters on working class literature, gender and the city, the first being Anna Williams who discusses how contemporary Swedish female novel-ists express gender and class in urban space. Catrine Brödje, in her study of four Swedish novels from 1910s, finds gendered differences in both the way the protagonists live their urban lives, and the way the four novelists depict men and women. Ewa Bergdahl sketches the life and authorship of Maria Sandel whose books are set in the time and environment of Sandel’s own life – in an industrialised Stockholm in the beginning of the 1900s. The first part ends with Per-Olof Mattsson’s text on how Swedish working class literature interacted with metropolitan modernism around the 1930s, show-ing how the industrial and modern city as a literary object were em-braced by the author Arthur Lundkvist and several of his contem-poraries.
In the second part, History Writing and Narrating the City, the authors analyse and discuss how historical data, mediated texts, and architectural descriptions become official city narratives. The part begins with Heiko Droste’s text on creating and maintaining chronicles and myths of a city, with the town halls of Stockholm and Lüneburg as examples. Kerstin Gunnemark has focused on a more peripheral urban phenomenon, and studied historical aware-ness and local concerns amongst residents in a 100 year old subur-ban area of detached family houses in Gothenburg. Peter Olaus-son shows how narratives of the past are used in the marketing of Karlstad, and how history and myths are maintained in urban space through public signs and symbols. Following is two chapters on history making with Helsingborg as example, the first by Elis-abeth Högdahl and Anja Petersen on critical analysis of gendered norms in reiterations of city narratives. In the next chapter, Karin Gustavsson shows how the influential work “Svensk stad [Swed-ish City]”, publ[Swed-ished in two volumes 1950-1953, have impacted on
understandings of Helsingborg’s history, and discusses the work’s influence on perceptions of spatial divisions in the city. In following chapter, Olga Zabalueva presents official and countering narratives of Russia’s political history, and the role of Moscow as a place for national commemorative practice. Zabalueva gives example of both revisionist museum representations and grass roots’ memory initi-atives. In the last chapter of this second part, Cloe Wells discusses young Finns’ feelings of loss in relation to Vyborg in today’s Russian Karelia – a city that through territorial struggles has alternately be-longed to Sweden, Finland and Russia since medieval times.
The third part, Transforming the City – Planning and Rede-velopment, focuses on what role depictions and representations of a city can play in urban planning, building and regeneration. First is Johanna Overud’s study of how gendered and racializing rep-resentations of the mining town Kiruna’s history are passed on in the making of new Kiruna, as the town is moved a few kilometres (due to major cracks in the rock beneath the city). Eva Dahlström Rittsél shows how conceptions of preservation and cultural heritage in the context of inner city industrial areas have changed since the 1970s, with examples from redevelopments in Stockholm. Gabriella Olshammar has studied the Ringön harbour in Gothenburg, and elaborates on its present and future relevance and resilience using the concept “urban glue”, and an image of “the end of the world”. In next chapter, the three archaeologists Mattias Öbrink, Ivonne Dutra Leivas and Christina Toreld describes their pedagogic work alongside their excavations in Nya Lödöse – the medieval town un-derneath eastern parts of present day Gothenburg – in conjunction with a large infrastructure transformation. This part ends with a summary of a text by Ingrid Campo-Ruiz, who has studied notions of “equality in death” when Malmö Eastern cemetery was built in beginning of the 20th Century.
The authors in part four, Counter-Narratives and Spatial Prac-tices for Change, present studies of strategies and approaches to disseminate or challenge public city narratives, in relation to cit-izenship and distribution of urban space. In the first chapter, Ann-Catrin Kristianssen analyses Israeli narratives of Jerusalem, as they appear in statements of Israeli policies, public affairs and
visionary documents, and in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian con-flict. Christina Hansen follows with a chapter on local activism in Möllevången, Malmö, where she studied what activism might mean for migrants’ emplacement in a new place, like activities of challeng-ing an anti-immigrant rhetoric in public discourses on migration. In the next chapter, Erik Hansson and Maria Persdotter discuss a re-cent (and still ongoing) “begging-debate” in Sweden about so called EU-migrants’ right to beg in public urban space. Hansson and Pers-dotter show how the debate exposes paradoxical moral positions in Social Democratic politics and in discourses of the People’s home (Folkhemmet) and the Swedish Model concerning citizenship and solidarity. In the following chapter, Dominika V. Polanska sketches the history of squatting in Sweden from the 1960s until today, with examples from various towns and cities. She presents a typology of motivations for squatting, and discusses how these motivations have changed over time. Hereafter follows the poem “Stockholm” by Jenny Wrangborg, who gave much appreciated recitations in the evening of the conference. The next two chapters concern politics and practices of graffiti. The first by Anja and Thomas Örn on how graffiti may appear in, and reinterpret, “in-between spaces” in Stock-holm, Kiruna and Luleå. The second by Eric Hannerz and Jacob Kimvall on the role of open (legal) graffiti walls and negotiations of urban space, exemplifying with an open wall in Malmö. This part ends with an ethnographic study by Vinícius Zanoli and Rubens Mascarenhas Neto, who have explored processes of place making and identity production in Campinas in Brazil. Zanoli and Mascar-enhas Neto discuss how a black LGBT community group give new meaning to urban places through drag performances, while simulta-neously challenging what “black culture”, “LGBT culture” or “favela culture” might mean.
The fifth part called Museum Work – Top-Down and Bot-tom-Up Perspectives gathers four texts, all by museum profession-als. It begins with the conference keynote speech by Carlos Tortole-ro, President and Founder of the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, USA. With esprit and humour, Tortolero gives accounts of the work and joy of managing and developing the museum since the start in the early 1980s. This involves being strongly embedded
in the local Latino community, establishing national and transna-tional partnerships, and overcoming discriminating hinders. The fo-cus is on making exhibitions appealing to all and not just to a cul-tural elite, and always having free entrance. The following chapter is by Fredrik Elg who describes the municipal process of establishing a new National museum in Malmö – The Museum of Movements – which will focus on democracy and migration. Various stakehold-ers as NGO:s, activists, heritage experts, politicians and researchstakehold-ers have been invited to the process. Thereafter Karin Carlsson and Re-becka Lennartsson present a project at Stockholm City Museum on gendered space and gendered representations in museums. They discuss how to contextualise documents, photos, film, and objects to make data and historic contexts multidimensional and accessi-ble to both the public and to researchers. As examples of gendered urban space, they discuss kitchens, cafés, brothels, storefronts and parks. Lars Hansson ends this part with a chapter on the Museum of Migration in Gothenburg, focusing on the museum’s pedagogic challenge of communicating knowledge and experiences of tion. At the core of the museum is a commemoration of the migra-tion of one million Swedes to USA from Gothenburg (which was the largest emigration port in Sweden) around the turn of the 19th Century.
In part six, Inquiries and Collecting – Methods of Understand-ing the City, the authors give accounts of methodologies and meth-ods to approach and investigate social life in an urban spatial con-text. First out is Tiina-Riitta Lappi and Pia Olsson who describe their process of making a research design for the project “Shared Cities” – an ethnographic study of how “inter-ethnic encounters” interact with urban space in Helsinki and Vantaa in Finland. Fol-lowing is Fredrik Egefur’s chapter on the labour movement’s ar-chive in Skåne, and the project and challenge of collecting material from activist groups who themselves have no routines of archiving their material. Anneli Kurttila presents the Stockholm County Mu-seum’s initiative of a “place workshop” – a platform for dialogues on place, history and urban planning, where citizens, heritage pro-fessionals and local associations can meet. Kurttila exemplifies with a place workshop in Märsta, on the outskirts of Stockholm. Lia
Ghiraldi discusses cultural mapping and planning as participative tools for engaging local communities in urban development. Alda Terracciano presents an experiment with digital mapping for cap-turing memories and sensory perceptions in relation to urban space – a work that she has elaborated on in Golborne Road in London. The last chapter in this part is by Birgitta Witting who describes the documentation project “Homeless in Helsingborg” which she conducted at Helsingborg museum in 2015, resulting in an exhi-bition. The photographer Anna Bank was part of the project, and some of her photos are reproduced in the chapter, for which we are very grateful.
The seventh and final part, Non-Profit Associations and Pa-trons as History Making Actors, consists of three authors who dis-cuss the influence of local non-governmental groups, patrons and their alliances, for the development of Malmö and the surround-ing environment. The first chapter by Inger Lindstedt describes the development and relevance of Malmö Förskönings- och Planter-ingsförening (the Society for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage and Green Parks), established in 1881 and still active. In follow-ing chapter Kjell Å Modeer gives an account of patrons in Malmö and Copenhagen from the late 19th to mid 20th Century, focusing on their investments in culture and publishing enterprises in the Öresund region. This final part ends with a text by Göran Larsson, former director of Malmö Museum. Larsson reflects on the activ-ities and importance of the independent Malmö Kulturhistoriska förening (Malmö’s Association for Cultural History), established in 1909. The association has since contributed to the making of Malmö’s official history through forwarding collections to the mu-nicipality, publishing a local history journal, and arranging actions for the preservation of historic buildings.
The way the 38 texts engage in urban history and making of cities are of course not limited to the theme of each part. On the contrary, the texts all present and discuss topics and perspectives touching upon several of the themes. We believe the dynamics of the con-ference regarding scholarship, profession and language, as well as perspectives, theories, methods and scopes, comes through in this
collection of texts. In particular, we want to highlight the contribu-tors’ critical perspectives on urban history and urban development, and how they engage in equality, justice, democracy and public par-ticipation. Our ambition is to encourage further discussions on how urban history relates to contemporary urban social life, politics, planning and development, and to aspects of Creating the City – as it is expressed in the title.
Finally, we hope these texts taken together demonstrate the fruitfulness of meeting in conferences, seminars and workshops across disciplines and professions, where practitioners and scholars can meet to reflect on each other’s work. One aspect of creating the city can actually be to create opportunities like these, for interro-gating mutual and complex challenges of urban history and urban futures together.
Pål Brunnström and Ragnhild Claesson Malmö in February 2019
Notes
1. Massey, Doreen (2005) For Space. London: Sage. Sandercock, Leonie (2003), "Out of the Closet: The Importance of Stories and Storytelling in Planning Practice." Planning Theory & Practice, 4 (1):11-28.
2. Lefebvre, Henri (1996 [1968]) “The Right to the City”, Kofman & Lebas,
Writings on Cities. Cambridge: Blackwell
3. Harvey, David (2009 [1973]), “The right to the city”, Social Justice and the
City. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Mayer, Margit (2009), “The
‘Right to the City’ in the context of shifting mottos of urban social move-ments”. City 13 (2-3): 362-374.
4. Mitchell, Don (2003), The Right to the City: Social justice and the fight for
public space. New York: The Guilford Press
5. See conference programme: https://www.mah.se/upload/Forskningscen-trum/IMH/creating-the-city-program_final.pdf
References
Harvey, David (2009 [1973]), “The right to the city”, Social Justice and the City. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Lefebvre, Henri (1996 [1968]) “The Right to the City”, Kofman & Lebas,
Writings on Cities. Cambridge: Blackwell
Massey, Doreen (2005) For Space. London: Sage
Mayer, Margit (2009), “The ‘Right to the City’ in the context of shifting mottos of urban social movements”. City 13 (2-3): 362-374.
Mitchell, Don (2003), The Right to the City: Social justice and the fight for public
space. New York: The Guilford Press
Sandercock, Leonie (2003), "Out of the Closet: The Importance of Stories and Storytelling in Planning Practice." Planning Theory & Practice, 4 (1):11-28.
Part 1: Authors Writing
the City
Carolyn Steedman1
Where have you been?
Creating the city
Who built the seven gates of Thebes? The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone? And Babylon, so many times destroyed.
Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima’s houses, That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it? In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up?
Bertolt Brecht, ‘Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters’ (1935); “A Worker Reads History” (1947), Compact Poets: Bertolt Brecht, Denys Thompson (ed.), 1972.2
‘The Worker Who Reads‘ asks the questions that every social histo-rian must ask when thinking about the creation of cities. They may be thinking about land acquisition and architectural plans, exca-vation and building works, bricks and mortar, the instructions is-sued to the stone-masons and the carpenters; but they must still ask about the labourers who hauled the craggy blocks of stone. Only then, when we’ve wondered about where and how the workers lived, and about their families, and their life off the building site, can we ask about the other ways in which cities are made, or created: in people’s minds, out of their imagination and experience of all the other places, including cities, that they have known. This chapter fo-cuses on the way Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) created Goth-enburg (and many other Nordic cities and towns) during her Scan-dinavia tour of 1796.3 Then for comparison, we briefly follow an
equally famous English traveller to the North to consider further the perspective of writers and the role of audiences, readers and re-cipients, in imagining the city. Between May and August 1799, the Revd Thomas Robert Malthus, the already-famous, though not yet notorious, author of the Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) made a tour of Denmark, Sweden and Norway. He was accompa-nied by three others–a good friend and two acquaintances–and of-ten by local men taken into the group’s employ as guide, interpreter and servant. The first edition of Malthus’s Essay had been out for a year; in the second, much revised and enlarged edition which ap-peared 1803, Malthus used much of the statistical, economic, and sociological material collected during the 1799 trip.4 His
manu-script travel diary surfaced in the 1960s–or at least the volume de-scribing the party’s travels in Denmark and Norway surfaced. It in-cluded the journey from England to the Hamburg and Kiel region of northern Germany, through Denmark and up the Swedish coast to Norway, in June 1799. The diary detailing the second and much more extensive visit to Sweden made on the friends’ return in Au-gust, has disappeared.5 Some ten years after their visit, Malthus lent
the volume of the second Swedish journal to one of his former trav-el companions for the compilation of his own memoirs; it was not returned, and appears completely lost.6 Nevertheless, when
Mal-thus still had the volume in his possession, he used some of the lost Swedish material in the revised editions of the Essay on Population.
Beginnings
The Conference that gave rise to this book was planned to address urban history, keeping in mind questions of identity, memory, and participation in city life. We would be discussing rights to the city: the right to be there, in the first place; the right to define the city’s identity. But if we consider cities in a world-historical perspective, or even simply in the perspective of The North, over the last five hundred years, we see that although millions have inhabited them, very few have been in a position to either make a city’s identity or make their own, out of a city, not only because their stories are not recorded in a vast urban literature, but also because we simply don’t know about those people: the workers; the people who hauled the
craggy blocks of stone to make a city. That proposition gives enor-mous power to the historian, to articulate, or make (or make-up) the identities of those in the past who may not have thought about their own lives in that way, at all. And who is doing this ‘considering’? This finding of stories important or not important? Are we talking about town elites in – say – Gothenburg, or Paris, or Birmingham, in – say – 1750? Those elites knew themselves to constitute the story of the city, but they did not know the stories of the poor who built their houses, made the furniture for their many rooms, kept them clean and tidy and waited upon them in their dining chamber. For the elites who knew themselves as citizens, street traders and serv-ants, immigrants from the countryside and poor children begging, simply did not have a legible story of the city or of themselves ex-cept one of poverty, indigence, and criminality; or, a story of how they burdened the city’s governors, magistrates and taxpayers with their perpetual demands for relief, of some sort or other. Or maybe we are talking about historians looking at the records the city man-agers left behind; about historians who find themselves only able to tell the stories of poor citizens through the records created by elites? To think the city, historically-speaking, you must consider all those people who were not its citizens, and all the ways cities divide peo-ple from each other, spatially and in terms of status and class.
South of the river
We were to talk then, about issues of power and identity in ur-ban history, in relation to class, gender and ethnicity. To even start thinking about those questions I fell back on my own experience of cities, and my experience of historical subjects in their relationship to cities. I am briefly, and by way of introduction, my own historical example. ‘Strange, isn’t it, how much of London still lies south of the river’ remarks one of the characters in Norman Collins’ novel London Belongs to Me (1945).7 I read it in 1959 when I was twelve
years old. I read it in London, where I was born, and particularly enjoyed its setting in South London, where I lived. I already knew that North London, over the River Thames, was the ‘proper’ city, the real one, where novels were set and on which the newspapers reported. Things didn’t happen here; not in South London’s endless
streets. I haven’t read London Belongs to Me since (not even for the Conference), but I have remembered from the day I finished it in 1959, a certain ‘London-belongs-to-me’ feeling. A thousand times, I have stepped off the train from Coventry (in the West Midlands) at London’s Euston Station, walked out into the thundering traffic of the Euston Road, the purposeful crowd, the air full of promise and menace, and thought: this is my city; I know how to walk these streets; I was born here; I know it: London belongs to me. Which it doesn’t, for I left the city of my birth at the age of eighteen and have never lived there since. And I find that the feeling doesn’t come when I take the train from Leamington Spa (also in the West Midlands) where I now live, to London Marylebone Station. From Leamington Spa to London Marylebone there is a quick journey through salubrious countryside to an elegant railway station. Maybe you need the full-on urban dereliction of the Euston Road to re-trieve that London-belongs-to-me feeling; maybe you need the dirt, the smell, the press of people, eight million stories in the naked city,
Left: Mary Wollstonecraft. Portrait by John Opie, oil on canvas, circa 1797, © National Portrait Gallery, London. Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) authored
The Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792.
Right: Map of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Scandi navian Journey. Wikimedia commons.8
insistently pressing their concerns upon you, all different, all the same.9 The feeling never comes when I step off the train at
Maryle-bone Station.
And thus to the second reaction to stepping of the train, no mat-ter which North London mat-terminus I arrive at. It contradicts the first, and I have learned it from seventeenth- and eighteenth-centu-ry trip-through-town literature. It’s the nagging anxiety that, worse come to worst, you couldn’t walk out of it, couldn’t walk out of Lon-don as you could walk out of Birmingham or Bristol, then and now. People crashing into you with nary a sorry and volatile temper, as observed in countless city-satires of the eighteenth century. Many of those London-life satires featured a country booby just arrived in the city and suffering sensory overload; the country booby was there for the entertainment of those in the know: the citizens of London.10 But there’s never really a laugh to be had, in any of that
so-called city-satire literature, because it instructs you to sneer at the habits and manners of the low, doing away with any fun you–or they–may possibly have (or may have had). I am now that country booby: I have made my choice; I do not belong to London–and it doesn’t belong to me.
My second source for thinking about cities and ideas of the city, then and now, is through my experience of Joseph Woolley, the Nottinghamshire stockingmaker whose diaries form the basis of An Everyday Life of the English Working Class.11 His experience of
Not-tingham, as far as it can be retrieved, was important for my book. Joseph Woolley (c. 1770-1840) lived in the framework knitting (stocking making) village of Clifton, some three miles south west of Nottingham. Using English-English, my definition of ‘city’ is an elastic one. Nottingham was not a city at the beginning of the nine-teenth century; city status was bestowed as part of Victoria’s Dia-mond Jubilee celebrations, in 1897. But never mind that: in 1800 it had a population of about 29,000; it was the county town and ad-ministrative centre of the county of Nottinghamshire and, with the surrounding country districts, the epicentre of the nation’s stock-ing manufacture. ‘A fashionable, elegant town’ writes one economic historian of the region on its modern-day website.12 ‘The situation
many fine houses ... The streets are broad and open and well paved ... it even exceeds imagination’, said a 1771 visitor, also pointing out that ‘the town is a county of itself ’; that besides being the seat of county government, it was also ‘governed by the mayor’, and pos-sessed its own magistracy, many Justices of the Peace (JPs) being appointed from among its numerous aldermen who were also, of-ten, major merchant-manufacturers in the knitwear industry.13 These
factors were important for the way in which Joseph Woolley wrote up his friends and neighbours when they had all been in Nottingham.
Woolley walked into Nottingham every Saturday night of his diary-writing years (1801-1815), most likely to deliver the stock-ing-shapes he had knitted to a middleman hosier along the way; to get shaved and spruced up, read the papers at the barbers, and for his own Saturday Night Out. What else he did in Nottingham, I do not know, though his accounts for monies spent in the town are punctuated with ‘spent foolishly‘. He wrote several vignettes of dead-drunk Clifton women vomiting in Nottingham gutters, and of Clifton husbands and wives having a right set-to on market day. These scenes could have been written about Clifton village inci-dents; the city-setting makes very little difference to their telling. And in fact it was not a Saturday night that produced his finest satiric set piece, in which he was highly amusing in describing the stratagems of young men seeking out sex in the city.
In August 1805 two of his Clifton friends went to Nottingham Races, as did he. A few weeks before, his friends had ‘baught a List of the Spoarting Ladies’; lists of prostitutes working provincial race meetings were widely available from at least the middle of the eight-eenth century.14 ‘Att night they agreed to Go and See too of them’,
continued Woolley; ‘they were to meet at Such a place at such a time’. But one of them met up with ‘an old Companion from mans-field’ and went off with him to a village feast outside the town, leav-ing Thomas Langford (the Clifton Coach and Horses landlord’s son and also a stocking-maker) whom he had arranged to meet ‘wating and havering about till verey Late at night and then was forst to come home by him Self Like a fool as he was ... daming and Swa-reing because he was dispointed of is miss and Company too on the rode’. Undeterred, the lads were back the next day with a different
strategy. Woolley saw them arm-in-arm at the race course, flaunting themselves around ‘Just Like Some people of vast Great property and ... above Speaking to their betters So I Leve you to Gess if they would Spek to their infearers’. When they’d splendoured their way around the racecourse (without being taken any notice of by anyone, Woolley drily noted) they ambled off to a public house, where ‘fop Like they strutted and splanded about to show themselves till the sober part of the Companey was quiet Sick to see them’. Then the fine ‘Jentlemen must Go to the play’. Bustling up to the gallery in fashionable disarray, ‘their hats Set in Stile’, waistcoats unbuttoned to show the neckerchiefs they ‘had stuck in their besoms to make them Look Like a fann tale pidgeon’, they appeared to have for-gotten the sporting ladies, and even the strategy of attracting some girls by their display. After all, said Woolley, they were just a ‘Sto-kenor and Cobbler’ and everyone knew it, despite the gloves ‘which they wore for fear people Should know their profession and for fear that the Ladies should be frited at their Coars bare hands’.15 The
Boys (and Woolley) knew all about the fashion-clothes of the Lon-don fop–that is the taken-for-granted of his commentary.16
A regular, twice-daily mail coach ran between London and Not-tingham even on a Sunday, carrying among many other cultural products, books, pamphlets, prints and magazines, to stock Not-tingham’s five bookshops. Woolley belonged to a Nottingham cir-culating library; he bought many cultural products in the town; he took part in what were called the political ‘papers wars’ in the lead-up to the 1803 Nottingham election, spending 2s 2½d on pamphlet material. Here are some indications of how Woolley’s writerly im-agination was formed. But the town of Nottingham–the city–did something more to his vision of it. Certainly, he did not need to be in Nottingham to see with a satiric eye; but the wide expanses of Nottingham Race Course provided a perspective on the fops and fools parading around it. The interior of an eighteenth-century the-atre afforded view not only (not primarily) of the harum-scarum enacted on the stage, but of the audience, its comings-and-goings, a thousand little scenes enacted in the aisles, the pit, the staircase up to the gallery, especially if the gallery was where you were watch-ing, as Woolley was in August 1805. Such sites of sociability were
architecturally and topographically arranged to provide perspective on la passagiata; and we should say ‘perspective’ not ‘distance’, for the Boys were Woolley’s mates, his neighbours, on whom he frequently passed wry, almost-affectionate, comment. But here, now, the wide open spaces of Nottingham, its high pavements and public squares, allowed him to look for longer and tell a more sustained tale. The city allowed him to expand his skills as a writer. Nottingham exer-cised my imagination, as it did Woolley’s between 1800 and 1815.
Away from London, to the North
I have never willingly written about London as a historian: it is so a-typical; its structure of government and social structure, its pop-ulation, its economy, have never raised compelling, or even inter-esting, historical questions for me. London exerted its gravitational pull when I encountered the anonymous Low-life: Or, One Half of the World Knows not how The Other Half Live (1750?, 1752, 1764).17
This is an extraordinary, dream-like survey of what took place, one never-happened June day in London in 1750, and which has, I was surprised to find, been treated as documentary by some historians, and as satire by many more nineteenth-century essayists and nov-elists. Charles Dickens for example, and the Mayhew bothers, ab-sorbed Low-life’s time-structure and elaborated its use of vignette; they did this at a time when the cultural and literary task was to distance the modern, mid-nineteenth-century writer from crude and cruel ‘olden times’, so the sentimentality of their own writing about disabled crossing-sweepers and crippled bird-sellers obscured the sentiment that Low-life (and its precursor literature) inscribed in relation to the poor Londoners who throng its pages. But any-way, Low-life is a text that says it never happened to London’s poor citizens; it is a text that says they–the poor citizens–never happened. Or at least, that’s my argument. Because of eighteenth-century lit-erature like this it is nowadays, quite hard for me to retrieve that London-belongs-to-me feeling.
Thus are raised my questions–historical and personal questions– about cities and belonging. Who was born in the city? Who has left it? And now come back? Where have they been? Who are its immi-grants and emiimmi-grants? Its visitors? Where have they been? Who will
stay and who will leave? Having no familiar social and legal sys-tem onto which to map such questions about Scandinavia, I decided to follow Mary Wollstonecraft to the North, in 1795; she with her high-handed confidence that she always knew what it was she was looking at, even in a strange land, even though she had no historical account to guide her interpretation of its institutions, practices, and ideologies.
Wollstonecraft travelled from Hull to Gothenburg (and from Sweden, to Norway and Denmark) in the summer of 1795. She started her journey from London, where she had been born and where she now lived. The city she left in May 1795 and returned to in October, was different from the one she had been born into. The stagnation of population growth in early eighteenth-century Lon-don had been reversed. The demographic regime of LonLon-don at the end of the seventeenth century was one in which people married in their late twenties, and had relatively few children, in or out of wedlock. A new pattern was well established by the 1760s: high lev-els of illegitimacy, an average marriage age of below 25, and high overall levels of fertility both within and outside marriage. Women dominated the population. By 1801, 54 per cent of Londoners were female. It has been estimated that a century earlier, around 1700, a sixth of all people born in England lived some part of their lives in London. In 1800 almost one in 10 of the entire British popula-tion lived in the capital. A survey of 1781 suggested that only one in four of its inhabitants had been born in the city. London was, in Wollstonecraft’s time, from 1759 to 1798, a city of women and of migrants, not of the young or the old.18 When we look through the
eyes of witnesses like her, or look with Thomas Malthus, at the cities of the past, we need to know something like this, of factors that may have shaped their vision; something of their imagined cities, as much as all the cities they actually inhabited.
The American Gilbert Imlay, her lover and father of her little girl Fanny, commissioned Wollstonecraft, to pursue the legal fate of one of his dodgy import enterprises–a lost ship with a Norwe-gian captain who had apparently absconded with a fortune in silver bullion. Imlay had intended to trade the silver in Sweden for goods to import into France past the British blockade (we are two years
into the Revolutionary Wars with France).19 For the first stage of
her journey she took the mail coach from London to Hull, some two hundred miles, through mostly very flat countryside. The ter-rain may have helped with journey time; but then she did have with her a baby–little Fanny, just a year old–and French nursemaid Mar-guerite, whom she had only recently taken into service in Paris, and whose English was practically non-existent. As Janet Todd dryly re-marks, the other passengers on the stage coach could not have wel-comed the little party.20 Then there were days–weeks–to cope with
the baby in damp, gloomy accommodation in Hull, waiting for a ship, waiting for the weather to turn, the ship being the more diffi-cult thing, for most of Hull’s shipping routes were either to London, via the east coast, or across the Atlantic. During the waiting time, a local doctor and his wife took Wollstonecraft on a little trip to Beverley, eight miles away, where she had grown up. (She had been born in Spitalfields, London, in 1759; the family moved to Bever-ley when she was nine years old. Janet Todd says that ‘Mary was always a Londoner’.) She had not seen Beverley since she left it in 1774 at the age of fifteen. In her letters to Imlay she had spent her time since leaving London disparaging the provincials. Now, the lit-tle place that had been her metropolis as a girl (it was, after all, a market town, a civil parish and the county town and administrative centre of the East Riding of Yorkshire; still in the 1790s a place for balls, musical evenings, theatre, literary and other entertainments) seemed very small. After London, after Paris, it felt like a village.21
And when she ‘found that many of the inhabitants had lived in the same houses ever since ... [she] left it’ she could not help ‘wonder-ing how they could thus have vegetated, whilst I was runn‘wonder-ing over a world of sorrow, snatching at pleasure, and throwing off prejudice’.22
Then a ship was found; terms were agreed with the captain, though bad weather forced the ship to turn back. Finally they set sail, land-ing in Gothenburg on June 27th.
Thanks to the extraordinary researches of Norwegian historian Gunnar Molden, we know now what we did not know even twenty years ago about this journey: that Wollstonecraft knew exactly what had been on the missing ship and the full implications of Imlay’s venture.23 We know now that every place she visited and every legal
man and judge she interviewed, was connected in some way or oth-er to the missing ship and its cargo of silvoth-er–and that she knew full well that the ship had carried silver bullion, for she had overseen its loading back in Le Havre during her early pregnancy. Now Woll-stonecraft was pursuing the compensation Imlay sought from the Danish-Norwegian crown.
Whether you read A Short Residence, or The Love Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft to Gilbert Imlay, intrepid really is the word you have to use of Wollstonecraft. And maybe ‘brave’, and certainly determined. Marguerite the maid was constantly upbraided for timidity by Wollstonecraft, but was surely as intrepid as her mistress. And Mar-guerite surely had a harder time of it than Wollstonecraft, being left behind with the baby in Gothenburg, whilst Wollstonecraft con-sulted with legal men up and down the Norwegian coast between Rusoer and Christiania. Marguerite was left with not much more than the Enlightenment injunction of her mistress, to dress the child lightly and wash her all over, everyday–among people whom Wollstonecraft believed kept their children swaddled and bundled up all year long and never washed them at all.24
The prescriptions for washing and clothing children came from the daddy of all childcare manual writers, philosopher John Locke, in his Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693). The prescription teased and frazzled many an English nursemaid, throughout the long eighteenth-century. Incidentally, Wollstonecraft had already penned her own childcare manual, long before she became a mother: her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters was published in 1787. Not really knowing about something never stopped her writing about it. All over Sweden, Norway and Denmark Wollstonecraft noted the absence of children playing out in the fresh air. When the child was with her, locals pitied little Fanny for being so loosely and lightly clad. In vain did she ventriloquise Locke in trying to persuade the ladies of Tonsberg that ‘they injured their children by keeping them too warm’.25 She was not the most tactful of travellers and guests.
Wollstonecraft was a close observer of mistresses and servants across Denmark-Norway and in Sweden. She thought the wag-es paid to Norwegian women servants too low, which was ‘par-ticularly unjust, because the price of clothes is much higher than
provisions’.26 She noted that servants were given different food from
that served to the household, though in Norway she ceded, it was less awful than the dietary of Swedish servants. But she thought the situation of servants bad everywhere, and particularly in that so-called land of liberty, England.27 But even as guest and visitor she
could not resist moaning about the servants, just as if she were at home, noting (again, in Tonsberg) that ‘the servants wait as slowly as their mistresses carve’.28 But she was weary already at the length
of time meals took all over Scandinavia, and might have thought herself fortunate on this occasion at being served fresh meat, for she had done a lot of complaining to Imlay during the past month, about pickled fish and rye bread.
She spent much time with legal men during her visit. In 1794, a royal commission presided over by the Norwegian Judge Wulfsberg had not found enough evidence against the captain of the missing ship to proceed with a charge. Part of Wollstonecraft’s commission was to interview him. So she interacted with the higher levels of the legal hierarchy, and it is not very likely that she learned about the police courts that managed master and servant legislation in ei-ther Christiania or Copenhagen.29 But she had no qualms about
mapping an unfamiliar legal system onto one which she knew bet-ter, happily calling judges ‘mayors’, and court personnel in country places, ‘magistrates’. She knew that throughout her Nordic travels that she was in absolutist states, and found herself surprised to ‘talk of liberty; yet the norwegians [sic] appear to me to be the most free community I have ever observed’, and this despite the fact that ‘the mayor of each town or district, and the judges in the country, exercise an authority almost patriarchal. They can do much good, but little harm, as every individual can appeal from their judgement: and as they may always be forced to give a reason for their conduct, it is generally regulated by prudence. “They have not time to learn to be tyrants,” said a gentleman to me ...’.30
The lesson you might take from Wollstonecraft is that not real-ly understanding what you’re looking at, is no impediment to your opinion on it. Though there was nothing in Wollstonecraft’s expe-rience, and nothing in my historical expeexpe-rience, onto which to map the police courts of Denmark-Norway, say, it’s no impediment to
our thinking about them. One problem with this approach however, is that Mary Wollstonecraft herself can have had but little knowl-edge of English master-servant legislation, or of the hugger-mugger arrangements (most of them actually illegal, or at least not sanc-tioned by law) by which domestics and their employers sought ar-bitration, or recompense, or simply–at last!–the payment of their wages, in magistrates’ courts across England and Wales. Neither can Marguerite have known much about the English half-system of servant management, for she had spent a mere two months in Lon-don before the two women set off for the North. Marguerite was the first servant that Wollstonecraft had had the sole hiring of, and that had been under French/Parisian arrangements. Marguerite certain-ly noticed differences between France and Scandinavia, but what her observations were we are never likely to discover. She tried to entertain her mistress with droll accounts of her last three months in Sweden during their long homeward journey from Crosoer via Sleswick and Hamburg; but Wollstonecraft sneered silently at her, imagining her telling her family back in Paris her traveller’s tales, with ‘that arch, agreeable vanity peculiar to the French’. Wollstone-craft thought sourly of ‘the importance she should assume when she informed her friends of all her journeys by sea and land–shewing the pieces of money she has collected, and stammering out a few foreign phrases ... in a true Parisian accent’.31 How valuable would
be ‘Letters of a French Nursemaid, Written during a Short Resi-dence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark’! And how impossible that anything like them should exist. But it is not unimaginable that the several local guides and interpreters that Malthus and his friends took into service in Sweden and Norway could have made some re-cord of their experiences with the English travellers, not only be-cause they belonged to a highly literate culture but also bebe-cause they had local knowledge that Marguerite did not possess. There are several instances in the Travel Diaries, of these menservants hav-ing very clear opinions on what they saw the Englishmen seehav-ing. On a protracted visit to a Sami settlement on 27th July 1799, when
Malthus bombarded the family with questions about reindeer milk, and cooking, and clothing, and washing the children, their servant showed what could–possibly–have been his disapproval: ‘There were
many more questions that we wished to ask, but our servant natu-rally thought so many questions trifling & foolish & shewed a little unwillingness to repeat them; but upon the whole we had reason to be satisfied with him’.32
Wollstonecraft’s overt points of comparison between Scandina-via and Britain (and France) were: the service relationship, the posi-tion and behaviour of women of all degrees, and the everyday life of households. Her vision of Scandinavia was formed by an amalgam of direct observation, information provided by others, and the extensive literature that guided those ‘exploring European frontiers’ in what to see, and how to feel about it.33 Thus her observations about laundry
and gender relations, made twenty miles outside Gothenburg: In the winter, I am told, they take the linen down to the river, to wash it in the cold water; and though their hands, cut by the ice, are cracked and bleeding, the men, their fel-low servants, will not disgrace their manhood by carrying a tub to lighten their burden. You will not be surprised to hear that they do not wear shoes or stockings, when I inform you that their wages are seldom more than twenty or thirty shillings per annum.34
But she could not have seen the poor servants with their cracked and bleeding feet, or known whether or not these things actually happened, for it was high summer when she wrote, and no hardship to go without shoes.
She discussed Sweden’s landscape and terrain by comparison, not with the flatlands of East Yorkshire, but by book-notions of the picturesque, the sublime, and the beautiful. She responded with ‘mingled rapture and disquiet to the wild beauty’ of the land north of Gothenburg, says Janet Todd.35 Some of her finest nature writing
came from the Swedish shoreline walks she took, escaping the kind-ness of her hosts. She described Swedish bourgeois manners as for-mal, cold, iron-like, whilst those of the peasantry evoked for her the simplicity of the golden age. All very wearying though, she wrote to Imlay; peasant politeness was as tedious as that of the bourgeoi-sie. She did not compare Scandinavian cities with all the others she knew. That kind of comparison was not in the Romantic lexicon she
carried with her, which she used for terrain, geography, and flora and fauna. She thought Gothenburg clean and airy; Dutch-built, she noted. When she remembered her time in Dublin and com-pared its hospitality to that of Gothenburg, it was the bottle she had in mind, and manners, not cityscapes. Indeed, she thought that too much kindness and politeness indicated a vacant mind:
Hospitality has ... been too much praised by travellers as proof of goodness of heart, when in my opinion, indis-criminate hospitality is rather a criterion by which you may form a tolerable estimate of the indolence or vacancy of a head; or, in other words, a fondness for social pleasures in which the mind, not having its proportion of exercise, the bottle must be pushed about.36
She noticed the silence and emptiness of streets in major cities, par-ticularly in Christiania and Copenhagen, and wondered particular-ly about the absence of children playing out. We have to assume that her point of comparison here was the deafening, never-ceasing noise of London; but it is not a point she ever made. She got clos-er to home–the familiar city–when she and Marguclos-erite and Fanny reached Hamburg on the return journey in September 1795: ‘an ill, close-built town, swarming with inhabitants’, she wrote to Imlay.37
Hamburg may have been dirty and crowded, but as Todd points out, Wollstonecraft really did prefer big cities to small towns.38
Another traveller to the North
Every single observation Wollstonecraft made about Denmark, Sweden and Norway, in the Letters at least, was to Gilbert Imlay; she wrote to and for the other half of a relationship that most bi-ographers agree, was on the rocks of a very stormy sea, though Wollstonecraft was unwilling to acknowledge it. The entire journey and her writing of it was inflected by her ‘mood of amorous melan-cholia’, says Barbara Taylor.39 By way of contrast, Thomas Malthus
did not make his observations in letters; he did not write for anoth-er, but for himself. He wrote a diary for his own research purposes. He knew that the Scandinavia he saw and experienced was going to be read by others, and indeed it was, when he revised the Essay
on Population, but he was not writing for a specific person, as was Wollstonecraft. Moreover, his experience of towns and cities was different from hers: he knew Bath (where he had been at school), and Cambridge (where, after his undergraduate days, he was ap-pointed Fellow of Jesus College, in 1793), and several small parishes and villages in Surrey, where his family lived and he acted as curate to several Church of England vicars in the 1790s. (He married in 1804, a year after he gained his own church living in Lincolnshire). His experience of England was mostly a provincial, rural experience.
The party of friends left Cambridge on 20th May travelling via
Bury St Edmund’s to Yarmouth where they took ship to Cuxhav-en. They were in Hamburg by the 25th.40 The first Swedish journey,
which lasted some ten days, was a constant source of comparison for Malthus during the ensuing Norwegian visit.41 Approaching
Kongsbergh, Norway, for example on July 4th Malthus observed
that ‘the country women when working wear nothing upwards but their shifts–which are made higher than those in England–some-times a coloured handkerchief is thrown over their shoulders; but there are no stays, or covering to the waist’. He remembered seeing ‘the women in Sweden work[ing] in the same manner’; they too had ‘looked exactly like men working in their shirts’.42 Well might
an English visitor notes the absence of stays, for England was the only European country in which all women, high and low, working and leisured, wore stays. Visitors to eighteenth-century British cit-ies frequently remarked on the particularity of urban vistas traversed by women, hurrying on or leisurely strolling by, the posture of all of them dictated by the stays they were wearing.43 Things were more
agreeable in Norway than in Sweden, as far as Malthus was con-cerned: on July 10th on the road to Tofte, he noted that ‘we have met
with at the inns and seen on the road a number of very fine wom-en in Norway, with fair complexions & agreeable countwom-enances’; he contemplated the ‘superiority of the Norway women to the swed-ish’. The next day, just before reaching Fockstuen and ascending to-wards the mountains, he decided that Norwegian horses were better than the Swedish variety.44
On the first Swedish journey his point of comparison was Eng-land or the Denmark he had just left. He recorded of Wennesburgh
on 20th June that he and his companions had seen ‘many women
digging in their gardens with their petticoats tuck’d up & their rag-ged shifts appearing below’, but also that he had ‘seen however as bad cottages & as poorly dressed people in some English villages’.45
He was a fine observer of fashion and clothing throughout Den-mark, Sweden, and Norway and not just of working women’s dress. Everyone, men and women, was still following the fashion for short (high) waists! Did they not know what a vulgar air it gave them, especially the men? The company looked ‘exactly like an assembly in a small country town in England’, he wrote of a dance at Freder-ickshall on 23rd June.46 He had said the same of Frederiksberg, west
of Copenhagen, at the beginning of the month: ‘they are now in the extremity of the short waists. The men in general ... wear coats with short waists & long skirts which, being a vulgar fashion among us, gave them in our eyes a vulgar appearance’.47 He was highly aware
of himself as an observer; he knew how his own perceptions had been shaped and formed; knew that the ladies and gentlemen of Frederiksberg did not think themselves to be vulgar, at all.
The travel diaries have been read to show Malthus busily ‘re-cording local details of the pressure of population on food supplies, and of the various local customs and institutions by means of which populations were held in check’, as his Dictionary of National Biog-raphy entry has it.48 It has also been said that the diaries were
writ-ten ‘during an important interim period in the author’s life, when he was seeking for factual confirmation of a principle which he had earlier formulated in theoretical outline’.49 There are indeed many
such details and traces of such a project, and the Essay chapter ‘Of the Checks to Population in Sweden’ show his method with par-ticular clarity.50 Here he was writing (or revising) a book: the
Nor-wegian chapter is about Norway, and the Swedish about Sweden. The constantly updated comparisons (between three Nordic coun-tries; between them and Germany and Britain) of the Travel Diaries is absent. But if you read the Travel Diaries in the light of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters from Scandinavia, with her creation of the spaces and places of the North in her own mind and on the page, then Malthus will appear as writer not only of political economy but of people and places, and habits and manners.51
He got much of his information about the production and dis-tribution of food, and about markets and local market economies from women. Sitting next to ladies at dinner in Frederickshall, in Kongsburgh, and in Trondheim he learned how everything had to be made at home, from soap to candles to cloth to bread (and thus why households employed so very many servants); he learned how middle-class women structured their year around the one-off provi-sioning of a household by sending for goods to Copenhagen.52 He
and his travel companions longed for fresh meat, but were not puz-zled at the absence of markets in which to purchase it, for Malthus had already been taught the fundamentals of this food economy. At Roras, in July, though they were staying at a
rather a smart inn, we could only get for dinner salt fish & potatoes, besides a kind of soup made of preserved cherries which was not bad. The master of the Inn told us that if he would give any money, he could not buy a bit of meat in Roraas; yet it certainly is the most considerable place that we have seen in Norway, except Christiana & Drontheim (Trondheim) & perhaps Kongsberg.53
He wearied at salt fish quite as much as Wollstonecraft did, but knew the reasons for its prevalence.54 When he looked at scenery
or enthused over a mountainous landscape, his point of compari-son was the Scandinavian country he had just left, not Britain. He did however mention the River Thames as a marker of grandeur and the sublime, specifically ‘the Thames near Putney’ where the contemporary view was that the river offered its most beautiful as-pect. The Thames meandered through the county of Surrey, south west of the capital, before flowing into London. Travelling from his various Surrey homes to the capital, Malthus would pass near Put-ney. After leaving Christiana he expressed surprise that no one had told him that they would pass through such beautiful countryside, so much like that of ‘the Thames near Putney’; at Westgaard, later in the month he found the Glommen river ‘about the size of the Tames at Putney’.55
Here at Westgaard there was no sweet (fresh) milk or cream on offer at the inn, though sour milk and cream in abundance. The
travellers declined them, as they had ‘not yet come to a relish of them’, implying that one day they might–or could. Malthus wrote as a more open-minded, engaged and inquiring traveller than Mary Wollstone-craft; but he was writing research notes for his own use, not penning versions of himself to an absent and soon-to-be-lost lover.
Imagining the city
We make cities in our minds and imagination, out of what we know of other cities, and spaces and places; we write them for some pur-pose, present or future.
Thus are raised more general questions about how cities are, and have been, seen, and the experience of those doing the seeing, then and now. We have here three eighteenth-century people–two of them famous (or notorious), one of them an obscure turn-of-the-century worker. Each of them wrote about the cities and towns and other places they visited: they conjured Nottingham, and Gothen-burg, and Trondheim in their minds before they wrote about them. This is a universal procedure of writing: you have to figure a place (anything) in your mind before you remake it in writing. On the evidence of his diaries, Nottingham was the only city (or town) that Joseph Woolley ever visited, though he knew well all of the villag-es and hamlets of South Nottinghamshire. And he visited the city every week; it was only three miles from home. He used the city, to purchase goods and services and pleasure; it served him very well as a writer, in throwing into sharp focus his friends and acquaint-ances from his village. The city backdrop allowed him to write ac-complished satire about them, and about the class relationships of a familiar society. Of course the writing-situations of Wollstonecraft and Malthus were different, and I really shouldn’t labour the point. But they were both far away from home; they had both made more or less arduous journeys to reach Scandinavia, and they were both perpetually on the move when they were there. They both con-sciously used other cities and places to assess what they heard and saw: their writing was broadly comparative. Their different purposes for writing have been discussed throughout this chapter. But there is a further comparison for the historian to make. Malthus moved through a crowded countryside: dozens of women worked in fields
and the garden plots of houses near the road; inns were crowded in his writing; dances and balls and dinners were packed with people. He and Wollstonecraft did not move through different countries: we have to assume that Wollstonecraft too moved past field workers and along busy roads. But she did not write them. What she wrote was emptiness and absence, particularly marked for her by the lack of children playing in the streets of major towns. She was very fond of Rousseau’s Reveries of Solitary Walker (fond of all of Romantic Rousseau) and said to her later lover and husband William God-win, that she would always be one herself.56 A writer with a
self-im-age as Solitary Walker does not write about the men and women she meets on her coastal ramblings, but the historian has to assume they were there, as they were for Thomas Malthus. So we have to add a fourth figure to the land- and cityscapes of the imagination written by Woolley, Wollstonecraft and Malthus: the historian. The historian has to reckon with their silences, with what they did not write, and what they made absent from their prose. And this histori-an’s introductory reflections on leaving the city, on settling down in a much smaller, provincial place, turn out to be of not much help in disinterring feelings and beliefs about cities in the past, for the only creative route offered me, is by Mary Wollstonecraft, in her dispar-agement of provincial Beverley; or in her crying out to Imlay when in Risor, surrounded by sea and tall steep cliffs: ‘Talk not of Bas-tilles! ... To be born here, was to be bastilled by nature ... The ocean and these tremendous bulwarks enclosed me on every side’. She had to give in to her own view of little towns and far-flung provincial places; give in to what she believed about all the other little places she had lived and known: She ‘felt the confinement, and wished for wings to reach still loftier cliffs, whose slippery sides no foot was so hardy as to tread’. She ventured out for a precipitous walk; ‘yet what was it to see? – only a boundless waste of water – not a glimpse of smiling nature – not a patch of lively green to relieve the aching sight, or vary the objects of meditation’.57 There is the historian’s
problem in (re)creating the cities of the past out of the words of others; I do not want to have Wollstonecraft’s feelings of disparage-ment, of being far away, from some centre of things. I would much rather be Thomas Malthus than Mary Wollstonecraft in Norway
