English 336 Review

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English 336 Review

• 1. Farewell Orwell
• 2. Picturing London Transitional Period
• 3. Exam Review Workshop

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The Cultural Geography of London Poverty

• We have explored this subject in relation
  to-- --repeated themes, tropes,
  characters--styles, genres, aesthetics--ways
  of seeing describing--politics
  ideology--historical discourses
  movements--new media and technologies
  --psychologies sociologies--movement,
  crossings, mapping --eroticism

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Blanchard Jerrolds biography of Gustave Dore
discusses the production of London A Pilgrimage
(1872)For our trips round and about London in
search of material for our sketches and studies
of character from the life, two private
detectives had been placed at our disposal and
every night we spent hours in such populous
districts as Lambeth, Clerkenwell, Bayswater, and
the Docks. It was a real pleasure to watch Dore,
dressed in some ragamuffin style or other,
hurrying in and out of the streets and
alleys. He was enchanted with Petticoat Lane
by night, the sailors haunts in Ratcliff
Highway, Drury Lane by night, the slums of
Westminster, the thieves quarters round about
Whitechapel, and the low lodging-houses. The long
back kitchens of these houses had a particular
charm for him. We were spies upon them men
of better luck whom they were bound to envy, and
whose mere presence roused the rebel in them. A
few of them, loitering around the Whitechapel
road, flung a parting sneer at us, as we hailed a
returning cab.
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Gustave Dore, Wentworth Street, Whitechapel,
1872
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Gustave Dore,NewgateExerciseYard, 1872
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Vincent Van Gogh,Prisoners Exercising (after
Dore), 1890
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Gustave Dore, The New Zealander,1872
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Bill Brandt,Dancing the Lambeth Walk, 1939
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Bill Brandt, Children,South London, c 1939
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Bill Brandt, Young housewife, Bethnal Green, 1937
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• Unchanging London, Lilliput 1939When
  Gustave Dore began his pilgrimage in the early
  seventies of the last century, he was astounded
  that London should ever have been described, as
  was the fashion in artistic circles, as dull and
  ugly. He was fascinated by the river, the
  crowded bridges and the streets, the play of
  light and shade and the restless life of the
  city he even found a mournful grandeur in its
  poverty. . . . . Bill Brandt, who followed
  Dores footsteps with a camera nearly 70 years
  later, is a young English photographer who
  studied in Paris under Man Ray. Like Dore, he is
  deeply absorbed in the everyday life of London.
  He finds a depressing attraction in the endless
  rows of suburban houses, and in the narrow alleys
  between riverside warehouses. His books of
  photography, London at night, and the English at
  home, are a vivid presentation of social
  conditions in England to-day. But, again like
  Dore, Bill Brandt has the art of infusing realism
  with a sense of beauty.

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Exam Review Section A
1. There was no denying that Clem was
handsomeat sixteen she had all her charms in
apparent maturity, and they were of the coarsely
magnificent order. Her forehead was low and of
great width her nose was well shapen, and had
large sensual apertures her cruel lips may be
seen on certain fine antique busts the neck that
supported her heavy head was splendidly rounded.
In laughing, she became a model for an artist, an
embodiment of fierce life independent of
morality. Her health was probably less sound than
it seemed to be one would have compared her, not
to some piece of exuberant normal vegetation, but
rather to a rank, evilly-fostered growth. The
putrid soil of that nether world yields other
forms besides the obviously blighted and
sapless.

1. Look at a map of greater London, a map on
which the town proper shows as a dark,
irregularly rounded patch against the whiteness
of suburban districts, and just on the northern
limit of the vast network of streets you will
distinguish the name of Crouch End. Another
decade, and the dark patch will have spread
greatly further for the present, Crouch End is
still able to remind one that it was in the
country a very short time ago. The streets have
a smell of newness, of dampness the bricks
retain their complexion, the stucco has not
rotted more than one expects in a year or two
poverty tries to hide itself with Venetian
blinds, until the time when an advanced guard of
houses shall justify the existence of the slum.
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Exam Review Section A
2. "Well, it was this way," returned Mr.
Enfield "I was coming home from some place at
the end of the world, about three o'clock of a
black winter morning, and my way lay through a
part of town where there was literally nothing to
be seen but lamps. Street after street and all
the folks asleep -- street after street, all
lighted up as if for a procession and all as
empty as a church -- till at last I got into that
state of mind when a man listens and listens and
begins to long for the sight of a policeman. All
at once, I saw two figures one a little man who
was stumping along eastward at a good walk, and
the other a girl of maybe eight or ten who was
running as hard as she was able down a cross
street. Well, sir, the two ran into one another
naturally enough at the corner and then came the
horrible part of the thing for the man trampled
calmly over the child's body and left her
screaming on the ground. It sounds nothing to
hear, but it was hellish to see. It wasn't like a
man it was like some damned Juggernaut.

1. Look at a map of greater London, a map on
which the town proper shows as a dark,
irregularly rounded patch against the whiteness
of suburban districts, and just on the northern
limit of the vast network of streets you will
distinguish the name of Crouch End. Another
decade, and the dark patch will have spread
greatly further for the present, Crouch End is
still able to remind one that it was in the
country a very short time ago. The streets have
a smell of newness, of dampness the bricks
retain their complexion, the stucco has not
rotted more than one expects in a year or two
poverty tries to hide itself with Venetian
blinds, until the time when an advanced guard of
houses shall justify the existence of the slum.
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Exam Review Section A
3. Now he came to Bishopsgate street, and here
at last he chose the gift.  It was a toy-shop  a
fine, flaming toy-shop, with carts, dolls and
hoops dangling above, and wooden horses standing
below, guarding two baskets by the door.  One
contained a mixed assortment of tops, whips,
boats, and woolly dogs, nobly decorated with
coloured pictures, each box with a little cranked
handle.  As he looked, a tune, delightfully
tinkled on some instrument, was heard from within
the shop.  Dicky peeped.  There was a lady with a
little girl at her side who was looking eagerly
at just such a shining, round box in the
saleswomans hands, and it was from that box, as
the saleswoman turned the handle, that the tune
came.  Dicky was enchanted.  Thisthis was the
thing, beyond debate  a pretty little box that
would play music whenever you turned a handle. 
This was the thing worth any fifty clocks. 
Indeed it was almost as good as a regular
barrel-organ, the first thing he would buy if he
were rich.

1. Look at a map of greater London, a map on
which the town proper shows as a dark,
irregularly rounded patch against the whiteness
of suburban districts, and just on the northern
limit of the vast network of streets you will
distinguish the name of Crouch End. Another
decade, and the dark patch will have spread
greatly further for the present, Crouch End is
still able to remind one that it was in the
country a very short time ago. The streets have
a smell of newness, of dampness the bricks
retain their complexion, the stucco has not
rotted more than one expects in a year or two
poverty tries to hide itself with Venetian
blinds, until the time when an advanced guard of
houses shall justify the existence of the slum.
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Exam Review Section A
4. Look at a map of greater London, a map on
which the town proper shows as a dark,
irregularly rounded patch against the whiteness
of suburban districts, and just on the northern
limit of the vast network of streets you will
distinguish the name of Crouch End. Another
decade, and the dark patch will have spread
greatly further for the present, Crouch End is
still able to remind one that it was in the
country a very short time ago. The streets have
a smell of newness, of dampness the bricks
retain their complexion, the stucco has not
rotted more than one expects in a year or two
poverty tries to hide itself with Venetian
blinds, until the time when an advanced guard of
houses shall justify the existence of the
slum.

1. Look at a map of greater London, a map on
which the town proper shows as a dark,
irregularly rounded patch against the whiteness
of suburban districts, and just on the northern
limit of the vast network of streets you will
distinguish the name of Crouch End. Another
decade, and the dark patch will have spread
greatly further for the present, Crouch End is
still able to remind one that it was in the
country a very short time ago. The streets have
a smell of newness, of dampness the bricks
retain their complexion, the stucco has not
rotted more than one expects in a year or two
poverty tries to hide itself with Venetian
blinds, until the time when an advanced guard of
houses shall justify the existence of the slum.
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Exam Review Section B
1. On May 4 1889, an anonymous reviewer for
Whitehall Review gave the following review of
George Gissings The Netherworld Old Hewitt
and his son Bob, Clem, Peckover, Pennyloaf, and
the Byasses are all additions to Mr. Gissings
grim and depressing gallery of portraits from
East London, which they, or their like, may be
found in numbers and they are described with
absolute and relentless truth. The quality which
distinguishes the authors books from others
which describe the London poor is this truth of
delineation. He never for a moment idealises his
characters he sees with keenness, perhaps he
almost exaggerates, the coarseness of their
vices, their lives, their very amusements and he
describes them with what is sometimes almost
brutal accuracy. Do you agree with this
reviewers assessment of Gissings novel? Can
you speculate as to why the reviewer found the
characters brutally accurate?

1. Look at a map of greater London, a map on
which the town proper shows as a dark,
irregularly rounded patch against the whiteness
of suburban districts, and just on the northern
limit of the vast network of streets you will
distinguish the name of Crouch End. Another
decade, and the dark patch will have spread
greatly further for the present, Crouch End is
still able to remind one that it was in the
country a very short time ago. The streets have
a smell of newness, of dampness the bricks
retain their complexion, the stucco has not
rotted more than one expects in a year or two
poverty tries to hide itself with Venetian
blinds, until the time when an advanced guard of
houses shall justify the existence of the slum.
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Exam Review Section B

2. Discuss the treatment of the Ripper murders
in Whitechapel, 1888, a cartoon from an 1888
issue of Punch. How does it contribute to the
Victorian cultural imaginary surrounding these
murders?
1. Look at a map of greater London, a map on
which the town proper shows as a dark,
irregularly rounded patch against the whiteness
of suburban districts, and just on the northern
limit of the vast network of streets you will
distinguish the name of Crouch End. Another
decade, and the dark patch will have spread
greatly further for the present, Crouch End is
still able to remind one that it was in the
country a very short time ago. The streets have
a smell of newness, of dampness the bricks
retain their complexion, the stucco has not
rotted more than one expects in a year or two
poverty tries to hide itself with Venetian
blinds, until the time when an advanced guard of
houses shall justify the existence of the slum.
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Exam Review Section C
ADAPTATIONChoose a work that we have studied in
this course and discuss how and why you would
adapt it for a contemporary audience. You may
approach this topic in two ways you may write
an essay explaining how you would adapt the work,
or you may write a short essay along with a short
example of the proposed adaptation. You will
need to make an argument for the adaptive choices
made Why is the particular work worthy of
adaptation and/or remediation? What kinds of
changes would you make to it? In which medium
should it appear and why? In which
representational mode should it appear (social
realism, pornography, gonzo journalism, etc)?
Who is the new target audience?