GAVARNI IN LONDON: SKETCHES OF LIFE AND CHARACTER, WITH ILLUSTRATIVE ESSAYS BY POPULAR WRITERS.

Edited by Albert R. Smith, with 23 original illustrations by Paul Gavarni,

engraved by Henry Vizetelly.

Originally published 1849.

This edition edited, with annotations and an introductory essay by Stephen Banks.

Lambertville, NJ: The True Bill Press. 248 p.

ISBN-10: 0-9791116-4-1

ISBN-13: 978-0-9791116-4-8

Published July 2009 in hard cover at a price of $45.00

     "An elegant volume, tastefully decorated, and adapted to grace the table of a fashionable drawing room," thus did the John Bull periodical describe this collection of essays from a dozen of Victorian England's most popular literary loungers or flâneurs, now reprinted by the True Bill Press. Originally published as a magazine series in 1848, with each contribution illustrated by a lithograph by the distinguished Parisian artist Paul Gavarni, these essays were intended to be ironic, occasionally tragic, but predominately witty and always artful in their observations of life in the then contemporary London. Perceptive but never proselytising, they presented a view of the Metropolis such as would have been recognizable to the well-to-do should they have chosen to stroll through the broader, safer streets, noting with a droll or doleful eye the hustle and the bustle all around.

      The city under inspection was one that, publicly at least, had turned its back on its Georgian excesses but which had not yet been subdued by later Victorian sensibility and reform. It was a city that still retained its orange vendors, its acrobats and its cacophony of musicians. By 1848 however, the increasing demands for efficient dealing and unencumbered movement had become so observable that many of the contributors correctly foretold that the city that they knew, and many of the personalities associated with it, would not long endure. When penning then their vignettes of London life, some contributors chose to sketch those characters, such as the street sweepers, whose livelihoods were manifestly in decline; or else to record those entertainments, such as those provided at Vauxhall Gardens, that were slowly falling out of fashion. Thus they created both an entertainment and a testament. It was a testament though rarely disfigured by romanticism or undue nostalgia; although in one piece an Old Playgoer remarked wistfully that he was born before the invention of nerves, influenza, railways, fast modes of doing everything and Chartists. Some pieces in the collection regarded not the past nor the present but looked to the future and speculated, somewhat whimsically, where the expansion of the Metropolis might finally lead. Perhaps more thought-provoking however, were those contributions that preferred to observe the seemingly irremediable nature of humanity, the ever present fact of poverty and the continuing artifices of beggars and thieves.

      This edition itself was first edited and published by Albert Smith in 1849 and Smith himself wrote eight of these vignettes of London life. As a man who was eventually to successfully author some thirty books and innumerable essays he displayed as ever an unerring instinct for the sensibilities of those of the middle classes and above who constituted his reading public. Although no undue editorial hand seems to have been laid upon the work of Smith's fellow contributors each seems gladly to have fulfilled his obligation to entertain and, within limits, to inform. The result was the creation of a quixotic collection of works that took the reader out from the mannered behavior of the drawing room, to the entertainments of the opera and the casino and down to the world of the laboring poor and the lives of the destitute and the depraved. However, if the readers were invited to contemplate somewhat ruefully the deficiencies of the city, the purposes of the authors would not have been achieved had they allowed those same readers to brood too long upon somber themes. Readers were soon diverted by the amusing anecdotes, the tales of topical controversies, and the portraits penned of popular celebrities.

      One such popular celebrity in 1848 was Gavarni himself, recently arrived from Paris. It was entirely appropriate that it was he who should have been chosen to illustrate the serials. Praised and promoted by Balzac, Gavarni was already well known to the London public through his fashion plates and his scenes of Parisian life, notably those in Le Charivari. The Times credited him with having added, "The finesse of a keen observer of the world to the grace of the true artist. He has produced works which, of their kind, are perfect gems." The contribution of this complex, even difficult artist promised the public a view of London life observed with a fresh unjaundiced eye. Ultimately his work justified the collection of the pieces into this single volume and the lithographs included represent the work of an artist then at the very height of his reputation. However, as the critical essay accompanying this new edition explains, Gavarni himself was to become victim of the chauvinistic sensibilities of his English audience, sensibilities often evident in the essays themselves.

      The essays in the volume are connected not simply by the labors of the illustrator but also by their shared attribute of a confident, somewhat uncritical, faith in the durability of society. These were not radical writers but men consciously speaking to their own, writing for classes that had never been so prosperous who were living in a society that had never been so powerful. Like the men and women who purchased this volume, they were neither blind to the condition of their city nor wholly indifferent to the harshness of the lives of very many who lived within it. Both writers and readers however, viewed such matters without undue sentimentality and with a mixture of fatalism and optimism proceeded with their lives. Economic change and technological progress were self-evident and synonymous with improvement; whereas substantial social and political change were barely contemplated or else, like the efforts of the Chartist campaigners, speedily dismissed. Herein are the writers that the men and women of the better classes chose to read for their daily leisure, writers who understood them, their consciences and convictions. As such then, this new edition offers the modern reader the chance once more to view London through the eyes of these most influential Londoners and a fresh opportunity to understand the prejudices, perceptions and possibilities which informed their lives in the city and which ultimately did so much to shape the vigor of Victorian society.

      Stephen Banks, the editor of this edition, is a lecturer in criminal law and legal history at the University of Reading, U.K. He researches and writes in the fields of violence and honor culture in 19th century Britain.