Cover not available
Part of
Landscapes of Realism: Rethinking literary realism in comparative perspectives
Edited by Svend Erik Larsen, Steen Bille Jørgensen and Margaret R. Higonnet
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXIII] 2022
► pp. 423–447

“Distance avails not”

Representing the modern masses

| Aarhus University

Around 1850 the major cities in Europe approached the one-million mark. With the influx of people of all kinds, a new urban mass emerged that seemed quite distinct from the well-defined social classes of citizens from top to bottom of society. From that point the urban environment, its objects and the composition of its people never stopped changing. All classes, old and new, mingled in the bustling street life, and all classes depended on the same infrastructure for transport and sanitation that determined everybody’s movements and not least their health. In this new context, the distance between the individual and the mass began to shrink, because the very volume of inhabitants created a mutual dependency between them that challenged the understanding of both individual and collective identity. To interpret urban life, arts and literature began to explore new ways of representing the mass and thereby city life in general. In this case study, Charles Baudelaire, Walt Whitman and Bruno Wille will open the discussion. Works of Eugène Delacroix and Honoré Daumier will show the early attempts to represent the new urban masses in the visual arts, while Charles Dickens’s novels Barnaby Rudge (1841) and A Tale of Two Cities (1859) illustrate the realist representation of the masses as an ongoing project in a changing social reality.

Keywords: distance, urban masses, body experience, visual and literary representation, observation, interaction, realism
Article outline
  • 1.The individual and the masses
  • 2.The individual as part of the masses
    • 2.1Visualizing the masses
    • 2.2Narrating the masses
  • 3.Coda: A needle in a haystack
  • Notes
  • Works cited
Published online: 16 March 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/chlel.xxxiii.12lar
References

Works cited

Bairoch, Paul and Gary Goertz
1986 “Factors of Urbanization in the Nineteenth-Century Developed Countries.” Urban Studies 23: 285–305. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail
1981 The Dialogic Imagination, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Balzac, Honoré de
1966 Ferragus [1833] In La Comédie Humaine vol. 4, 13–53, edited by Pierre Citron and Pierre-Georges Castex. Paris: Seuil.Google Scholar
1974 Ferragus. In History of the Thirteen, translated by Herbert J. Hunt, 29–154. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Baudelaire, Charles
1980 Le Spleen de Paris: Petits poèmes en prose [1869] In Œuvres complètes, edited by Michel Jamet, 161–212. Paris: Robert Laffont.Google Scholar
1989 The Poems in Prose, vol. 2, translated by Francis Sharpe. Southampton: Anvil Press Poetry.Google Scholar
Canetti, Elias
2000 Crowds and Power [1960], translated by Carol Stewart. London: Phoenix Press.Google Scholar
Chevalier, Jean and Alain Gheerbrant
eds. 1994 A Dictionary of Symbols [1969], translated by John Buchanan-Brown. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Clark, Timothy James
1973 The Absolute Bourgeois. London: Thames and Hudson.Google Scholar
Compagnon, Antoine
2017 Les Chiffonniers de Paris. Paris: Gallimard.Google Scholar
Demandt, Alexander
1978 Metaphern für Geschichte: Sprachbilder und Gleichnisse im historisch-politischen Denken. München: C. H. Beck.Google Scholar
Descartes, René
1927 A Discourse on Method [1637], translated by John Veitsch. New York: Dutton.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles
1964 “Nobody’s Story” [1853] In Christmas Stories, 61–66. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
1984 Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty [1841] London: Penguin.Google Scholar
1985 A Tale of Two Cities [1859] London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Doetsch, Hermann and Cornelia Wild
eds. 2020 Im Gedränge: Figuren der Menge. Amsterdam: Brill. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dos Passos, John
1953 Manhattan Transfer [1925] Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund
1955 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego [1921] In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, vol. 18, 65–144. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.Google Scholar
Hobsbawm, Eric
1969 Bandits. London: Delacorte Press.Google Scholar
1974 Primitive Rebels [1959] Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Kemp, Wolfgang
1973 “Das Bild der Menge (1789–1830).” In Städel-Jahrbuch, Neue Folge 4: 249–70.Google Scholar
Kierkegaard, Søren
2011 Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks: Journals NB6-10, vol. 5, edited by Niels Jørn Cappelørn et al. and translated by Alistair Hannah et al. Princeton: Princeton University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Le Bon, Gustave
1896 The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind [1895] Anonymous translator. New York: McMillan.Google Scholar
Passeron, Roger
1979 Daumier: Témoin de son temps. Fribourg: Office du livre.Google Scholar
Riesman, David
1989 The Lonely Crowd [1950] New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Rudé, George
1967 The Crowd in the French Revolution [1959] Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Toussaint, Hélène
ed. 1982 La liberté guidant le peuple de Delacroix. Paris: Éd. De la Réunion des Musées Nationaux.Google Scholar
Whitman, Walt
1990 “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” [1856] In Leaves of Grass, edited by Jerome Loving, 129–34. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Widder, Roman
2020 Pöbel, Poet und Publikum: Figuren arbeitender Armut in der Frühen Neuzeit. Konstanz: Konstanz University Press.Google Scholar
Wille, Bruno
1908 “Straβe” [1890] In Der Heilige Hain, 103–04. Jena: Eugen Diederichs.Google Scholar
Wohl, Anthony S.
1983 Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar