Defoe and the London Wall: Mapped Perspectives
Edward Copeland, Pomona College
Volume 10, no. 4, July 1998
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
Space in Defoe’s London is admittedly hard to describe. “What does he actually show us?” Samuel Monk asks, and answers his own question: “Nothing.” Max Byrd agrees. For Byrd, Defoe’s London remains “abstract civic space,” “somehow two-dimensional, an abstract environment, so to speak, without colors or smells or windows and doors.” If we grant Monk and Byrd their frustration in describing the quality of space in Defoe’s works, the question still has to be asked — what precisely does “abstract civic space” look like? How do we experience space in a Defoe novel when the cues we expect to find, those of Hogarth and Dickens, are not given us? Or perhaps a question that is more to the point, what are the cues that are given us in place of the ones we expect? … Critics who find that Defoe has no “eye” generally cite a particular kind of passage to demonstrate it, the lists of street names that he uses to describe the escape routes of criminal protagonists such as Moll Flanders or Colonel Jack. I would like to turn the tables and suggest that these lists of street names hold the key to a rival tradition for visualizing urban life, one that fits Defoe’s culture and generation, and one that may well be unfamiliar to us, since it belongs to late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century practices of northern European map reading and map production.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “The City” include:
Relocating Femininity: Women and the City in Mary Brunton’s Fiction
by MARTHA MUSGROVE (ECF 20.2, Winter 2007-8)
“The Middle State”: Italian Opera in Frances Burney’s Cecilia
by LEYA LANDAU (ECF 17.4, July 2005)
Benevolent Vision: The Ideology of Sentimentality in Contemporary Illustrations of A Sentimental Journey and The Man of Feeling
by W.B. GERARD (ECF 14.3-4, April-July 2002)
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