Concannon, Amy
(2019)
Urban Landscape in the Age of Reform: Salisbury, Bristol, Brighton, Lambeth, c.1820–1850.
PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.
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Abstract
This thesis investigates the representation of urban places at a time of dramatic societal change in Britain. Unprecedented urbanisation, the polarising issue of political reform and major infrastructural change, epitomised by the ‘railway mania’ of the 1840s, served to re-map the British landscape. In this context, urban locales and their hinterlands were continuously redefined and endowed with new significances, thus offering new opportunities and challenges to those who took up the task of representing the urban landscape.
Despite the dynamism of urban change, and wide attention on both the ‘Romantic’ period in general and landscape practice during this time, urban landscape imagery remains marginalised in British landscape scholarship to date. Similarly, despite the dominance of reform as a political concern and its impact on the social structure of early nineteenth-century Britain, it has not been used as a lens through which to read landscape images of the period. Intersecting the fields of cultural geography, the regenerating field of topographical studies and reawakening interest in the work of John Constable, this thesis offers a model for reconstituting and critiquing the cultural image of urban places in the period c.1820–50.
To this end, it presents case studies on four distinctive urban locales: the cathedral city of Salisbury; Bristol, a port town; Brighton, a watering place; and Lambeth, on the fringes of the metropolis. Thus, new insights into the production and evolution of civic identity in these locales are produced by viewing a broad spectrum of material (including oil paintings, prints, maps, and topographical literature) through the prism of the reform era. With the exception of Bristol, these places coincide with subjects taken by Constable for three of his major six-foot canvases. Three of these chapters therefore also reinterpret – within the context of urban landscape culture and the reform era – Constable’s urban ‘six-footers’ through close iconographical analysis. They are thus revealed to be highly topical and complex assemblages of references designed to narrate urban transformation in an era of continuous flux.
Item Type:
Thesis (University of Nottingham only)
(PhD)
Supervisors:
Alfrey, Nicholas Daniels, Stephen
Keywords:
Art history, Reform, nineteenth century, British landscape, urbanisation, Salisbury, Bristol, Brighton, Lambeth
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