The Pre-Raphaelite city and the trap of modernity

Abstract

In 1841, a few years after Victoria became Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, approximately 50% of the English and Welsh population still lived in a rural setting -understood here as a place which might be slightly urbanised, but had not yet been fully industrialised -and over 20% of the available labour force worked in the agricultural sector. When the Queen died in 1901, these figures had fallen to 20% and 9% respectively, the evolution bearing witness to the higher mobility of British citizens, the increasing appeal of urban centres, and the growth and industrialisation of these centres. According to J. A. Banks (Banks 1968), whose 1968 article "Population Change and the Victorian City" provided the figures I used, this radical change in the socio-demographic landscape is not due to a rural crisis per se, but rather to the concentration of economic and social opportunities in the cities, and the construction throughout the era of a first-in-history civilisation of the town -to use a phrase Banks borrows from Thomas Freeman. Such a revolution in the structure and organisation of society had wide-range effects on architecture, mindset, health, and governance. Some readers of the literature of the 1841-1901 era might think that this change did not matter to most Victorian poets: the combination of modernist and formalist opinions on authors such as Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, or Swinburne has resulted in a long-standing and influential view of their work as a purely, or mainly, aesthetic endeavour, devoid of political influence and impact. More recent approaches have fortunately corrected this opinion, by showing how Victorian poets -even, or maybe especially, those belonging to the Pre-Raphaelite or symbolist groups -engaged with contemporary social issues.Despite being quite often very discreet, this political stance is generally strong, and appears quite clearly between the lines of many a poem. Mostly concerned with the The Pre-Raphaelite city and the trap of modernity Angles, 15 | 2022