Papers by Peter T A Jones
The Victorianist blog, 2017
History Workshop Online, 2021
This brief article is intended as a point of departure rather than as a thematic itinerary of the... more This brief article is intended as a point of departure rather than as a thematic itinerary of the ‘Whose Streets?’ series yet to come. It opens by thinking about what it means to live through the jarring collapse of public life in the midst of a pandemic and how this moment might stimulate new radical histories of the urban commons.
Victorian Comedy and Laughter: Conviviality, Jokes and Dissent, 2020
This chapter examines the significant and formative impact that the laughter of the music hall ha... more This chapter examines the significant and formative impact that the laughter of the music hall had upon literary culture. During the fin de siècle, the animus towards the popular humour of the music hall in pessimistic novels by writers such as George Gissing, gave way to an embrace of verbal comedy in the works of ‘cockney school’ and ‘New Humour’ writers including Somerset Maugham, Rudyard Kipling and William Pett Ridge. This investigation makes the case that this tonal crisis in the genre of literary realism marks a moment of energetic rejuvenation, rather than terminal decline. The disruptive vernacular speech and ‘laughing grammar’ of the music hall sparked important experiments in genre formation, which radically transformed the mood and temper of realist presentation.
The London Journal
This paper traces the growth of working-class street markets in Victorian London and argues that ... more This paper traces the growth of working-class street markets in Victorian London and argues that they possessed the capacity to disrupt axiomatic narratives of liberal reform and commercial progress. It contends that accounts by slum writers (James Greenwood and George Gissing) and the visions of market reformers (Baroness Burdett Coutts and Arthur Cawston) sought to define the parameters of a proscribed sphere of informal commerce and to replace it with a sanitized, formal ideal. Rather than meekly fading away into obsolescence, however, street traders challenged these ‘static images’ in spaces like Whitecross Street market, which flourished on the frontiers of urban modernity.
London Fictions Online, Aug 2012
Somewhere beyond William's, which supports the Obelisk, lies Kennington, famous for "Jim's" and t... more Somewhere beyond William's, which supports the Obelisk, lies Kennington, famous for "Jim's" and the "Original Pieman"; and beyond these again is Brixton; and between these two you shall find Arthur's. This is an ambiguous direction; but then we night-seekers are jealous of our ill-fame, and the fear of the Oxford Movement is strong upon us.
Conference Presentations by Peter T A Jones
Between 1890 and 1910, novelists from the ‘cockney school’ challenged the static image of south L... more Between 1890 and 1910, novelists from the ‘cockney school’ challenged the static image of south London as a dingy cultural backwater. This talk will look at little-known narratives by William Pett Ridge, Albert Neil Lyons, Somerset Maugham and Edwin Pugh that depict a culturally contested region where ostensibly ‘minor’ forms of pleasure and commerce emerge which become fundamental the fabric of everyday life in the city.
The word ‘transpontine’ was used by Victorian social commentators to refer to the ‘Surrey-side’ melodramas, sensational fiction and cosmopolitan street cultures associated with the South. Despite its derisory and distantiating connotation, this term constitutes an important conceptual anchor for this enquiry because it preserves the sense of a transitional movement having taken place. During the nineteenth century, the river Thames did not constitute an impermeable cultural barrier and this paper will be targeted at plotting the narrative bridges that cut across simplistic binaries separating north from south, slum from suburb and centre from periphery.
At the turn to the twentieth-century ‘social investigators and external agencies’ were increasingly shifting their attention away from the East End and toward districts in the South. Writers such as Charles Masterman expressed concerns that reformers had failed to counteract the rise of ‘popularity’ and that these deteriorating conditions gave rise to potentially menacing metropolitan identities. But novels such as William Pett Ridge’s Mord Em’ly (1898) and Albert Neil Lyons’ Arthur’s (1908) deliberately sought to counter a bleak vision of south London’s criminogenic streets and offered an alternative to this monolithic conception of metropolitan identity.
This paper makes the case that Edwardian social investigators who had become accustomed to the ‘p... more This paper makes the case that Edwardian social investigators who had become accustomed to the ‘picturesque squalor’ of London’s slums, found the sprawling, semi-suburban ‘Abyss’ of south London to be indicative of a new urban form or a growing ‘fourth estate’, which had yet to be adequately accounted for. I will look closely at accounts by two Liberal progressives who became involved in the University Settlement Movement during the 1900s. Charles Masterman (who would later become a Liberal MP) spent time living in a block dwelling in Camberwell and later recorded his impressions of an experience that he described as ‘sudden unaccountable revelation’ in From the Abyss (1902). In Across the
Bridges (1911), the prison reformer Alec Paterson reflected upon the knowledge he had gained from conducting youth work at the ‘Oxford and Bermondsey Club’. Both these accounts register a marked concern that the chaotic growth of south London had led to the emergence of an ‘uncouth laboratory’ where dangerous urban types were nurtured amongst a new generation.
In London: The Biography Peter Ackroyd ends a chapter that focuses on London’s markets by describ... more In London: The Biography Peter Ackroyd ends a chapter that focuses on London’s markets by describing ‘Rag Fair’ as a ‘woebegone place’ that over the course of the nineteenth century ‘disappeared beneath its own waste.’ But why is it that irrespective of social value and mythic prominence, the rag market still tends to disappear ‘beneath its own waste’ in cultural and economic histories of Victorian London? This paper approaches this question by examining the iconographic depiction of the old clothes seller in Maria Edgeworth’s, Harrington (1817), Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1836) and Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838).
The old clothes trader occupied a strikingly ambivalent position in the Victorian domestic economy. On the one hand, this character with his distinctive cry (‘Old Clo! Old Clo!’) is rendered as an untrustworthy imposter who hides his venal motives behind the garb of respectable trade. He brings evidence of a morally unhealthy attachment to the city’s ‘cast-offs’ into the uncontaminated sanctuary of the home. This figure is weaved into a mythic genealogy of Jewish bogeymen and one contemporary production of The Merchant of Venice even transforms Shylock into many-hatted hawker of used garments.
On the other hand, it is also true that these accounts are shadowed by a recognition that negative stereotypes functioned to create a false distance between the holders of property and those disreputable or ‘ragged’ districts (such as Field Lane, Monmouth Street or Houndsditch) where domestic waste was reprocessed. Hence, in Sartor Resartus, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh finds a redemptive potential in a vision of society stripped of its fashionable vestments, which he discovers in the second hand clothes market. Representational strategies that sought to de-legitimize the rag trade as an ‘undesirable’ presence in the metropolis, need to be reread for the discrepancies that they were intended to preclude.
This paper reflects upon my experience of teaching the literary and cultural history of South Lon... more This paper reflects upon my experience of teaching the literary and cultural history of South London to 14-16 year old pupils in a South East London Academy with 'The Brilliant Club’ outreach scheme. This paper will discuss the process of designing and implementing a course which focuses upon London novels as a window onto four ‘cultural junctions’ (Crystal Palace, Lambeth, Peckham Rye and Brixton). In 1899 Walter Besant stated that South London had ‘no intellectual, artistic, scientific, musical, literary centre’ and that ‘one cannot imagine a man proud of New Cross’. This talk will argue that Besant’s vision of cultural entropy is a tenacious and corrosive reality has influenced opinions of South London right up until the present day. This is why my course seeks to engage students in the work of finding alternatives to this orthodox response by retrospectively re-reading the cultural history of South London and populating it with new stories.
In 'London: The Biography' Peter Ackroyd ends a chapter discussing London’s markets by describing... more In 'London: The Biography' Peter Ackroyd ends a chapter discussing London’s markets by describing ‘Rag Fair’ as a ‘woebegone place’ that over the course of the nineteenth-century ‘disappeared beneath its own waste.’ This response is typical of critical approaches that have thus far treated the Victorian rag trade as a topic barely warranting scrutiny. But why is it that irrespective of its apparent social value, the rag market still tends to disappear ‘beneath its own waste’ within economic and social histories? What are the implicit assumptions upon which this attitude is grounded?
This paper approaches this question by examining a number of literary responses to used clothing markets by writers and journalists such as Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle and George Augustus Sala. Discussions scrutinize a marked tendency within these accounts to associate the processes of recycling and reprocessing that took place in London’s informal markets with a degree of shame and moral suspicion. For example, in Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1838) Field Lane (significantly chosen as the location of Fagin’s Lair) is imagined as a ‘commercial colony in itself’, set apart according to its foreignness and criminality. The handkerchiefs, old boots and clothes sold in the market are coded as ‘sign-boards to the petty thief’ that effectively act as markers for the disreputable character of this district and the socially outcast condition of the local population.
Subsequently, representational strategies that sought to de-legitimize the rag trade as an ‘unsightly’ and ‘undesirable’ presence in the modernizing metropolis, need to be reread for the inherent contradictions and paradoxes that they were intended to preclude. Far from being an isolated and insignificant remnant of a more ‘developed’ urban economy, Henry Mayhew’s investigations suggest that by the 1840s old clothes reprocessing was an immensely profitable enterprise that was taking place on an industrial and global scale. Efforts to discredit and marginalize those workers who dealt with society’s ‘cast-offs’ on the city’s streets, corresponded to increasingly stringent attempts to regulate and reform informal marketing throughout the nineteenth-century. However, concluding remarks will explain how these cultural and commercial spaces were able to resist and ultimately survive the attempted deformation and denigration of their social function.
Peter Jones is studying for a PhD in English Literature at Queen Mary. This paper relates to his research into the literary representation of marginal and surplus populations in urban exploratory fiction and journalism. Peter has previously given talks discussing street markets, urban waste, and ‘residual’ economies at the Literary London Conference held at the Institute of English Studies, and at the Emergent Critical Environments event, which was held at Queen Mary. He has also been involved in setting up the Literary London Reading Group that takes place on a monthly basis at Senate House.
Through explication of novelistic and journalistic accounts by Charles Dickens, George Gissing an... more Through explication of novelistic and journalistic accounts by Charles Dickens, George Gissing and James Greenwood this paper seeks to explore written representations of the vibrant spectacle of the London street market. These sites were often located in the city’s poorest districts and provided underprivileged and deprived city dwellers with affordable resources. Despite this, Nineteenth Century chroniclers of the urban life tend to emphasize the capacity of the plebeian marketplace to exacerbate rather than alleviate social ills. Disgust and aversion are disclosed as the proper protective mechanisms that separate the sensibility of the genteel visitor from the shameful appetites of the vulgar crowd who will not turn away from the corrupted (and corrupting) produce of the street market. Through differentiating the shameful and indiscriminate natures of market goers, this gesture of negation has the effect of marking out an abject site of social redundancy and moral degeneracy that forms a counterpart to utopian projections of urban space structured according to what Pierre Bourdieu calls ‘pure taste’. Investigations pay special attention to representations of Whitecross Street market (now near the Barbican). These depictions are shown to bear a close relation to the rhetoric of urban planners and reformers who were attempting to remove the pathological ‘waste’ elements from the fabric of the city at this time. Discussions ultimately converge upon the highly inventive language associated with the marketplace (what Mikhail Bakhtin aptly terms ‘Billingsgate’). In this manner it will be possible to explore how through a peculiar adaptability and efficacy these unofficial sites were able to survive attempts to deny or distort their genuine social worth.
Book Reviews by Peter T A Jones
This collection makes a vivid case for the manifold ways that G. K. Chesterton's fictional and no... more This collection makes a vivid case for the manifold ways that G. K. Chesterton's fictional and non-fictional output repurposed the 'everyday matter' (lamp-posts, bricks, water-towers) and everyday matters (train journeys, grocery shopping, automobile rides, playing with children) of urban modernity (11). A colourful and diverting group of essays emphasises how a Chestertonian literary project was bound up with the creative imperative to play with the 'apparent banality' of urban life at the turn of the twentieth century (4).
Conference Panels by Peter T A Jones
This panel will look at the development and implementation of London literature courses at differ... more This panel will look at the development and implementation of London literature courses at different educational levels. It will explore how heuristic reflection upon teaching practices can provide a valuable means for crystallizing and interrogating some of the wider intellectual challenges in this 'discipline'.
What criteria can we use to define literary London 'canon'? What is the pedagogical value of literary tours and excursions? Should texts produced in London be differentiated from texts written about London? Or in other words, what is an ‘urban text’? Can the conditions that give rise to the development of certain literary genres be directly linked to specific locations? Can urban narratives provide a way to engage students in the work of rereading London’s cultural past?
Ultimately this discussion will converge upon different critical methods – whether that be social history, close reading, spatial theory and literary geography – which are employed in teaching the interpretation of urban fictions. Even if texts describe a location that is intimately known to the reader this place can still seem strange and remote in relation their own experiences. The speakers on this panel will grapple with the difficulties that are produced when teachers want to preserve this sense of strangeness while also acting as guides who can furnish students with critical tools for making a fictional location ‘mappable’, graspable and familiar.
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Papers by Peter T A Jones
Conference Presentations by Peter T A Jones
The word ‘transpontine’ was used by Victorian social commentators to refer to the ‘Surrey-side’ melodramas, sensational fiction and cosmopolitan street cultures associated with the South. Despite its derisory and distantiating connotation, this term constitutes an important conceptual anchor for this enquiry because it preserves the sense of a transitional movement having taken place. During the nineteenth century, the river Thames did not constitute an impermeable cultural barrier and this paper will be targeted at plotting the narrative bridges that cut across simplistic binaries separating north from south, slum from suburb and centre from periphery.
At the turn to the twentieth-century ‘social investigators and external agencies’ were increasingly shifting their attention away from the East End and toward districts in the South. Writers such as Charles Masterman expressed concerns that reformers had failed to counteract the rise of ‘popularity’ and that these deteriorating conditions gave rise to potentially menacing metropolitan identities. But novels such as William Pett Ridge’s Mord Em’ly (1898) and Albert Neil Lyons’ Arthur’s (1908) deliberately sought to counter a bleak vision of south London’s criminogenic streets and offered an alternative to this monolithic conception of metropolitan identity.
Bridges (1911), the prison reformer Alec Paterson reflected upon the knowledge he had gained from conducting youth work at the ‘Oxford and Bermondsey Club’. Both these accounts register a marked concern that the chaotic growth of south London had led to the emergence of an ‘uncouth laboratory’ where dangerous urban types were nurtured amongst a new generation.
The old clothes trader occupied a strikingly ambivalent position in the Victorian domestic economy. On the one hand, this character with his distinctive cry (‘Old Clo! Old Clo!’) is rendered as an untrustworthy imposter who hides his venal motives behind the garb of respectable trade. He brings evidence of a morally unhealthy attachment to the city’s ‘cast-offs’ into the uncontaminated sanctuary of the home. This figure is weaved into a mythic genealogy of Jewish bogeymen and one contemporary production of The Merchant of Venice even transforms Shylock into many-hatted hawker of used garments.
On the other hand, it is also true that these accounts are shadowed by a recognition that negative stereotypes functioned to create a false distance between the holders of property and those disreputable or ‘ragged’ districts (such as Field Lane, Monmouth Street or Houndsditch) where domestic waste was reprocessed. Hence, in Sartor Resartus, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh finds a redemptive potential in a vision of society stripped of its fashionable vestments, which he discovers in the second hand clothes market. Representational strategies that sought to de-legitimize the rag trade as an ‘undesirable’ presence in the metropolis, need to be reread for the discrepancies that they were intended to preclude.
This paper approaches this question by examining a number of literary responses to used clothing markets by writers and journalists such as Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle and George Augustus Sala. Discussions scrutinize a marked tendency within these accounts to associate the processes of recycling and reprocessing that took place in London’s informal markets with a degree of shame and moral suspicion. For example, in Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1838) Field Lane (significantly chosen as the location of Fagin’s Lair) is imagined as a ‘commercial colony in itself’, set apart according to its foreignness and criminality. The handkerchiefs, old boots and clothes sold in the market are coded as ‘sign-boards to the petty thief’ that effectively act as markers for the disreputable character of this district and the socially outcast condition of the local population.
Subsequently, representational strategies that sought to de-legitimize the rag trade as an ‘unsightly’ and ‘undesirable’ presence in the modernizing metropolis, need to be reread for the inherent contradictions and paradoxes that they were intended to preclude. Far from being an isolated and insignificant remnant of a more ‘developed’ urban economy, Henry Mayhew’s investigations suggest that by the 1840s old clothes reprocessing was an immensely profitable enterprise that was taking place on an industrial and global scale. Efforts to discredit and marginalize those workers who dealt with society’s ‘cast-offs’ on the city’s streets, corresponded to increasingly stringent attempts to regulate and reform informal marketing throughout the nineteenth-century. However, concluding remarks will explain how these cultural and commercial spaces were able to resist and ultimately survive the attempted deformation and denigration of their social function.
Peter Jones is studying for a PhD in English Literature at Queen Mary. This paper relates to his research into the literary representation of marginal and surplus populations in urban exploratory fiction and journalism. Peter has previously given talks discussing street markets, urban waste, and ‘residual’ economies at the Literary London Conference held at the Institute of English Studies, and at the Emergent Critical Environments event, which was held at Queen Mary. He has also been involved in setting up the Literary London Reading Group that takes place on a monthly basis at Senate House.
Book Reviews by Peter T A Jones
Conference Panels by Peter T A Jones
What criteria can we use to define literary London 'canon'? What is the pedagogical value of literary tours and excursions? Should texts produced in London be differentiated from texts written about London? Or in other words, what is an ‘urban text’? Can the conditions that give rise to the development of certain literary genres be directly linked to specific locations? Can urban narratives provide a way to engage students in the work of rereading London’s cultural past?
Ultimately this discussion will converge upon different critical methods – whether that be social history, close reading, spatial theory and literary geography – which are employed in teaching the interpretation of urban fictions. Even if texts describe a location that is intimately known to the reader this place can still seem strange and remote in relation their own experiences. The speakers on this panel will grapple with the difficulties that are produced when teachers want to preserve this sense of strangeness while also acting as guides who can furnish students with critical tools for making a fictional location ‘mappable’, graspable and familiar.
The word ‘transpontine’ was used by Victorian social commentators to refer to the ‘Surrey-side’ melodramas, sensational fiction and cosmopolitan street cultures associated with the South. Despite its derisory and distantiating connotation, this term constitutes an important conceptual anchor for this enquiry because it preserves the sense of a transitional movement having taken place. During the nineteenth century, the river Thames did not constitute an impermeable cultural barrier and this paper will be targeted at plotting the narrative bridges that cut across simplistic binaries separating north from south, slum from suburb and centre from periphery.
At the turn to the twentieth-century ‘social investigators and external agencies’ were increasingly shifting their attention away from the East End and toward districts in the South. Writers such as Charles Masterman expressed concerns that reformers had failed to counteract the rise of ‘popularity’ and that these deteriorating conditions gave rise to potentially menacing metropolitan identities. But novels such as William Pett Ridge’s Mord Em’ly (1898) and Albert Neil Lyons’ Arthur’s (1908) deliberately sought to counter a bleak vision of south London’s criminogenic streets and offered an alternative to this monolithic conception of metropolitan identity.
Bridges (1911), the prison reformer Alec Paterson reflected upon the knowledge he had gained from conducting youth work at the ‘Oxford and Bermondsey Club’. Both these accounts register a marked concern that the chaotic growth of south London had led to the emergence of an ‘uncouth laboratory’ where dangerous urban types were nurtured amongst a new generation.
The old clothes trader occupied a strikingly ambivalent position in the Victorian domestic economy. On the one hand, this character with his distinctive cry (‘Old Clo! Old Clo!’) is rendered as an untrustworthy imposter who hides his venal motives behind the garb of respectable trade. He brings evidence of a morally unhealthy attachment to the city’s ‘cast-offs’ into the uncontaminated sanctuary of the home. This figure is weaved into a mythic genealogy of Jewish bogeymen and one contemporary production of The Merchant of Venice even transforms Shylock into many-hatted hawker of used garments.
On the other hand, it is also true that these accounts are shadowed by a recognition that negative stereotypes functioned to create a false distance between the holders of property and those disreputable or ‘ragged’ districts (such as Field Lane, Monmouth Street or Houndsditch) where domestic waste was reprocessed. Hence, in Sartor Resartus, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh finds a redemptive potential in a vision of society stripped of its fashionable vestments, which he discovers in the second hand clothes market. Representational strategies that sought to de-legitimize the rag trade as an ‘undesirable’ presence in the metropolis, need to be reread for the discrepancies that they were intended to preclude.
This paper approaches this question by examining a number of literary responses to used clothing markets by writers and journalists such as Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle and George Augustus Sala. Discussions scrutinize a marked tendency within these accounts to associate the processes of recycling and reprocessing that took place in London’s informal markets with a degree of shame and moral suspicion. For example, in Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1838) Field Lane (significantly chosen as the location of Fagin’s Lair) is imagined as a ‘commercial colony in itself’, set apart according to its foreignness and criminality. The handkerchiefs, old boots and clothes sold in the market are coded as ‘sign-boards to the petty thief’ that effectively act as markers for the disreputable character of this district and the socially outcast condition of the local population.
Subsequently, representational strategies that sought to de-legitimize the rag trade as an ‘unsightly’ and ‘undesirable’ presence in the modernizing metropolis, need to be reread for the inherent contradictions and paradoxes that they were intended to preclude. Far from being an isolated and insignificant remnant of a more ‘developed’ urban economy, Henry Mayhew’s investigations suggest that by the 1840s old clothes reprocessing was an immensely profitable enterprise that was taking place on an industrial and global scale. Efforts to discredit and marginalize those workers who dealt with society’s ‘cast-offs’ on the city’s streets, corresponded to increasingly stringent attempts to regulate and reform informal marketing throughout the nineteenth-century. However, concluding remarks will explain how these cultural and commercial spaces were able to resist and ultimately survive the attempted deformation and denigration of their social function.
Peter Jones is studying for a PhD in English Literature at Queen Mary. This paper relates to his research into the literary representation of marginal and surplus populations in urban exploratory fiction and journalism. Peter has previously given talks discussing street markets, urban waste, and ‘residual’ economies at the Literary London Conference held at the Institute of English Studies, and at the Emergent Critical Environments event, which was held at Queen Mary. He has also been involved in setting up the Literary London Reading Group that takes place on a monthly basis at Senate House.
What criteria can we use to define literary London 'canon'? What is the pedagogical value of literary tours and excursions? Should texts produced in London be differentiated from texts written about London? Or in other words, what is an ‘urban text’? Can the conditions that give rise to the development of certain literary genres be directly linked to specific locations? Can urban narratives provide a way to engage students in the work of rereading London’s cultural past?
Ultimately this discussion will converge upon different critical methods – whether that be social history, close reading, spatial theory and literary geography – which are employed in teaching the interpretation of urban fictions. Even if texts describe a location that is intimately known to the reader this place can still seem strange and remote in relation their own experiences. The speakers on this panel will grapple with the difficulties that are produced when teachers want to preserve this sense of strangeness while also acting as guides who can furnish students with critical tools for making a fictional location ‘mappable’, graspable and familiar.