Reading and Responding

Stallybrass and White, “The City: The Sewer, The Gaze, the Contaminating Touch”

With the rise of industrial capitalism, the countryside began to contract, the city to grow. It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century in England that, for the first time in history, the population of cities and towns would outstrip that of the country. The countryside itself did not disappear entirely in the sense that its functions were reproduced in the plantation economies of the British colonies where the slave trade provided cheap labor. The contraction of the countryside displaced rural populations. Uprooted laborers were no longer able to support themselves in traditional occupations such as farming and the handcrafts and flooded into the city seeking work, producing the problems of overcrowding and massive poverty. These displaced populations were without the skills necessary to be integrated into a newly emerging industrial society, as they possessed the pre-industrial habits and temperaments not suited to factory work.

For another, parallel account of the transformation of Britain from an agricultural to an urban, industrialized society, see “Science, Industry and the Gothic.”

At the beginning of the industrial revolution, there were basically three classes: the aristocracy: those with land or title; the bourgeois with sufficient capital to own factories and shops; the working classes or proletariat without capital who labored in factories and shops often for miniscule wages or who served the bourgeois in menial capacities: servants and maids. Under all of these formed a “lumpenproletariat” or underclass: beggars, thieves, prostitutes, and assorted criminals.

The middle-class began an explosive expansion under industrial capitalism, ranging in its constitution from a “bourgeois” class of factory and shop owners to a professional, managerial class formed by training and education: lawyers, judges, teachers, engineers.

Stallybrass and White’s article focuses on two interrelated subjects: the space or topography of the city as well as the self-definition of the emerging bourgeois/middle-class.

•An emerging bourgeois or middle-class viewed itself as “civilized” and “respectable”: where civility and respectability meant subjection to new forms of regulation and prohibitions governing the body. The body required a rigorous discipline ensuring its productivity and temperance, the development of modest sexual and dietary appetites.

Yet, the middle-classes were ambivalent about the discipline which it imposed upon itself, and as an expression of that ambivalence it was fascinated and drawn to, but also disgusted by, the working-class and lumpenproletariat whose habits and dispositions were constructed in opposition to those of the middle-class.

•The divisions of the city mirrors