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APARTMENT STORIES: CITY AND HOME IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY PARIS AND
LONDON ‘The major works on domestic ideology in nineteenth-century Europe have focused on England, while paradigmatic studies of urbanism have converged on Paris’ according to Sharon Marcus; her own ‘comparative approach aims not to invigorate these oppositions but to undo them by bringing to light the domesticity of Parisian urbanism and the urbanism of London’s domesticity’, and purports to ‘supply us with new visions of Paris and London, the nineteenth-century home, and the location of men and women in public and private spaces’. Unhappily, her text presents a barrier to understanding rather than any new insights. Although bursting at the seams with criticisms of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writings, the book often misconstrues or over-simplifies even the most basic information. For instance, her assertion that, in Second Empire Paris, ‘buildings were attached in rows of uniform height strictly enforced according to Haussmann’s new building regulations’. In fact, established principles of alignment and height control were perpetuated by the 1859 Paris building regulations which, far from imposing a uniform height, increased the maximum height limits permissible for the street frontages of private developments (a very different matter). Developers and their architects continued to enjoy freedom within these constraints and elevational uniformity remained a rarity. Comparison of the two cities tends to be just as partial. For example, Marcus suggests the cemeteries of Victorian London were essentially suburban ‘as opposed to Paris, which was able to incorporate the cemetery into the city by making the cemetery itself more urban’. She chooses to ignore the ban placed on burials in Paris intra-muros, the opening of three suburban cemeteries at Père Lachaise, Montparnasse and Montmartre and the influence all this had on burial grounds in London. The bibliography affords some light relief publication of Nicholas Taylor’s ‘The Awful Sublimity of the Victorian City’ in The Victorian City: Images and Realities (1976) seemingly pre-dates Hermann Muthesius’s Das englische Haus (only the abridged 1979 English translation is cited), while James Stevens Curl’s The Victorian Celebration of Death appears to have pipped both at the post by a century, with a publication date of ... 1872. Marcus does float one interesting idea: ‘intellectual work is fuelled first of all by money’. It refers to the huge number of bursaries, grants and fellowships American academic institutions contributed to her work, from doctoral dissertation to present book. The end product, with its 24 plates (all very grey), copious footnotes, two bibliographies and index, ‘addresses itself to readers interested in feminist criticism and theory; geography; urban studies; architectural history; the novel; and interdisciplinary research on everyday life’. For readers read Readers, for this is a book nobody should be expected to read unless paid. Handsomely. CHARLOTTE ELLIS |