previous | next

The basic elements of the Sublime are all here: extremes of dimension, sheerness, dramatic chiaroscuro. ("..flare on rainy night"; a premonition of the use film noir made of wet streets and neon!)

The German architect Schinkel in his visit to Britain in 1826 presciently admired warehouse architecture in Manchester. It naturally took others longer:

"In twenty years or thirty at farthest we shall see here nothing more romantic than shipping warehouses and wharves" complained Edgar Allan Poe of New York. Yes, indeed; how right he was; for it was precisely twentyfive years later that Walt Whitman exclaimed:

"City of wharves and stores - city of tall facades of marbles and iron! Proud and passionate city - mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!"

Whitman loves the wharves and warehouses! A discovery has been made: the discovery of the city as dynamic, thrilling, imaginatively potent, wharves and all.

Descriptions of London become splendidly sublime as the century continues. There is of course de Quincey, already hallucinating to the quasi-urban images of Piranes . In The Nation of London he writes the ultimate 'sublime' evocation of London:

"The great length of the streets in many quarters of London; the continual opening of transient glimpses into other vistas equally far stretching, going off at right angles to the one which you are traversing; and the murky atmosphere which, settling upon the remoter end of every long avenue, wraps its termination in gloom and uncertainty."

Another voice is Robert Mudie, who writes in Babylon the Great (1825), in a wonderfully John Martinesque vein:

"In the streets immediately below, the congregated multitude of men, of animals, and of machines, diminished as they are by the distance, appear like streams of living atoms reeling to and fro; and as they are lost in the vapoury distances, rendered murky by the smoke of a million fires.....house after house, palace after palace street after street., and square after square -it stretches on and on, till the eye fails in catching its termination, and the fancy easily pictures it as everywhere gliding into the infinitude of space.."

previous | next