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For all the desired objectivity of topography there is always a 'period' feel to views that remind us again of their subjectivity. In the Rhinebeck view of 1810 there is a creamy kind of light across the whole urban fabric suggestive of the wholesale application of Regency stucco over the entire metropolis. Very attractive it is too until you remind yourself of Byron's near-contemporary description of London as "a mighty mass of brick…dirty and dusky". But just as this view and other Regency topography opts for bleached, creamy light there is also something very distinctly Victorian in the scratchy unsparing engraving of urban scenes such as one finds in the illustrated London News.
In Victorian engravings of the city there is always chiaroscuro, a feeling of contrast between light and dark that to us can only suggest (obvious though it is) the dramatic contrasts, social and otherwise, of Victorian London.

Exaggeration is often (even always) a feature of city pictures. Eighteenth century views of London give great prominence to church spires and steeples. Artists eager to display the array of new post-fire churches clearly exaggerate their height, creating a dramatic contrast: a spiritually hierarchical city in which the houses huddle domestically around a forest of spires and steeples, an image beloved of spiritual reactionaries (such as Pugin or Ruskin, or more recently Prince Charles). And then there is the tendency to shift things subtly to improve the display. A view is a visual catalogue of what a city has to show. If one building obscures another to what degree is it untopographical to move things about? Shift a steeple just slightly to one side in order to display it better?

But probably the greatest problem, (and the cause for greatest falsification) is a very prosaic one: how to confine a city to the format in computer terms known as 'landscape' (the piece of A4 on its side). A famous and very attractive image in the Museum of London is entitled London from Southwark. There are various things wrong with this seductive view of the city: The artist has made of London a tight burger-ish city of Flemish looking edifices; the Thames, to the east, bends far too dramatically north after the Tower, etc. But above all this picture reveals that most dramatic of falsifications all topographers were obliged to make. Pictures can never be as long as the cities they portray. A panoramic view can simply not be fitted into a picture space with even a 5:1 ratio. Van Wyck has had enormously to compress sideways the features of London. Most dramatically St. Paul's, (the old St. Paul's of course) has an impacted profile totally unlike its true long, barnlike appearance. A hundred years later, in order to represent the same extent, Buck, in his London panorama, used a 15:1 ratio of height to width; even this may have been artificially squeezing up the panorama; the Illustrated London News 1843 Panorama uses a 25:1 format, again for the same extent, (Westminster to The Tower of London). If this is largely correct then we can see how much (justified) falsification Van Wyck had to impose, quite simply having to make every building one fifth of its actual length or, in the interests of 'display', omitting bits 'in between'.

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