Writing the Materialities of the Past: Cities and the Architectural Topography of Historical Imagination 9781138340244, 9780429440786, 9781032018485

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Writing the Materialities of the Past

Writing the Materialities of the Past offers a close analysis of how the materiality of the built environment has been repressed in historical thinking since the 1950s. Author Sam Griffiths argues that the social theory of cities in this period was characterised by the dominance of socio-economic and linguistic-cultural models, which served to impede our understanding of time-space relationality towards historical events and their narration. The book engages with studies of historical writing to discuss materiality in the built environment as a form of literary practice to express marginalised dimensions of social experience in a range of historical contexts. It then moves on to reflect on England’s nineteenth-century industrialisation from an architectural topographical perspective, challenging theories of space and architecture to examine the complex role of industrial cities in mediating social changes in the practice of everyday life. By demonstrating how the authenticity of historical accounts rests on materially emplaced narratives, Griffiths makes the case for the emancipatory possibilities of historical writing. He calls for a re-evaluation of historical epistemology as a primarily socio-scientific or literary enquiry and instead proposes a specifically architectural time-space figuration of historical events to rethink and refresh the relationship of the urban past to its present and future. Written for postgraduate students, researchers and academics in architectural theory and urban studies, Griffiths draws on the space syntax tradition of research to explore how contingencies of movement and encounter construct the historical imagination. Sam Griffiths is Associate Professor in Spatial Cultures in the Space Syntax Laboratory at the UCL Bartlett School of Architecture. His research interests focus on theories and methods for studying the historical relationship between people and built environments, the spatial culture of industrial cities and space syntax as an interdisciplinary research perspective in the humanities and social sciences. He has published a number of articles and book chapters on these topics. He is co-editor, with Alexander von Lünen of Spatial Cultures: Towards a New Social Morphology of Cities published by Routledge in 2016.

Routledge Research in Architecture

The Routledge Research in Architecture series provides the reader with the latest scholarship in the field of architecture. The series publishes research from across the globe and covers areas as diverse as architectural history and theory, technology, digital architecture, structures, materials, details, design, monographs of architects, interior design and much more. By making these studies available to the worldwide academic community, the series aims to promote quality architectural research. Rebuilding the Houses of Parliament David Boswell Reid and Disruptive Environmentalism Henrik Schoenefeldt Le Corbusier in the Antipodes Art, Architecture and Urbanism Antony Moulis Kenosis, Creativity, and Architecture Appearance through Emptying Randall S. Lindstrom Affect, Architecture and Practice Toward a Disruptive Temporality of Practice Akari Nakai Kidd Architectural Anthropology Exploring Lived Space Edited by Marie Stender, Claus Bech-Danielsen and Aina Landsverk Hagen Writing the Materialities of the Past Cities and the Architectural Topography of Historical Imagination Sam Griffiths For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Research-in-Architecture/book-series/RRARCH

Writing the Materialities of the Past Cities and the Architectural Topography of Historical Imagination Sam Griffiths

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Sam Griffiths The right of Sam Griffiths to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Griffiths, Sam, author. Title: Writing the materialities of the past : cities and the architectural topography of historical imagination / Sam Griffiths. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Routledge research in architecture | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020056945 (print) | LCCN 2020056946 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138340244 (hbk) | ISBN 9780429440786 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Cities and towns--Social aspects. | Cities and towns--Historiography. | Marginality, Social. | Hegemony. Classification: LCC HT111 .G76 2021 (print) | LCC HT111 (ebook) | DDC 307.76--dcundefined LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056945 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056946 ISBN: 978-1-138-34024-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-01848-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-44078-6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by MPS Limited, Dehradun

This book is dedicated to the memory of Professor Bill Hillier

Contents

Lists of Illustrations Acknowledgements

x xi

Introduction: the architectural topography of historical imagination

1

I II III IV

Definitions 1 Crossing the Rubicon 9 Architectural topographic descriptions 15 Figurational contingencies 21

PART I

Contingency in the historiographies of the English Reformation, French Revolution and period of the Industrial Revolution in England

25

1

27

Contingency and artifice I II III IV

2

Definitions 27 Events of the English Reformation 29 Events of the French Revolution 37 Events from the period of the Industrial Revolution in England 43

Encounter and utterance I II III IV

Definitions 49 Events of the English Reformation 50 Events of the French Revolution 54 Events from the period of the Industrial Revolution in England 61

49

viii 3

Contents Milieu and movement I II III

IV

4

Definitions 71 The city as ‘environment’ 72 The repression of the encounter field in the historiographies of the English Reformation, French Revolution and the period of the Industrial Revolution in England 78 The abbreviation, abridgement and metaphorical sublimation of the encounter field 90

Figure and event I II III IV

71

95

Definitions 95 Spatial stories 96 Maps and mapping 102 The figures of events 110

PART II

Writing history as a city

119

5

121

Proximity and distance

Identifying narrative figures in the architectural topographic sequences of archetypal stories I II III IV

6

Definitions 121 Social stories 122 Architectural topographic sequences and toponemes 127 Narrative figures as architectural topographic sequences 133

The revolutionary encounter field: Paris c.1789–94 and other stories

How Thomas Carlyle, Simon Schama and Hilary Mantel re-people the past I II III

Definitions 145 Imagining the urban encounter field 147 Contrasting strategies of architectural topographic description in three narratives of the French Revolution 149

145

Contents ix IV

7

Embodying the past in Carlyle, Schama and Mantel 167

Recollection and re-enactment

173

Embodying nineteenth-century Sheffield in Leader’s Reminiscences (1875) I II III IV 8

Definitions 173 A history of ‘small details’ 174 Embodying Sheffield in the text 176 Narrative figures of ‘memory lane’ 179

Morphologies of feeling

198

Contingency and the experience of social change I II III IV

Definitions 198 ‘The passing of Merrie England’ 201 Toponemic disturbances 209 ‘Feeling the change’: reflections on contingency 215

Appendix A A notation for the architectural topographic sequencing of texts Appendix B Synopsis of Cinderella Appendix C Additional architectural topographic sequences from Cinderella Appendix D Search terms and subcategories used in toponemic analysis

236

References Index

238 250

229 232 233

Lists of Illustrations

Figures 6.1 Key search terms returned in each category as a proportion (%) of the total number of search terms returned across all categories – by text 6.2 Key search terms returned in each category as a proportion (%) of the total number of search terms returned across each category – all texts combined 6.3 Key search terms returned as subcategories of toponeme as a proportion (%) of the total number of search terms returned in this category – by text 6.4 Key search terms returned as subcategories of toponeme as a proportion (%) of the total number of search terms returned in this category – all texts combined 6.5 Rank order of the total count (absolute numbers) returned by all search terms in all categories 6.6 Rank order of the total number of instances per page returned by all search terms in the toponeme category

153

153

154

154 156

156

Tables 6.1 D1

Top ten Parisian toponemes in Carlyle’s, Schama’s and Mantel’s accounts of the French Revolution Search terms and subcategories used in the toponemic analysis of Carlyle’s, Schama’s and Mantel’s accounts of the French Revolution

151

236

Acknowledgements

A large number of people have contributed to the writing of this book, in many different ways and over a number of years. I can only acknowledge some of them here. Barbara Penner as Director of Research at UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture encouraged me to apply for the sabbatical that gave me the opportunity to get started on the writing. My colleagues in the BSA’s Space Syntax Laboratory: Sean Hanna, Laura Vaughan, Sophia Psarra, Ava Fatah gen. Schieck, Kerstin Sailer, Kayvan Karimi, Tasos Varoudis, Ashley Dhanani and Alan Penn, have all at different times provided practical support and intellectual inspiration. During the period this book was conceived and written I have also had the pleasure of collaborating with colleagues beyond UCL including Alexander von Lünen, Vinicius Netto, Lasse Liebst, Frederik Weissenborn, Simon Sleight and Katrina Navickas, whose work and thinking have enlightened me on numerous occasions. I would also like to acknowledge Howard Davis, Richard Rodger and Jeremy Whitehand for their professional support and open-minded engagement with the space syntax approach. Particular thanks to my wife Rachel who has had to cope with many additional domestic responsibilities during lockdown, while I have been working on this book, and my children Benji and Abigail who remained supportive of the project until they finally reached the point when they just wanted me to get it finished. My mother Lynne Hapgood has been a continual source of encouragement and advice. My brother Jacob has always been supportive of whatever it is he thinks I do. I am grateful to Simon and Jacqueline Joseph for lending me their beautiful cottage in Wales for several key stages of writing. Finally I would like to thank Grace Harrison for her encouragement and advice in helping me to develop the initial book proposal. Also to Fran Ford and all the editorial staff at Routledge and Taylor and Francis who have dealt with me so courteously and patiently throughout a difficult time.

What wonderful things are events! The least are of greater importance than the most sublime and comprehensive speculations! Benjamin Disraeli Coningsby 1844

Introduction: the architectural topography of historical imagination

I Definitions The main proposition of this book is that architecture, or more precisely, what I understand as architectural topography, is a largely repressed dimension of historical studies. By ‘architectural topography’, I refer to inhabited landscapes of all kinds that have emerged through historical processes of fashioning and refashioning the raw materials of nature into the shelters, buildings, roads, open spaces, monuments, settlements and especially cities, where social life happens. It is these processes which connect the household routines of the domestic interior to the infrastructure of long-distance communications through their mutual effects on generating and perpetuating complex patterns of movement, bodily copresence and encounter. I show how the effects of this repression have been to almost completely conceal, through disciplinary practices of abbreviation, metaphorical sublimation and abridgement, the process of thinking architecturally as being fundamental to historical thought, formative of both the definition of historical events and the stylistic choices deployed in historical writing. The term ‘architectural topography’ traditionally denotes regional gazetteers of architectural styles. A more refined conceptualization is required for my purpose, which is concerned less with architectural design than with architecture as the material arrangement of time-space for the affordance of social action. My preference for ‘architectural topography’, albeit in a rather different sense from its traditional usage, stems from a desire to resist the reduction of this distinctively architectural perspective to a footnote of the socio-economic and cultural determinisms of the ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities and social sciences on the one hand and, on the other, to counter the dematerialization of built environments to their representations in discourse, a process of textualization characteristic of much postmodern social theory. Architectural formations seem to me to offer a more productive – and certainly more intuitive – starting point for understanding the historical relationship between the time-space locatedness of actions, thereby realized as social actions, and the abstract entity called ‘society’, than either ‘space’ or

2 Introduction ‘place’. Both these well-worn sociological categories carry an excessive conceptual freight and burden of elucidation which raises the question of their value to historical research. Most archive historians understandably prioritize developing a critical sensitivity to events as they appeared to people in the past over the assertion of theoretical models of ‘space’ and ‘place’ that tend to escape the contingent meanings of historical situations. In certain respects, I might have chosen to deploy ‘architectural morphology’ or even ‘architectural topology’ as alternatives to ‘architectural topography’. Morphology is the study of organisation in real-world systems. It draws on a body of empirical research to identify a system’s elementary units and establish the combinatorial rules that describe the relation of the individual elements to the whole. Urban and architectural morphologists are concerned with processes of material transformation through which historical built environments and building typologies emerge over time (Kropf 2017; Steadman 1983). Topology is principally concerned with establishing the abstract mathematical parameters that describe and govern a network. Topologically based models and simulations of urban street networks, for example, are the basis for much computationally based research in urban analytics and network science (Batty 2013). These two fields of enquiry are not mutually exclusive. An example of a spatialmorphological process of settlement growth in space syntax research is the stipulation that new buildings must continue, rather than interrupt, the exterior frontage of existing buildings in order preserve a degree of linearity across consecutive frontages, as elements of the larger street network (Hillier and Hanson 1984, 55–62; Hillier 1996, 181–186). In this way historically negotiated and culturally specific codes of building practices are said to produce emergent ‘spatial configurations’ that can be precisely described and visualized using quantitative network analysis. Space syntax theorizes architectural formations as generative fields of socializing practice rather than in aesthetic terms or as socio-economically determined (Hillier, Leaman et al 1976; Hillier and Hanson 1984). Hillier (1989, 6) argues that the morphology of human settlement emerges “sometimes to generate and sometimes to restrict the field of encounter of human beings and their symbols”. Formal space syntax analysis of the encounter field is grounded in the quantitative description of actual building and settlement layouts represented as ‘spatial configurations’. The configurational method is useful for exploring relationships between material (or ‘artefactual’) arrangements such as streets in a street network, and their practised functions (e.g. what happens in a given street in consequence of its relationship to other streets in the network). The formal proposition states that highly accessible or integrated spaces in a town or city are characteristic of the foreground network of space that is likely to generate movement, bodily co-presence and encounter at a global scale, whereas relatively isolated or segregated locations are said to be the characteristic of the background network of space where movement, bodily co-presence and

Introduction 3 encounter are more likely to be localized. The foreground network is associated with public spaces, and diverse social and commercial activities, while the background network is more dispersed, residential and associated with the negotiation of cultural identities (Hillier 2012). In space syntax methodology the configurational structure of the encounter field is highly sensitive to the resolution at which it is modelled. The line of a street, for example, might be represented at the micro-morphological scale of localized irregularities even though it has been assimilated into a major urban-scale thoroughfare. Such ambiguities, which are intrinsic to the configurational definition of inhabited or ‘lived’ space as a social space, are rarely acknowledged by Hillier who is primarily concerned to assert general morphological principles that govern all settlement forms – an intention that requires a privileged observer across comparable cases. To the extent that the patterning of path, road and street systems can be regarded as sufficiently generic across different settlement and building types, it demonstrates the existence of spatial-morphological constraints limiting the field of all theoretically possible encounter fields (most of which would not describe feasible systems of human habitation). The historical imagination, however, necessitates that the observer is deprivileged to the extent that there is no necessary reason to prioritize any given resolution of description (or analytical perspective) above any other, at least not for the purposes of understanding situated pattens of human action in the past. The myriad possibilities of such actions require a mode of spatial description sensitive to how any specified localized space might be constituted at multiple resolutions, consistent with the rhythms, routines and rituals of social practice that use and re-use the same spaces in different ways. This in turn indicates how spatial descriptions must equally constitute temporal descriptions, since the constitution of the encounter field is conditioned by the prevailing socio-economic, technological and cultural modes of social practice that characterize different historical periods (Griffiths 2011). Reflecting on the time-space descriptions of the material world reveals inhabited space as an embodied domain of movement, bodily co-presence and encounter, generating interfaces within, across and between historically constituted resolutions of social action. Psarra (2009) develops the configurational proposition in space syntax theory to explore the individual, collective and literary dimensions of the architectural imagination. Her study of Venice reveals the city’s historical built environment as possessing the capacity to generate complex variations of its structure in material, cultural and design domains alike, raising important questions for the value of idealized and utopian representations as a way of understanding cities (Psarra 2018). In this sense inhabited space is a source of contingency and therefore meaning in social relationships, since no hegemonic socioeconomic, technological or cultural image can give adequate expression to precisely what is happening somewhere at any given time or place. Patterns of social practice do not conform neatly to historical periodization but

4 Introduction co-exist in complex imbrication with one another making contrasting demands on their time-space description. This variability which is, arguably, a source of weakness in analytical terms, becomes an interpretative strength by revealing the materiality of inhabited space as a generative source of ongoing social negotiation involving the emergence and convergence of social practices and the institutional regulation of their descriptions. A method of time-space description that deserves mention in this context is Time-Geography, associated with the Swedish geographer Torsten Hägerstrand (1916–2004), which achieved significant reach as a method of social-scientific enquiry in the 1970s and 1980s. Time-Geography represents individual biographies diagrammatically as series of localized ‘time-space paths’ through which varied social and institutional ‘projects’ are realized, and social structures reproduced (Pred 1983). It was innovative methodologically in showing how the quotidian constraints and opportunities of individuals’ routine itineraries become implicated in the construction and perpetuation of social norms. A difficulty with the Time-Geographic method for the present purpose, however, is that it represents biographies in essentially economic terms, with time and space projected as finite economic resources belonging to individuals in pursuit of their pre-determined goals. Time-Geography’s macro-sociological focus on social reproduction allows insufficient scope, indeed does not discern, the conceptual need to consider the architectural topographic description of lived space as distinct from a Euclidean space for mapping goal-orientated behaviour. An impoverished conceptualization of the encounter field means the elimination of contingency as an aspect of social experience, making Time-Geography of limited value in understanding the unpredictable qualities of complex situations that are so important to historical understanding. An awareness of TimeGeography’s deficiencies in expressing the specificities of social and historical change brings Allan Pred to Raymond William’s (1961) characterization of systems of social communication as comprising “structure of feeling”, which Pred redeploys in order to develop a time-geographic perspective that defines sense of place. This seems to me to be a prescient insight on Pred’s behalf, but one Time-Geography was not well suited to developing. I will return to Williams’ idea from an architectural topographic, rather than Time-Geographic, perspective in Chapter Eight. Archaeologists and geographers often refer to historical landscapes as ‘palimpsests’ (Bowden 1999, 80; Martin 1968).1 The use of this textual analogy, however, can be misleading in characterizing the built environment as an accumulation of discrete physical layers. Archaeological fieldwork, no less than research in architectural or urban history, typically shows how successive strata or phases of building activity interpenetrate one another, often transforming the composite lived spaces of quotidian activity in unpredictable and unique ways. Enduring architectural topographic arrangements describe complex and overlapping patterns of social action as they accommodate (or otherwise) to an ongoing process of construction, modification, demolition and erosion. Innovations in transport and communications technologies

Introduction 5 (including in the organization of urban space itself) have the capacity to transform the meaningful temporal-spatial resolution of everyday life, increasing socio-economic and cultural differentiation on the basis of accessibility to the relevant infrastructure, whether this means the social networks sustained by urban centres or, to give a contemporary example, the availability of high speed broadband in areas of social deprivation. The differentiation of social activity in the architectural topographic dimension also offers a mechanism for understanding how particular sites become privileged symbolically as signifying places through their effect on patterns of bodily co-presence, movement and social encounter. The habitual co-positioning of bodies, objects and symbols (whether, for instance, in the bedroom, church, high street or town square) has an effect on how embodied social practices express the immaterial meanings with which they become invested, enabling them to transcend the immediacy of their situation as memories, ritualized performances and texts. This does not mean, however, that memories, performances and texts have an independent existence as Platonic abstractions; on the contrary, they must be continually revisited, rehearsed and reinterpreted in concrete situations in order for their social meanings to endure. For Vinicius Netto the configuration of urban space constitutes a referential ‘fabric’. Here the material agency of urban form in connecting actions discretely located in time-space is revealed as a socializing, semanticizing agency that sustains communicative action (Netto 2017, 76–77). When the world-historian Arnold Toynbee noted that “Man is truly an amphibian”, living in the “biosphere and in the spiritual world simultaneously”, he was restating the traditional theological opposition of nature and culture (Toynbee 1976, 19).2 Systems of religious belief commonly differentiate between the horizontal-spatial (profane) and vertical-temporal (sacred) domains. Research in the architectural topographic dimension, by contrast, strongly resists this absolute differentiation as it implies not only an equivalence between the embodiment of social space and the biological imperatives of asocial physical environments but also sustains the totalizing abstraction of social structure from social experience. The architectural topographic landscape, by contrast, mixes bodies, objects and signs in a temporal-spatial entanglement of signifying corporeal practices that never entirely sublimates the materiality of situation to a transcendent level of meaning or vice versa. Mankind’s ‘amphibious’ quality, in this sense, arises not from the opposition of the temporal and spatial domains but from the richly variegated historical terrain in which movement, bodily co-presence and encounter unfold. The range of formal morphological and topological methods for the description of built form arrangements are integral to the conceptualization of architectural topography advanced in this book. They offer valuable inspiration for enquiring into how the historical imagination engages critically with architectural topographic arrangements as particular figures

6 Introduction for imagining, researching and writing historical events as narratives. Such a task involves reflecting on the time-space relationality that constructs historical events as linked descriptions of ‘when-where’ actions each with specific chronological and locative markers (e.g. a room in a house, a street in a city, a city in a network of cities) through which the event unfolds at given scales or resolutions of movement, bodily co-presence and encounter. An architectural topographic perspective helps to redirect historians’ attention away from the architectural object as a representation of particular socio-economic, cultural or aesthetic regime, or as the useful backdrop to an illustrative period tableau, and towards the agency of architectural arrangements as pre-figuring, as well as being figured by, multiple trajectories of social action. My reason for preferring ‘architectural topography’ over the alternatives is that it is sufficiently broad to embrace the formal analytical methods, terminology and attention to detail of built environment research in network science, urban morphology and built environment surveys where necessary, while remaining open to the question of how these can help excavate the time-space figuration of the encounter field in historical texts. Progress has been made in this respect in literary studies. Franco Moretti, for example, has noted how “Space is not ‘outside’ of narrative […] but an internal force, that shapes it from within”. But what is this internal force and how might we describe its motive action on the shape of narrative? Moretti argues that in the European novel, “what happens depends a lot on where it happens” (Moretti 1998, 70 {emphasis in original}). He does not mean that narrative motifs can simply be mapped onto particular types of space. A more ambiguous relation is implied that Moretti locates in the complex social dynamics of the nineteenth-century city. Studies exploring the influence of Britain’s increasingly integrated network of national transportation on the novels of Charles Dickens (Grossman 2012), and of the importance of the “corporeality of mobility” to the Victorian novel, including from a gendered perspective (Mathieson 2015, 2), examine the role of material practices to the re-construction of local, national and global ideas of community. In doing so they provide a refreshing balance to the scholarly emphasis on the ‘invention’ of community as an essentially disembodied phenomenon defined by language and symbolism (Anderson 1991). An innovative attempt has also been made by Kern (1998) to explore how the collapse of distance represented by the train and telegraph networks of the late nineteenth century informed not only the development of modernist art and literature but also contributed to the complex triangulations of political communication that led to military mobilizations and the outbreak of the First World War. For all the interest in the representations of space, technologies and mobilities, however, the absence of an underlying proposition of what discrete architectural elements such as roads, lanes, streets, doors and rooms actually do socially to generate lived space, recurs again and again,

Introduction 7 and prevents their contribution to narrative being properly understood and historicized. It sustains a conceptual elision that fails to clearly distinguish between the agency of the encounter field as an essential source of contingency in human affairs, and its many competing socio-economic and cultural representations. The repression of architectural topographic description in historical writing has particular implications when it is considered that what is often at issue is the proper narration of particular events, identified as ‘events’ precisely by their contingent nature. Indeed, the role of the historical imagination in discovering an intelligible or narratable past from sparse source material that, typically, offers non-continuous accounts of when-where actions is, as I show, in many respects paramount. My concern with the architectural topographic descriptions in historical explanation is intended to draw attention to this repression of the encounter field as a means (one that may be deployed conventionally rather than intentionally) of closing down the possibilities of ‘what happened where’ in preference for macro-historical explanations where the ‘details do not matter’. Such details might be excluded because they are regarded as the most likely source of error or because the historian seeks to establish their own privileged position as an observer detached, as it were, from the human patterning of the past and its many uncertainties. In this respect, the built environment constitutes a particular and largely unexplored problem in historical thought. It is illustrated by Bentley (2006, 352-3) who draws on Heidegger’s description of a Greek temple, to meditate on how traces of a past that is irretrievable might yet be located ‘present at hand’ (Heidegger, 1962, 430; 2011, 103-7). The caution against simplistic assumptions of “ontological continuity” Bentley offers (i.e. the sense that because the Greek temple survives Ancient Greece itself somehow exists unmediated in the present) is necessary only if the building is thought to project some essential principle or truth through the harmonies of its architectural form. If, however, the Greek temple is understood not only to represent particular ideals but equally to (re)fabricate the material conditions of social action in a more contingent sense, the nature of what is at issue for historical understanding changes. Rather than ‘reading’ the temple as a physically present signifier for something else, the focus becomes how it was corporeally re-enacted as a social space through successive historical epochs never envisaged at the time of its construction. What actually happened in the Greek temple (or any other building or settlement that has continually adapted to radically altered conditions) would, of course, vary a great deal over time and be, in many ways, unpredictable. Even so, the temple’s long history as a distinctive spatial arrangement affording many possible social actions over this time imparts to its built form a degree of autonomy in an architectural topographic sense. This is not satisfied by its symbolic potency as a ruin, nor the persistent echo of Ancient Greek ideals in the present – though both are important images. Rather the temple’s dedicated historian might reflect on how successive

8 Introduction human bodies or groups of bodies have moved into, around and through the building, encountering or perhaps avoiding one another, many times and for many different reasons in the several millennia since its construction. Occasionally isolated records of specific movements or encounters may be found in the archive or through site excavations. More typically though, the specificity of past actions is defined by their absence. All the historian has left to work with in such cases is the field of architectural topographic possibility itself: ‘probably a private chamber through this narrow doorway’, ‘perhaps large meetings took place here, in the central space’. These illustrations may appear trivial, but they are nothing of the kind. Such apparently generic descriptions are, in fact, highly significant for historical ontology because they demonstrate why the past is not simply a mental image or a meta-narrative that can be written onto a blank page. It has a grain, prefiguring how history can be imagined and written. Whatever the chronological and locational precision of the testimonies the historian retrieves from his or her sources, and no matter how much contextual knowledge he or she brings to their interpretation, the assertion of any relation between discrete actions in the past has to be at least minimally congruent with the field of architectural topographic possibility and must always implicate the historical imagination in arbitrating the undocumented and unverifiable. This is true no matter how densely or sparsely distributed the actions happen to be in sequential terms. The historian’s God’s-eye view offers a synchronic vantage point which enables him or her to elide many apparently trivial, intermediary and contingent actions and move seamlessly between those considered to be the most historically significant (and which are likely to be those which are best documented). By contrast the myriad unnamed (and largely unknowable) social actions through which the historian’s subjects become participants in historical events unfold at ground level in architectural topographic timespace. The events summarized or narrated in historical accounts must necessarily limit the number of architectural topographic descriptions, so far as these may fairly be considered as contextual or secondary to the principal topic focus. Indeed, to do otherwise would make history writing a near impossible task. Yet given how fundamental this process of architectural topographic description is to historical thought, it is striking how little is understood about what it entails and its wider implications for history as a discipline. The architectural topographic dimension crucially defines historical understanding at the elementary level of distinguishing where and when ‘events’ from generalized philosophical principles of human action. Its importance to historical ontology arises from the architectural topographic nature of social space as situating the when-where locations of movement, bodily co-presence and encounter recognizable to historical actors. The coherence of the architectural topographic field in the historical imagination is a critical means of making sense of what happened in the past by

Introduction 9 establishing when-where it happened. It is also an essential condition for the coherent translation of discretely situated (i.e. distinct or separate) actions as named historical ‘events’. If a paucity of evidence means there are inevitably uncertainties in historians’ construction of the relationship between past actions, the balance of probabilities can often be assessed in architectural topographic terms to determine whether a hypothesized intermediary action consistent with a given narrative proposition (i.e. a line of inquiry), must, might or could not have happened. The interventions of the historical imagination continually direct the historian towards the pastness of the past by confronting him or her not with what is present (possibly knowable for certain) but with what is absent (unknowable for certain). The pervasive lacunae that characterize historical knowledge are imaginatively figured in architectural topographic narratives, around which the semantic tissue of knowable events must be stretched and given shape. In this sense, the architectural topographic field embodies the contingencies of historical situations in historical thought and writing. Architectural topographic descriptions may themselves be only minimally accessible to historians through surviving physical remnants: cartographic, visual or textual sources that support conjoining the locative ‘where?’ to the chronological ‘when?’ of the event, yet such sources, as descriptions of lived space, are no more reducible to ‘mere’ representations than is Heidegger’s Greek temple (Griffiths and Vaughan 2020). The often intimate relationship of archive historians to the contemporary locations where the historical events they describe occurred strongly implies how architectural topography, by opening the historian’s mind to the manifold possibilities of social action that percolate historical sites, offers a deeper resource of historical understanding of materially encoded sociality than a priori categories of ‘space’ or ‘place’ waiting to be signified by an agency external to themselves. This does not imply the reduction of historical method to an empathetic function. On the contrary, the purpose of this book’s concern with architectural topographic description is to articulate the historian’s imaginative sense of ‘what it was like to be here-then or there-then’, as a critical sense, rather than as a naively intuitive or fictional engagement with the past.

II Crossing the Rubicon My reflections on the contribution of the architectural topographic sense to historical understanding are inspired by the work of the philosopher and historian of Roman Britain R.G. Collingwood (1889–1943). Collingwood is best known for his contention in the Idea of History (1989 [1946], 215) that “… all history, is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian’s own mind”. Collingwood is not advocating an idealist philosophy of mind through which an individual truly enters into the experience of another individual. On the contrary, his starting premise is that since the actual

10 Introduction reality of an objective past cannot simply be ‘found’ in archive sources or buried under the ground in archaeological strata, history must be something the historian does intellectually. Refuting absolute scepticism as contrary to experience Collingwood asserts that genuinely historical knowledge is possible only through an imaginative process of retrieving and thereby re-enacting the thought that precipitated past actions. I refer to this coupling as ‘thought-to-action’, to the extent that evidence of these thoughts have arrived in the present through the chance survival of sources that identify them with past actions. For Collingwood the historian is not said to rethink the same thoughts as historical agents, rather the critical exercise of the historical imagination allows him or her to reflect systematically on past thoughts that would have been consistent with a given action in the past. An important question is how far Collingwood’s concept of historical re-enactment extends beyond thoughts-to-action that can be precisely represented in language. This refers to how thoughts-to-action encode embodied descriptions of specific architectural topographical situations in texts and other forms of historical evidence, though without discursive clarity. Embodied thought is grounded in the experience of what the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty (1962 [1945]) refers to as “body-subject”, a “special kind of subject” that liberates the individual by learning familiar actions that can be performed with minimal intervention of self-conscious thought. For Seamon (1979, p.41, 54–59) this represents a social, rather than a psychological liberation as body-subject is immersed in spaces and places with other people. Collingwood (1989, 216) himself specifically dismisses as “nonhistorical” routine bodily actions such as sleeping and eating (by extension walking and vocalizing too) that he views as arising from man’s “animal nature”. This qualification does not, however, exclude such behaviours once they become “social customs”, a category that contemporary sociologists would readily extend into most habitual forms of human action (216). Similarly, while the direct perception of a past situation demands corporeal presence and is therefore inaccessible to historical re-enactment as thought, this stipulation does not mean that historical knowledge is not corporeally constructed. Collingwood is clear that the past is inaccessible “in vacuo, as the disembodied ghost of a past experience” (300). This does not, of course, engage the historian in physically reanimating the bodily motions of historical agents! Rather, it proposes that historical understanding involves the historian in the re-enactment (or re-animation) of situated thoughts-toactions, accessible through his or her intellectual ability to reflect critically on the when-where possibilities of embodied experience. Making such embodied practices the object of the historian’s critical reflection is difficult when the architectural topographic dimension of historical thought is itself poorly understood. The historian’s informed but equally intuitive sense of patterns of movement, bodily co-presence and encounter in the past may, indeed, be considered to lie beyond serious critical scrutiny.

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The architectural topographic description of largely unknown time-space routines of social practices can be said to minimally prefigure but not to predict specific actions associated with historical events of the kind named in historical textbooks. Collingwood gives Marcus Brutus’ decision to stab and murder Julius Caesar on the Ides of March 44 BCE as an example of a thought the historian might retrieve and re-enact (214).3 Collingwood does not mention that Brutus’ decision occupied a particular time-space, the floor of the Senate House in Rome. Given that the definition of any historical action associates a past-time (when) with a past-location (where) it seems highly unlikely that the retrieved thought which is the object of historical re-enactment could be distilled, as it were, disembodied from the architectural topographical situation which afforded it historical actuality. Nor does it seem credible that the historian can entirely extract the discursive thought-to-action from the situated practice of its enaction. Brutus’ decision then occupied a particular time-space in the morning of 15th March 44 BCE that embodied his thought-to-action. On this basis one might ask: ‘What did Brutus think, which made him decide to stab Caesar then and there, on the floor of the Senate?’ Here the thought-toaction accessible to the historian is the embodied thought belonging to Brutus. It possesses an irreducible architectural topographic encoding as a consequence of its unique situational manifestation. This encoding serves to differentiate the specific event of Brutus’ stabbing of Caesar from the generic field of architectural topographic description prefigured in the historical imagination of the Roman historian by his or her scholarly familiarity with the built environment of ancient Rome, the rituals of the Roman Senate and the habits of Roman senators. This is not a contextual level of explanation. Rather it expresses the generic agency of the architectural topographic dimension to define the specific contingencies of embodied thought-to-actions in the past as nameable ‘historical’ events unfolding in a socialized time-space. The historian may critically interrogate this agency in order to narrate specific actions in relation to others in an intelligible way. Collingwood’s distinction of historical ‘actions’ from ‘mere events’ follows from his belief that the study of history prioritizes the “interior” dimension of human action that belongs exclusively to the past and which “can only be described in terms of thought”. The “exterior” event, by contrast, is accessible to scientific observation and refers to “everything belonging to it which can be described in terms of bodies and their movements” (specifically human bodies and movements) (213). Yet if Collingwood refuses the reduction of historical understanding to natural science his philosophy is not anti-materialist in acknowledging the influence of material formations on human history, as his extensive archaeologically inspired histories of Roman Britain amply demonstrate (Goldstein 1970). Collingwood, in fact, explicitly emphasizes the unity of interior and exterior ‘actions’: The historian is never concerned with either of these to the exclusion of the other. He is investigating not mere events (where by a mere event

12 Introduction I mean one which has only an outside and no inside) but actions, and an action is the unity of the outside and inside of an event. (Collingwood 1989, 213) Collingwood agreed with his contemporary Henri Bergson that human temporality was irreducible to the predictable sequence of clock time (t1,2 … tn) derived from the movements of astronomical bodies through space. He was, however, highly critical of the strong dualism Bergson maintains between the inner world of experiential time (as being inaccessible to critical reflection) and the external world of spatialized time (a kind of ‘unreality’ inaccessible to human experience). In the Idea of Nature (1960 [1945]) Collingwood argues this dualism makes no sense. If the “stream of life”, as Bergson characterizes evolutionary time in nature, “presupposes the topography of a material world through which it flows” to give life to (historical) actuality, then “so the stream of consciousness”, as Bergson characterizes human experience, “presupposes the topography of logical and conceptual forms, categories or ideas” (194, 140-41). Collingwood’s argument is consistent with the position adopted here. His ‘imaginative topography’ suggests the past actions of historical actors (body-subjects) may become the object of intellectual reflection because their descriptions of past situations are, in some sense, intelligibly encoded in extant historical sources. It follows that it is the embodied, architectural topographic, descriptions of situations characterizing the thoughtsto-action of people in the past, that are said by Collingwood to be “reenacted” by the historian. The risk of adopting the alternative view lies in endorsing Bergson’s stark distinction of human time from the ‘mechanistic’ material world, a move which renders nature as “dead matter”, alienated from the actuality of historical events, regarded by Collingwood not as ‘mere events’ but as actions representing a unity of interior (thought) and exterior (material) descriptions (141).4 In the Idea of History Collingwood makes the intellectual case for the historical imagination as a “labour of active and therefore critical thinking” by contesting what he views as Bergson’s idealist conflation of temporal intuition with historical understanding (Collingwood, 1989, 215). Interestingly, he sought to counter Bergson’s separation of mind and action by arguing for the autonomous empirical reality of the material world, not as “dead matter” but as matter that has been “fabricated for the purposes of action” – a proposition with strong architectural connotations (189). Unfortunately, Collingwood’s own distinction between the ‘interior’ and the ‘exterior’ of events produces its own ‘mind–matter’ dualism which is never fully resolved in his theory of historical re-enactment. Written largely before the project of social history was theorized from the 1960s Collingwood’s work has been widely criticized in its wake, not least on the basis of alleged methodological individualism. From this perspective the theory of historical re-enactment can be applied only to (ideally well-documented, prominent) individuals but is unable to account for complex collective processes such as, for example, the

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feudal system or urbanization that have no ‘interior’ as such. Collingwood, though, never saw himself as a methodological individualist, nor did he seek to deny the agency of ‘exterior’ social processes (Dray 1995). Collingwood’s prioritization of imaginative historical re-enactment simply represents a refusal to distil history to sociological categories detached from “particular events in space and time” (Collingwood 1989, 5) which is precisely what he believed distinguishes events as historical. Collingwood’s most rehearsed example of historical re-enactment is that of Julius Caesar’s decision to break Roman Republican law by crossing the Rubicon river with a single legion in 10th January 49 BCE to march on Rome. As a paradigm case this example usefully demonstrates some of the complexities of the architectural topographic perspective. Using Collingwood’s categories the ‘exterior’ of the event describes the “passage of Caesar, accompanied by certain men, across a river called the Rubicon at one date”, whereas by the ‘interior’ of the event he means the decision which led to “Caesar’s defiance of Republican law” which banned generals bringing their armies into Roman territory (Collingwood 1989, 213). This minimal account immediately highlights a prima facie problem that there is very little evidence about the circumstances of this event – even the geographical location of the Rubicon is far from certain. Given the paucity of evidence the symbolic significance of the Rubicon as a legal boundary is amplified over its topographical description. Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon offers a convenient abbreviation of a worldhistorical event about which little else is known. Indeed ‘crossing the Rubicon’ has become a widely invoked idiom used to signify any political turning point. Here the interior (symbolic) and exterior (material) dimensions of the event become detached with the effect of privileging the symbolic, thereby collapsing Collingwood’s ‘unity of the action’ into an example of what the Bakhtin might call the “metaphorical sublimations” of a complex historical reality (Bakhtin 1981 [1938], 222). It is certainly possible to imagine Caesar’s decision taking place in sight of the bridge over the Rubicon as a natural point to rest and assess his possible courses of action. It would have been an indeterminate moment fraught with anxiety and uncertainty. The popular historian Tom Holland (2004, xix-xxi) devotes three successive pages to its detailed description in his history Rubicon. These indicate why pausing with Caesar on the river’s banks is treacherous territory for historians. Holland tells us how Caesar “gazed into the turbid waters of the Rubicon” saying nothing; “And his mind moved upon silence” (xx). Holland could not know this; it is literary embellishment. In the main primary source the Roman historian Suetonius has Caesar prompted to cross the Rubicon by a pipe-playing apparition; once on other side he quotes Caesar declaring “Take we the course which the signs of the gods and the false dealing of our foes point out. The die is cast” (Suetonius 2014, 77). The tense atmosphere, the ghost, the direct speech of Caesar, the unfolding narrative of the event are intimately

14 Introduction connected with its architectural topographic specificity. Yet in scholarly terms these concrete elements also introduce instances of artifice and mythology. A greater difficulty with Collingwood’s theory from an architectural topographic perspective is that the ‘fabricated’ material domain of social action is largely untheorized in his work. In Collingwood’s philosophy (but not his history) the impact of the physical world on historical events is largely subsumed into ahistorical ‘acts of nature’, for example, the eruption of a volcano or severe flood (a view that is surely harder to sustain in the Anthropocene era). The significance of natural processes, as for socioeconomic processes, is said to lie in how these may have influenced the thoughts of historically situated actors. Yet if the material world is conceived reductively in terms of acts of nature and biological bodies, rather than as the architectural topographic domain of socialised body-subjects, this serves only to reinforce the separation of ‘exterior’ (matter) and ‘interior’ (mind) events rather than establish a relation (if not necessarily a ‘unity’) between them. Collingwood claims that intellectual activity builds on a residual “topography of logical and conceptual forms” that render the experience of material existence intelligible (Collingwood 1960, 141). It is interesting to note how this argument resonates with Hillier and Hanson’s proposition that the spatial configuration of settlement forms encodes social information in the material world that “must be constantly re-embodied in social action” if it is to endure (Hillier and Hanson 1984, 45). Certainly, Collingwood’s world ‘fabricated for action’ implies a material existence altogether more artefactual (i.e. humanly manufactured)), complex and inhabitable by body-subject than is allowed for by viewing it through the narrow lens of sporadic ‘acts of nature’. It points to the architectural topographic encoding of thought-to-action as a condition of social existence. Without allowing for the agency of the architectural topographical description to socialize individual thought-to-action in relation to others it is difficult for Collingwood’s philosophy of history to conceive of the interpenetration of the ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ dimensions of historical events. The situatedness of thought-to-action in socialized time-space differentiates the historical re-enactment of these thoughts in an intellectual process capable of expressing contrasting positions from the abstraction of philosophical, social-theoretical and mathematical arguments that seek to transcend particularity to establish universal propositions. This is why the historical imagination is in many ways an architectural topographic imagination. History and the humanities have long been pulled to and fro on the interdisciplinary rack of competing claims made for ‘space’ and ‘place’, sometimes used interchangeably, sometimes to distinguish a focus on movement and interaction from a concern with culture and meaning. Sometimes terms like milieu and environment are deployed as alternatives

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to summarize the material or social qualities of a particular locale. All these concepts have their value as will become clear from their recurrence throughout the pages of this book. However, my central contention is that they are, in themselves, inadequate as categories of historical analysis without acknowledging their shared anchorage in architectural topographic description as a fundamental concern of historical thought. Architectural topography describes the temporal-spatial resolution of human action itself. It is essential to imagining, interpreting and representing the succession of concretely situated events in a meaningful way. While, from an historiographical perspective, architectural topographic description is most commonly associated with narrative history, it is no less important to enquiries in social scientific or cultural history – albeit as so much intellectual scaffolding to be discarded in the written account. The question for historians is what concessions they are prepared to make to Caesar’s apparition on the banks of the Rubicon because the field of architectural topographic possibility points resolutely to what is not known or properly understood in the record of knowable events.

III Architectural topographic descriptions To know something about what happened in the past involves understanding at least something of where it happened as well as when it happened. Evidence of location is no less essential than evidence of chronology in making the elementary assertion that the events that become the subjects of historical enquiry did, in fact, actually happen. If the conventionally assumed marker ‘when’ of historical events implies an equally necessary ‘where’, however, it is surprising how often these two dimensions of events (‘when-and-where’) are separated and even opposed to one another, especially when the locative dimension is made theoretically explicit. It is no coincidence that the postmodernist critique of chronologically linear ‘grand narratives’ encompassing, for example, the rise of religions, nation-states, and the bourgeoisie, emerged hand-in-hand with the pervasive ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities and social sciences from the 1990s, inspired by the social theory of Henri Lefebvre (1991) and Michael Foucault (1984; 1995), among others. The emphasis on social space as a complex nexus of materialities, relationships and representations has enabled historians to arrive at important new insights into the diversity of practices and subjectivities of the past. It achieves this, however, mainly by intellectually privileging spatialized matrices of indeterminate explanatory contexts over the chronicling of principal events; and the description of relativistic “meshworks” over the necessary selectivity of constructing narratives directed by a single line of argument, or ‘story to tell’ (DeLanda 1997, 32). The shift represented by the spatial turn reversed the previous privileging of chronology in when-where event descriptions by translating the more recessive ‘where’ into the analytical categories of ‘space’ and ‘place’. The pervasive influence of the spatial

16 Introduction turn has, however, led to the traditional ‘when’ coordinate receding into a more secondary role in much contemporary historical scholarship. In the methodological domain too, the spatial turn has prompted a resurgence in the kind of social-scientific approach to historical studies pioneered by the French Annales School in the 1960s that produced leading social historians of this period, including Fernand Braudel. Braudel famously distinguished three historical temporalities: geological time, socioeconomic time and human-scale event time (Braudel 1975, 20–21). In Collingwoodian terms Braudel’s schema prioritizes the exterior over the interior of events and the stratification of events into natural, social and (broadly) political layers over their narrative unity. The power and relative accessibility of mapping tools enabled by HGIS (Historical Geographical Information Systems) lend themselves to the compilation, comparative analysis, and visualization of large georeferenced (mappable) datasets in the tradition of Annales. HGIS has offered historians new ways to interrogate the spatial dimension of social organization (Gregory and Ell 2007). It is far from clear, however, how far the new ‘digital history’ or ‘spatial humanities’ actually offers any new thinking on the relationship between society and space from that pioneered by a previous generation of practitioners of the (now ‘old’) ‘New History’, who introduced computational techniques into historical research in the 1970s (von Lünen and Travis 2013; von Lünen 2016). Certainly the production of vast georeferenced databases and enhanced 3D visualizations of landscapes do not, in themselves, tell us anything new about history. Historical expertise and contextual knowledge is required for both the preparation and interpretation of such material. If history is the telling of what happened in the human past, computationally driven research projects must be a means rather than an end. Such arguments might lead the reader to suppose that this is a book evaluating the pros and cons of the spatial turn, or the value of space as an analytical category in historical research, but this is not so. In any case, the ground is already shifting. Advocates of the recent ‘temporal turn’ in the humanities largely accept the emphasis spatial theorists and geographers place on the multiple spatial trajectories of social experience but respond by asserting that there is “no need to choose between an independent temporality and a separate spatiality” (Corfield 2015, 91). In taking the inseparability of time and space (when-where) as its conceptual starting point a principal theme of this book converges with a central tenet of the temporal turn. Rather than rediscovering temporality in the vast time spans of pre-historic evolution such as espoused by advocates of ‘Big’ and ‘Deep’ history, however, I begin the book by seeking to rediscover it at the (relatively) micro-morphological scale in an existing corpus of historical scholarship, most of which predates both the spatial and temporal terms in academic theory. Specifically, the book reveals the central importance to historical thought of the architectural topographic grain of lived space where historical events unfold chronotopically.

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Critics of the various ‘spatializations of history’ via the influence of modernist (i.e. social scientific) and postmodernist (i.e. language-based) perspectives, as well as advocates of the recent temporal turn, tend to occlude the architectural topographical dimension of historical thought, possibly because they mistakenly assume such questions to be the exclusive province of specialist architectural historians. In fact, there has been a surprising lack of reflection on the ways in which historical writing of different kinds (including local histories, tourist guides and historical fiction) encode narratives of historical events in architectural topographic descriptions. As I shall show, closer inspection of these descriptions tends to challenge critiques of narrative history as naively ‘linear’. By resisting the separation of diachronically sequenced narrative ‘whens’ from their material embedding in the synchronic multiplicity of possible locational ‘wheres’, the architectural topographic dimension preserves complex interpretative ‘pathways’ to explore the relatedness (or otherwise) of historical actions; what I refer to as the time-space figuration of historical events. In non-narrative or comparative forms of historical writing the architectural topographic description may be almost non-existent, but its repression in historical writing does not lessen its epistemological importance prima facie. I would go so far as to say that the covalent when-where of events is profoundly important to the possibility of historical understanding at all. This argument may come as a surprise to many historians. To focus on the relationship between architecture and narrative in historical writing might seem trivial, even suspect to the extent it prompts indulgence in ‘period detail’ and introduces entertaining (but erroneous) anachronisms. As Collingwood’s example of Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon highlights, architectural sites sustain myths, contested memories and diverse historical associations that present scholarly historians with difficult problems of defining authenticity. This raises the question of the reliability of extant source material, which is usually too sparse and tangential to establish exactly ‘what happened when and where’ at highly localized points of resolution. The architectural topographic description of social space has rarely been prioritized in the spatial (or temporal) turns. While the reconceptualization of space in socio-economic and cultural history as a dynamic relational field of social practice is now widely acknowledged, making the case for architectural formations as generative of fields social action is still fraught with conceptual difficulties (Westin 2014). The artefacticity of architectural arrangements presents a problem in the conceptualization of its social agency. This is typically caught between the behaviourist spectre of physicalenvironmental determinism on the one hand, and the rather unsatisfying (and, I would argue, non-intuitive) default position that architecture does little more than reflect a society back at itself, on the other Actor Network Theory (ANT) emphasizes the two-way agency of human and non-human actants to influence one another (Latour 2005). ANT, together

18 Introduction with Assemblage theory (DeLanda 2006), has been responsible for much recent scholarly interest in the material dimensions of human existence. ANT advocates a networked ontology to describe how materialized bundles or ‘assemblages’ of socio-economic, technological and biological relationships constitute social reality, thereby revealing the historical contingency of time and place in sociological categories (not least the idea of ‘society’ itself) that tend to be universalized (De Munck 2017). In architecture ANT’s focus on material agency provides a useful counterweight to postmodern aesthetization. Its methodology involves ‘mapping’ (or deconstructing) the architectural object as an ‘actor-network’ to identify the socio-economic, technological and biological relationships (e.g. funding consortia, CAD technology, staff) that hold its autonomous status, as a stable, architectural entity up to scrutiny (Yaneva 2012). Clearly, incorporating the material dimension into socio-economic processes does not, of itself, offer an explanation of specifically architectural agency. Indeed, such a notion is anathema to ANT as its ‘flat’ relational ontology precludes privileging what it would regard as any preconceived analytical categories such as ‘architecture’, ‘buildings’ or ‘cities’ above their description as assemblages. While there is much to recommend this critical position, it does not provide a satisfactory response to the question ‘what does architecture do?’ because the deconstruction of architectural and urban objects tends to reveal them as derivative of external processes, or to put it another way, less as than the sum of their parts. Yet architecture conceived as socialized arrangement of materials surely does something that is not entirely derivative of socioeconomic or cultural factors but is itself generative of social life. To illustrate this argument: one may plan a house party with the intention that the main venue for social activity should be the largest room that has been specially laid out for the purpose with large sofas and a drinks cabinet, only to be frustrated by the density of people and intensity of conversation in the freezing-cold hallway or blocking the doorway that leads into the kitchen. One might conclude from this that modernist architects were not wholly correct to claim that form follows function. More often than not function follows form because, as Bernard Tschumi (1994, 160) noted, one may ‘cook in the bathroom and sleep in the kitchen’. The architectural topographic arrangements of the material world affords social action sustained on quotidian flows of movement, bodily co-presence and encounter in ways that are not always predictable. Architectural topographic descriptions are in this sense gloriously ambiguous as to meaning. This is their power. They are less concerned with the functional or symbolic labels of architectural objects than with the unintended, contingent possibilities of inhabited time-space. As things stand the description of the material or artefactual qualities of the encounter field are not sufficiently understood in comparison to its social-factual determinants, making the former less straightforward to express in language (Weissenborn 2016). This makes the disruptive critical engagement ANT sets up with more established categories of social enquiry

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less productive with regard to architectural formations. Perhaps more fundamental, though, is that ANT is a radically spatializing perspective exclusively focused on the exterior of events and largely unconcerned with the contingencies of historical experience. While DeLanda’s implementation of Assemblage Theory addresses the complex material, biological and linguistic temporalities of social formations his focus is on the long duration of evolutionary time (DeLanda 1997). His tripartite conception of nonlinear history recommends him as the Braudel for the current century, but it is a system largely oblivious to the when-where specificity of unfolding of historical events. Collingwood’s sense of the indivisibility of the interior and the exterior of the event made manifest, as I have proposed, through its architectural topographic description has little purchase in this context. It follows that the process of narrativization, the selective privileging of some people, places and events over others, would be intrinsically suspect to ANT and Assemblage theorists as a distraction from the task of describing the meshwork of social reality. In a manner redolent of ANT – though in fact arising from his own distinctive engagement with the spatial turn – the urban historian Paul Ethington (2007, 466) views historical knowledge as “literally cartographic: a mapping of the places of history indexed to the coordinates of spacetime” (466). For Ethington “topoi” are the signifying places of human action in the past located at the “intersection” of (social) lived space and (natural) ‘space-time’ (485). While Ethington makes a nominal case for conjoining time and space, his cartographic ontology perpetuates the Bergsonian separation between ‘natural time-as-space’ (mappable) and ‘lived time’ (reaching into the present) without any of Collingwood’s sense of the exterior and interior of the historical event being mutually constitutive. ‘History as mapping’ in Ethington’s sense barely admits to the possibility of historical thought (as invoking a knowledge of the past) by resolving time into the cartographic representation of topoi in the present. Ethington’s method aims at constructing a “vast multi-perspectival atlas of world history”, presumably powered by HGIS functionality or the hyperlinks across the world wide web (484). Consistent with this epistemology Ethington advocates non-narrative history as a reaction to the irretrievability of the historical past as it actually happened. The fact that cartography’s “infinitely possible figurations cannot be reduced to narrative form” is deployed to counter the pre-occupation of some critical theorists with what they propose as the intrinsic fictionality of historical narratives (486). Surprisingly perhaps, it is the ANT urbanist Thomas Bender (2007, 498) who responds to Ethington’s assertion by noting “Yes, but the unremarked but crucial point is that without narrative history is denied motion”. This is not simply a stylistic argument but a comment on the importance of narrative as a mode of thought enabling the historian’s ability to explain the past as a lived reality open to contingency and meaningful interpretation.

20 Introduction Interestingly, advocates of the spatial, temporal and material (actornetwork) turns in the social sciences rarely draw on architecture to explain the relationship between action, event and narrative. Yet if it is possible to conceive of architectural topography as a differentiated pattern of lived time-space that is generative of social action in a minimal sense, then this pattern must limit what is possible in terms of the credible historical representation of the past. People can neither walk through walls, fly unaided nor be in two places at once; they must live, work, meet and separate. The doing of these activities points to the existence of an intelligible architectural topographical encounter field that affords social action. Architectural topographic description therefore acts as a formal constraint on Ethington’s ‘infinite’ cartographic figurations by limiting them to that subset of possible material configurations that humans can actually inhabit. The temporality of historical events is no longer flattened by a static model of cartographic relationships but emerges intrinsically through the architectural topographic grain of time-space that is being continually refashioned from old materials. It is the ability of narrative to express the encoding of the architectural topographic dimension in language that gives it the capacity to represent the complexity and specificity of historical events, from the smallest to the largest resolutions of human action. Yet if architecture is referred to at all in mainstream historical studies it is most likely to be in contextual mode, perhaps to elucidate the character of ideological systems that it symbolically endorses, for example, classical, in preference to gothic or modernist architectural styles. Such perspectives have relatively little to say about the role of architectural topography in giving material definition to historical events. Indeed, this topic has rarely been seen as a question of theoretical interest. Yet if socialized time-space is defined by architectural topographic arrangements, then its importance to historical thought lies in enabling the discovery of narrative coherence in the overwhelming complexity of past actions by acting as both a generator and constraint of possibilities as to ‘what happened and what might have happened?’, considered in light of the available evidence. Architectural topographic description denotes a differentiated time-space of movement, bodily co-presence and encounter through which events are imaginatively constituted as events, brought into relation with each other, scaled up (across greater extents of time-space) and scaled down to a higher level of event resolution (locally circumscribed in time-space). The epistemological – and equally the stylistic – question then concerns the appropriate balance of expression (i.e. through narrative) and repression (i.e. in non-narrative mode) of architectural topography in the writing of the historical account itself. Architectural topography in this sense is concerned with constituting the historical imagination as a mode of witness to the past, demonstrating its “rootedness in reality” as a fundamental constraint (if not the only one) on what can be claimed as historically authentic (Bentley 2006, 356).

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IV Figurational contingencies The architectural topographic description encoded in Collingwood’s illustrative example of Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon links the ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ of the historical event in a meaningful and dynamic way. It reveals the Rubicon as more than simply a physical barrier or symbolic boundary but as a material agency bringing, bodies, materials (and an apparition) into a specific mutual relation to occupy a specific socialized time-space. The presence of a bridge, most likely erected at a reasonably narrow point where the river was easiest to cross, expresses the moment of historical contingency, a question that it is the intellectual task of historical re-enactment to resolve, namely: ‘what will Caesar do?’ Suetonius has Caesar himself state: “Even yet we may draw back; but once cross yon little bridge, and the whole issue is with the sword” (Suetonius 2014, 77). This gives an indication of why for Collingwood knowing ‘what happened’ and ‘why it happened’ are broadly equivalent (Collingwood 1989, 214-15). In re-enacting the situated thoughts of historical agents that constitute the interior of the event the historian is, in first instance, drawn into the time-space contingencies that are expressed in narrative mode rather than, for example, a meditation on ethics or military strategy – which are tertiary syntheses premised on the prior historical understanding of events. The architectural topographical dimension of Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, therefore, not only situates a decisive historical event in the fall of Republican Rome, it also asserts the architectural topographic emplotment of historical narratives as a fundamental quality of the historical imagination. I have made the case for an extension of Collingwood’s prioritization of the discursive thoughts underlying past actions to acknowledge the architectural topographic agency, such thoughts embody. Thoughts-to-action bring the ‘interior’ (body-subject) and ‘exterior’ (body-world) into meaningful and dynamic relation in defining specific time-space events. The emphasis on the architectural topographic dimension of historical reenactment is, in many respects, more intuitive than Collingwood’s exclusive emphasis on mind since it speaks in concrete terms to the historian’s motivation to know what the past was like. Its importance for historical narration also has certain resonances with what the historian-philosopher Michael de Certeau (1984, 115–130) calls the “spatial stories” of urban walkers, whose spontaneous production of social knowledge is clearly differentiated from biological imperatives and cognitive function. For de Certeau spatial stories sustain a narrativizing (asynchronous-embodied) process that contests the ‘texturological’ (synchronic-disembodied) representation of institutionalized space by revealing the urban surface as an uneven bricolage of coded social meanings (91–92). We might ask then whether historical understanding involves the telling of ‘spatial stories’ in de Certeau’s sense? In some respects it does. For example, de Certeau notes how the spatial story of a text “privileges a ‘logic

22 Introduction of ambiguity’ […] It ‘turns’ the frontier into a crossing, and the river into a bridge. It recounts inversions and displacements: […] the river is what makes passage possible” (de Certeau, 1984, 128). The presence of the riverbridge in Collingwood’s example therefore immediately raises alternative possibilities: ‘what if Caesar had not crossed the Rubicon, then and there?’ The possible inversion and displacement of the actual event in historical writing is always implicit in its architectural topographic description because other things might or might not have happened then-there. This is not intended as a theoretical justification of ‘counterfactual’ history so much as an acknowledgement of the contingent situational ‘noise’ that any conventional account of historical events must, to an extent, repress. The varied ‘spatial stories’ of the many historical actors that comprise the noise are most likely subordinated to the scholarly intent of the historian. Their absolute repression, however, would also represent a failure of the historical imagination that must engage the ‘logic of ambiguity’ present in architectural topographic description in order to conceive even a minimal coherence in historical events in the light of sparse source material. Historical writing necessarily constructs its academic texturology in relation to a body of source material or evidence with which any given interpretation of past events must broadly correspond.The quality of this correspondence to past reality is largely evaluated in the architectural topographical dimension through a rehearsal of possible and alternative narrations, whether or not the ‘telling’ of these ultimately constitute the written historical account itself. Of course, in one sense, Caesar always crosses the Rubicon (at least we must believe he did) but the extent to which the event of his crossing is considered marginal or central to the telling of Roman Republican history, the extent to which the human scale of the ‘spatial story’ matters, in other words is a profound ontological as well as epistemological question facing the individual historian – because it concerns how much of the past’s infinite complexity is to admitted into his or her written account. Yet de Certeau, whose primary interest lies in theorizing the spatialtextual productions of modernity, can also be a frustrating inspiration for historical researchers. The bricolage of the spatial story lends itself to the poetics of individual subjectivities rather than the critical engagement with sources and scholarship which is a necessary part of the historian’s work. As an historical method the spatial story is more likely to produce highly personalized psychogeographies of place, with little regard for the chronological coherence that constrains the scholarly historian of events. This is hardly surprising since de Certeau’s theoretical purpose is precisely to disrupt conventional images of the city as these might appear in academic histories. It follows that for de Certeau ‘space’ itself is useful as an analytical category (he rarely refers to ‘architecture’ as such) because it is so adept at evading the architectural topographical specificity belonging to concrete historical situations. From this perspective the assertion that

Introduction

23

historical understanding engages architectural topographic understanding will be suspected so long as the material organization of architectural space (e.g. its morphology and topology) is viewed reductively as a representation of systematic social power; a texturology rather than an artefactual field of embodied social possibility. Even so, de Certeau’s important qualification of space as a “practiced place”, rendering place as a site of historically contingent social action (de Certeau 1984, 117), is a necessary corrective to the widespread preference for the term ‘place’ in the humanities on the basis that space as a concept is inadequately sensitive to expressing the specificities of cultural identity. Without such qualification the static essentialism of Heideggerian ‘place-asdwelling’, effectively abridges the contingencies of material existence to sanctify ‘place’ as a kind of spiritual point of departure-arrival. My own preference for developing research in the architectural topographic domain arises from the belief that it promises to achieve greater conceptual clarity as to what social space does socially when it is conceptualized as a dynamic field of movement, bodily co-presence and encounter but without advocating a spatialized reduction of specific sites and events to their morphological or topological descriptions. De Certeau’s concept of ‘texturology’ reveals political agency in the power to represent the city-as-a-text. My contrasting emphasis is on the ways in which historical writing both expresses and represses the descriptions of the material world enacted in the ‘social stories’ of historical actors. These accounts of historical events encode texts as timespace figures which are an imaginative source of historical understanding. The ambiguities inherent to generic figures of the architectural topographic encounter field (such as the crossing of a river-bridge in a landscape) inflect the historical narration of specific events (the crossing of the river-bridge over the Rubicon where Caesar brought his soldiers then, 10th January 49 BCE). The bridge over the Rubicon, in other words, proposed the question ‘to cross or not to cross?’ to all who approached it, but only Caesar (we assume) had reason to agonize over this decision as he considered whether or not to march on Rome. The figure embeds or ‘prefigures’ the architectural topographic description that expresses the contingencies of unfolding events. It also highlights the mechanisms through which this uncertainty is closed down in much historical writing where the logical ambiguity of architectural topographic dimension is repressed. This book explores architectural topography as a factor common to scholarly history, local history and historical fiction in studies of three epoch-defining historical events: the English Reformation, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. It does not seek to imply epistemological equivalence between the different genres examined but draws on them to identify the variety of ways accounts of major historical events encode architectural topographic descriptions. It is divided into two parts: Part I ‘Contingency in historiographies’ examines the expression and repression of architectural topography in historical writing. Chapters One

24 Introduction and Two explore the themes of contingency and artifice, and encounter and utterance respectively, as representing characteristic modes of architectural topographic expression in historical narratives. Chapter Three examines the repression of architectural description through processes of abbreviation, metaphorical sublimation and abridgement that are characteristic of environmental and milieu-based frameworks of historical explanation. Chapter Four develops this theme by reflecting on the indispensability of architectural topographic narratives to the ‘mapping’ of historical events. Part II ‘Writing the text as a city’ explores how time-space figurational motifs prefigure the architectural topographical imagination. Chapter Five deconstructs two archetypal fairy tales to offer formal definitions of architectural toponemes and architectural topographic sequences, before introducing five generic figures of architectural topographic description. Chapter Six identifies these figures in the work of Thomas Carlyle, Simon Schama and Hilary Mantel, focusing especially on their narratives of the French Revolution in Paris. Chapter Seven is concerned with a single account of local history Reminiscences of Old Sheffield (Leader 1875) in which the text is said to embody the built environment of the city through its account of a series of imagined urban walks. Chapter Eight concludes the book by reflecting on the architectural topographic prefiguration of urban-industrial England in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as giving rise to distinctive morphologies of feeling with the capacity to express the complex entanglement of social change and continuity that characterized this period.

Notes 1 Interestingly palimpsest is a term also used By Thomas Carlyle in his 1830 essay “On History” to describe the relationship between past and present. 2 Toynbee attributes the sentiment to the English scholar Sir Thomas Browne (1602-85) 3 Brutus was only one of a large number of conspirators involved in Caesar’s murder but as the two men had been close, it was his participation that most shocked Caesar. 4 I will continue to refer to historical ‘events’ in the conventional sense while acknowledging Collingwood’s point that the human dimension of historical events distinguishes them from “mere events” in the physical world that can be described using the methods of natural science. I will use the term social or historical ‘actions’ to refer to unspecified bodily activities in the past that have not been historicized as ‘events’ as such.

Part I

Contingency in the historiographies of the English Reformation, French Revolution and period of the Industrial Revolution in England

1

Contingency and artifice

I Definitions This chapter explores the qualities of contingency and artifice in architectural topographic descriptions in the narratives of contrasting events from different epochs of English and French history. The historiographical survey reveals how widely different levels of investment in architectural topographic description are associated with different approaches to historical writing. These approaches do not simply reflect stylistic choices but different ideas about the nature of historical knowledge. The historian’s imaginative response to the problem of representing the specificity of whenwhere events as a coherent narrative succession is architectural topographically encoded, allowing scope for the play of divergent possibilities and unknowns in the light of sparse and ambiguous source material. The artefactual domain does not give unlimited scope to contingency in the sense that ‘anything’s possible’ but expresses the time-space figurational constraints of a specific historical reality in terms of its contingent possibilities for movement, bodily co-presence and encounter. In developing this argument I distinguish three kinds of historical contingency in architectural topographic description: chance, programmatic and figurational. Contingency as chance (e.g. an overheard conversation or the taking of a wrong turning) refers to social actions that are essentially unpredictable and least susceptible to contextual or deterministic explanation as to when and where they took place. These may be trivial in themselves or ‘one-off’ events, but that is not to say they do not have important, though quite possibly unintended, consequences. Contingency of programme (e.g. a dance or procession) refers to social actions that are highly codified in advance and which may recur in similar formats at different times and locations. Here the contingent element is relatively constrained but arises from the particular situation of the ritual, namely whenwhere it actually happened. Figurational contingency (examples might equally include a riot or a process of scientific discovery) refers to the pattern of movement, bodily co-presence and encounter in the architectural topographic field that extends beyond the localized resolution of social

28 Contingency in the historiographies action to define a specific higher-order historical event dynamically, in relation to other, lower-order events. These three kinds of contingency are far from being mutually exclusive. In narrative terms both chance actions and programmatic actions constitute relatively localized figurational descriptions that serve to differentiate the apparently random element (contingency as chance) and element of flux in an otherwise predictable pattern (contingency of programme) from the prefigured architectural topographic field of quotidian, and therefore largely generic or routine, past social action. In historiographical terms architectural topographic description can be used to define different kinds of contingency that express the particular figuration of an historical event at contrasting resolutions of time-space. The historical imagination draws on architectural topographic description to express contingencies and resolve uncertainties in the process of consolidating the discretely located when-where actions of people in the past as nameable historical events. This is historical understanding in narrative mode but it does not necessarily lead to the writing of narrative history. It is the chronotopical quality of narrative in expressing the contingent figuration of historical events that explains its appeal to popular historians, historical novelists and their readers. I distinguish between artifice, where figurational contingency is exploited to assert possible relations between specific whenwhere actions that would be considered improbable on other grounds, and embellishment where figurational contingency is exploited for scene setting, the addition of period details for contextual or literary effect rather than narrative purpose – quite possibly (though not necessarily) without any evidential basis.1 If the architectural topographic dimension enables these fictionalizing tropes in historical writing, however, it equally reveals itself as an important source of authenticity in historical writing. This is because architectural topographic description is integral to how the historical imagination figures ‘messy’ patterns of socialized action into narratable historical events. The scholarly practice of history however, cannot stop there. It must critically engage architectural topographic intuitions of when-where relationality with archive evidence and competing historical accounts, such that the contingency admitted by the narration of events is used constructively to extend rather than distort the interpretative field. These propositions are developed in this chapter through an historiographical analysis of six key events in the histories of the English Reformation in the sixteenth century, the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth-century phase of the Industrial Revolution associated with rapid urbanization of Britain. The events that have been selected are widely referenced in most histories of these paradigmatic episodes of social change, making it possible to compare the architectural topographic descriptions of a range of different historians. The contrast between historical periods and events helps to identify different architectural topographic dimensions of the historical imagination. It was also intended that the selected events, whenever possible, should be those

Contingency and artifice 29 relatively likely to be familiar to the reader, in order to make the theoretical argument more accessible.

II Events of the English Reformation The marriage of King Henry VIII of England (1491–1547) and his second wife Anne Boleyn (1501-36) is a key episode in any account of English national history. Henry’s desire that his first marriage to the Spanish Catherine of Aragon (1485–1526) should be nullified in order to allow him to marry Anne, eventually led to the separation of the English church from the Roman Catholic church, and the establishment of the Church of England. Two examples from the narrative of their relationship will be used to illustrate how event contingency is expressed through its architectural topographic description. First, the possible initial meeting of Henry and Anne in June 1520 during the diplomatic spectacle known as the Field of Cloth of Gold, offers an example of contingency as chance.2 Secondly, Henry and Anne’s dance at Greenwich Palace in December 1526 that marked the beginning of their serious courtship, offers an example of contingency of programme. Given its pivotal role as a catalyst of the English Reformation, a major turning point in national history, the circumstances of Henry and Anne’s liaison before their courtship was formally established from the late 1520s are not only of interest to royal biographers but carry broad historical significance. Historians have long wondered whether the first meeting of Henry and Anne occurred at the extravagant Field of Cloth of Gold pageant in June 1520 when the courts of Henry VIII and Francis I, King of France, met at a site not far from Calais to compete in diplomacy, sports and conspicuous displays of wealth. Elaborate and highly choreographed occasions such as royal pageants lend themselves to a synchronic description as a kind of visual tableau, replete with details of luxurious residences, sartorial magnificence and excessive consumption, the claret flowing from fountains. Their contemporary renown means that royal spectaculars such as the Field of the Cloth of Gold are likely to be relatively well-documented events. To the cultural historian they offer an almost hyper-real snapshot of a period: its hierarchies, fashions, tastes and neuroses, but in narrative terms they can appear more recessive as it is less clear what significance they hold as events. This is exemplified by a scholarly review of a major academic study of the Field of the Cloth of Gold published in 1969 by historian Joycelyne Russell. The reviewer accused Russell’s work of being “simply antiquarian” on the basis that it offered insufficient interpretation of the significance of the event in the broader political and diplomatic contexts of early sixteenthcentury English history (Epperson 1970, 194). Whether or not this is fair criticism of Russell is less important here than how it reveals the difficulty of accommodating the density of impressionistic, material and visual description of an event such as the Field of the Cloth of Gold in the

30 Contingency in the historiographies compressed narratives of traditional political history. The choice seems to be between ‘thick’ anthropological description on the one hand and reductive linear narrative on the other. The potential significance of Henry and Anne’s first mutual encounter taking place at the Field of the Cloth of Gold problematizes this academic division of labour by drawing the historian into a detailed consideration of the architectural topographic specificity of an event narrative that the majority of Tudor historians view as a colourful, static tableau of marginal significance in political and diplomatic terms. In any case, it is far from certain that Anne Boleyn herself was then-there at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. It is the particularity of a unique occasion that begs the question; the evidence is at best circumstantial. The consensus of Anne’s biographers is that she probably was present in attendance on Francis I’s wife Queen Claude and hoping to see her sister Mary Boleyn and father Thomas Boleyn, both of whom who attended as members of the English court. Perhaps more to the point for Tudor historians though is it simply does not matter enough to the broader narrative of the English Reformation whether Henry and Anne were introduced in 1520 or not. The possibility of a chance meeting at the Field of the Cloth of Gold can be safely localized because they had many other opportunities to encounter one another as participants in the rituals of court life after Anne returned to live in England in 1525. Having said this, if Henry and Anne had become mutually acquainted in June 1520 and if this had been a factor in seeding their subsequent relationship, it would be highly significant given the role of their eventual marriage in precipitating the English Reformation. As the Tudor historian C.S.L Davies (1988, 13) noted, it would be “absurd to underestimate the importance of chance” in the unfolding of historical events, for all the influence of socio-economic and cultural determinants. And for the popular historian or novelist, would not the Field of the Cloth of Gold be the perfect dramatic setting for such an encounter? But if there is a theatrical backdrop and a genuine possibility of bodily co-presence on the site, what is the credible narrative of any possible encounter? Russell states the historian’s dilemma as follows: [Anne in 1520] would have been about 19, and it may be that her dark but striking beauty was noticed by Henry of England. We have no evidence, but inevitably speculation is rife. (Russell 1969, 126) In the absence of any certainty all the historical imagination has to work with is the architectural topographic description of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, a temporary settlement at which the two protagonists may have been bodily co-present. The English and French encampments sharing a central ceremonial space, the arrangement of the royal apartments, the ceremonials

Contingency and artifice 31 of access to their residences describe a dynamic encounter field that readily translates into particular narrative figures that makes the unlikely meeting between Henry and Anne a coherent proposition in imaginative terms; an event that could have happened. It necessitates a research process involving cross referencing such contextual evidence as is available to evaluate the likelihood that it actually did. Russell’s study traces ‘speculation’ as to Henry and Anne’s encounter to the nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874). For Michelet it was a meeting “fraught with significance”, on the basis that it would precipitate the English separation from Rome – a development for which as a protestant, he had some sympathy (Russell 1969, 126). Michelet viewed the contingent circumstances of their first meeting less as chance so much as divine providence. Of the occasion when Henry went to dine with Queen Claude, Michelet writes: This prince […] found her in the middle of that beautiful crowd of ladies and damsels. Was he so blind that he did not see the youngest and the most charming? Has the queen forgotten to point out to him that a child of fourteen3, beautiful, witty, graceful, advanced, and well educated, was one of her subjects? It seems unlikely to me. (Michelet 1876, 219, author’s translation from the French) The Victorian archivist and popular historian Alexander Ewald (1842–1891) subsequently speculated as to Anne’s presence “under canvas” in the tents belonging to the French court on the slopes outside the abandoned town of Arde where the main ceremonial would take place (Ewald 1883, 445). On arriving at the lodgings of the Queen of France, he was met at the entrance by the most beautiful of the ladies of the household dressed in cloth of gold. The weakness of Henry for the sex did not permit him to hurry over this part of the ceremony; he passed slowly along the line of fair dames—was Ann Boleyn among them? —and amused himself by critically inspecting its ranks. […] At the end of the corridor he was met by the mother of Francis “dressed as a widow,” who did him reverence and led him to the apartments of her daughter-in-law. (450-51) Simon Schama in A History of Britain presents the reader with an evocative sketch of the Field of the Cloth of Gold tableau before continuing that “somewhere in the middle of this over-dressed mêlée was the young woman who would bring down […] quite inconceivably, the Roman Church in England” (Schama 2000, 244). Schama is understandably equivocal about whether the two actually met at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. He allows the possibility they were introduced while declaring that more likely Henry’s attention was “engaged elsewhere” at this time.

32 Contingency in the historiographies Historians who admit the possibility of Henry and Anne’s meeting at the Field of the Cloth of Gold use architectural topographic description of the occasion to shift from largely synchronic, illustrative accounts of the pageant to descriptions of the routines and rituals of movement, bodily copresence and encounter that co-opt Anne herself into the narrative of English history at a definable point in time and space. For Michelet (1876, 215) Henry “found” Anne in Queen Claude’s accommodation. For Ewald, Henry observed her in a line of women as he moved along a corridor towards the threshold of Queen Claude’s apartments. Schama, with less precision, imagines Anne emerging from the inchoate noise of the “mêlée” to position herself at the centre of the action. Of course each of these historians is alluding to an almost intangible occurrence. It could never be established for sure, even in so well a documented event as the Field of the Cloth of Gold, whether one human being (Henry) noticed another human being (Anne) so as to differentiate her from any number of other females of the French court. However attractive this narrative is in literary or historiographical terms, the architectural topographic field in itself can only prefigure narrative possibilities in the historical imagination. It is not enough to rely on establishing the probability of mutual co-awareness of Henry and Anne in the absence of specific evidence – still less without considering what any co-awareness may have meant personally to these individuals at this time. But if architectural topographic description cannot tell us exactly what did happen, it is essential to the imagining of the what might have happened were the evidence there to confirm or deny it, and also what could not have happened. For where the shape of the encounter field precludes the bodily co-presence of two people then it follows that any attempt to imagine and thereby narrate such a meeting must be logically incoherent as history. I have used the event or (more likely) non-event of Henry and Anne’s meeting at the field as an example of ‘contingency as chance’ because an unscheduled encounter between two people producing mutual coawareness is essentially an unpredictable event. It follows that it is the most likely of my three categories of contingency to stimulate the sceptical question ‘would history have been written differently if it were possible to establish whether this encounter had/ had not taken place’? I have already explained how the historiography of the relationship of Henry and Anne establishes that any meeting at the Field of the Cloth of Gold can be consigned to localized significance; they were probably introduced to each other at a later date. On the other hand, the possible presence of Anne at the pageant in 1520 is not a possibility that more recent biographies, both of Anne (Bernard 2010) and her sister Mary (Weir 2011), are willing to ignore. Whatever historians ultimately know or do not know about the first meeting of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, there was certainly nothing inevitable about their relationship. Henry’s feelings towards Anne are often described in terms of an infatuation. From Henry’s perspective at least it was not an arranged or

Contingency and artifice 33 diplomatic marriage – in contrast to his youthful betrothal to Catherine – but an affair of the heart and of the eye. Any chance meeting in advance of their formal courtship in the late 1520s could have had an influence on a course of events that took an increasingly dramatic turn as Henry struggled to release himself from his marriage to Catherine. Time-space figuration constructs events in relation to what happened before and after, yet the Field of the Cloth of Gold can seem to exist in splendid isolation, suspended in almost fairy-tale world. The insurmountable difficulties of evidence to definitively confirm or rule out the meeting of Henry and Anne in 1520, combined with its relatively limited capacity to disrupt the principal narrative of the English Reformation either way, means that inclusion of the Field of the Cloth of Gold episode might be considered a mere embellishment of the Reformation narrative, a beautiful ‘aside’, wonderful for the detail required of popular histories but easily omitted without consequence. Embellishment uses architectural topographic description to support the accretion of period detail that sustains the visual impact of the scene depicted but has little narrative or explanatory value in its own right. Similarly, the architectural topographic description of the first meeting of Henry and Anne when taken in isolation from the broader historical contexts is not simply a question of antiquarian embellishment but is also a means of historical artifice. Here, imaginative speculation can be given free rein to actions that occurred tangentially, as it were, to those constituting the principal narrative arc, where the sequence of events is more firmly established and the relation of possibility to evidence more closely scrutinized. In this sense, the awareness of mutual attraction ‘across a crowded room’ of the royal prince and the ambitious younger daughter of minor nobility has the potential to escape historical narration altogether as an archetypal figure of courtship and romance. This is certainly how Michelet tells it. For him Henry was the “unwary” viewer of Anne whose “heart is unexpectedly wounded by an innocent flash of the eyes”. He continues, But how was it from that day when this child of the two nations [Anne] had to reveal to him [Henry] the French grace? A smile from the little girl was able to make the salvation of Europe. (Michelet 1876, 219 – author’s translation from the French) Michelet’s is less a historical verdict as a philosophical ‘happy ever after’ in vindication of Anne’s protestantism - though of course Michelet is only too aware of Anne’s later execution for high treason in 1536. Artifice of a slightly different kind is present in Schama’s use of the Field of the Cloth of Gold to begin the pivot of his narrative away from the early phase of Henry’s reign associated with Henry’s Lord Chancellor Cardinal Wolsey (the mastermind of the Field of the Cloth of Gold pageant) and towards the main phase of the English Reformation with Anne, Henry and Thomas

34 Contingency in the historiographies Cromwell, (Wolsey’s replacement as Henry’s principal advisor), as its main protagonists. The mention of a possible meeting between Henry and Anne in this context is unimportant other than to signal this change in narrative direction. This is not a question of a misuse of sources – though for all their footnotes neither Michelet nor Ewald are specific about the basis for their claims. There is certainly no basis for them in the principal English language source Edward Hall’s Chronicle (1809 [1548]). Anne’s “smile” for Henry as described by Michelet and even her position in the “middle” of Schama’s “over-dressed mêlée” go beyond what can be firmly established in terms of evidence. Such examples of embellishment and artifice are apparently credible is because they are consistent with architectural topographic descriptions of the Field of the Cloth of Gold as a specific when-where encounter field. Contemporary academic historians would, of course, never allow themselves the kind of literary license Michelet employs but the contingency of the meeting of Henry and Anne remains implicit in histories of the English Reformation. As sober an historian as Wormald (2010, 238) argues that but for specific events there would have been a reformation of one kind or another in Britain, although it would have been “later” and “different”. She is considering the possibility of Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, bearing a son or agreeing to the annulment of her marriage. The same ‘what if’ logic applies to the question ‘what if Henry had not met and/or been attracted to Anne?’, even if the consequences are less obvious. The chance of this introduction happening at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520 – over five years before they were known to be courting – is indeed small, and its ultimate significance for the broader narrative of the English Reformation, marginal. Yet the reason why it exists at all as a possibility in the historical imagination is because the strong architectural topographic specificity of the Field of the Cloth of Gold as an encounter field gives expresses it as a concrete possibility. In Collingwoodian terms the imaginative exercise serves to link the disembodied interior thought-to-action ‘what was Henry’s thought that inspired his interest in courting Anne?’ to the embodied thought-to-action that encodes the architectural topographic description of the encounter field in the question: ‘what was Henry’s thought that inspired his interest in courting Anne there and then?’ Perhaps only Michelet completely embodies the thought-to-action in his text, for him the answer was Anne’s smile of “French grace”; for Ewald (more obliquely) it was the sight of Anne at the entrance to Queen Claude’s residence, for Russell and Schama (more obliquely still) it was how she stood out from the crowd. More typically though, the architectural topographic description is entirely repressed in historical accounts on the basis of insufficient evidence. This does not change the fact that acknowledgement of contingency as chance, arising from unpredictable patterns of movement, bodily co-presence and encounter in the past, depends upon the architectural topographic exercise

Contingency and artifice 35 of the historical imagination in prefiguring the encounter field of complex when-where situations and conceiving alternative narrative possibilities on this basis. If the question of whether Henry’s will to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon was caused by his attraction to Anne Boleyn “will never be certainly known” it is more straightforward to track the progress of their courtship through its later, better documented, stages as it gradually became public knowledge (Marshall 2018, 164). The second historiographical example, the dance of Henry and Anne at a grand reception thrown for the French Ambassadors at Greenwich Palace on 5 May 1527, occurred just before this public phase of their relationship. The interpretative focus here is less on contingency as chance in the sense of unpredictable events that ‘need not (indeed may not) have actually happened’ as they did, so much as on contingency of programme. This implies the deviation of what actually happened from the pre-scripted patterns of movement, bodily co-presence and encounter associated with the performance of particular ritual or situation. The Greenwich reception was a highly formal occasion in which Anne’s participation was carefully planned. The Victorian historian John Lingard describes the reception at Greenwich in the following manner. Before their departure Henry gave to the ambassadors a magnificent entertainment at Greenwich. Three hundred lances were broken before supper; in the evening the company withdrew to the ballroom, where they were entertained with an oration and songs, a fight at barriers, and the dancing of maskers. About midnight the king and [the French Ambassador and viscount] Turenne retired with six others, disguised themselves as Venetian noblemen, and returning took out ladies to dance. The reader will not be surprised to learn that Henry’s partner was Anne Boleyn. (Lingard 1874, 237) By May 1527 the courtship of Henry and Anne had been underway for a little over a year. It was not long before the ambassadorial reception, in April 1527, that Henry had first consulted his advisors about the possibility of annulling his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. This may, therefore, have been the first time the two had danced together with Henry thinking about marriage (Ives 1986, 83-4). One of Anne’s biographers Warnicke (1989, 56-7) draws on a contemporary account of this entertainment in a French manuscript to describe how the French ambassadors spoke with Anne and were impressed by her knowledge of France and French. The interest of the ambassadors may have encouraged Henry who, now satisfied his marriage to Catherine of Aragon was invalid, “surely had begun to observe the ladies around him in a new light, that is, from the perspective of an unmarried man” (57). It is perhaps not a coincidence that it was from the summer of 1527 that Henry’s relationship with Anne became public knowledge. While

36 Contingency in the historiographies King Henry danced with Anne Boleyn, the ambassador De Turenne danced with the Princess Mary, daughter of Catherine. In a popular history of Henry’s six marriages, David Starkey describes the reception in the following terms: It took place in a specially constructed banqueting house and theatre: the decorations of the theatre were painted by Holbein, while the banqueting house was hung with Henry’s most precious tapestries and stacked with his finest gold and silver plate. The festivities culminated in the evening entertainments of 5 May, when, by the King’s command, [De Turenne danced with the Princess Mary and the King with Anne Boleyn] (Starkey 2003, 284) In both Lingard and Starkey’s accounts, it is notable how architectural topographic description is deployed to bring particular historical actors into embodied relation with one another in a specific situation. Lingard’s description foregrounds the choreography of the event in time and space, whereas Starkey prioritizes the embellishment of architectural description with slightly exaggerated period details (i.e. tapestries are the ‘most precious’, the gold and silver plate is the ‘finest’ and ‘stacked’), which must be regarded as impressionistic. In both cases the architectural topographic dimension frames a contingency in the narrative of Henry and Anne’s relationship. For Lingard the appeal to the reader who “will not be surprised” inserts Anne Boleyn as the dynamic element in what otherwise would have been a conventional, if extravagant, royal masque – precisely because Anne’s dance with Henry may well have been ‘surprising’, certainly notable, to the other guests. Starkey also uses the occasion to invite the reader to reflect with him on a contingent circumstance, namely, the proximity of Catherine of Aragon’s twenty-one-year-old daughter, the Princess Mary, to Anne, her mother’s future nemesis. “What the two women thought of each other during this encounter we can only guess”, notes Starkey, before pointing out that Mary “probably noticed nothing” (Starkey 2003, 285). The proposition is an interesting one, but it is also an example of artifice in prioritizing an expression of the historical imagination over the existence of source material that could lend it scholarly credence. The progress of Henry and Anne’s evolving relationship did not depend on their dance at the Greenwich reception. The ritual formalities of aristocratic social life could – and did – bring them together at other times and locations. As a narrative figure, therefore, the significance of this event’s choreography remains localized to the extent that it is regarded as peripheral detailing to the central narrative of Anne becoming Henry’s consort and, from 1533, his Queen. Yet a dogmatic insistence on this argument serves to repress the contingencies of when-where specificity that is the stuff of historical understanding, in preference for declarative statements of

Contingency and artifice 37 historical fact abstracted from the time-space through which historical events unfolded. While it is notable how the Greenwich Palace reception of May 1527 is sporadically acknowledged in both scholarly as well as popular biographies, it is scarcely mentioned in the major national histories of Tudor England or the English Reformation. Marshall’s accessible but scholarly Heretics and Believers (2018, 167) goes further than most in stating that in May 1527 “Anne appeared in public with Henry for the first time, at a Greenwich reception for the French ambassador”. While it clearly matters in narrative terms to establish the chronology of their intimate relationship becoming public, the absence of architectural topographic description in Marshall’s text confers on it a misleading sense of inevitability. There is, for example, no sense how things may have hung in the balance if Anne had performed her part badly in front of the French dignitaries or if Mary had attempted some kind of desperate intervention on her mother’s behalf. While it is the historian’s primary task to establish to what did happen rather than what might have happened, his or her ability to pursue the former task is premised on the facility to imagine the latter in terms of the competing credibility of narrative possibilities, such that the contingencies of the architectural topographic encounter field are not repressed. It matters historically then that the dance of Henry and Anne did in fact occur on 5 May 1527 at the diplomatic reception at Greenwich Palace. The fact that it took place then and there was not a matter of contingency as chance – on the contrary the dance was a highly scripted event – but historians’ investment in the architectural topographic description of the entertainments reveals how the narration of the relatively generic figure of the aristocratic masque is necessarily contingent on its site-specific performance by particular people at a particular time and location. This is an example of architectural topographic description affording contingency of programme. The critical juncture that Henry and Anne’s relationship had reached by May 1527, the reaction of the French Ambassadors to Anne, the proximity of Anne and Mary and what that may have meant to either party – these were not repeatable elements. The architectural topographic description of the generic figure of the formal entertainment frees the historian to imagine what may have been different in the unfolding of this particular when-where event realized as the figuration of a specific social action.

III Events of the French Revolution I now shift chronological and geographical registers to the history of the French Revolution to examine the architectural topographic dimension of two well-known events: the Tennis Court Oath (20 June 1789) and the Champ de Mars Massacre (17 July 1791) The first is principally an example of contingency of programme, the second principally of figurational contingency. The first example, the Tennis Court Oath, was a highly symbolic event in the

38 Contingency in the historiographies birth of the French Republic. The Oath committed the oath-takers to the autonomy of the new French National Assembly as the single sovereign body of the French nation, freed from the royal prerogative. In so doing it began the parallel process of dissolving the monarchical institutions of the French ancien regime. The Tennis Court Oath offers a strong contrast to the previous historiographical examples from the history of the English Reformation in that it justifies a mention in almost all histories of the French Revolution; in that sense it belongs to the core narrative of that history, no matter how abbreviated its inclusion may be. If the occasion of the Tennis Court Oath had not occurred then something very much like it, liberating deputies to gather as a National Assembly without royal sanction, would have been required for the revolutionary events to unfold more or less as they did. That said, it would be a mistake to view the taking of the Tennis Court Oath as an historic inevitability. The localized patterns of movement, bodily co-presence and encounter that ultimately led the deputies from the Royal Palace of Versailles to the tennis court nearby could not have been predicted. The immediate cause of their necessity lay in King Louis XVI’s decision to deny entry to the debating chamber to all deputies of the 3rd Estate. These were representatives of the common people of France as distinct from the aristocratic 1st Estate and ecclesiastical 2nd Estate, who were permitted to enter. Louis’ decision led to some 600 deputies of the 3rd Estate wandering about in frustration on the road between Versailles and Paris before one of their number (Dr Guillotin, no less) managed to procure the nearby tennis court of a friend off the Rue de Vieux Versailles as a temporary home; a small number of deputies belonging to the 1st and 2nd Estates would also join them. The weather was not good. In driving rain, the capacious interior of the tennis court was the “nearest large building that offered shelter” (Cobban 1972, 145). Had it not rained so hard on the Paris road and had the tennis-court building not been conveniently available to Dr Guillotin at such short notice, it is conceivable that the revolutionary moment may at least have been postponed. The directing of some 600 emotional and soaking wet men and their excited supporters away from the Palace of Versailles and towards an unknown tennis court, albeit over a relatively short distance (less than a mile), cannot have been a straightforward operation. Architectural topographic description identifies contingency as chance in the improvised re-orientation of the exiled deputies of the National Assembly towards their new, temporary, accommodation. In the unscripted hiatus following their failure to enter Versailles, there lay sufficient scope for confusion, dissent and dissipation to prevent the deputies from effectively re-convening in the tennis court. Michelet puts it like this: Behold our new kings [the deputies], put out, kept out of doors, like unruly scholars. Behold them wandering about in the rain, among the people, on Paris avenue. All agree about the necessity of holding the

Contingency and artifice 39 meeting and of assembling. Some shout, Let us go to the Place d’Armes! Others to Marly! Another to Paris! (Michelet 1967 [1847], 120) Michelet’s evidence for these claims is uncertain, but they clearly express the architectural topographic operation of the historical imagination in revealing the contingencies that relate to when-where events. Neither is this a trivial exercise. That the most practical venue of choice, a nearby (indoor) tennis court, was agreed by the ‘wandering’ deputies over the alternative suggestions is as critical a part of the revolutionary narrative as the two symbolically significant and politically separate sites that bracket the beginning and eventual destination of the deputies’ march. Once the deputies were inside the tennis court with the avowed purpose of using it to pledge loyalty to the newly sovereign National Assembly the architectural topography encounter field came under greater control; it now resembles a comparable example of contingency of programme to the Greenwich Palace reception of Henry VIII. In generic terms a debate, like a masque, is a highly scripted procedure that can, in principle, take place in any room of sufficient size. (Indeed, this was the point the deputies of the National Assembly were making on 20 June 1789 in taking their oath in a tennis court rather than a royally designated building.) Of course, if a tennis court could only be used for playing tennis one could say its ‘form follows its function’ – in other words that its immaterial socio-cultural determinants entirely dictate what happens there. But the debate of the deputies and the taking of the oath of loyalty to the sovereign National Assembly shows such a functionalist view misunderstands the potential of architectural topographic arrangements to generate alternative situational possibilities, even in their most localized descriptions. It was precisely the architectural qualities of tennis court as a reasonably large, interior space with well-defined, defensible, boundaries and good visual accessibility from peripheral galleries that made it possible to repurpose it as a debating chamber ad hoc with minimum modification. In legislative debates social interaction takes place between a select set of individuals who represent different interests according to a set of proscriptive rules that govern occupation of the debating chamber itself and its decision-making procedure. Yet relatively generic codes of debate do not undermine the when-where specificity of its performance. The performance of the debate was affected by the material conditions fabricated for this purpose: the makeshift desk installed for the president, the lack of proper seating for deputies, the over-crowded spectator area. Interestingly these architectural topographic descriptions of the tennis court/debating chamber by historians even suggest a parallel between one rule-based activity (tennis) and another (debating). For Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) the tennis court was:

40 Contingency in the historiographies […] four walls; naked, except aloft some poor wooden penthouse, or spectators’-gallery […] on the floor not now an idle teeheeing, a snapping of balls and rackets; but the bellowing din of an indignant National Representation, scandalously exiled hither! (Carlyle 1837, 371) Schama, in similar vein to Carlyle, puts it this way in Citizens: the naked, echoing court was the perfect opposite of the profusely decorated palace from where they had come […] There was nothing but their bodies, their voices bounding off the pitched interior roofs from which tennis balls usually rebounded. (Schama 1989, 359) There is metaphorical artifice in the association of the sound of tennis balls being replaced by the voices of the deputies of the National Assembly. For Carlyle and Schama this sound is amplified by the echoing “naked” space of the tennis court. For Michelet (1967, 122) it was a “miserable building, entirely modern, bare, and unfurnished” where the “pure spirit of Reason and Justice” might reign – but Schama’s metaphor seems less extravagant. The rebounding of voices is a reminder that the deputies’ voices were not simply being projected onto the blank canvas of history but into a very real and dynamic situation. Yet the effective use of language is, of course, paramount in debating. Schama notes that it was the particular achievement of the Tennis Court Oath to forge something highly abstract – the idea of French nation – represented in its National Assembly that was no longer defined by a particular building gifted by the crown but by the simple fact of the deputies meeting (Schama 1989, 359). This abstract idea is the supreme symbolism of the Tennis Court Oath made famous in the drawing of Jacques-Louis David in which all but one of the deputies raises their hand in taking the oath. Yet language, no matter how universal its ambition, is also grounded in the material context of its production. The oath crafted by Mounier contained a commitment that the deputies were “never to be separated” until their work of making an “equitable Constitution” was done (359). It is hard not to read this in more concrete terms as a reaction to the real danger of the deputies’ collective will dissipating in light of their exile from Versailles. For Michelet in 1846 the echoing tennis court, “that cradle of Liberty” as he described it, was a site of pilgrimage, completing its transformation from a profane recreational space to one of sacred reverence. But visiting it in that year he felt ashamed by what he regarded as his generation’s betrayal of the ideals expressed in the oath. He sadly reflects “We felt we were unworthy, and quitted that sacred place,” (Michelet 1967, 121). Here Michelet seems to acknowledge how the ideal always struggles to transcend the materiality of its realization. Contingency of programme then has a

Contingency and artifice 41 localized description where the chance element emerges from the tension between the scriptable aspatial rules that govern a given routine or ritual and their embodiment in a specific when-where location where the shape of the encounter field must be adapted for that purpose. By contrast, the third kind of contingency I examine here, figurational contingency, is identified in the way in which historians use architectural topographic description to figure the time-space relationality of historical events over sometimes extended scales of time-space. Another core episode in the history of the French Revolution helps to clarify this point. This is the Champ de Mars Massacre of 17 July 1791 that fatally split the ruling constitutionalist party who wanted a reformed monarchy from the more militant republicans. In the early evening the National Guard marched out from Paris to the Champ de Mars, a large space on the edge of the city, to meet a crowd of some 20,000 that had come in mainly peaceful procession to sign a petition against the National Assembly’s decision to persist with a constitutional monarchy. When the National Guard opened fire on the crowd some 50 people died and more were injured. Hampson (1974, 107-8) seeks to explain the Champ de Mars Massacre in the context of the emerging conflict between the middle class and popular elements in the revolution, the former seeking an excuse to repress the latter in the name of maintaining public order. By implication then, if not a massacre in the Champ de Mars, then-there, it would happen sooner or later, somewhere else, such was the structural inevitability of the factional split. In this sense the explanatory value of contingency of chance (i.e. running into the line of fire) or of contingency as programme (i.e. the assertion of public order on public space) in the day’s events is essentially restricted to localized events in Champ de Mars itself. Scholarly interpretations like Hampson’s prefer to focus on how the massacre was determined by political divisions that reflected deep and divergent socioeconomic interests. Yet if, as I have maintained, the historical imagination operates as an architectural topographic imagination then it cannot be so localized. The task of understanding what actually happened during a given ‘then-there’ event involves bringing complex distributions of other ‘when-where’ actions into coherent relation – an architectural topographic exercise in the time-space figuration of events that produces narrative propositions. Such an imaginative exercise can only be extended so far as the historian’s knowledge makes this possible, but as the ‘raw material’ of historical understanding, it is surely anterior to the assertion of synchronic sociological categories on the contingencies of situated events. Interestingly (and no doubt deliberately), Hampson ignores the chance element mentioned in many popular accounts of the Champ de Mars Massacre. It is that martial law was only declared by the National Assembly following the republican crowd’s peremptory lynching of two men found hiding under the wooden structure of Altar of the Fatherland where the petition was to be signed

42 Contingency in the historiographies (Lefebvre 1965, 209; Cobban 1972, 183. Hazan 2017, fn 131). These men were presumed to be traitors planning to bomb the event, but as they were unarmed and otherwise unknown individuals it seems unlikely this was the case. Narrative historians of the French Revolution tend to view this incident as an example of the ‘butterfly effect’ that transformed a relatively localized incident into a major revolutionary event (e.g. Hibbert 1983 and Schama 1989). Carlyle refers to the concealed men as an “Ill-starred pair of individuals!” boring with their gimlet “to see, perhaps ‘with lubricity,’” whatever from that point of vision, could be seen. He continues: But indeed what stupidest thing may not human Dulness, Pruriency, Lubricity, Chance and the Devil, choosing Two out of Half-a-million idle human heads, tempt them to? (Carlyle 1837, 1061) Carlyle’s method is to meditate briefly on what could have motivated two men to put themselves in such a position at such a fevered moment and to see the world from their point of view, looking out from beneath the altar scaffolding. Rudé (1978), historian of the French revolutionary crowd, does something similar in his description of the incident. Unfortunately for the petitioners, before their arrival, a curious incident took place that morning in the Champ de Mars that, in the tense political atmosphere prevailing, provided the authorities with a pretext for intervention. Two individuals who had hidden under the ‘autel de la patrie’ –possibly with the intention of getting a better view of the ladies’ ankles– were pulled out by suspicious bystanders and unceremoniously hanged from a nearby window (89) A Marxian historian like Rudé would certainly not be intellectually inclined to see key events of the French Revolution as determined by chance – but it is not his particular interpretation that is at issue. The extent to which the two figures beneath the altar of the fatherland matter in explaining the Champ de Mars Massacre is a question for specialist historians. Rather I am concerned to reflect on how the process of historical understanding involves imaginative recourse to the architectural topographic encounter field in order to bring the discretely positioned actions of individuals (e.g. the men who hide beneath the altar) and groups (e.g. the crowd that lynch the men) into coherent time-space relation with the pervasive reach of aspatial agencies (e.g. the ideology of republican clubs, the state violence of martial law). These intersections are revealed in the discretely located actions of individual and groups (e.g. that sign the petition or fire on the crowd). This imaginative process forms the basis of intelligible narrative propositions that enables critical reflection on the flow of events, prior to the assertion of any causal relation between chronologically sequential

Contingency and artifice 43 actions. It is similarly anterior to interpretation on the basis of synchronic socio-economic or cultural categories such as class, to the extent that these are abstracted from the thoughts-to-actions of the historical actors themselves. Figurational contingency implies that while each actor may have their own point of view, the (interior) thought-to-action of the event embodies the (exterior) social, architectural topographic reality in which actions are realized in ways that are not entirely predictable. It involves acknowledging sources of interpretative ambiguity because almost inevitably the time-space relationality between discrete actions in the past can rarely be established with certainty even when they can be assumed to exist.

IV Events from the period of the Industrial Revolution in England I now make a further shift of historical period and geographical location to examine the themes of contingency and artifice in the historiography of early nineteenth-century England. At this time new industrial cities such as Manchester returned no members to Parliament, leaving large concentrations of middle and working-class populations, most of whom had no right to vote in any case, entirely without political representation. The two historical events that form the focus of the discussion from this period, the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 and the ‘Great’ Parliamentary Reform Act of 1832 can be understood in this context. There are some parallels between the architectural topographic description of the Champ de Mars Massacre and the massacre of demonstrators for Parliamentary reform at St Peter’s Field, but the broader social-political conditions were very different. On 16 August 1819, some 60,000 people had gathered in central Manchester to hear Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt and others make the radical case for, among other things, universal male suffrage. Shortly after Hunt took the hustings the Manchester magistracy took the view that the local constabulary was inadequate to manage the threat to public order and called for military assistance. The yeomanry (militia) soon arrived in St Peter’s Field on horseback and wielding sabres, killed some 18 people and injured some 650 in about 20 minutes (Navickas 2016; Poole 2014). At the localized architectural topographic resolution of St Peter’s Field, the outcome of a violent armed intervention by soldiers in a dense crowd of demonstrators is predictable as to its general outcome (people are likely to be hurt or killed) but unpredictable as to specifics (who will be hurt or killed). Many of the dead and wounded were trampled by horses and slashed pretty much at random by soldiers, a constable was also killed. The exact movements, bodily co-presence and encounter of individuals in a crowd taken by surprise, including those of the attacking soldiers, could not have been pre-meditated with any precision under these conditions. While these contingencies of chance might be considered trivial in terms of the historical significance of Peterloo, how it played out will have

44 Contingency in the historiographies mattered a good deal to the people present in St Peter’s Fields as a matter of life and death. Similarly, at this localized resolution, contingency of programme can be identified in historians’ speculations about how established social codes of peaceful mass demonstration were put under strain in the period before the yeomanry arrived by the large numbers of people present and the official nervousness around the organization of the meeting. The demonstrators formed a protective barrier around the hustings, preventing the constables from making it easily accessible to magistrates, because of (well-founded) fears that they may wish to arrest the speakers (Reid 1989, 161). The shifting arrangements of bodies in St Peter’s Square comprised a dynamic encounter field that the watching magistrates began to feel was moving beyond their control – even while the demonstration itself remained peaceful. However, it is hard to know what ‘move’ exactly may have tipped the balance in this respect to precipitate the military intervention. The Manchester magistrate William Hulton was probably in the best position to see and hear how the situation in St Peter’s Field was developing, from a first-floor window overlooking St Peter’s Field. This does not, of course, make his judgment of events objective. The popular historian of Peterloo Robert Reid, ‘re-enacts’ Hulton’s reasons for giving the order to the military to intervene. This involves a rehearsal of the “agitated state” of people in the first-floor room, where no fewer than 60 local manufacturers had arrived to enquire about what action Hulton was prepared to take against protestors. It must have been a charged atmosphere. Reid comments: Flustered and under pressure, [Hulton’s] purpose was to try to deal with a crowd which he has been convinced was about to turn to violence. (Reid 1989, 244) The architectural topographic description of William Hulton’s situation enables his encounter with local manufacturers to figure in his narrative of Peterloo. In Reid’s account it proposes an imaginative connection between the presence of the manufacturers and the thoughts-to-action of Hulton in requesting military assistance – though assertions as to the effects of Hulton’s state of mind in this situation must, to an extent, be regarded as an artifice of historical explanation. This does not mean that it is possible to localize the responsibility for the Peterloo Massacre in the psychology of a local magistrate who felt himself to be under pressure – quite the contrary. Peterloo, like the killings in the Champ de Mars, is principally an example of figurational contingency in an architectural topographic sense. It describes a highly dynamic encounter field characterized by the movements of large numbers of people including demonstrators, children, speakers and agencies of law and order, approaching

Contingency and artifice 45 St Peter’s Field from all directions across a large urbanizing area. Unlike the Champ de Mars Massacre, a considerable amount of advanced official planning had gone into preparing the reaction of state authorities to the demonstrators. The bloody events that unfolded once the soldiers arrived gave concrete realization to the abstract principle of state-sanctioned violence against Manchester’s working population. The Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth himself had authorized force if necessary “by the law or the sword”, as he put it, before pragmatically recommending caution as the meeting approached (Poole 2006, 276). Even so, the local authorities knew they had the authority to use military force against the demonstrators and had put the yeomanry on standby as a consequence. Figurational contingency in this case is identified in the conjunction of multiple time-space trajectories of historical actors with pervasive beliefs about public order and Parliamentary reform (to name just two), connecting the particular events in St Peter’s Field to broader socio-economic and political developments. It asserts that any claims to an historical understanding of Peterloo, as opposed to a moral or political verdict on its outcomes, must be parsed through a consideration of the messy reality of what actually happened. It is by reflecting on the figurational contingency of the architectural topographic encounter field that the trajectories of different historical actors can be seen to intersect, and different narrative propositions identified to embody these contrasting perspectives but without excluding others prima facie. The generation of such narrative propositions and their resolution (which can never be complete) involves the exercise of the historical imagination to critically engage with possible figures of time-space relationality, that culminated, for example, in Hulton’s decision to call in the militia. In an event as multifaceted as an Peterloo, such relations could never be ‘found’ in the archive but only in the architectural topographic facility of historical thought. The brutality of the armed intervention in a non-violent demonstration has ensured that Peterloo (its very name includes an unflattering reference to the battle of Waterloo) has become a symbol for the bloody oppression of legitimate working-class political aspiration by the forces of reaction. It is a core element of the emancipatory narrative through which the labouring population of industrial England became aware of itself as an oppressed class. The labour historian E.P. Thompson stated as long ago as 1963 that: We shall probably never be able to determine with certainty whether or not Liverpool4 and Sidmouth were parties to the decision to disperse the meeting with force. But we can no more understand the significance of Peterloo in terms of the local politics of Manchester than we can understand the strategic importance of Waterloo in terms of the field and the orders of the day. (Thompson 1991 [1963], 749-50)

46 Contingency in the historiographies In other words, perhaps the contingency of details of who said or did what, exactly where and when, ultimately do not matter because, in an oppressive political system where acquiescence is policed by the threat of force, what else can be expected but bloody repression? Thompson is no doubt right in one sense, but there is a danger in his argument historiographically speaking. Events such as Peterloo (or the Tennis Court Oath) that conduct a high symbolic charge can easily be metaphorized, leading the contingent experiences and points of view of historical actors being repressed as rather trivial distractions from the principal event narrative, which is contested in terms of what it does or does not represent. For the historian to lose track of the material contingencies in unfolding events is to open the door to ideologically-driven argument between competing static representations. My second example from this period also shows how the socio-economic reality of early nineteenth-century Britain kept Parliamentary Reform clearly on the agenda. The popular agitation for reform which had received such harsh treatment from the British state in 1819 had amassed sufficient upper- and middle-class support to make it respectable by 1832, when the Great Reform Act was passed into law. Of course, the main beneficiaries of the 1832 Act were not the protestors of 1819 but the urban middle-class of the industrial towns and cities who received the vote and members of Parliament for their new constituencies, an outcome that produced a febrile political atmosphere. The Great Reform Act is a critical juncture in the narrative of British history. It is often represented by historians as the point at which revolution was averted by the timely concessions of a responsible ruling class, responsive to the people’s legitimate calls for representation. The eventual passage of the act was played out over at least two years and three changes of government in countless meetings in the country houses of the aristocracy, their London clubs, Parliamentary offices and committee rooms, and finally the debating chamber of Parliament itself. The advocates and opponents of reform were both sustained by a relentless flow of correspondence and memoranda that form the basis of the historiography. Although its strong architectural topographic dimension identifies many contingencies in the high politics of this narrative, the apparent inevitability of Parliamentary reform by the early 1830s on the one hand, combined with a scholarly focus on Parliamentary procedures and arithmetic on the other, tends to repress this dynamic field of encounter. Once again to clarify: by drawing attention to figurational contingency I am not seeking grounds for counterfactual argument so much as to insist on the architectural topographic description of events to establish their when-where embeddedness in, rather than abstraction from, complex situational narratives. A specific architectural topographic description mentioned in the history of the 1832 Act is an excellent example. It concerns the Prime Minister Earl Grey’s communication of his decision to ask his strongly reformist son-in-law John Lambton, Lord (Later Earl) Durham to head a committee of four men to draft the (1st) Reform Bill in the weeks following

Contingency and artifice 47 the collapse of the Duke of Wellington’s ministry in late November 1830. According to Butler (1964 [1914], 159), Grey’s request was “casually” made as they were coming down the steps of the House of Lords, an occurrence also noted by Trevelyan (1969, 1–2). Both historians cite the same source which also quotes Grey as saying “Lambton, I wish you would take our Reform Bill in Hand” (although neither of the histories quotes it exactly this way) (Broughton 1910, 178). The drafting committee would take place at Durham’s London House at 13 Cleveland Row, the other participants being Lord John Russell, Sir James Graham and Lord Duncannon. Of course, Grey’s invitation to Durham to draft the Bill would, no doubt, have occurred elsewhere and a different time. In that sense this encounter changed nothing – begging the question why mention it at all other, perhaps, than to embellish the narrative with anecdote? This brings the arguments presented in this chapter full circle. Yet if their meeting of the steps of the Lords is an example of contingency as chance similar to that of Anne Boleyn and Henry at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520, it does not seem inconsequential in historiographical terms, not least because we can be reasonably certain it actually happened, and Durham’s appointment to the drafting committee is historically significant. In fact, the significance of the incident stands out as a momentary glimpse propelled from the diaries and memoirs into the scholarly histories – of the profound intimacy of elite political society in the 1830s – and perhaps (surprisingly given the extent of official and private records available) of their consequent inaccessibility to the typical historian. The historiographical discourse of high politics tends to eschew much in the way of ‘scene setting’ perhaps because of the restricted circle of protagonists, the relatively well-known locales they frequented and rich documentation that appears to render too much contextual information superfluous. Perhaps because detailed accounts of the life great houses or even the backroom intrigues of Parliament can seem rather trivial next to the great narratives of state – matters for biography or memoir rather than serious history. A characteristic compression of the circumstances of Grey’s appointment of Durham is offered by Michael Bentley: Four men had originally been deputed to consider [the Reform Bill] issue and report to cabinet with suggestions […]. Grey’s choice of Durham as convenor for the little group was natural in a father-in-law who wanted to control radicalism, while Durham’s of Graham seemed equally natural in a patron wishing to advance a protégé. (Bentley 1999, 46) While one gets a feel for the intimate relations of kinship and patronage that characterized aristocratic society in this passage, historical accounts identifying figurational contingency in an architectural topographic sense through chance meetings and encounters are relatively uncommon.

48 Contingency in the historiographies The fleeting mention by Butler and Trevelyan of Grey’s invitation to Durham then-there on the steps of the House of Lords matters in this respect because taking place in a transitional (if hardly public) space within the Palace of Westminster, it reports on the contingent dialogue of a gilded world that usually took place behind closed doors – and one usually out of reach of the archive historian. Butler senses how the dense official record around which the familiar when-where events of the Reform Act is constructed in fact serves to reveal as much about what is unknown as much as it informs. Gladly would we give many letters of the time for a few snatches of the familiar talk of these men among the autumn woods on the windy Northumbrian coast.5 For we may guess that there and then the scope of the coming Reform Bill was first dimly conceived. (Butler 1964, 91) In this respect the record of Grey and Durham’s conversation on the steps of the House of Lords hints at the existence of lacunae in historical knowledge that reveal the smooth surface of political history as an artifice of historical writing. It is the moment when the essential otherness of an aristocratic life in early nineteenth-century politics is brought home to the contemporary reader. Ironically, this sense is realized through the unremarkable nature of a contingent architectural topographic description that serves to anchor the history of this heavily symbolic event in the quotidian reality of the past.

Notes 1 Embellishment is a decorative form of ‘background’ or milieu writing, which I discuss in Chapter Three. 2 The Field of the Cloth of Gold took place in the portion of contemporary France that was under English sovereignty 7–24 June 1520. Henry hosted the nominally diplomatic meeting with the French King Francis I, but the real purpose of the event was to exhibit the splendour and youthful virility of the two monarchs. 3 Even Anne’s age is not established though most contemporary historians, with Russell, believe Anne to have been nineteen. 4 Lord Liverpool, British Prime Minister 1812–27. 5 ‘These men’ refers to the drafting committee of the First Reform Bill. Earl Grey’s ancestral seat of Howick Hall is on the Northumbrian Coast.

2

Encounter and utterance

I Definitions The language of written record, whether state papers or personal letters and diaries, is best equipped to escape the contingent circumstances of situation to transmit meaning across time and space. To some extent all historical accounts are premised on the imaginative possibilities of architectural topographic description in establishing the precise when-where of situated actions alluded to or inferred from their material survival as textual ‘traces’ in the documentary archive. This chapter considers how figurational contingency identified in the flux of encounter fields in the past is embodied in historical writing through quotation and reporting of ‘things said’ or ‘things thought’. Architectural topographic description may express speech and dialogue in situ or by positioning the record of written testimonies at a specific when-where in the time-space figuration of an event. Where architectural topographic description is repressed, on the other hand, it serves to disembody ‘things said’ by extracting speech acts and testimonies of speech from their figurational embedding, instead framing them with the historian’s analytical voice, typically in non-narrative mode. In a similar manner to Chapter One the particular contingency of speech acts is examined through an historiographical analysis of key events in the histories of the English Reformation, the French Revolution and Industrial Revolution in England. To speak of the time-space figuration of an historical event is to highlight the tension between (asynchronous) architectural topographic description as a narrative succession of when-where actions in a past encounter field and the (synchronous) discursive figure through which past actions become recognizable to historical understanding as named events at a particular chronotopical resolution (e.g. a skirmish, a battle, a war). In Chapter One, for example, relatively localized chance or programmatic time-space figures of ‘glance’, ‘dance’ and ‘oath’, were explored together with open-ended figurations which constructed the encounter field over a greater extent of time-space, often revealing different points of view in the contingency of events (e.g. ‘massacre/accident’, political innovation/aristocratic ritual’).

50 Contingency in the historiographies Speech stands in ambiguous relation to these figures since it at once the most localized, ephemeral and undetermined of actions, but on reaching the written record often becomes the most universal, static and necessary of actions. The very scarcity of recorded speech acts guarantees them a special status. For historiographical purposes it no longer matters whether Caesar actually said “the die is cast” on crossing the Rubicon river; as Suetonius claims, it has become part of the mythology of the event and part of its metaphor.

II Events of the English Reformation Sometimes, indeed, most of the time, scholarly rectitude demands that the voices of the past remain silent, even when the historian has enough source material to reconstruct a particular situation with reasonable confidence. A good example can be found in the MacCulloch’s (2018) biography of Thomas Cromwell, King Henry VIII’s chancellor and the administrative genius behind the defining event of the English Reformation, namely, the separation of the English church from Rome. MacCulloch’s biography is an interesting example of scholarly history written in architectural topographic mode. Its high-resolution narrative of the when-where of events allows him to construct a compelling picture of the complex sociospatial dynamics of the Tudor Court and government navigated by Cromwell. MacCulloch notes how, in November 1536, Cromwell’s standing with the King had reached a low point as a consequence of the Pilgrimage of Grace, a major rebellion in the north of England in October that year. The rebels targeted Cromwell as the man responsible for Henry’s religious changes, including the systematic dissolution of the monasteries, which were just getting under way. In late November a worried Henry was considering what concessions to offer the rebels. The removal of Cromwell from the King’s council would have been popular; it may also have been fatal to Cromwell since the grounds for the removal would quite probably have been treason or heresy. MacCulloch’s close reading of the sources notes how the King was at his palace in Richmond (on the Thames near London) during this time where, by late November, he was meeting regularly with Cromwell. MacCulloch regards Richmond as a “significantly unusual” choice for Henry, but it was situated at only a short distance from Cromwell’s country residence at nearby Mortlake. The conclusion that MacCulloch draws is that Cromwell managed to engineer exclusive access to the King at a critical juncture and used it wisely, to shore up his position in the council and make sure he would not be sacrificed to appease the rebels. He writes: “invariably the secret of winning King Henry’s favour was to contrive to remain as close to him as possible”. Cromwell was successful in this and the “terrifying moment of peril” passed (MacCulloch, 2018, 394). Although MacCulloch does not elaborate on this the logic of his argument is that the bodily proximity of Henry and Cromwell at Richmond Palace enabled them to

Encounter and utterance 51 have ‘frank exchange’ of views; his knowledge of both men and the timespace figuration of events unfolding around them allowing him to infer how Cromwell was able to persuade Henry of his case.1 Architectural topographic description is strongly implicated in MacCulloch’s ability to imagine and, in a Collingwoodian sense, ‘re-enact’ possible conversations between Henry and Cromwell as embodied ‘thoughts-to-action’ that resulted in Cromwell’s position being secured. Because there is no reporting of their actual dialogue, however, a serious academic historian like MacCulloch would not invent one. As it stands MacCulloch’s account is more satisfying than Cromwell’s other biographers, for example, Dickens (1967), who does not mention the incident or Elton (1991 [1977], 268), whose assessment that Henry “threw all his power and energy behind Cromwell” is substantially consistent with MacCulloch’s but abbreviates the figurational contingency of Cromwell’s moment of crisis. Less scrupulous scholars or writers of fiction can, of course, find opportunity in the silences or lacunae by taking advantage of circumstantial evidence to insert an unlikely speech act that may subvert rather than inform historical understanding. An extreme example of this exists in a fraudulent account of the demolition of St. Thomas Becket’s shrine located in what is now Trinity Chapel in Canterbury Cathedral in early September 1538. The destruction of Becket’s shrine was the occasion of a festival of Thomas Cromwell’s particular design; what MacCulloch (2018, 464) describes as the “greatest set-piece of all in his campaign [of dissolution]”. Members of Henry VIII’s court had been on a progress (tour) through the county of Kent in the late summer of 1538, and were joined by Cromwell for its Canterbury denouement on 5 September. The town was packed with nobles for the arrival of the King and his party. Cromwell’s servants were also present. Over the next few days they systematically dismantled the shrine, removed its treasures and – reportedly – burned at least some of the saint’s bones. As part of the festivities a play called Treason of Becket by John Bale was played to attack his memory. Relatively little is known about the actual process of demolition of Becket’s shrine, despite extensive antiquarian detective work to establish whether Becket’s bones had survived the desecration or been burnt by Crowell’s agents (Mason 1920). While it is established that Henry VIII and Cromwell were in Canterbury at the time the destruction took place and that Cromwell’s men were responsible for the overseeing the work itself, it is not known what official choreography may have accompanied the event, or whether the principal figures of the king and Cromwell, among others, were personally involved, given their proximity. Henry, for example, stayed in his recently appropriated palace in the dissolved monastery of St Augustine, next to the Cathedral. He is likely to have seen and heard signs that the work was taking place. The seventeenth-century forger of historical documents, Robert Ware, took advantage of these circumstances of

52 Contingency in the historiographies proximity to make Henry and Cromwell witnesses to the shrine’s desecration, assigning to Henry these dramatic words: Bring me here the other scull which these Rogeish monkes shewed unto myne and my predecessors subiects for the reall one. Lett these two sculls be brought, I command yee, and all these bones that wee may dispose of them otherwise, and not haue our subiects gulled and made to Idolators. (quoted in Warner 1891, 754) The nineteenth-century historian Warner (1891) authoritatively undermined the veracity of this testimony by revealing it to be a fabrication of Ware’s. Warner’s investigation has prevented Henry’s alleged speech from becoming part of the historiographical tradition (MacCulloch 2011). Ware’s account of the demolition of Becket’s shrine is interesting, however, as an example of how architectural topographic descriptions enable the historian’s text to embody the dialogue of an historical actor. Ware, for example, has Henry at the open tomb ordering servants to bring a skull ‘here’ and then to fetch ‘these’ skulls. While Ware’s forged document is work of a different order to MacCulloch’s scholarly reconstruction of Henry’s meeting with Cromwell at Richmond, it is important to understand the nature of the distinction. In MacCulloch the architectural topographic description identifies a finegrained moment of necessary contingency in the momentarily insecure relationship of Henry and Cromwell. It contributes to historical understanding by explaining the survival of Cromwell. In Ware’s forgery, by contrast, architectural topographic description is deployed in a trivial sense to exploit the lack of historical evidence and put words in Henry’s mouth that Ware, as an anti-Catholic polemicist, would like him to have said. While Ware’s may be an act of imagination; it is not an act of the historical imagination in Collingwood’s sense because Ware’s text is intended to serve his contemporary (and universalizing) ideological purpose, rather than historical understanding. MacCulloch’s historical account is the result of sustained critical engagement with the archive record that involves developing narrative propositions on the basis of evidence. This imaginative process leads him to re-enact embodied thoughts-to-(speech)-actions in the situated dialogue of Cromwell and Henry in Richmond. It does not, however, lead him to go so far as to actually fabricate the imagined dialogue in his text. If the architectural topographic basis for MacCulloch’s narrative might be considered historical artifice it is not, in any sense, fictional. While these two cases address the architectural topographic definition of imagined and fraudulent speech acts, a third example shows how concrete evidence of dialogue in the past raises the issue of how the spoken word escapes the contingent conditions of the embodied utterance to resonate in the diary and the archive. On 24 August 1546, Henry VIII received the French Ambassador Claude d’Annebaut in purpose-built banqueting facilities in the

Encounter and utterance 53 grounds of Hampton Court Palace. Among the leading guests was the strongly reformist Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556). Henry VIII himself was vacillating between more conservative (Catholic) and reformist (Protestant) positions in the last years of his life but had generally been opposed to abandoning all aspects of the traditional Catholic mass. It is noteworthy then, when the historian Marshall (2018, 299) quotes Cranmer’s secretary, who was present at the meeting, as saying that the King and d’Annebaut, on behalf of the (Catholic) French king Francis I, had agreed that France would, like England, break with the pope in Rome, and both countries would transform the mass to a strongly protestant, vernacular service. Here, a section of the speech attributed to Cranmer by his secretary is quoted at greater length from one of the sources used by Marshall. when after the bankette was done the first night, the king leaning upon the Ambassador and upon me, if I should tel what communication betwene the kings highnes and the said Ambassador was had, concerning the establishing of sincere Religion then, a manne would hardly haue beleued it. (Foxe 1583, 1269) The surprise expressed here by Cranmer is echoed by Marshall who argues that it is hard to know how to interpret these intentions which he regards as “extraordinary” in the light of Henry’s doctrinal conservatism. He concludes that Henry’s sentiment “underlines just how volatile and unpredictable religious politics had become” (Marshall 2018, 299). The elaborate choreography and preparations for d’Annebaut’s visit are detailed in both the sources that Marshall cites.2 The source for the quotations is the fervent Protestant and martyrologist John Foxe who, like Robert Ware, had a vested personal interest in words attributed to the King – though Marshall takes them seriously as the testimony of Cranmer’s secretary. Perhaps Henry’s words seem less extraordinary if we bear in mind his physical dependency amidst the complex rituals of state diplomacy. Of course, the historian is not in a position to know what these private discussions between Henry and d’Annebaut ‘really meant’, or if the King actually expressed the views attributed to him. Marshall suggests it was simply the King playing diplomatic games, perhaps an attempt to take control of the agenda in the light of his fears about his health and the succession of his young son. The architectural topographic description in this case, therefore, helps to recover Henry’s possible volt-face from the domain of sheer ‘unexplainability’ by articulating the situation in which it was logical for many things to have been said for different reasons. It is surprising, however, that this incident is rarely included in narrative syntheses that tend to repress the contingency of situations in the telling of state or dynastic history. The Hampton Court exchange is an example of historical speech acts, the substance of which something is known from source material. Yet while it

54 Contingency in the historiographies possesses an historical authenticity that Ware’s forgery of the scene at Becket’s shrine does not possess, the fact of the dialogue itself makes little apparent difference to the narrative of Henry’s final years because it was just something he said. Only in the Richmond Palace example can we see how the talking might have made a difference to what happened next, but here the historian has no direct evidence of what was said. The only point of commonality between all three examples is to show how architectural topographic description is essential to conveying the immediacy of contingent speech acts in the flux of movement, co-presence and encounters of people in the past. By emplacing accounts of speech and dialogue into narrative figurations of when-where actions, such description serve to differentiate the historical speech act from the historian’s own voice. Contingent speech acts can also be associated with the localized contingency of chance and programme, as discussed in Chapter One. Speech acts identified with contingency as chance are likely to be the most out of reach to the historian as they are the most tangential and unpredictable in terms of their relationship to historical events, and therefore the least likely to be recorded. This extends to the majority of quotidian utterances, which are of a fairly incidental nature and elusive as to their precise when-where definition. Speech acts arising from contingency of programme are identified when things said go beyond things sayable as these are formally scripted, for example, in a text, a liturgy or diplomatic protocol. Elements of contingency of programme are present in both the imagined Richmond dialogue between Henry VIII and Cromwell, and the reported dialogue of Henry with d’Annebaut at Hampton Court. In both cases the question of precisely ‘what was said’ acknowledges scope for a possible departure from the generic formalities of official meetings in what may be said to a monarch and by a monarch at particular times and in particular places.

III Events of the French Revolution In many, though certainly not in all cases, the reporting of speech acts is likely to be incidental to the principal event narrative. This makes speech particularly susceptible to embellishment in historical writing because, whether or not Caesar actually said “the die is cast” his soldiers crossed the Rubicon anyway, thereby liberating the historian, Suetonius, to attribute to Caesar the words he ought to have said at this juncture. The when-where immediacy of things said by particular people in the past lends their quotation a dramatic impact that emphasizes the authenticity of the historical text. This legitimate artifice of scholarly history in bringing the past to life can be manipulated, for example, in the use of evocative quotation to imply the validity of a general argument that may require closer scrutiny. In most cases the reporting of ‘things said’ relies on the retrospective testimonies of eyewitnesses to events as they happened. Yet if there is an intrinsic difficulty in accurately remembering speech acts that have not been officially recorded

Encounter and utterance 55 (and even then), their importance to historical understanding is not limited to accuracy of the transcription. Rather the record of a speech act, however, compromised, also signifies a specific when-where positionality, even if this cannot be precisely established. The architectural topographic encoding of speech acts then has the quality of revealing to the historical imagination the possibility of alternative perspectives on events, often in highly visual as well auditory terms and from a point of view perhaps less privileged than the historian’s own. Two principal events with rich historiographies in the history of the French Revolution offer good examples of how speech acts encode architectural topographic description. The first is the storming of the Palace of Versailles by revolutionary insurgents in the early hours of 6 October 1789. For Edmund Burke this was a defining moment in sealing the collapse of deference represented by the revolution and which, but for the quick wittedness of a loyal servant, might have led to the brutal murder of the Queen of France. The storming of Versailles was the denouement of a complex sequence of events that had brought a large number of poor Parisian women and their supporters in procession over the six miles to Versailles the previous day and would later see them return with the royal family in tow. In one (social-scientific) sense decades of socio-economic injustice symbolized by the shortage and cost of bread was the immediate motivation of many among the crowd but in another (architectural topographic) sense the events of 6th October could not have been predicted by these determinants, nor by most of those who had set off from Paris the day before. This makes the storming of Versailles an example of what I have termed figurational contingency – that is, contingency arising from the flux of movement, bodily co-presence and encounter situated in (uncertain) relation to other events lying beyond the localized architectural topographic field. My purpose is to draw on the historiography of the storming of the Palace of Versailles to illustrate, first how architectural topographic descriptions can present an elementary narrative figure for the coherent arrangement of complex and fragmented source material, secondly, how this figure is sufficiently generic to express the ambiguity of events given in different historical accounts and, thirdly, to consider how it affords the specific when-where positioning of past speech acts, thereby interrupting the privileged voice of the historian. The principal sequence of events at Versailles on 6 October, 1789 was precipitated by a significant number of the crowd who had marched out from Paris the previous evening and gathered outside the palace for the night, gaining access to the building itself. The storming of the palace unfolded as a largely improvised succession of discretely distributed actions without any preconceived ‘plan’ other than that which emerged in the course of events itself. Depending on exactly where they first gained access to the palace precincts, the insurgents traversed a series of outer courtyards, either from the Cour d’Honneur or the Cour des Princes (perhaps both),

56 Contingency in the historiographies into the Cour Royale until they arrived at the smaller, innermost Cour De Marbre in the central section of the building, where access to the Royal Apartment could be gained. Once there, they bypassed the royal guards and ascended the stairs into the Queen’s apartments, breaking down a succession of enfiladed rooms until they reached her bedchamber. Thomas Carlyle gives the following account: In few moments, the Grate of the inner and inmost Court, which they name Court of Marble, this too is forced, or surprised, and burst open: the Court of Marble too is overflowed: up the Grand Staircase [Queen’s Staircase], up all stairs and entrances rushes the living Deluge! (Carlyle 1837, 636) The Queen’s staircase featured as an architectural topographic description in the accounts of a number of narrative historians. Carlyle situates two royal guards here, the body of the murdered Jerome and the fleeing Miomandre, whose actions in defending the Queen he regards as heroic. Hazan’s recently written account of the incident is more compressed. A group entered the palace by a poorly guarded gate, breaking into the Marble Court. A guard fired, a man fell, the crowd flung themselves on the royal guards and killed two of them, carrying off their heads on pikes. The crowd invaded the royal apartments, almost reaching the queen’s bedroom. (Hazan 2017, 88) Despite important stylistic differences, architectural topographic description is no less essential to Hazan than it is to Carlyle in enabling both historians to identify intelligible narrative propositions in the complex ‘noise’ of myriad when-where actions involving a large number of people. Especially since it is evidently impossible that the actions of each person present could be known, let alone individually detailed in the narrative. Architectural topographic description prefigures the encounter field of the Palace of Versailles across successive interfaces of resolution (indicated by square brackets): [palace exterior (most public)] > [palace courts (transitional)] > [entrances to royal apartments (transitional)] > [palace interior (transitional) > Queen’s bedchamber, (most private)]. This architectural topographic sequence describes a particular narrative figure, that of ‘orientation towards’ that help historians construct narratives of a complex situations. It is exploited particularly by Carlyle as a metaphorical artifice in representing the accelerating movements of the insurgents as a ‘deluge’. Dovey (1999, 22–23) has explained how the spatial depth of the King’s throne room from the visitors’ entrance to the Palace of Versailles created a “spatial narrative” that supported the “representational narrative”, in which the French King embodied a sacred space to

Encounter and utterance 57 which access was tightly controlled by rigid social conventions. The events of 6 October 1789 are clearly intelligible in these terms as a revolutionary transgression of the spatial codes that emphasized the sacred nature of French monarchy. This was achieved by symbolically violating the Queen’s bedchamber – in lieu of the Queen herself, who had escaped to safety through a private corridor to the King’s chambers. But to leave it at that is still to render the figurational contingency of the encounter field as a static image rather than as a generative flux of movement, bodily copresence and encounter open to contrasting positions offset from the principal narrative. In other words, it would be to repress the very agency that enables the revolutionary transgression to occur. It is interesting just how difficult it is to get a precise idea of the architectural topographic sequence of events on 6 October 1789 simply from cross-referencing the numerous historical accounts with extant historical plans of the Palace of Versailles. This is not only a question of contradictions in the sources, inconsistencies in the plans and the different views taken on these by individual historians. The scholarly debates on these matters are the concern of specialist historians (Blakemore and Hembree 2001). To a greater or lesser extent though, such uncertainty as to the exact course of events arises intrinsically from its complexity. The high resolution of granularity required to give detailed narrative accounts of the storming of Versailles Palace means that the precise points of access, egress, movement and encounter of the different actors involved matter. The fact that many different things were happening in different parts of the Palace at the same time means that the historical imagination cannot easily resolve them into a linear narrative without considerable abbreviation of the many disparate and uncoordinated actions on the ground each one of which represents the possibility of an alternative telling. Narrative accounts of ‘what happened’ during the storming of Versailles can be represented on maps and plans of the palace only in the most generalized sense. When narrative historians draw on individual testimonies to express the time-space figuration of events unfolding they employ a ‘nonlinear’ method of imaginative re-enactment that embodies the asynchronous and contingent movements of multiple actors in the text. This contrasts with the synchronous image of the plan that assigns equal priority to each position by enabling the privileged observer to see ‘all points to all points’ at a single time. While maps and plans are essential source materials that give historians access to the encounter field of the past and offer a reference point to evaluate the authority of competing testimonies, they are not the only source of architectural topographic description. What the historiography of the storming of Versailles shows is how architectural topographic figures are encoded as narrative propositions in the textual accounts of event sequences. Rather than writing Versailles ‘as a text’, this encoding implies how the time-space figuration of the narrative sustains a minimal architectural topographic intelligibility of the palace that is capable of expressing the contingencies

58 Contingency in the historiographies implicit in the specificities of the narrative as told. Carlyle, concerned to convey the irresistible natural force of the crowd but whose sympathy lies entirely with the besieged royal family, takes the reader with those who would protect the queen, running just ahead of the deluge, culminating in the declaration of her terrified ladies-in-waiting at her bedroom door that they would die in her defence. The terrorstruck Bodyguards fly, bolting and barricading; it follows. Whitherward? Through hall on hall: wo, now! towards the Queen’s Suite of Rooms, in the furtherest room of which the Queen is now asleep. Five sentinels rush through that long Suite; they are in the Anteroom knocking loud: “Save the Queen!” Trembling women fall at their feet with tears; are answered: “Yes, we will die; save ye the Queen!” (Carlyle 1837, 637-38) The popular historian Christopher Hibbert deploys a similar figure to invest his account with a sense of motion. He strings together a sequence of evocative quotations that emphasize the bloodthirsty appetites of the Queen’s pursuers and her precarious chance of survival, were they to gain access to her private chamber. [The Queen] was suddenly awakened at dawn by the noise of trampling feet and by loud shouts on the staircase that led up to her apartments: “Death to the Austrian! Where is she? Where is the whore? We’ll wring her neck! We’ll tear her heart out! We’ll fry her liver and that won’t be the end of it.” “I’ll have her thighs!” cried one. “And I’ll have her entrails,” called others. “I’ll have her kidneys in a fricassee!” (Hibbert 1983, 101) In Citizens (1989) Simon Schama raises the moral question of whether revolutionary ends justify revolutionary means (he believes they do not). As a consequence, his account of events has less of the momentum of either Carlyle’s or Hibbert’s. The architectural topographic description serves mainly to situate, as a single gruesome quotation, similar sentiments that Hibbert implicitly puts in the mouths of different speakers.3 Probably introduced by one of the soldiers, the crowd broke into the Cour de Marbre and went up the stairs leading to the royal apartments. A guard later said that he heard one of the women shouting that it was necessary to “tear out the heart of the coquine [whore], cut off her head, fricasser her liver and even then it would not all be over.” A guard fired at the onrushing crowd; a man fell and the soldier was then killed on the spot (Schama 1989, 467)

Encounter and utterance 59 The three quotations demonstrate how the generic intelligibility of a particular architectural topographic figure (i.e. linear orientation towards the Queen’s bedroom) can be used to support, not only different styles but also contrasting interpretative emphases in the work of different historians. The use of such figures to situate contingent speech acts at a key position in the encounter field, sometimes as direct, sometimes indirect speech, creates immediacy and opens up a narrative perspective to past testimonies in situ rather than as proofs of a scholarly argument advanced in thematic terms. It is also clear from these quotations how figurational contingency expressed in architectural topographic description creates opportunities for embellishment and artifice in historical writing. None of the three historians gives specific references for these quotations but the variations on the figure they offer implies acceptance of an historiographical tradition where ‘such things were said’ (in French, of course) under conditions like these. In reality, of course, it is unlikely that the overwhelming human noise of the storming of Versailles was so neatly distilled into such cathartic statements. In these examples their apparent authenticity is an artifice of historical writing but, in fact – what underwrites them and in a sense what matters more is the figurational coherence of the architectural topographic description. My second example drawn from the historiography of the French Revolution is the case of the capture and execution of the French revolutionary and leading republican Maximilien Robespierre on 27–28 July 1794 (9th–10th Thermidor in the revolutionary calendar). It illustrates how the historian’s quotation of eye-witness testimony may itself incorporate architectural topographic description into historical writing that situates the testifier at a particular when-where location and helps ‘tell the story’. Robespierre was the preeminent member of the Jacobins, the most radical republican faction in French revolutionary politics, who became increasingly influential in national affairs in the period following the execution of the King in January 1793. By the summer of 1794 the Robespierre’s Jacobinical Committee of Public Safety was involved in a vicious power struggle with the principal legislative body, the French National Convention. On the night of 27–28 July 1794 Robespierre and his closest associates were gathered in a first-floor room in Paris’ Hôtel de Ville attempting to raise military support in Paris against the Convention which had declared their lives forfeit earlier that day. Their plans were brought to an end when soldiers from the Convention broke into the room to arrest them. In the ensuing action Robespierre was shot in the jaw; whether this wound was the result of a suicide attempt or an attempt to stop him escaping is impossible to verify. In the absence of clear evidence either way most scholarly historians (e.g. Scurr 2007, Schama 1989) tend to the opinion that Robespierre tried to take his own life. Many of his fellow Jacobins in the room with him either committed suicide or attempted to improvise escapes one way or another, none of them successfully. The popular historian Hibbert prefers the narrative that Robespierre did not take his own life but was shot by the soldier Charles-André Merda.

60 Contingency in the historiographies He does not admit the possibility of Robespierre’s suicide despite acknowledging that Merda’s “vainglorious” account of his part in the capture of Robespierre has been “largely discredited but not entirely disproved” (Hibbert 1983, 265). In the long passage of Merda’s written testimony he inserts into his own account, Merda tells how, having gained entrance to the Hôtel de Ville, he climbed the staircase and tricked his way through the pro-Robespierrist guard into the council chamber deliberating whether to turn left or right before making his way to the room (the ‘secretariat’) where the Jacobins were in conference: I then took the passage to the left … and reached the door of the secretariat … Eventually the door was opened. I saw about fifty people inside in a state of great excitement … I recognized Robespierre in the middle. (Hibbert 1983, 265 – ellipses in Hibbert’s text) According to Merda he then moved on Robespierre with his sword pointed at his heart shouting “Surrender, you Traitor!”, to which Robespierre replied, “It is you who are the traitor. I shall have you shot.” At this point Merda claimed he shot but failed to kill Robespierre with his pistol. As an eye-witness account of the unfolding of a key historical event Merda’s testimony conveys immediacy and dramatic impact. The localized architectural topographic description encodes (from Merda’s point of view) successive examples of contingency as chance: his success in talking his way into the council chamber, the deliberation over whether to turn right or left, the fevered exchange and the shooting of Robespierre in the jaw in the secretariat. None of these actions or their outcomes were predictable. Yet the events that brought Merda and Robespierre into bodily copresence in a room at the Hôtel de Ville in the early hours of 28th July extended across the highly complex and dynamic encounter field of Paris itself. At this resolution of architectural topographic description events at the Hôtel de Ville that night express a figurational contingency in the narrative of the French Revolution itself. This reveals how the artifice in Hibbert’s history is sustained at several levels by Merda’s self-aggrandising testimony and Hibbert’s de facto acceptance of it as passably plausible in his account of revolutionary events overall. I have previously explained how the value of architectural topographic description is to afford the historical imagination alternative (contingent) narrative propositions, usually in the absence of detailed evidence. By allowing Merda’s comprehensive description to carry the narrative weight Hibbert’s account of Robespierre’s capture is compromised by what feels like a lack of imaginative effort in working critically with Merda’s ‘discredited’ testimony to consider other possibilities or provide additional evidence to justify the one advanced. In the afternoon following their arrest on 28th July, the condemned Jacobins were packed into tumbrils (carts) for the journey from their incarceration in

Encounter and utterance 61 the Conciergery along the rue Saint-Honoré to the Place de la Révolution, where they would be executed by guillotine. This journey to the place of execution had become part of the processional ritual of revolutionary Paris. The guillotining of prestigious individuals drew large crowds following the tumbrils and packing the Place de la Révolution. The execution of such a deeply divisive revolutionary protagonist as Robespierre, who had himself sent many people to their deaths in a similar manner, is highly symbolic in representing the logic of revolutionary violence to consume those who would guide it. Historians’ accounts of Robespierre’s execution deploy the familiar architectural topographic figure of revolutionary execution differentiated as a particular whenwhere event, not only through the fate of the particular individual concerned but because of what was seen, said and heard on that occasion; an example then of contingency of programme. Robespierre’s biographers note how the route to the guillotine took him past his lodgings on the rue Saint-Honoré where the woman who may have been his lover Éléonore Duplay may have been watching (McPhee 2012, 220; Scurr 2007, 357). They also sample derogatory comments attributed to members of the crowd en route, recorded at some length by Hibbert “The thought of your punishment intoxicates me with joy” (Scurr 2007, 357; also Hibbert 1983, 268) and, “Isn’t he a fine-looking king?” (McPhee, 2012, 220). Strapped to the guillotine before the executioner pulled away the bandage that held his jaw in place Robespierre releases “animal screams” (Schama 1989, 846), a “hideous roar of pain” (McPhee 2012, 220) – for Hibbert (1983, 268) quoting an unnamed source, it was a “groan like that of a dying tiger”. It is a powerful moment at which the situatedness of meaningful speech acts seems almost to escape the historical when-where moment into the universalized experience of “excruciating pain “that you hear sometimes in hospitals”, as Scurr (2007, 357) puts it. Doubtless the architectural topographic description affords embellishment as does looseness of translation from deeply buried archive sources. Non-narrative or more academic histories of the French Revolution tend to repress these speech acts in their abbreviated accounts of Robespierre’s execution (e.g. Hazan 2017, 408). Yet on the basis that they are not simply fabrications, the artifice the speech acts represent is not intrinsically malign in terms of historical understanding because it helps establish the specificity of historical events as actions, rather than abstractions, accessible to the historical imagination through their position in figures of architectural topographic description.

IV Events from the period of the Industrial Revolution in England The final historiographical example of situated speech acts afforded by contingencies of architectural topographic description explores a different kind of event from those previously examined – one that in many respects

62 Contingency in the historiographies does not fit the conventional definition of an ‘event’ at all. This is the technological turning point in the Industrial Revolution in Britain identified with James Watt’s (1736–1819) steam engine that innovated in using a separate condenser to significantly increase power and efficiency. Conventionally dated to 1775 when the successful commercial partnership of Watt with Matthew Boulton (1728–1809) was founded, Watt’s development of his engine in fact dates back at least to 1763. The invention of Watt’s engine suggests how events named by historians are simply approximations of complex processes of movement, bodily co-presence and encounter – including speech acts – that describe, as narrative figures, emergent chronotopical, rather than static, social phenomena. Yet the architectural topographic definition of events such as Peterloo or the storming of Versailles, for all their complexity and broader historiographical contexts, are also characterized by a high degree of time-space compression in the unfolding of critical moments where contingencies of the encounter field readily differentiate the ‘event’ from the quotidian. By contrast an event such as Watt’s steam engine that combined virtuosity in intellectual endeavour with the gradual alignment of numerous personal, scientific and commercial relationships over long stretches of time and geographical distance clearly requires a different a kind of description – not least because, in historiographical terms, it is almost impossible to know exactly when ‘it’ happened. In this case the architectural topographic description of event contingency must be sought mainly (though not exclusively) in the programme of organized meetings and in the written correspondence of Watt’s social network rather than in the immediacy of a focal when-where encounter field. Watt’s personal and professional network can seem, with hindsight, to have overcome temporal-spatial distance almost effortlessly. In fact, this network relied on the changing material conditions of eighteenth-century Britain that afforded it the possibility of realizing an effective encounter field over a considerable geographical area. As one canonical historian of English industrialization describes the arrival of Watt’s engine was as a paradigmatic change: “With this great new event, the invention of the steam engine, the final and most decisive stage of the industrial revolution opened” (Mantoux 1964, 337). Yet technological innovations are hard to pin down as when-where events; their influence being felt by diffusion. The very pervasiveness of a successful technology often makes the extent of its uptake seem more urgent to the social historian than the process of invention itself. The overwhelming transformation of the social structure that industrialization brought in its wake means that its early human pioneers such as James Watt can appear as over-determined signifiers of socio-economic change to come, rather as historical individuals who did certain things, in certain places at certain times. Watt receives just four mentions in Eric Hobsbawm’s (1974) Industry and Empire and three in Griffin’s A Short History of the British Industrial Revolution (2010). A reluctance to prioritize individual biographies in the historiography of the industrial revolution goes hand-in-hand with the

Encounter and utterance 63 repression of architectural topographic description since the situatededness of when-where events is, at best, seen as secondary to the thematic exploration of indices of social change. In approaching the innovation of Watt’s steam engine not as a structurally predetermined ‘non-event’ but as an event that emerged as a figurational contingency of social relationships in the increasingly extensive and integrated field of encounter that connected eighteenth-century Britain, one can still understand it as Watt’s invention. This involves acknowledging the specificity of Watt's individual biography, engaging with broader thematic categories of social history without over-determining the former or denarrativizing the latter. Four specific events in the historiography of the invention of Watt’s engine serve to illustrate different aspects this proposition: Watt’s time as an instrument maker at Glasgow University, his ‘eureka moment’ on Glasgow Green, the organization of Boulton and Watt’s Soho Works in Birmingham and meetings of the scientific Lunar Society, of which Boulton and Watt were members. By 1757 The young James Watt had procured a workshop to make mathematical instruments and a shop to sell them in the precinct of Glasgow University where he could not be prevented by local trade organizations (as a non-Glaswegian) from practising his trade. The shop was on the ground floor next to the Principal’s gate and accessed directly from the high street. Smiles tells us how “His shop, being conveniently situated within the College, was a favourite resort of the professors and the students” (Smiles 1865, 230). Two regular visitors were the academic chemist Dr Joseph Black and the student John Robison (later a Professor of Natural Philosophy) who liked to examine the instruments and discuss their relative merits – and sundry issues – with Watt. By 1759 Robison had directed Watt’s attention to the challenge of developing an efficient steam engine, and it was Dr Black who would be his constant source of encouragement and money in the early years and for a long period after. It is the architectural topographic description of Watt’s shop and workshop that situates the informal conversations he had with Robison and Black that specialist historians recognize as essential to his early development as a scientist (Ashton 1948, 67–68). Such routine encounters were likely to have been important in encouraging Watt to believe that he was indeed a scientist. Robison reported on first encountering Watt in 1757 that he “saw a workman and expected no more: I found a philosopher” (Smiles 1865, 235). It was also in Watt’s workshop that Robison and Black initiated their own longstanding friendship (236). Such relationships did not emerge because of abstract temporal-spatial proximity but through a specifically figurational contingency expressed in the quotidian encounter field of eighteenth-century Glasgow: the accessibility, attraction and informality of Watt’s shop and workshop to scholars at the university. The second contingent event in the invention of Watt’s steam engine is the silent ‘eureka’ moment Watt experienced when walking to Glasgow

64 Contingency in the historiographies Green from his house one Sunday afternoon in Spring 1765. It was subsequently recounted to (and recorded by) his friend Robert Hart in response to the wish of Hart’s brother to know where the idea occurred to Watt and how it came to him (Hart 1859, 4). The passage quoting Watt is a shared reference point for the nineteenth-century biographer (e.g. Smiles 1865, 259-60; Thurston 1878, 248-9) and twenty-first century social scientists (e.g. Moon 2014, 11). It was in the Green of Glasgow. I had gone to take a walk on a fine Sabbath afternoon. I had entered the Green by the gate at the foot of Charlotte Street–had passed the old washing-house. I was thinking upon the engine at the time, and had gone as far as the Herďs-house, when the idea came into my mind, that as steam was an elastic body it would rush into a vacuum, and if a communication was made between the cylinder and an exhausted vessel, it would rush into it, and might be there condensed without cooling the cylinder. […] I had not walked farther than the Golf–house when the whole thing was arranged in my mind. (Hart 1859, 4 – italics in the original text) Moon (2014, 11) comments that it is “not difficult to see how such a story would appeal to a biographer” – as indeed it does. Moon is careful not to be dismissive of Watt’s intellectual contribution, but he clearly regards the actual moment of insight itself as an attractive but ultimately trivial epiphenomenon. Instead, Moon emphasizes the extensive network of scientists and investors that had mobilized around steam-engine technology through which Watt developed his contribution. From this perspective the knowledge accumulated in the network anticipated the local outcome of Watt’s separate condenser steam engine, whether or not it was Watt himself who made the decisive breakthrough. If Moon is right to contest the ‘genius theory’ of invention by highlighting how innovation emerges in knowledge networks – a theme I shall return to – here it comes at the cost of not taking Watt’s own report of his epiphany very seriously. To suggest that it should be taken seriously does not mean that the separate-condenser steam engine would have remained ‘uninvented’ without Watt going out for walk one afternoon; neither does it imply that Glasgow Green contained environmentally embedded ‘clues’ or cues ‘that’ stimulated Watt’s realization; nor does it advance a cognitively based argument on the basis of an projected association of walking and creative neurological activity (O’Mara 2020). It is simply to highlight how Watt’s testimony of how his idea for the separate condenser occurred encodes an architectural topographic description of contingency as chance. Hart’s account describes his insight as an essentially unpredictable conjunction of thought (condensation of steam) and embodied action (walking). If the precise relationship of the action and thought is impossible to gauge, that is not the point. The historical imagination is able to grasp that nobody else other than Watt invented the

Encounter and utterance 65 steam-condensed steam engine and that the crucial moment of invention happened then-there during a specific walk on Glasgow Green. The contingency of the encounter field affords the definition of the historical event, without which history would have turned out differently. A recognition of the importance of Watt’s social network to his invention of the steam engine extends the figuration of the moment of discovery in time-space, identifying contingency of programme and figurational contingency in the narrative of global events. It should not seek to transcend the contingency (and temporality) of historical explanation altogether. The third event I am concerned with in the development of Watt’s steam engine concerns his decision, in 1775, to move commercial production to Matthew Boulton’s Soho Works, near Birmingham; the fourth, related, event concerns Watt’s membership of the scientific Lunar Society of which Boulton was a founder member. Both the Soho Works and the Lunar Society defined ‘institutional’ spaces governed by particular programmes (rules) that guaranteed at least a minimal organizational coherence over time. In 1775 Watt moved not only his steam engine but his whole family from Glasgow to Soho, where they occupied a residence near the Works. The Soho Works in the late-eighteenth century accommodated the highly skilled artisanal traditions of metal work that existed in Birmingham within a single, centrally managed site, optimizing the production process through increased division of labour and gradually bringing the different stages of production into logical spatial arrangement, along the lines of a factory (Roll 1930, 186-7). Boulton was an innovator in scientific industrial organization. His combination of artisanal informality with contemporary commercial logic was ideal for Watt to develop his steam engine which needed to be assembled from many complex parts, few of which could easily be mass produced in 1775 and which involved a good deal of trial and error. Reflecting this reality in the early years of their partnership the steam engines produced by Watt and Boulton were largely experimental and their business model mainly one of consultancy, advising on the installation of engines built to their designs by third parties. Such an admixture of virtuosity, industrial organization and adaptability to market opportunities as existed as Soho Works represents a contingency of programme through which the routines of manufacturing could enable Watt and Boulton to operate as consulting engineers long before their separatecondenser steam engine could be rolled off the production line. Another kind of contingency of programme characterized meetings of the Lunar Society. Unlike the Soho Works the location for meetings of the Lunar Society was not fixed. Boulton’s residence at Soho House was the most popular venue but its membership could meet anywhere convenient – for example, at the house of the natural philosopher Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) at Lichfield, some fifteen miles away. The society had no written constitution (though Bolton proposed one in 1776) or rules of membership beyond the mutuality of their interests and enthusiasms (Robinson 1962, 160).

66 Contingency in the historiographies As neighbours at Soho, the architectural topographic focal point of the Lunar Society network, Watt and Boulton were ideally situated to cross fertilize its intellectual dynamism, technical sophistication and commercial intelligence with the practical business of steam-engine production. The meeting of Watt and John ‘Iron-Mad’ Wilkinson (1728–1808), for example, was for Watt almost as important as his partnership with Boulton in providing the specialist expertise in metal production that could build the vital separate-condenser unit for his engine. This relationship of scientific and commercial interests was made and sustained through the Lunar Society network. The informality of the programme governing the when-where and who of Lunar Society meetings meant that, although Wilkinson himself was only an occasional attendee, he was always welcome – thereby facilitating meetings with Watt. If the immateriality of rules that regulate social relationships means they are transferrable (in principle) across time and space, it is their intersection with contingent movement, bodily co-presence and encounter in a localized encounter field that figures the historical event materially, through its architectural topographic description. Between Watt’s Glasgow moment of epiphany in 1765 and the founding of his partnership with Boulton in 1775 lay almost ten years of uncertainty. Watt always needed money, of which there was not enough available to him in Glasgow, and expertise in precision engineering, of which there was almost none. For large-scale investment his friend Dr Joseph Black had introduced him to the iron founder and mine owner Dr Roebuck (1718–1794) in 1765. Roebuck would eventually pass his investment onto Matthew Boulton when he became bankrupt in 1774. Much of the intervening period 1767–1774 was spent by members of Boulton’s circle in trying to persuade Watt to come to Birmingham to develop his engine – and Watt, who had a wife and children in Glasgow as well a commitment to Roebuck – finding a reason for not doing so. It was not until Spring 1774 that he finally headed to Birmingham, a move precipitated by the death of his wife Peggy the previous year. In the summer of 1767 Watt had to be in London on business and visited Soho Works for the first time on his way home. In the absence of Matthew Boulton himself Watt was shown around by Boulton’s friend Dr William Small (1737–1775) and the two men developed a close friendship through correspondence. For most narrative historians this event was of some consequence (e.g. Mantoux 1964, 324; Uglow 2003, 120). Roll states how “Watt was naturally struck with the unique organisation of Soho and, above all with the excellent workmanship, which was in sharp contrast to that which he could command in Glasgow” (Roll 1930, 13). In 1768 Watt had to visit London again to sort out a patent application and returned via Soho, this time meeting Matthew Boulton who was there in person to impress him. Uglow, the historian of the Lunar Society (2003, 132), observes (with some embellishment) how Soho seemed to Watt a “mechanics paradise, a promised land, a wonder of modernity with Boulton its chief sorcerer” (132).

Encounter and utterance 67 For Uglow, Dr Jonathan Small’s role in maintaining the group of scientists and friends known as the Lunar Society was fundamental, “the living filament that bound them together” (Uglow 2002, 250). He had been a colonist in Virginia, US, before settling in Birmingham in 1765. Not only a friend of Boulton's, Small was also known to American luminaries including Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, to whom he had been tutor. From 1767 to 1774 Dr Small was the chief advocate of bringing Watt south to Birmingham. Watt’s biographer Smiles repeatedly quotes from Small’s letters encouraging Watt to come to Birmingham in 1769, 1770, 1772 and 1773. It is interesting in this context to note how Moon’s abstraction of the social network around Watt as an “influence matrix” collapses Small’s individual contribution to the development of the Steam Engine into the collective influence of the Lunar Society – which also conceals the very different contribution of John Wilkinson. Yet although Small was not an innovator in this area he was a key facilitator of what might now be called ‘knowledge transfer’ between Watt in Glasgow and the wider network. Yet even this account is something of an abstraction. In fact, Small’s achievement is better conceptualized in architectural topographic terms; his extensive correspondence expresses the possibility of the geographically distant urban regions of Glasgow, Birmingham and London as a single (which is not to say uniform) encounter field enabling movement, bodily co-presence and encounter – certainly a communicative agency – between Small, Watt, Boulton and their extensive acquaintance. Glasgow itself had not yet become a major industrial centre during Watt’s early life and the qualities of the connection to London and Birmingham were not good until the end of the eighteenth-century. Watt’s early trip to London as an apprentice instrument maker in 1755 took him about two weeks on horseback. But the situation was changing. By 1800 the turnpike system and the advent of mail coaches had reduced the time of travel by coach between London-Glasgow to approximately ten days, between London and Birmingham to a little under two days with Birmingham-Glasgow to something in between. Small’s correspondence with Watt in April 1769 turned around between Birmingham and Glasgow in less than two weeks. Their letters encode the emerging architectural topographic reality of increased ease of communications while explicitly drawing attention to its limitations. The men are notionally discussing the threat to Watt’s intellectual property posed by a London linendraper named Moore. [Letter from Small to Watt dated 18th April, 1769] A linendraper [cloth and wool merchant] at London, one Moore, has taken out a patent for moving wheel-carriages by steam. This comes of thy delays. I dare say he has heard of your inventions … Do come to England with all possible speed. At this moment, how I could scold you for negligence! However, if you will come hither soon, I will promise to

68 Contingency in the historiographies be very civil, and buy a steam-chaise [carriage] of you and not of Moore. And yet it vexes me abominably to see a man of your superior genius neglect to avail himself properly of his great talents. (Smiles 1865, 368-69) [Letter from Watt to Small dated 28th April 1769] If linendraper Moore does not use my engines to drive his chaises, he can’t drive them by steam. If he does, I will stop them. I suppose by the rapidity of his progress and puffing he is too volatile to be dangerous …. You talk to me about coming to England, just as if I was an Indian that had nothing to remove but my person. Why do we encumber ourselves with anything else? I can’t see you before July at soonest, unless you come here. (Smiles 1865, 369) On one hand, the tone of Small and Watt’s correspondence is so conversational that the geographical distance between the two correspondents appears an irrelevance; on the other, the need for such letters evokes the duration and difficulties of travel that make ease of personal contact at this distance impossible, their frustration is given rhetorical voice in both letters. The extensive correspondence of Watt that forms the basis of the historical accounts of his life emphasizes the intimacy between many of the Lunar men as they rushed around the country along roads that were never good enough but just about traversable, nonetheless. The urgency of their communications is revealed by the close interest they took in who-met -who, where, and with what effect, and characteristic frustration with the impediments to more frequent meetings, conscious of the physical and emotional burdens of travel. It expresses the invention of the steam engine as premised on the communicative flux enabled by the deliberate, and often exhausting, forging of an active architectural topographic encounter field from the ‘raw material’ of eighteenth-century transport infrastructure in Britain. Voices of the road permeate the frequent excerpts from Watt’s correspondence that are deployed by historians. His childhood spent in the Scottish coastal town of Greenock was largely cut off from Glasgow by very poor roads, despite being only (by contemporary standards) some 25 miles away. On hearing of a deterioration in his wife’s health in September 1773 Watt hurried home from the Fort William area of the Highlands where he had been surveying for a proposed canal. Shortly after, he wrote to Small from Glasgow, grieving his wife’s death. “I had a miserable journey home, through the wildest country I ever saw, and the worst conducted roads” (Uglow 2003, 247). William Small himself died after repeatedly vomiting on the ten-mile journey from Birmingham to Tamworth in February 1775. He collapsed after the coach arrived, knowing that Watt was at last coming south from Glasgow. Small’s funeral was postponed for three weeks so that his brother could make the trip down from Scotland (250). Given the

Encounter and utterance 69 intensity of Watt and Small's correspondence and their enthusiasm for the invention of the steam-driven chaise, this three-week delay must have been another reminder of how slow – and how contingent - things could be when bodily co-presence was a social necessity. While the analytical methods of social network analysis have much to recommend them, they tend to represent social relationships in instrumental terms, giving little sense of the material uncertainties that affect the possibilities of communication and encounter as these extend over time-space. The ebbing and flowing of personal relationships in this sense is not simply a question of individual biographies, but it is rather an example of how the architectural topographic description encoded in biographies identifies the figurational contingency of encounter as the agency which sustains social relationships. This is also a point missed by Peter Hall (1999) who struggles to accommodate the contingent elements in Watt’s biography into his general thesis that cities drive innovation. As he puts it: “It is not enough simply to generate a one-off innovative moment in history, as Watt did in Glasgow”, rather cities must be able to sustain a “chain” of innovation to be successful (499). Biographies do not really matter to Hall in explaining innovation; they are almost too historical! From Hall’s perspective the difficulty is that the existence of Glasgow and Birmingham, the cities that had the strongest positive effect on the development of Watt’s engine, cannot in themselves explain ‘why Watt?’, rather than someone else. But Hall is right that from an urban planning perspective this is probably the wrong question. It is more analytically objective to focus on the urban conditions that support sustained innovation rather than the contingency of innovation itself, for this cannot be environmentally circumscribed. Just as Watt did not neatly distil informational resources from knowledge networks abstracted from the ‘messy’ reality of his actual social life, neither was his knowledge of the world constrained by geographical abstractions (or legal boundaries) such as ‘city’ or ‘country’. This is because his social relationships, like our own, were discovered, sustained and mislaid in the flux of movement, bodily copresence and encounter that characterizes everyday life. Social networks and cities may indeed have nurtured Watt’s creative relationships but the co-dependency of urban density and social connectivity is prefigured in architectural topographic descriptions of an historical encounter field that is neither abstracted from material conditions of inhabited space nor arbitrarily cut-off at the limits of a built up area. The innovation represented by Watt’s steam engine cannot be tied down to any specific time and place, but this does not make it any less historical as an event to the extent that its architectural topographic description expresses the contingent process of its development as a coherent time-space figure (e.g. in narrative). From the late eighteenth-century, Britain’s gradually improving road system enabled social relationships to become, as it were, institutionalized across greater extents of time-space through frequent correspondence carried by mail coach. Yet while Watt’s social network was

70 Contingency in the historiographies sustained across geographical boundaries by means of correspondence this does not mean it can be represented as synchronic in network terms. On the contrary, the architectural topographic description of Watt’s key personal and professional relationships (I have mentioned Dr Black, Robison, Dr Roebuck, Dr Small, Boulton, Wilkinson) describe encounters initially mediated through contingency of chance and programme, and differentiated in time-space by figurational contingency, meaning it required considerable effort from these discretely located bodies to maintain personal contact with one another For the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin the concept of heteroglossia refers to the unique ability of the novel to incorporate a diversity of voices held in dialogic tension with the unifying voice of the writer. Bakhtin differentiates the poetic form of writing from the novelistic (narrative) form on the basis that the former clears away the “scaffolding” of different voices that went into the poem’s creation by submitting them to the dominant poetic voice, a process with parallels, I would argue, in the production of scholarly historical writing (Bakhtin 1981, 331). The concept of heteroglossia, therefore, is useful in articulating the value of architectural topographic description to the historical imagination. It expresses the different positionalities, voices and narrative trajectories of situated historical actors through their movements, encounters and (my focus here) speech acts in dialogic contrast to the analytical voice of the historian. On this basis it is possible to assert that historical speech acts (which I extend to those speech acts recorded in written testimonies) are situated as embodied thoughts-toaction in historians’ accounts. The architectural topographic description of speech acts affects what is sayable as a consequence of the partial view afforded by the speaker’s position, while acknowledging how historical writing necessarily represents the privileged (if still partial) view of the historian. While historians may choose to repress the architectural topographic positioning of speech acts in their narratives, perhaps to draw attention to their unreliability as evidence, this positioning may equally be expressed where the narrative emphasis is focused on the specificity and contingency of the historical event.

Notes 1 Diarmaid MacCulloch discussed his book at an event at the Stratford Literary Festival in May 2018, at which he drew attention to this episode. 2 The other near contemporary source, alongside John Foxe, is the history of Charles Wriothesley https://archive.org/stream/chronicleofengla01wriouoft/ chronicleofengla01wriouoft_djvu.txt [accessed 24.07.20] pp. 172–73. 3 There is also an inconsistency as to whether it was Marie-Antoinette’s kidneys or her liver that were to be served fricassée.

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I Definitions One may usefully distinguish between historical writing that ‘shows’ and historical writing that ‘tells’.1 If ‘showing’ prioritizes the immediacy of past events, ‘telling’ prioritizes their interpretation. If history that ‘shows’ conceals its telling in the construction of the narrative, history that ‘tells’ reveals the past in the framing of evidence to support its interpretation. This is not simply a question of stylistic preference but also of epistemology. If accounts of certain kinds of event (e.g. royal pageants) make particular demands on the historian to ‘show’ period details, other events (e.g. fluctuations in grain prices) make necessary demands on the historian to ‘tell’ by providing an interpretation of otherwise generic statistical tables. ‘Tellability’ in literary studies refers to the capacity of a plot to be narrated in a manner that is intelligible in a minimal sense. In historical writing tellability can be thought to refer to the capacity of past actions to be coherently narrated but with the important qualification that the criteria for coherence extends to the correspondence of the narrative with available historical evidence. Another important difference is that tellability in historical studies does not necessarily produce narrative in historical writing, rather it refers to the facility of the historical imagination to find coherence from traces of the past as these are found in archives. I have explained that this facility is essentially architectural topographic, forming narrative propositions as figures that express the whenwhere relationality of historical events. ‘Show and tell’, then are not mutually exclusive but how these qualities are balanced usefully serves to distinguish between different kinds of historical writing. The narrative histories which are the principal focus of Chapters One and Two prioritize ‘show’ over ‘tell’ but these works do not simply present visual tableaux. Instead, they use narrative to ‘show and tell’ by foregrounding the architectural topographical description of historical encounter fields to express patterns of movement, encounter and dialogue, focusing on the most contingent moments to explain the precise unfolding of events. I now turn to consider those historians who prioritize ‘tell’ over ‘show’ in accounts of the English Reformation, French Revolution and the

72 Contingency in the historiographies era of the Industrial Revolution in England. These historians write in didactic rather than narrative mode. While this means they are more likely to present their written work thematically according to social-scientific categories such as ‘demography’, ‘gender’, ‘the economy’, and ‘ethnicity’, this does not mean they eschew narrative altogether. On the contrary, ‘tell’ historians may use narrative in a minimalistic way to organize their material chronologically or contextually to explain their thematic focus. Such narratives, however, are more likely to repress the architectural topographic dimension on the basis that it exposes historical writing to charges of embellishment, artifice and speculation that are likely to conflict with its scholarly and didactic purpose. Of course there is no reason why the architectural topographic encounter field that is an important focus of this book should not itself constitute a thematic focus of research (see Griffiths and von Lünen 2016 on ‘spatial cultures’). There are two main reasons why this has rarely been the case. Primary among these is a tendency among historical writers to conflate the material definition of architectural topographic description with the ‘natural’, ‘physical’ or a-social ‘built environment’, on the one hand, or with a socio-economically and culturally determined ‘environmental background’ on the other. The second, related, reason is more pervasive, perhaps because less widely acknowledged. Since movement, bodily co-presence, encounter and speech acts describe embodied practices they may not seem obviously architectural or topographic at all, to the extent that these terms refer to the materiality and aesthetic intention of architectural or urban objects in themselves, rather than the shape of the encounter field. From this perspective architectural topographic description is restricted to a background function as a localized contextual marker of the ‘where’ of events but has no specific agency to express contingent relationality between events. It is perhaps not surprising then that the repression of the architectural topographic foreground in historical writing tends to coincide with the post-World War II modernist tradition in historical scholarship that is equally sceptical of the role of imagination in constructing historical narratives.

II The city as ‘environment’ The sociological and historical imagination of early nineteenth-century Europe was stimulated by the tumults of the French Revolution and growing industrial cities of Britain. By bringing the urban ‘masses’ into clear view and demonstrating their collective agency to affect social transformation these events did much to precipitate the search for a new ‘science of man’ able to account for changing social realities. At a time when the metaphysical or providential basis of social arrangements could seem increasingly disconnected from the rapid pace of events, thinkers such as the sociologist Auguste Comte (1798–1857), the philosopher Herbert Spencer

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(1820–1903) and the social reformer Robert Owen (1771–1858) became interested in the effect of external material conditions in determining trajectories of social development. The idea of human life developing in its own particular ‘environment’, as distinct from a pre-lapsarian state of nature, became increasingly widespread. If this meant that the social world of human action was realized as the historical fabrication of human action, under the influence of the biological sciences far greater explanatory power was assigned to the environment itself in shaping the attributes of the ‘social organism’. Comte’s foundational sociology was inspired by the natural science of the late eighteenth century pioneered by men including Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788) and Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) who sought to explain the differentiation of animal and plant species through the formative influence of external circumstances. Comte drew on these biological ideas in his formative text Cours de philosophie positive (1830) which established the sociological project as the empirical investigation of the relationship between the human organism and its external surroundings or, as he preferred, ‘milieu’. As the most socially complex of organisms he believed that humans were uniquely dependent on their circumstances. Comte’s ideas were foundational for Herbert Spencer whose corpus of biological and social-scientific thought established the primacy of the term ‘environment’ (introduced into English by Thomas Carlyle in 1828), over ‘conditions’, ‘milieu’ and ‘circumstances’ in both these fields. Spencer believed that the socio-economic and political changes of the nineteenth century had necessitated a “revolution in circumstances” in which the index of social progress was harmony between individuals and their environment, which he conceptualized as a single social organism (Spencer 1851, quoted in Pearce 2010, 245). In publications such as The Social Organism (1860) and Principles of Psychology (1870-2) Spencer extended the concept of ‘environment’ from the physical and biological domains to cover all forms of social organization including, for example, systems of governance. It was largely through his work that the normative idea of the environment as being ‘good or bad’ for the overall health of the social entity entered sociological discourse. It was subsequently perpetuated by influential sociologists including Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) and Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) for whom a properly functioning social environment has an innate telos or purpose to reduce conflict by successfully integrating its human components into the social whole. Pearce (2010) has shown how Spencer was largely responsible for establishing the environment-organism dyad: ‘the environment’ in singular relation to the ‘the organism’. He notes that for Spencer, as for biologists, ‘the environment’ and ‘the organism’ performed “metaphysical work” by offering “a way to talk about general causes without exploring the details of micro-level complexity” (249). Spencer’s preference for the singular environment over the plurality of circumstances introduced a far greater

74 Contingency in the historiographies level abstraction in the use of these terms than was the case even with Comte’s work. For Pearce this move amounts to: … a progressive concealment of the different elements that make up the world outside the organism and the relations between these elements. This concealment, perhaps misleadingly, implies that the environment can be taken to be a single, unified cause. (Pearce 2010, 249) The singular abstraction of ‘the environment’ as a rather ill-defined admixture of physical, biological and social causes provides the conceptual basis of nineteenth-century ‘environmental determinism’. Its reciprocal is the universal ‘human organism’ whose paradoxical development as a (generic) individual is addressed by the convergence of its interests with those of the social organism. Environmental determinism has a troubled history as a mode of sociological explanation through its association with ‘social Darwinism’ which reduces social life to a fight for survival. This represents a distortion of Darwin’s argument in On the Origin of Species (1859) where he showed how the intrinsically random quality of natural variation means that it is not clear a priori precisely which environmental conditions confer evolutionary advantage. The pervasive late nineteenthcentury tendency to blame the existence of slums on the allegedly poor biological ‘stock’ of the people who lived in them, for example, can hardly be justified on an evolutionary basis (Stedman Jones 2013 [1971]). Even so, Darwin’s eventual adoption from Spencer of the singular term ‘environment’ (in preference to ‘conditions’) helps explain why evolutionary theories have been readily applied to such questions – an approach that inevitably appears normative by justifying the status quo of societal arrangements on the basis that they are ‘natural’. A more benign tradition of normative thinking about the urban environment as a natural environment predates the use of the term in English. One historian has referred to this as the “secular environmentalism” of the slum that represented a shift away from religiously motivated social concern that distinguished between the deserving and undeserving poor towards a more democratic focus on the conditions in which the poor lived (Bass Warner Junior 1983, 389fn). The social reformer, philanthropist and industrialist Robert Owen drew on eighteenth-century terminology to articulate his belief that the “force of circumstances” was primary in shaping people’s lives and that the conditions they found themselves in were not, in the first instance, their fault (Owen 1927 [1813], 261). It was this conviction that led him to pioneer a uniquely architectural response to the squalid conditions of workers in industrial cities by creating the world’s first model factory town in New Lanark, Scotland. Owen’s radical manifesto the New View of Society (1813) is known to have been inspired by the utilitarian ideas of Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), reinventing society on a rational

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basis to maximize human happiness, but the educational ideas of the political philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) were almost certainly another influence. Rousseau believed that the antidote to the artifice and corruption of civilized society lay in men understanding their true nature, a romantic meditation which may involve rejecting urban fashions for countryside simplicity. ‘May’ not ‘must’ because ‘nature’ for Rousseau did not mean uncivilized but a more authentic form of human existence that would bring forth a more virtuous and harmonious social environment. Owen’s enlightened educational programme at New Lanark (without ‘unnatural’ punishment or reward) stemmed from his view that education should not be “contrary to human nature” (Owen 1927, 279). Rousseau himself observes in his pedagogical manual Emile (1762, 20) that “We are born sensitive and from our birth onwards we are affected in various ways by our environment”.2 Achieving maturity involved a developmental process of learning, first from the material world of things and then from the social world of people. Owen’s own understanding of ‘circumstances’ is broadly consistent with Rousseau’s ‘environment’ but carries an obvious utilitarian stamp. Long before the publication of Comte’s Cours Owen had argued that: The reflecting part of mankind have admitted, in theory, that the characters of men are formed chiefly by the circumstances in which they are placed; yet the science of the influence of circumstances, which is the most important of all the sciences, remains unknown for the great practical business of life. (Owen 1927, 270) Owen’s philanthropy was both heartfelt (Roussean) as well as rational (Benthamite) in its motivation. New Lanark was intended to prove that providing good living conditions for industrial workers did not mean a business could not be run at a profit. The town offered access to shared communal facilities (e.g. a nursery, primary school, community hall, a park, allotments), as well as sanitary, if not particularly commodious, tenement housing. Personal conduct was strictly regulated by rules (or ‘programme’) enforced through a formal structure of community organization. The title ‘Institute of Character Formation’ assigned to the building (constructed in 1816) which served as a library and community centre gives a flavour of how Owen intended New Lanark to encourage habits of self-discipline in his workforce. For the cultural and literary critic Raymond Williams (1963, 44) New Lanark was the solution to a problem of “social engineering” namely, how to reinvent the idea of the village community for the industrial age through something man-made – namely, through culture. Owen’s originality lay in his belief that it was possible for the enlightened to intervene – not least architecturally – to change human nature. New Lanark offered respectable living conditions for impoverished industrial workers and a radically progressive educational provision that

76 Contingency in the historiographies went hand-in-hand with the reduction of child labour. More problematic, from a sociological perspective, is Owen’s assumption that by improving the physical (housing) and biological (health) environment of his workers he would necessarily improve their social environment (principally through education) – because in the end the criteria of the virtuous community was not set by the workers but by their paternalist employer. The regulation of social life in New Lanark was certainly more didactic than ‘natural’ in the spirit of Rousseau, but then in many respects the community’s adults were also viewed by Owen as children under his care. This suggests how, as E.P. Thompson observed, for Owen it was mainly the working classes who were the “creatures of circumstances” (Thompson 1991 [1963], 864). If Owen later applied the same argument to social elites it was only to plead understanding for their lack of sympathy towards the urban poor. From this perspective it was the subaltern ‘other’ who were made visible and objectified by Owen’s “force of circumstances”, while the position and privilege of the middle and upper classes went largely unexamined. The influence of Owen’s New Lanark settlement was far-reaching. The first of many model factory towns, its legacy can be traced through the socially ameliorating tradition of town planning in industrial Britain that extends from Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities, to many of the modernist inspired post-war New Towns and social housing estates of the midtwentieth century. Despite their contrasting architectural styles these schemes perpetuated Owen’s theoretical legacy through the belief that particular architectural forms, such as, blocks situated in green space and communal buildings in proximity to nature would be conducive not only to human health but also to the production of virtuous, rational, enlightened communities. Such a view depended on a portmanteau concept of physical, biological and social causation that Spencer would later collapse into the singular term ‘environment’. Whether it was Owen’s New View … (1813), Howard’s Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1902) or Le Corbusier’s City of To-Morrow and its Planning (1929), architectural schemes could be represented as transformative social environments on the basis of the ambitions of their respective imaginaries while the quotidian, contingent quality of social life in the settlements themselves remained more obscure. Consistent with Spencer’s social-organicist ideas the expectation was that individual needs and the needs of society could be perfectly reconciled through a physical environment that embodied paternalist, liberal or socialist ideals of social harmony. These architectural manifestos offer a critique of urban vice, inequity and filth by advocating the relocation of working populations to rural areas or strongly differentiating new developments from the surrounding historical city. This emphasis resonates with Thompson’s critique of Owen’s thought that the ‘force of circumstances’ was deployed to represent a particular social group (the working class) as falling short of middle-class expectations. This argument could easily be manipulated in the interest of social privilege

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by being used to justify a regime of social discipline. The construction of prisons, asylums and hospitals as a means of social reform reveals a specifically architectural form of environmental determinism that developed over the nineteenth century and is associated with the assertion of panoptical social control of marginalized social groups (Foucault 1995; Hillier 1996). Indeed in 1816 Owen was invited by the Parliamentary Committee on Poor Laws to devise a scheme for a self-supporting pauper community that met with radical hostility, not least on the basis of its similarity to a prison (Inglis 1972, 150). The scope of the social transformations imagined by Owen and his successors extended well beyond the ability of localized architectural schemes to affect them. From the point of view of the urban poor, the social and economic life of the city, as such, was not necessarily the problem (though poverty, working conditions and ill-health certainly were). For the urban middle-class in Britain, however, the quotidian movements of the poor were something potentially threatening and even revolutionary, to be observed and controlled. In this sense it was desirable that urban street life was brought under as much surveillance as possible. Municipal programmes of urban improvements were, therefore, normative, not simply in offering an amelioration of urban conditions but also in reflecting middle-class social unease about the ungovernable poor of the city. Graeme Davison (1983) has shown how the early social surveys of towns were often conducted by medical practitioners who developed the traditional metaphor of the social ‘body’ into an anatomical diagnosis of urban maladies that was consistent with the prevailing social-organicist outlook of the early nineteenth century. Doctor Thomas Southwood Smith (1788–1861), a pioneer of sanitary reform, argued that the city functioned as a ‘sanitary economy’. The free circulation of water and air, and removal of waste from the urban system created the conditions for a healthy life in the city just as it prevented disease in the body. The sanitary reformers, most famously the public health pioneer Edwin Chadwick (1800–1890), offered a greatly improved diagnosis of urban conditions in recognizing the connection between systemic factors (e.g. the circulation of clean water) and localized problems of poor health and disease. During the Victorian period the utilitarian sanitary economy became conflated with what Robin Evans (1997, 94-101) refers to as a “moral geography” in which unsanitary urban environments, poor bodily health and the presence of vice became inextricably associated, demonstrating the “contagion of immorality” as a kind of disease. In adapting themselves to this environment the urban poor were becoming irredeemably degraded. Stedman Jones (2013, 130) shows how “biologism provided a framework for a comprehensive theory of hereditary urban degeneration” that became pervasive among the middle classes.” The desire to replace labyrinthine slums with thoroughfares was driven by the Victorian association of urban morality with circulation in the minds of Victorian reformers: “The street was not a place to loiter, but to move”, as Daunton (2001, 6) puts it. Ease

78 Contingency in the historiographies of circulation was viewed positively by middle-class urban elites as a way of making poorer areas of the city morally healthier and also more visible to inspection by the forces of law and order. At the same time high levels of residential segregation in the growing suburbs suggested limited enthusiasm among the middle classes for too much social mixing – and only the middle classes could afford to travel in from the urban periphery. John Urry (2007, 207) notes how movement and circulation become fetishized in a society in which social status is associated with mobility. This fetishization is evident in some contemporary urban analytics that abstract movement patterns as global variables while, in Pearce’s (2010, 249) terms concealing the complex entanglement of social practices at more localized scales of activity.

III The repression of the encounter field in the historiographies of the English Reformation, French Revolution and the period of the Industrial Revolution in England So where does this discussion of environmental determinism lead in terms of the principal focus of this book – the architectural topographical encoding of historical writing? The historical imagination of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been heavily influenced by positivist social thought and scientific modernism such that an excessive weight of explanation is placed on the physical, biological and social ‘environment’ of historical events, sometimes in preference to the relating the when-where of what actually happened that uniquely distinguishes history as a domain of enquiry. In a scholarly sleight of hand these environmental variables are often referred to as ‘context’, even when the ‘factors’ at issue refer to the material conditions of the past (demography, wealth, pollution etc.). This leads to an elision between a legitimate acknowledgement of the effects that the physical and social environment has on people, and a normative assumption that human action can be explained as the sum of its environmental influences. Both ‘environment’ and ‘context’ are synchronic modes for framing historical arguments in what I have referred to as didactic ‘tell’ mode. I distinguish these from histories in storytelling mode, in which architectural topographic description drives narrative asynchronously through the contingencies of the encounter field. Where environmental and contextual description predominate narrative contingency is likely to be repressed in preference for a more abstract evaluation of the relative merits of explanatory factors. This suggests a distinction between modes of tellability in the architectural topographic ‘foreground’ of contingent narrative figures and the architectural topographic ‘background’ – which submerges the description of the encounter field into non-contingent contextual or environmental explanation. In Chapters One and Two the embellishment of historical accounts with speculative period detail was said to arise from the storytelling nature of narrative histories written in the architectural topographic foreground.

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While embellishment may contribute to the construction of a localized narrative artifice it is the overall narrative arc of the text which provides substantive historical explanation. Contextual and environmental descriptions differ from embellishment in that they supply a metaphysical level of explanation that does not arise from the relationality of when-where events but rather transcends the specificity of any given historical narrative. In an unpublished working paper Hanson and Hillier (1982) draw on a range of fiction writing to develop the useful distinction between ‘milieu-rich’ and ‘milieu-poor’ writing which allows them to distinguish between novels that invest heavily in environmental description and those which do not. Adapting Raymond Williams’ notion of the “knowable community” as referring to a crisis in the novelistic representation of new urban populations they seek to develop what they regard as the neglected spatial dimension of his position (Williams 1974, 14–15). Hanson and Hillier claim that whereas milieu-rich writing serves to render low-status urban groups ‘unknowable’ by assigning agency to the environments of which they are assumed to be products, milieu-poor writing assumes a knowable community shared by readers, writers and subjects alike in which agency lies with the motivations and psychology of the novel-reading (bourgeois) individual. For Hanson and Hillier this spatial dimension of community has clear implications for the conceptualization of architectural design, but it is also an argument that can usefully inform historical understanding. The distinction between milieu-poor and milieu-rich writing makes it possible to interrogate historical writing in two different dimensions: on the x-axis, as it were, from the repression to the expression of contingency in the encounter field, according to the pervasiveness of architectural topographic descriptions; and on the y-axis, from milieu-rich to milieu-poor writing, according to the explanatory value assigned to environmentalcontextual variables. These distinctions are intended as a heuristic to inform discussion, rather than the basis for a formal classification. If Chapters One and Two focussed on examples of the expression of contingency in the encounter field, the historiographical focus in this chapter is rather on the means by which historical writing in didactic mode seeks to repress such contingency. It does so first by examining ‘milieu-poor’ accounts of the English Reformation and the French Revolution that invest in explanation in environmental-contextual rather than in narrative mode, before turning to ‘milieu-rich’ accounts of the industrial revolution. Here environmental description is said to frame historical explanation by establishing a discontinuity between the historical world depicted and the one shared by the historian and his or her readers. Finally processes of abbreviation, metaphorical sublimation and abridgement of the encounter field are identified in ‘milieu-poor’ narratives of national history. These are said to encode a tacit assumption of continuity between the historical subject matter and the world familiar to writer and reader alike.

80 Contingency in the historiographies i Environments of the English Reformation A.F Pollard’s (1905) traditional biography of Henry VIII illustrates how environmental causation offered scholarly historians a means of putting their subject on a scientific methodological footing by reducing the play of chance in the narrative.3 In the opening chapter of his book Pollard rejects explanations of the significant events of Henry’s reign on the basis of his ‘miraculous’ force of personality – likening such an argument to the discredited geological arguments for biblical floods: The miraculous interpretation of history is as obsolete as the catastrophic theory of geology, and the explanation of Henry’s career must be sought not so much in the study of his character as in the study of his environment, of the conditions which made things possible to him that were not possible before or since and are not likely to be so again. (Pollard 1905, 4) The second chapter ‘Prince Henry and His Environment’ builds on this argument. It emphasizes contextual factors, for example, the renaissance education available at his father’s court, as being formative of the young Prince’s outlook. Here Pollard uses ‘environment’ and the plural ‘conditions’ interchangeably to suggest a specific set of influences more akin to Carlyle’s definition of environment as an ‘empire of circumstances’. But elsewhere the ‘environment’ of Henry VIII’s reign becomes more determining of the argument. For Pollard, politics are essentially amoral because they are “akin to the operation of natural forces; and, as such, they are neither moral nor immoral” (437). He believes Henry was ultimately successful bringing England through a prolonged period of medieval dynastic wars into the modern age because he was able to adapt the English state to the prevailing tides of history. That is the secret of Henry’s success. He directed the storm of a revolution which was doomed to come, which was certain to break those who refused to bend, and which may be explained by natural causes, but cannot be judged by moral considerations. The storm cleared the air and dissipated many a pestilent vapour, but it left a trail of wreck and ruin over the land. The nation purchased political salvation at the price of moral debasement. (Pollard 1905, 438) Pollard’s emphasis on the historical necessity of the English constitutional settlement between the monarchy and Parliament identifies him with what is known as ‘Whig’ history – that is, English history as the triumph of (Protestant) liberty over (Catholic) tyranny. Here the idea of the social organism does the metaphysical work of explaining the consolidation of the

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English state and Parliamentary constitution under King Henry VIII as a natural response to external perturbation, a ‘storm’ clearing the air and expelling pestilence. This makes Pollard’s Henry VIII an ambiguous figure because the centralization of political power in his person was itself a source of corrupting tyranny. The “trail of wreck and ruin” left by the storm materializes the “moral debasement” of Henry’s reign – the executions of wives, councillors and religious dissenters – by invoking the destruction of the material culture of Catholic England: shrines, monasteries and sacred objects. Pollard’s environmental description is also a metaphor for the degraded spiritual conditions of social life in Tudor England. The attribution of moral codes to an environment bearing down on individuals identifies a meta-narrative of environmental causation that Robert Owen would have recognized. By contrast, there is none of the didacticism of Pollard’s “moral debasement” in the observation of a contemporary historian referring to the English Reformation as “laying waste to a spiritual eco-system” – by which he means the material culture of Catholic England, most notably the monastic houses (Marshall 2018, 261). An eco-system is certainly more sensitive to local differentiation than the monolithic ‘environment’, implying a dynamic relation of the parts to the whole, rather a static totality. Even so, the use of an environmental metaphors bears closer scrutiny. Drawing a parallel between natural processes and human ones conceals from view that which is less tangible but strongly implicit in the human process, namely, how myriad routines of movement, bodily co-presence and encounter sustained Catholic England and how far these practices overlapped, were adapted and dissipated during the Reformation. Instead, the process of social change is assigned to a global environmental variable, ‘the spiritual eco-system’ such that one instantiation (Catholic) might be replaced by another (Protestant). If these constrating ‘eco-systems’ are given architectural topographic descriptions it becomes clearer how Catholics and Protestants overwhelmingly contested the same social spaces. For many ordinary people the different confessional doctrines as stake were ambiguous as to their practical implications and endlessly negotiated on a local basis, hence the complexity of the Reformation (Duffy 2001). Keith Thomas’ pioneering work on English popular religion in early modern England Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) revealed how organized religion existed in complex relation with pre-Christian traditions of folklore and superstition in the era of the Reformation. Its first chapter, titled simply ‘The Environment’, seeks to ground a wide-ranging exploration of people’s continuing belief in the magical arts in a general account of material social conditions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is environment as context, in the sense that Thomas is not concerned to describe specific historical environments but gives summary accounts of population, mortality, medicine, and religious and recreational practices during this period. The chapter lays the ground for the argument that

82 Contingency in the historiographies magical belief persisted because life was incredibly insecure, hence: “In Tudor and Stuart England men were fully accustomed to disease and a low expectation of life” (Thomas 1971, 17). Inclusion of such a remark under the rubric of ‘environment’ is indicative of a normative statement carrying the assumptions of a particular (late twentieth century) perspective on the ‘expectation of life’. Thomas himself reflects on this when drawing general conclusions from his vast survey. It is therefore possible to connect the decline of the old magical beliefs with the growth of urban living, the rise of science and the spread of an ideology of self-help. But the connection is only approximate and a more precise sociological genealogy cannot at present be constructed. Too many of the participants in the story remain hidden from view and the representative status of those who are visible is too uncertain. (Thomas 1971, 665–6) Thomas acknowledges how the generic sociological categories that structure environment-as-context (urbanization, science, Protestantism, etc.) cannot explain his richly varied historical material in any satisfactory way. The when-where specificity of social action necessitates the exercise of the historical imagination in the architectural topographic dimension rather than through applying global thematic contexts to discretely located phenomena. Such an imaginative exercise is not inconsistent with Thomas’ anthropological method, but theoretically his work is coloured by a developmental model of human society as characterized by progression from a pre-industrial state of folk belief to a secular industrial modernity. This model has its origins in organicist beliefs about social evolution as telos, directed along predictable lines to particular ends. Pollard also represses contingency in his narrative to the extent that Henry’s VIII’s actions are explained by his contemporary environment rather than by the unfolding of events. His work anticipates a standard model of historical studies which begin with a chapter of general socio-economic environmental-context before providing a narrative of events in which contingency is largely repressed even while a basic chronology is maintained. For Thomas who is not writing in narrative, the question of contingency in the encounter field does not arise. His sources are organized thematically (e.g. chapters titles include ‘Providence’, ‘Magic and Religion’) to provide a largely synchronic picture – albeit one that roams over a period of two centuries. ii Environments of the French Revolution The defining events of the French Revolution from the fall of the Bastille in 1789 to the execution of the King and Queen in 1793, and the Terror of 1793-4 took place in Paris. An urban focus lends itself to political

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narratives by presenting the historian with a richly differentiated architectural topographic foreground with which to establish the time-space relation of myriad, discrete events. Certainly accounts that focus on political events in Paris tend to have the strongest narrative dimension. Within the specialist field it is acknowledged that there is a danger of putting too much emphasis on the events in Paris. It is notable that in accounts where a greater emphasis is given to the peasantry and provinces, a more sociological structure is likely – whether focussed around social class (Lefebvre 1960), international contexts (Lefebvre 1965), town and country (Cobb 1972) or culture (Hunt 1984). Theda Skocpol’s (1994 [1979]) comparative historical analysis States and Social Revolutions is unusual in that it strips almost all narrative from its accounts of the events of the French, Russian and Chinese Revolutions in order to isolate the external variables (notably foreign wars) that drove revolutionary processes and, Skocpol argues, led to the consolidation of state power. Skocpol differentiates her method from ecological approaches to political science that, she argues, conceptualizes revolutions as a kind of pathological telos within states that develop predictably through a series of stages (Skocpol 1994, 38–39). Yet whatever its analytical strengths Skocpol’s macro-emphasis on social revolutions as overwhelmingly determined by international factors offers very limited scope for the explanatory significance of localized contingencies of political action. It follows, therefore, that the architectural topographic dimension of revolutionary activity is entirely repressed in her study. Paris (Moscow and Beijing) feature only insofar as they are the geographical location of state institutions. Most social historians, even those with a strong interest in the structural factors of social change, struggle to marginalize revolutionary events in Paris so completely as Skocpol. Rudé’s The Crowd in the French Revolution (1978 [1959]) is divided into nine chapters: five offer narratives of major crowd events in French revolutionary history and four are thematic chapters reflecting on topics such as the ‘anatomy’ and ‘motivations’ of crowd activity. Rudé’s revolutionary crowd is overwhelmingly the Parisian crowd. The second of his two introductory chapters ‘Paris on the Eve of the Revolution’ therefore sets the scene for much of what is to follow. Rudé’s descriptions of Paris’ built environment is scholarly but evocative, suggesting a personal knowledge of the city. For example, in the medieval heart of Paris: … there were streets of lodging houses and chambres garnies, like the rue de la Mortellieries, adjoining the Hôtel de Ville, or the rues Galande and des Jardins, a stone’s throw from Notre Dame, where riverside workers, porters, stonemasons, and other seasonal workers lived closely huddled in lodgings at one to four sous a night. (Rudé 1978, 14–15)

84 Contingency in the historiographies Rudé’s account of Paris’ eighteenth-century expansion (in territory and population) focuses on the widespread building activity that sought to “promote the economic interests and to flatter the social ambitions of the nobility and the wealthy bourgeoisie” (12). Even so Rudé is clear that there was no ‘working-class’ suburbs in revolutionary Paris, but that wide distinctions in social status existed “cheek by jowl” (15). He associates prerevolutionary riotous crowd activity in the city more with fluctuations in the price of bread than any emerging working-class consciousness in the Marxist sense. This being the case, how does Paris itself inform his analysis? It is hard not to notice the contrast between Rudé’s description of the outward transformation of Paris and his argument that relative lack of riotous activity in the pre-revolutionary city meant that “behind the apparent calm there were forces maturing, not immediately discernible to even the most enlightened and far-seeing observers” that would precipitate the cataclysm of revolution (26). What ‘forces’ and how exactly they were ‘maturing’ is not directly addressed in the subsequent narrative which leaves the key question of the role of Paris in creating the revolutionary crowd unanswered. The appeal by default to the abstract category of a protorevolutionary environment is akin to Pollard’s ‘natural causes’. To leave it there, however, would not to do justice to the architectural topographic encoding of Rudé’s work. First, his narratives of the major crowd events of the revolutionary period would be inconceivable without an exceptional sense of the Parisian social spaces through which revolutionary action unfolded. Secondly, his thematic chapters, particular Chapter XIV ‘The generation of revolutionary activity’ demonstrate the communicative agency of Paris as an encounter field. For example: The wine-shop may have been […] potent as a channel of communication for revolutionary ideas. Not only do wine-merchants appear to have been a most consistent revolutionary group […] but their shops were the common resorts of the menu peuple of the faubourgs and markets who, on Sundays and Mondays in particular flocked beyond the barrières to the popular taverns of La Courtlille, Les Pocherons, and La Nouvelle France. These became ready centres for gossip and exchanges of news and rumour; for this and other reasons it is perhaps no coincidence that so many of the great journées in Paris should have started or gathered momentum at the week-end (Rudé 1978, 217).4 Rudé represents the wine-shops not as isolated destinations but as generative nodes in an informational infrastructure that produced and rapidly circulated revolutionary ideas. The weekly routines of movement, copresence and encounter he describes prefigured the revolutionary journée. The goals of the people that mobilized to storm, for example, the Bastille and Versailles Palace, were not neatly defined by their socio-economic

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status or common identity as ‘revolutionaries’ but in a less tangible, more contingent, sense by their shared participation as a crowd in the encounter field through which events were unfolding. Rudé’s interpretation presents a ‘spatial culture’ of the crowd in revolutionary Paris, but this is kept thematically distinct from the narrative account of events in the first part of his study. Rudé aspires to a ‘scientific spirit’ of enquiry and direct evidence for the circulation of information is sparse. Even so his work makes a powerful case for how architectural topographic description can mobilize the figure of the urban crowd in historical writing (Rudé 1978, 5). Whereas Rudé opens with a description of the Parisian ‘environment’, the introductory chapter of Norman Hampson’s A Social History of the French Revolution (1974 [1963]) offers a broad survey of shifting power relations between the monarchy and different strata of French society in the late eighteenth century. The organization of his account is indicative of the broad influence of Marxist historiography that saw in the French Revolution the playing out of an historical process in which feudalism was displaced by bourgeois capitalist class. Yet Hampson opposes this view. In revolutions, he argues, structural change cannot be separated from political change since the former becomes the object of the latter. His Social History interweaves the foreground narrative of revolutionary events in Paris into an elucidation of the French social structure in crisis. From one point of view major social revolutions are like geological faults. […] Unlike geological faults, however, social revolutions are the product—however unexpected and unwelcome—of human action. (Hampson 1974, vi) Hampson’s insistence on the contingent field of political action necessitates the architectural topographic encoding of the Parisian encounter field to express the unpredictability of events in which the whole population of the city was becoming involved. On the day before the revolutionary events at the Bastille (14 July 1789) it is noted how: […] barricades were going up, trenches being dug to repel cavalry and paving stones carried to the upper floors of the five- and six-storey buildings that dominated the narrow streets. (Hampson 1974, 73) Taken as a whole Hampson’s account of the French Revolution is written thematically, in analytical mode. He engages extensively (though not uncritically) with the sociology of class politics and emphasizes the price of bread alongside the views and actions of leading protagonists. Even so, it is remarkable how the sequence of revolutionary events 1789–1794 demands narrative ‘telling’ in all but the most structuralist accounts of the French Revolution such as Skocpol’s. This telling encodes in architectural

86 Contingency in the historiographies topographic figures the means of realizing the political agency of the Parisian population. Yet historians continue to conceptualize urban space (if they have tried to conceptualize it at all) in physicalist terms, as an ‘urban ‘variable’ rather than a source of contingency in the unfolding of events. For example, Hobsbawm (1969) notes how Paris is a city that has fermented much revolutionary activity (in 1789, 1830, 1848, 1871). This leads him to ask whether there is something unique in its urban structure, for example, the density of the old city, the facility of barricading its narrow streets – that can explain this recurrence of revolutionary activity. Unsurprisingly, he finds in the negative. “Revolutions”, Hobsbawm summarizes, “arise out of political situations, not because some cities are structurally suited to insurrection” (308). Yet how could it be otherwise given the political complexity of social revolutions? While Hobsbawm grasps political complexity he does not recognize the complexity of urban structure in the architectural topographic dimension. Instead he seeks to translate the Parisian encounter field into a structural category of a similar order to ‘class’ or ‘population density’– neither of which can explain revolutionary activity in themselves either. What emerges clearly from an extensive survey of historical accounts of the French Revolution is that all but the most determinedly structuralist draw tacitly on the historian’s knowledge of Paris’ architectural topography in order to imaginatively reconstruct even the most elementary narratives of key events. This suggests that revolutionary activity in Paris is not reducible to some essence of its urban structure. Rather it is the capacity of the Parisian encounter field to express the profound when-where contingency of revolutionary events that matter to making the French Revolution intelligible as an historical event. While the capacity of urban space to express contingency in narrative figures is not unique to Paris, the particular architectural topographic description of revolutionary events in 1789–1794 that encodes these figures is entirely specific. Despite the best efforts of social-scientific history the encounter field of revolutionary Paris appears irrepressible in almost all accounts of the French Revolution – this is the best riposte to Hobsbawm’s enquiry! iii Environments of the Industrial Revolution In the vast historiography of the urbanization associated with the Industrial Revolution in Britain the industrial city is rarely portrayed as a ‘generative space’. On the contrary, the British ‘industrial city’ became pathologized in the nineteenth century as an overwhelming and oppressive environment in which human life could hardly prosper in any civilized form. The influence of Frederick Engels’ Condition of the English Working Class (1892 [1845]) on urban thinking has been far reaching. Although Engels himself drew on the previous generation of social thinkers including Robert Owen who believed human life to be determined by its material circumstances, he

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extended this insight to human history more generally. Engels drew a direct comparison between the French Revolution and what he called the “industrial revolution” in terms of their magnitude but in England, as he saw it “the mightiest result of this industrial transformation is the English proletariat” (Engels 1892, 15). The crucible for this process of class creation was the industrial city. Engels’ extensive urban observation and his sensitivity to how the capitalist city organized human life spatially – such that wealthy people occupied thoroughfares and poor people were out of sight in the courts behind – combines urban ethnography with a morphological insight in a way that was formative of urban sociology. As Eastwood (1998, 103) points out, it is wrong to see Engel’s work simply as a polemic or revolutionary text. In many respects it is an early piece of urban social science with parallels to similar works by other pioneering urban investigators including those by Peter Gaskell and Edwin Chadwick.5 Yet what also comes across in Engels’ writing is his aesthetic distaste for the city. He says of London that the “very turmoil of the streets has something repulsive, something against which human nature rebels”, an anti-urban trope with echoes in the attack on street-based cities by architectural modernists inspired by Le Corbusier (Engels 1892, 24). Engels’ testimony leaves us in no doubt that he was genuinely appalled by the conditions in which the urban poor lived, but his social-organicist critique of the urban environment conflates justified criticism of housing quality and overcrowding with the social life and morality of the people who inhabit such places. In a word, we must confess that in the working-men’s dwellings of Manchester, no cleanliness, no convenience, and consequently no comfortable family life is possible; that in such dwellings only a physically degenerate race, robbed of all humanity, degraded, reduced morally and physically to bestiality, could feel comfortable and at home. (Engels 1892, 63) This kind of polemic sits uneasily with the bonhomie of Engels’ dedicatory address To the working-classes of Great Britain. In conducting his research into the condition of England, Engels (a German) explains: I wanted more than a mere abstract knowledge of my subject; I wanted to see you in your own homes, to observe you in your everyday life, to chat with you on your condition and grievances, to witness your struggles against the social and political power of your oppressors. (Engels 1892, xx) Here Engels, no less than Owen, expresses his own sense of bourgeois distance from his working-class ‘subject’ which, elsewhere, is being precisely abstracted as the proletariat. This is not to call Engels’ own motives in

88 Contingency in the historiographies working for the relief of capitalist exploitation into question. Rather it is to highlight how his ‘milieu-rich’ description of the most environmentally degraded areas of Manchester’s built environment has been reproduced historiographically with the effect of rendering the actual experience of people in cities during the industrial revolution as almost unintelligible except through this environmental lens. Engels, for example, was highly influential on John and Barbara Hammond, themselves the founders of an influential tradition of socialist historiography of the industrial revolution. This remarkable passage is worth quoting at length because it represents the tradition. There is a great chapter in Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris describing the rise of printing and the overthrow of architecture as the principal language of mankind. But we have to remember that the population in the new industrial districts was a population for which literature scarcely existed, that the boundaries of their lives were for many the boundaries of their imagination, and that the only things that spoke to their minds were the mill in which they worked and the town in which they lived. […] Thus the monotonous strain of an occupation that gave no scope to the mind, and its unattractive setting, rendered them all the more dependent on their surroundings, making it more certain that they would derive from their buildings and their streets and their homes the spiritual influence that others would find in their work, and others again, by means of literature, in the imagination and experience of distant worlds and distant ages. […] Perhaps the best way to describe the new towns and their form of government would be to say that so far from breaking or checking the power of circumstances over men’s lives, they symbolised the absolute dependence and helplessness of the mass of the people living in them. They were not so much towns as barracks: not the refuge of a civilisation but the barracks of an industry. This character was stamped on their form of life and government. The medieval town had reflected the minds of centuries and the subtle associations of a living society with a history; these towns reflected the violent enterprise of an hour, the single passion that had thrown street on street in a frantic monotony of disorder. (Hammond and Hammond 1920, 38–39) The Hammonds’ writing, like Engels’, is ‘milieu-rich’. It invests heavily in figurative language to communicate the intensity of the particular environment of the industrial city and the devastating impact they believed it had on people’s lives. Such accounts have been highly influential culturally and have created a generic image of the industrial city as an environment where social life did not happen in any meaningful sense. For example,

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Hunt (2004, 321, 16) states that it is “hard to over-emphasise the diabolic misery of the early Victorian city”. One may, or may not, agree with this verdict, but the story of the urban poor in industrial England is rarely told through their own experiences, so much as through those of the medical investigators and government commissioners (as systematically explored by Inglis 1972). While a scarcity of source material is, of course, a challenge, it is not insurmountable. For example, research into the material culture of industrial areas (Mayne and Murray 2001), working-class autobiographies (Griffin 2014) and the great diversity of manufacturing towns and cities (Trinder 2013) promises to disrupt the power of the monolithic image of the industrial city as an homogenizing “environment”, and replace it with one more grounded in the architectural descriptions of everyday social life. The architectural topographic description of Paris was used to express the contingency of unfolding events in the French Revolution and thereby make the revolution intelligible as an event – even in thematically organized studies. By contrast the ‘milieu-rich’ focus on the environment of the industrial city offers a critique of industrial society as something ultimately unintelligible to human experience – a complexity accessible to history not as a lived reality but only in terms of abstract macro socio-economic structures. In this respect there is clear tension in Engels’ thinking between his recognition of the spatial-morphological pattern to the distribution of wealth in Manchester’s built environment that functioned as a system to keep poverty from middle-class eyes, and his own representations of the habitations of the urban poor as ‘labyrinths’ characterized by ‘confusion’ and ‘disorder’. To convey an impression of the sensory shock of industrial cities typically required that architectural topographic description was replaced by something more metaphorical (e.g. Old Manchester as a “Hell upon Earth” (Engels 1892, 53). A consequence is that the social contingency of the encounter field is collapsed into a static image that confuses the distinction between the condition of the industrial environment and what it was working people were actually doing there. The tension in Engels’ thought is identified by Stephen Marcus (1973) in his book chapter ‘Reading the Illegible’. Marcus argues that the modern city is (objectively) experienced as ‘illegible’ in the sense that it appears disorganized and chaotic “a random agglomeration of mere appearances”, an assertion he justifies with reference to the legacy of the nineteenth-century industrial city as described by Engels (257). But, says Marcus, Engels’ inspired description reveals how Manchester “This chaos of alleys, courts, hovels, filth -and human beings- is not a chaos at all” but a system of meaning, constructed by laissez-faire capitalism that benefits the middle classes at direct cost to the urban poor (272). He seeks to put Engels’ observational acuity on a scientific footing by drawing on the contemporary literature of environmental social science to equate industrial cities to unplanned “aboriginal artefacts […] morphological embodiments of behaviour”. (264)

90 Contingency in the historiographies And in the collective human artefact–the settlement, town, or city–men are expressing historically the character and quality of their existence, of the arrangements they have made, on the one hand, with the natural world, and, on the other, with one another. (Marcus 1973, 264) In some ways Marcus is prescient in recognizing how Engels spatialmorphological observation identifies something akin to what a later urban theory would recognize as an ‘emergent complexity’ of the industrial city, as opposed to the metaphorical ‘chaos’ often attributed to it. The difficulty is that for Marcus as for Engels the human experience of the city is said to map directly onto the environmental description of the human artefact as a capitalist social totality. Rather than meaning arising contingently from movement, bodily co-presence and encounter in the architectural topographic foreground, the built environment (again) expresses a milieu-rich metaphor for the power of the bourgeoisie and the existence of an undifferentiated urban proletariat. Marcus commends Engels’ for making the ‘unintelligible’ city ‘intelligible’ - but unintelligible and intelligible for whom and on what criteria? Engels’ witness and appalled reaction to chronic poverty is morally right but it also represents the reaction of a middle-class Victorian gentleman who struggles to believe that a human life lived in poverty may – against the odds – find its own sources of meaning. This is not to argue that overcrowding, poverty or insanitary living conditions are in any way acceptable as the ‘price of progress’, but it does suggest how the powerful image of the industrial city as unintelligible to its inhabitants but intelligible to university-educated historians could unintentionally constitute an exercise in social ‘othering’. In many ways it was left to Victorian novelists such as Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell to find meaning and inspiration in the quotidian life of the industrial poor where historians and urbanists found only dirt and disorder.

IV The abbreviation, abridgement and metaphorical sublimation of the encounter field Milieu-rich environmental description in historical writing may represent the discontinuity of past and present, in a sense differentiating past environments as visual images of a ‘foreign country’. Milieu-poor writing, by contrast, can be deployed to emphasize the continuity or seamlessness of past and present. This occurs in narrative mode when the contingency of the encounter field is repressed in the architectural topographic background in order to define a minimal, linear sequence of events through a Euclidean space. The architectural topographic foreground is most commonly repressed in this manner to facilitate the time-space compression or abbreviation of historical narratives. Abbreviation is typical in traditional didactic or ‘textbook’ narrative histories that require the chronological

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scaffolding of the architectural topographic description in the sense that one ‘when-where’ event must proceed logically from the previous when-where event for the narrative to make sense. Contingency, however, is repressed in the architectural topographic background. This facilitates a scholarly tone of communicating the facts of events ‘as they are commonly agreed’ and without artifice or embellishment (of course, this style is its own artifice) since the reader is assumed to be sufficiently familiar with the minimal temporal and locational references deployed to render their further elaboration unnecessary The abbreviation of principal events is characteristic of didactic national histories. It involves the exclusion from the narrative of more trivial but lesser known ‘in between’ events that could introduce contingent elements. For example, the tortuous courtship of Anne Boleyn and Henry is dealt with summarily in Dickens’ English Reformation by the statement that although by March 1527 it was not known whether Henry “already planned a marriage with Anne Boleyn; certainly he was doing so by the following autumn” – when his love letters are known to have been written (Dickens 1967, 152). In A Social History of the French Revolution (previously discussed) Hampson (1974, 66) deals with the Tennis Court Oath of 20 June 1789 that created the French National Assembly en passant: stating briskly that an agreement by deputies of the Third Estate “[…] not to separate until France had a constitution, was pronounced by Mounier, and only one member refused to sign”. In a Short History of the British Industrial Revolution (2010, 96), not a narrative history but an introductory textbook, Griffin summarizes the technological innovation of James Watt’s invention of the steam engine as his “realisation that the two phases of the engine’s cycle – the heating and the cooling – could be separated”. It is not to criticize the accuracy of these statements on their own terms to draw attention to radical abbreviation of historical reality that they represent. The form this abbreviation takes is the repression of the complex time-space figures of these contingent events, to a single whenwhere coordinate which presents them axiomatically, as facts to be taken ‘as read’. Abbreviation in historical thought can also take the form of metaphorical sublimation. This occurs when a name or label commonly used by historians to summarize a complex figuration of when-where phenomena becomes increasingly abstract from the reality it is supposed to describe. An example of metaphorical sublimation is the term ‘anti-clericalism’ that was invented by historians to explain what they believed was the general acceptance by the English population of the ecclesiastical reforms of English Reformation. The widespread adoption of this generic term casts a long shadow over what is now recognized as the hugely varied range of reactions to the Reformation process (Wormald 2010, 270). Similarly the idea of the ‘Ancien Regime’ has been widely used by historians (though also current in contemporary usage) as a shorthand for the governing class of

92 Contingency in the historiographies pre-revolutionary France. As a tacit metaphor for monolithic, corrupt and unpopular ruling elite it lends itself to the expression of a simplistic narrative of revolutionary inevitability that elides the complexity and contingencies of revolutionary process itself (MacLachlan 1989, 53). The ongoing tendency of industrial cities of the nineteenth century to be represented in metaphorical terms as the “second fall of man” continues a long historiographical tradition inherited from romanticism that collapses the many towns and cities touched by industrialization into a univeralized image of ‘the industrial city’. (Thomis 1976, 160). The problem arises when these categories begin to take on a life of their own, projecting a simplified historical reality that conceals the specific contingencies of what happened then-there in the past onto a static spatial representation. In fact the paradigmatic events discussed in this book referred to as the ‘English Reformation’, the ‘French Revolution’ and the ‘Industrial Revolution’ have all been revealed as “metaphors” or “myths” detached from the elusive reality of the past they seek to describe (Cobban 1964, Clark 2000, Coleman 1992; MacCulloch 1991). When an event is said to have been ‘invented’ it usually means either that the analytic categories used by historians have taken precedence over the language used by people at the time, or that the language people used at the time has been mistakenly appropriated by historians to describe stable categories of past reality. Coleman (1992, 42) says of the industrial revolution concept that it is “ultimately a metaphor for a complexity not otherwise describable”. Even when the historiographical emphasis is on the language that contemporaries not historians used to describe events, however, the messiness, variety and contingent nature of situated speech acts (and written testimonies) in the architectural topographic dimension mean that the figurational contingency of their enaction as when-where events can easily be lost to narrative in preference for thematic accounts focussed on linguistic or semiotic productions (e.g. Duffy 1992; Hunt 1984, 1984). If abbreviation in the sense described earlier is pervasive in historical writing there is a variant of abbreviation, abridgement which is specifically relevant to those histories that seek to express the particular telos of a state, nation or class. In The Whig Interpretation of History (1965 [1931]) Herbert Butterfield drew attention to what he called the ‘Whig’ tradition of English historiography (named after the Parliamentary Whig Party). The telos or meta-narrative of Whig history (what Butterfield refers to as its ‘abstract principle’) was built around England’s constitutional settlement following the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 that forcibly deposed the Stuart King James II in preference for the Protestant William of Orange. For Whigs this Parliamentary settlement represented the universal victory of (Protestant) liberty over (Catholic) tyranny that it was the special purpose of English history to explain. Butterfield describes the art of the historian as the “art of abridgment”, it is the problem of “abridging a complexity” (102). He means that all historical thought involves a selective principle

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since it is not possible or desirable to include every detail; to do so would be to make something as “chaotic and baffling” as life itself (97). Done properly the art of abridgement: implies the gift of seeing the insignificant detail and detecting the sympathies between events, the gift of apprehending the whole pattern upon which the historical process is working. It is not the selection of facts in accordance to some abstract principle; for if it were, the abstract principle would beg all questions and we should be in a position to impose any pattern we liked upon the story. (Butterfield 1965, 103) A central theme of this book is how the architectural topographic facility of the historical imagination overcomes the inevitable lacunae and ambiguity in source material by formulating contingent narrative propositions to express possible relations between discretely situated past actions. Butterfield distinguishes between abridgment in historical writing, consistent with such an imaginative, evidence-based, process (closer to what I have called ‘abbreviation’) and abridgement as involving the imposition of an abstract ideological principle onto historical source material. Abridgement in this whiggish sense has the effect of repressing the contingency of the architectural topographic encounter field in the historical imagination since to do otherwise would be to admit alternative narrative possibilities to the one dictated by Butterfield’s “abstract principle” – for example, British history as the history of liberty. Although Whig history of the kind identified by Butterfield has long been in retreat in academic history, the abridgement of historical narratives on the basis that they possess a telos persisted long into the post-war period. In Keith Feiling’s A History of England (1950) for example, the English Reformation is portrayed as a brutal but necessary step towards the formation of Britain (more than two centuries later): “Before modern Britain —a united kingdom, Protestant, seafaring, and capitalist— could come into existence, a vast work of destruction had to be done” (Feiling 1969 [1950], 349). For John Roberts 1988 [1978] the changes of the French Revolution are best summarized (albeit with reservations) by using the “fashionable term ‘modernization’” that implies it was a necessary stage in French national development (157). For David Thompson (1991 [1950]) the industrial and agrarian revolutions made the rise of the twentieth-century welfare state an inevitable, rather than contingent, event in British history (237). National histories especially repress the architectural topographic foreground because their primary role is to rehearse and refresh the key events in national history – the broad architectural topographic template for which little introduction is assumed to be required. By contrast the telos of Marxist historiography is more likely to be expressed, in the spirit of Engels, through the milieu-rich description of the environmental conditions of industrial cities.

94 Contingency in the historiographies Taken as a whole it is remarkable how the idea of ‘environment’ in the social sciences has resisted architectural topographic definition for so long in order to assert a set of amorphous contextual factors whose relavence to explaining historical events remains ill-defined. At the same time historians have long been accustomed to the need to abbreviate the complexity of historical reality but are perhaps unaware of the value of architectural topographic description in calling stale categories into question and identifying the contingencies of social action that threaten to disrupt the smooth surfaces of authoritative event narratives. The abbreviation, metaphorical sublimation and abridgement of the complexity of past reality is no lesser part of the ‘art’ of the historical imagination than the architectural topographic facility I have described. Indeed, they are similarly premised on the critical facility to imagine and evaluate competing narrative propositions, conscious of the contingencies, ambiguities and lacunae that constrain what is knowable and tellable. This imaginative work is not necessarily revealed in the written history.

Notes 1 This distinction was suggested to me by the historical novelist Amanda Weir at the Hay Festival 2018 in discussing how historical novelists choose to ‘show’ the reader what happens. 2 Nous naissons sensibles, et, dès notre naissance, nous sommes affectés de diverses manières par les objets qui nous environnent. The translation is by Barbara Foxley. Project Gutenberg Epub edition, 19. 3 Albert Frederick Pollard (1869–1948) was Professor of Constitutional History at UCL (1903–31). 4 Rudé provides a glossary of French terms: Menu peuple - the common people; Faubourg – former suburbs enclosed within the city boundaries; Barrières – custom posts around the City of Paris; Journée - a day of revolutionary crowd action (253–58) 5 Peter Gaskell. 1936. Artizans and Machinery; Edwin Chadwick. 1842. Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain.

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I Definitions The kind of introductory survey that frames an historical narrative with environmental-contextual themes has the effect of repressing the figurational contingency of the encounter field, though it may incorporate localized architectural topographic description for the purposes of period illustration. Chronologically organized histories might also deploy localized architectural topographic description in this manner. In both cases the globalizing sequence of when-where events becomes fragmented or abbreviated to the extent that architectural topographic description prioritizes the synchronic form of visual embellishment over the expression of movement, co-presence and encounter. Architectural topographic description as I define it is not specifically concerned with transport and communications technologies or pedestrianism; rather it advocates the precise material definition of the human encounter field as the primary enabler of social action, contesting any a priori assertions of socio-economic, cultural or technological determination. Its significance for historical studies lies in the capacity of the historical imagination to prefigure narrative propositions in the architectural topographic foreground of social action, the encounter field. The interface this creates between the interior (embodied thought-to-action of historical actors) and exterior (relationality of a given action to other actions in the material world) enables the historian to express – given the limitations and ambiguities of evidence – intelligible narrative propositions around the time-space figures of particular historical events. In this sense the architectural topographic foreground describes a prefigured encounter field that minimally encodes the material reality of the past in historical texts as figures of narrative possibility. Part II of this book will explore a range of localized architectural topographic descriptions that express characteristic time-space figures of the global narrative. This final chapter of Part I prepares the ground: first, through an historiographical discussion to distinguish architectural topographic description from psychogeographical approaches to spatial narratives; second, by exploring the relationship between cartographic visualizations in historical writing and finally, by reflecting on

96 Contingency in the historiographies how sequences of architectural topographic description constitute timespace figures of historical events rather than being simply contextual or colourful.

II Spatial stories Psychogeography has its origins in the artistic reaction to what the French Marxist intellectual Guy Debord (1931–1994) called the Society of the Spectacle (Debord 1967). In the spirit of nineteenth-century flaneûrs (urban wanderers), Debord and his fellow Situationists used long, open-ended urban walks they called dérives to get behind the smooth surfaces of the modern city and reveal unexpected, and subversive juxtapositions. The method involved the physical decomposition of official cartographic representations of Paris that would be restructured according to the route of their walk, embodying what de Certeau (1984) would call its particular ‘spatial story’. Peter Ackroyd, the author of the popular history London: the Biography (2000), is not a psychogeographer in the situationist spirit of an experimental and politically committed writer such as Iain Sinclair (1997). Even so, the conceit of making the city rather than human actors his biographical subject points to the influence of urban psychogeography on his work, as does his rejection of the chronological organization of conventional biography. So if not a psychogeography as such, London: the Biography is set up as a spatial story in that it deploys a kind of ambulatory voice to tell urban history. It is interesting for my present purpose to reflect on the tensions Ackroyd’s work produces in the use of such a non-linear narrative device to accommodate eclectic historical material while also seeking to draw out some kind of meta-narratological themes capable of binding the whole together. Ackroyd (2000, 2) states he is “not a Virgil prepared to guide aspiring Dantes around a defined and circular kingdom” but just “one stumbling Londoner”. Even so, his conception of London as an “infinite” and “visionary” city that contains “everything” provokes the comparison (3, 449, 810). Ackroyd’s London, combining Hell, Heaven and especially the purgatory in between, is its own Divine Comedy. It aspires to be read both in the horizontal dimension as human history and in the vertical dimension of universal truths. Ackroyd draws upon the classical analogy of the “city as a body” with its “own laws of life and growth” (1–2) to justify the biographical conceit. This sets up a pervasive tension in his work between the bricolage of evocative (often literary) descriptions of historical people, buildings and events, and the pervasive sense of Ackroyd’s London as a totalizing urban environment (the city as a body) with the capacity to impose some kind of coherence on this variety – though coherence of exactly what kind is uncertain. As Engels described Manchester so Ackroyd describes London as a ‘labyrinth’ – a rather loaded metaphor for urban entities that were not purposely planned – as labyrinths are designed. In both cases the use of the

Figure and event 97 term reveals a flaneûr’s detachment from the object of his observation. In Engels this embodies his social distance from the working class lives of Manchester; in Ackroyd, it reflects the literary perspective of the psychogeographer who deconstructs dominant built environment representations so that they can be seen from different points of view. But whereas Engels put his observations to work in overcoming social distance by revealing Manchester’s ‘labyrinth’ to be the spatial-morphological logic of laissezfaire capitalism, Ackroyd’s method “moves quixotically through time”, actively forming the textual ‘labyrinth’ for his disorientated reader to navigate (2). Ackroyd deliberately represents London using the image of a labyrinth on the basis that to do otherwise would be to confine his view of London to a single authoritative perspective. Yet Ackroyd clearly imposes his own metaphorical load on the city in an example of de Certeau’s assertion of authorial texturology. It emphasizes how, in fact, Ackroyd’s distinctive point of view offers the only intelligible way of navigating the text (there is, after all, only one way in and out of the labyrinth). In this respect it suits his purpose to represent London as chaotic (so unlike the well-defined geometric schemes of Dante’s cosmology!) and indeed Ackroyd does not act as a guide in the spirit of Virgil. He asks us simply to follow him and to risk getting lost. Ackroyd seeks to make the reader aware of London as both a ‘real’ (material) city and an unreal (imagined) city by his method of piecing together historical commentary, reportage and literary representations of London. Yet there is something of an irony in the pragmatic way that Ackroyd organizes the ‘chaos’ of his prodigious archive of London source material into a series of more-or-less standard social-historical themes (e.g. chapter titles include: ‘The Early Middle Ages’ and ‘Crime and Punishment’). The preference for thematic organization reflects Ackroyd’s belief that the linear chronology of conventional historical narrative cannot express the complex transhistorical associations that recur in London’s history, but it sits rather awkwardly with the ambulatory conceit that the reader is accompanying Ackroyd on his ‘stumble’ around London. To make things easier London: The Biography is prefaced with a series of schematic maps, but exactly what they are for is not clear (they are never referenced in the main body of the work). Recurrent street and place names (Cheapside, The Thames, The Tower of London, etc.) serve to orientate the text around significant London topoi but accounts of historical events are localized within the thematic schema. Neither is the urban psychogeographer’s method of reconstructing the city’s physical topography on the basis of a walked dérive as apparent, as one might expect it to be. The effect that both the contiguity and contingency of London’s architectural topographic foreground is repressed, imparting a surprisingly static quality to the text. For all the indexing of people and places, Ackroyd’s London feels like an exercise in ‘cut and paste’ urban-social history in which the narration of the author-as-urban-walker is undermined by his quest to identify the ‘essence’

98 Contingency in the historiographies of London through sheer weight of historical example. After some 700 pages the author reflects rhetorically whether London is “just a state of mind” or whether it is experienced by a collective memory forged from material permanence as a settlement continuously populated for two millennia (767). It is a good question. Ackroyd himself comes down in favour of the latter – but rather unconvincingly. This is because Ackroyd pursues an elusive essence of London that leads him ultimately to translate the city into a transhistorical figure. Ultimately the materiality of memories in flesh and stone dissolve into a personal vision of London as a kind of divine multiplicity, an effect he achieves, as I have suggested, by rearranging London into an intertextual ‘labyrinth’. Ackroyd quotes Michael Moorcock approvingly that London passes “beyond the natural to become metaphysical, only describable in terms of music or abstract physics”. This music though is heard by some of its inhabitants “the dreamers and the antiquarians” (among them Ackroyd) more than others (who? the philistines, the materialists?) who “perceive it only fitfully” (776). London then is realized by Ackroyd as a state of higher consciousness with its spiritual transfiguration summarized in the title of the final chapter Resurgam – ‘I will arise’ – taken from a Roman tablet found by Christopher Wren as he began work on St Paul’s Cathedral in following the Great Fire of London in 1666 (777). This critique is not intended to diminish the substance of Ackroyd’s monumental work so much as to take issue with his conceit of offering a thematically indexed miscellany as a ‘biography’ of London in the absence of any methodological rationale – whether social-historical, psychogeographical or literary – that is capable of revealing London itself rather than Ackroyd, as the author of its spatial stories.1 Without such a rationale Ackroyd’s biography of London escapes its chronotopical moorings in the architectural topographic foreground to represent the city as a transcendental milieu that universalizes a particular idea of London-as-environment that appeals to its author. In Ackroyd’s biography the contingencies of the encounter field and of history are concealed by generic environmental metaphors of the urban labyrinth. In the city-organism historical events just happened as they did, and bodies were just then-there as they were because the city-idea is an all-encompassing totality – nothing can escape its definition; everything has its place in the author’s schema; anything goes. In Chapter Three I explained historical writing in the architectural topographic background as involving the localization of narrative figures within a broader thematic or environmental-contextual mode of explanation. Such writing may take the form of periodic insertions of milieu-rich descriptions that, while they do not assign explicit explanatory value to ‘environment’ in the manner of Engels or Ackroyd, neither are they simply embellishments of narratives written in the architectural topographic foreground. Rather, these localized architectural topographic and milieurich interventions denote the momentary suspension of the historian’s

Figure and event 99 authoritative voice in order to illustrate his or her global argument through the introduction of archive material. Suspensions of this kind are frequently used by historians to announce a thematic shift, but which as an artifice of historical writing may also go beyond what is strictly required to elucidate the argument. They recur, for example, in Marshall’s history of the English Reformation Heretics and Believers (2018), which combines thematic organization within an overall chronological narrative of the period 1520–1600. Chapter Six ‘Martyrs and Matrimony’ opens with a paragraph describing Anne Boleyn’s arrival in Henry VIII’s court: In March 1522, Henry VIII, Defender of the Faith, led a band of knights in an assault on a castle. It was not very dangerous: the castle was timber and tinfoil, centrepiece of a courtly masque organized by Wolsey to impress visiting imperial ambassadors. It was ‘garrisoned’ by ladies of the court, each taking the identity of a romantic virtue, embroidered in gold on her headdress. One was a young gentlewoman, recently returned from France. Her name was Anne Boleyn, and the word emblazoned on her fashionable Milan bonnet was ‘Perseverance’. (Marshall 2018, 163) The account of the masque is admirably compressed compared with the lengthy description of the occasion in David Starkey’s combined biographies of Henry VIII’s wives (2003, 264-66). Both historians abbreviate the sixteenth-century source which provides comprehensive antiquarian detail (Hall’s Chronicle 1809 [1548]). The description of Anne in the character of ‘perseverance’ is highly symbolic in the light of her determination to be Henry’s queen, never merely his mistress. It is not surprising that popular historians would wish to make use of it. In Marshall, however, the inclusion of this passage is useful as a scholarly artifice to orientate the general reader to his account of Henry and Anne’s relationship. It does not arise, in other words, from the logic of Marshall’s narrativization of events as such (the previous chapter dealt with early converts to Protestantism in England). Marshall’s method represents a pointilliste approach in which localized micro-narratives of particular when-where events are distributed throughout his text to help engage the reader in the presentation of a complex historical argument. Organizing disparate historical source material thematically is an entirely proper way of engaging systematically and critically with the questions and debates facing the historian. Many kinds of historical arguments are difficult or unsatisfactorily communicated in narrative terms – especially those with a diffuse dramatis personae or no strong biographical focus. The increasing extension of the term ‘biography’ to include cities, institutions, sports teams and even vaccines highlights the historical writer’s need for a global organizational principle for discretely related time-space phenomena that, in traditional biography, would be supplied by the individual life.2 In

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conventional historical biographies the architectural topographic foreground itself supplies such an organizing principle by contouring the individual ‘life and times’ (whens-wheres) of the narrative around which other, environmental-contextual, material coheres. So intuitive is the biographical principle that the concrete architectural topographic dimension still serves to sketch the time-space trajectory of an historical life even when the written biography is arranged on an entirely thematic basis. For example, in John Guy’s (2000) life of Thomas More (1478–1535), statesman and author of Utopia (1516), successive chapters explore the different dimensions of More’s life, as a of a family man, social reformer and ‘heresy hunter’, etc. Yet in other cases, the underlying sense of a global biographical structure allows pervasive environmental influences to permeate architectural topographic description, repressing its contingent element. Childhood and youth (usually the period about which least is precisely known) furnish the biographer with a useful circumstantial means of explaining character formation. When historical explanation is sought in generalized accounts of environmental influences rather than through specific events this borders on environmental-cum-psychological determinism. An example is A.G. Dickens’ (1967 [1959]) biography of Henry VIII’s chief minister Thomas Cromwell (1485–1540), the man responsible for administrating the English Reformation in the 1530s by taking the laws separating the English and Roman churches through Parliament. Dickens’ account is thematically organized, examining Cromwell’s ideas, opponents and his relationship to the English bible. Dickens observes of Cromwell’s youthful life as an itinerant in Europe that included a spell in the French army before entering Henry VIII’s court, that his “successive environments were all hostile towards delicacy and sensibility” – with the strong implication that his character reflected this (40). Such an environmentally determined assumption makes Cromwell’s subsequent actions easier to understand as the consequence of a steely temperament – an understandable interpretative strategy when so many historical details are obscure. It also serves to support Dickens’ abridgement of Cromwell’s life as the story of a modern, almost secular, man, emancipated from the “neo-feudal” values of Tudor England, who was destined to “cast his shadow centuries forward upon the history of England” (11). The titles of Chapter Two ‘The way to power’ and Chapter Three ‘The Opening Moves’ plot the stages in Cromwell’s self-willed fulfilment, the telos of his patriotic ambition for the English state. The thematic organization of Dickens’ study broadly coincides with the key phases of Cromwell’s life in terms of its chronology and corresponding shifts of location. While there are some tantalizing architectural topographic observations in Dickens’ Cromwell these are highly localized and provide little in the way of narrative accounts of specific events. For example, Dickens mentions that Cromwell benefitted from entering the “milieu” (i.e. environment) of Wolsey’s household but otherwise says little more about the dynamics of this “nursery of the court” (Dickens 1967, 20).

Figure and event 101 There is also a useful summary of the company Cromwell kept at his London house in Austin Friars (38-9). The dominant resolution of architectural topographic description is, however, coarse and can be summarized in the sequence: London > Europe: (France, Italy, Low Countries) > London: Whitehall > The Tower (where Cromwell was executed in 1540). Even at this level of generality Cromwell’s ‘spatial story’ describes an elementary narrative figure (departure and return from London via Europe, a political life that leads ultimately to the Tower) that are significant to his biography. Yet at such a degree of abbreviation these locative markers do not describe an encounter field but rather sustain the environmental mode of explanation in narrative mode by expressing the assumed influences on his actions of the successive environments through which Cromwell moved. As Dickens points out, such environmental associations can easily mislead historians (Dickens 1967, 185). He is critical, for example, of an early biographer of Cromwell, Roger Merriman, who asserts that Henry’s first wife Catherine of Aragon may well have been poisoned by Cromwell. The accusation is on the basis that Cromwell had “sufficient experience of the Italy of Alexander VI and Caesar Borgia to render him quite callous to the ordinary sentiments of humanity in such matters” (Merriman 1902, 229). Here Merriman does not simply offer a generic environmental framing of events but specifically accuses Cromwell of murder on the basis that he was familiar with the immoralities of Rome. Given the complete lack of historical evidence for such an assertion (by Merriman’s own admission!) it is possible to see how the intuitive architectural topographic description of the life biography, if expressed only at a coarse resolution, can be manipulated to endorse environmentally determined propositions in the guise of exploring architectural topographic contingencies. It is the particular property of description in the architectural topographic foreground to afford a mechanism, the encounter field, through which discretely located individuals (their objects and thoughts) can be brought into contingent relations of movement, co-presence and encounter. This is what makes the relationality of the encounter field so indispensable a part of the historical imagination in its capacity to prefigure alternative narrative propositions about what happened in the past. While this relationality is necessarily imagined it is not simply invented (as it might be in fiction), since it expresses the architectural topographic encoding of the material world, figures which can be subject to critical interrogation on the basis of archive and survey material, and through visits to historical sites. One of the difficulties that de Certeau’s concept of ‘spatial story’ presents historical writing is that it projects a highly individualized subjectivity onto the complex sociality of lived time-space. This is because it not only has little sense of the material (or artefactual) description of the encounter field, but in many respects it deliberately sets out to subvert such material definitions on the basis that they project hegemonic social representations.

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The spatial story can be liberating if written in the first person or in a metaphorical sense as a kind of psycho-biography. It is arguably less successful in expressing the historical reality of spatial stories as social stories, that is in describing socialized space as it actually was for people then-there. Of course it’s true that the historian, with his or her panoptic view over time and space, ‘plays God’ as Darnton (2002) puts it, but by starting from the architectural topographic description of past events – the historical imagination also admits to what it cannot see at a given ‘when-where’ moment. It forces a reckoning between the contingency of the past (what actually happened, may have happened or did not happen) and the synchronic environmental image that signifies a given meaning. It stimulates a reflective process that involves considering how any given ‘spatial story’ expressing a particular individual’s point of view of an event may appear to any other individual whose point of view, and spatial story, was different, were the encounter field to bring both individuals (and both stories) into mutual relation. De Certeau (1984 119, 115–130) makes the distinction between “map” and “itinerary” as approximating the difference between official representations of institutional “proper” space, and the walked “spatial stories” of individuals. Yet, as I have explained, this can too easily dissolve the latter into solipsism by collapsing the historically contingent social situation into the totalizing idea (texturology) of the individual author, very much as Ackroyd does. In historical events the immaterial and material cannot be separated since the contingency of the encounter field is continually implicated in mediating the ‘inside and outside’ of the ongoing event, in Collingwood’s terms. So if a stronger, more social, sense of the spatial story is needed to express the architectural topographic dimension of the historical imagination how should this ‘mapping’ of social space be characterized in methodological terms?

III Maps and mapping Many works of history, especially those with a strong urban focus, include schematic plans and maps of regional connections in the ‘front-matter’ somewhere between the contents page and the first chapter.3 Precisely why these are included is not always clear. The pragmatic justification is presumably that they provide the reader with a cartographic reference to key locations (topoi) referred to in the main body of the text. While this is selfevidently true so far as it goes, it is not, I believe, an argument that can be pushed too far without revealing the conceptual weakness of the premise. It is doubtful how much use these prefacing maps and plans really are to readers. The fact that they are rarely referenced directly in the main text relegates them to the status of appendices. Not only are they often segregated from the main text, but they are also largely superfluous to developing its argument, especially when this is expressed in narrative form.

Figure and event 103 As post-hoc supplementary materials one suspects they are of relatively little interest to the authors themselves. Interestingly, this differentiates the kind of schematic maps of real-world locations found in historical texts such as Paris in Simon Schama’s Citizens or central London in Peter Ackroyd’s London, from the maps that preface many works of fantasy and science fiction. Here fictional maps serve the author’s artistic purpose in establishing the authenticity of the fantasy world, and in that sense are neither separated from nor superfluous to what is written in the text but consitute an integral part of its fictional reality. However, in both historical and fantasy writing, the use of prefacing maps presents the reader with the problem of identifying the narrative flow in the visual image. Raising this question is more likely to draw the willing reader into the fantasy world than the historical one because, whereas in fantasy writing the narrative and the map have been artistically crafted around one another, in historical writing the map typically takes the form of a schematic sketch of an historical location that exists beyond the text, apparently rendering such artistic effort unnecessary – even methodologically suspect. Yet why this should be the case is not clear. It reveals something of a naivety in conceptualizing the relationship between the mapped visualization and the text in which the former is thought to represent the locational geometry of the latter in a fairly straightforward and objective way. This assumption, however, is called into question when it is understood that historical writing encodes its own (architectural topographic) ‘mapping’ of the past, an imaginative process that makes the assumption of a linear relationship between the text and the conventional prefacing map-image highly questionable. In fact, maps and plans typically included in the front-matter of historical studies do not represent what the historian has actually written so much as provide a global ordering concept along the lines of ‘everything which you will read about in this book can be accommodated within the spatial frame depicted [here]’. The [here] locates the history in a named place, let us say a city, understood by the reader and historian alike to exist independently of the text, thereby authenticating the historical narrative as a ‘true story’.4 Ironically though, the visual framing provided by prefacing maps and plans tends to emphasize their alienation from the main body of historical writing by projecting the text onto the synchronic, often simplified, representations of the city-image. The narrative trajectory of the historical account, by contrast, is likely to reveal the mapped city in a rather different, more contingent, way. This is because the real work of ‘visualizing’ [here-there] in the past is precisely what is undertaken by the historical imagination and is textually encoded for the reader in architectural topographic descriptions of when-where events. This process cannot be straightforwardly represented in schematic or illustrative maps and plans. The historiographical discussion in preceding chapters has established that if historical understanding involves a process of ‘mapping’ it is not

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reducible to plotting spatialized datapoints on a Euclidean surface but involves the architectural topographic description of past encounter fields. This reveals a different kind of global ordering concept in historical writing, in the sense that the relationality of the encounter field encodes the text as a city, through an imaginative process that involves the figuration of historical time-space in language rather than vice versa. This means the intelligibility of events, their narrative grain, is internalized in architectural topographic descriptions, rather than externalized in the schematic map or plan. Unlike the schematic map or plan, architectural topographic description is sensitive to the figurational contingencies of unfolding events, their shifts in resolution (i.e. ‘zooming in and zooming out’) and the multiplicity of positions from which questions of causation might be assessed. By insisting on a definition of historical events as prefigured in the historical imagination by the social possibilities of past encounter fields, the architectural topographic dimension distinguishes the specificity of historical understanding from philosophical abstraction. From this perspective the repression or deprecation of architectural topographic description implied by prefacing cartographic representations is as likely to be a source of confusion as enlightenment for the reader. What the time-space specificity of a given architectural topographic site (such as a city) has to do with what happened then-there can hardly be inferred from a map if its spatial culture is rendered as mere physicality and its social spaces either reduced to their symbolic representations or disaggregated into atomized arrays of (x,y) coordinates in a GIS database. What is generally true of prefacing maps and plans is also largely the case even when the map- or plan- object is itself the focus of the historian’s critical attention. Examples include the semiotic deconstruction of cartographic objectivity to reveal hegemonic cultural assumptions, or the interpretation of georeferenced data visualizations produced using Geographical Information Systems (GIS). In both cases the critical-analytical exercise serves to repress the architectural topographic description of events as they actually happened in order to sustain levels of contextual or environmental explanation. Every cultural studies student knows that modern cartography developed as an exercise in state power and that its totalizing representations are not to be conflated with the reality experienced by people. Ingold (2000, 234) refers to this as the “cartographic illusion” that he associates principally with the science of cartography as it emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Historians are similarly likely to distrust the idea that maps and plans can inform scholarly understanding of movement, bodily co-presence and encounter in the past on the basis that to do otherwise implies a naïve understanding of maps and plans as source materials essentially uncompromised by the conditions of their production. Interestingly Ingold, an ethnographer, differentiates between scientific ‘map-making’ and ‘mapping’ as a socialised, embodied practice. This is the spatial story as performance involving the multimodal re-enactment of a

Figure and event 105 journey through movement, gesture and speech. Yet one might equally reflect on how the archive of scientifically produced maps and plans may inform the architectural topographic description of historical events. In this sense the map or plan is no more simply the output of a given socioscientific process than it is a naive representation of past reality. Rather it has the capacity to inform the process of historical understanding itself by facilitating the historian’s imaginative prefiguring of the past encounter field (Griffiths and Vaughan 2020). Unfortunately, the relationship between maps, plans and historical writing is rarely considered interesting in theoretical terms precisely because the map’s ancillary relation to the text has become so widely accepted that it serves to conceal what is theoretically at issue. Teachers always instruct their students to explain clearly the use of cartographic images in their written work but this instruction is not so simple as providing a caption. That there might be problems with the historian’s pragmatic assumption of the purpose maps serve is implied by considering the self-evident tension the ‘helpful’ inclusion of prefacing maps or plans immediately sets up for the reader whose eye (finger or pencil) is in principle free to imagine all sorts of routes in and around the space depicted, and the narrative itself which is highly directed by the historian. In some cases (surprisingly rare outside of military history) the use of arrows and other cartographic symbols will assist in representing the figure of an event on the map or plan to ensure a better fit with the narrative figures deployed in the text. In the emerging field of ‘spatial history’ techniques such as the use of animated maps published online are also exploring how GIS mapping techniques can help not only to represent but also to refine and express historical narratives.5 In the end though, such examples (as exceptions that prove the rule) emphasize how the cartographic showing cannot be meaningfully separated from the narrative telling. The time-space figure of an individual event does not exist in isolation from the encounter field from which it arose and which prefigures the field of narrative possibility in the historical imagination. Where maps and plans help to reveal and compensate for the difficulty of expressing event-figures of movement, bodily co-presence and encounter in language then they are valuable; when they serve to conceal this difficulty by facilitating the repression of architectural topographic description in the text, or simply creating a distraction to textual description then their inclusion may be counter-productive. To look at this another way: while the architectural topographic description of the map or plan may enrich textual description, in a sense by narrativizing the cartographic image, text can rarely be substituted for the image though the image may be substituted by text. This is why it is important to emphasize that cartographic images and architectural topographic descriptions are not different sides of the same coin but signify contrasting epistemologies. While the former involves the production of visualized data according to a set of instructions that deliberately externalizes the

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time-space specificity of narrative, the latter involves the time-space figuration of sparse source material (data) in the historical imagination in order to better internalize the architectural topographic description of when-where events in narrative propositions. So far the discussion in this section has focussed mainly on schematic prefacing maps and visualizations derived from historical source materials produced in GIS rather than historical maps and plans as sources in themselves – though the same critique applies when the historical map or plan is used to show rather than show-and-tell. None of this, however, means that cartographic records of all kinds – maps, plans, sketches, surveys (site visits) – are anything other than essential historical sources, nor is it intended to undermine the value of GIS visualizations in creating new spatial ways of seeing history. It does, however, maintain that what matters for historical understanding is the narrative telling of the historian’s interpretative dialogue with the mapping process rather than the production of the visualized object itself (Griffiths 2013). The historical imagination is concerned to express the socialized encounter field that embodies both the material exterior and interior experience of situated action. It could hardly do so without cartographic sources to heighten the historian’s critical sensitivity to the task of architectural topographic description. Cartographic sources do not represent past encounter fields in a naïve sense, nor are they privileged above other forms of evidence. For the period specialist though, the sustained cross referencing of cartographic sources with other archive material, the exploration of extant built environments, where possible, and the deployment of specialized spatial morphological and urban morphological methods including space syntax analysis (Hillier and Hanson 1984) and Conzenian town-plan analysis (Conzen, 1968), where necessary, enhances the historian’s critical engagement with his or her intuitions about the social patterning of quotidian encounter fields in the past. The particular dynamics of atypical historical events are thrown into relief by this exercise in the prefiguration of architectural topographic description. As I showed in Chapters One and Two, the exegesis of secondary material enables the genealogies of abbreviated event narratives to be traced back to expose the contingencies of architectural topographic description encoded in the foundational histories and archive sources, but which are often repressed in subsequent accounts. Through this research practice the historical imagination hones its sense of past encounter fields such that what cannot be precisely known about movement, bodily co-presence and encounter comes into negative view. The effect is to prefigure the relationality of fragmented historical sources in terms of the probable presence or absence of the time-space relation that presents specific narrative propositions while discounting others. This research practice does not imply that historical maps and plans are straightforwardly objective sources when regarded from a spatial-morphological perspective. A cartographic depiction of architectural topographic relationships

Figure and event 107 will inevitably be normative and influenced by the social context of its production. Its biases (not simply inaccuracies) pertain to the representation of inhabited space itself, not simply the power-vectors (e.g. ‘why was this map made, for whom and for what reasons?’) that are the typical critical emphasis. These distortions include, for example, biases of resolution (are footpaths represented?); of interface (are doors and windows represented?) and of selection (which features are included and which excluded?). The important question regards the extent to which the cartographic representation can usefully inform the construction of the encounter field in the historical imagination. The historian’s intuitive sense of the encounter field precipitates a parallel process of critical reflection that, in Collingwoodian terms, involves describing the ‘logical forms’ (or time-space figures) through which the past world becomes ‘fabricated for human action’. Architectural topographic description then, is a means of unlocking the embodied thoughts-to-actions of historical actors as a source of historical understanding. While one might refer to this imaginative-reflective process of architectural topographic description as ‘mapping’ the encounter field, to do so would be misleading because it implies the necessity of including an actual map or plan image in an historical study, when there is no such necessity. Rather, the historian constructs his or her ‘map’ as narrative propositions explored through the architectural topographic description of the inhabited built environment or landscape. This narrativizing process admits to the intrinsic contingency of event narratives that must always propose relations that go beyond those which can be precisely substantiated by historical evidence, while also remaining consistent with the architectural topographic description that encodes the time-space figuration of the event. At the most elementary level, the admission of contingency into accounts of historical events raises the issue that between two events known to be related in some way – other events, perhaps trivial or irrelevant, perhaps not – may intervene. This presents the historian with a complex epistemological question. The historian of France, Alfred Cobban reflects that the “relation between events is always other events” (Cobban 1964, 4). In discussing the views of the philosopher Michael Oakeshott, Cobban asserts that: to ask for pure narrative is to ask for pure nonsense. Amid a multitude of recorded facts, some principle of selection, conscious or unconscious is inevitable, and this principle must be an idea of some kind. (Cobban 1964, 6) For historical knowledge the challenge is that these randomly surviving traces do not necessarily fit together in any obvious way. However, the danger with Cobban’s “idea” is that it invokes Butterfield’s critique of the Whig ‘abridgement’ of history, involving the imposition of meta-narratives as a principle of selection on historical material (Butterfield 1965). Cobban’s sense is actually more pragmatic – the ‘idea’ as a guiding argument or

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proposition – but the epistemological question remains the same: on what basis can the historian extract the narrative from the noise? Architectural topographic description offers one – non meta-narratological – basis for this selection, since source material with a contextual relevance but no identifiable figurational relation to the event can be excluded. Just as pertinently, however, architectural topographic description might be considered to ‘embrace the noise’ of recorded history. If the historical writer is committed to architectural topographic expression rather than a text-book abbreviation, then the figuration of the event reflects their understanding of how sparsely evidenced past actions are brought into (uncertain and contingent) relation. This stands opposed to what Collingwood (1989 passim) referred to as “scissors and paste” history which splices together evidenced actions with little reflection on what the historian does that enables him or her to connect one surviving trace to the other in any meaningful way. To this can be added the observation that the architectural topographic nature of the historical imagination means that recorded events are typically related through quotidian movements, bodily co-presence and encounter; situated practices that go overwhelmingly unrecorded. This means that the historian has not only to be selective about what recorded facts to include but also to abbreviate the expression of myriad unrecorded actions that must be considered axiomatic for historical knowledge of any kind to exist. In other words the dangers to historical understanding of repressing figurational contingency through the abbreviation, abridgement and metaphorical sublimation of architectural topographic description must be balanced with the danger of sacrificing historical understanding to the expression of architectural topographic description without any selective principle founded on the historian’s intention to present a reasoned historical argument. I will illustrate and seek to at least partially resolve this issue of selection with reference to the discussion of Collingwood’s historical thought by Goldstein (1970). Goldstein uses as an example the Battle of Hastings in 1066 when Duke William of Normandy defeated the English King Harold to become William ‘the Conqueror’ of England. Goldstein wishes to defend Collingwood against critics who held that his idea of the historian’s intellectual re-enactment of past thought involves a literal re-enactment of the lived past experience that goes beyond available evidence.6 Goldstein refutes the assertion that an historian offering an accurate summary of this battle (e.g. ‘William defeated Harold to become King of England’) is ‘generalizing’ from the imagined details of combat – for example, the flight of arrows, the rising tides of panic and elation on different parts of the battlefield. On the contrary, Goldstein argues, the historian simply “does not even know” such myriad facts as an actual observer might know them (20). He or she only knows what the evidence reveals – the past being inaccessible to observation. For Goldstein the problem the historical imagination addresses is less one of a generic understanding of the nature of early medieval battles (which is not to say

Figure and event 109 such knowledge is not useful) so much as with a problem of evidence with regard to a particular battle. One can see Goldstein’s point in insisting on the primacy of historical evidence over the imaginative intervention of material drawn from generic attributes assumed to be common to a given category of activity (e.g. early medieval battles). This is certainly not the role of the historical imagination envisaged by Collingwood. The difficulty with Goldstein’s argument, however, is that his factual statement that at the Battle of Hastings ‘William defeated Harold to become King of England’ is so abbreviated in terms of its architectural topographic description that it reduces historical knowledge to atomized ‘facts’ that are themselves rather generic (begging the question, one battle, another battle – what’s the difference?). So while Goldstein is right to assert that the historian is not literally an observer of the past, he does not respond to Cobban’s argument that historical sources (extended to include archaeological evidence), however sparse in themselves, will often involve the historian in greater interpretative complexity than simply reporting the fact of a given event (e.g. ‘William won the battle of Hastings’). As I have maintained, architectural topographic description is not the imaginative embellishment of which Goldstein is critical. Rather it is the attribution of when-where specificity to an event characterized as an encounter field of contingent social action, through which historical imagination brings diverse sources of evidence into relation. The architectural topographic intelligibility of these relations is an important consideration in formulating and evaluating narrative propositions. The relation itself, however, can rarely be identified absolutely in sparse evidence. Establishing its probability is the historian’s art, but it is a necessary art, because it is almost impossible to conceive of an historical event if not as a situated timespace figuration of discrete yet contingently related actions. We are unlikely ever to know for certain whether or not King Harold was killed by an arrow in the eye, for example, but we can hardly pose the question other than on the basis of an architectural topographic description of the battlefield at Hastings, imagined as a particular kind of encounter field in which certain kinds of relation between arrows and eyes may be considered more or less probabale. Architectural topographic description should not be confused with an advocacy of micro-historical or anthropological approaches to historical research to the exclusion of others. On the contrary, the description of figurational contingency in the architectural topographic foreground addresses how localized historical events become, as it were, ‘globalized’ as historical narratives – without abridgement or abbreviation in the spirit of Cobban’s meta-narratological ‘idea’. Historical understanding arises through a figurationally contingent process in which the localized encounter field of specific events (e.g. The Battle of Hastings) proposes relations to other encounter fields defined at different scales of resolution. The resolution of architectural topographic description at which historical events are

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expressed ‘scale down’ to a fine-grained tissue of lesser events (e.g. the mêlée of the battle) and ‘scale up’ (e.g. to the Norman conquest of England) as event-relations are identified over lesser or greater periods of time-space. This scaling process, however intuitive it may appear to the specialist historian in preparing their text, is not merely mechanical but of critical importance in determining the kind of history that is being imagined and written. In broad terms this is because consistently ‘coarse-grained’ accounts lend themselves to the abbreviation, abridgement and metaphorical sublimation of historical events, while accounts written at a highly consistent resolution lend themseles to thematic organization. Histories that express events across a range of resolutions, from the finest to the coarsest grain of the architectural topographic foreground, however, are most likely to deploy narrative as their mode of explanation

IV The figures of events The historian of the English Reformation, Diarmaid MacCulloch, offers an important insight into why neither the abundance of historical evidence in Cobban’s sense, nor the paucity of evidence in Goldstein’s sense, render architectural topographic description redundant. In a newspaper interview MacCulloch was asked what differentiated his biography of Thomas Cromwell (2018) from the account of Cromwell’s life in the Booker-prize winning work of the historical novelist Hilary Mantel.7 MacCulloch acknowledged that, in a manner similar to an academic historian, Mantel worked from what was known on the basis of archive evidence and she did not like to actively distort facts. The difference MacCulloch states is that in the absence of firm evidence, Mantel could assert as facts things he could only offer as possibilities. What she can do is tell the stories which I cannot, because the facts simply aren’t there. And the one word that historians have to use all the time, and novelists don’t, or shouldn’t, is “probably”. When I’m filling in a gap, I may say: “The probability, looking at the evidence, is this.” But it must always be conditional: there must always be a “might have”. And that must always be the limits of my story, while a novelist is liberated from all that.8 MacCulloch’s observation is interesting in articulating how the critical balance of the known and the unverifiable is at the core of historical understanding – and that the historian’s ‘probably’ and ‘might have’ is no less important than the novelist’s ‘is’ or ‘is not’ in establishing the scope of the story. MacCulloch describes an exercise of the historical imagination informed by critical understanding of sources, not simply in the general sense of ‘weighing options’ but in the particular sense of selecting one narrative trajectory from the others available on the basis of probability. In an

Figure and event 111 architectural topographic sense ‘probability’ has to do with the extent to which the figurational contingency of the events translate to intelligible narrative figures as events that ‘did’, ‘may have’ or ‘could not have’ happened. Architectural topographic description carries much of the weight of enabling the formulation and evaluation of narrative propositions by managing the demands these propositions make on the prefigured encounter field to establish credible event relations in the historian’s imagination. This involves proposing the existence of ‘in between’ events provoking reflection on probable patterns of movement, bodily co-presence and encounter, that are unlikely ever to have made it onto the historical record but have much to do with determining the balance of competing narrative possibilities. It is interesting, therefore, to reflect on how MacCulloch’s sense of the ‘limits of the story’ refers not simply to absent evidence but also to evidence at a certain order of granularity which is where the academic historian’s story ‘cuts off’. Determining this cut off point highlights the necessity of the historical imagination to inferring certain possibilities on the basis of reflection on the shape of the past encounter field. In Chapter Two, I showed how MacCulloch argued from the likelihood of the bodily proximity of Cromwell at Mortlake and Henry VIII at Richmond to suggest that Cromwell survived the setbacks of the 1536 rebellion by staying corporeally close to the king. This focus on the dynamics of the architectural topographic foreground is a relatively unusual strategy in a heavily footnoted scholarly treatise – albeit one facilitated by the traditional narrative organization of the biography. MacCulloch reconstructs Cromwell’s world as an information-rich encounter field. He continually informs the reader where his large cast of historical actors were corporeally located, from where they wrote letters and memoranda and what relations (including temporal and spatial relations) described their position in Cromwell’s social network. The map of key locations in ‘Cromwell’s London’ included before the acknowledgements (MacCulloch 2018, xiii-iv) are useful, if crossreferenced with the text, but it is their articulation in the narrative figures of events that matter in terms of the global organization of MacCulloch’s study. Overall ‘London’ has more references than any other term in a detailed index that breaks the city down to its individual streets and buildings (718). Recurrent references to Cromwell’s London home at Austin Friars and the various residences at one time occupied by Cardinal Wolsey, such as York Place, help to integrate the events of the historical narrative into the quotidian routines of a political life in Henry VIII’s court. MacCulloch’s account of the fall from royal favour of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell’s predecessor as Lord Chancellor of England, exemplifies his sensitivity to both the social dynamics of the encounter field in which his protagonists moved and a readiness to express architectural topographic description at different resolutions in order to express the contingencies of a key historical event as it appeared to contemporaries.

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The following passage describes Wolsey leaving his London residence at York Place (on the site of contemporary Whitehall) for Esher in suburban Surrey, on the King’s orders. [Wolsey] was banished to Esher in Surrey, still not the worst fate in the world, for this rather stately house belonging to his diocese of Winchester was quite near the King’s much used residence at Hampton Court. The future, that location suggested, was still open, but rumours swirled, and there was a settled conviction in the City of London as the Cardinal left York Place for the last time that his destination was not Esher but the Tower. The crowds of excited spectators in boats on the Thames must have been greatly disappointed as Wolsey’s barge turned in the opposite direction towards Putney. (MacCulloch 2018, 86) In the second and third sentences of the passage MacCulloch expresses what I refer to as an architectural topographic sequence (ATS) that serves the prupose of concatenating descriptions of Wolsey’s movements at different degrees of granularity or resolution from low to high. For clarity I have differentiated each shift in resolution using square brackets. The degree or ‘zoom’ of resolution is indicated by the number accompanying the description with a higher number meaning a higher resolution: {[City of London, 1] >> [York Place, 2] >> [River Thames, 3] >> [Wolsey’s barge, 4] >> [Putney, 1]}. Clearly this architectural topographic sequence does not ‘map’ a journey from York Place to Esher in an objective (cartographic) sense, nor is the resolution assigned to each element an empirical fact since the River Thames is more geographically extensive than York Place and the City of London. Rather the ATS {} records how MacCulloch figures the event of Wolsey’s journey in his text, drawing on his imaginative understanding of sixteenth-century London (i.e. its prefiguration as an encounter field) to create interfaces (or relations) between descriptions at different resolutions. In the narrativized figure, Wolsey’s departure from York Place on a barge appears as a detail that is abbreviated in most histories. Highlighting it here allows MacCulloch to draw readers’ attention to the suspense of the crowds who did not know for sure which way Wolsey’s boat would turn – west into exile in Surrey or east, to be executed at the Tower of London. This encounter represents the key moment of contingency in the narrative, since the crowd did not know which decision Henry VIII has made. Although MacCulloch anticipates this eventuality earlier in the passage so that his readers do not share the surprise of the crowds, it is easy to see how he has pushed his narrative as far as possible towards the ‘show and tell’ of popular historical narratives but without going beyond what the evidence will allow. This passage from MacCulloch is largely derived from the 1641 Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey by George Cavendish that gives a more detailed description of the scene on the barge. It includes an account of a dialogue between Wolsey and his treasurer Sir William Gascoigne in which Wolsey

Figure and event 113 explains he is not going to the Tower before eloquently declaring his willingness to surrender his possessions to the king “or else I were an unkind servant”. He then proceeds to board his barge at the “privy stairs”, a detail of architectural topographic description more expressive of Wolsey’s movements than the less specific ‘Thames’ but excluded by MacCulloch (Cavendish 1905 [1641], 102). As previously noted in Chapter Two the most figurationally contingent actions are often described at the highest degree of architectural topographic resolution, the point where evidential verification is most difficult. MacCulloch’s scholarly probity leads him to ‘cut off’ his story at 4th degree of granularity, presumably on the basis that Cavendish’s account of Gascoigne and Wolsey’s dialogue before descending the privy steps was too narratively contingent to be included. Given the influence of Cavendish on the passage cited it is interesting to see how the resolution of architectural topographic description that may considered to be more ‘show’ than ‘tell’ (in the sense of embellishing the core argument) is used by MacCulloch to identify the limits of tellability. In developing this point it is worth referring back to one of the examples of figurational contingency I discussed in Chapter Two, the storming of Versailles Palace following the March of the Women from Paris 5/6th, October 1789. I noted there how the multiple actors involved in the pursuit, defence and flight of the royal family, when combined with the complexities of accessing and defending the royal apartments at many different points, present serious challenges to any attempt to authoritatively ‘map’ the event as a narrative, difficulties which are reflected in the variations of historians’ accounts. I identified accelerated ‘movement towards’ as a time-space figure that expresses a minimal narrative coherence while allowing considerable scope for variation in detailing and emphasis. Here I give the ATS{} for the insurgents (§1) and the pursued queen, Marie Antoinette (§2) giving the degree or ‘zoom’ of resolution as a number. §1 |insurgents| [public street, 1] >> [exterior court > interior court, 2] >> [Queen’s staircase, 3] >> [guardroom > antechamber > queen’s living room > queen’s bedroom, 4] §2 |queen| [queen’s living room > queen’s bedroom > private corridor > King’s apartments, 4] In comparing ATS § (1–2) it should be noted that degree of resolution is not equivalent to sequential depth – though the two are closely related. For example, while it is clear that the queen’s bedchamber, named last in the sequence, is the deepest (and in that sense the most symbolic) space, it exists at the same resolution of architectural topographic description as the other internal rooms in Versailles. In §3 I approximate the combined movement of historical actors at the storming of Versailles Palace in an overall schema of the event, adding the

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degree of resolution after each description. A ‘schema’ is distinguished from an architectural topographic sequence in that it summarizes the generic prefiguration of the encounter field arranged from the coarsest to finest degrees of resolution, rather than codifying the movements of particular historical actors in a narrative sequence. §3 [palace exterior (most public), 1] >> [palace courts (transitional), 2] >> [entrances to royal apartments (transitional), 3] >> [palace interior, transitional >> Queen’s bedchamber, (most private), 4] ATS §1&2 show how the schematic encounter field in ATS §3 can be expressed in different ways by the crowd and the queen. Representing their movement, bodily co-presence and encounter at the 4th degree of resolution is a matter of integrating the two sequences into a single ATS {}. The schema describes a figurational contingency in the encounter field that facilitates the historian’s narration of pursuit and flight as movement towards the queen’s bedchamber expressed at the highest (4th) degree of resolution. Of course, the storming of Versailles Palace involved many more individual and groups of historical actors than just the insurgents who broke into the queen’s bedchamber and the queen herself. This emphasizes how in historical ontology de Certeau’s spatial stories cannot be said to emerge pre-formed, as it were, from the practice of bodily movement of people in the past because historical narratives have to be imagined by historians. The historical imagination itself is not forged primarily as an expression of the historian’s own psychic geography (as it is for Ackroyd) but through acknowledging the multiplicity of positions and experiences of individual historical actors in relation to an encounter field that is, to a greater of lesser extent, a domain of shared social experience. The complexity of the encounter field that characterized the storming of Versailles Palace probably explains why the majority of the specialist literature does not include a cartographic representation. Blakemore and Hembree are an exception in attempting to facilitate expression of the architectural topographic foreground in the text with the aid of a plan of the Royal Apartments. The queen’s apartments were comprised of a series of four rooms, shaded in the diagram above, through which a crowd would have had to pass to reach her bedroom: the gardes de la reine, the antichamber, the salon, and finally the chambre à coucher, her bedroom. (Blakemore and Hembree 2001, 512) This description is useful to ground the narrative figure of pursuit and flight in the spatial organization of the Queen’s Apartments. It is notable, however, that Blakemore and Humbree’s plan of Versailles does not represent

Figure and event 115 corporeal accessibility (e.g. through doors) either between the inside and the outside of the Royal Apartments or between the queen’s staircase and her private suite of chambers. Ultimately the plan is limited in helping to understand the precise course of events. It serves mainly to draw attention to the inadequacy of ‘stand-alone’ maps and plans to represent the encounter field in themselves, rather than as source materials that help the historian to imaginatively reconstruct the historical encounter field. The architectural topographic sequences (§1–3) encode socialized timespace relations (e.g. outside to inside, public to private) that might be considered static and generic. Since the ATS{} offers a particular viewpoint or orientation on a specific encounter field, however, this encoding is both dynamic (movement towards) and contingent (involving unpredictable relations of movement, bodily co-presence and encounter). Arising from the architectural topographic description of a particular historical event (The storming of Versailles Palace 5–6 October 1789), it similarly expresses the dynamic and contingent narrative possibilities of architectural topographic description. One can reflect on how such descriptions of historical encounter fields constitute synchronic or archetypal narrative figures that are not exclusive to a given event, while the contingencies of the unfolding of the specific event that are expressed in the narrative itself are unique in history. So while the storming of Versailles Palace represents, for example, the desecration of the (royal-female) interior by the profane (plebeian-male) exterior, it expresses this in an historical narrative that embraces the contingencies of the event – not least that many of the insurgents were female and the queen’s defenders included commoners. Regarded as an architectural topographic sequence, Blakemore and Hembree’s use of French nouns: gardes de la reine > the antichamber > the salon > the chambre à coucher helps makes the point that in narrative terms such spatial labels are not simply functional but express embodied possibilities of movement, copresence and encounter with resonance for decoding the routine spatial culture of everyday life – and not just aristocratic life – at Versailles Palace. Fascinatingly, these elementary sequences seem to generate their own kind of spatial stories of the encounter field. Even when presented in a formal manner as in § (1–3) they seem to demand telling. In seeking to understand why this should be the case I turn to the philosopher of history David Carr whose work proposes narrative as a mode of thought intrinsic to historical understanding. Carr’s (1986) argument that the temporal directionality of narrative is congruent with how historical actors themselves construct events at the level of meaningful social experience is consistent with the role I have proposed for architectural topographic description and ATS{}.9 Carr is concerned to counter philosophical arguments emanating mainly from literary theory that historical writing is characterized by the authorial imposition of ‘meta-narratives’ onto the chaos of actual experience rather than arising from the historian’s sense of the historical patterning of that experience (White 1973). Carr proposes that:

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Contingency in the historiographies We have an experience in common when we grasp a sequence of events as a temporal configuration such that its present phase derives its significance from its relation to a common past and future. (1986, 128)

From the architectural topographic perspective it is interesting how Carr suggests that the sequence of historical events is ‘graspable’ as a temporal pattern equally open to the past and the future. However, the sense in which Carr expresses this seems rather abstract. It appears the temporality of events is grasped or ‘configured’ by the historian in a cognitive sense that is somewhat removed from the remorseless contingency of corporeal existence. In a later work Carr (2014) goes further in arguing that the possibility of historical knowledge is premised on the narrative constitution of social life. For Carr this raises the: possibility of an “ontologization” of the concept of narrative— that is, the possibility of speaking of a narrative “mode of existence,” of a social and historical reality whose being is already characterized by narrativity and not merely known and influenced by historians’ narrations. (Carr 2014, 8.27) Carr’s proposed ‘ontologization’ of narrative is intended to establish historical events as social entities shared and lived rather than as an ordering device imposed on the mess of reality by the historian. To this end he discusses the ‘familiarity’ of narrative and its common-sensical ability to explain actions embedded in everyday life. As he says, we can “explain an action by telling a story about it” (2014, 25). In this respect Carr’s position has parallels with the proposition of this book that narrative intelligibility, as distinct from evidential authority, is its own source of authenticity in historical writing. Yet without explaining further how narrative propositions might arise from the material or architectural topographic description of social lives, as opposed to the apparently innate narrativizing capacity of individuals, meaning itself seems a rather predetermined ‘common-sensical’ quality; the histories we tell, devoid of contingency and the possibility of alternative tellings. Carr’s discussion of a passage from Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory (1995) serves to illustrate this point. Schama’s passage describes the English explorer Sir Walter Raleigh (c.1552–1618) looking over the Thames from his residence at Durham House anticipating his expedition to find El Dorado (Carr 2014, 8.11–13). Carr meditates on the various elements of Schama’s description noting that while the historian clearly could not know on the basis of historical evidence exactly where Raleigh stood, what he saw or what thoughts these might prompt in him, Schama’s careful and imaginative use of partial evidence allows him to depict a credible possible scene. Carr describes this account as “veridical” on the basis that Schama’s intention as a historian is to “portray the real” rather than fictionalize (12–14). Carr goes on to note how Schama’s vivid portrayal of

Figure and event 117 Raleigh’s pensive state of mind at that time is logically consistent with the explorer’s personal motivations. Since he was shortly to set off on a major expedition it made sense that looking over the river Thames might make him think about the journey to come. This leads Carr to conclude that Raleigh’s “physical surroundings are not just impinging on him causally; they have significance for him […] derived from their relation to a longterm project” (13). This suggests that for Carr, the material world is ‘physical’ or ‘symbolic’; it may cause things to happen or it may mean something. Yet from an architectural topographic perspective this is unsatisfying because it implies the environmental influences on Raleigh matter only insofar as they are direct and determining. One might equally emphasize Schama’s use of architectural topographic description to situate Raleigh in a building overlooking the Thames and thereby establish the authenticity of the scene as a specific when-where event in Raleigh’s career as an explorer. Even so, it is notable that Carr offers an example of what is a largely static visual tableau to explain the authenticity or ‘veridicality’ of Schama’s historical narrative. In Chapter Three I characterized such tableau as ‘milieu-rich’ explanations that evade the contingency of the encounter field in order to assert the basis of pervasive environmental influences. It seems that something is missing in Carr’s ontologization of narrative. Carr, in a manner similar to de Certeau, implies that narrative meaning emerges directly from the situated nature of experience, largely unmediated or contested by the contingencies of the encounter field. This material domain encoded in architectural topographic description surely correspond better to Carr’s “experience in common” than the abstract temporality of pre-determined event sequences on the one hand or the pervasive influence of “physical surroundings” on the other. While allowing for the reflexive relationship between narrative meaning and situated experience, the “structure of social time” to which Carr refers can only constitute a narrative structure, as he believes it to, if it is extended to encompass the figurational contingency of the encounter field in time and space on the basis that narrative meaning is contingent and not determined, by such a structure (Carr 1986, 128). I have proposed that the historical imagination deploys architectural topographic description to prefigure past encounter fields and identify specific contingencies in the when-where events with which they are concerned. These may be expressed (to different extents) in narrative or repressed in more environmental-contextual modes of explanation. One can reflect on the potential for architectural topographic description in historical writing to invert the psychic geographies of spatial stories such that cities and landscapes are viewed less as inhabited texts so much as texts imaginatively encoded as time-space figurations of narrative forms capable of expressing the possibilities of shared social experience. It is the necessity of imagining sequences of social action comprising the when-where specificity of historical events that invokes the contingency of the encounter field in expressing figures of movement, bodily co-presence and encounter in

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their myriad forms: departure, return, movement away, movement towards, seeing, sensing, meeting, missing, hiding, waiting, speaking, silence. These figures disrupt the surface of the historian’s texturology with the intermittent collision and separation of bodies but without tying them down to particular meanings or interpretative positions. The architectural topographic description of the encounter field embodies historical writing in its relentless shifting of figurational resolution. Such description is better suited to the ‘mapping’ of these contingent figures than either the dérive or cartographic image.

Notes 1 The French historian Eric Hazan is rather more successful in discovering Paris’ revolutionary history in the topography of the contemporary city: Éric Hazan. 2010. The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps. Translated by David Fernbach. London: Verso; Éric Hazan. 2019. A Walk Through Paris A Radical Exploration. London: Verso. 2 For example: Simon Wilde (2018) England: The Biography: The Story of English Cricket. London; New York, Schuster and Schuster Ltd. Christopher Bryant (2014) Parliament: The Biography London: Doubleday and Andrew Arstenstein, A. (ed.)(2010) Vaccines: A Biography. Springer-Verlag, New York. 3 Examples previously discussed include Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Thomas Cromwell: A Life, Simon Schama’s Citizens, Jenny Uglow’s Lunar Men and Peter Ackroyd’s London: the Biography. 4 This indicates why the authorial use of prefacing maps and plans plays a particular role in works of historical fiction. Depending on the kind of historical fiction, these maps and plans range from the pared-down schematic sketches common in scholarly history to works of cartographic art intended to be enjoyed in their own right. This question is touched upon with reference to Hilary Mantel’s 1992 novel A Place of Greater Safety in Chapter Six. 5 Further examples include Vincent Brown’s mapping of the Jamaican Slave Revolt 1760-61 http://revolt.axismaps.com/map/ accessed 15 August 2020; Vincent Brown ‘Mapping a Slave Revolt Visualizing Spatial History through the Archives of Slavery’, Social Text 33.4: 134-41; the animation of the Peterloo Massacre discussed in Chapter Three. 6 Collingwood’s position has been summarized in the introductory chapter 7 Two of Hilary Mantel’s Tudor trilogy Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring up the Bodies (2012) have been awarded the Man Booker Prize while the third The Mirror and the Light (2020) was shortlisted. All three are published in the UK by Fourth Estate. 8 ‘Diarmaid MacCulloch: “I got very irritated with Henry VIII”’ Diarmaid MacCulloch interviewed for The Guardian by Alex Preston 13.07.2019, https:// www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jul/13/diarmaid-maculloch-thomas-cromwella-life-interview-hilary-mantel accessed 2.12.20 9 The reference to Carr (1986) is discussed in Simon Schama’s ‘Preface’ to Citizens (2004 [1989]), xvi, where the author reflects on the merits of narrative history.

Part II

Writing history as a city

5

Proximity and distance Identifying narrative figures in the architectural topographic sequences of archetypal stories

I Definitions Lining up facts in chronological order does not write history. Collingwood (1989 [1946], 277) cautions against what he calls “scissors-and-paste” history on the basis that the the past does not exist “ready-made” in the archive but is animated by the historian through critical engagement with his or her materials. Historical understanding then is not analogous to a jigsaw puzzle waiting for the historian to arrange the missing pieces to complete a preconceived picture. At least, if it is a jigsaw it is poorly made, reflecting how the historian is constrained by the partiality of extant archive sources to craft his or her ‘pieces’ into only approximate relation. And if there is a pattern it describes not an image but an event, the full explication of which is likely to require an indeterminate number of extra pieces, probably more than the historian has at his or her disposal. But while the scholarly historian cannot simply make things up it is not possible for even the most scrupulous practitioner to reconstruct the past absolutely on the basis of sparse (even profuse) evidence. The historian is always adding something to makes the parts cohere into a whole. I have suggested that this ‘stickiness’, if it is not to be found in the abridgment of national, class-based or theological metanarratives, can be found in the practice of architectural topographic description. This chapter builds on the arguments in Chapter Four to demonstrate how architectural topographic description is fundamental to the narrative coherence of historical events, not least as a source of contingency in explanation so that the embedding of events in an intelligible reality admits alternative narrations may be possible, if they too conform to that reality. Developing this argument requires a closer focus on the relationship of architectural topographic description with narrative. In the first section of the chapter I lay the ground by considering how the architectonic quality of narrative carries its own source of contingent meaning enabling the motivations of individual characters, the symbolic import of situations and the significance of geographically proximate relationships to be expressed through movement, bodily co-presence and encounter. The second and third sections present an architectural topographic analysis of two classic fairy

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tales: Goldilocks and the Three Bears and Cinderella to reveal the imaginative process through which architectural description is narrativized, as an important preliminary step to understanding its particular importance to the historical imagination. First, the architectural topographic sequence of each narrative is described to show how it is prefigured as the global encounter field of an intelligible time-space reality. This description is anterior to the resolution of any specific questions of meaning or motivation proposed by the story but itself proposes a range of alternative narrative and stylistic possibilities. Taking this step involves refining the notion of architectural topographic sequences set out in Chapter Four by reconceptualizing the individual elements of description as architectural toponemes, thereby acknowledging the capacity of texts to expresses the imaginative translation of functional labels into narrative relations. Secondly, five localized figures of event-narration are identified as characteristic architectural topographic sequences which construct the encounter field at different resolutions of architectural topographic description. In broad terms the form of narrative is shown to express a profoundly global architectural topographic intelligibility. This establishes a distinction with non-narrative texts which are (at least partially) liberated from the necessity of architectural topographic description but at a reciprocal cost, I shall argue, to the expression of historical understanding. I conclude the chapter by reflecting on particular aspects of the formal analysis of fairy tales that will inform the historiographical analysis of subsequent chapters.

II Social stories In The Production of Space Henri Lefebvre (1991, 229) notes that the “task of architectonics” is the precise descriptions of social spaces “on the ground” that are the historical legacy of embodied social experience. Lefebvre offers spatial architectonics as response to what he regards as the disembodiment of space conceptualized as passive text awaiting its reader, rather than as a lived spatial practice. He is equally critical of functionalist approaches that represent social space in instrumental terms as essentially uninhabited, a “blank sheet of paper upon which psychological and sociological determinants supposedly ‘write’ or inscribe their variations or variables” (297). Lefebvre does not specifically address the question of narrative architectonics, but it is one that has been pursued by Michael de Certeau (1984, 115) whose explication of spatial stories is prefaced by the observation that “narrative structures have the status of spatial syntaxes” in the sense that sentences, like journeys, serve to “organize places” and “link them together”. In Chapter Four I made the point that de Certeau’s concept of the spatial story works less well as a ‘social story’ in the sense one might conceive historical writing. One reason for this is that while sentences and narratives are typically considered vehicles for communicating authorial meaning in

Proximity and distance 123 metaphorical terms, spatial syntaxes cannot have any single meaning imposed onto them because, as spatial arrangements, they express a principle of material constraint. To the extent that space must be shared it must be social, with no given agent (including the historian) having the absolute authority to establish its meaning – on the contrary the historian must be open to possibly divergent views on any given situation. The question of the meaning of a spatial syntax, in other words, is entirely contingent on the specific sociality generated in patterns of movement, co-presence and encounter rather than on any metaphor or analogy. Of course, this does not mean the author-historian does not impose his or her own authority on the text (de Certeau’s ‘texturology’) but in historical writing or ‘social stories’ at least, it forces a distinction between the architectural topographic encoding of narrative expressing a socialized field of embodied spatial practices, and questions of meaning arising from historical interpretation. To a greater or lesser extent the semanticization of social space must be regarded as contingent on the negotiation of language and symbols in situ rather than simply imposed from without. Responding to Lefebvre’s argument, this chapter is concerned with the architectonic figuration of narratives. This is a first step in formulating a response to the question ‘what is the historian doing when faced with an actual rather than metaphorical sheet of blank paper and tasked with drafting an account of historical events?’ In this I am concerned with what Lefebvre might have described as the architectonic “texture” of historical narratives and the imaginative process through which the material reality of past social spaces becomes encoded in historical writing. Rather than give primacy to the text in representing material reality I prioritize the agency of the historical imagination in prefiguring past encounter fields as fields of narrative possibility that render historical texts intelligible. As a preliminary step it is necessary to understand more about the status of architectural topographic description in narrative theory, and in particular to note how its definition of socialized time-space has been under conceptualized because of its assumed equivalence with the physicality of the natural environment. Regarded as so much ‘scaffolding’, the role of architectural description in encoding narrative contingency as a necessary condition of meaning in a situational or social sense is easily elided into generalized statements about the social significance of spatial proximity. The narratologist Marie-Laure Ryan (1991) argues that if any exercise in textual representation of reality was equivalent to fiction then there would be no basis for differentiating narrative from fiction, a position Ryan does think logically tenable. For Ryan narrative involves “bringing a universe to life, and conveying to the reader the sense that at the center of this universe resides an actual world [(AW)] where individuals exist and where events take place” (259). History is not fiction because whereas historical and fictional texts alike draws on “truth-functional mimetic statements” to create a textual actual world (TAW) that is therefore real on its own terms to the reader, historical

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writing remains centred on the AW inhabited by the reader and author alike. Fiction, by contrast, “recentres” its statements and evaluates them against a ‘textual reference world’ (TRW) that is distinct from the references of the AW. All narratives in TAW, however, are said to be equally ‘modal’ in that they exist in relation to alternative possible textual worlds (TAPWs) through which the narrative leads the reader. Whereas in history writing TAPWs stay centred on alternative possibilities in the real world (APW), fiction (e.g. science fiction) recentres the TAPW on an alternative scheme of reality. Ryan reveals just how much of fictional reality draws its terms of reference (TRW) from actual reality (AW) – as an example of “principle of minimal departure” (54). This creates the basis for fictional realism by saving the author the work of establishing an entire alternative reality in the genres (e.g. crime fiction) where this is not required. The literary practice of both author and reader, in this sense, extends beyond the text into the shared, historical, time-space of the real world in quite a fundamental way. Achieving “historical coherence”, for example, by avoiding anachronism, is crucial to most fictions in this respect (45). Ryan argues that: “In order to be narrative, a text must not only project an actual world, it must also place this world in history” (259). In this sense history is one of the “logical foundations” of narrativity as a system for communication. Even in more experimental fiction that lack events and character, “all present a concrete setting” (260). In factual history as opposed to historical fictions Ryan notes how the range of alternative possibilities is presented in conditional mode rather than asserted, and there is a special role for the historian in taking responsibility for what is claimed (34–35). This is because – as Ryan points out – historical events do not exist as “raw narrative data” but arise through the process of narrativization itself – a process that does not exclude processes of selection and emplotment (258). This does not, however, render them ‘fictitious’ since they are centred on the actual world of experience consistent with the principle of minimum departure. But while Ryan’s theorization of narrative’s non-equivalence to fiction is convincing, she takes the conventional position of collapsing architectural topographic description into the category of physical laws that apply to the natural environment; or, in a different sense, reducing it to the stock of common reference object ‘properties’ as, for example, when a fictional London can be identified with the historical London (35). The result is that the architectural topographic foreground is relegated to little more than a subcategory of a single indicator. It denotes the ‘physical world’ in a multiitem index for translating between the AW and TAW on the basis of minimal difference. Yet, as I have argued, there are good reasons for believing that narrative is fundamentally architectonic to the extent that architectural topographic description gives particular expression to narrative possibilities prefigured in the historical imagination. One of Ryan’s key propositions is that tellable narratives in the sense of viable or intelligible stories work by being embedded in “virtual narratives”

Proximity and distance 125 that engage the reader by proposing a range of possible outcomes that are not specified in the text Ryan (1991, 148–74). She illustrates this using Aesop’s fable of the Fox and the Crow. In the fable the Fox deceives the crow into opening his beak by flattery, as a consequence of which his piece of cheese falls to the ground and is eaten by the Fox. The reader knows the Fox intends to steal the cheese but the Crow does not know this – believing that the Fox simply wants to hear his voice. It is the reader’s understanding of these conflicting virtual narratives that give the fable its interest as a story and its moral namely, ‘will the Fox’s plan work or will the Crow see through it?’ Without this virtual element the fable would be a rather banal tale of ‘Fox collects cheese dropped by singing Crow’. Ryan’s broader thesis on narrative tellability is helpful in explaining why asserting that narrative as ‘linear’ might be rather simplistic, if not reductive, since even archetypal narrative forms embed alternative virtual narratives of ‘what might have happened’ seen from different points of view. The relevance of Ryan’s concept of virtual narratives to understanding how architectural arrangements construct spatial meaning has been recognized by Alan Penn (2003) and Sophia Psarra (2018, 258). They highlight how the position of a local space in relation to other (unseen or less immediately accessible) spaces enables the construction of “tellable” spatial narratives as people move around a configuration and explore its possibilities (Penn, Martinez et al. 2007). Yet in the absence of a configurational conception of the encounter field Ryan’s focus on the algorithmic mechanics of narrative meaning for fictional characters leads her to prioritize the discursive motivations and goals of individual characters over the situated nature of their embodied (nondiscursive) actions. This leads to problems in conceptualizing the architectural topographic encoding of narratives because it is these embodied actions that express the contingent possibilities of the encounter field, and which is a precondition for narrative meaning in any genuinely dialogic sense to emerge. Narrative in the architectural topographic foreground must navigate the asymmetry between what is known to characters in relation to one another, what is known to the author, and what is revealed to the reader: an imaginative exercise in ‘virtual narratology’ that undermines any definitive statement as to what a situation (or the social space of a building or city) means. In other words the figuration of the narrative in architectural topographic description destabilizes meaning as much as it stabilizes it, thereby keeping the question of meaning open to historical interpretation. The apparently simple fact, for example, that the Fox and Crow encounter one another at the tree is primary in generating narrative possibility – the Fox moves towards the Crow who is too high up for him to reach – ahead of any specific definition of ‘plot’ or ‘character traits’. Of course, archetypal narratives such as Aesop’s fable of the Fox and the Crow with their roots in pre-Christian folk-story traditions are so minimalistic that their architectural foreground (a tree in a landscape) is physicalist and

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symbolic as much as figurational. And while the ‘tree in landscape’ defines the encounter field of the two protagonists it is completely ahistorical. Even so, the intelligibility of this elementary architectural topographic schema is more fundamental to the narrative than Ryan’s indexical system allows. This is because at a certain level of narrative resolution the ‘events between other events’ are not specified by Aesop; it is the architectural topographic description that sustains ontological coherence between what actually happens (Fox gets cheese), and the virtual narratives of what might happen (Crow keeps the cheese) and what could not happen (Fox and Crow fail to notice one another because there is no tree or equivalent, such a telegraph pole!). Focusing on the when-where of the characters socialized action makes the task of scoping their individual motivations easier by highlighting how their intentions are not projected onto an empty space but are prefigured in the architectural topographic foreground as a source of embodied social action. A further issue is that an asocial definition of environment as physical or natural space means that amorphous proximity is seen, almost by default, as a kind of proxy for the encounter field. Hence, the Fox and Crow interact simply because they are close. In this sense proximity is an abstract state projected onto tabula rasa onto inhabited space. Tobler’s first law of geography that ‘everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things’ is a principle of relationality (i.e. near things are related more), although it can imply a normative idea of proximity that near things matter or mean more. In neither case does it apply straightforwardly to the architectural topographic foreground where relations of social proximity are expressed in terms of, movement accessibility, bodily co-presence and encounter rather than geographic (typically Euclidean) distance. Social proximity in an architectural topographic sense may be identified over a relatively extensive geographical distance with high accessibility and social distance may be identified at relatively localized scales where social control of interfaces in the encounter field make access difficult. The abstract definition of proximity becomes more problematic in narrative terms if we were to extend Tobler’s principle to think not just in terms of spatial proximity but in terms of temporal proximity. Here relationality might be taken to imply not a spatial relation but some kind of causal principle post hoc, propter hoc explanation (since a followed b, a caused b) to the effect that events proximate in time are more likely to be causal and in that sense more meaningful than one distance in time. Most historians would correctly regard this as a logical fallacy not borne out by evidence. For Laurence Stone (1965) historical events have long-term “preconditions” and short- term “precipitants”. Stone’s own priority was the explanatory power of long-term socio-economic factors, which could be subject to “comparative analysis and generalization”, over immediate precipitants comprising “accidental pattern of events […] which are unique and unclassifiable” (p.xxii). ‘Preconditions’ in this sense, being associated

Proximity and distance 127 with sociological history and ‘accidents’ with more traditional narrative forms. This argument about historical causation, however, is not really the point in this context. Anterior to questions of causation one has to narrativize the event being explained, an exercise in time-space figuration that makes demands on the when-where specificity of successive historical actions. This figurating process is fundamental to historical understanding. It is always possible to abbreviate the text to evade the contingencies of situation but at the possible cost of misrepresenting the event itself. Proximity then is the ahistorical abstraction of Euclidean space that architectural topographic description sets out to solve in narrative terms. It seeks to do this first by imaginatively prefiguring the relations of closeness and distance of people, information, symbols and materials with regard to the quotidian dynamics of a particular past encounter field, and secondly, by encoding this in texts.

III Architectural topographic sequences and toponemes In the remainder of this chapter I offer a formal explication of the role of architectural topographic description in encoding narratives as embodied texts. It responds to the tendency in historical studies to repress the contingency of the encounter field by conflating it with contextual explanatory factors in the natural or physical environment – a category error made even by a narratologist such as Ryan. I use two traditional fairy tales Goldilocks and the Three Bears and Cinderella to explore narratives expressed as architectural topographic sequence. These fairy tales are useful for presenting the formal analysis in an accessible way because they are universally recognizable and relatively straightforward narratives in their deployment of architectural topographic sequences. It is important to note how fairy tales differ from historical writing in two fundamental ways. First because, as accounts of mythical events the architectural topographic description of the narrative is similarly non-specific, or archetypal, whereas in historical research it is grounded in the scholarship of when-where events. Second, because the ‘once upon a time’ motif decisively differentiates the reality of the mythical fairy-tale world from the shared historical world that defines contemporary reality. In other words fairy tales exist ‘worlds apart’ from historical narratives. This means that we cannot expect in a fairy tale the reflexive acknowledgement of the continuum of past and present that characterizes historical writing. In the standard contemporary version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears Mother Bear has prepared porridge for breakfast and the family go out for a walk in the wood while they wait for it to cool. Goldilocks, also walking in the wood, discovers the house of the three bears while they are still out. She mischievously explores the house and samples its comforts, eating Baby Bear’s porridge, breaking his chair and falling asleep in his bed in the process. Returning home later the three bears retrace her steps until they find Goldilocks in Baby Bear’s bed. At this point she awakes and flees back into the wood.1

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In examining the architectural topographic sequence of the Goldilocks narrative in §1 ATS{} (below) and subsequently, I refer to the discrete elements of architectural topographic description as architectural toponemes or simply toponemes to express their status as the narrative syntax of architectural topographic sequences.2 Toponemes do not simply transcribe or otherwise ‘map’ the material conditions of when-where events (mythical or historical) in a documentary sense. Rather they represent the imaginative principle of prefiguration through which the material conditions of whenwhere events (mythical or historical) figure the text as an encounter field generative of intelligible narrative propositions. The label ‘toponeme’ serves to emphasize that elements of architectural topographic description are not simply stock labels applied to ‘real-world’ physical objects but are expressions constitutive of the architectural topographic (time-space) figures that constitute narrative. It is useful in this sense to distinguish between the global ATS{} of the narrative that represents all toponemes in a prefigured encounter field and localized ATS{} consisting of a subset of toponemes that comprise particular time-space figures embedded within the whole. As figures, architectural topographic sequences denote movement, bodily copresence and encounter rather than connote particular meanings. To read §1 ATS{} and subsequent diagrams it helps to become familiar with the the notation, although it is intended to be reasonably inuitive.3 I will provide a minimal explanation of each diagram in context. §1 ATS Goldilocks and the Three Bears { / |all| [wood: house] >> [kitchen] >> [wood: house] >> front door >> [kitchen > sitting room > bedroom > kitchen > sitting room > stairs > bedroom > stairs] >> front door >> [wood] >> front door \ } The §1 ATS{} is common to |all| the characters in the Goldilocks story, the forward slash / indicating the point of entry and the \ backwards slash the point of exit. A single arrow > indicates an interface transition between two spaces at the same resolution (or scale) of description; a double arrow >> indicates an interface transition between spaces at different resolutions. The resolution of a toponeme is a relative, not absolute, quality that depends on the scalar range of the global ATS {}. Having said that, the most generic distinction of resolution is that between [exterior (unenclosed)] and [interior (enclosed)]. Consecutive toponemes at different resolutions are distinguished by square brackets such that [wood] is separated from [kitchen]. Toponemes that comprise interface transitions between resolutions do not use square brackets – as in >. Elements of architectural topographic descriptions that directly follow the toponeme as in [wood: house] separated by a colon,

Proximity and distance 129 indicate object attributes at that resolution. In other words at the resolution of the wood the house is an object (similar to a tree) it is not until characters pass through the front door that it’s toponemic definition as a system of interior spaces is manifested. Whether a given element of architectural topographic description is regarded as a toponeme or an object attribute is then, relative to the resolution at which it is expressed. Two more important points need to be made about §1 ATS{}. The first is methodological. The ATS{} has been constructed on a close reading of the text. It contains no other architectural topographic description other than that which is (a) specified in the narrative itself; (b) is strongly implied by character actions or references to specific objects in the narrative and (c) specified contextually in ‘setting the scene’ as a preamble to the narrative. This means, for example, that elements which one can logically speculate to have been present (the path in the wood, the three bears’ front garden, the hall in the three bears’ house) are not included. This is because I am concerned with the architectural topographic sequencing of the text, not with engaging the text as a representation of a mythical ‘reality’ as such. Even deploying these criteria settling on the final ATS {} inevitably involves a degree of subjective judgement. For example, in §1 ATS{}, I have assumed that the three bears’ cottage included a separate sitting room containing their comfy chairs – as distinct from the kitchen where they eat porridge. This three-room cottage seems plausible through the organization of the story in threes (three bears, three bowls, three chairs, three beds etc.), but it is no less plausible to locate the chairs in another part of the kitchen. The second point relates to the fact that toponemes specified according to criterion (a) appear in §1 ATS{} in black – while those supplied consistent with criteria (b & c) appear in grey. This helps to indicate the nature of the judgements made in preparing the ATS{}, but this representation has a more substantial value. The frequency of black and white toponemes is indicative of the balance of direct and indirect architectural topographic description in the text such that the toponemes in black provides minimum markers of when-where activity while the toponemes in grey rely on the fact that architectural topographic legibility is intrinsic to narrative and can be expressed in a number of ways (through objects and character actions). Moreover, these greyed out silent or dropped toponemes are a crucial source of stylistic variation since the decision to include or not to include a direct toponeme marker can make a difference to how the encounter field figures the narrative action. The sequence §1 ATS{} can be subdivided into §2a-b ATS{} that distinguish between the narratives of the three bears |3B| and Goldilocks |G|. The symbol / indicates the point where |G| enters into the |3B| narrative and vice versa, while the symbol \ indicates where |G| leaves the |3B| narrative and vice versa. The double straight brackets ||G|| (§2a) and ||3B|| (§2b) indicates an encounter between |G| and |3B| takes place in the bedroom.

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§2a ATS G3B { / |3B| [wood: house] >> [kitchen] >> [wood] >> [kitchen > sitting room > stairs > /||G ||\ bedroom] >> front door \ } §2b ATS G3B { /|G| [wood: house] >> front door >> [kitchen > sitting room > /||3B||\ bedroom > stairs] >> front door >> [wood] \ } §2a-b ATS{} show how it is possible to represent the same narrative from two points of view while drawing on the same stock of toponemess identified in §1 ATS{}. Both involve similar interface transitions and both are abbreviated in the sense that they do not make full use of all the available toponemes. For example, the act of going up the stairs to the bedroom is not specified for either |G| or |3B|, only |G|’s descent is specified giving emphasis to her flight from the house. Even if the [stairs] had not been specified the architectural topographic imagination would have supplied them as a silent toponeme. We know that |3B| went “up” to their bedroom and our sense of fairy tales set in little house in the wood precludes the possibility of lifts to bring her back down. §3 ATS G3B { [/|3B| wood: house] >> [kitchen] >> [ (|3B wood /|G|) : house] >> front door >> [kitchen > sitting room > bedroom > |3B| kitchen > sitting room > stairs > ||3B | G|| bedroom > |G| stairs] >> front door >> [wood |G|\] >> |3B| front door \ } §3 ATS{} adds the character information to §1 ATS{} to create a global ATS {} that differentiates local character positions. As no character is prioritized over any other, all character markers | | are embedded within the body of the ATS {}. The / symbol indicates when one or other of |3B| or |G| enters the narrative and the symbol \ indicates when they exit. Round brackets (…) indicates co-presence without mutual awareness of (|3B| or |G|) in the wood. Double straight brackets indicate the mutual encounter ||3B | G|| in the bears’ bedroom.

Proximity and distance 131 §4 ATS G3B { [/|3B| wood: house] >> [kitchen: table; bowls; porridge] >> [ (|3B| wood /|G|) : house] >> front door >> [kitchen: table; bowls 1–3; spoons 1–3; porridge 1–3 > sitting room: chairs 1–3 > bedroom: beds 1–3 > |3B| kitchen: table: 1–3; bowls; porridge 1–3 > sitting room: chairs 1–3 > stairs > ||3B | G|| bedroom: beds 1–3 > |G| stairs] >> front door >> [wood |G|\ ] >> |3B| front door \ } In §4 ATS{} the granularity of architectural topographic description is extended to include all the directly specified object attributes of toponemes expressed at the resolution of the house interior. Where there is more than one object attribute, they are separated by a semi-colon (;) and arranged first to last in a logical fashion such that table precedes bowl which precedes spoon which precedes porridge. §5 ATS G3B { [/|3B| wood: house] >> [kitchen: table; bowls; porridge, preparation] >> [ (|3B| wood /|G|) : house, walk] >> front door, peep; enters >> [kitchen: table; bowls 1–3; spoons 1–3; porridge 1–3, tastes; eats porridge 3 > sitting room: chairs 1–3, tests; sits; breaks chair 3 > bedroom: beds 1–3, test; climbs onto bed 3; lies down; sleeps > |3B| kitchen: table; bowls 1–3; porridge 1–3, examine; speak > sitting room: chairs 1–3, examine; speak > stairs > ||3B | G|| bedroom: beds 1–3, examine3B; speak; awakeG > |G| stairs, runs down] >> front door, exits >> [wood, disappears \|G ] >> |3B| front door, look out for Goldilocks \ } The final §5 ATS{} adds most of the directly expressed elementary bodily actions afforded by the toponemes and their object attributes. These named actions follow the object attribute list and are indicated by a comma (,). Where there is more than one associated action they are separated by a semi-colon (;) and arranged first to last in a logical fashion such that ‘lies down’ precedes ‘sleeps’. In the bedroom the actions of |3B| and |G| are listed in the order of their occurrence (examine; speak; awake) using subscript to assign the actions to the relevant characters. §6 ATS schema: G3B { / |all| [wood: house, character actions] front door, character actions

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\ } The global Goldilocks narrative §1–5 ATS{} can be summarized in the schematic §6 ATS{} where the two-way double arrows indicate that movement between the house and the wood takes place in both direction in the narrative. The purpose of §6 ATS{} schema is not to represent the narrative itself but to indicate the range of resolution definition and the description of key transition interfaces. It draws attention to the front door as the threshold between the house-object as seen from the wood – familiar to |3B| strange to |G| – and the house interior where the narrative unfolds. It captures an important quality of ATS{} that distinguishes them from cartographic forms of representation, that social activity is not restricted to a single synchronic projection, but that intelligible narratives express movement, bodily co-presence and encounter within, between and across contrasting resolutions. The ATS{} of the Goldilocks narrative encodes a number of time-space figures that are both relatively global and relatively localized within specific areas of the narrative. For example, the most generic §1 ATS{} encodes a figure of outside > inside > outside which sustains the narrative arc of Goldilocks as a story of intimate exploration characterized by arrival and departure. Yet from the point of view of |3B| things look different since, once back in their house, they do not leave it again – for example, by following |G| into the wood. From their perspective (and the reader’s) |G|’s exploration of the bears’ cottage when they are in the wood represents a transgression. And while one can hardly talk of contingency in a fairy tale it is interesting how the story pivots on an archetypal decision point - that of the unlocked door: what made |G| go inside? Her decision leads directly to the crucial encounter ||3B | G || that takes place in the bears’ bedroom. The bedroom is the deepest, and in that sense the most private, room in the sequence [wood: house] >> front door >> [kitchen > sitting room > bedroom] that is shared consecutively by all the characters rather than at the same time– such that |3B|’s pursuit of |G|’s invasions of their privacy and |G|’s moment of fear at her discovery produces maximum dramatic impact. It is also worth mentioning how the object attributes of the kitchen: tables, bowls, (spoons) porridge recur no fewer than three times in the narrative. These mark the key stages of its development: the Three Bears leaving the house to allow the porridge to cool, Goldilocks beginning to enjoy what is not hers by sampling the porridge, and the Three Bears, discovery of her misdemeanour (“Who’s been eating my porridge?”, as Father Bear puts it). In general it is notable how the simple §(1–5) ATS{} enables the time-space figuration of powerful narrative possibilities including: exploration, trespass, guardianship, flight and pursuit to be expressed by bodily movements though an elementary encounter field, with minimal elaboration of plot, character psychology or symbolism.

Proximity and distance 133 It is remarkable how clear an account of the Goldilocks narrative the §1–5 ATS{} are able to provide and how much the intelligibility of the story depends upon it doing so. The generic formulation §1 ATS{} is richly generative of narrative potential while the more detailed §5 ATS{} satisfactorily expresses the narrative’s principal dynamic in the Three Bears’ pursuit and eventual discovery of the sleeping Goldilocks. In archetypal stories such as fairy tales there is very limited scope for milieu-rich environmental description or social context. Fairy stories are set ‘once upon a time’ in a non-specific historical reality and depend heavily upon figures of movement, encounter and co-presence to convey narrative meaning. The non-specific setting does not mean, however, that the emphasis on the action in the architectural topographic foreground renders such tales as essentially (rather than factually) ahistorical. This is not simply because the principal material culture of the Goldilocks story (kitchens, bowls, spoons, porridge etc.) would have been familiar to many in early nineteenth-century Britain.4 Rather, to draw upon Ryan’s terminology, it is apparent how the architectural topographic sequence of Goldilocks establishes a fundamental ‘accessibility relation’ between the world of the reader and the ‘TAW’ of the story on the basis of ‘minimal departure’ from the AW of historical reality. To look at this another way the ATS{} of Goldilocks carries much of the narrative load of creating an intelligible mythical world such that the phenomena of talking bears living in a country cottage and feasting on porridge seems entirely reasonable.

IV Narrative figures as architectural topographic sequences To assess the figurational potential of architectural topographic sequences in greater depth it is necessary to consider the role played by temporal intervals both in emphasizing the recursive elements of a narrative and fragmenting its time-space contiguity. A temporal interval is already implicit in §1–5 ATS{}, specifically in the figure [/|G| kitchen > sitting room > bedroom > |3B| kitchen > sitting room > stairs > ||3B | G|| bedroom] in which the Three Bears retrace Goldilocks’ steps while she sleeps. Another fairy story, Cinderella, which is a more complex narrative than Goldilocks and the Three Bears is a useful example to examine the implications of temporal intervals in ATS{} since the story takes place over a greater length of time and contains a number of recursive elements. A synopsis is provided in Appendix B.5 The Cinderella narrative is also used by Ryan to deploy her ‘plot map’ analysis, aimed at representing the virtual or alternative narrative possibilities that sustain interest in the story (for example, ‘what would happen if Cinderella’s true identity is revealed at the ball?’) (Ryan 1991, 164). My approach, by contrast, considers such ‘virtual’ narratives as prefigured contingencies arising from the architectural topographic sequencing of the story, rather than existing a priori as logical possibilities to be revealed

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through the analysis of plot structure. It is interesting in this context to find how the story of Cinderella has also been invoked by the architectural theorist Bernard Tschumi (1999, 164). For Tschumi the programme that defines the intended uses of familiar buildings (such as family homes) and the plots of stories (such as Cinderella) alike, lives only in the “retelling” – that is, in the transformation of plan and plot that comes with the actual use of the building and the repeated performance of the story. This implies that those buildings and stories that are most able to sustain their value over time do so not through the static definitions of programme and plot but from the ability of buildings-as-lived to generate activities not specified in the programme and the ability of stories-as-told (or read) to generate narrative possibilities not specified in the plot. This does not mean that Cinderella fails to make it to the ball any more than it means the kitchen will not be used for cooking. Rather it means the possibility that she does not make it to the ball (or that the kitchen will be used for sleeping – to use Tschumi’s example) remains alive with each telling and only in the telling. It is possible to differentiate between the flow diagram that represents virtual plot structure as a logical proposition in the abstract, and the timespace figuration of architectural topographic sequences that represent the directionality of the told narrative in its own words. While both may raise the possibility that Cinderella does not make it to the ball, it is hard to see how the former can do so without the latter. The contingencies of the Cinderella narrative cannot be deduced from an archetypal plot diagram in any meaningful sense because such contingencies are temporalized expressions of its telling, as Tschumi emphasizes. The virtuality at issue in the retelling (or rereading) of a narrative, therefore, is not limited to the range of macroscopic alternatives that might be deducted from its elementary plot structure – no matter how granular the formal analysis. What matters is less the abstract possibility that Cinderella did or did not make it to the ball, any more than it matters (in the abstract) to the history of the Roman Empire whether Caesar did or did not, in fact, cross the Rubicon. What is at issue in the retelling are the restatements of situational contingency as an elementary condition of narrative intelligibility. Every time Cinderella arrives at the ball we wonder whether she will be found out there-and-then, every time Caesar approaches the Rubicon we wonder whether he will cross it there-and-then. The architectural topographic sequencing of narrative reveals localized figurational variation that make myriad different stylistic and narrative outcomes possible (at least more than could be accommodated in a flow diagram), so long as the coherence of the encounter field holds globally. Such variations are inseparable from the retelling of the actual story. On the contrary, as contingencies encoded in architectural topographic description they are intrinsic to its telling. Tschumi refers to the movements of people in a building as rhythms that constitute a figure distinct from goal-orientated or functional movement,

Proximity and distance 135 and which cannot be assigned any specific intentionality or motive beyond the embodied ‘meaning possibilities’ that the figure itself expresses. He regards movement notation as useful to “eliminate the preconceived meanings given to particular actions in order to concentrate on their spatial effects” (Tschumi 1999, 162). He has in mind the kind of notation that choreographers use to describe dance moves but one can think of the representation of architectural topographic sequences in a similar light. ATS{} identify the figures of movement, bodily co-presence and encounter that arise from the narrative itself as a source of possible meanings, rather than attempting to map possible meanings onto static representations of plot. One important source of rhythmic variation in this respect is the decision of the teller to specify or drop given toponemes from an architectural topographic sequence, the presence or absence of which can make a significant difference to the figurational expression of the encounter field. In preparing §7–12 ATS{} of Cinderella I have followed the same procedure as for Goldilocks. Several additions to the notation will be explained as they arise. In order to prevent a large number of ATS{} interrupting the presentation of the argument only the individual ATS{} of Cinderella |C| and the Prince |P| are included here, in a simplified representation similar to §2(a-b) ATS{} (above). The ATS {} for Cinderella §13 and the Prince §14 that extend to all objects and actions, together with the individual §15–17 ATS{} for the stepsisters |SS|, the Fairy Godmother |FG| and Cinderella’s father |CF|) as well as the ATS{} schema §18 are all included in Appendix C. To keep the ATS{} as simple as possible the entrance and exit points of the different characters (other than the Prince and Cinderella in §7–8 ATS{}) are not represented, nor has a global ATS{} combining all characters in a similar manner to §3 ATS{} (above) been included. The principles of the global representation ATS{} have been sufficiently explained with reference to Goldilocks in §1,3–5 ATS{}. In this section I take a rather different emphasis to draw out the figurational characeristics of localized ATS{}. In any case, such is Cinderella’s domination of the narrative that her ATS{} closely approximates to the global narrative excepting only the section where the Prince sets off for the city to track her down. §7 ATS Crla { / |C| house >> [kitchen: hearth > dressing room > garden > dressing room > pantry > dressing room > cellar > dressing room > garden > dressing room] >> [road: carriage] >> palace >> [/||P||\ ballroom] >> [road: carriage] >> house >> [interior room …1 day > kitchen: hearth; fire] >> [road: carriage] >> palace >> [/||P||\ ballroom] >> [road: carriage > road] >> house >> [kitchen: hearth; stool by cinders > interior room …1 day > interior room] >> [road: carriage] >> palace >> [/||P||\ ballroom] >>

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Writing history as a city palace door >> [road] >> house …1 day >> [kitchen > /||P|| interior room >> [road: horse] >> palace >> [palace interior]

\\ } An additional notation …∂ is introduced in §7 ATS{} where ∂ expresses a temporal interval. The ball in Cinderella is held over three days so between each return to the ballroom ∂ = 1 day. The interval between the arrival of the Prince and Cinderella at the Palace together and their wedding is represented as ∂ = ? in §12 ATS{} (below), as the length of the interval is not specified. §7 ATS{} shows how |C|’s actions encompass the full arc of the narrative and range of time-space figurational resolutions: from the domestic kitchen, via a three-times looped sequence simply described as house>palace>house that is shared with |SS| and ends ‘happy ever after’ with a fourth house > palace including a wedding at |P|’s palace that marks the end of the story. The highest resolution in §7 ATS{} is the kitchen hearth at the fourth degrees of resolution (road; house; kitchen: hearth) which represents |C|’s exclusive and symbolically significant space that gives her her name – after the cinders in the fireplace where she is forced to sleep.6 |C|’s repeated journeys home from the ball are also highly specified as palace>road>house rather than simply abbreviated to palace>house. The repeated inclusion of the road as a toponeme emphasizes its liminality as a space where an unexpected encounter would expose the shame of Cinderella’s secret poverty, emphasizing her continuing vulnerability despite being singled out by the beneficent magic of the Fairy Godmother. §8 ATS Crla { / |P| palace >> [/||C||\ ballroom …1 day > /||C||\ ballroom …1 day > ballroom /||C||\] >> palace door >>…1 day [interior room] >> [city: streets; houses; house interiors] >> Cinderella’s house >> [/||C|| interior room] >> [road: horse] >> palace >> [palace interior] \\ } §8 ATS{} establishes the toponemes and object attributes of the city, its streets and access to its many houses as exclusive to |P| emphasizing his agency and determination in searching for |C|. The palace door is the other toponeme exclusive to the Prince. All others except several (e.g. the hearth, the pantry, the cellar) belonging to Cinderella herself are shared between the different characters at one time or another. The palace door is a transitional interface or threshold where the Prince narrowly fails to catch up with Cinderella but finds her glass slipper. It identifies a critical moment in the narrative when the question of Cinderella’s ‘true identity’ (princess or

Proximity and distance 137 pauper?) is posed and marks the first step towards its resolution as the narrative focus shifts onto the Prince’s quest for Cinderella. §16(a-b) ATS{} which focuses on Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother (Appendix C) is interesting because toponemes are largely non-specified in her narrative which has to be deduced from the description of Cinderella’s situation. As a magical character |FG|’s appearance is exclusively shared with |C| in her house except for her final appearance in the narrative following the Prince’s declaration that Cinderella will be his bride. This localization of the |FG| ATS{} prevents her magical nature becoming a distraction to the other characters and in this sense makes the fictional ‘recentring’, in Ryan’s terms, of the Cinderella narrative in a magical world less complicated than it might otherwise be. Having developed two examples of ATS{} in order to give a precise account of the global encoding of narratives as architectural topographic sequences, I am now in a position to develop the analysis by drawing on the ATS{} of Golidlocks and Cinderella to give a generic summary of five narrative figures encoded by localized ATS{} that have been identified in the toponemic analyses. These are as follows: recursion, concatenation, decomposition, synchrony and temporalized distance. While these five figures are referred to as ‘local’ in the sense that they are all accommodated within the single narrative of Cinderella each of them has, in principle, the potential to take precedence in the encoding of global ATS{}. It is apparent, for example, how the figure of recursivity in Cinderella extends right across the narrative which is structured around the recurrent trips between her house and the palace. It is the particular deployment of figures in this sense that matters – none is mutually exclusive. The principle of recursivity is that character action flows repeatedly back through the same toponemes. At its most basic this has to do with the number of times a toponeme or object attribute recurs in a text. For example in §7 ATS{}: [road] n=8(7); [dressing room] n=5(5); [kitchen]n=4(4); [palace]n=4(2), [ballroom]n=3(1), where n>1(d) is the number of instances (greater than 1 indicating a recursion) and the d the number of instances that are greyed out as silent or ‘dropped’ toponemes unspecified in the text but strongly implied by the ATS{}. Immediately apparent here is the high proportion of dropped toponemes indicating how a given object attribute or associated action renders naming the toponeme unnecessary. It is also indicative of how the architectural topographic sequencing of a narrative becomes highly intuitive and flexible. This quality enables it to accommodate a lot of redundancy in expressing the encounter field creating scope for stylistic emphasis. For example the only time the road between the palace and Cinderella’s home is directly specified we learn it was a “dark, lonely road” on which she has been stranded (Southgate 2012, 28). Recursivity lays the ground for the expression of routine and ritualized movement in the encounter field. It is an architectural topographic description that can throw one-off deviations from the routine into relief. For example, while the narrative arc of Goldilocks has a symmetry in that it begins and

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ends in the woods, this is not the case in Cinderella where the pattern of three recursive trips back and forth between her house and the palace (§9 ATS{}) are finally broken by a fourth trip to the palace for her wedding to the Prince – a trip from which she does not return. Here the deviation from the established pattern emphasizes not only the exceptional nature of this final journey in that it depended on the Prince’s ability to find Cinderella but also its finality. §9 ATS Crla { |C| house > [road] > palace [ballroom] [road]> house >> }3 Recursion of ATS{} enables ‘imagined’ descriptions of socio-spatial entities at a lower resolution such as house or city to be validated only through the localized arrangements of higher resolution entities such as rooms or streets. For example, in ATS §10{} Cinderella’s encounter with her Fairy Godmother is expressed as follows: §10 ATS Crla { |C| >> [kitchen: hearth > dressing room > garden > dressing room > pantry > dressing room > cellar > dressing room > garden > dressing room] >> } The architectural topographic identity of the ‘dressing room’ is speculative, but it appears that Cinderella first encounters her Fairy Godmother in the same room where she had been engaged in dressing her stepsisters. In this case the localized recursion back and forth from the dressing room as Cinderella responds to the Fairy Godmother’s instructions cannot be described as a ‘routine’ – but the recursive movement prefigures the interior of Cinderella’s house as an intelligible space and helps the reader appreciate the exceptional nature of the Fairy Godmother’s intervention. In particular Cinderella’s own particular domain of kitchen, pantry, cellar and garden (where the work of the house takes place) is established in concrete terms. Recurrent arrangements of ATS{}, as I have described, are likely to lead to variation in the emphasis and deselection of given toponemes. This introduces a source of localized differentiation that could be described in terms of concatenation (flattening localized differences of resolution) and decomposition (emphasizing localized differences of resolution). This suggests how ATS{} that contain recursion are unlikely to describe a simple a loop or ‘reversible’ sequence because its precise description will not be the same each time. In ‘real life’ even a highly specified ritual (such as in religious ritual) cannot be exactly repeated, something about its performance will always be different. In an ATS{} this principle of difference is expressed in terms of the directionality (or irreversibility) of narrative since recursions happen sequentially as the narrative moves on.

Proximity and distance 139 Concatenation involves the prioritizing of movement and narrative linearity in the ATS{} by flattening localized differences of resolution – thereby reducing interface transitions. This may mean collapsing toponemes into a single description on the basis that varied localized elements are connected by lines of sight and aligned through a process of accelerated movement or abbreviated simply by recursion. For example, each of Cinderella’s three trips from her house to the ball in §11(a-c) ATS{} (simplified), looks different. §11a ATS Crla { |C| [kitchen: hearth > dressing room > garden > dressing room > pantry > dressing room > cellar > dressing room > garden> dressing room] >> [road: carriage] >> palace >> [ballroom] } §11b ATS Crla { |C| [kitchen: hearth] >> [road: carriage] >> palace >> [ballroom] } §11c ATS Crla { |C| [interior room] >> [road: carriage] >> palace >> [ballroom] } While helping her Fairy Godmother do her work provides a long preamble to Cinderella’s journey in §11a ATS{}, only the toponemes for the carriage and the ballroom are specified in §11b ATS{}. By§11c ATS{} all the toponemes have been dropped with the effect that the journey between Cinderella’s house and the palace is considerably foreshortened. The routine having been established allows the narrative to linger on the details of Cinderella’s outfit. The three sequences §11(a-c) ATS {} also have the accumulative effect of accelerating the narrative towards its climactic moment at which Cinderella’s identity is revealed – in this sense inhibiting the introduction of contingent elements as the near inevitable resolution of the story comes into view. If an ATS{} of concatenation endorses the encounter field in a movement dynamic of ‘seeing and going’ that may involve the erosion of localized difference, then ATS{} of decomposition does the opposite by revealing localized difference at a higher resolution, in that sense describing a movement dynamic of ‘coming and seeing’ that slows down the pace of the narrative to draw it towards a focus, perhaps with greater symbolic intensity, on a given situation. One example is given in §11a ATS{} (above). While the movements that dominate the narrative are the recursive sequence of Cinderella’s journeys between her home and the palace, the symbolic significance of this journey is heightened by our close-up insight into her intimate world of vermin ridden pantries and cellars. A further architectural description in the Cinderella ATS{}, that of [kitchen: hearth] offers a useful example of resolution decomposition in the figure of [toponeme: object attribute]. I have defined ‘hearth’ as an object

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attribute of the kitchen, but as the recess in which Cinderella sleeps it could equally justify a toponemic description as [hearth]. I have not defined it in this way because within the schema of the story as a whole, that ranges from hearth to city, this would be to introduce unnecessary complexity (for a similar reason ‘carriage’ is treated as an object attribute of [road]). The toponemic description might be expected, however, were the entire narrative to unfold within the house or the kitchen. Either way, as toponeme or object attribute, the hearth, at the finest fourth degree of resolution in the narrative, is identified as a special place that symbolizes Cinderella’s degradation and justifies (in moral terms) her reversal in fortune. The transition interface is specified only once in §7 ATS{} and only once in the Prince’s narrative in §8 ATS{}. Although one can assume that this door was used on other occasions by both characters it does not occur in the story until Cinderella leaves the end of the third ball pursued by the Prince. It is not included in §7 ATS{} even as a dropped toponeme on Cinderella’s first two visits on the basis that the specified toponeme >>palace>> is used to describe the transition interface between the road and the ballroom when entering the palace, with no additional toponemes specified on leaving. While it would be possible, retrospectively, to insert the >>palace door>> toponeme between [ballroom] and [road], to do so would seem to contravene an important principle of ATS{} as a representation of narrative. In other words the reader cannot know about the palace door until it is presented in the text. Even so, I have taken the decision not to include >>palace door >> as a dropped toponeme for the Prince and Cinderella’s final journey back to the palace. Again the generic toponeme >>palace>> is specified as the interface transition. Neither is the text clear as to whether the doorway where Cinderella lost her slipper was internal or external – though it was clearly on the way out from the ballroom. In the end these are technicalities. What matters is how in §7–8{} the >>palace door>> is singled out as having a special status precisely because its specification is, on the whole, unnecessary. Its solitary appearance in both ATS{} draws the reader into a moment of tension where Cinderella narrowly avoids betraying herself and which launches the Prince on his odyssey to find her. One value of ATS{} is to resist conceptualizations of fictional or historical time-space as synchronic descriptions by emphasizing how architectural topographic description prefigures the global narrative as an encounter field. Yet there are times in a narrative where a relative absence of movement draws the reader’s attention into the static intimacies of a given scene characterized by the multi-modality of visual, auditory, olfactory and haptic modes of sensory awareness. Synchrony, in the figurational sense, refers to a highly localized ATS{} that emphasizes the immersiveness of situation. In that sense it can be thought of as a contraction, characterized by a suspension of movement in the unfolding narrative. It is likely to draw attention to complex acts of communication between characters – for

Proximity and distance 141 example, as expressed in speech acts. To an extent, synchronic descriptions are most likely to be marginal to the core narrative as performing a contextual or scene setting function. The first six paragraphs of the Cinderella story, for example, establish that she lived in a house with her stepsisters, does all the work of the house and is made to sleep in the hearth but the narrative does not begin in earnest until the seventh paragraph that opens with the when-where marker “Now it happened that the king arranged a great feast for his son” (Southgate 2012, 8). Only at this point does the reader find Cinderella helping her sisters dress in preparation for the ball. Hence, the opening two toponemes of §7 ATS{house >> [kitchen: hearth > dressing room} are extracted from this contextual preamble to the narrative and are included as dropped toponemes for this reason. The best example of synchronic description in the Cinderella ATS {} is a key scene that takes place in a single room in Cinderella’s house and which occurs when the Prince arrives at her house with the glass slipper. Finding that the slipper does not fit the stepsisters the Prince asks Cinderella’s father to summon his other daughter. He responds that Cinderella “cannot show herself” on account of her lack of cleanliness. Cinderella duly does show herself (presumably ascending from her kitchen domain) and, of course, the slipper fits, at which point the Prince declares her to be “my true bride” (Southgate 2012, 36–40). Immediately Cinderella’s Fairy God Mother appears from nowhere to dress Cinderella as befits a princess before the Prince rides away with her to the palace.7 The slipper fitting and its aftermath is a narrative event that is characterized less by movement than bodily co-presence and encounter between all of the story’s main protagonists ||C|P|SS|FG|CF|| as Cinderella’s triumph over her stepsisters and miserable circumstances is completed. Although it is not completely static the scene’s localized ATS{ [interior room] } demands that all the characters are able to see and hear one another with ease in order for the key question in the Cinderella narrative to be resolved: will the Prince still want to marry Cinderella when he sees her in rags? The reluctance with which Cinderella’s father concedes her presence to the Prince is a critical moment of narrative uncertainty and offers up the only genuine dialogue in the story since the reader does not expect Cinderella’s father to attempt to question the Prince’s desire to see her. The final example of localized ATS{} in Cinderella combines the figures of synchrony with that of temporalized distance. Distance is an interruption in narrative contiguity occasioned not by an absence of movement but by a temporal interval that may be accompanied by toponemic displacement – that is by a shift in the location of the narrative. In fact the recursive nature of the Cinderella ATS{} means that both temporal and spatial displacement is limited. §12 ATS Crla { |C| [ballroom > …1 day > ballroom >1 day > ballroom > house …1 day > kitchen > interior room > palace interior …?, wedding] }

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§12 ATS{} highlights the temporal intervals that characterize Cinderella’s recursive movements. I have previously noted the contrast between the clearly specified intervals of one day between each of the three balls and the non-specified interval between the return of Cinderella and the Prince to the palace and their wedding that is represented here – though we can assume the interval was a short one. Even so, the lack of a specified interval is significant. It coincides with the tableau of the wedding of Cinderella and the Prince that is presented at the finale of the narrative and in that sense projects the marriage of the happy couple beyond the dynamics of the encounter field that has characterized the action in the three nights since the first ball. Much has changed for Cinderella in this time. We learn that the wedding was “magnificent”, that “All the kings and queens and princes and princesses in the land came”, and specifically that the wedding feast – no matter exactly when it started – lasted for a week (Southgate 2012, 42). Whether the temporalized distancing is located before or after the wedding is not really the point because it can be identified in the traditional closing line of fairy tales that Cinderella and the Prince lived “happily ever after”. The effect of this line is a metaphorical full stop that reminds the reader that he or she is in a fairy tale world because their ‘ever after’ extends into a present that is inconsistent (in an empirical sense) with our own historical reality. Unexpectedly, this insistence on a separation of worlds is a characteristic that fairy tales share with a modernist-era sensibility in historical scholarship that tends to repress reflection on the contingent circumstances of its own production for fear of undermining its epistemological claims to objectivity (e.g. Elton 1969). The difficulty is less with this claim in itself – historical research methods should indeed be as objective as possible – so much as with the implicit belief that the historian-as-scientist occupies a privileged position somehow beyond the reach of the events he or she is involved in researching, and which are assumed to be complete or ‘finished’. This tends to sustain the belief that achieving absolute objectivity in the reconstruction of historical reality is a desirable and sensible theoretical aspiration, if not necessarily a practical one. If historical understanding can be informed by the analysis of architectural topographic sequences presented in this chapter then it is by highlighting the value of unplugging the ‘full stop’ at the end of the fairy tale to reflect on how the intelligibility of the past is premised on the accurate architectural topographic description of a shared historical reality. It should be obvious that by this I do not refer to empirical exercises in mapping and surveying – valuable though they are – but to the imaginative process whereby these various morphologies and palimpsests are narrativized as architectural topographic sequences. In this respect an important implication of the analysis of ATS{} for historical study is that it helps highlight and defend the important role of the historical imagination in preventing historical knowledge being reduced to the repetition of accepted truths which are the mere images of the past. It does so not by dismissing narrative in the name of thematic objectivity but

Proximity and distance 143 through seeking to understand what it is that narrative does in drawing our attention to the instabilities and contingencies that exist in all historical accounts based, as they are, on partial evidence. This in turn implies how narrative does not simply represent the historical past, but acknowledges methodological commitment to expressing historical knowledge through the specific when-where situationality of events in the material world over careless generalizations. Three further points identify specific areas where the analysis of ATS{} can usefully inform historiographical interpretation. First, because any toponeme expressed at one resolution of architectural topographic description may also be implicated in event descriptions assembled at lower or higher resolutions of architectural topographic granularity, or as an interface transition across such resolutions, there can be no linear mapping of the materiality of architectural topographic descriptions onto their expression in narrative. I have demonstrated how the process of narration can simultaneously implicate a given toponeme in the increased abstraction of the encounter field (erosion and concatenation of transition interfaces) and the decomposition of the encounter field at a finer granularity of description. Architectural topographic sequences identify how social action cannot be intelligibly narrated at one resolution of inhabited space alone but combines movement, bodily co-presence and encounter within, between and across different time-space resolutions (as these might be recorded by an observer). A crucial contribution of narrative to historical understanding is the expression of this specificity in the description of events. The second point follows from this. Since the ratio of possible actions (PA) to architectural topographic elements (E) in material reality will always be of the order PA>E, then the number of potential descriptions (d) of a given architectural toponeme (aTn) in the figuration of an historical event is likely to be of a similar order of d>aTn. This imbalance in the ratio expresses in elementary terms the potential for contingency in the telling of material arrangements as ATS{}, since alternative event possibilities can be imagined consistent with (indeed are proposed by) the architectural topographic sequence as a textually encoded description of material reality. At the same time this potential for contingency is limited, not prima facie on the basis of logical possibilities of events in the abstract, but because events that are entirely inconsistent with the architectural topographic sequencing of an intelligible encounter field simply cannot have happened. Finally, the encounter field of social action in the actual world might be said to be relatively undirected in comparison with its narrative representation in texts, which might be thought to be relatively directed to the extent that actions can be undone and redone in the former but not in the latter, where they are settled as ‘past events’. Yet the distinction is not as clear cut as it seems at first. If a real-world action or ritual can never be performed in exactly the same way twice – and in that sense needs to be directed – architectural topographic sequences encode lacunae, contingencies,

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and qualifications, not least in the specification and dropping of toponemes, that open the event up to different tellings that can be adapted in the light of new evidence. In that sense historical narratives can never be entirely directed but live in the telling – and in a way that fairy tales are not, open to radical transformations of expression. Ryan (1991) refers to ‘fictional recentring’ as the process of shifting the modal centre of a work of fiction from the actual world to a fictional possible world which establishes the basic expectations of the fictional reality. It would be worth considering what I refer to as ‘historical recentring’ as involving a similar imaginative challenge rather than regarding it as a kind of default state, which makes light of the kind of work historians do in seeking to provide accurate accounts of the past. In attempting to understand historical processes of social change it is important to identify their construction through the ongoing flux and contingencies of the encounter field in which social life unfolds. Reflection on how the historical imagination prefigures the architectonic shape of inhabited time-space in the past has an important contribution to make in this respect. While the analysis of ATS{} in fairy tales offers a formal means of understanding the role of architectural topographic description in encoding fictional texts as global encounter fields, as archetypal narratives these stories are concerned with universal tellability rather than the expression of social change. To what extent then, are the generic time-space figures identified in the architectural topographic sequences here of assistance in describing the prefiguration of historical encounter fields in narratives that are explicitly concerned with social change? This question is the focus of the historiographical investigation in Chapter Six.

Notes 1 From Goldilocks and the Three Bears published in the Ladybird Tales series (2012) – retold by Vera Southgate Penguin London 2 The definition of toponeme is distinct in this sense from toponym, meaning place name. If the similarity is potentially confusing it is nonetheless clear why toponeme belongs in the family of terms that share the same Greek root topo3 A full summary of the notation system used to describe architectural topographic sequences is provided in Appendix A at the end of this book. 4 The origins of the story date back to the 1830s and include a version by the poet Robert Southey published in 1837 5 The version I use here is Cinderella published in the Ladybird Tales series (Penguin, 2012) retold by Vera Southgate. The version popularized by Charles Perrault in 1697 has most of the features familiar to modern readers and a setting in a non-specific medieval Europe 6 See Appendix C §18 ATS{} for the schema of Cinderella 7 The ability of |FG| to simply appear or disappear means §16(a-b) ATS{} are characterized by a complete lack of movement lending a certain synchronic quality to all her scenes (Appendix C).

6

The revolutionary encounter field: Paris c.1789–94 and other stories How Thomas Carlyle, Simon Schama and Hilary Mantel re-people the past

I Definitions In this chapter I build on the formal analysis of architectural topographic sequences in Chapter Five to consider contrasting figurations of the Parisian encounter field in narrative histories of the French Revolution by Thomas Carlyle, Simon Schama and Hilary Mantel. This discussion is prefaced by a consideration of Carlyle’s singular contribution to the theory and practice of historical narrative and an elaboration on what is involved in the ima­ ginative prefiguration of an urban encounter field. It concludes by reflecting more widely on the role played by architectural topographic description in the time-space figuration of other historical writing by these authors. The inclusion of Hilary Mantel, a leading author of historical fiction, alongside two scholarly historians is not intended to precipitate a discussion of the relationship between history and fiction. Rather it takes Ryan’s as­ sertion that narratives and fiction are not the same thing as a cue to examine further the role of architectural topographic description in ‘centring’ his­ torical texts on the past realities of a material world presumed to be shared by historical actors, historians and readers alike – though quite possibly at different times. In particular I am concerned with how contrasting ex­ pressions of the Parisian encounter field are used to prefigure the events of the French Revolution and the kind of social change it represented in dif­ ferent ways. Recognizing how architectural topographic description ex­ presses both the certainty but also the contingency of social change in the writing of Carlyle, Schama and Mantel heightens our sensitivity to just how deeply it is implicated in the very possibility of historical understanding. For the literary critic Raymond Williams, Thomas Carlyle “did more than anyone else in his generation to communicate this sense of history – of historical process as moral substance and challenge” (Williams 1974, 12). Williams drew attention to the profound importance of Carlyle in shifting the idea of history from being something that happened somewhere/ sometime else (for Williams this is history as “spectacle” (13) to history as a social dynamic, lived and participated in by people who were its agents as much as its instruments. Such a shift in the contours of the historical

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imagination, precipitated by the ongoing upheavals in political and socioeconomic life associated with the French Revolution and Industrial Revolution made new demands on historical writing that needed to express not just the fact but also the process of social change, the exhilaration and anguish – and ultimately the responsibility – of the people involved. This imperative informed Carlyle’s famous assertion that “Narrative is linear, Action is solid” (Carlyle 1830, 52). He is highlighting the necessary tension in historical writing between the directionality of narrative with the implied authorial assertion of a beginning-middle-end sequence, and the complex multi-dimensionality of real-world actions that situate the story-line se­ quence of historical events in the non-linear interplay of other possible events, unknown, unnamed and therefore only imaginable, that lie beyond the scope of the historian’s archive material and which could hardly be articulated in any work of history that aspires to a minimum intelligibility. For historians of the early- to mid-nineteenth century, including Carlyle and his contemporary Thomas Macaulay (1800–1859), this tension was re­ presented in the historiographical transition from the philosophical history typical of the previous generation of historians including David Hume (1711–1776), Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) and Henry Hallam (1777–1859) that did not seek to identify with the past so much as universalize what could be learnt from its study, and the romantic concern, inspired by the historical fiction of Walter Scott (1771–1832), with evoking a sense of past events as these were experienced by contemporaries (Phillips 2003). Vybarr CreganReid (2013, 137) refers to the writing of Macaulay and (implicitly) Carlyle as examples of “architectonic explanation” in that they narrated events, as it were, in ‘real time’. In the new literary historiography, of which Carlyle and Macaulay were in the vanguard, historical actors were situated as participants in dynamic and contingent when-where events of which, for the most part, they were likely to have only a partial understanding and exercise a limited control. In a manner that, in some respects parallels Collingwood’s much later definition, Carlyle saw historical events as combining (interior) human motivations (however, inarticulately these may be expressed or understood), with their (exterior) realization (however imprecisely manifested) as social actions. This insistence on history as the study of human thought-to-action represented a considerable historiographical challenge when extending the writing of history to include revolutionary crowds and working-class pro­ testers. It came at a time when the urban masses in Britain’s industrial cities were being mapped and tabulated as data and the narrative of British history popularly abbreviated to a chronicle of state, nation and empire. Carlyle’s sense of the particularity of historical events explains his refusal to view the human world in the materialist-organicist terms that became a commonplace of nineteenth-century sociology; nor did he view it in idealist terms for all his belief in religious transcendence. For Carlyle history was the struggle of mankind sometimes towards, more often away from the divine light, but inescapably situated in the human “chaos of the Actual” (1837, 49).

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He was prescient in expressing the contingencies and essentially un-determined course of human history. In the nineteenth century the idea of ‘chaos’ would generally have been understood as ‘disorder’, certainly the absence of divine order, but Carlyle’s use of the term is more nuanced and concrete. For ex­ ample, in describing a particular episode (the constitutional or ‘two chamber’ phase of the French Revolutionary government) in 1790 Carlyle comments: Civil war, indeed, is Chaos; and in all vital Chaos, there is new Order shaping itself free: but what a faith this, that of all new Orders out of Chaos and Possibility of Man and his Universe, Louis Sixteenth and TwoChamber Monarchy were precisely the one that would shape itself! (Carlyle 1837, 868) This striking statement of ‘order out of chaos’ resonates with contemporary scientific understanding of ‘chaotic’ phenomena as not necessarily being ‘random’ but indicative of dynamic systems of organization that produce areas of localized order in which temporality is internalized and irreversible. Such ‘emergent’ order is characteristic of ‘open’ (i.e. historical) systems as opposed to closed systems (such as machines) where time can be reset and processes re-run (Prigogine and Stengers 1984). Its relevance in this context is that for all its ‘chaos’ Carlyle acknowledges the ‘Actual’ (i.e. the ‘actual historical world’) as the vital generative source where events – where life, where history – happen. The historian’s task, therefore, was to describe and understand this generative process. While Carlyle’s intuitive grasp of ‘chaotic’ systems can help explain his increasingly desperate search for a source of legitimate social order, ultimately in the powers of a reformed aristocracy or ‘great men’, there is another di­ mension to his historical thought which is less widely acknowledged. It is Carlyle’s formal achievement in The French Revolution that he pushes narrative to its limits in attempting to overcome the representational disjunction between the apparently ‘random’ distribution of actions in ‘solid’ space and their tem­ poral ordering in linear narrative. His response was to prefigure his text as the Parisian encounter field, generative of the contingent narrative possibilities which could give expression to the complex and dynamic historical realities of the French Revolution. In this he set a radical example for subsequent historians to emulate or reject.

II Imagining the urban encounter field The literary theorist Franco Moretti (1998, 79) has suggested that novels “read” cities to “make them legible” but one can equally propose that it is the structure of cities, settlements (and buildings) that ‘make’ (or more precisely ‘figure’) the language of texts to make them inhabitable. Urban scientists have established that cities possess ‘fractal’ like structures that result from historical growth processes in which urban areas strike a spatial-morphological com­ promise between compactness (hard to navigate but everything closer in terms

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of units distance) and linearity (easy to navigate but at the cost of greater unit distance) (Hillier 1996; Batty 2008). Generic regularities in urban spatial configurations differentiate between accessible public space (mixed-use, ‘pro­ fane’) and symbolic space (monumental, ‘sacred’) (Hillier and Hanson 1984). Yet it is important to emphasize that the architectural topographic description of the city (or, indeed, any other form of settlement) in historical writing does not amount to a textualized transcription of its material form. Rather, it ex­ presses an imaginative process of prefiguring the urban encounter field in the historian’s mind as he or she works towards establishing intelligible relations between evidence of actions discretely located in time and space. The concept of prefiguration responds to the proposition that the global figuration of historical narratives are not only derived from rhetorical or meta-narrational tropes. On the contrary, they are said to arise implicitly through a dialogic engagement of the historical imagination sustained by critical reflection on the architectural topographic description of the realworld events that constitute the traditional object of historical research and writing. As part of the archival research process, the historian (e.g. of re­ volutionary Paris) assembles evidence of the when-where of events, crossreferencing his or her own material with the work of other historians, other contextual sources including maps, plans, visual culture and possibly a personal knowledge of the contemporary city. A secondary outcome of this research process is an enhanced sense of the patterns of movement and bodily co-presence that characterized the encounter field of the city as a necessary condition of establishing the time-space relationality of the events under consideration to any degree of accuracy. This evidence-based but equally intuitive sense of ‘how things were’ is rarely acknowledged but constitutes an important critical resource on which the historian can draw in assessing the credibility of competing interpretations. This intelligibility of the prefigured encounter field of an historical narrative has a global definition that extends across the body of research undertaken and which expresses combinations of relatively localized figures (including those of recursivity, concatenation, decomposition, synchrony and temporalized dis­ tance given formal definition in Chapter Five) when these are found to be useful in articulating the time-space relationality of a specific event or kind of event. The expression of such localized figures can be identified in conventional lan­ guage such as that used in many accounts of urban history, for example, in speaking of people: ‘going backwards and forwards between houses’, ‘moving rapidly through the streets’, ‘meeting only when they could do so in private’, ‘congregating in the poorer areas of town’ or ‘revisiting the site of their tri­ umph’. These localized figures help the historian to constitute events and po­ sition them within the larger narrative, consistent with the imaginative prefiguration of the urban encounter field. Whether or not this process actually produces narrative history is a matter for the historian concerned – it is a se­ parate question. Either way, the necessity of prefiguration follows from his­ torians’ prioritization of the specificity of when-where events as the essential

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condition of historical understanding. This epistemological imperative requires an engagement of the historical imagination in relating discrete when-where phenomena without abstracting them from their embedding in time-space reality. It is an imaginative engagement because the relation simply can never be established on the basis of evidence alone – there will always be details missing, something in between, something unknown. When the research process is to produce a written narrative, historians’ task of prefiguration extends to embodying the encounter field in his or her text. The narrativizing process (described in Chapter Five) involves the encoding of successive elements of architectural topographic description as toponemes in architectural topographic sequences. Not the city as a text but the text as a city. While this process is likely to identify gaps, omissions and incompatibilities in the evidence, the prefiguration of the encounter field in the historical imagi­ nation also offers the means to overcome these by proposing the missing ‘inbetween’ relation in the figurational description of any given event. This clarifies why the inevitable lacunae in historical knowledge are not simply black holes which the historian must avoid. On the contrary, they beg the very questions that justify the claims of historical knowledge by asserting, in fig­ urational terms, the possibility of the relation that bridges the void, and by giving it a shape making intelligible (meaningful) history possible. To look at this another way, the prefiguration of the encounter field and its corollary the figuration of the event in the historical imagination bring the material constraints of time-space to bear on the telling of history but dis­ covers that these are not constraints as such but situated ways of reflecting on the embodied thoughts-to-actions of multiple historical actors. Architectural topographic description does not offer a compensation for lack of evidence but is a necessary consequence of attempting to tell the specificities of events. In the inevitable gaps are found the uncertainties and contingencies that provoke alternative explanations to be proposed and other possibilities to be explored. It helps in reframing the relationship between scholarly history and historical fiction by identifying a fertile territory between orthodox academic objectivity and the motivations of popular historical fiction, where the latter applies the rigours of historical research methods to reveal the contingencies, uncertainties and voids exposed by architectural topographic description. This is the point identified by MacCulloch (Chapter Four) at which the no­ velist is liberated to imagine where scholar may not follow.

III Contrasting strategies of architectural topographic description in three narratives of the French Revolution i Prefiguring the Parisian encounter field in Carlyle, Schama and Mantel While it might be expected that historians would employ different strategies of architectural topographic description from historical novelists the nature

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of these differences is not always clear, especially where the novelist is concerned with achieving historical authenticity in their work. Historians can also differ from one other in this respect, though these differences might be limited by their common reliance on evidence available in archive sources. Yet historians and novelists alike must respond to the challenge of describing the same material reality in their narratives. Examining these propositions analytically by profiling different architectural topographic strategies of historical writing is, of course, a far greater challenge when faced with the works of historians and novelists than fairy tales. Even so, by building on this preliminary work but using a more heuristic method of investigation it is possible to undertake a comparison of three landmark narratives of the French Revolution, namely, The French Revolution (FR) by Thomas Carlyle (1837), Citizens (C) by Simon Schama (1989) and Hilary Mantel’s (1992) historical novel, A Place of Greater Safety, (PoGS). By this comparison it becomes possible to approximate not only the dif­ ferences but also the similarities between authors in the way Paris is glob­ ally prefigured as an encounter field, and the characteristic figures used in the localized expression of specific events. The research method combined repeated readings of the three texts, cross referenced with their prefacing maps and checked against textbook accounts of revolutionary events in Paris (extended to the Palace of Versailles). This was done in order to identify a representative sample of the recurrent terms of architectural topographic description used in each text, along with the names of key protagonists, collective names for the urban population and any repeated contextual markers. This process identified a sample of 55 nouns and proper nouns that were recurrent in at least one text, which were then cross-checked with the others. These nouns comprised four distinct categories: toponemes (n=37), biographical (n=8), collective (n=6) and con­ textual (n=4). Toponemes refers to elements of architectural topographic description (e.g. ‘street’), biography to the names of protagonists (e.g. ‘Robespierre’), collective to names for the urban masses (e.g. ‘crowd’) and contextual to macro-scale markers (e.g. ‘France’). The high number of re­ current toponemes identified compared with biographical, collective or macro-contextual markers approximates their relative frequency in the texts in which elements of architectural topographic description are pervasive. It made sense then, to subdivide the toponeme category into six subcategories: building interior (e.g. ‘room’), institutional building (e.g. ‘Hôtel de Ville’), private building (e.g. ‘house’ +’ home’), non-specific interface or transitional space (e.g. ‘door’), public space (e.g. ‘street’) and topographic (e.g. ‘River Seine’). The sample of recurrent nouns and proper nouns in each category and subcategory were deployed as search terms to query the e-book copies of the three texts using a standard e-reader text search function.1 The number of times each term appeared in the main body of the text was recorded.2 The process of sampling and review was analogue and targeted rather than computational and exhaustive. The sampling exercise was focussed on

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identifying characteristic elements of architectural description and the context in which they were used. It does not claim to be a comprehensive textual analysis. The extensive review process prioritized validating the sample by re­ moving the large number of anomalous or rogue results (e.g. to distinguish the verb ‘to house’ from the noun ‘house’ produced through the text search) and consolidating plurals and compound terms such that the search term ‘door’ consolidates ‘door’ + ‘doors’ + ‘doorway’ + ‘doorways’, but excludes ‘indoors’. This means that while the results can be regarded as robust for the purposes I deploy them here, it is likely they have retained some anomalies and irregula­ rities in the application and review of search terms and categories that would need to be refined ahead of a more systematic application. Some recurrent terms, particularly associating specific institutional buildings with political groups (e.g. ‘Jacobins’) in a way that is not always straightforward have been excluded, as have metaphorical signifiers, mainly to individuals, groups and populations (e.g. a ‘swarm’ to denote a crowd of people). Such issues, in fact, arise no less in more computational methods for the quantitative analysis of texts. (There is little point in programming a computer to do something ahead of understanding what it is that the programme would be required to do.) Table 6.1 gives the ranking of the 12 highest ranked toponemes (from 37), representing 73% (FR), 61% (C) and 61% (PoGS) of the total for each history, Table 6.1 Top ten Parisian toponemes in Carlyle’s, Schama’s and Mantel’s accounts of the French Revolution rank 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Carlyle: The French Revolution (1837)

Schama: Citizens (1989)

Mantel: A Place of Greater Safety (1992)

street(s) Versailles Bastille Hôtel de Ville ** door(s) Tuileries room(s) wall(s) Saint-Antoine Rue [named] Champ de Mars staircase

Bastille Versailles street(s) * home/house Rue [named] room(s) Palais-Royal wall(s) window(s) Hôtel de Ville ** door(s) Tuileries

home/house room(s) ** door(s) street(s) window(s) wall(s) Rue [named] staircase apartment(s) Versailles Bastille † Hôtel de Ville

*

Sources: e-books of Carlyle (1837), Schama (2004) and Mantel (2009). Key: toponemes in the top ten in three texts – dark grey; in two texts - medium grey; in one text - light grey. * House and home in the singular where they refer to a named individual’s residence. ** Includes ‘doorway’ † The Hôtel de Ville is ‘City Hall’ in PoGS

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respectively. In each case the top category is strongly indicative of the distinctive emphasis the writers have taken to the prefiguration of Paris as an encounter field. In Carlyle’s Paris it is the public space of the common streets that stands out and the clear majority of the most recurrent toponemes describe public buildings or public spaces in the city. For Schama it is the symbolic institutional buildings most associated with the revolutionary event, the Bastille and Versailles, that take precedence; of the listed toponemes five are institutional buildings. Mantel’s Paris is orientated to the domestic interior, ‘house/home’ is the most recurrent toponeme and the private ‘room’ the second, while the iconic revolutionary buildings are clustered towards the lower end of the list. The toponemes that are exclusive to the top 12 of each writer reinforce this impression. For Carlyle the revolutionary suburb (also a road) of St Antoine (ranked 19th in both C and PoGS) and the cathartic public space of the Champ de Mars (17th/21st), a site of revolutionary spectacle and massacre, feature significantly. For Schama the cosmopolitan pleasure gardens and arcades of the Palais-Royal (ranked 17th in FR and 13th in PoGS) recur more often than the Hôtel de Ville or royal palace (and prison) of Tuileries. In Mantel it is the apartments of revolutionary protagonists that stand out (19th in FR, 14th in C) – doors, windows and staircases are also prominent. The bar charts in Figures 6.1 and 6.2 represent the distribution of key architectural topographic, contextual, collective and biographical search terms returned in each category, first (Figure 6.1) as a proportion of all search terms returned in each text considered individually and secondly (Figure 6.2) as a proportion of the total for each category comparatively across the three texts. To control for the different lengths of the books and facilitate comparison, the raw totals for each search term presented in the bar charts were first divided by the total number of pages. The charts show how Carlyle’s FR has the highest proportion of architectural topographic description as a proportion of other recurrent terms in this text and least focus on named individuals both in­ ternally and comparatively. This seems surprising given Carlyle’s association with history as biography, but in FR the principle human agency is that of the Parisian crowd. At the other extreme it is clear from both charts how the novel PoGS has an overwhelmingly biographical focus but Figure 6.2 reveals it also to have the highest proportion of architectural topographic description on a comparative basis, though this category is less dominant than biographical markers if the text is considered in its own right (Figure 6.1).3 Schama’s C sits mostly somewhere in between the two. Interestingly, C draws on more con­ textual and collective markers than FR on all counts with PoGS very light on contextual markers such as ‘nation’ or Paris’ – suggesting that historians may have a greater need of these when writing in didactic mode. One should note that Carlyle’s heavy use of metaphor to describe crowd and crowd movements (see below) may partially account for the relatively lower proportion of FR assigned to collective markers compared to C. Figures 6.3 and 6.4 represent the search terms returned as subcategories of the toponeme classification, which is specifically concerned with

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Figure 6.1 Key search terms returned in each category as a proportion (%) of the total number of search terms returned across all categories – by text Sources: e-books of Carlyle (1837), Schama (2004) and Mantel (2009).

Figure 6.2 Key search terms returned in each category as a proportion (%) of the total number of search terms returned across each category - all texts combined Sources: e-books of Carlyle (1837), Schama (2004) and Mantel (2009).

architectural topographic description. When the balance of toponemes deployed to encode the encounter field in each text is considered (Figure 6.3) we find that in FR it tends strongly towards public space and institutional buildings, and away from private space, whereas the opposite is true of PoGS. A similar profile is maintained when the relative proportion of toponemes across the different texts are directly compared (Figure 6.4). The balance of private interior space over public space and especially in­ stitutional buildings in PoGS is quite striking. As before C is positioned

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Figure 6.3 Key search terms returned as subcategory of toponeme as a proportion (%) of the total number of search terms returned in this category - by text Sources: e-books of Carlyle (1837), Schama (2004) and Mantel (2009).

Figure 6.4 Key search terms returned as subcategory of toponeme as a proportion (%) of the total number of search terms returned in this category - all texts combined Sources: e-books of Carlyle (1837), Schama (2004) and Mantel (2009).

somewhere between the two but the profile is significantly closer to FR than it is to PoGS. A final point could be made which notes the extensive weight given to architectural topographic description of transition interfaces in PoGS. Things that happen in doorways, on staircases and beyond windows express that fine resolution of action which may elude the academic his­ torian for whom interior spaces are always likely to be more inaccessible.

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The contrasting balance of contextual, collective, biographic and topo­ neme profiles offer a valuable insight into the different priorities for Carlyle, Schama and Mantel in prefiguring their narratives as global encounter field. The defining quality of a toponemic descriptor is that it has a dual identity, first as a conventional signifier for the architectural topographic object and secondly, in narrative, as a relational element in an architectural topo­ graphic sequence that identifies it as a toponeme. The toponeme expresses the relation that prefigures the encounter field across different resolutions of movement and bodily co-presence. The implication of these differences in the toponemic profile of the Parisian encounter field for the time-space figuration of revolutionary events in these three texts will be discussed subsequently. A prior point though, is to take note of the similarities as well as the differences between the profiles. This helps in understanding what is at stake in making the distinction between historical narrative regarded as a purely representational exercise in ‘writing the city’, such that the only parameters that matter are the intelligibility constraints of language, and the contrary argument that material reality itself is a source of constraint (at least in historical writing) on what is tellable in language and what is not. Of course any text is, at one level, a representation but the historical imagination in prefiguring the text of the encounter field uses toponemes to construct the text as a generative and contingent agency said to constitute actual historical events. To the extent that there is a high degree of simi­ larity across the toponeme profiles of the three texts, it is harder to assert that historical past exists only in language by drawing our attention to the nature of writers’ engagement with a shared historical reality. Figure 6.5 ranks all the search terms across all categories on a log-log scattergram using the raw count data. Figure 6.6 ranks just the search terms in the toponeme category, relativized as the mean number of instances per page. Rank-ordered data puts the search term with the highest count first, the second next, and so on to give a sense of the overall distribution. The linear patterning of the scatter of all three sets of search terms on both log-log plots points to a distribution that – in approximate terms – is skewed towards a small number of high values with a relatively larger number of lesser values. At the top of the distribution it is the contextual, collective and biographical markers (‘Paris’, ‘France’, ‘Louis/King’, ‘revolution’ and ‘people’), that dominate both FR and C, whereas in PoGS it is the biographical markers (‘Danton’, ‘Desmoulins’, ‘Robespierre’ and ‘Louis/King’). The first top toponemes in FR (‘street/s’ – 7th) and especially PoGS (‘house/ home’ – 4th, and ‘room’ – 6th) are high up the order. In C other biographical and collective markers interpose before ‘Bastille’ (ranked 11th). Yet statistically speaking these important differences conceal a significant degree of agreement in the rank ordering of search terms to the extent that one could justifiably state that, all things being equal, a term that is re­ current in one text is in many cases likely to be similarly recurrent in

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Figure 6.5 Rank order of the total count (absolute numbers) returned by all search terms in all categories Sources: e-books of Carlyle (1837), Schama (2004) and Mantel (2009).

Figure 6.6 Rank order of the total number of instances per page returned by all search terms in the toponeme category Sources: e-books of Carlyle (1837), Schama (2004) and Mantel (2009).

another (Figure 6.1).4 As suggested in Table 6.1 and confirmed in Figure 6.6 across the sample as a whole there is a large amount of agreement between all three historical writers as to the key toponemes, as well as a significant variations of detail between them. Of course all things are never equal – words, writing and authorial intent do matter! Whatever their global frequency, ranking and distribution,

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toponemes and other biographical, contextual and collective markers do not in themselves tell the narrative of the history. What matters in this respect is their figuration in architectural topographic sequences that ex­ press the events of the French Revolution in the way that Carlyle, Schama and Mantel wish them to be told. Yet as narratives they are not ontologi­ cally separated from an historical reality as fairy tales are, on the other side of the ‘happy ever after’ full stop. Even Mantel who is writing fiction is not engaged in the writing of fairy tales. The story told in PoGS is inconceivable other than on the basis a formidable depth of research-based historical understanding – as she herself acknowledges.5 The intellectual effort of his­ torically recentring a narrative means it should not be regarded as a naïve default state before the ‘inevitable’ fictionalizing process that so beguiles philosophers of history, begins. On the contrary, in the hands of historians and historical writers such as Carlyle, Schama and Mantel it involves a profound engagement of the historical imagination, looking outwards to the social and material reality of revolutionary Paris to prefigure their texts as encounter fields capable of expressing that reality. Herbert Butterfield’s belief (or aspiration) that in preparing his or her narrative “each historian does something more than make a confession of his private mind and his whim­ sicalities” resonates here (1965 [1935], 2). The contrasting figurational ex­ pression these three writers give to the French Revolution does not undermine its historical reality. On the contrary their texts embody the plurality, elusiveness and contingency of that reality. ii Mass and momentum in Carlyle’s French Revolution Carlyle’s Paris is richly expressive of how revolutionary moments emerge as abnormal tipping points that disturb the restless but equally relentless routines of departure and return in the quotidian city. He contrasts the “concrete reality” of the streets with the abstract arguments that take place off the street in revolutionary institutions (Carlyle 1837, 1568). Throughout The French Revolution the streets of Paris construct revolutionary ideas in concrete terms. In July 1792, for example, the revolution appears under threat from the ene­ mies within and without. For Carlyle Paris is the Singular City! For overhead of all this, there is the customary baking and brewing; Labour hammers and grinds. Frilled promenaders saunter under the trees; white-muslin promenaderess, in green parasol, leaning on your arm. Dogs dance, and shoeblacks polish, on that Pont Neuf itself, where Fatherland is in danger. So much goes its course; and yet the course of all things is nigh altering and ending. (Carlyle 1837, 1261–62) For Carlyle a definition of this singularity is how the symbolism of the bridge Pont-Neuf does not arise simply from its status as a topos on which

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the tricolour of the revolution is mounted – but from the availability of this symbolism to the population of Paris who (for the moment) continue to engage in largely routine, non-revolutionary activities. On the other hand, the revolution as an ideal made concrete on the streets must carry everyone with it, the shoeblacks no less than the “frilled promenaders” and even­ tually the royal family itself. Carlyle’s portrayal of the increasing capacity of the recurrent eruptions of revolutionary activity to appropriate the quotidian life of the streets requires architectural topographic sequences that combine accelerating movement towards revolutionary denouement (concatenation of toponemes) with revealing the myriad interfaces that bring men and women on the street from the interior domains of work and rest (decomposition of toponemes). Open windows are a recurrent image in FR. For example, during a revolutionary burst of looting at the Maison de Saint-Lazare in 1789 ahead of the storming of the Bastille when every window “vomits: mere torrents of furniture, of bellowing and hurlyburly” or in July 1794 when they are “crammed” with people, to watch Robespierre on his way to the guillotine (Carlyle 1837, 415, 1932). Elsewhere Carlyle offers an almost schematic statement of how the interface between the interior (private) and exterior (public) spaces of cities expresses the corporeal transition from horizontal stasis to vertical mobility. So […] day after day, month after month. The Streets of Paris, and all Cities, roll daily their oscillatory flood of men; which flood does, nightly, disappear, and lie hidden horizontal in beds and trucklebeds; and awakes on the morrow to new perpendicularity and movement. Men go their roads, foolish or wise. (Carlyle 1837, 1192) This transition to the street is socially transformative in activating the re­ volutionary: a Patriot, if he appear in the drawing-room, or amid a group of officers, is liable enough to be discouraged […] but no sooner does he get into the street, or among the soldiers, than he feels again as if the whole Nation were with him. (Carlyle 1837, 826) The people are not simply on the streets they are transported by the street: “Yes, pardieu ca-ira, cry the passengers on the streets” (Carlyle 1837, 780). This passage comes from Carlyle’s account of a republican march to the Champ de Mars 17 July 1791 to protest against a constitutional settlement that would preserve the monarchy (an event that would later end in a massacre – see Chapter One). It does not matter whether the people on the street are dis­ ciplined or “without order” because it is the street that organizes their many “accidental reunions” collectively into a revolutionary force – a dynamic

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process that Carlyle describes using water metaphors, the “streams” of men becoming “floods” (Carlyle 1837, 779; 791). Carlyle does not seek to present the French Revolution as ‘intelligible’ in a trivial sense. In many respects the purpose of his history is precisely to reveal its unintelligibility, certainly in a moral and spiritual sense. This is where Carlyle’s prefiguration of Paris as the conjunction of endless streets and the streets as the interfaces of innumerable houses and institutional buildings is so innovative. It enables the revolution to be written as a multifaceted, complex event unfolding across all resolutions of urban space – but without committing him decisively to assign it any meta-narratological explanation or meaning. Indeed his account raises the possibility that it may even be ‘meaningless’ in a transcendental sense, but what matters for Carlyle is that it happened. Carlyle’s prioritization of streets and street interfaces in the prefiguration of revolutionary Paris enables him to accommodate the mass of its urban population whose biographies we cannot tell, by incorporating them into street directed crowd movements. Without such an innovation they would have stayed outside history. ‘Intelligibility’ in an architectural topographic sense then does not mean ‘easy to understand’ but rather expresses the principle of figurational contingency in which discretely located actions may appear chaotic but are not necessarily random (in the sense of being unrelated to one another) of so much as characterized by flux. Whether or not such phenomena are ‘understandable’ in a more profound sense their figurational definition makes them tellable as events. The effect of Carlyle’s emphasis on the role of Paris’ streets in transforming its population into a revolutionary agency means ‘the crowd’ in FR is not a simply a derivative of human density; it was an event that kept happening. Carlyle does not assert his intellectual authority to gloss, abridge or otherwise abbreviate historical events that defy straightforward description. Rather he draws attention to these knots of historical understanding as requiring special study. Specifically, he grapples with the challenge of their architectural topographic description as the critical imaginative problem in historical writing, if history rather than philosophy is to be written. For example, at the supreme revolutionary moment the storming of the Bastille 14 July 1789, Carlyle pauses his narrative to reflect on how such a building can tell such a history. To describe this Siege of the Bastille (thought to be one of the most important in history) perhaps transcends the talent of mortals. Could one but, after infinite reading, get to understand so much as the plan of the building! But there is open Esplanade, at the end of the Rue SaintAntoine; there are such Forecourts, Cour Avancé, Cour de l’Orme, arched Gateway (where Louis Tournay now fights); then new draw­ bridges, dormant-bridges, rampart-bastions, and the grim Eight Towers: a labyrinthic Mass, high-frowning there, of all ages from

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While the plan of the Bastille serves a useful symbolic purpose in representing the baroque complexity of the social order of ancien regime France, it is also clear that Carlyle has committed time to considering its narrative elucidation. Struggling, he resorts to the convenient (but rather conventional) analogy with a ‘labyrinth’. Even so, the passage gives a sense of how Carlyle uses archi­ tectural topographic description to de-linearize his narrative in order to render his account of events, if not literally ‘solid’ then certainly dynamic and con­ tingent. In an earlier work Carlyle refers to the “Tissue of History which in­ terweaves all Being” (Carlyle 1831, 42–3). In The French Revolution the tissue of history is prefigured as the interconnected streets and buildings of Paris. iii Paris as a cultural ‘melting pot’ in Schama’s Citizens As befits a cultural and art historian for whom the work of French re­ volutionary artists such as Jacques-Louis David are a recurrent source of reference, the narrative of Citizens develops through a succession of pre­ cisely described scenes or tableau. Historical actors appear in the manner of a drama, with one set of protagonists succeeding the next as their part moves centre stage. In comparison with Carlyle, therefore, Schama’s characteristic mode of figurational expression is relatively static, empha­ sizing the synchronic expression of vision, social interaction and encounter over movement. This does not mean that his narrative is static (it is, after all, a narrative) but in contrast to the accelerating directionality of Carlyle’s crowd movements in FR, movement in Citizens tends to be confined to finer-grained resolution with protagonists more likely to be facing each other. This allows Schama to expresses revolutionary denouement of a different kind, consistently decomposing the flow of rapidly unfolding events to identify specific encounters that anticipate or otherwise represent the revolutionary upheaval of social norms. Schama’s sensitivity to both the aesthetic and social dimension of ar­ chitectural form itself reveals how architectural and social history can be brought into productive juxtaposition in producing what we might call ‘thick’ architectural topographic descriptions of historical events. It is sig­ nificant that Chapter 10 titled ‘Bastille’ sets up the key moment of re­ volutionary outbreak not by a focus on the Bastille itself but with a comparison of the different images of France represented by two other buildings: the royal Palace of Versailles (rural and feudal), and the PalaisRoyal in central Paris (urban and democratic). While the former was a physical and symbolic manifestation of royal distance from the urban po­ pulation, Schama has previously described the latter as the “most specta­ cular habitat for pleasure and politics in Europe”; a vast arcade complex of

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shops, cafés, gardens and reputable, and less reputable entertainments si­ tuated right in the centre of Paris near the largely vacant Tuileries palace (Schama 1989, 134). In Chapter 10 Schama draws on his understanding of the architectural plan of the Palais-Royal less to explore the meaning of the building in its symbolism but to narrate it as an encounter field. Even before Paris came to fetch the King from Versailles, the PalaisRoyal had conquered the Château de Versailles. In every respect it was its opposite; indeed its nemesis. At the core of the château was a pavilion block where the King’s control over business was formalized by apartments enfilading off one another so that access at each stage could be barred or yielded as ritual and decorum required. North and south extended immense half-mile wings, dependencies in every sense, that housed the governmental and palatial services of the theoretically omnipotent monarch. The Palais-Royal was an open space, colonnaded at its perimeter: a Parisian equivalent of republican spaces like the Piazza San Marco in Venice. Its architecture gave no instructions. Rather it invited sauntering, watching, browsing, reading, buying, talking, flirting, pilfering, eating—all at random—in spontaneously improvised order or in no order at all. While Versailles was the most carefully patrolled space in France, the Palais-Royal, as the property of the Duc d’Orléans, prohibited the presence of any police whatsoever unless invited in by its proprietor. If institutional Versailles set great store by the hierarchy of rank, the frantic business of the Palais-Royal subversively jumbled it up. Versailles proclaimed corporate discipline; the Palais-Royal celebrated the public anarchy of the appetites. (Schama 1989, 370) This passage is remarkable not only in the ingenious way it contrasts the political, geographical and cultural connotations of the governance of the Palais-Royal and Versailles but because the social significance of the PalaisRoyale is not simply ascribed to these socio-cultural qualities in the abstract, nor to its architectural-historical antecedents. Rather, Schama highlights how in the absence of explicit systems of legal control, the architecture of the Palais-Royal (in comparison with that of Versailles) “gave no instructions”, on the contrary it “invited sauntering” and the ‘jumbling’ up of distinctions of rank to create a ‘spontaneous’ and profane mixing of people. The im­ plication is clear that, if left unpoliced such a generative social space could lead to something unpredictable happening – perhaps even a revolution. It was from the Palais-Royal that the revolutionary agitation began that would lead directly to the storming of the Bastille on 14th July, prompted among others by the orator and propagandist Camille Desmoulins. This ex­ plains Schama’s decision to begin his narrative of the storming of the Bastille with the detailed architectural topographic description of the ‘two-palaces’. In this he scales up the narrative from a high resolution ‘micro-morphological’

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perspective on urban space to arrive at the climactic event. Certainly Schama ascribes the urban phenomenon of the Palais-Royal more explanatory power than the fall of the Bastille itself. For all his detailed account of this event one feels that, like Carlyle before him, Schama struggles to match the vast historic symbolism of the storming of the Bastille with the historical reality of the siege itself, which involved relatively little actual fighting (albeit some of it grue­ some) and liberated only the small number of prisoners it held. By contrast the narrative significance of the Palais-Royal in Citizens is not restricted to the events of July 1789, nor is it primarily of symbolic re­ sonance. It is an important recursive toponeme in the global architectural topographic sequencing, that is, the prefiguration, of the Parisian encounter field in Citizens. The second mention in the index to the print edition in­ troduces it as the “cultural melting pot” and “quotidian carnival of the appetites” of ancien regime Paris from 1770s (Schama 1989, 134-5), while the final mention reports on the assassination of the aristocrat-turned republican Michael Lepeletier in a café in January 1793 (671). In between it features numerous times including to highlight its role in literary culture (176), the series of agitations leading to the storming of the Bastille (370-3, 479-82) and the demonstrations of actors wanting their share of revolu­ tionary egalité (497). In this the Palais Royale expresses a recursive figure of departure and return that orientates and redirects the narrative in time and space at a number of different junctures in the period 1789–1793. This is not simply a narrative artifice. The expression of the Palais-Royal in fig­ urational terms cannot be separated from its material situation in the centre of eighteenth-century Paris; a teeming and notorious site of movement, bodily co-presence and encounter between bodies from all areas and strata of the city. It was, in other words, a natural place to come back to, for contemporaries and historians alike. iv Contingent dialogues in Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety Mantel’s narrative of the French Revolution in her novel PoGS is told through the quotidian, domestic lives of three of its leading protagonists, Georges-Jacques Danton, Maximilien Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins, but she gives equal, if not greater, prominence to the women with whom these ‘historical’ lives are shared. While the streets and public buildings of Paris do feature in the narrative they are overwhelmingly peripheral to the domestic spaces inhabited by Danton, Robespierre, Desmoulins and their families where the narrative’s encounter field is centred. This means that in terms of its architectural topographic description the novel is fairly even in terms of resolution. Firmly orientated around the domestic interior it has few of the recurrent shifts of resolution that characterize Carlyle’s The French Revolution and none of the panoramic tableau that feature so heavily in Citizens. That said, transition interfaces: doors, windows and staircases are recurrent toponemes in Mantel’s narrative. These generally connect between,

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or offer views from within, interior rooms. On occasions when the interface transition is between the domestic interior and the street it often expresses the violation, or potential violation, of the former by the unpredictable forces without that have been unleashed by the revolutionary turmoil; an interface then, that needs to be protected. The narrative events of PoGS are prefigured by Mantel through the in­ terlocking of local journeys, the inevitability of domestic routines and the kinds of bodily movement that characterize the occupation of domestic interiors involving chairs, tables and fireplaces. Such an encounter field would be unusual in conventional historical narratives and it is conse­ quently able to express the kind of movements that rarely feature there. – for example, those associated with rest, stillness and fidgeting. Far from being automisms this strategy reveals such individual bodily movements (or deportments) as being no less forms of embodied social behaviour than bodily co-presence or encounter but associated primarily with the absence of these, as in: waiting, missing, hiding, avoiding. I continue to refer to the prefiguration of the ‘encounter field’ nonetheless, since it is precisely the contingent nature of movement, bodily co-presence and encounter in social time-space that is at issue. Major revolutionary events taking place in the public streets and squares of the Paris including the fall of Bastille and the execution of Louis XVI are dealt with obliquely in PoGS. The focus is always on what these events mean to her protagonists as individuals, friends and lovers. For example, following the revolutionaries’ success in storming the Bastille on 14th July Mantel has a minor (though no less historical) character in her novel Francois Robert, a delicatessen owner and radical, return home to find Camille Desmoulins with his wife, the novelist and journalist, Louise de Kéralio. He tells her that: ‘The Bastille has been taken’. He crossed the room and looked down at Camille. ‘Despite the fact that you were here, you were also there. Eyewitnesses saw you, one of the mainstays of the action. […] He moved away. ‘Is there some more of that coffee?’ He sat down. ‘All normal life has stopped,’ he said, as if to an idiot or small child. (Mantel 1992, 233) Desmoulins was a popular revolutionary agitator whose oratory outside the Palais-Royal on 12 July, had played a significant part in inciting the se­ quence of events that would result in the assault on the Bastille. He was not, however, present at the siege itself. The words Mantel puts in Robert’s mouth emphasize how from the very moment of their occurrence historical events generate fictions and mythologies that are disruptive of the claims of historical accounts to authoritative knowledge on the basis of the elemen­ tary facts, let alone their meaning (as Carlyle himself seems to acknowledge with regards to the Bastille). Such events are not static objects but complex

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time-space processes to which it is difficult even for contemporaries to bear witness because there will always be a disjunction between the thing itself and its telling. Events, in other words, unfold in encounter fields which are intrinsically contingent as to their definition and historical expression, and open as to their meaning because they cannot be authoritatively described from any single point of view. Movement in PoGS is carried on the ebb and flow of character dialogue dialogue which the reader must often follow, often without much in the way of signposting. Yet where dialogue takes place matters since in the complex patterning of personal and political relationships no single character is in a position to know what the others have said about them somewhere else. It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that on first reading POGS appears to tell the history of the French Revolution almost entirely through direct speech. This extends to sections written in dialogue in the manner of a stage drama which Mantel assembles on the basis of archive material as far as she can – intervening on a minimum basis where she can let the historical record do the work. It is unlikely though, that the following dialogue has any straightforward basis in the historical archive as it involves two women Louise de Kéralio and Gabrielle Danton in conversation with Camille Desmoulins. Louise and Gabrielle were waiting for news. He [Danton] had been uncommunicative, when he came in. ‘George-Jacques [Danton] intends to remain at City Hall, in control of operations. François [Robert, Louise’s husband] is there too, working away in the next office.’ Louise: ‘Will he be safe?’ [Camille] ‘Well, apart from a great earthquake, and the sun going black, and the moon becoming as blood […] – all of which is an everpresent risk, I agree – I can’t see much going wrong for him. We’ll all be safe, as long as we win.’ ‘And at the [Tuileries] palace?’ Gabrielle said. [Camille] ‘Oh, at the palace they’ll be killing people by now.’ (Mantel 1992, 477-8) The dialogue takes place in the apartment of Camille and Lucile Desmoulins on the Rue des Cordeliers around the corner from Dantons on Cour de Commerce on 10 August, 1792. The Royal Family have been forced to leave the Tuileries palace for their own safety. This was a turning point in the revolution at which the most radical republican, militarized elements, moved in to take charge of events. It led to a massacre of Louis’ personal Swiss Guard in the ground of the Tuileries. Danton placated the mob to stay in control and save the royal family under reduced circum­ stances while the Swiss guard were mercilessly butchered. The easy familiarity of this dialogue depends on the routine nature of the interchanges between the Danton and Desmoulins families which sustain a

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recurrent figure of departure and return throughout the narrative. Camille’s wife Lucile is also in the room and we know that Danton’s wife Gabrielle is pregnant. It is an intimate scene that shows revolutionary actions experi­ enced not as well-defined events strung on an abstract string (a time-line) but embodied in people's lives. The familiarity of the situation not only emphasizes the shocking impact of Camille’s final retort but also to their mutual distance from events that were only happening a short distance away. In this it manages to express the relative positions, not simply the proximity, of events unfolding around them. Gabrielle and Lucile wait for Danton. The events at City Hall and the Tuileries Palace are out there in the realm of hearsay and uncertainty, not because they did not happen – but precisely because they did happen. Again, it is this necessary contingency of historical understanding that Mantel has her characters anticipate. If Mantel’s narrative occasionally figures synchrony in a manner similar to Schama it is in intimate moments like this where the situation is linked to ideas, events, relationships and histories that extend far beyond the Desmoulins’ apartment. More typically though, rooms to Mantel are as streets to Carlyle. The characteristic event figure of PoGS is a rapid sequence shuffling through successive rooms, concatenative but never accelerating and scaling up only to the extent that the functional labels of particular rooms are dispensed with. Mantel’s prose is almost entirely free of milieu-rich description, but her narrative deploys architectural topographic sequences involving rooms to express the immediacy of social change, using the toponeme to expose instabilities in the relationship of form and function. For example, Mantel has Eléonore Duplay, a young woman trying to seduce Camille Desmoulins in Robespierre’s bedroom (that is rented from her father). In looking for a reason to detain him and allay his fear of scandal – she says: “People can have conversations in bedrooms. People can have whole parties in bed­ rooms. Whole conferences” (Mantel 1992, 448).6 Similarly, in the summer of 1792 the private office of Louis XVI at the Tuileries Palace has become the office of the Committee of Public Safety overseen by Danton. Danton finds the aristocratic décor unsettling in his identity as a leading revolutionary. In similar spirit Camille says of the debates of the National Assembly taking place at the old royal palace of the Tuileries: […] no wonder this business is such a bloody mess, no one ever knows what anyone else is saying. No one knew at Versailles; no one knows now […] We have elected our own place in the silences of history, with our weak lungs and our speech impediments and our rooms that were designed for something else. (Mantel 1992, 652) The dissonance of sustaining revolutionary practices in aristocratic sur­ roundings suggests that while much had changed perhaps not enough had

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changed – or maybe too much if all their trouble had been to repeat the same tasks in the same places but without anyone taking any notice. In this example the difficulty in being heard among the cacophony of voices opens up the “silences of history” to Camille. Mantel’s method of prefiguring the Parisian encounter field as a series of interiors repeatedly brings her back to the same questioning of what happens in rooms. Ginette Carpenter (2018, 106) praises Mantel in PoGS for refusing “to adhere to the conventions of classic realism whereby the fictional is ac­ cepted as an unproblematic representation of the phenomenal world”. Yes, but surely few contemporary historical writers, novelists and historians alike still hold such a naïve view of fictional representation. In any case, criticism of conventional realism is not a reason to give up on historical research. It is something of an irony in this respect that Mantel’s relation­ ship with traditional historical archive scholarship poses something of a challenge for theorizations of history that seek to dissolve the important if inevitably fuzzy distinction between history and fictional narratives into a discussion of language and discourse (e.g. Munslow 2007). While Carpenter acknowledges Mantel’s personal emphasis on the consistency of her historical fiction with the historical record, she clearly sees this as in­ cidental or certainly less interesting in understanding Mantel’s representa­ tion of Paris in PoGS than the Situationist tradition which constructs the city as a kind of textual dérive defined by the intersecting trajectories (‘spatial stories’) of the novel’s many protagonists (103). Yet one could just as well argue that Mantel’s literary strategy as an historical novelist is absolutely dependent on the existence of Paris as an historical reality (and let us not forget that she prefaces her PoGS with a schematic ‘Map of Revolutionary Paris’). As a material reality Paris pre­ sents its own ‘archive’ of embodied experience much as the traditional ar­ chive provides one of text and image. It would be useful to know just how well Mantel became personally acquainted with contemporary Paris – but in fact this is not point.7 What matters is how the historical imagination finds in the architectural topographic description of the encounter field a rationale for bringing discrete and fragmented pieces of evidence into mu­ tual and potentially meaningful relation. This is not, of course, at all the same thing as saying that it is possible for any historical writer to provide an ‘unproblematic representation’ of that reality. In fact, as I have already implied Mantel’s literary practice in this respect seems to be defined precisely through her imaginative relationship with the historical city. The higher the resolution of description, the sparser the historical evidence available; placing ever heavier constraints on what can be claimed by the academic historian in exact proportion to the extent the historical novelist is liberated from the archive. The encounter field of PoGS is prefigured at such a high resolution of rooms, doors, staircases and even arrangements of furniture, first because this frees Mantel to develop the complexities of interpersonal relationships through intensive domestic

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dialogues, and second, because she knows her writing is situated exactly in the lacunae that scholarly historians know are there but are themselves unable to peer into (at least not in their published works). The architectural topographic encoding of the Parisian encounter field in terms of its do­ mestic time-spaces defines Mantel’s art in PoGS.

IV Embodying the past in Carlyle, Schama and Mantel In the preface to Citizens Schama notes how “Historians have been overconfident about the wisdom to be gained by distance, believing it somehow confers objectivity […] Perhaps there is something to be said for proximity” (1989, xiii]). He means the proximity conferred by narrative in bringing people, places, ideas and things into intelligible relation. Proximity in this sense extends beyond the historical events described. Historical narrative is not centred on a fictional world. Lacking the conclusive ‘happy ever after’ of fairy stories it leaves the recursive figure open, eventually bringing the writer, the reader and events being described into relation, however long or short the distance in scientific units of time and space involved. This does not imply a kind of transcendent or idealist proximity which collapses the materiality of inhabited time-space into the flow of experience. On the contrary, it refers to a socialized, architectural topographic proximity to which the historian stands in personal re­ lation,rather than a sense of proximity conferred by abstract quantities of time-space to which the historian is external. It is the proximity of historical understanding embodied in the encounter field through which people move, come together and encounter one another. I conclude this chapter by focusing on the architectural topographic de­ finition of what I have called the figure of temporalized distance, in his­ torical writing by Carlyle, Schama and Mantel. This figure expresses the temporal relationship between now and then which is internal to the nar­ rative but also implicates the historian in reflecting on the relationship between past and present on the basis of their own embodied relations to situations in the past. In all three historical writers it seems that the role of architectural topographic description is indispensable to the historical imagination in expressing this figure which could be said to historicize the ‘past’ as much as it ‘presents’ the past. It does so by raising an intellectual awareness of what is lost to the past in the material contouring of the present. The first example draws on one of Carlyle’s more accessible works Past and Present (1843). The work is a commentary on the early thirteenthcentury chronicle of Jocelin Brakelond, a monk at St Edmundsbury Abby near Bury St Edmonds. Part history but mainly polemic about the ‘condi­ tion of England’, Carlyle’s engagement with his subject was stimulated by a visit he made to the ruined Abby of St Edmundsbury located in the Suffolk market town of Bury St Edmunds. In meditating on the remnants of this

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once thriving monastic foundation Carlyle begins to reflect on the dis­ junction between the built environment as evidence of historical continuity that signifies the absence of the past – the medieval world of Catholic England having been decisively unpicked three centuries beforehand. On the one hand when Carlyle looks hard enough time does indeed collapse. He notes how the “old St. Edmundsbury walls […]were not peopled with fantasms; but with men of flesh and blood, made altogether as we are” (Carlyle 1965 [1843], 54). For Carlyle this vision of the past brings his critique of the present into sharp focus: “men then had a soul […] Verily it was another world then” (53). Benjamin Cannon (2014, 43–44) argues that for Carlyle the architectural remains of St Edmundsbury Abby acted like a metaphorical magic lantern to “recover history for vision” such that his encounter with the past was pro­ jected through its architectural reality. The magic lantern is a device used to project sequenced images painted onto glass slides in the manner of a slide show that chimed with the fascination with illusion and artifice in Victorian culture. Cannon’s analysis is insightful, but I would balance his emphasis on the visual artifice of the magic lantern by noting how Carlyle’s visit to St Edmundsbury points to an imaginative engagement with the historical past that was embodied in an architectural topographic sense. If this enabled vi­ sual projection to the extent that Carlyle was able ‘to see’ the past, it was because that seeing was anchored in a physical orientation towards St Edmundsbury that involved movement, touch and a visceral, if fleeting, sense of bodily co-presence with the men who has lived there, which stimulated his intellect. Carlyle’s own pilgrimage to St Edmundsbury has, of course, prompted generations of students of Carlyle’s work (including this author) to make the same trip to better understand the site that provoked such a strong reaction. Thus, from Jocelin’s chronicle through Past and Present to contemporary scholarship, the texts and the building as architectural topo­ graphic sources of historical understanding cannot be entirely separated; indeed, this succession of meaning creates its own narrative. Carlyle’s account of his epiphany at St Edmundsbury, as Cannon’s work anticipates, has a distinctively televisual quality. One can certainly see echoes of Carlyle’s meditation in Schama’s three-volume work and accompanying television series A History of Britain. It suits Schama’s method well to narrate his history through surviving historical sites that can be visited with cameras, making broad historical themes accessible through the specificities of local events. At the remote Neolithic settlement of Skara Brae in the Orkney Islands, for example, he finds evidence of an advanced material culture: To gaze at these objects, surviving from so distant a time, is to be confronted with the great paradox of all history: that it is at all times a dialogue between the alien and the familiar. […] So although con­ scientious historians must resist the temptation to imagine themselves back into the company of Neolithic Orcadians, it is hard to walk

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between the houses […] and not feel in the midst of a thriving little world […] (Schama 2000, 24–25) Another example is Schama’s use of Bindham Priory, a church in Norfolk, to frame his chapter on the English Reformation. His observation is posi­ tively Carlylean: You don’t notice the ghosts, not right away. At first sight Binham Priory looks much like any other East Anglian country church: lime­ stone and limewash, plain and simple. But then you look again and sense something else lurking behind the innocent façade. The multistoried arcades and the round window high on the west wall seem much too grand for a parish church. And then you begin to see things that are no longer there: stained-glass windows, wall paintings, a great rood crucifix. The emptiness fills. The vaulted space becomes a forest of faith. An ardent, coloured, noisy world begins to press in, a world of monks and masses, of plainsong and pictures: the world of Catholic England. (Schama 2000, 233) In both cases Schama is careful to stop himself; the “conscientious his­ torian” must not naively conclude that the Orcadians were people like us; if you tried “reaching out” to the “ghosts” at Binham they would “flake away into nothing” (Schama 2000, 233). The historian’s role is more reflective in assimilating these local fragments into a larger scheme. Yet, it is hard not to think that Schama protests too much here. It is clear how his practice as an historian involves the kind of imaginative engagement with the architectural topography of the past – the spaces in which people once lived and moved – that he deploys so eloquently here. Intellectually, however, Schama knows he is on treacherous ground – precisely because, as I have been concerned to explain, the intellectual dimension of such an engagement with architectural topographic description is not well un­ derstood. One difficulty is that the historical encounter field is a source of con­ tingency and uncertainty in historical explanation, expressing the com­ plexity of concrete situations and identifying the inevitably incomplete nature of evidence available to describe them. Schama draws attention to this in his work of historical fiction Dead Certainties (1992). The produc­ tion of this work closely parallels Mantel’s own method of being scrupulous with the sources in terms of consistency but feeling free to remove the conditional components and to elaborate in those typically high-resolution scenes where evidence is most scarce. Dead Certainties consists of two fragmentary stories. One portrays different perspectives on the death of General Wolfe at Quebec in 1759, from a soldier, a painter and a

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nineteenth-century historian. The other describes the unresolved murder of George Parkman, the uncle of Wolfe’s historian Francis Parkman. Schama comments that: Both the stories offered here play with the teasing gap separating a lived event and its subsequent narration. Although both follow the docu­ mented record with some closeness, they are works of the imagination, not scholarship. Both dissolve the certainties of events into the multiple possibilities of alternative narrations. (Schama 1991, 320) The “gap” Schama refers to is precisely where the architectural topographic nature of the historical imagination engages. For all their stylistic experi­ mentation it is notable how both of Schama’s narratives rely extensively on detailed architectural topographic descriptions of Boston, Massachusetts, a device which serves to bring fragmentary evidence of when-where events into an intelligible encounter field through which “alternative narrations” can be grounded. This is not, of course, a question of Schama providing an unmediated representation of Boston. Rather it is one narrativized in ar­ chitectural topographic sequences constructed on the basis of his own strong corporeal sense of the Parkmans’ world. This enables Schama to situate his historical understanding as the embodied thought-to-action of his characters. It is perhaps no coincidence that Schama was himself a Professor of History at Harvard around the time Dead Certainties was written and conveniently situated to retrace the Boston steps of his two protagonists. In her BBC Reith Lecture Series Mantel (2017a, 4) elaborated on the im­ portance of the material world in giving definition to her historical writing. She observes that a “faithful representation is one that is stabilized by physical reality. (…) Reality has a coercive force”. For Mantel the constraints put on literary representation (her narrative) by physical reality are not limiting what can be said rather they are guide both to what is tellable and what is true – in the sense of being historically authentic. Her first example is how reality coerces the body. The moulding of bodily posture to clothing, Mantel argues, means that a modern woman, correctly fitted to a sixteenth-century aristo­ cratic costume, “can’t stand in any other way” to the figures in portraits. As a child she also had her ‘St Edmundsbury moment’. On a trip Hampton Court Palace she burst into tears on entering Cardinal Wolsey’s closet as she ima­ gined Cardinal Wolsey’s presence in the same room. Noting that since that day she has fulfilled this imaginary in her historical fiction: “I have, as it were, seen Cardinal Wolsey sitting by the fireplace and I have leaned my elbow on the windowsill and I have conversed with him” (Mantel 2017b, 7). Mantel is also enlightening on the architectural topographic ‘coercion’ of the historical imagination. At the beginning of the first lecture in the series she explains how a photograph she has of her great grandmother (whom

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she never knew) standing outside a terraced house in the Derbyshire village of Hadfield led her to seek out the street and try to identify the house. She believes she was successful in this but cannot be sure. By the time she saw it the houses had been demolished, only the facades remained behind as part of the wall of a surviving mill yard that the houses had backed onto. The windows and doors had been blocked up. In attempting to recover the life of her grandmother and connect it with her own Mantel seeks the con­ nection between the collective, life – something of which may be known from social history – and the private life of her great grandmother of which almost nothing remained. What is striking is Mantel’s use of architectural topographic description to describe the imaginative process that would allow the connection to be made. She imagines standing on the doorstep with her great grandmother: I move through the domestic space and emerge into the buzzing economic space of the mill yard – the market place, the gossip shop, the street and the parliament house. (Mantel 2017b, 5) Mantel explains how in an imaginative sense her great grandmother ac­ companies her, such that “what is enacted meets what is dreamed”. Yet the enaction of the movement itself (through a bricked up doorway) is equally imagined, though with a clear architectural topographic definition. This movement can be represented as an architectural topographic sequence. ATS {/ |HM+GG| >> front door: doorstep >> [domestic interior] >> [mill yard > market place > gossip shop > street > parliament house] \} As a novelist Mantel is free to reflect on the workings of the historical imagination in a way that a scholarly historian could never do. Yet it is perfectly consistent with their historical writing to propose that the monks of St Edmundsbury were no less present to Carlyle or the Parkmans to Schama than Mantel’s great grandmother was to her in this account. The re-enactment of movement, bodily co-presence and encounter in the his­ torical imagination is fundamentally architectural topographic in nature. In moving with Mantel through the (unblocked) doorway of the ruined house, through the domestic interior and into the public realm she is expressing the unique quality of architectonic narrative to express the human experience of the past– which moves easily across resolutions of inhabited space that are almost always separated in analytical studies. Narrative matters in­ tellectually in this sense because it has the capacity to express change as something that is experienced and felt in bodily terms as much as it is known in a discursive sense such that it can be precisely measured using the appropriate indices.

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Notes 1 The ebooks for Citizens (1989) and A Place of Greater Safety (1992) are listed separately in references as: (Schama 2004 [1989]) and Mantel (2009 [1992]). Page-number references for Carlyle (1837) refer to Project Gutenberg ebook throughout, while those for Schama and Mantel refer to the print editions of these works. 2 See Appendix D for the full list of search terms and taxonomy applied. 3 Owing to the constraints of the software the maximum number of searches re­ turned was 1000, a limit that was reached only three times in searches for ‘Camille’, ‘Danton’ and ‘Robespierre’ in A Place of Greater Safety. 4 For all search terms the r-squared values are as follows: Carlyle and Schama = .85, Carlyle and Mantel 0.04, Schama and Mantel 0.06, respectively. The major difference in biographical and contextual markers used by Mantel and the two historians creates a significant divergence in the distribution. If just toponemes are included it becomes Carlyle and Schama 0.65, Carlyle and Mantel 0.21, and Schama and Mantel 0.24. 5 In her ‘Author’s Note’ to the 2010 edition of Place of Greater Safety published by Fourth Estate, Mantel explains how her work is “closely tied to historical facts – as far as those facts are agreed” and that her story “centres on Paris”. One can adopt the critical position of regarding this statement as ‘part of the text’ but it simply records Mantel’s de facto assumption that something called the ‘French Revolution’ happened in Paris in 1789 and that the ‘once upon a time’ of her story is anchored in that shared historical and material reality. 6 Eléonore Duplay’s observation echoes Bernard Tschumi’s remark discussed in Chapter One (III) that one may ‘cook in the bathroom and sleep in the kitchen’ 7 In an interview with the Scottish Review of Books (10 November, 2009) Mantel explains: “I started writing A Place Of Greater Safety the year after I left uni­ versity, so I began writing in England. I worked on it for two and half years before I went to Africa. I didn’t think of myself then as a career writer. I thought of myself as someone who was going to write that one book, and I couldn’t look beyond it. So a lot of the time when I was in Botswana, in my head I was in revolutionary Paris”.

7

Recollection and re-enactment Embodying nineteenth-century Sheffield in Leader’s Reminiscences (1875)

I Definitions When event descriptions in historical writing become metaphors they begin to lose touch with the specificity of when-where situations and become moribund place-holders for arguments conducted in largely conceptual terms. This has happened to the ‘industrial city’ which has been made to carry a heavy historiographical burden as the signifier of the profound social changes associated with capitalist modernity. As a metaphor the industrial city tends not only to homogenize the complexity of regional variations but also to disembody industrialization through an overwhelming abridgement of human experience to a derivative of blind socio-economic forces. The process of metaphorical abstraction is facilitated by the fact that the industrial revolution was not productive of discourse in the same way that is true of the other macro-events explored in this book: the English Reformation and the French Revolution. These events produced vast amounts of language that gives historians privileged access to the world views of those involved, and indeed helped make sense of these events for historians and contemporaries alike. Industrialization seems rather mute by contrast, identifiable to economic historians of the longue durée but less to the participants themselves. Of course, the industrial revolution in Britain did have both its protagonists and its prophets; in previous chapters, I have discussed the careers of James Watt, Robert Owen and Thomas Carlyle. Such figures, however, are rarely the issue when seeking historical understanding of industrialization as a pervasive social reality. In this respect the value of the ‘industrial city’ to describe the particular conjunction of manufacturing production and urbanity in the nineteenth century remains a useful category. It becomes more of a hindrance when the singular sense of ‘the industrial city’ is deployed to invoke a generic image of human and environmental degradation associated with large-scale manufacturing. By collapsing the architectural topographic description of different industrial cities into the black box of urban agglomeration economics, the historian is liable to repress the contingencies of the lives of their inhabitants. The abridgement makes it harder

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for the historical imagination to engage with the important but always elusive question of how the experience of the industrialization affected people at the time. What then, if one were to approach industrial cities not as metaphors, ‘warnings from history’, nor as polluted backdrops to changes in patterns of work, leisure, sex, consumption or political identity but as dynamic material formations generative of a plurality of time-space disjunctions in the familiarity of everyday social life characterized by movement, bodily co-presence and encounter in the architectural topographic foreground?

II A history of ‘small details’ To explore this possibility this chapter focuses on a remarkable work of local history Reminiscences of Old Sheffield, its streets and its people (1875) compiled and edited by Robert Eadon Leader (1839-1922), a key source on Sheffield, one of the ‘shock’ cities of the English industrial revoution.1 The Leader family were proprietors of the Sheffield Independent newspaper. A leading liberal (and unsuccessful parliamentary candidate), Leader was involved in many aspects of Sheffield’s public life and published a number of historical works on the city. On one level Reminiscences is simply a compilation of personal anecdotes derived from letters and other material on Sheffield’s local history, originally published in the Notes and Queries section of the Sheffield Independent, a typical late Victorian exercise in antiquarian activism. What distinguishes Reminiscences as a local history, however, is that it takes the distinctive dialogical form of transcripts of notional conversations between its various contributors as they imaginatively perambulate the streets of Sheffield. Their shared memories of the city serve as a prompt for a range of anecdotes about its history and its inhabitants; what has changed, and what has stayed the same. Leader presents Reminiscences as an urgent attempt to preserve for the historical record aspects of Sheffield’s early nineteenth-century history that would otherwise be forgotten. This book does not claim to be anything so dignified as history. It is only a gathering together of the various threads out of which history is woven—threads which, if not seized and put into tangible shape, quickly escape altogether. Our local annals afford many illustrations of the loss that has been sustained through want of persons who would take the trouble carefully to chronicle small details, and no one can be fully conscious of that misfortune until he rises from the compilation of such a work as this. (Leader 1875, iii) Leader’s comments voice a strong historical sensibility arising from his personal commitment to a city that had been profoundly transformed in scale, wealth and renown in his lifetime. But if, as Leader asserts, Reminiscences is not a history – what is it? Certainly, it has much in

Recollection and re-enactment 175 common with the long tradition of antiquarian ‘miscellany’ with its characteristic emphasis on local curiosities of people and place. This tradition is still going strong. For example, Old Sheffield Town: An Historical Miscellany by a retired tutor of Sheffield history in further education, J. Edward Vickers (1999), is still in print at the time of writing. It is representative of a committed local history told entirely through its people and places, and supported with a large number of illustrations and photographs of local places since the age of Queen Victoria – the selection and reproduction of which is an important contribution of the local historian’s role. Reminiscences certainly has more in common with this kind of local antiquarianism than the more conventional accounts of Sheffield’s history. These narratives are guided by a gentle telos that explains ‘how Sheffield got from there (the past) to here (the present day)’, a trajectory that emphasizes the city’s ‘rise’ to industrial modernity from its pre-historic origins. For John Derry the purpose was to explain why Sheffield had become known to men in “every civilised land” (Derry 1915, 1). Mary Walton’s history of the city begins by noting how the natural advantages of Sheffield’s location (particularly waterpower) would “shape its destiny” as a great manufacturing city (Walton 1984 [1948], 9). David Hey’s authoritative history of Sheffield from its earliest foundation concludes optimistically that at “the beginning of the twenty-first century, a new air of confidence is apparent” (Hey 2005, 304). The strongly linear chronological orientation of these accounts, linking Sheffield’s past to its present and future, is entirely absent from Reminiscences. Not aspiring to be a “history” as such, it offers successive personal recollections of Sheffield’s past, and occasional meditations on the relationship of its past and present, that simply begin on the first page and end on the last without asserting any global narrative arc save that arising from the architectural topographic sequencing of the text itself. But if Reminiscences has no organizing chronological structure, it is not an historical psychogeography of the city avant la lettre in the manner of Ackroyd’s ‘stumble’ around London (as discussed in Chapter Four), and if it is a work of antiquarian scholarship it is not ‘mere antiquarianism’. In the first case the editor and contributors, in “gathering together of the various threads out of which history is woven”, are clearly conscious of what they regard as their responsibility to record only historically accurate testimonies before these are lost to historical memory. The dialogic method involves an exchange of personal testimonies within a peer group (an “amicable confraternity” as Leader calls it) that acts as a constraint on the introspective struggle for a meta-narratological meaning that frames Ackroyd’s London: The Biography. There is also an important difference between the contributors’ respect for accurate reporting in Reminiscences who alert one another to sources of error, and the playful cutting and pasting from historical and literary sources in Ackroyd’s London, for whom it matters less

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whether the things reported were true so much as that they were said at all (Leader 1875, iii–iv). In the second case, although a dense non-narrative text like Reminiscences, can seem inaccessible from a twenty-first century perspective – especially if one is not personally familiar with Sheffield – this does mean it lacks editorial ambition. Leader seeks to seize the threads of history and put them into “tangible shape”. He notes in his ‘Preface’ that he has verified the statements wherever possible. Yet, we must ask, how often was it possible? Much gossip and anecdote is, by its nature, unverifiable. It seems likely that a key aspect in the verification process was the need for a high degree of when-where specificity of the “small details” chronicled in Reminiscences, details which are consistently anchored to specific locations at a high resolution of precision. If it is Leader that seizes the threads, it is Sheffield itself that knits them into a tangible whole. This method is not, of course, a guarantee of documentary truth in a scientific sense, but it does force the reader to confront past phenomena on their own terms – demanding that we make sense of it, rather than fixing on those topics that conform most closely to historians’ thematic preoccupations. The dialogical form of local history in Reminiscences recalls the argument of the sociologist of memory, Maurice Halbwachs – as paraphrased by Paul Ricoeur – that “one does not remember alone” (Ricoeur 2003, 121).2 As a specifically local history, it leads us towards understanding how the social nature of memory is historically tethered to the when-where imaginaries of a common situation (Hebbert 2005). This is not because all the contributors to Reminiscences necessarily share the same memories (i.e. were physically co-present at any given time or place) but rather because Sheffield itself provides the implicitly agreed material referent that allows their varied recollections to be cross-referenced, authenticated and given “tangible shape”, in the sense of being figured as historically intelligible narratives. One might say Reminiscences offers an elementary riposte to the postmodern prejudice that memory, at least social memory, is free from chronological specificities; and that imaginaries of place have little to do with their material formations. In this spirit then, rather than deploying Reminiscences instrumentally as a source for elucidating themes assumed a priori to Sheffield ‘the industrial city’,3 I approach it from an architectural topographic perspective to identify figures of familiarity and displacement in the production of a shared imaginary of early nineteenth-century Sheffield as urban community; one honed through the immersion of its authors in the quotidian and material realities that brought them into mutual relation.

III Embodying Sheffield in the text Reminiscences’ eleven chapters record the dialogue between five elderly Sheffielders (referred to pseudonymously in the text as Leonard) (Leader

Recollection and re-enactment 177 himself), Twiss, Everard, Leighton, Wragg and Johnson4 who take an active interest in the history of their city and whose collective memory extends back to at least the second decade of the nineteenth century, with some variation. Leader himself was the youngest born in 1839. Each chapter is prefaced with a cast of dramatis personae naming those present, the year between 1872–1874 when the dialogue took place, and finally where it took place (sometimes at someone’s house, other times at a local hostelry and sometimes unspecified). Although the conversations recorded in Reminiscences do appear to have taken place, they are something of an artifice to the extent that the speakers intended their reflections to be recorded and come prepared accordingly, occasionally reading from texts. Quite possibly there are sections that were initially set forth or subsequently revised through written correspondence, and of course the whole has been carefully edited by Leader. What matters though is the dialogue itself, particularly how it facilitates the imaginative rewalking of Sheffield’s streets as the discursants “mentally repeople” the city, as Leighton claims in the opening passages of the second chapter. I have quoted it at length here to give a sense of its dialogic structure. CHAPTER II. Campo Lane, the Old Grammar School, the Townhead. Scene — The same.5 Period — Two days later. Present — Everard, Wragg, Leighton, Twiss, and Leonard. Leighton: When last we met we mentally repeopled Campo lane with its old inhabitants, from the top of Paradise square to the bottom of the Hartshead and Watson’s walk. Suppose we now go in the opposite direction, taking the Lane from Virgin’s row to the Townhead. Wragg: Yes, that part is full of interest, though you moderns, Mr. Leonard, will scarcely credit it. Leonard: Well, it is difficult to find much romance there now, amid its dingy second-hand clothes shops and its squalid tenements. The only thing of interest about it I remember is a ghost story connected with the dreadful row of shops we come to first, going from St. James’s row, on the left, that look as if they had started life with great pretensions, but the force of adverse circumstances has brought them to a worse plight than that of their older neighbours. The latter, if poor, have an air of decent poverty about them; but these have nothing but a seedy look of decayed snobbishness. Twiss: What you refer to was not really a ghost story, but only a great hoax, perpetrated by the aid of a magic lantern. Leonard: At any rate, a lot of people were well frightened, and one woman lost her life. (Leader 1875, 26)

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Although Leader refers to Reminiscences as “gossip” in the ‘Preface’ this dialogue shows just how far it was from being simply that. Leonard’s mention of the ghost story associated with the junction of Campo Lane and St James Row does not serve as a rhetorical cue for the spinning of a good yarn, as it might have done, but rather earns a sceptical retort from Twiss, the elder man, who recalls the ‘ghost’ as the trick of a magic lantern. In contrast to the metaphorical magic lantern that enables Cannon to conceive the ruins of St Edmundsbury Abby as a transparency for Carlyle’s vision into the past (Chapter 6, Section IV), the historical magic lantern for Twiss is a source of misinformation rather than imaginative insight. Yet Leonard responds to Twiss with a slight rebuke that hoax or no, people were scared and someone died as a consequence of the incident. The ghost, to those people at least, was real – and for Leonard that is what matters historically. The dialogue highlights both sides of a complex equation. On the one hand Leonard’s ghost story is never told in Reminiscences because it is presumed to be a fiction. On the other hand, the magic lantern of Campo Lane seems to go into a metaphorical reverse, populating the past with people who themselves appear ghost-like because their presence is entirely contingent on their association with the debunked ghost; we are never told their names.6 How is this reversal achieved? The metaphor of the magic lantern, however attractive, is in fact limited in its application to the historical imagination because it is ultimately a projection of light onto blank surfaces and historians like Twiss recognize an illusion where they see one, even where people in the past did not. What matters in this respect is not the phantasm of the visual spectacle itself but the concrete situation it elucidates that lends the scene’s historical depth; a contrast of the foregrounded movement of the people who came, saw a ‘ghost’ and returned somewhere else (the unfortunate woman who died excepted); and in the background the probability of ongoing localized activity evoked by Leonard’s description of a densely inhabited quarter of old Sheffield, well known to all present, but that had become run down by the 1870s. Leonard’s anecdote describes the figuration of past and present in the architectural topographic foreground of Campo Lane in central Sheffield. It depicts an encounter field which brings the ghost, the people who saw the ghost and were scared, the woman who died, and other people who must have been there or thereabouts on the night into spatial and temporal copresence with each other, the historian (Leader) who imaginatively reenacts their situation and the contemporary reader. In situ, as Schama (2000, 233) says, we “begin to see things that are no longer there”. On a number of occasions in Reminiscences specific people are referred to whose “name I have forgotten” (179).7 Here the architectural topographic description of the encounter field draws attention to the deficit between what is known empirically and the embodied re-enactment of an historical situation which constructs the narrative of the event in relation to the unseen

Recollection and re-enactment 179 as much as the seen. To “chronicle small details” as Leader says is not therefore to ascertain the certainty of past events in documentary mode – far from it. The details serve to cast the broader hinterland of what is lost to the past into relief; in that sense of revealing the pastness of the past as something that gives “tangible shape” to the present – while being hidden from it. Perhaps paradoxically, constructing the voids, the loss and the forgetting reveals past and present to be differentiated but not separate, conjoined by a fragile time-space continuum sustained in the architectural topographic foreground of contingent movement, co-presence and encounter. So if, in one sense, the dialogue of Leonard and Twiss is of the here and now (Sheffield c.1875) with the there and then (the remembered city of the early nineteenth century), the relationship of past and present is not presented as a succession of states but as the interpenetration of movement, bodily co-presence and encounter. Here may be then (as they talk themselves into the past), now may be there (as they mentally walk themselves through the historic city). Of course it is relevant that in Reminiscences the ‘amicable confraternity’ is describing a city that is within their living memory and in or near where they all reside, but in the end this does not matter other than to facilitate the dialogic method. What is significant in terms of historical ontology is that the imaginative prefiguration of Sheffield as an encounter field enables the contingencies of the ghost story. It extends the localized spectacle beyond the moment of a given when-where action, such that it may be re-enacted in the historical imagination at a later time and place (those people (which people?), that woman (which woman?)) as an event happening then-there, and embodied in the micro-narratives which comprise the time-space figuration of Leader’s text. Of course, in reading Reminiscences nearly a century and a half later, we are, in a sense, looking at Leader and company in a similar way, positioning them in time-space in relation to ourselves in order to make sense of what they said and did as local historians. One does not need to know Sheffield personally to do this (though it would certainly help with digesting the text). Either way, Sheffield is the contingent principle in Reminiscences as much as it is the shared point of reference; other routes could have been taken that would have produced a different text.

IV Narrative figures of ‘memory lane’ As befits an architectural topographic arrangement of small details that is not a history, nothing particularly happens in Reminiscences. The narrative is localized but that does not mean it is written in the architecturaltopographic background. Rather it is for the reader to discover how Sheffield is prefigured as an encounter field into which motley local events are accommodated. The larger structure is its own thing; a text-as-a-city, unencumbered by classification and still inhabited.

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i Going back Routine journeys lend themselves to being conceptualized in performative terms as ‘place ballets’ (Seamon 1979) or ‘choreographies’ (Pred 1977), in the spirit of Jane Jacobs (1961) rather than through their association with any explicit codes of ‘meaning’. In memory, routines generate incidental stories tied to locality. In narrative terms figures of departure and return identify regularities in the practice of everyday life that are associated with ‘going away and coming back’. In Reminiscences they articulate a shared understanding of how parts relate to wholes in the city. In fact a text search of Reminiscences reveals an interesting pattern of incidence in which the main streets of the historic town are those most frequently mentioned in the text.8 These toponemes are distributed throughout, indicative of how the accessibility structure of historical Sheffield is closely mirrored by the mental walk of Leader’s contributors, an action of socialized memory he refers to as having “tangible shape”. Broad Lane – Westbar – Snig Hill – Angel Street – High Street – Church Street form an almost complete circuit of the early modern city. Leonard makes a single use of the rather antiquated phrase “the principal streets” in Reminiscences to refer to these. The context in his account of how, in 1795, Sheffield’s women had thanked the civic-minded Dr John Browne for his work to alleviate high flour prices by bringing a light carriage to the Cutlers’ Hall and begging permission to draw him through the town (Leader, 1875, 56). The phrase ‘principal streets’ was common currency in local newspapers until about the 1830s. Its use is indicative of how the text of Reminiscences is constructed through mental circulations of the main streets of the historical central area. Leonard: I think we have now completed the circuit of the Market Place, and are ready to descend Angel Street. (Leader 1875, 97) Leonard: And thus we complete another circuit, and find ourselves once more at the Parish Church. (Leader 1875, 266) Despite the impressive mental walking of most of the streets of the early nineteenth-century town – the contributors remain quiet on at least one, Cross Burgess Street. Why? Was there nothing to say there? Was it an omission or a decision on some unknown basis? We cannot know. The ontological slippage is from identifying the possibility of what is knowable to an acknowledgement of what is actually recordable – and feeling the difference. A desire to record miscellaneous local lore is precisely what Reminiscences is concerned with, so it suggests Cross Burgess Street was omitted accidentally, or that there was nothing worth mentioning there. The circuitous walk-in-memory constructs the shared reality of the historical city. Work and domestic routines comprised the lives of the majority of Sheffield’s inhabitants, but these are not systematically documented in

Recollection and re-enactment 181 Reminiscences which is conscious of not being a conventional history (for the former Griffiths 2017). Routines of departure and return associated with the daily news, however, do feature. Johnson and Leighton discuss Mr Thomas Wiley at “Old No. 12” at the corner of Change Alley and Market Place. The said Mr “Wiley’s Window” was something of an institution and a centre for accessing and discussing local and national news. Johnson notes how: It was almost a substitute for the daily papers of the present time. All, or nearly all, the events of the day were chronicled there—the deaths from cholera, the debates in Parliament, the elections—anything out of the ordinary course. I remember going down daily, during the debates on the first Reform Bill, to get the names of the speakers for my father. (Leader 1875, 80–81) Mr Wiley is said to have shown great “public spirit” by getting the newspapers up from London quickly - 14 hours in 1832 when Prime Minister Earl Grey resigned, compared to three days in 1800. The arrival of communications into Sheffield from the wider world was not simply about information gathering in an instrumental sense but was also a social occasion. Leighton notes how in the period c.1810-15 the arrival of the mail was an event. London letters were brought by horse mail round by Worksop, and the rider fired his pistol at the Market-place to notify his arrival. There was then only one letter-carrier for the whole town—a female who lived in Lee croft, and she carried the letters in a small hand basket, covered with a white napkin. (Leader 1875, 67) Wragg comments among other things how the cost of postage before the railway meant that people travelling to London by mail coach would get accosted by people wanting to take their letters. As a result “many people discovered friends they did not know of”, generating a social network around coaching inns such as the Tontine and Angel through which local people maintained and extended their connections in London and elsewhere (Leader 1875, 68). Coaching inns were a source of horses, social life and news. How their role was destroyed by the railway age is noted at several points in the text (Leader 1875, 99; 215). The ability to reach beyond Sheffield to other places is a recurrent theme of Reminiscences – but one expressed by observing its effects on local habits and custom en route through the town. The first merchants to sell directly to London (one Mr Fox of Westbar in the mid-eighteenth century who apparently walked the whole way, the perils of Nottingham Forest notwithstanding), and to trade with America and Australia, are all recorded

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(Leader 1875, 115; 10; 71). Wragg also notes (referring to the later eighteenth century) that “About a century back—nay, even less time—it was considered more dangerous to reach London than now Australia”. Everard replies (obliquely, since the conversation has moved on a little) “Yes, things are greatly changed” (68). If Reminiscences does not offer a global narrative in the sense of a traditional historical account, it is not an example of micro-historical ‘thick description’ either, because references are eclectic and non-systematic. The text embodies the imagined perambulation of the streets by Leader’s colloquists, which, however contrived as an artifice of the book in one sense, is also strongly expressive of a way that historical understanding is imaginatively prefigured in architectural topographic descriptions and the form of social memory. As the contributors looked back upon the town they knew, so contemporaries can walk the same streets (in most cases). Even if we see different things from Leader and his companions – they are not entirely different. The figure of departure and return remains open to its future perambulation. ii Coming forward Yet in Reminiscences these circulatory routes also hint at the challenge to this dialogic method. The city is growing and more places must be left out. Everard notes that “As to the outskirts we should have to make a complete circuit of the town to give even an idea of the changes” (Leader 1875, 160). Although there is much discussion on the newly settled “suburban colonies” in Reminiscences, it does not have the comprehensive sweep of the coverage of the old town and is very selective in its choice of locations (162). In any case the imagined walk method works less well in a suburban context because exploring the suburbs is not characterized by circulatory movements of departure and return so much as linear movements of ‘leaving’ and ‘re-entering’ the town. This carries something of the Rousseauian romanticism of shaking off the city and seeking the country, an orientation that is perpetuated at ever greater distances from urban centres. The question posed by ‘suburbanization’ has implications for Reminiscences since it is the imaginary of Sheffield’s encounter field that organizes the book in social memory. The very term would feel jarringly anachronistic in this context, a generic summary of socio-economic processes rather than a perambulated history. The intersection of their Reminiscences of Sheffield with national narratives of industrialization, urbanization, suburbanization and Empire (the latter two linked as colonial expansion created markets for Sheffield’s products which paid for the suburbs to colonize the countryside) as a possible way of giving “tangible shape” to this work of local history does not seem to have occurred. In comparison with the other historical works examined in this book, there are relatively few examples of linearizing figures of

Recollection and re-enactment 183 accelerated seeing and going in Reminiscences, since the book is principally organized by a circulatory orientation of Sheffield city centre. There is also little thematic continuity in Reminiscences other than a concern to tell stories of the city as these occur on the contributors’ imagined perambulation. The method works to exclude significant events in national history, which are dealt with only insofar as they are invoked incidentally en route. For example, the Great Reform Act of 1832 is introduced mainly via the anecdote about Thomas Wiley at Old No. 12 (though see also the account of the election riot, below). There is no mention of the events of the Napoleonic or Crimean Wars, or of Queen Victoria; George IV merits only a single tangential reference. The Great Sheffield Flood of 1864 (a major event in local history) is mentioned only with reference to the destruction of an historical house at Malin Bridge. Given that all these nationally recognized events and persons had significant local resonance, this might be thought surprising. It is likely to reflect the belief of the contributors that well-known local events were already ‘on the record’ in local newspapers. Even so, it emphasizes Leader’s lack of concern in Reminiscences with establishing Sheffield’s position in national narratives of economic growth and Empire; with the city’s ‘ineluctable rise’ as Derry, Walton and even Hey present in their more traditional narratives. One is aware of such omissions in a local history of this nature but also of how many more things there are to be said about ‘what happened’ during this period of structural economic change that would normally escape attention – begging the question of how much must have been left unsaid. Occasionally personal memory and national events do coincide in Reminiscences, for example, the outside meeting at Brocco to urge the petitioning Parliament to inquire into the Peterloo Massacre. Everard’s description of the gathering describes the procession of various parties from Wicker area in the north of the city and interweaves comments about the state of the nation then and now. In the passage quoted below it has a stronger narrative emphasis than a simply visual impression. The reader accompanies the procession with Everard, which culminates in his generalized historical reflection on the state of the nation. The procession was formed in the Wicker, and included almost all the clubs and friendly societies in the town and neighbourhood, with their respective banners and bands of music. On arriving at the ground they were marshalled in their appointed order. The platform was erected on the flat part near Allen street. The late venerable Samuel Shore, Esq., was the chairman, and the late Earl Fitzwilliam was one of the speakers. That vast assemblage, numbering many thousands, and standing rank above rank on the slopes of that natural amphitheatre, together with the display of flags and symbols, presented a magnificent and deeply impressive spectacle. The

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Public parks and large open spaces often formed the points of ritual denouement in nineteenth-century urban processions. The narration of these in lengthy accounts in local newspapers reveals linearizing figures of seeing and going to drive the narrative to its symbolic conclusion where the collective symbols of Sheffield’s urban community can be proclaimed (Griffiths 2016). Everard’s account of the procession to the Brocco similarly uses a mass gathering as a means of reflecting on the collective “our” of improvements in Sheffield as an urban community – linking this to the condition of nation. But otherwise there is not a single mention of ‘Empire’ or ‘dominions’ in Reminiscences, and precious few allusions to any preoccupation of national histories. The term ‘colonies’, for examples, typically refers to suburban housing developments. It is relevant, of course, that some of the most ‘spectacular’ events in the city’s history post-date the publication of this book. The first visit of a member of the Royal Family to Sheffield occurred in 1874, the year before it was published but they recurred with greater frequency subsequently as Sheffield’s status as armaments manufacturer to the Empire increased. More typical than the declaratory statements of civic pride are the ambiguous voices of men, even relatively young men like Leonard, to come to terms with the changes they have witnessed. Leonard: Yes; when one looks at them it is impossible to help feeling that, interesting as are the reminiscences in which we are indulging, and tempted as we sometimes feel to long for power to sweep away innovations, it is just as well that we can’t. (Leader 1875, 42) The absence of globalizing narrative themes in Reminiscences enables it to evade, for the most part, the inevitable concern to explain Sheffield’s relationship to the ‘national story’ that influences more conventional histories of Sheffield. Its non-linear approach to historical narrative, constructed piecemeal from memories of Sheffield’s streets, offers a kind of documentary technique to reflect on the collective experience of social change. It is not one told through improved infrastructure or wealth per se but through more quotidian indices that reflect how the contributors themselves experienced change. The history emerges from the imagined perambulation of Sheffield’s streets; it is not told through journeys to particular destinations to illustrate pre-selected themes. The relatively spontaneous and contingent nature of the

Recollection and re-enactment 185 dialogue is fundamentally chronotopical; a record of stuff that once happened in Sheffield ungoverned by any meta-narratological principle other than to be true to the city the contributors remember. It suggests why we should not look to industrial cities simply to find the experience of social change in generic indices of environmental or human degradation, nor even in the symbolism of its ‘invented traditions’. Rather we might seek to understand simply whether the old routines and ways of doing things still made sense – what qualities of life had come and what had gone. iii Looking closer We know how children, being smaller – and perhaps less preoccupied – find more social opportunities in the world around them than larger, older people who find fewer niches, hence children’s facility to play hide and seek (Crompton 2000). In fact, heightened attentiveness to the affordances of place may equally arise from familiarity with it over long stretches of time (Seamon, 1979). A characteristic of repeated journeys around familiar areas is that highly localized experiences that would be glossed over in accelerated linearizing figures of seeing and going are identified as sources of identity and meaning. For example: Leonard: Pretty nearly every yard branching out of High street has a history of its own; and there are, or have been, quaint old places in them little heeded by the passer-by. There is the old “Grey Horse,” for instance, which one of our local traditions represents as having been the resting place of King John when once he passed through Sheffield. Twiss: It is simply a tradition. The house was, perhaps is now, the property of the family of the Girdler’s. (Leader 1875, 70) Leader’s contributors are keen to record the various streets names and record their origin, and are very disapproving of those who would change street names, which they express as a kind of symbolic violence. Leonard: The idiots who change old names—Tom Cross lane to stupid Brunswick road, and Coalpit lane to Cambridge street—ought to be ostracised. They cannot have been native-born Sheffielders. (Leader 1875, 160) The curmudgeonliness of the local historian is certainly evident, but it is also a sensitivity to processes of change that Leonard communicates here by implying that the name-changers were new to the city. The loss of popular place names, for example, “Sow Mouth” and “Pincher-croft lane” may also

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have recorded a loss of a localized habitat, such as a de facto playground for boys, as this dialogue of Leonard and Johnson reveals. Leonard: Forty years ago, there were one or two trees growing on the property of Mr. Withers, in Pinstone street. A passage leading from Fargate to New Church street was a favourite play-ground of the boys of those days, and boasted the name of “Sow Mouth.” In 1825, the Town Trustees purchased some property in Pinstone lane for the purpose of widening it. Johnson: Its present width makes us wonder what it must have been before. Its old name was Pinstone-croft lane, or in the vulgate, “Pincher-croft lane.” (Leader 1875, 264) The contributors in Reminiscences are especially sensitive to the finer grains of social activity as road improvements, successive changes in transport infrastructure (omnibuses, electric trams, railways) and cultural change gradually erode qualities of social life sustained at the high resolution afforded by particular sites and locations. For example, a fairly typical kind of observation might be this note on the origins of the Bridgehouses area of Sheffield. Wragg: At the Bridgehouses end of Nursery street, near the Iron bridge and destroyed by the railway, was the Bridgehouse, the residence of the Clay family. Robert Clay, who died in 1737, came from Chesterfield to Sheffield, and for some time resided at Walkley. (Leader 1875, 223) While the contributors to Reminiscences share the antiquarian concern simply to put on the record things that elude general histories of the town, the effect of their perambulatory method is to raise awareness of the high resolution of architectural topographic description at which quotidian social life was lived in early industrial Sheffield. For example, the range of ‘town feasts’ that took place are each associated with individual streets with their own distinctive character. In consecutive statements Twiss notes how: […] Broad lane took precedence, being held on the 30th April, while Crookes followed on the 1st May—its usual day. Scotland street feast was held on the 29th of May. […] The other town feasts were the Wicker, held on the second Sunday in July; Little Sheffield, September 29; and Attercliffe, on the Sunday nearest to St. James’s day. (Leader 1875, 201)

Recollection and re-enactment 187 Leonard and Leighton, in upstanding Victorian mode, considered the recent disappearance of the town feasts to be a good thing as their original purpose of maintaining family relations with the surrounding countryside was said to have declined, and they had become associated with drunkenness and nuisance.9 The dominant tone of enquiry, however, is neither antiquarian nor pejorative so much as measured surprise that such things should have occurred in a thriving manufacturing city within living memory. There is a strong sense of locality in Reminiscences. Terms such as ‘neighbourhood’ and ‘vicinity’ are frequently used at a finer resolution than is common in twenty-first century usage, to refer to areas of Sheffield that may be no bigger than a street or a lane and distinguish between different areas of what might easily be homogenized as the ‘town centre’. For example, Leonard says of John Milner, spring-knife cutler and keen debater that “He was born in Spring street or the immediate vicinity” (Leader 1875, 151). In Reminiscences these highly specific areas are often associated with particular characters. For example, Johnson says: The neighbourhood of Bridgehouses reminds me of “Silly Luke,” whom I often used to see there; and he, in turn, calls to my remembrance how many eccentrics we had formerly about the town; now any that we have seem to be hidden. Besides “Silly Luke” there used to be “Mr. Bowman,” “Jack Burton,” “Soft Charley” and his brother George, “Belper Joe,” and others. (Leader 1875, 225) The appeal (and decline) of the eccentric is something of a motif in English literary tradition but the preservation of their memory in the pages of Reminiscences shows how its plebian incarnation is indelibly linked with localities defined at a fine grain of architectural topographic description.10 It highlights how the amount of urban space created by rapid expansion of the built environment would have been a challenge to the very way life was experienced and remembered. As cities grow, eccentrics can easily become vagrants who would be unlikely to elicit this degree of faintly nostalgic recollection. The high resolution of architectural topographic description in Reminiscences also confronts us with the limits of what is known because the decision to record such ‘small details’ is itself a source of contingency. The points at which the contributors pause to reflect in their mental perambulation is highly selective – and contingent on what they wish to tell us. Why spend so much time on characters such as Tommy Hotbread (the knock-kneed spring knife cutler turned constable who was thrown into a river while sleeping) and Enoch Trickett (the file manufacturer who struggled to make himself understood in London with his Sheffield accent)? Clearly these were characters of local note but given the extent of the contributors’ local knowledge it is not hard to speculate that other things might have been said? Bearing in mind that Reminiscences does not seek to trivialize local history or record whimsy for the sake of it we must take it

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that these stories were considered representative of something important about the life of a town in memory as readers are brought to the very limits of what is possible to know about the past. At the finest grain the contributors’ own knowledge of the past is passed on directly; we are drawn into it not by what we do know (it is usually not possible to do more than take or leave it) but by the precise architectural topographic framing of what we do not know but are sometimes told. One of the intriguing qualities of Reminiscences is that it writes history as a kind of stream of consciousness informed by associations and relations. Yet this is not writing Sheffield as an individual’s psychodrama in the spirit of Ackroyd’s London, let alone the fictionalized Dublin of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). In Reminiscences the material reality of Sheffield’s streets matters in rendering them as a mnemonic ‘locus’ for the dialogic negotiation of social memory between the colloquists and by extension all ‘Sheffielders’ past and future. Social memory is constructed contingently in the architectural topographic foreground as Leader’s contributors embody historic city through the shared imaginary of its encounter field. Wragg: It is worthy of note that the houses on the Ecclesall side of Coalpit lane are older than those on the town side. In that lane was Miss Patten, whose father was in the cutlery trade. The house is now Mr. Kent’s mattress shop. Up the yard were Mr. Patten’s workshops. On the site of the Primitive Methodist Chapel is a large building divided into tenements, said to have been a farm house. Below was the old chapel, built by Mr. Bennet, about 1775, for a congregation of seceders from Nether Chapel, who removed to Howard street Chapel in 1790. Another congregation of Independents removed from it in 1803 to Garden street Chapel. For eight years previous to 1814 it had been occupied by the Baptists, until they removed to Townhead street Chapel. A few people, who held baptismal notions among the various Independent churches, separated from it and formed themselves into a distinct congregation or church, and chose one from among themselves to be the minister, Mr. Downes. He was said to be the most knock-kneed man in the town, even surpassing, in that respect, Tommy Hotbread. (Leader 1875, 256) When the principal narratives of a local history are expressed at the highest resolution of architectural topographic description the evidential basis of the claims become clearer because, necessarily, the sources are sparse. Many, if not most, of the anecdotes Reminiscences records would be difficult to cross-check. A high resolution of architectural topographic description always implies other questions: ‘what was happening then-there – just before or, just after the action described?’, ‘was the action recurrent or a one-off?’, ‘is it possible to zoom in further?’, ‘what is being concealed?’, ‘what other things might have been

Recollection and re-enactment 189 said?’. It is in the architectural topographic focus on inevitably sparse details that the ghosts come in and out of view. The house at the corner of Campo lane and Hawley11 croft, now the Cup Inn, is an interesting old place. Wragg: Over the door it bears the date, 1726, and the initials, JTB or perhaps ITB Leighton: That was the residence of Mr. Isaac Barnes, one of the old school of manufacturers. His workshops were just above. He was universally respected as an upright tradesman and an honest man. Leonard: The house was subsequently the residence of his son, Mr. George Barnes, who carried on this, one of the oldest cutlery trades in the town. Ultimately, however, the business was allowed to expire. Mr. George Barnes built himself a residence at Ranmoor, and the Campo lane house then reverted to what it is suspected to have been at first — a beer shop. Leighton: Methinks I see old Isaac Barnes now, walking up to his old friend “Whit,” to smoke his pipe and enjoy his pint of strong ale at the “Warm Hearthstone,” still, as of old, looking down the lane. Its then occupier and owner, Whittington Souter, bore a name renowned in the local annals. He was a good and charitable man, and highly respected by all. (Leader 1875, 27–28)

Twiss:

This is one example but many more would serve to illustrate how Reminiscences figures Sheffield’s encounter field in time and space – here at a pub at the corner of two streets – constructs the micro-narrative of an encounter that seems to collapse time and space but in fact does so only be throwing the past into relief, revealing the contingency of the encounter. Encounters here are virtual in the sense that the recollection is a possibility rather than a fact: Isaac Barnes steps out towards his favoured alehouse and its proprietor ‘Whit’. Isaac Barnes was a successful cutlery manufacturer, but this is less of point of connection than his frequency of the ‘Old Hearthstone’. The narrative soon moves on from the Old Hearthstone to the Grammar School. iv Lasting impressions Reminiscences which take the form of an imaginative re-telling of an anecdote that may or may not have actually happened but which has little status as an historical event in traditional sense contrast with accounts of eye-witness testimonies on events with broader significance. Such accounts are relatively thin on the ground in Reminiscences but in a few instances they reveal the situated perspective of a personal gaze, most typically on complex outdoor events that took place when the contributors to

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Reminiscences were all children and, we may speculate, fully immersed in what they were either seeing for themselves or, in some cases, finding out about from family members. These synchronic figures are not characterized by movement but may record moments of social interaction and dialogue. One example is Everard’s recounting of an incident associated with the ‘potato’ riots of 1812, caused by economic hardship and the high price of food, that took place outside Sheffield’s Tontine Inn. Everard recounts an incident witnessed by his father in which one of the rioters flung a potato that hit the magistrate, Justice Parker, on the chest. According to Everard’s account once the man saw what had happened he regretted it: Everard: […] standing forth a space in front of the mob, he shouted out— “ Mester Parker, I didn’t intend that to hit yo; I meant it to hit Tom Smith.” Thomas Smith, the constable, was standing near Mr. Parker at the moment, and thus escaped being the victim of this very sincere, if not good, intention. (Leader 1875, 214) Everard’s account of his father’s testimony serves as an example of the argument advanced in Chapter Two that the high resolution of architectural topographic description that is implicitly or explicitly expressed in the arrangement of complex social situations is essential to lend vitality to the reporting of direct speech. Another example of this recalls an incident in December 1832 when five men and boys were killed in riots following the first borough election after the passing of the 1832 Reform Act that meant mainly middle-class Sheffielders could elect members to Parliament. The riots appear to have been caused by non-electors who were throwing stones at the Tontine Inn, which was the headquarters of one of the successful candidates, to express their unhappiness with the result. The men and boys were shot dead outside the Tontine by soldiers of the 18th Irish Foot Regiment for refusing to stop throwing stones after the riot act had been read. For Johnson, a liberal-leaning member of Sheffield’s middle-classes, the incident represents little more than a sad point of interest for recording in the annals. Johnson: Talking of riots, these are happily gone out of fashion. Formerly, they were too plentiful. I can just remember the riot at our first borough election. Fortunately I was kept at home on that night, but I well recollect going down the next day and seeing the devastation that had taken place. Three men and two boys were shot dead on the occasion, and another young fellow died of his wounds shortly afterwards. (Leader 1875, 269) The “devastation” of the scene evidently left an impression, possibly with knowledge of the horrific shooting only coming later; certainly this is a

Recollection and re-enactment 191 powerful visual image. Interestingly, neither Derry, Walton, nor Hey record this incident in their general histories but for John Baxter, a labour historian of Sheffield, the killings could not be regarded as mere mishap. He regards the riots as “measured class response” to the “political and social oppression of Sheffield workers” (Baxter 1983, 9). Baxter would, no doubt regard Johnson’s regretful rather than angry commentary as a further evidence of middle class disinterest in Sheffield’s working class – and he may well be right in moral terms. From an architectural topographic perspective, however, the young Johnson’s turning up at the site of the Tontine Inn to witness the spectacle of the mess that the riots had made of the town centre also draws attention to the elementary fact most people were not directly involved and may indeed have simply expressed regrets, rather than taking sides for or against the oppressed workers (even if such analytical categories of analysis had been available to them). The actions that define the event in the encounter field, in other words, have a contingent relationship to ‘what it meant’ to people at the time and this needs to be acknowledged if history is to be regarded as an open enquiry rather than a series of episodes strategically deployed to justify a given historical interpretation. Of course, the youthful Johnson was kept in for the night of the riot itself and formulated his reaction that ‘riots cause destruction’ only after the event. Another example of a synchronic figure in Reminiscences is Everard’s memory of the mourning of the popular Princess Charlotte – heir to the throne had she outlived her father George IV – in the Brocco area. Here Everard reads from a script, perhaps because he is aware of a responsibility to document a national moment accurately. On a dark November night, in the year 1817, I remember standing with my father on the top of the Brocco, from eleven o’clock until midnight. It was on the occasion, and at the very time, of the inter[n]ment of the lamented Princess Charlotte. The hillside was partially covered with groups of spectators, who stood to watch the firing of the minute guns in the Barrack yard during the hour of the funeral procession. The flash of each discharge illuminated for an instant the entire valley, succeeded by a sense of deeper darkness, as the sound boomed up to where we stood and reverberated amongst the woods and hills. This midnight darkness and the firing, together with the solemn ‘dumb peal’ that fell upon the ear from the bells of the Parish Church, produced on my mind a lasting impression. (Leader 1875, 208–09) The Brocco is a wide-open space which enabled everything to come into view and made the sights and sounds immersive for the watching Everard. The synchronic time-space figure offers a richly illustrated tableau of the occasion. The impression it leaves is too immediate to offer much in the way of national symbolism or commentary on the meaning of the event as

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was common in the newspapers. Instead, Everard’s position overlooking the Brocco communicates something of what it feels like as a child to sense one’s part in something bigger. The account shifts register from the historian’s intellectual awareness of the political and popular reaction to Queen Caroline’s death, to appreciate its sensory and emotional power as bodies gathered in open space to acknowledge each other. At a time when Sheffield’s population was mushrooming the collective energy of the event clearly made it memorable. A final example of this kind of synchronic figure of architectural topographic description in Reminiscences is Johnson’s recollection of the outbreak of the cholera in Sheffield which is brief but poignant – and completely different in tone to the evidence of the medical professionals which is a key local history source for this tragedy. Johnson: One of my earliest recollections is standing in Howard street on a summer’s night, and seeing the funerals of cholera victims in the Cholera Ground at Clay Wood in 1832, and I recollect few things that seemed more appalling than this […] (Leader 1875, 234) The image captures Johnson the child’s spellbound horror in the face of the hurried emergency burials in Clay Wood (now Norfolk Park), an area safely beyond the urban limits in order to keep sources of infection away from densely inhabited areas and the churchyards. Such testimony is moving in itself but is heightened here by its immediate context which recalls the Parliamentary candidacy of a leading cutler in 1832, the original premises of a contemporary steel manufacturer and the membership of the Howard Street Chapel – anecdotes disconnected other than for their association with Howard Street. The juxtaposition reveals the ‘here and now’ immediacy of Johnson’s experience from his position on Howard Street because we (the contemporary reader) are not expecting it anymore, one assumes, than he was at the time. The impact of these synchronic figures derives from the feeling of immediacy they convey rather than from the symbolic significance associated with the events in themselves. The architectural topographic description establishes the contingency of Johnson’s situation on Howard Street on the evening he relates, and this serves to communicate his shock at what he saw. An architectural topographic description of a given material arrangement, whether of a recessed doorway, a street, a park, expresses a toponeme that constructs time-space figures at different resolutions depending on the social actions it sustains. Nineteenth-century Howard street, for example, was a place for some people to linger (like the young Johnson), while others would have been making routine local journeys to and from the many cutlery works situated nearby, while visitors from further afield might occasionally pass through at the beginning or end of longer journeys into or away from the city. It was also a street that regularly featured on mid-nineteenth-century processional routes. The contingencies of the

Recollection and re-enactment 193 encounter field means that architectural topographic descriptions of urban space disrupt their textual representations as synchronic images because the noise of social activity always prefigures alternative narrative possibilities. v Reveries Narratives accounts of walks out of the city were a popular journalistic genre of the nineteenth century which, for example, featured in the series of ‘Walks in the Neighbourhood of Sheffield’ which appeared sporadically in the Sheffield Independent, and Yorkshire and Derbyshire Advertiser from 1830 to 1831. These are offered as romantic wanderings from the town centre, remarking on the new industrial developments until at last attaining the Arcadian rural fringe. Such linearizing ‘seeing and going’ movement across a series of concatenated roads from centre to edge are unlike the departure-and-return perambulations-in-memory of the central area that provides the main organizational idea of Reminiscences. It makes its appearance when the contributors turn their disapproving attention to the city’s rapidly suburbanizing periphery. […] the quiet evening slipped on, and we sat in silence for some time, lazily watching the smoke as it curled upwards from our pipes in the still air, as mentally we dwelt in the past. LEONARD broke upon our reverie with one of his abrupt speeches. The worst of it is, said he, that with all this much boasted extension and growth, the town is losing so much of its old beauty. Ten minutes’ walk or so in any direction from the Old Church would have brought us, thirty or forty years ago, into charming country lanes. What a distance we have to go now before we get rid of the smoky blackness! Even Wincobank is losing its freshness, and is invaded by dull rows of houses. Heeley is repulsive, and as for Attercliffe, or Brightside, or Grimesthorpe, ugh! And how our woods have gone. Without going so far back as Clay Wood (so called from the Bridgehouses family) or Bamforth Wood, there were Cook Wood, and the Old Park Wood, and Hallcarr Wood, where such delightful rambles were to be had—“how fallen, how changed.” Bamforth Wood reached from Hillfoot almost to Owlerton. It belonged to Madame Bamforth, and there was a well in it, the water of which it was pretended would cure every disease. People used to fetch the water from miles and miles. (Leader 1875, 156) Whereas the contributors’ recollections of the central area are exploratory and discursive in the engagement of past and present, the suburban sections articulate a fairly conventional middle-class distaste for the sprawling lateVictorian city, with the consequence that the feeling of contingent encounters with the past becomes muted. Leighton, for example, clearly regrets the conjoining of Sheffield with one of its outlying industrial villages

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Attercliffe in the mid-nineteenth century, noting how the ‘shaking of hands’ of the built-up areas has rapidly led to the ‘degeneration’ of a once rural village where otters had been found in the river until fairly recently. Leighton: Attercliffe has long been on the road to (pictorial) ruin, yet within the time you mention, though degenerating from country into town, it was not without its rural features. So late as 1836 it was still matter for remark that “Sheffield and Attercliffe appeared not unlikely soon to shake hands.” Within a few years of that time two or three otters had been caught in the [River] Don there—one of them in that very year. (Leader 1875, 156) The centre-to-edge orientation of the contributors’ imagined walks out to the suburbs encode what I have called a time-space figures of ‘seeing and going’. Often this figure serves a definite narrative purpose in historical writing by foreshortening and accelerating the movement towards a given encounter or symbolic denouement. Such linearizing movements expressed as figures of temporalized distance are more ambiguous in narrative terms; however, since they are not necessarily orientated towards any moment of resolution that implies a stopping and returning, they could go on and on. Leonard’s’ and Leighton’s walks in memory extend out of Sheffield as far as necessary to express the feeling of change, rendering the movement in largely symbolic terms. Figures of temporalized distance differ from the other figures in that the historian’s imaginative engagement with the prefiguring encounter field is as likely to be prompted by contemporary architectural remains as with specific accounts of past actions. This means that the historian’s own motivations in selecting a particular site or location for the imaginative reconstruction of the architectural topographic foreground (a process that may involve engaging with archaeological surveys or in situ through personal familiarity with still extant built environments – as is the case in Reminiscences) comes under closer scrutiny. The figure is said to be of distance, although it reflects specifically on sites of temporal-spatial co-presence, in the sense of ‘where I am now, others have been before and other will come again’, that tends to reduce or even collapse temporalized distance into an experience of temporal proximity. Yet this exercise of the historical imagination is also prompted by a sense of what is lost and unrecoverable in the past – one unlikely to be compensated for by extant historical evidence, though the figure sets up a critical dialogue with evidence on the basis of an embodied sense historical understanding. This gives temporalized distance a definable architectural topographic figure such that the historical dialogue of presence and absence is less a question of the vanishing past being assimilated into the smooth surface of the present, than of the present being disrupted through the persistence of historical architectural topographic descriptions. These enduring descriptions express the encounter field of the past, but with the enduring

Recollection and re-enactment 195 capacity to figure contemporary and future experience in uncertain and contingent ways. In Reminiscences Leonard’s dislike of the “dull rows” of suburban houses and Leighton’s sense of degeneration is indicative of a disorientation in the social memory of the encounter field that expresses not simply an aesthetic preference but also a kind of dissonance in the dialogue of presence and absence. It suggests how the contributors, deeply familiar with the architectural topographic description of historical Sheffield, struggles to recalibrate their individual and collective experience, not simple to different sights but to the increased scale and complexity of the encounter field of a large mid-Victorian city. Ann Colley argues that “Removed by time and space, recollection stabilizes and names what had once been familiar so that a picture of a previous moment stands out like a relief from the unshapely and confusing mass of the past” (Colley 1998, 211). On one level the material continuity of the built-up area named ‘Sheffield’ and its localities might be thought of as assisting this process of stabilization and naming, and if the focus is on the architectural object – a given building or square, for example – there is certainly something in this. But there is also a countervailing process in the historical imagination of the architectural topographic foreground that resists this process of stabilization. No matter how confusing the past is there is no reason to think the historical imagination identifies it as amorphous – in the sense of an “unshapely and confusing mass”. On the contrary I have argued that the events of the past take a tangible shape of a prefigured encounter field of movement, co-presence and encounter which expresses the intelligibility, or potential tellability of the past but also its essential mutability and contingency. If there is stability of recollection in Reminiscences it lies in the imagined perambulation of the streets that expresses historical continuity in figures of departure and return. The dialogue of past and present enables many apparently disconnected events to be coherently strung together fluently. However, this stability is contingent. If the shared experience of Sheffield as a material entity is the essential dialogic condition for its prefiguration in Reminiscences, it does not dictate what is remembered nor how events are constituted or narrated. It simply brings us into the possibility of historical understanding as that which becomes meaningful to people at given relations of time and space. Colley also notes how “nostalgia’s memory both resists and requires the obliteration of the past” (1998, 209), and it is hard not to catch a note of nostalgia in the passages of Reminiscences that deal with suburban expansion in the manifest longing for past scenes, the evocation of the magical well of Madame Bamforth and otters in the River Don. Yet resistance to obliteration seems to be fairly integral to any genuine impulse to preserve historical knowledge for posterity. The documentary motivation of Reminiscences defines its purpose as saving Sheffield’s past from oblivion for future generations. Similarly, the obliteration of the past that nostalgia

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‘requires’ might be more simply interpreted as indivisible from history’s traditional role to inform the present about the past in the light of social change. History, in this respect is borne of a desire to record and understand the passage of change on the basis that the present and future are, in some ways, differentiated from the past. Such considerations are important in distinguishing between nostalgia and social memory, at least in the form of local histories. While the bucolic suburban images in Reminiscences are certainly nostalgic in tone, the dialogic method of its production prevents them from becoming mere nostalgia. Its imaginary of movements are drawn from the contributors’ architectural topographic encoding of social experience negotiated in the flux of a shared encounter field. The images are, in other words, contingent and open to disruption; they are historical. While this chapter is focused on the toponym ‘Sheffield’ it is not about Sheffield the industrial city to the extent that it refutes the idea that industrialization is the only way of understanding what happened then there. It does not assume that Sheffield as a social space exists as an historically stable form given that Sheffield in 1700, 1900 and 2000 can hardly be said to be the same place in a naïve sense, its industrial phase sandwiched between ‘pre’ and ‘post’ industrial slices. Rather what is at issue is how the architectural topographic description of the city allows it be imaginatively prefigured as an encounter field that embodies a dynamic principle of historical continuity as well as change and allows a history to be written that contests stark separation of then and now, here and there in social memory. In the contingencies of the encounter field lies the narrative possibilities that help us to make sense of historical experience. In this sense, the figure of temporalized distance expressed by Leonard and Leighton is still open and still being negotiated. In the early twenty-first century, inhabitants of many British towns and cities are used to looking on, with more or less disapproval, as estates of ‘ugly new housing’ periodically extend the built-up area beyond the pre-war suburban boundaries that have become part of the historical urban fabric. The architectural topography of the historical imagination then extends the dialogue to the contemporary reader, bringing us into the conversation. The case I have been making in this book is that social historians often approach architecture the wrong way around, in terms of the intentionality, symbolism and meaning of the designed object rather than in social terms as the architectural topographic description of a field of movement, copresence and encounter. While it would be ridiculous to claim that a work of local history such as Reminiscences supplies a narrative account of social change in the industrial revolution, it perhaps helps us to understand why such a narrative is so hard to conceive of in conventional terms. The imaginative prefiguration of the encounter field of an industrial city readily belies those invasive teleologies of social history: ‘rapidly increasing growth’ and ‘suburbanization’ that serve mainly to conceal the complex unfolding of diverse trajectories of social change and continuity in the socialized time-space in which lives were lived. In this respect Reminiscences is

Recollection and re-enactment 197 so much more than a collation of trivial facts. Perhaps the considerable effort it takes to describe the historical encounter field of industrial Sheffield such that its rich collection of miscellany and anecdotes can be coherently organized in time-space, offers as good a narrative account of the human experience of social change during industrialization as any other.

Notes 1 The population of Sheffield Parish increased more than sixfold from approximately 45,755 in 1801 to approximately 284,508 in 1881. (For source see Crook, A.D.H. (1993) ‘Population and Boundary Changes 1801–1901’, in Binfield et al (eds) The History of the City of Sheffield 1843–1993, ii, Society. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press: 482–483.) 2 Ricoeur also refers in this context to the work of the phenomenologist of place, Edward Casey in noting the importance of places to the process of “Reminiscing”. 3 There is just one occasion in Reminiscences (446) when the term ’industry’ is used in the generic sense of ‘manufacturing industry’ – in all other instances it refers to the personal quality of working hard. Sheffield itself is never referred to in generic terms, neither as an ‘industrial’ town/city nor as a ‘manufacturing’ town/city. 4 Leader Preface to Sheffield in the Eighteenth Century (1901) “I have been asked to reveal the identity of the original colloquists. They were: Twiss, Mr. William Swift; Everard, Mr. Samuel Ellis; Wragg, Mr. T. O. Hinchliffe; Leighton, Mr. George Latham; Johnson, Mr. Isaac Jackson. Each of these had a distinct individuality. Leonard, a sort of general-utility man, represented the editor—the sole survivor”. 5 As for Chapter 1, Scene — A room in Leonard’s house. Period— A.D. 1872–3. 6 David Clarke (2013, 16–23) names the deceased woman as Hannah Rallison, said by the coroner to have died of fright. Clarke’s research into the Campo Lane ghost puts the incident in the context of the social and religious divides of early nineteenth-century Sheffield in which lower class members of dissenting congregations were often accused of credulity by more educated members of the community, as represented here by Twiss. Hannah and her husband were Mormons. Clarke’s work justifies Leonard’s insistence that the ghost story should be a matter of historical record. 7 On at least six occasions in the text one of the contributors claims to have forgotten names (Leader 1875, 51; 179; 209; 239; 245; 264) 8 High Street count 51, Westbar + Westbar Green 44, Church Street 40, Broad Lane 39, Angel Street 36, Wicker 33, Campo Lane 29, Fargate 26, Market Place 23, Snig Hill 21, Silver Street 16, Paradise Square 16, Scotland Street, Pea Croft 14, Workhouse Lane 7. 9 James H. Stainton working in the 1920s identified pre-Christian symbolism in the way the Scotland Street Festival transformed a narrow street in one of the poorer areas of the city into a leafy grove. Trees were planted along either side and the houses and beershops decorated with branches, garlands and flowers, all hung with teapots and kettles (Stainton, 1924, 11). 10 Hywel Williams in his generally approving review of William Donaldson. 2003. Brewer’s Rogues, Villains, Eccentrics: An A-Z of Roguish Britons Through the Ages. London: Cassell, for The Guardian 11.01.03 writes that “The English eccentric is now a pretty rundown model”. https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2003/jan/11/featuresreviews.guardianreview15 accessed 25.10.20 11 An item in the Errata clarifies the proper address as Hawley Croft not Lee Croft as on p.79 of the text

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Morphologies of feeling Contingency and the experience of social change

I Definitions On the whole it is remarkable but understandable how hard historians find describing the social experience of industrialization. The pervasiveness, diffuseness and complex temporality of this process means it cannot possibly be satisfactorily narrativized, not least because it lacks definition in time-space figures of proximate action that characterize ‘events’ in the sense of a conventional political or military history. Even to the extent that, for example, the people employed in constructing steam-powered manufactories in the early nineteenth century or, subsequently, commuting back and forth on electric trams to their recently constructed suburbs, were aware of their participation in changing patterns of everyday life and work, such gradualistic recalibrations of routine social actions are really too generic to amount to a tellable narrative of the ‘industrial revolution’ in any meaningful sense. Whereas the profound religious changes enacted by the Reformation Parliament in Westminster or the outbreak of political violence in revolutionary Paris offer robust narrative kernels of the English Reformation and French Revolution that assist in rendering complex historical realities accessible to historical understanding, the industrial revolution is more difficult to localize in architectural topographic description and, in that sense, is less easy to imagine as an event unfolding. Many historians are cautious in their use of the term ‘industrial revolution’. Jonathan Clark (2000, 449) dismisses it as not a “thing, still less an event, but a term of historical art”. Clark regards it as a lazy anachronism deployed widely only from the 1880s to imply a misleading analogy between events in England and in France that, he argues, was intended to “celebrate an alleged watershed between premodernity and modernity”. Yet while Clark is right to call out the artifice of this binary opposition, one can go too far down the route of scepticism. While the English Reformation and French Revolution were rich in the production of language and symbolisms, industrialization, as Lefebvre (1991) has shown, was characterized by the production of new kinds of space. Something like an ‘industrial revolution’ certainly appears to have happened in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century

Morphologies of feeling 199 Britain even if the legitimacy of the analogy with the situation in France is questionable. The semantic technicalities of this debate draw attention to the difficulties of describing the quality of the social changes wrought by industrialization, given the level of difficulty in specifying when and where, or even if, it actually took place. Evidence of its occurrence is most reliably found in tables of annual economic outputs or other assorted metrics that define it as what Coleman (1992, 7) calls a “transcendant historical process” – that is, an event that happened everywhere and nowhere. Understanding the experience of social change is never straightforward. The spatialities of industrialization did not arrive ready-made on the smooth tabula rasa of pre-industrial Britain, sometimes imagined as a condition of pregnant stasis, but emerged over an extended period of time and almost always implicated sites with long histories of use – most notably town and cities. Even where innovations such as factories and railways were introduced, their embedding in historical urban and rural landscapes requires detailed architectural topographic description to assess how such interventions affected the shape of the encounter field, rather than simply restatements of their importance as socio-economic determinants or metaphors of social change. Lacking the symbolic crescendos of traditional national histories, it is not surprising why social histories of the industrial revolution have leant heavily on vivid representations of factory conditions, back-to-back housing or over-crowded urban courtyards to provide indexical images of social change. Yet in some ways these images have served to keep the human experience of change at a distance by flattening the contingencies of the encounter field to conform with the dominant image of the industrial city as an unhealthy environment in which human life is inevitably degraded. Of course this shorthand is not without truth, but it is worryingly deterministic when elevated to the status of historical understanding because its affect is to culturally ‘other’ the industrial landscape through which collective social experience has passed. In the first part of this book I explained how the architectural topographic description of the temporalized sites of human activity have been widely repressed in the twentieth-century historical imagination by abridgement and abbreviation in works of social history that have prioritized the thematic exposition of abstract socio-economic processes over the narration of human events. I may sometimes have used the term ‘historical imagination’ in a rather generic sense in this context, implying it constitutes a kind of universal facility (though one capable of refinement by historical scholarship) to find intelligibility in social activity in the past on the basis of incomplete evidence. To leave it there would be inadequate. It is hardly controversial to assert that the historical imagination is a critical faculty but one forged nonetheless, in light of the historian’s own position in relation to the events he or she is describing. As Clark intimates, for much of the twentieth century it was a faculty preoccupied with assessing the disjunction between the past (‘pre-industrial’) world and the present (‘modern’) world. This was a principal theme in the

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energized field of post-war social history at a time when British cities were being redeveloped consistent with the tenets of architectural modernism. The historian of ideas, John Pocock has used the German term sattelzeit, literally translated as ‘time in the saddle’, to refer to the reorientation of English political discourse away from a mid-eighteenth-century emphasis on civic virtue and towards themes of utility and commerce in the earlynineteenth century, a development that links industrial-urbanization with the rise of positivist sociology and empirical urban investigations deploying social surveys in Britain (Pocock 1993, 311).1 In historiography this shift has parallels in the intellectual retreat of architectonic narratives associated with figures such as Carlyle and Macaulay, as analytical modes of historical explanation were increasingly employed, not least due to the influence of Karl Marx and the development of economic history as a specialist discipline in the later nineteenth century. The repression of the encounter field in historical epistemology is, in other words, ironically, bound up with the emergence of industrial cities as new kinds of human environments that were the special focus of social-scientific study. In this chapter I sketch an alternative approach to industrial cities in historical writing, considered as what the literary critic Raymond Williams (1961) calls ‘structure of feeling’, said to be constructed through the contingencies of the urbanizing encounter field. The contested role of the generic industrial city as a symbol of English modernity has functioned both to draw a veil over the reality of its material existence and to render the specificity of local histories with their focus on architectural topographic description as trivial or nostalgic in the face of more scientific approaches to urban environments. I first examine the recurrent trope of the industrial city as a kind of historical incubus draining the life from narratives of ‘Merrie England’ while simultaneously presenting a counter-intuitive impetus to the sharing of normative assumptions between urban history and modernist town planning. Secondly, I highlight toponemic disturbance as an implicit but neglected motif in historical writing that connects the English Reformation to the Industrial Revolution. Though typically offered as an embellishment of the principal narrative, this motif, in fact, reveals the intuitive sensitivity of historians to shifts in the architectural topographic description of the encounter field. Finally, I draw on the philosophy of Mikhail Bakhtin to examine the historical ‘chronotope’ of industrial England as one of proliferating contingencies of movement, co-presence and encounter between people, symbols and materials. This chronotope has been repressed where historians have assumed an equivalence between the static image of an ‘environment’ and the human life it sustains, with the effect of tacitly endorsing environmental or architectural determinism. In contrast to Bakhtin though, my emphasis is less the dialogical play of language in fictional spaces so much as the figurating play of historical spaces in language, situating history and expressing feeling through architectural topographic description.

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II ‘The passing of Merrie England’ The urbanization associated with industrialization involved a rapid expansion in the overall quantity of urban street-space, new intra-urban modes of transport including horse-drawn buses and, from the later-nineteenth century, electric trams to support the movements of a suburbanizing workforce that transformed the structure of the “walking city” (Dennis 1984, 113). At the same time new networks of nation-wide communications including canals and turnpike roads in the eighteenth century, and subsequently the railways, connected these growing centres of production and consumption to each other and to London. These networks transformed the British landscape as its disparate urban centres became integrated within a single national economy. They are ‘textbook’ facts of the era of the industrial revolution, but they are rarely deployed in an architectural topographic sense to express the contingencies of lived space that profoundly re-organized the field of human encounter in the nineteenth century. Of course this process did not start in 1800 nor did it stop in 1900. Skip forward to the second half of the twentieth century and the shattered industrial cities of post-war Britain were once again a source of extensive redevelopment much as they had been over a century before. But midVictorian civic pride and municipal socialism had done much to rectify the worst aspects of early nineteenth-century industrial areas and celebrated their economic and cultural achievements. In the 1950s and 1960s, by contrast, architects and planners were empowered to reinvent bombdamaged industrial areas on ‘rational’ design principles informed by a modernist planning ideology that systematically disowned the urban past as a story of capitalist exploitation and immiseration best forgotten. The consequences were far reaching and included huge programmes of slum clearance, the construction of housing estates and New Towns modelled on idealized village communities, the city re-engineered for cars and leisure with ring-roads and shopping precincts, and in 1974 radical changes to local government that abolished many county jurisdictions, some of which pre-dated the Norman conquest. National communications were also overhauled. A system of motorways sought to bring the infrastructure of Victorian industrial cities into modernity. This process decisively overturned the urban hierarchy of medieval England that was dominated by county market centres and port towns. To journey up the M6 today is to concatenate industrial Britain from the West and Wales, through Birmingham and the Black Country, the Potteries, Manchester, Liverpool, Lancashire and eventually linking to Glasgow and beyond. The M1 does the same for the East of the country – Nottingham, Sheffield, Leeds, Bradford, Newcastle – bringing both sets of towns closer to London and to each other. If the 1960s offered cultural vitality and optimism, the oil shock of the early 1970s was a setback in the drive for modernization. The acceleration of Britain’s industrial and imperial decline

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precipitated higher unemployment in many cities, a process which coincided with the increasing deterioration of many of the post-war housing developments into ‘sink estates’ beset with social and environmental problems. By the 1980s industrial cities had become, once again, the focus of acute cultural anxiety. As before this led to their metaphorization as a symptom for the wider crisis of urban-industrial society. Although post-war England (the story differs elsewhere in the British Isles) was a mature democracy, its experience of industrial-urbanization and the politically radical vision of urban modernization on offer was widely contested in both popular and elite culture. More than simply an aesthetic concern over rural loss and urban ugliness, the successive upheavals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including two world wars, had created a profound sense of historical rupture in the English historical imagination whose dominant cultural image – inherited from romanticism – remained overwhelmingly one of rural continuity. Urban modernity was widely received as a symbolic violation, and it struggled to be accommodated into popular historical narratives. It is indicative of how in 1958 W.G. Hoskins, author of the Making of the English Landscape commented towards the end of his masterpiece of popular scholarship on how the industrial landscape of the twentieth century was a “distasteful subject but it must be faced for a few moments”; the topic was effectively disregarded as being ‘unEnglish’ (Hoskins 1986 [1955], 298). If the romanticism of England as Blake’s ‘green and pleasant land’ had repressed the industrial city as a “bad dream” (Hunt 2004, 321), hopes of a new Jerusalem were co-opted by the discipline of town planning to inspire extensive post-war intervention aimed at de-densification. Jonathan Hill (2016) has drawn attention to the influence of romanticism on mid-twentieth-century architectural modernism in Britain as part of a shift away from technologically driven architecture of an earlier period and towards something more humanistic and in tune with the natural world. Whereas social reformers on the political left had long associated industrial cities with squalor, social inequality and class formation, the political right were more justified in ignoring them altogether, once their socio-economic might could be revealed as a relatively brief interruption to the pre-eminence of the City of London (Rubenstein 1994). In social history, the prioritization of socio-economic determinants over the longue durée followed from the widespread tendency to regard the built environments of industrial cities as manifestations of capitalist coercion, rather than as complex encounter fields generative of social life. It seems the changes of industrialization were just too hard to narrate. In the midtwentieth century enthusiasm for sociological categories, something toponemic was often missing in the scholarly and professional assessments of the streets and neighbourhoods of industrial towns and cities where many people lived and worked. A consequence has been the tendency for images of the ‘shock’ industrial city endorsed by historians and architects alike to be brought into contrasting and unflattering relief with popular images of

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England as a bucolic Arcadia. These images work to obliterate history by sustaining an artificial opposition of town and country in which the rural past is said to be ‘absorbed’ by the urban present (but rarely vice versa). At the ‘watershed’ of modernity, life in England could easily be imagined before or after the advent of the industrial city but rarely during it. While urban life might equally be described as contained within or taking place beyond the city, it was less often said to be actively sustained by it across the different resolutions of time-space that the ‘rhythms’ and routines of quotidian social action demands. Why, one can ask of the historiography, this absolute sense of time-space boundaries, ‘before and after’, ‘in or out’ of industrial cities? It is possible to understand this better by realizing just how much post-war urban history represented a continuing reaction to the ‘shock’ of the industrial city as an ongoing and largely repressed traumatic event in English culture. The situation is well described by the industrial archaeologist Anthony Burton (1976) for whom the historical imagination of an idealized preindustrial golden age of “Merrie Englande” was borne of the collective memory of urban immiseration, rather than of the memory of ‘preindustrial’ world itself. Utopia is a country with no existence in the present – it is a vague dream of a state for the future or of one that has passed away, a Golden Age, Arcadia, Merrie Englande. For a generation brought up in the slums of Manchester or Nottingham […] the days before the industrial revolution of the mid-eighteenth century took on a rosy retrospective glow. (Burton, 1976, 9) Burton’s “retrospective glow” is pervasive in the popular twentieth-century historiography of English national history, which is haunted by the presentiment of the industrial future in which the historians themselves were writing, though few issued from the ‘slums’ he describes. For many English historians there was (and remains) something irreducibly alien in the country’s industrial cities. Their writing represents urban-industrialization as a kind of pestilence unjustly visited on a nation whose dominant cultural sensibility they present as predominantly rural. Writing during the onset of World War Two, for example, the popular historian Arthur Bryant (1940, 175) wrote: “for all the gloomy horrors of its growing towns, the nation still had enough of vigorous country blood in its veins to make light of its cancers”. The context is England of the 1850s but with clear contemporary resonances for a nation engaged in fighting a war. G. M. Trevelyan’s bestselling English Social History, in print continuously since its publication in 1942, is also indicative of the way in which contemporary concerns about urban environments were projected backwards onto the past.

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Writing history as a city When Waterloo was fought, rural England was still in its unspoilt beauty, and most English towns were either handsome or picturesque. The factory regions were a small part of the whole, but unluckily they were the model for the future. (Trevelyan 1986 [1942], 477)

Trevelyan’s own wish to repress the industrial present leads to his rather superfluous (if not actually anachronistic) reference to factory regions as the unfortunate “model for the future” in an early nineteenth-century context (Trevelyan 1986, 456). It highlights the challenge of incorporating the experience of industrialization into the traditional chronological structures of social history: when-where, for example, does it start and when-where does it end? Trevelyan’s own twenty-six chapter British History in the Nineteenth Century, 1782–1901 (1924) responds to this challenge with two chapters, (I) ‘England on the eve of the Industrial Revolution’ and (IX) ‘The Industrial Revolution’. These offer a minimal narrative progression in the transformation of socio-economic conditions from the ‘eve’ of the revolution to the revolution itself, while also serving to separate the background contexts of improved transport infrastructure, urban conditions and factories from the foregrounded political narrative. The tension of the compromise is revealed in the preface to this work where Trevelyan justifies his decision to begin his nineteenth-century history in the 1780s on the basis of the twin ‘before and afters’ of the French and Industrial ‘Revolutions’. It is necessary first to describe the starting-point of this great era of change, to give a sketch of the quiet, old England of the eighteenth century before machines destroyed it, and the political scene before the French Revolution came to disturb it. (Trevelyan 1924, viii) Yet the destruction of English serenity by the machines of the industrial revolution and the disturbances to its politics of the French Revolutions present quite different problems to narrative history. The exact chronological starting point of Trevelyan’s history (1782) was chosen to coincide with the start of the ministerial career of Pitt the Younger (Britain’s Prime Minister through much of the Napoleonic Wars) rather than take on the narrative of the ‘origins of the Industrial Revolution’ as such. Rising to this task would demand quite a different kind of historical epistemology associated with the new socio-economic history of the post-war period. In the generation that followed Trevelyan, the presentiment of industrialization is pervasive in an historiography that subordinates all themes and periods to the teleology of the ‘coming of industrial society’. For example, S.T. Bindoff writes in Tudor England that: “It was not merely that four and half centuries ago the face of England had scarcely felt the blistering touch of industrial and urbanized man, but that a large part of

Morphologies of feeling 205 England had scarcely been touched by man at all” (Bindoff 1971 [1950], 9); or Keith Thomas in Religion and the Decline of Magic 1500–1700, “Even in the later seventeenth century the economy gave little indication of the industrialisation that was to come” (1971, 3); or Christopher Hill’s comment in Reformation to Industrial Revolution: 1530–1780 that history is properly concerned only with the “new” and “emerging”, anything else being “sentimental antiquarianism” (Hill 1975 [1967], 20). As Malcom Thomis (1976, 160) put it many historians writing at this time believed the “Industrial Revolution was the second fall of man” – a characterization that raises the question of the relationship between urban social historians and the architects and planners of the modernist New Jerusalems. In social history the image of the industrial urban environment as a canker on the communitarian body of England casts a long, retrospective, shadow backwards at least as far as the English Reformation of the sixteenth century, where twentieth-century critics of secular, laissez-faire utilitarianism from Storm Jameson (1930) to Christopher Hill (1975) located the source of joyless puritanism and a disciplinarian protestant ‘work ethic’. By contrast, debates in the nascent discipline of British urban history in the post-war period were informed by a strong interest in the historical built environment that projected the environmental shadow of the industrial city into the modernist future. Although the new urban history was not specifically concerned with the nineteenth-century city, the heart of its enquiry lay there, as key publications show (Briggs 1963, Dennis 1984, Dyos 1968, Dyos and Wolff 1973, Fraser and Sutcliffe 1983, Thernstrom and Sennett 1969). It was perhaps to address the amorphous ‘facelessness’ of the industrial revolution and to locate the experience of social change somewhere that the category of the ‘industrial city’ emerged as an interdisciplinary currency at this time. The formative period of urban history in the 1950s-1980s coincided with a period of massive redevelopment of urban infrastructure in Britain. It was strongly coloured by the contemporary debate over the future of the city in the context of the post-war town planning agenda that promoted the widespread redevelopment and de-densification of historic urban centres. For Hobsbawm the achievements of late Victorian civic pride did not go far enough. “If the British city […] remained an appalling place to live in” (though, he argued, preferable to industrial mining villages), “it was because urban industrial expansion still outstripped the spontaneous or planned attempts at urban improvement” (Hobsbawm 1974 [1968], 158–59). Urban historians have been largely sympathetic to planners’ critique of the squalor and social inequalities associated with the industrial city, while also acknowledging the detailed picture is more complex. Reflecting on history’s verdict Philip Waller quotes an article published in the journal Town Planning in 1940 in which the author, Thomas Sharp, observes how the nineteenth-century English town had been built “so vilely” that the idea of the town as a home, a “utility for collective living of a good life” and a “place

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where beauty might be created […] had vanished” (Waller 1983, 317). The extent to which the ambitious redevelopments of English cities during the post-war period are deemed a ‘success’ or otherwise is not my concern here. Either way the innovation of architectural modernism did little to challenge the prevailing historiographic representation of the industrial city as an overdetermined but under-imagined ‘environment’. It was the disorder of urban centres that one of the founders of post-war urban history Harold Dyos distrusted. For example, in his ‘Agenda for Urban Historians’: We need to impose more order on the social life of our own cities and to adapt the human personalities of living generations to these environments, and to their cultural opportunities. (Dyos 1968, 4) One historian has called this process the secular “environmentalism” of the slum (Bass Warner Junior 1983, 389fn). For urban historians as for town planners the future lay in better planning and social engineering. The contribution of Francis M. Jones, from Liverpool University’s School of Architecture to the volume edited by Dyos, published following the Urban History Group's conference in 1966, reveals the emerging interdisciplinarity of urban history. At first Jones’ arguments are tantalizingly ‘foreground’ in their sensitivity to architectural topographic description. He notes how the typical “image” of the industrial city as monotonous does often not “conform to the reality” of everyday life and the diverse uses of its urban spaces (Jones 1968, 176). He goes so far as to observe how arrangements of urban buildings are not merely physical but create social places of “natural congregation” (177). The insight of Jones’ observations, however, are undermined by the underlying stimulusresponse model of architectural agency he employs that recalls both the environmental determinism of Herbert Spencer (Pearce 2010) and the social psychology of Graham Wallas (1914). Jones defined it in this way: Architecture is the design of a controlled static environment for human use, and the interaction of physical and psychological realities of all kinds must be considered. (Jones 1968, 172) Here architecture is said to act directly on individual psychological states rather than socially through its contingent effects on the organization of the encounter field. As a mode of architectural topographic description ‘environment’ is both a generic and localized background concept that, in the context of architectural design, can be manipulated with the aim of eliminating uncertainty by acting on individuals to change their behaviour. Where specific social and economic needs can easily be identified then architecture can, perhaps, fit form to function but the emergent patterning of

Morphologies of feeling 207 social action generated by the encounter field cannot be precisely predicted or easily described over any lengths of time. The factory, for example, is far better understood in abstract economic terms as a particular form of workplace organization than through the social relationships generated in, around and outside the factory building as a distinctive social space embedded in urban and rural landscapes. The formative urban-historical image of industrial landscapes as being dirty and oppressive precisely deprives them of their agency to situate unexpected movement, co-presence and encounters that is the stuff of life and of historical events. As a particular kind of environmental image, the industrial city is, in fact, cut off from both its past and future by the still widespread insistence on its objectification as the totalizing socio-economic crucible of capitalism – an example of what Massey (2005, 36) calls the “prison house of synchrony”. Ironically, the scholarly tendency to project the historical image of the industrial city as a malevolent, essentially chaotic, agency deploys the same idea (environmental determinism) to assert an order on the messiness of past as did the progressive post-war town planners, many inspired by the modernist architects of the interwar period, most notably Le Corbusier (1887–1965). Slum clearances and new multi-level social housing estates situated in acres of green space were an architectural means to a similar end of asserting social order on the city. The projection of the image of the ideal, socially just, city envisaged by modernist architects and urban planners alike, onto the actual social life of industrial cities with their own kind of characteristic spatial culture, has been complicit in the repression of the contingencies of the encounter field in historical writing. It has ensured the perpetuation of an historical abbreviation that makes it convenient to see people in the past as direct products of their environments rather than as historical actors whose lives refute such reductive definition. If the modernists wanted to sweep away the accumulated historical filth of industrial cities, social historians turned away from narrative accounts of the industrial revolution by prioritizing thematic studies of environmental catastrophe, class formation and social control rather than attempting to see how even the most polluted and oppressed environments might function as generative social spaces constructive of their own order, as contemporary critics of modernist urban development were well aware (Jacobs 1961). This aversion to the quotidian life of the industrial city, in other words, can become an aversion history itself – the ultimate modernist motif. I do not seek to dispute the importance of socio-economic history in understanding industrialization but rather to question the assumption that experience of social change during this period defeats narrative on the basis that – give or take the odd Peterloo – not much of interest seemed to actually happen there. While the ‘great events’ of political life naturally stayed in London and the country houses of the elite, the industrial city, it often seems, was inhabited by the nameless poor who were, for the most part, noticed only in a state of rebellion. Yet, of course, the perpetuation of this image depends

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on what kind of history one wants to write. It draws attention to the conceptual impoverishment of architectural topographic description of industrial cities. “Again and again the ‘passing of Old England’ evades analysis” observed E.P. Thompson (1991 [1963], 456). One straightforward reason for this is that social historians have often prioritized socio-economic trajectories of class formation and capital accumulation over the piecemeal rewiring of daily existence of the kind elucidated in Chapter Seven with reference to Leader’s Reminiscences of Old Sheffield (1875). The ubiquitous (seemly inescapable) cliché of the ‘rapidly growing industrial city’ (with its parallel the ever ‘expanding middle-class’) not only flattens the varied spatial cultures of cities in historical pre-industrial landscapes to a kind of generic template but in so doing confines the lived experience of industrialization to a black box that carries much of the metaphorical weight of the industrial revolution concept. The consequence is that the ‘industrial city’ is sustained as a rather reductive category whose architectural description is difficult to imaginatively prefigure in terms other than that of the degraded industrial environment. From an historiographic perspective one reason for this evasion is a de facto division of labour between social historians of the long-eighteenth century (typically to 1820) and of the nineteenth-century city. Whereas the former are more likely to focus on themes such as politeness, commerce and urbanity, the latter are likely to draw on sociological categories such as conflict, class and poverty. For example, Rosemary Sweet’s interestingly socio-spatial account of ‘topographies of politeness’ in eighteenth-century English towns describes attractive urban settings consisting of assembly rooms and esplanades to set against Hobsbawm’s verdict that the industrial city “destroyed society” (Sweet 2002, Hobsbawm 1968, 87). This convenient historiographical division, which tends to reinforce certain normative and methodological preferences, also serves to conceal attention being paid to the architectural topographic foreground of industrial cities by reinforcing the differentiation of the ‘sociable’ eighteenth-century townscape from the emphasis on capitalism, class and social control in the nineteenth century. Critiques of meta-narratives of social change often focus on how the language used to describe events does not reflect so much as construct historical reality. While the English Reformation and the French Revolution are sometimes said to be ‘myths’ or ‘invented’ phenomena by historians, this refers equally to how those discourses were contested by contemporaries as to how they were applied by subsequent historians (e.g. MacCulloch 1991; MacLachlan 1989). When a similar critique is applied to the Industrial Revolution (e.g. Coleman 1992; Clark 2000) it implies something different because, in the first instance, it is the pervasive material changes of industrialization rather than its language or even economic

Morphologies of feeling 209 metrics that are at issue when trying to index the social experience of change. […] what mattered was not so much the pace of sectoral advance when indices of growth were disaggregated, but rather the way which economic and change drove urbanisation. It was the combination of dramatic changes in modes of production and apparently uncontrollable urbanisation which traumatised early nineteenth-century Britain. (Eastwood 1998, 100] Eastwood explains why it is the material upheaval of rapid urbanization associated with industrialization, and its corollary in the corporeal rearrangements of human movement, co-presence and encounter it implies, that best characterizes the ‘Industrial Revolution’ as an event. It suggests how Eastwood’s characterization of this event as a ‘trauma’ may be usefully interrogated by identifying the historical experience of change and continuity expressed through the shifting realignments of the encounter field, as well as through the romantic reaction or the mortality figures among manual labourers – which are no less relevant but perhaps better understood.

III Toponemic disturbances While landscapes have continually adapted to the changing ways of life of the people who inhabit them, the era associated with the industrial revolution in England, and whose shadow extended long into the modernization of the post-war period and beyond, was one of accelerated material upheaval, at once bringing the past into view while overlaying, displacing and accommodating it in new arrangements. While this transformation was not evenly distributed geographically, the infrastructure of roads and railways, the mechanization of agriculture, the steadily increasing size of the cities before the 1970s, the two wars and the gradual decay of aristocratic government from country houses meant that few built environments of the country were left untouched. Such was the rate of change that a single generation might see the places they grew up in repeatedly transformed in their lifetimes heightening a cultural sensitivity to the residual scars, sutures and juxtapositions of the historical and familiar with the new and strange. Two leading urban historians of the 1980s comment that “having demolished slums which stood for a century we constructed homes which lasted a decade” (Fraser and Sutcliffe 1983, xxiii). This is indicative of the widespread disillusionment with the prospect for urban living as the modernist dream of a clean, fresh start for cities disintegrated. It suggests why the experience of social change is properly understand as a social phenomenon realized in the material world through which societies become aware of their own historicity. The experience of social change in

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this sense does not simply point to the transformation of a given built environment, its symbolic and aesthetic qualities, so much as to the reshaping and dramatic temporalization of the encounter field these material changes imply. The urbanization associated with the industrial revolution was not simply a question of more space generating social possibilities across interfaces constructed at greater resolutions of time-space but also – perhaps paradoxically – of an increasingly temporalized space in which the boundaries between old and new, and past and present became less absolute as the privileged position of the present becomes exposed as illusory and more and more people were drawn into the historical flux. Thomas Carlyle’s achievement as an historian makes exactly this point (see also Chapter Six). Narrative, as Carlyle pointed out, may indeed be linear (though his hardly was), but action and experience are certainly not. Under the conditions of rapid industrial-urbanization the quotidian reconstruction of routines of movement, co-presence and encounter expressed the balance of change and continuity of social life in the architectural topographic foreground, a phenomenon to which few other contemporary writers than Carlyle could begin to give adequate expression. The assimilation of new purposes into old spaces and the reappropriation of new spaces for old purposes is an essential expression of the dynamic of the encounter field of the industrial revolution, creating interfaces between past and present that establish the porosity of the distinction. But it was not necessarily about what the eye could see; old spaces were accommodated into new arrangements and new spaces into old arrangements, bringing people into contact with new and old symbols, information, people and situations in highly contingent ways. Notwithstanding many important contributions in the field of transport history, and cultural-historical explorations of the relationship between road building and nation building (Guldi 2012), one might fairly say that the rearrangement of social space in the era of industrialization has been written as an event without an architectural topographic foreground; that is as context without contingency. In industrial and modernizing cities the foreground is generally written in a functional sense as in ‘roads built with a purpose’, rather than as an emergent arrangement of generative social spaces whose explicit purpose generates incidental contingencies. Unlike the compact, often walled, medieval centres beloved of urban morphologists industrial cities appeared to lack the symbolic definition that sustains historical-geographical analysis of towns built around forts, castles, cathedrals and market places. From at least the late-eighteenth century to the early twentieth century the ‘shock towns’ sprawled and ‘rows upon rows’ of suburban terraced housing made it hard to know when the city ended and country began. To the historian this may have made the local specificities of urban form seem less significant, certainly less intelligible, than the global, homogenizing, phenomenon of industrial-urbanization. It helps explain why the historian’s imaginative sense of what changed ‘when-where’ might

Morphologies of feeling 211 have been repressed in preference for images that express socio-economic totalities, rather than drawing on architectural topographic descriptions to give narrative expression to the time-space figures of social actions on the ground. Yet what do narrative accounts of the experience of social change in the architectural topographic foreground of the encounter field look like? Are they something that escape straightforward representation in archival records, or can they be found there? In Chapter Seven I drew on Leader’s Reminiscences to examine the role of architectural topographic description in expressing figurational possibilities of social change. Here I contextualize this analysis by briefly considering a range of architectural topographic descriptions of changes in the English landscape from the English Reformation to the twentieth century, in order to reflect on how texts and other representations encode toponemic disturbance in what might be called the ‘deep morphological structures’ of lived space – historical road networks. From John Leyland’s Itineraries (c.1539–43), Daniel Defoe’s Tour the Whole Island of Great Britain (c.1724–6) and William Cobbett’s Rural Rides (c.1830) to Joseph Priestley’s English Journey (1934) and the exploration of the industrial north by George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (published 1937), repeated by Bea Campbell The Road to Wigan Pier Revisited (1984) – to name just a few – roads and railways have offered journalists and polemicists ways of exploring and narrating historical change in the architectural topographic dimension. A recurrent figure in these works is the need to ‘discover’ the real life of the country beyond the centre of elite socio-economic and political activity in London – what might now be called the ‘metropolitan bubble’ – in order to identify the differential effects of social change. Such work is not social-scientific in the tradition of Peter Gaskell or Charles Booth.3 Rather it is a genre distinguished by the contingency of its discoveries made ‘on the move’ along roads and rails that play a key part in organizing the narrative. Historians often rely on descriptions of “castles […] religious houses, country seats, forests and market towns”, says Christopher Hill (1967, 21) with an eye to the quotability of Leyland and Defoe, to ‘colour’ even the driest accounts with some period detail. Typically, such references are dropped in by the historian who wishes to give a localized description of a particular place or event (that may be retrieved from the index) whose own account is unlikely to be organized consistently with the architectural topography of the encounter field. In fact narrative historians of Britain such as Trevelyan and Schama refer relatively frequently to the accounts of Leyland, Defoe, Cobbett and Orwell, among others, as their itineraries provide a tangible narrative connection between people and places that are not otherwise directly linked by a causal chain of events. The value of these sources in prefiguring the historical imagination and orienting it towards the archival record of documented events is perhaps underestimated. For

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example, Trevelyan draws on Leyland to imagine the wider material impact of Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in the late 1530s: But the third kind of ruin that Leland saw was the most recent. The crash of monastic masonry resounding thorough the land was not the work of the ‘unimaginable touch of time’ […] but the sudden impact of a king’s command … (Trevelyan 1942, 115) And in her thematically organized and highly scholarly account of early modern Britain, Wormald also steps back to reflect on the broad social impact of the dissolution in a manner that indicates she draws at least indirectly on sources such as Leyland. […] no one living in the vicinity of any abbey or priory could ignore the visual impact of great stone buildings – probably the only stone buildings in the area, with their appearance of massive and unchallengeable permanence – having their roofs stripped off, their fabric plundered. (Wormald 2010, 263) There is no specificity of location mentioned in either of these examples from Trevelyan or Wormald – though doubtless they would have many more examples to draw on, not least records of personal visits to the many ruined religious foundations scattered throughout Britain with which we can reasonably assume they were highly familiar. In a manner similar to Schama’s meditation on the frescoes at Binham Priory (Chapter Six) Trevelyan and Wormald are extrapolating from the sources to see things that are ‘no longer there’. In doing so, they are again echoing Carlyle’s vision of monastic life at his visit to St Edmundsbury Abbey. Here the historical imagination situates itself in a prefigured architectural topographic foreground, ‘re-embodying’, as it were, events unfolding in the thoughts-to-action of multiple unnamed historical actors, and thereby establishing the historian’s imaginative witness to past when-where events. Whether repressed or expressed in historical writing the faculty of narration is an essential basis for evaluating and making intelligible otherwise fragmentary source material. It finds the possibility of historical understanding to be grounded in the facility of architectural topographic description to express the material specificity of situation. Another example is offered by the Whig parliamentarian, historian and man of letters Thomas Macaulay who in July 1831 gave a famously optimistic assessment of the state of the nation during a Parliamentary Reform debate: “Our bridges, our canals, our roads, our modes of communication”, he declared, “fill every stranger with wonder” (Macaulay 1854, 27). This passage is sometimes offered by sceptical historians as an example of Macaulay’s slightly naïve faith in social progress, but it also serves as a useful reminder that images

Morphologies of feeling 213 of the social changes of the nineteenth century were not entirely dominated by the city but also by the infrastructure of movement or “conveyance”, as Macaulay would have put it. The description of physical infrastructure has been integral to most social histories of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, (including those of his descendant G.M. Trevelyan), where they are typically presented in the context of ‘improvements’, separated from the principal narrative of political or technological ‘events’ (e.g. Cole 1938, Ashton 1948; Langford 1989). But to approach the rapid accumulation of material changes to the road network during industrialization as simply ‘improvements’ to the physical infrastructure of communication and mobility is to instrumentalize what was also a profound qualitative change in the shape of inhabited time-space that constitutes social action, and that was rarely confined within the boundaries of a given town or city. Clark (2000, 70; 465) characterizes England’s early nineteenth-century towns and cities as an “amphibious” culture best understood not in terms of urban and rural boundaries but by continual movement across this boundary. This assessment dovetails with Dyos and Wolff’s description of the Victorian city as an “interpenetration” of urban and rural culture. In the spirit of Macaulay, Dyos and Wolff view this as a “civilizing process” that involved a “lengthening of the lines of human communication” (Dyos and Wolff 1973, 898). As cities reorganized the spaces that lay beyond their physical limits to create a more integrated society it was making new movements and encounters possible. There is further evidence for this urban-rural fluidity in industrial England. The eighteenth-century historian Paul Langford notes how contemporary visitors to England were struck by how little difference existed between town and country in the polite society of the middle and upper class (Langford 2000, 15). In Butler’s account of the passing of the 1832 Parliamentary Reform Act he observes how the ruling elite of England “spent the summer moving from country-house to country-house, imbibing gossip and discussing policy” (Butler 1964 [1914], 91). More recently Bentley includes a schematic map of important aristocratic seats in his high politics account of the British nineteenth century to make the tacit point that the pattern of communication between town and country seats, and between the country houses themselves, is key to understanding the social dynamics that underpinned political events of the Victorian period (Bentley 1999). Of course none of this means that contrasting cultural images or geographical jurisdictions that define ‘town’ and ‘country’ as distinctive environments have no bearing on historical events. Rather it shows how they are inadequate to prefigure the encounter field in the historical imagination and to this extent may act to inhibit the expression of contingency and in narrative. Interestingly, many of the country seats in the map inserted into Bentley’s book also appear in the contemporary cartographic guides produced by Historic England and the National Trust, which they use to

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promote their sites to visitors.4 A cursory analysis of these maps draws attention to the disjunction of the reticulated and laterally articulated pretwentieth-century road network that connect castles, forests, monasteries and stately homes alike in a web-like structure, and the dominant northsouth motorways that connect cities of the industrial era along the M1, M6 corridors. Even at its fullest extent the motorway network has little organic connection to heritage sites that are widely and most densely distributed away from major urban centres. The maps also establish how visitors from beyond the immediate locality of any given site would, in most cases, be likely to make use of motorways in order to reach their destination. The different historical layers of the contemporary road network, in other words, reconstructs the country house that is traditionally located at the centre of its localized network, in new ways and at different figurational resolutions of time and space. The encounter field of pre-industrial England is continually brought into dialogue with the globalizing infrastructure of car-owning modernity but without erasing the former or leaving the latter unmodified – not least where motorways followed the path of pre-existing routes, or have in other ways adapted to or cut across pre-industrial structures. I should emphasize that I am not seeking, through this example, to advocate a ‘networked’ historical epistemology focussed on quantitative or qualitative mapping exercises, so much as encourage reflection on the architectural topographic description of the encounter field as an agency of social change that has been repressed in the historical imagination. Traditional methods of Historical Geographical Information Systems (HGIS) will only take one so far in this respect (Griffiths 2013). The architectural topographic description of a network cannot be assumed on the basis of a cartographic visualization – though this is certainly a valuable method of research. For the historian though, what is primarily at issue is the importance of working heuristically and critically with maps, plans and other sources to refine the prefiguration of the encounter field in the historical imagination, as this is embodied in the movement, co-presence and encounter of people in the past, and semanticized through association with the figuration of specific when-where events. Just as importantly though, this process is a source of narrative constraint. The relationality of historical actions in the architectural topographic foreground cannot simply be fictionalized as if onto a blank canvas, rather events exist contingently as toponemic possibilities in historical writing. In fact the canvas and the page are never tabula rasa but are always prefigured in the historical imagination by the material traces of ongoing social action broken and reconstructed at multiple resolutions of architectural topographic description. The encounter field expresses the experience of change as contingency; the liberation of situation since I know we have neither infinite time nor space so other people must have come before me here and will follow after I have gone there.

Morphologies of feeling 215 Under-imagined materialities of lived space require new architectural topographic descriptions and drive the creation of new toponemic figures in historical narratives. At the risk of labouring the metaphor, an architectural topographic framing of Pocock’s ‘time in the saddle’ points to the emergence of a highly fluid, dynamic and complex encounter field during industrialization, one that generated myriad possibilities of social action within, between and across increasingly imbricated resolutions at which everyday social life took place. It makes corresponding demands on the historical imagination to articulate the change. Yet, as I have noted, it is equally possible to evade the challenge of architectural topographic description. The historical imagination of the mid to late twentieth century that was particularly inclined to do so was forged not only in reaction to the nineteenth-century city but also in relation to its post-war modernist redevelopment and the ravages of subsequent economic crises, events that, ironically, sought to erase its history. This served mainly to preserve background images of Merrie Englande in aspic to hold up against ‘mirrorimages’ of the degraded industrial environment. If the repression of architectural topographic description can be considered a characteristic of modernist historiography across all periods, its effects have been particularly detrimental for understanding industrialization. One reason is because a characteristic social ‘event’ of the industrial revolution was indeed material change in the architectural topographic foreground of the encounter field itself, for example, in the creation of myriad liminal spaces that do not straightforwardly conform to conventional images of town or country. I now turn to consider their description.

IV ‘Feeling the change’: reflections on contingency How far the material changes in the pattern of lived space represented by nineteenth-century urbanization and its twentieth-century aftermath embodied the experience of the associated social change is difficult for historians to assess for a number of reasons that have previously been reviewed. The critic Raymond Williams observes that social change cannot be expressed in measurable phenomena alone but constitutes what he calls a “structure of feeling” that expresses the writer’s personal negotiation of the material conditions of society as a kind of reflective engagement with collective experience, specifically the changing balance of country and city in the era of industrialization (Williams 1961; 1975). Williams argued that new possibilities of social action and literary representation are formed in response to changing material realities but that these changes do not determine their content in the abstract since meaningful experience is borne of the specificity of when-where situations that render narrative accessible (in some minimal sense) to individuals. Something of Williams’ concept of structure of feeling is expressed by the historian Peter Laslett in his book The World We Have Lost (1965).

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While Laslett, a specialist in demographic statistics, was at the forefront of the then ‘new’ sociological history, he positioned this research in opposition to Marxist analysis of class formation which he considered too removed from the local relationships of work and family life in pre-industrial England to be a sufficient model of historical explanation. For Laslett the displacement of the rural or small-town patriarchal family as the key socio-economic unit of production by urban-located factories and firms was the defining event of social change wrought by industrialization. In posing the question: “Was The World we have lost a more appropriate one for human beings to dwell in?” Laslett establishes the feeling of change as the issue at stake in seeking to understand the social experience of industrialization (Laslett 1965, 237). It is a largely rhetorical question that cannot ultimately be resolved by statistics – though, he would argue, nor could it be settled without them. The poetic quality of Laslett’s elegiac phrase is heightened for English readers by the recognition that ‘we’ is, in fact, ‘us’ located in an England where we are ready to believe that something has been lost to industrialization – but what? Certainly the agrarian basis of society. But when Laslett says “We are right to think of the world we have lost as a bucolic world […] even if we are wrong to go on believing that we ought all to be living in the countryside still” (56) he is making the more telling point that while ‘Merrie Englande’ is no longer to be found in the countryside (and never was) understanding the changes wrought by the industrial revolution involves acknowledging the feeling of change, and trying to articulate as far as possible, when and where it comes from. In other words, the feeling is part of the change that historians need to understand. For Laslett, as for Williams, nineteenth-century social change was not primarily about class formation, nor even urbanization as such, but something at once more concrete and less tangible – namely, changes in the ‘scale’ (equivalent to what I have referred to in this book as ‘resolution’) at which everyday social life was lived and became meaningful (Laslett 1965, 12). The publisher’s pitch on the dust jacket of the first edition of The World we have Lost (presumably approved by, if not written by, Laslett himself) summarizes this nicely. The World we have lost is a pioneer book on the contrast between England before the coming of industry, and England in the twentieth century. The small-scale, almost entirely rural and familial society in which Shakespeare, Cromwell and Newton lived their lives is compared with the large-scale, entirely industrial and almost completely urban society of our own experience. (Laslett 1965, dust jacket) A difficulty in dealing with a relational idea such as scale in this context, however, is that Laslett’s formulation might be thought to evoke the

Morphologies of feeling 217 conventional binary opposition between rural simplicity and urban complexity although his enquiry into the experience of social change reveals many continuities. Nor is Laslett arguing that cities are simply bigger than villages and key social relationships more geographically proximate in the country than in the city, though both geographical parameters are relevant. Cities before industrialization barely count for Laslett not only because the pre-industrial urban population was a much smaller part of the population as a whole but also because the change in the role of the family as the principal economic unit of production that was a consequence of industrialurbanization embedded social change. This was not abstract change, but change realized in the realigning resolutions of time-space at which social relationships were constructed. Importantly, in this respect, the shifts in the scale of life portrayed by Laslett was never absolute. The rhythms of the industrial and pre-industrial worlds interpenetrated one another, with the industrial gaining definitive precedence only during the early twentieth century. The complex entanglement of old and new routines, combiningpractices of continuity, modification and erasure are, from this perspective, the concrete ‘events’ that define the historicity of industrialization and the recalibration of social existence it entailed. Laslett characterized the widespread deployment in historical analysis of explanatory categories such as ‘capitalism’ and the ‘rise of the bourgeoisie’ as “incomplete descriptions” of change, in the sense that they abbreviate the actual contouring of human social experience (Laslett 1965, 20). One can then enquire ‘what sort of descriptions are needed?’ Laslett’s emphasis on the scales at which social relationships are constructed is congruent with my argument that the feeling of social change associated with industrialization was expressed through the rewiring of the encounter field in the architectural topographic foreground. This change was characterized by increased movement, co-presence and encounter within, across and between resolutions of time-space characteristic of an agrarian society and those characteristic of an urbanizing one. It involved traditional images of the ‘country’ and ‘city’ becoming increasingly unstable in light of quotidian experience, contributing to the widespread cultural ‘trauma’ noted by Eastwood. The widespread repression of the encounter field in social history that has been a principal theme of this book suggests how a more refined architectural topographic description aimed at revealing the time-space figures of industrialization might also aim at articulating ‘lost’ or contingent toponemes of social change and give concrete expression to the dynamics of movement, co-presence and encounter in an urbanizing society. The contingency of this encounter field, its ambiguities, uncertainties and dilemmas, its materiality, its feeling has largely been marginalized by the co-option of the idea of the city and its role in social change by modernist certainties. By default, the task of architectural topographic description, falling as it often does to antiquarians and local historians, has been made to seem rather

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intellectually trivial in the face of huge and complex transformations such as the industrial revolution. Yet, if the details do not matter at the worldhistorical scale (which might represent industrialization as the per capita increase in the energy consumption) they matter very much at the human scale in identifying with precision the myriad trajectories of social change. For all his metaphysical inclinations Thomas Carlyle never eschewed the work of architectural topographic description; perhaps because he was antimodern in temperament. In Chapter Six I showed how in The French Revolution (1837) Carlyle expressed change in the movement energy generated on the flux of the Parisian encounter field, from the odysseys of its individual protagonists to the contingent surges of the crowds through the streets. Carlyle was also among the first historians to recognize what he called the “Mechanical Age” as a profound social upheaval that represented an entirely different kind of challenge for historical writing (Carlyle 1829, 22). It was an historical turning point that was not defined, as he notes, by “such and such a ‘Crossing of the Rubicon’” moment but represented a different kind of change, one that ran “deeper”. Unlike the traditional epoch defining event, the dawning of the mechanical age had “passed over unnoticed, because no Seer, but only mere Onlookers, chanced to be there!”. In other words, it was an unprophesized change without heroic protagonists but one witnessed only by ordinary people. “The weightiest causes,” he concludes, “may be most silent” (Carlyle 1830, 51). In later life the disappearance of the heroic would become a preoccupation of Carlyle’s as he assumed the mantel of prophet of the spiritual decline heralded by secular materialism. Yet from a twenty-first century perspective this should not negate Carlyle’s achievement in developing an historical ontology capable of expressing the pervasiveness of dramatic social change that he saw unfolding all around Britain. While it is understandable why so much academic interest focuses on Carlyle’s philosophy of ‘history as Chaos’ (e.g. Nixon 2005, Taylor 2004, Lamb 1990), it is in many ways more remarkable that a mind so powerfully attuned to metaphysical speculation should nonetheless anchor his work in archival research and express himself through closely argued historical essays and narrative. His attention to the shifting course of everyday human actions forces him into the realization of the essentially unpredictable course human events must take – even while he warns against the spiritual poverty of such open-ended history, believing it must end in catastrophe. Carlyle elicits the feeling of change in a different way in his meditations at St Edmundsbury Abbey in Past and Present (1843). His method of juxtaposing the events of what he regarded as the more spiritual epoch of medieval Christianity to facilitate critical reflection on the contemporary “Industrial Ages” was an innovative strategy deployed to reveal the world he believed had been lost. The enduring, though ruined, structure of St Edmundsbury Abbey and the surrounding town of Bury St Edmunds were not simply the romantic setting for Carlyle’s philosophical

Morphologies of feeling 219 ruminations, rather they were physical structures whose architectural topographic description enabled him to imaginatively prefigure the whenwhere possibilities of his narrative and were written into his account as toponemes that situated his historical understanding in the world of human experience. This is Carlyle’s method of telling modernity (enfolding both the English Reformation and the industrial revolution) as a highly personal ‘structure of feeling’, to use Williams’ term (which I shall return to). It reveals that no room, building, street, town and city is ever exhausted of narrative possibility until it is erased physically and entirely eliminated from memory and the written record. Something else will always happen there; someone else can lean against these walls and walk through that door; the building can be re-imagined in times and places unsuspected by Carlyle just by reading his account. History is never total, somewhat worryingly for Carlyle; it is entirely open to the unexpected things people do. Architectural topographic description is key to understanding the ontological challenge posed to history by Carlyle, not least because the built environment provides an essential (if rarely conceptualized) toponemic schema for thinking about how the present is neither categorically separated from the past, nor a consummation of the past, as modernist and religious teleologies hold. It forms an important part of any response to the question posed by Laslett of how ‘we’ can do better at “understanding ourselves in time” (Laslett 1965, 228). Carlyle’s awareness of the inadequacy of the contemporary historical imagination to express the eradefining change of industrialization did not lead him to renounce the traditional role of history as the narrative record of when-where human action. Instead, he calls for it to be true to historical experience by abandoning its “pretensions, more suitable to Omniscience” such that it is “aiming only at some picture of the things acted” (Carlyle 1830, 52). He reveals the challenge of the historical imagination as one of accepting the complexity of human events, the discipline of searching after the parts while the meaning of the whole stays stubbornly in the shadows that he chases. There is an interesting parallel to Carlyle’s insistence of the philosophical importance of situated action in the thought of the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin’s early work develops the idea of architectonic unity to express the philosophical status of social actions defined by their unique positionality in time and space – what I have called when-where actions. For Bakhtin such actions provide the essential descriptive basis of the shared material reality that make literature and any socially meaningful communication possible – as, for example, between author and reader (Bakhtin 1993 [1921], 54). For Bakhtin, establishing this unity was an ethical position through which he sought to define literature’s contribution to representing the concreteness of social reality in fiction, against solipsistic retreat into the abstract or idealism. Bakhtin subsequently conceptualized this mode of representation as the “chronotope” which refers to the “intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are

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artistically expressed in literature” (Bakhtin 1981 [1938], 84). The chronotope concept can be usefully applied to historical narratives of all kinds to explore its architectural topographic description as a representation of the material world that is not arbitrarily imposed by the author on the text, but through which the author expresses in figurational terms the shape of socialized space as this is constructed in the historical world that he or she depicts, and in which his or her text is written and read.5 If, however, the imaginative prefiguration of the material world of social action has been widely repressed in social history of industrialization during the modernist period, the ‘industrial novelists’ of the nineteenth century have a gone a long way to supplying the deficiency.6 In the 1970s, social historians’ concern to understand more about the broad experience of the industrial revolution led to the publication of a number of anthologies in which excerpts from contemporary documentary sources and social commentaries sit alongside the work of poets and novelists.7 The prominence of nineteenth-century novels as sources in the historiography of industrial cities is testament both to the unique insight they are widely thought to offer into the human effects of socio-economic change but also testifies to the difficulties historians themselves have had in expressing this change. Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope is a challenging one for historians whose work involves attempting to escape their own chronotopic ‘frames’ in order to render those of the past intelligible and enable neglected voices to be heard in situ. Dyos and Wolff (1973, 902) make the interesting observation that the “underlying predisposition” of the Victorian novel was to treat the city as an “hostile environment” noting that it was a “tendency of the high culture of Victorian Britain to express a pre-urban system of values”. They are drawing attention to the tendency of novelists such as Benjamin Disraeli and Elizabeth Gaskell to seek address for the immiseration of the industrial working class in reformed aristocratic institutions and enhanced middle-class sensibility towards the suffering from which they were likely to be shielded. The rich are encouraged to acknowledge their responsibility to the poor and the contrasting worlds of manufacturing and agriculture learn to understand each other’s concerns better. Dyos and Wolff’s comment also exemplifies how urban historians of the post-war period were themselves most likely to use literary accounts of industrial cities to highlight their deficiencies as human environments. This emphasis on the quality of physical surroundings contrasts with a relative lack of interest in the movements and encounters of the novels’ characters, who appear rather recessive in historians’ arguments. Yet if questions of literary characterization are considered less relevant to the historian on the basis that they are fictions then surely this critique is no more true of fictional characters and their liberal aspirations for class reconciliation than it is of the evocative representations of industrial environments that historians have turned to so readily. This question highlights a tension in the chronotopical definition of the industrial novel. On one hand they exemplify the documentary mode of

Morphologies of feeling 221 chronotope that represents an “unrepeatable intersection of a fictional world with a given place and time in human history” (Beaton 2010, 75), and which – taken at face value – informs the urban historian about the devastating conditions of the early industrial city. On the other hand, this documentary emphasis can rather overshadow Bakhtin’s characterization of nineteenth-century novels as examples of the “chronotope of encounter” through which the architectural topographic description of the city street and square becomes a source of contingency and chance in the unfolding of human events (Bakhtin 1981 [1938], 243-50). Where the industrial novels are treated as documentary social artefacts rather than as fictions, in other words, the architectural topographic foreground that constitutes the encounter field is repressed in favour of a focus on ‘background’ environmental descriptions. Ironically, it may be that the fiction comes nearer to historical truth in expressing the contingent rather than determining quality of life in the industrial city. At the least it must be acknowledged that movement, bodily co-presence and encounter, no less than the industrial environment, define the chronotope. If historical novelists may appear relatively unconstrained by the demands of evidence compared to scholarly historians they are no less constrained (perhaps more so) by the need to narrativize a historical reality through the architectonic embodiment of past actions in an encounter field; an exercise in time-space figuration that brings the historical world into the intelligible relation with the world in which the historian is writing. In fact, the architectural topographic description of the encounter field constitutes an essential dimension of historical writing that is not directly addressed by Bakhtin. This is why, in the absence of a specific (i.e. documented) whenwhere knowledge of ‘what happened’, the relation between the concrete description of the event as something unique known to actually taken place in some form and myriad ‘in between’ events not specifically known to have occurred becomes philosophically problematic in representational terms. It can precipitate the unreflective deployment of techniques of abridgement, abbreviation and metaphorical sublimation that may, without care, subvert attempts to narrativize concrete historical experiences of particular time and places. The prefiguration of the encounter field in the historical imagination positions the historian’s feeling or ‘hunch’ as to what may have happened in the past in the architectural topographic foreground, allowing a range of narrative possibilities (time-space figures) to be articulated and critically evaluated using such evidence as is available. Yet historians and social scientists tend to find the ‘fiction’ of the encounter field harder to interpret than the apparent documentary ‘fact’ of vivid descriptions of industrial environments. For example, the architectural theorists Hillier and Hanson (1982) follow the critic Auerbach (1946) in differentiating between classical and modern modes of literature on the basis of the role played by chance. ‘Divinely appointed fate’ in the former is contrasted with the deterministic role of historical forces

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in the latter. Hillier (1997, 298-99) argues that the scientific influences on the novels of Honore de Balzac (1799–1850) were an important point at which environmental determinism entered western culture as a way of understanding the built environment as a socializing agency. Balzac, he argues, explicitly extended the environmental mechanism of explaining variation between humans as a “social species” which he classified as belonging to their numerous milieux – provincial, Parisian, public and private – which are catalogued in Balzac’s Human Comedy (Balzac 1944 [1842], 2). As I noted in Chapter Three, Hillier associates milieu-rich writing with environmental determinism as the common framework linking the architectural schemes of progressive nineteenth-century reformers such as Robert Owen with mid-twentieth-century modernistinspired social housing estates. Such writing is said to differentiate the subaltern other by defining them as products of their alien environments, beyond the bounds of what could be considered ‘knowable’, or perhaps, ‘tellable’ communities in elite cultural and historical representations. For all its insight there are some problems with Hillier and Hanson’s analysis. Balzac’s human dramas, for example, were never simply about milieu. For all their rich environmental description of urban environments the novels of Balzac no less than those of Dickens and other nineteenthcentury writers are also sustained by powerful narratives in the architectural topographic foreground – allowing the interior life of the characters to be expressed socially through movement, bodily co-presence and dialogue in the encounter field. Balzac himself talked about the romance of chance (1944, 5). Bakhtin’s editor Holquist (2010, 31) notes how “Bakhtin introduces [the] chronotope to name the existential immediacy of fleeting moments and places”; he had novelists like Balzac very much in mind. These fleeting moments, imagined as narratives, constitute the events of history. The weakness of Hillier and Hanson’s position in this respect is that it conflates social action in the architectural topographic foreground with a purely classical or bourgeois mode of writing, when in fact bodily movement, co-presence and encounter are no less a source of historical meaning than environmental description. They are also the means through which urban encounters with ‘the other’, no matter how partial or imperfect, may be imagined and narrated. The ‘knowable community’ of historical actors in this sense is imaginatively prefigured in the encounter fields of urban modernity. The encounter field is the dynamic, chronotopical, principle that dissolves the conceptual distinction between the architectural topographic background and foreground into a relational flux of bodies, language and symbols, though which social experience is continually and contingently negotiated, materially encoded and practised, preserved and negated. At this point it is useful to consider Raymond Williams’ notion of the structure of feeling from the architectural topographic perspective advanced in this book. Williams defines a structure of feeling as the lived experience belonging to a generation at a particular historical juncture and which

Morphologies of feeling 223 makes that generation culturally recognizable to itself (Williams 1961, passim). Seaton (2019) argues that for Williams, writing in the 1950s1970s, the concept of the structure of feeling, expressed a personal sense of social change experienced as a specific time-space positioning in relation to historical and contemporary communication networks. Williams’ journey from an upbringing in rural Wales to Cambridge University and the cities of the world brought with it an awareness of how these networks at once brought distant things closer while, in another sense, pushing the more familiar further away. In a manner similar to Laslett’s historical account of ‘the world we have lost’, the critical index of change for Williams was not to be found in any social-historical metric but rather in a less tangible quality that is contingent on the situational specificities of social relationships. In the introduction to The Country and the City (1975 [1973]) Williams evocatively describes his family organization in network terms: We were a dispersed family, along the road, the railway, and now letters and print. These were the altering communications, the altering connections, between country and city, and between all the intermediate places […] (Williams 1975, 15) Williams’ preference for using the generic term ‘communications’ over a more technologically determined or sociological vocabulary of mobility is notable in this context. It carries an eighteenth-century connotation which curiously resonates with Macaulay’s 1832 famous description of industrial change in terms of its effects on “modes of communication” (Williams himself also references Defoe’s Tour of Britain in this context). Both men were concerned less with the description of physical systems per se as with changes in social possibilities that arose through the recalibration of these systems at different resolutions of architectural topographic description. For Williams it was the anchoring of the imaginative process in material reality that was necessary to express the extended geographical reach and heightened density of social life in literature and art – it was what made social change not only tellable but feelable. This point is arguably missed by Pred (1983, 56) who, arguing from a Time-Geography perspective (for more detail on this, see Section I of the Introduction), critiques Williams’ conceptualization of the structure of feeling on the basis that it is insufficiently sensitive to the specific social practices that sustain it. Yet Pred’s interpretation of the structure of feeling as expressing a “sense of place” (a rather static notion) seems to fall short of Williams’ more dynamic sense of material communications systems being implicated in the imaginative construction and literary representation of social change. It also overlooks what is at issue for Williams in literary representations – which we may extend to historical writing – which is precisely to understand the personal orientation of the writer towards their subject matter. As Williams notes, in articulating his

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own sense of the relationship of the city and the country, “my feelings are held, before any argument starts” (Williams 1975, 15). This does not mean that such feelings are beyond critical scrutiny but it does suggest that criticism involves reflecting on how the encounter field that connects the writer’s past and present is prefigured in an imaginative, chronotopic, sense and how it is concretely encoded in architectural topographic description. Williams’ observes how a “sense of possibility, of meeting and of movement, is a permanent element of my sense of cities” (Williams 1975, 15). Yet he is equally clear how this sense of contingent encounter extends beyond the physical boundaries of the city and his own particular experience to characterize much of urban modernity. This structure of feeling, in other words, does not distinguish absolutely between the country and the city because Williams’ experience of communications networks admitted of movement and relationships that could not be contained within these archetypal boundaries. It seems clear that the structure of feeling in this sense has far more to do with expressing what I have described as the architectural topographic description of the encounter field than it does with a ‘sense of place’ as such. The material conditions of movement carries with its historical meaning. Referring to the condition of the contemporary city, Williams observes that “traffic is not only a technique; it is a form of consciousness and a form of social relations” (356). One does have to swallow this statement whole to see how for Williams modes of communication were fundamental to how social change could be imagined and to that extent told, whether as a literary narrative or a history. Textually encoded as architectural topographic descriptions, such networks are not simply a question of technological affordance or symbolic emphasis, rather they express the whenwhere specificity of change experienced as the contingent flux of movement, bodily co-presence and encounter, even while – at any given moment – the physical world may appear timeless and inert. The element of architectural topographic description present in the structure of feeling is evident in Williams’ autobiographical novel Border Country published in 1960. In the novel the protagonist, Matthew, has become disillusioned with his historical research into working-class demographics. He finds such statistical work unable to express the sense of social change which he has experienced in his own life, having been raised in a small Welsh village near the English border. While in many respects the built environment of his childhood village remained similar, Matthew begins to ‘feel’ it differently as his adult life carries him away to university and city life. On a returning to the village to visit his parents he describes how the “houses seemed now to stand in relation to the road, rather than to each other. It was no longer an enclosed village, but a place on the way to somewhere else” (Williams 2006 [1960], 299). Williams here extends definition of the structure of feeling to the architectural topographic foreground of lived space.

Morphologies of feeling 225 Approximately contemporary with the interest of Laslett and Williams in the experience of social change, a literature emerged in the mid-twentieth century that was concerned to chart the gradual decentring of rural society and country house life in England. A leading contributor to this body of work was the writer and conservationist John Moore (1907-67). Moore’s popular three-volume account of English village life, the Brensham Trilogy (1985 [1945-68]) narrates the effects of wars and encroaching post-war modernity on rural England. It might be described as a fictionalized ethnography, closely inspired by but not a documentary account of life in the Gloucestershire Town of Tewkesbury (Elmbury), which forms the starting point of the trilogy. The 1985 edition is introduced by the urban historian Asa Briggs who records Moore as explaining how he had taken “as it were the ground-plan of a real town and built freely upon it” (Moore 1985 viii). The comment is interesting because it speaks to the role of architectural topographic description in achieving historical authenticity, if not necessarily “truth” in the documentary sense demanded of scholarly history. Moore’s novel Waters Under the Earth (1965) tells the story of a gentry family whose rural way of life is gradually undermined by the forces of post-war social change: a Labour government, imperial retreat and the grammar school education of their servant’s children, one of whom eventually marries into the family. The change is symbolized by the arrival of a motorway that cuts across the manorial parkland. The motorway is not only symbolic, however. It represents a material recalibration of the timespace realities of social life in the English countryside. It is this shift in the encounter field that gives the motorway its symbolic resonance. The road escapes the historical definition of its locality to generate a contingent modern reality. Realizing this, the local conservative M.P. Stephen comments regretfully how: your ordinary country road has tributaries, by-roads and farm lanes, and out of them come village postmen and bakers’ vans [….] The country traffic mingles with the motor traffic. But the singleminded motorway exists in another dimension from the scene it runs through […] you don’t belong to the loveliness you look at […] (Moore 1965, 440). In a manner redolent of Williams’ description of the road running through the Welsh village of his childhood, the material change is only part of the story. What is at issue is the rearrangement of proximities that makes the near seem distant and the distant near, initiating a profound disruption of deeply held certainties about how social life is constructed. Moore’s work expresses the feeling of change, but he was a popular rather than a literary writer, and it would be easy to dismiss his work as mere nostalgia. To do so would be to miss its acute expression of the structure of feeling of the postwar era. Moore’s hope that country villages and towns could provide the

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model for a “new sort of community” was completely in step with the spirit of the age. Similar sentiments informed the development of Britain’s New Towns and many social housing schemes (Moore 1985, xiii). Moore’s writing deploys architectural topographic description to establish what he refers to as a “framework of truth” (one might prefer ‘authenticity’) in his fictionalized accounts of the social changes in village life wrought by twentieth-century modernity – the coming motorway locating it at an ever shrinking distance from the industrial city of Birmingham (Moore 1985, viii). As Laslett noted in 1965 “we” continue to live “among the material remains” of the pre-industrial rural world, an awareness that prefigures the historical imagination of the post-war generations and beyond (Laslett 1965, 25). It represents a structure of feeling expressed in their different ways by men as intellectually contrasting as Williams and Hoskins (though both grammar school boys), as they record looking out from their study windows to reflect on the networks and landscapes that connect them simultaneously to urban modernity and to history (Williams 1975, 11, 15; Hoskins 1986 [1955], 15, 302). A similar structure of feeling is detectable in Ronald Blythe’s popular ethnography Ackenfield: Portrait of an English Village, though it is written in strictly journalistic rather than fictional or scholarly mode. Blythe notes how Akenfield lies on a Roman road, the straightness of which suggested an “expensive planning error” because “Centuries of traffic must have passed within yards of Akenfield without noticing it” (Blythe 1969, 13). When Craig Taylor revisits Akenfield in Blythe’s footsteps in 2004 he notes how the road (the B1078) has become unfriendly to pedestrians: “People used to miss Akenfield because of disinterest. Now, they miss it because of speed” (Taylor 2006, xiv). Blythe himself notes in the Prologue of Taylor’s book how his original work was borne of a “sense of things changing” but that he regarded it as “just a pattern of the world into which I was born” (7). It seems that the contours of this ‘pattern’ prefigures the historical imaginations of Blythe and Taylor. It gives expression to a form of architectural topographic description capable of articulating the complex interpenetration of past and present, change and continuity, here and then, there and now that constitutes human history as a socializing experience; a structure of feeling conditioned by trajectories of movement, bodily co-presence and encounter to which the historical writer stands in personal relation. Even if Ann Colley is right to argue that nostalgia both “resists and requires” the destruction of the past, the risk is that the definition of ‘nostalgia’ dominates interpretation, trivializing an important dimension of social memory (Colley 1998, 209). The balance of change and continuity expressed in architectural topographic descriptions are a source of toponemic disturbance in the representation of the past that reveal it not simply as a nostalgic (or any other static) image but as a contingent reality, the precise ‘meaning’ of which remains negotiable in the light of subsequent

Morphologies of feeling 227 experience. Unless all acts of memory are to be regarded as nostalgic, there has to be a difference between the materiality of the world understood as structure of feeling defining the personal orientation of the historical writer towards social action and the distortion or manipulation of this memory in the construction of unreflexive images, be they of ‘Merrie Englande’ or the ‘diabolic’ industrial city. “[Y]et how literate”, asked the social historian Clyde Binfield, posing the question of the relationship of history and architecture, “is the historian in reading buildings as a source rather than merely using them as illustration?” (Binfield 2003, 195). It is a good question, but I would argue it is posed in a misleading way, as a choice in ‘literacy’ between architecture as illustrative of the aesthetics and tastes of particular periods and architecture as ‘read’ much like a text, for its meaning. If historians only look at the side of the equation where language constructs the material world as a ‘texturology’ (in de Certeau’s phrase) then we are no longer exploring what happened when-where in the past so much as the metaphorical possibilities of language itself. In response, I have argued that there is a need to balance this ‘language first’ equation with one that starts with architectural arrangements, what I have referred to as the ‘architectural topography’ of the past. In rejecting narrative histories of social change, post-war urban historians were also rejecting the city as a site generative of social complexity. Contingency has, as I have shown, often been neglected as a dimension of historical understanding and never more so than with respect to industrialization and post-war modernization in Britain. The industrial revolution is impossible to specify as a when-where event in social history because it is almost pure process. Historiographically speaking the conceptual choice often seems to be between a static spatial multiplicity of localized differences and generalized thematic accounts focussed on the interrogation of a range of technological, demographic and socio-economic indicators. I have proposed that the experience of social change associated with industrialization, and other historical events, might be usefully explored in an architectural topographic sense, as a kind of ‘morphology of feeling’ (to adapt Williams’ term), expressed through contingent reorientations of movement, bodily co-presence and encounter, whether routine, exceptional or in unexpected juxtaposition.

Notes 1 The concept of the Sattelzeit was originally developed by the philosopher of history Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006). 2 In England these are typically Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds, Bradford, Newcastle and Sheffield but this was a British-wide phenomenon that certainly included Glasgow and Dundee in Scotland and Cardiff in Wales. 3 The field-work of Booth’s research team in London, which involved recording their observations street-by-street in notebooks, has parallels with this ambulatory tradition of reportage (Vaughan 2018).

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4 For example https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/search?view=map accessed 1 December, 2020. 5 I have occasionally used the term ‘chronotopical’ in this book to refer to historical writing consistent with this interpretation of its meaning. 6 Raymond Williams (1963) defines the ‘industrial novels’ as Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil (1845), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855), Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1854), Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850) and George Eliot’s Felix Holt (1866). 7 For example: C. Harvie, G. Martin and A. Scharf 1970 (eds) Industrialisation and Culture 1830–1914. London: Macmillan and the Open University; B.I Coleman 1973 (ed.) The Idea of the City in Nineteenth-Century Britain. London and Boston: RKP; A. Clayre 1977 (ed.) Nature and Industrialization. Oxford: Oxford University Press and the Open University Press.

Appendix A A notation for the architectural topographic sequencing of texts

ATS { / |h|

//prefigured encounter field in which ATS is constructed // historical actors present in a given ATS [aTn1 : o , a > aTn2 : o , a]a >> aTn : o , a >>

//single resolution of ATS (a) //resolution transition interface

[aTn3 : o , a > aTn4 : o , a]b //single resolution of ATS (b) \ }

// historical actors not present in ATS //close of all ATS in prefigured encounter field

General notation ATS {} – Encounter field prefigured in the text and expressed as an ATS |h| – character or historical actor / – character or historical actor |h| enters the ATS \ – character or historical actor |h| exits the ATS [ ]i – single resolution i of encounter field containing n toponemes where n≥1 aTnx – architectural toponeme x as a discrete element of ATS aTnx – greyed out denotes a ‘dropped’ toponeme implicit but not explicit in the ATS : o – denotes architectural topographic object(s) attributed to preceding toponeme : o – greyed out denotes a ‘dropped’ object implicit but not explicit in the ATS , a – denotes action(s) of |h| associated with toponeme ; – separates listed object attributes or actions …∂ interruption of variable duration ∂ in narrative continuum

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Appendix A

Movement > movement of characters or historical actors indicates directionality of ATS at a given resolution of the encounter field >> movement of characters or historical actors indicates directionality of ATS involving interface transition across given resolutions of the encounter field Co-presence (|h1|aTnx/|h2|) co-presence without co-awareness between characters or historical actors h1 and h2 Encounter ||h1|h2||aTnx – mutual awareness of characters or historical actors h1and h2 ||h1|h2|aTnx – asymmetric awareness: characters or historical actors h1 are aware of h2 but not vice versa |h1|h2||aTnx – asymmetric awareness: characters or historical actors h2 are aware of h1 but not vice versa

Additional notation for representing the encounter field as a figurational schema in a schematic (rather than ATS{}) representation of the prefigured encounter field, indicates movement of characters or historical actors in both directions at a given resolution. in a schematic (rather than ATS{}) representation of the prefigured encounter field, indicates when movement of characters or historical actors involves interface transitions across different resolutions in both directions. . denotes the translation of an asynchronous narrative relation into a synchronous relation.

A. Departure and return The principle of recursivity such as when the [aTn] becomes [ATnn>1] where n > 1 is the quantity of recursions within a given resolution of an ATS. Across multiple resolutions recursivity is when the interface transition >> aTn>> becomes 1 >> where n > 1 is the quantity of recursions and shows the narrative flows both ways across this interface.

Appendix A 231

B. Seeing and going The concatenation of multiple [aTn] elements and flattening interface transitions of an ATS into single sequence, so: [aTn1]a >> aTn2 >> [aTn3]b becomes [aTn1 > aTn2 > aTn3]c – an example of resolution ‘slippage’. It may also involve abbreviating the number of [aTn] elements that comprise an ATS such that: [aTn1 > aTn2 > aTn3] becomes [aTn1 > aTn2] It may involve abbreviating object attributes such that: [aTn1 : o > aTn2] becomes [aTn1 > aTn2].

C. Coming and seeing The decomposition of a single resolution of ATS into multiple resolutions at a finer grain containing a greater number of elements, so: [aTn1 > aTn2]a becomes [aTn1]a >> aTn† >> [aTn2]b, where aTn† is the element revealed at a higher resolution. This may involve translating objects expressed at coarser resolutions into [aTn] elements at a higher resolution of ATS, so: [aTn1 : o > aTn2] becomes [aTn1] >> aTn2 >> [aTn3] where the object o is translated as the toponeme aTn2 at the finer grain.

D. Here and now The contraction of movement to emphasize a synchronic encounter field characterized by multi-modal accessibility (localized movement, intravisibility, audibility etc.) and speech. For example, synchrony of discrete architectural topographic elements within a single frame of resolution could be indicated by the translation of the asynchronous relation [aTn1 > aTn2] into [aTn1. aTn2]. For example, synchrony of discrete architectural topographic elements across interface transitions at different resolutions, effectively bringing them into the same resolution can be indicated by the translation of the asynchronous relation [aTn1]a >> [aTn2]b into [aTn1. aTn2]c.

E. Here and then, there and now The ellipsis …∂ represents a time-space interval of (∂) where ∂ represents the measure of the narrative distance (whether as quantities of time or space or, most likely both) from the narrative expression of the preceding [aTn] element. At a single resolution the ATS [aTn1 > aTn2] becomes [aTn1> … ∂aTn2] or across resolutions when [aTn1] >> [aTn2] becomes [aTn1] … ∂ >> [aTn2] Temporalized distance expresses an interruption in the narrative which may be relatively trivial, represent the periodicity of events or express a profound time-space disjunction, introducing new characters/historical actors and situations.

Appendix B Synopsis of Cinderella

This synopsis is based upon the version of Cinderella written by Vera Southgate and published in the Ladybird Tales series by Penguin (2012). Cinderella tells the archetypal rags-to-riches story of a stepdaughter, enslaved to her jealous stepsisters (popularly known as the ‘ugly sisters’). The King arranges a ball over three days for his son to which Cinderella’s stepsisters are invited. Cinderella also wishes to attend but is thought to be her sisters’ servant. In any case she has no appropriate clothes or means of travelling to the palace. The situation is resolved by the appearance of Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother on each evening of the ball. She uses magic to transform Cinderella’s dress and make a carriage, coachman and horses from vermin and vegetables found in the house. Cinderella is able to attend the ball but the Fairy Godmother makes one condition, she must be home by midnight. This is when the magic expires and Cinderella will find herself back in her rags and without a carriage. Each night the Prince dances with Cinderella who is acknowledged to be the most beautiful girl at the ball, including by her stepsisters who do not recognize her, but each night she must leave abruptly to avoid exposure of her true condition. On the first night she makes it home on time, on the second she is forced to run half the way home and on the third night she leaves it so late that she must run all the way home. On this last night, the Prince, who has fallen in love with Cinderella, chases after her but finds only her glass slipper accidentally dropped in the doorway as she ran from the palace. The Prince announces his intention to find the beautiful girl by visiting all the houses in the city until he finds the one whose foot fits the glass slipper. Eventually he arrives at Cinderella’s house, but the slipper does not fit the stepsisters. In response to the Prince’s enquiry Cinderella’s father acknowledges he has another daughter and she is called upon to try the slipper. When the slipper fits perfectly to Cinderella’s foot the Prince announces his intention to marry her. At this moment the Fairy Godmother transforms Cinderella’s dress once again so that she looks like a Princess. Cinderella rides off with the Prince to the Palace where they are married soon afterwards and live happily ever after.

Appendix C Additional architectural topographic sequences from Cinderella

§13 // Cinderella, includes Cinderella’s encounters with the Prince ATS Crla { / |C| house >> [kitchen: hearth > dressing room, help dress sisters; cries, speaks to Fairy Godmother > garden, runs; gets pumpkin > dressing room, gives pumpkin to Fairy Godmother > pantry: mousetrap, runs; get mousetrap > dressing room, gives mousetrap to Fairy Godmother > cellar, runs; gets rat trap > dressing room, gives rat trap to Fairy Godmother > garden: cucumber frame, runs; gets lizards > dressing room, gives rat to Fairy Godmother] >> [road: carriage: velvet cushions, sits; rides] >> palace >> [||P|| ballroom, dances with Prince; leaves] >> [road: carriage, rides] >> house >> [interior room, listens to sisters …1 day > kitchen: hearth; fire ] >> [road: carriage, rides] >> palace >> [||P|| ballroom, dances with Prince; leaves] >> [road: carriage, rides > road, runs] >> house >> [kitchen: hearth; stool by cinders > interior room, listens to sisters …1 day > interior room] >> [road: carriage] >> palace >> [||P|| ballroom, dances with Prince; leaves] >> palace door, loses slipper >> [road, runs] >> house …1 day >> [kitchen: hearth > ||P|| interior room, the Prince fits the slipper to Cinderella’s foot] >> [||P|| road: horse, rides with Prince] >> ||P|| palace >> [||P||palace interior, …? wedding] \ } §14 // Prince, includes the Prince’s encounters with Cinderella ATSCrl { / |P| palace >> [||C|| ballroom, dances with Cinderella …1 day > ||C|| ballroom, dances with Cinderella …1 day > ||C|| ballroom, dances with

234

Appendix C Cinderella] >> palace door: finds slipper, looks for Cinderella >> ...1 day [interior room, declares intention to King] >> [city: streets; houses; house interiors, rides with Cinderella’s slipper] >> Cinderella’s house >> [||C|| interior room, fits the slipper to Cinderella’s foot] >> [||C|| road: horse, rides with Cinderella] >> ||C|| palace >> [||C|| palace interior, …? wedding]

\ } §15a // Stepsisters ATS Crla { / |SS| | house >> [dressing room] >> palace >> [ballroom] >> house >> [interior room] …1 day >> palace >> [ballroom] >> house >> [interior room] …1 day >> palace >> [ballroom] >> house …∂ >> [interior room] \ } §15b // Stepsisters including actions ATS Crla { / |SS| house >> [dressing room, speak] >> palace >> [ballroom, see Cinderella without recognizing her] >> house >> [interior room, talk about beautiful Princess] …1 day >> palace >> [ballroom, see Cinderella without recognizing her] >> house >> [interior room, talk about beautiful Princess] …1 day >> palace >> [ballroom] >> house …1 day >> [interior room, try on the slipper] \ } §16a // Fairy Godmother ATS Crla { / |FG| [dressing room] …1 day [kitchen: hearth; fire] …1 day [interior room] …1 day [interior room] \ }

Appendix C 235 §16b // Fairy Godmother including actions ATS Crla { / |FG| [dressing room: touches items with magic wand, instructs Cinderella] …1 day [kitchen: hearth; fire, instructs Cinderella] …1 day [interior room, instructs Cinderella] …1 day [interior room] \ } §17a // Cinderella’s father ATS Crla { / |CF| house >> [interior room] \ } §17b // Cinderella’s father with actions ATS Crla { / |CF| house >> [interior room, calls for Cinderella to try the slipper] \ } §18 ATS schema: Crla { / |all| [city: streets, houses : objects, actions] >

[interior rooms of Palace : objects, actions] > [interior rooms of Cinderella’s house : objects, actions] \ }

Appendix D Search terms and subcategories used in toponemic analysis

The method of selecting and deploying the search terms is explained in Chapter 6.III.i. Table D1 Search terms and subcategories used in the toponemic analysis of Carlyle’s, Schama’s and Mantel’s accounts of the French Revolution #

Category

1 Toponemes 2 Toponemes 3 Toponemes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Toponemes Toponemes Toponemes Toponemes Toponemes Toponemes Toponemes Toponemes Toponemes Toponemes Toponemes Toponemes Toponemes Toponemes Toponemes Toponemes Toponemes

Subcategory

Search term(s)

Search term 2

Building interior Building interior Building interior

room(s) 1 wall(s) hearth

fireplace

Institutional Institutional Institutional Institutional Institutional Institutional Institutional Institutional Institutional Institutional Institutional Institutional Institutional Institutional Institutional Institutional Institutional

Versailles Bastille Town Hall Tuileries Palais-Royal theatre (Salle du) Manège Invalides Abbaye Luxembourg The Temple Conciergerie Notre-Dame La Force Vendôm Salpêtrière Halles

building building building building building building building building building building building building building building building building building

1 Toponemes 2 Toponemes 3 Toponemes

Private building Private building Private building

home apartment(s) courtyard(s)

1 Toponemes 2 Toponemes 3 Toponemes

Interface Interface Interface

door(s) window(s) staircase

Hôtel de Ville

house

(Continued)

Appendix D 237 Table D1 (Continued) # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Category

Subcategory

Search term(s)

Toponemes Toponemes Toponemes Toponemes Toponemes Toponemes Toponemes

Public Public Public Public Public Public Public

space space space space space space space

Search term 2

8 Toponemes 9 Toponemes 10 Toponemes

Public space Public space Public space

street(s) Rue [de, du, St] Saint-Antoine Champ de Mars Pont Bridge Faubourg Place Louis Quinze Place de la Révolution Boulevard Place de Grève Elysées

1 Toponemes

Topographic

Seine

1 2 3 4

Contextual Contextual Contextual Contextual

Contextual Contextual Contextual Contextual

Paris France revolution the nation

1 2 3 4 5 6

Collective Collective Collective Collective Collective Collective

Collective Collective Collective Collective Collective Collective

people the crowd mob revolutionaries rioters insurgents

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Biographical Biographical Biographical Biographical Biographical Biographical Biographical Biographical

Biographical Biographical Biographical Biographical Biographical Biographical Biographical Biographical

The King The Queen Robespierre Danton Desmoulins Mirabeau Lafayette Marat

Louis Marie Antoinette

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Index

Ackenfield 226 Ackroyd, Peter: London: The Biography (2000) 96–98, 102–3, 114, 118, 175, 188 action: communicative 17; embodied thought-to- 10–11, 14, 34, 43, 96, 146, 170; human 3, 8, 10–11, 15, 19–20 passim; social 1, 3–4, 6–7, 9, 14, 17–18, passim. actor-network theory (ANT) 18–19 archaeology 4, 10–11, 109, 194, 203 architectonics: narrative 121–4, 146, 171, 200, 219–221; spatial 122 architectural determinism 200; see also environmental determinism architectural topography 1–2, 5–6, 9, 15, 20, 23 passim; agency 21; of the encounter field 211; and historical imagination 196; of the past 169, 211; see also artefactual arrangements architectural topographic description: as artifice 14–15, 27–28, 33–34, 59, 61, 91, 168 passim; background 72, 78, 90–91, 98, 179, 206, 221–222; as constraint 20, 149, 155, 170, 214; as embellishment; expression of 108, 134, 226; as foreground 72, 78–85, 90–101, 110–114, 124–6, 133, 206–24 (in Sheffield 174–9, 188, 194–95); intelligibility 57–9, 122, 126, 142, 159; repression of 1, 7, 17, 20, 24, 63, 104–05, 215 passim (abbreviation 1, 57, 79, 90–94, 101, 108–110, 199, 221; abridgement 1, 79, 90–94, 100, 107–110, 173, 199, 221; metaphorical sublimation 1, 79,

09–94, 108, 110, 221); resolution of 15, 20, 28, 43, 60, 101, 104–09,113, 129; see also encounter field architectural topographic sequences 56–57, 112–14, 122, 127–137, 142–45, 149, 155–58, 165, 170–1 artefactual arrangements 2, 14, 17, 18, 23, 27, 101 authenticity 17, 28, 54, 59, 103, 116–17, 150, 225, 226 Bakhtin, Mikhail, M: architectonic unity 219; chronotope 212, 219–22; metaphorical sublimation 13; heteroglossia 70 Bentley, Michael: on aristocratic government 47, 213; on historical ontology 7, 20 Biography 47, 50, 63, 69, 80, 96–102, 110–1, 150, 152 Butterfield, Herbert 157; abridgement 92–3, 107 Caesar Julius: crossing the Rubicon (49 BCE) 13, 15, 17, 21–23, 50, 54, 134, 218 Cannon, Benjamin 168, 178 Carlyle, Thomas 145–46, 175, 178, 210, 236; on environment 73, 80; and Macaulay, Thomas B. 146, 200; “Sign of the Times” (1829) 218; “On History” (1830) 146, 218–9; Sator Resartus (1831) 160; The French Revolution (1837) 39–42, 56–58, 146–167, 218; Past and Present (1843) 167–68, 212, 218 Carpenter, Ginette 166 Carr, David 117–17

Index 251 Certeau, Michel, de. 117; map and itinerary 102; spatial stories 21–22, 96, 134; texturology 22–3, 97, 102, 118, 123, 227 Cinderella 122; in Ryan 133; synopsis 232; toponemic analysis of 127–42, 233–35; in cities: as bodies 96; as environments 72–78; as morphologies of feeling 217, 221–24; as representations or images; as shared memory 149; as texts 23, 149, 155; texts as 24, 104, 149; as transhistorical 98; and urban history 205–08, 227 Clark, Jonathan, C.D: on the industrial revolution 198–9, 208; on urban–rural boundaries 213 Colley, Ann C. 195, 226 Collingwood, Robin G. 34, 51–2, 146; historical events 9, 21–22, 102, 107–09; historical imagination 12; history as reenactment 7–14 passim; scissors and paste history 108–121 contextual explanation 8, 11, 16, 20, 27–28 passim: see also environmental-contextual explanation contingency 3, 187, 221; and architectural topographic description 121; as chance 27–29, 32–38, 41, 47, 54, 60, 64, 70; of the encounter field 7, 45, 57, 65, 79, 89–90, 95, 102, 117, 127, 169, 189 passim; of event narratives 49, 86, 107 passim; expression of 214 passim; figurational 27–28, 37, 41–51, 55–70, 92–95, 108–117, 159; localized 54; of the past 102; of programme 27–29, 35–41, 44, 54, 61, 65; repression of 4 passim; of speech acts 49, 54, 59 DeLanda, M: Assemblage theory 18–19; meshworks 15 Dyos, Harold, J. 205–06, 213, 220; see also urban history encounter field: agency of the 7; architectural topographic description of the 34, 118, 166, 178, 200, 214; as movement, bodily co-presence and encounter 2–10, 18–23, 66–67, 104–06, 111–120, 221, 227 passim; prefiguration of 114, 144–5,

148–149, 152–163, 179, 196, 214, 220, 221; repression of 4, 7, 78–89, 200, 217 passim: in space syntax theory 2–3; and speech acts 54, 59; see also contingency Engels, Frederick: 86–90, 83, 93, 96–98 English Reformation (16th century) 23, 28,198, 200,208, 211, 219; Canterbury and the 51; historiography 29–37, 50–54, 80–82, 90–4; London and the 50, 101, 111–12; Henry VIII and Cardinal Thomas Wolsey (c.1529) 33–4, 111–13, 170; Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn (c.1520s) 29–32, 35, 48, 59, 91, 99; Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell (c1530s) 34, 50–2, 100–01, 110–11; Henry VIII and Claude d’Annebaut (1546) 52–54 environmental–contextual explanation 78–81, 90, 95, 98, 100, 117: English Reformation 80, 82 French Revolution 82–86; Industrial Revolution 86–90; see also contextual explanation; milieu–based explanation environmental description: in literature 133, 221, 222; milieu-poor writing 79, 102; milieu-rich writing 79, 88–90, 93, 98, 105, 110, 117, 133, 165, 222 environmental determinism 17, 74, 77, 206–07, 222; see also Hillier, Bill; Pearce, Trevor Ethington, Philip J. 19–20 Field of the Cloth of Gold (1520) 29–34, 47 figures see time-space figures Fox and the Crow (Aesop) 137–38 French Revolution (1789) 23, 28; historiography 37–43, 54–61, 82–6, 90–94; Paris and the 82–6, 149, 167 passim; storming of Versailles Palace (1789) 55–9, 113–15; Tennis Court Oath (1789) 37–40, 46, 91; Champ de Mars Massacre (1791) 41–43; capture and execution of Maximilien Robespierre (1794) 69–61 Goldilocks and the Three Bears 122–3; architectural topographic description 16, 20, 52, 104, 86–7; events 100, 186; grain 8, 188; toponemic analysis 127–137; see also resolution

252

Index

Hanson, Julienne 2, 14, 79, 106, 148, 221–22; see also space syntax Hillier, Bill 2–3, 14, 77, 79, 106, 148, 221–22; see also space syntax historical events 1–2 passim: architectural topographic description 35, 23, 41, 29, 49, 37, 61, 49, 60, 104, 108, 127, 204, 192 passim; contingency of 53, 58, 61, 74–75, 77, 79, 84, 86 passim; exterior and interior of 11–14, 16, 19, 21, 43, 146; figuration of 17, 28, 41, 49, 51, 57, 107–09, 155, 214; intelligibility of 22, 57, 86, 89, 104, 111; knowable 9, 15; local and global description 20, 36, 41, 55, 60, 65–6, 95, 99–100, 109, 111, 148, 160; mapping 19, 24, 105; mythology of 6, 127; named 9, 11, 49, 62, 103, 146; narration 6, 6–8, 13, 20, 27–30, 54, 99, 104, 133 passim; prefiguration 104; proximity of 127, 167; relationality of 13, 119, 126, 149, 221; resolution 6, 20, 28, 49, 57, 104, 110, 126, 143, 159; sequencing 33, 55, 57, 85, 90, 146 passim; specificity 32, 39, 42, 61, 79, 106, 117 passim; temporality of 20, 116; then–there 22, 30, 42, 48, 65, 92, 98, 179, 186, 196; when-where 6–10, 15–16, 19, 27 passim historical evidence 15, 20, 22, 36, 53–57; and architectural topographic description 10; maps and plans as 104–8, 115; sparseness 7–9, 13, 106–11, 89, 116, 143, 148–50, 166–70, 194, 212 passim historical imagination 3, 8–10, 22, 179, 194–6, 213 passim; and architectural topographic description 5, 14, 20–1, 35, 41, 55, 61, 93, 124 passim; and architectural topographic sequences 142; and artifice 36; in Carlyle 147–8, 212, 219; and the city 215 passim; and contingency 28, 39, 60, 102; English, the 202, 226; and evidence 71, 93, 109–111, 148–9; and mapping 102–05; and narrative intelligibility 7, 45, 57; of nineteenth-century Europe 72; of nineteenth-and twentieth-century historians 78, 199, 219; and Paris 157, 166–7, 170–1; and

prefiguration of the encounter field 32, 95, 104, 106–7, 117, 124, 144, 155, 211, 214; repression of 214; see also Collingwood, Robin G. historical mapping 4, 16, 18–19, 24, 102–110; as architectural topographic description 105–6, 142–3, 214; schematic maps and plans 102–104; as spatial stories 96–102; see also historical evidence historical writing 1 passim; architectural topographic encoding of 23, 27, 78, 86, 103; and authenticity 17, 28, 116; inclusion of maps and plans 103; repression of architectural topographic description in 7, 17; and narrative 17, 167 passim; nonnarrative 17, 19–20, 49, 61, 122, 176; and narrative in 17, 71–2, 146, 194 passim; see also architectural topographic description; narrative Holland, Tom 25 Hoskins, William G. 202, 226 industrial cities: Birmingham 62–9, 221; as cultural trauma 198–205; as environments 72–8; in fiction 220–21, 226; Glasgow 63–9, 221; historiography 86–94, 173, 196; London 46–7, 66–7, 181, 187, 201; Manchester 43–6, 86–90, 201; and post–war urban history 205–209; Sheffield 173–97, 201; as toponemic disturbance 209–10 Ingold, Tim 116 Industrial Revolution, period of the 23, 28; historiography 43–8, 61–70, 86–94; invention of Watt’s steam engine (1775) 62–70, 91; Peterloo Massacre, Manchester (1819) 43–6, 183; passing of the Great Reform Act (1832) 46, 183; see also industrial cities Laslett, Peter 216–219, 225–6 Leader, Robert E. Reminiscences of Old Sheffield (1875) 174–194, 208 Lefebvre, Henri 122–3, 210 London 124, 201–2, 207; palaces (Canterbury 51; Greenwich 29, 35–39; Hampton Court 53–4, 112, 170; ); see also Ackroyd; English Reformation; industrial cities Lünen, Alexander von 16, 72

Index 253 Jacobs, Jane 180, 207 Jameson, Storm 205 Macaulay, Thomas B. 146, 200 Manchester:; see industrial cities; see also Industrial Revolution Material: agency 21, 27; constraint 3, 123, 149 MacCulloch, Diarmuid 92, 208; on Cardinal Thomas Wolsey 112–13; on Hilary Mantel 110–11, 149; on Thomas Cromwell 50–52, 111 Mantel, Hilary 145; and Diarmuid MacCulloch 110–11 A Place of Greater Safety (1992) 150–7, 162–7; BBC Reith Lectures (2017) 170–1 milieu–based explanation 14, 24, 73, 98, 100; see also environmental explanation Moore, John: 225–6 morphologies of feeling 24, 198 Moretti, Franco 6, 147 narrative 6–9 passim; architectonic 121–4, 144–6, 171, 200; and architectural topographic encoding 17, 20, 27, 57, 79, 123–137, 224; intelligibility 27, 42, 56–7, 95, 111, 114, 123–134, 167, 176; localized and globalized 36, 65, 79, 95, 98–99, 103–04, 109, 111, 122, 132–140, 155, 182–184; histories 42, 56–7, 66, 71, 79, 90, 145, 149, 211; meaning 117, 121–5, 133–35, 198; meta– 8, 81, 92, 107, 121, 115, 208; as ontology 116–17, 157; possibilities 32, 35, 37, 57, 60, 93, 95 passim; prefiguration of 32, 95, 101, 124, 133, 139, 155, 163, 189; propositions 9, 41–60, 71, 93–95, 101, 106–111, 116, 128; rejection of 227; resolution of 50, 104, 126, 132, 139, 161, 188; see also Ryan, Marie–Laure narrative figures see time–space figures Netto, Vinicius: semanticized space 5 networks: communications 201, 223–6; mail coach 67–69, 181; road 211; street 2; social 5, 69, 181; and social change 226; train 6; telegraph 6; knowledge 6, 69 Owen, Robert: 73–77, 81, 86–7, 173, 222

Palais-Royal (Paris) 151–2, 160–3 Pearce, Trevor: 73–4, 218 Penn, Alan: architecture as tellable space 125 Pocock, John G.A. 200 practice: communicative 5; embodied 5, 10, 72, 104, 123; literary 124, 166; quotidian 4, 18, 28, 54 passim; social 3, 4, 5, 11, 17, 78, 223; spatial 122–3; see also action Pred, Allan 16, 19, 180, 223 prefiguration of the encounter field 8, 11, 23–4, 28 passim; see also encounter field; historical imagination; historical writing; narrative Psarra, Sophia: architectural imagination 3; architecture and narrative 125 psychogeography 22, 95–8, 175 resolution 5–6, 50, 176 passim; of architectural topographic description 15, 20, 28, 43, 60, 101, 104–09,113, 129; of events 48–9 passim in space syntax analysis 3, in toponemic analysis 56–7, 101, 113–4, 122, 126–45, 155, 159–60, 166 roads 3, 38, 68–9, 136–7, 152, 186, 211–14, 223–6 Ryan, Marie–Laure 123–7, 137; virtual narrative 125, 126, 133; narrative tellability 124–5; fictional recentring and historical recentring 137, 144–5, 157 Schama, Simon: Citizens (1989) 40, 58, 103, 150–7, 160–2, 167; Dead Certainties (1991) 169–70; A History of Britain volume 1 (2000) 31–2, 168–9; Landscape and Memory (1995) 116 Seamon, David 10, 180, 185 Sheffield 201; see industrial cities; Leader, Robert E. social network 3; of James Watt 62–69; of Thomas Cromwell 111; of the Tontine Inn 181 artefactual arrangements: see space syntax social space 3, 5, 7, 15, 22–23 passim; architectural topographic description of: 8, 17, 23, 81 passim; and contingency 3; and place 1–2; and

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Index

spatial culture 72, 85, 104, 115, 207–8; spatial turn 1, 15–16 space syntax 106; socializing agency of encounter field 2; background network 2–3; spatial descriptions 3; foreground network 2–3; spatial configuration 2, 5, 14, 148; encounter field 2; see also Hillier, Bill; Hanson, Julienne; artefactual arrangements speech acts 62; architectural topographic description of 52–55, 70, 72; and contingency 54, 59, 92; repression of 61 source material; see historical evidence Stone, Lawrence 126–7 time-space figures 144, 211, 217, 221; concatenative 139, 158, 165, 194, 198, 231; decomposition 139–40, 158, 160, 231; and events 49, 91, 95, 107; local and global 95, 104, 109–110, 122, 128–34 passim; recursive 137–9, 152, 162, 165, 231; resolution 192; synchronic 140–1, 160, 165, 231; temporalized distance 141–2, 167–71, 231; see also architectural topographic sequences; toponemes

time–geography 4, 223; see also Pred, Allan toponemes: definition 128; dropped, lost or silent 129, 137, 139, 140–1; toponemic analysis 112–15, 27–144; associated actions 131 passim; notation 233–5; object attributes 129–31, 137 passim; resolution transitions 128–9 passim toponemic disturbance 200, 209–15 Tschumi, Bernard 18, 134–5 urban history 4, 148; influence of post–war planning on 200–6 urban morphology 2, 6, Conzenian town–plan analysis 106 utterance see speech acts Vaughan, Laura 105, 227n3 Versailles Palace see French Revolution virtual narrative see Ryan, Marie–Laure Weissenborn, Frederik 18 Williams, Raymond 75, 145; Border Country (1960) 224–5; structure of feeling 4, 200, 215, 219–227